All told, there were six women in the confines of the dirty cattle trailer. There were no men and no children. Jensen looked around, hoping to catch sight of the little girl whose doll was still tucked into his vest, but saw no movement. He turned back to look and started slightly at the sight of his knife near his face. The redhead was simply handing it back to him, but he realized that she could have just as easily sunk it into the back of his neck. He had to be more careful.
Jensen nodded his thanks and looked at the uncertain women. “Are there any more out there?”
From the back, a woman he couldn’t see said, “Some of them left in the other trucks and followed Brent.”
Jensen nodded. “Was that all of them, then?”
The redhead nodded, “Just those two and the trucks. There was nobody else.”
He stood, eyes still moving. “Then we should be good. We took care of the other ones back near camp.”
The red-haired woman nodded. “That’s what we hoped when we heard the machine guns, but they didn’t know what was happening,” as she pointed toward the hill. “They didn’t start to run until they saw your tank. Thank you for helping us.”
“Daniel,” he called out. “Can you radio this back in? It’s safe down here for now if they want to come salvage what they can.”
Jensen couldn’t hear the radio comms from where he was, but Daniel shouted back about a minute later, “We should have a couple cars here in a few minutes!”
“Thank you!” he shouted back. “You set up on that end, I’ll blockade this side.” Jensen turned back to the small group of women. “We’re going to set up on each end of your camp. Go through and see if you can find any survivors. Salvage whatever you can.” He climbed back into his tub and moved it forward, away from the carnage. The women scattered, searching for their loved ones or their belongings.
It was several minutes before the other cars from the hill arrived, carrying the survivors that had managed to escape the carnage. They got out slowly, eyeing the cattle trailer and hugging the women that had been rescued. One man went straight to a body lying half out of a white hatchback, kneeling and pulling the body of another man into his arms, before sitting down and kissing him on the forehead. He just sat quietly, holding the body, ignoring the rest of the survivors as they moved around him.
It was a touching moment. Jensen didn’t know if the men were brothers, friends, or lovers, but the body in his arms was the only thing the man cared about at the moment. He looked further on and saw Brent on his knees by the body of a small boy, an attractive woman standing next to him holding an IV bag aloft. He did a double take when he realized the woman was Sheila. She had one arm raised high and the other resting on the man’s shoulder as he cried over the broken body on the ground.
That was all Jensen could take. He slowly rolled the heavy machine back toward the carnage and exited, uncasing the solar panels on both sides. Then he turned toward Sheila and Brent as he saw Daniel do the same. Yes, it was important to maintain overwatch, but it was more important to retain your humanity.
He reached down and put his hand on the man’s other shoulder. “We’ll get him up to the mountain and give him a proper burial.” Brent put a hand on his and squeezed slightly, unable to respond verbally through his tears.
It took hours to police the site. They found bodies in the vehicles, on the road, and in the clearing, clearly running as they were shot down from behind. All told, 18 people had lost their lives in the attack. The last body they found was that of Katie, the little girl whose brother he had killed. She had dragged herself behind a tree after being shot and bled out from her injuries. He put her in the back of the large pickup truck with the other bodies, wishing he had brought more body bags from the CDC trailer on the college campus. They wouldn’t have enough for all of them.
Chapter 4
The group was quiet as they took turns with the shovel, digging through the night to create resting places for 18 corpses. Several of them were tiny—children no older than eight or nine. Their small bodies brought grief to the assembled adults, many of whom had already lost children of their own. The flu had been particularly harsh on children and seniors, and the few they had with them had been lucky to survive.
There was no hiding now. The gunfire of the past two days would have drawn in any that were interested. As a result, Jensen had no issues building a bonfire to warm them and provide light. They had been digging for much of the day, mourning privately or talking amongst themselves. A few even sought out Jensen’s company and apologized for the confrontation. Katie had told them what really happened when Jamie left the building. He had gone out to scare the man on the rooftop, and it had gotten him killed.
The original group maintained watch, two either in the turrets or near them at all times. The tubs remained locked down; only Jensen and Daniel had access to them by virtue of their transmitters. The newcomers had a watch of their own. Apart from those digging, others wandered near the firelight with weapons in hand. Jensen wasn’t sure if they were guarding against them or were on watch for other two-legged predators, but he appreciated their desire.
The one remaining child, a boy named Ethan, awakened throughout the night crying. He had survived by hiding underneath one of the cars, a place only someone very small or very thin could go. Ethan had cried out for Jack to join him, but watched as he was gunned down by the men in the trucks. He shrieked, but nobody heard him over the sound of the gunfire. He watched through the narrow opening beneath the car as the men shot and injured another man, then put a bullet in the back of his head.
The man had groveled and offered to join them. He even offered to help round up the women for them. He was their friend; they could trust him, he said. A tall, thin man with a patchy beard simply laughed and shot Cody in the head. The bearded man watched as Cody fell before he turned and went looking for another target, out of Ethan’s line of sight. Ethan huddled under the car until the gunfire stopped.
It seemed to last forever. He wet himself underneath the car, and didn’t come out until after the big wheeled vehicles came to save them. Like Katie, he had been taken in by Marta after his family died. After the fight, he looked for the kindly woman, but she’d been killed. She had bloody holes in her chest and would never move again. Ethan found himself orphaned once more.
As each person was buried, Jensen stopped to pay his respects. He had tears in his eyes as he pulled the little one-armed doll out of his vest and placed it in her hand before she was wrapped in a sheet much too large for her frail body. He talked frequently to Brent, assuring him that he’d done nothing wrong, he’d only been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“I’ve seen this before,” he told the older man. “The strong prey upon the weak and take what they can. In this case, they saw your group as weaker than theirs, and with the help of a surprise attack, they were able to kill many of you before you were even fully awake.” He paused. “I ran into this on patrols in Pakistan and India. Sometimes days after the attacks.” Jensen looked off into the distance. “We did what we could for them.”
Just as Jensen had seen in those far-off lands, this attacking group had focused on capturing the women, marking the rest for death. The only women that had been killed in the attack were ones that had been able to get to weapons before they were found; many of the others didn’t even have weapons. Except for Marta—she was killed while she posed no threat to them.
Daniel listened solemnly and seemed to struggle for a moment before he said, “I know why.” He went on to tell them stories of groups in the Middle East and Africa he’d monitored, who made it clear that only women as young as ten or twelve to about the age of forty were to be captured. Anyone older or younger was to be put to death. Daniel had translated messages to that effect, aghast at the contents, but powerless to do anything about it.
He knew it was happening. He knew where it was happening and who was doing it, but it rarely provoked any sort of response from the U.S. milita
ry. They were too busy trying to outwit the Russians or bomb training areas. The generals didn’t bother with groups that were simply stealing young girls and women for their harems.
It was a practice that had happened throughout the ages. Romans, Vikings, Chinese, French, Russians, virtually every civilization throughout history bore some guilt. The Japanese at Nanking, Americans at Kanagawa and Okinawa, Bosnia, Rwanda, Bangladesh, Darfur, Iraq, Syria … men confused might with right and forced themselves upon women, frequently killing any man who tried to interfere.
Daniel knew. He was one of the few people in the western world that was aware of the full scope of the atrocities. He’d heard men bragging about their exploits and wished he could send them a bomb. He listened to them late at night in a building thousands of miles away and wrote down the details of their conversation, before clicking a button and sending the report off to a nameless analyst that would simply file the report.
Those were just some of the conversations that Daniel carried with him, coming back to haunt him at times while he slept. It wasn’t conversation fit for polite company, so he kept the voices inside where they taunted him as they bragged about their conquests. He dearly hoped they had been victims of the flu, or something far worse. He wanted to kill them with his own hands, because they were simply an evil in the world that he couldn’t bear.
That it had come home to roost and could happen in his own country made Daniel furious. It was almost as if his nightmares had come to life and populated the land around him. He wanted to destroy and desecrate the bodies of the men who had killed and tried to kidnap the women from Dahlonega. He wanted to set their heads on pikes as a warning to any man who would try to do the same.
These people were now part of his tribe, if they wanted to be, and he would do everything within his power to protect them. When Daniel made that promise to himself, he felt like he was making the promise to all of the women in the world that were seen not as humans, but as some sort of trophy. Especially to those he’d failed to save as he typed the words out from the stories and relayed those terrible messages.
Brent learned aspects of his new friends he probably wouldn’t have ever known if it weren’t for this tragedy. His life of building and creating was far different from the shadows these men lived in. There was a darkness in them he couldn’t comprehend. He had no frame of reference for the horrors they were describing, until today, and he knew that was simply an introduction to what played in their minds.
The construction manager would never have thought his own countrymen could be so callous and brutal. He hadn’t even thought to arm everybody in the convoy; he thought a few guns would be enough. Brent hadn’t prepared for the world those two men knew, he had only prepared for the world he knew, and that was gone.
Brent’s son Jack was the last one to be buried. By then, tomorrow’s dawn had arrived once again, casting warm light on the quiet mountaintop as Jack was laid to rest. It was his asthma that had prompted the rush from Dahlonega east, as much to avoid the oncoming flames as to hope his son would be able to breathe again.
Brent was a godly man. He knew in his heart he’d see Rebecca and Jack in perfect health when he arrived on the other side. He wished for a moment the bullet wound in his side had been over the heart instead, then chided himself for the thought. God would take him when it was his time. Until then, he’d continue to live and to serve others. He said quiet words over his son’s grave, the 18th in a line of dirt mounds overlooking the valley below.
Chapter 5
Daniel sat on a chair next to Brent, who was still recovering from the bullet wound in his side. Sheila had patched him up marvelously and he was doing well. They looked at the patchwork of tents and temporary structures spread out across the clearing. “We need to do something about this, you know.”
Brent looked at him curiously. Daniel swept his hand across the horizon. “This. They can’t keep living in tents and huts while a third of us live in the cabin.” He looked at Brent, “You owned a construction business; come up with a plan. We need more living space.”
Brent looked thoughtful. “You guys are serious? We can stay here?”
Daniel nodded. “Any of you that want to stay can stay.” He eyed a tall blonde near the edge of the tree line. “We’d really like that.”
Brent smiled. “You mean you’d really like Marcy to stay?”
Daniel smiled back at him. “That, too.”
Daniel and Marcy had hit it off almost immediately. It could have been as simple as a height thing, or the fact that she’d watched him leave the mountain in his tub to rescue her friends and heard stories of him gunning the enemy down with machine guns and a grenade launcher. It might have been that he was a strong, intelligent man with a protective instinct. It was probably all of those things.
At six foot one, Marcy intimidated most men with her height. She was frequently self-conscious about it and took to wearing flats, even when they didn’t go with her outfit. A woman over six feet tall wearing three-inch heels tended to tower over most men, but that would just bring her eye level with Daniel. That was only part of what made her feel at ease with Daniel. He was supremely confident, but often reserved. She found that sexy.
Daniel found her appearance absolutely striking. He was all for women’s rights to do what they wanted with their own bodies, but he also very much appreciated her figure and how she filled out her jeans. When he learned she brewed beer at a microbrewery, he almost fell over. She was smart, she was funny, and she could brew beer. If she could somehow get him Whataburger, she’d be the perfect woman.
But Daniel knew it was easy to overlook flaws in the first few days of meeting someone. He’d done it before, frequently. So he stayed a little bit distant. He was long past the days of finding crazy eyes exciting, and he enjoyed his nights even more because he was entirely sure he wouldn’t wake up with a knife in his chest and a dead cat in the sink. No, he was far more patient and even a bit wary these days.
It’s not that Marcy had crazy eyes. In fact, they were beautiful blue eyes without a hint of crazy in them. He thought about them often after he casually ran into her in the clearing. He thought even more frequently about how to get her the materials she needed to brew beer: barley, hops, yeast, and water. He didn’t have any ideas yet, but he’d find a way.
Brent broke into his thoughts. “I have a few ideas, but we’ve got ten women up here, and I don’t see them staying in a building together without killing each other.”
Daniel laughed loudly, causing some of those very same women to crane their necks to look back at the cabin. “You said it, not me” he replied. “Under penalty of torture I will not be the one to say that.
“We’ve also got seven men,” Daniel added, referring to himself, Jensen, Dave, and the four surviving men from the Dahlonega group, “and one boy.” He softly added, “I’m pretty sure Dylan and Abby have something going on as well,” referring to the two youngsters that were frequently off in the woods together.
It had been several days since the daybreak fight against the local men. At least they assumed they were local men. The plates on the destroyed trucks read Rabun County, which was the county they were in now. Daniel and Dave had removed the bodies from the pickup trucks on the drive up to the clearing and disposed of them in the river, allowing their corpses to float down the Chattooga rather than investing any effort in burial.
Daniel had decided to see just how far he could throw them, and managed to get one of the smaller men to sail almost ten feet out from the bridge, while the bearded man with the shaved head dropped almost straight down. It was macabre, but of all the things Daniel had dealt with in his life, it was probably one of the more normal ways of coping. Contrary to popular belief, there are no normal ways of coping with trauma, only typical ones.
Daniel continued his conversation with Brent, discussing such things as water, power, plumbing, and the upcoming crop season. They had seeds, but no way to till the land and no experience
. Brent had a partial solution for that, though. “Emmy has a green thumb. She had a floral shop back home. I’m sure she could take a look at those books y’all brought back and figure something out.”
Daniel felt foolish for a moment as he had to ask, “Which one is she?”
Brent pointed across the clearing toward a green and white tent pitched next to a gray sedan. “She’s the brunette that lives in the green tent over there.” Daniel was pretty sure he knew which brunette he was talking about, but made a note to go to that tent and introduce himself, that way he’d be able to place her in the future.
In military intelligence, Daniel had been around far more women that you’d typically find in the military, either because they were simply more intelligent, or because the recruiters saw it as an administrative type job and vectored them in that direction. ‘Far more’ was still well short of a third, and here he was outnumbered 10-8, if you count Ethan, by the fairer gender. “What is Emmy short for?”
Brent grunted and said, “I’m not really sure. I’ve always known her as Emmy.” He shrugged. “I don’t even know if it’s short for anything. You’ll have to ask her yourself.” He grinned slyly, “I just hope Marcy doesn’t get mad at you.”
Daniel stopped to think, “This is why I need a PlayStation Micro. It keeps me out of trouble.”
He looked glum for a moment, then Brent told him, “That wouldn’t do you any good.”
The big man looked at him quizzically, trying to figure out where he was going with that comment. “What do you mean?”
Brent smiled again. “You have to download all of the games, and I don’t think you’re going to connect to PlayStation Network again for a long time.”
Realization dawned, and Daniel kicked the ground. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that. But how did YOU know?” He couldn’t imagine how someone over a decade his senior would know about the inner workings of his favorite game system.
Tomorrow's Dawn (Book 2): Fractured Paradise Page 3