Masters of Mayhem

by Franklin Horton

  Bryan closed the forty feet between him and the boy. His army stayed in place. The child didn’t move when Bryan’s large horse towered over him, puffing breathy clouds into the cold morning air.

  “I expect your mother is going to spank you for getting so filthy,” Bryan said.

  The boy had no reaction, looking at Bryan as he spoke, then returning to his bottle. He renewed pecking at the bottle with the rock, the sound ringing through the leafless trees.

  “That bottle breaks, you might cut yourself,” Bryan tried.

  The boy responded in the same manner. He looked at Bryan with icy blue eyes set deep in cheeks pink from the cold, black from ash, but said not a word.

  Bryan sighed. “Anybody else live here?”

  The boy didn’t look up this time, bored with Bryan and his pointless questions. Clink, clink, clink, clink.

  “Helloooooo!” Bryan roared.

  The volume of Bryan’s outburst startled the child. He dropped the rock and clenched his grubby hands into fists.

  Bryan scanned the surrounding homes, watching for any movement. In a moment, a door opened and a woman burst out, hastily wrapping a blanket around her shoulders against the cold morning. She was wearing house slippers and ran to close the distance between her and her child. She was breathing hard by the time she snatched up her child. The blanket fell to the ground and she struggled to balance the child while picking it back up.

  “You should keep a better eye on your baby,” Bryan said. “In normal times, Social Services would be paying you a visit. That would be an improvement over what might happen these days.”

  The woman was too thin, with streaky blonde hair. She was only wearing a tank top and sweats beneath the blanket. She was chilled in the morning air, her skin like a plucked chicken. Her fiery eyes made clear that she had a lot to say but she had the brains to know this wasn’t the time to say it.

  Bryan studied her from the saddle, enjoying the intimidating height difference that being on horseback created. “These days people might take a child. Had we been of a mind to do so, you wouldn’t have even known he was gone. By the end of the day, he might have been roasting over a spit. That is, if we were the kind of people prone to such depravity.”

  He smiled at her, a gesture intended to let her know that she had no way of knowing what kind of people they were. Maybe they were cannibals. Maybe they were child eaters. Maybe they were worse. He would let her wonder about that.

  “What do you want?” she asked. “We got nothing left to take. If that’s what you’re here for, you’re shit out of luck.”

  “My objective is information,” Bryan said, his tone that of a man presenting himself at a reception desk. He was concise, all business.

  “About what?”

  “My companions and I are searching for a number of men missing from our group. We believe they may have gone this way a few weeks ago. It would have been a large number of men on horseback. They may have made inquiries for food and assistance along the way.”

  “You mean they robbed people,” the woman clarified. “You can’t hide behind those fancy words. I know what you’re saying.”

  Bryan took a deep breath and eased it back out. “The laws that govern society and social interactions are different now.”

  “There you go with the fancy words again. What you mean is there is no law anymore,” the woman said bitterly.

  Bryan smiled. “Precisely. If you wish to benefit from the new paradigm, you should better position yourself to take advantage of it.”

  “You mean I should build an army like you? I should go around stealing off poor people who can’t defend themselves?”

  “That’s one way,” Bryan said. “Another option would be to seek employment with a larger, more established group. For your labor you would receive food and protection. Keep in mind that I’m not extending that offer to you now. At this point, you would simply be a burden on us in our travels. But once we find the answers we are seeking, the odds are good that we’ll be returning this way. As we do, we’ll be rebuilding our labor force. Women such as yourself—strong, fit, able—will be of use to us. You have some time to think about it.”

  “No thanks,” the woman spat. “I don’t need any time to think about it. I’m not interesting in being someone’s slave.”

  Bryan was impressed by her quick grasp of the situation. He gave her a tight smile. “When and if the offer is presented, declining it may not be an option. We take what we want and no one stops us.”

  “Someone did,” the woman shot back with an irritating tone of satisfaction.

  Bryan raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

  “Someone stopped you.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  She threw her head in the direction Bryan was headed, the direction of the town they’d not yet entered. “Those guys you were asking about, they went through here all right. They tried to come back through our town, but they didn’t make it. Someone stopped them. And all those women they had with them were set free. They went back home.” She waggled her head as she spoke in a smug manner.

  It was too much for Bryan. He leapt off his horse and charged the woman, knocking the child from her arms. He grabbed the woman by her shirt and slung her down in the ash pit. A cloud of dust rose as he slammed her to the ground. She screamed, her face screwing up in pain as the trash beneath the ashes scraped and gouged at her. Broken glass. Lids hacked from tin cans with pocket knives. Crushed beer and soda cans.

  His face in hers, Bryan snarled, “What the fuck do you know about my men?”

  Spit sprayed in the woman’s face. She flinched against it, against the violence she expected to follow it. She didn’t look so smug now.

  “What do you know about my men?” Bryan repeated, slower this time. “You have five seconds or I kill your child in front of you.”

  “Just like you said,” the woman replied, her voice quavering. “They came through here the first time and stole from people. They said they were on a mission to find women to work on their farm. On their way back, they made it as far as the bridge in town. Then something happened.”

  “What happened?” Bryan shouted, as angry as he’d ever been. His composure, his poise, his careful diction, all of it was gone. He was a snarling beast. “Did folks organize against them? Did your little town decide to ambush them to protect trash like you? To keep you from getting carried off to work at my farm?”

  “No! It wasn’t us that attacked them. It wasn’t local people at all.”

  “Then who was it?”

  The woman shook her head violently. “I don’t know! I don’t know!”

  “Then what happened? Tell me everything!”

  “We heard there was a big group coming into town. Everyone was scared because of what those men told us the first time they passed through. We all went back up in the hills and hid. Everyone in town did the same thing. We could see the fires where they were camping around the river bridge. Then all hell broke loose. Shooting. Screaming. More fires.”

  “If it wasn’t your people, who was it?”

  She shook her head again, urgent, desperate. “I don’t know. We couldn’t see. It was dark and we were up too high to see clearly.”

  Bryan shoved the woman down hard and released her. He stood and straightened his clothes. “We’re going into town to see for ourselves.”

  Bryan mounted his horse and the woman struggled to her feet. She’d lost a shoe and blood streaked her filthy back.

  “Things better be like you said,” Bryan spat. “If it’s not, we’re coming back for you.”

  “Maybe I won’t be here,” the woman said defiantly, unable to restrain her tongue.

  Bryan yanked his pistol from his belt. The woman grabbed up her son and began running awkwardly to her home, the other house slipper flying free. Bryan wasn’t a good shot, but when the gun boomed she fell. She tumbled, falling on her son. The boy cried but the woman didn’t move again.

  The ho
rse beneath him whinnied and shifted. Bryan spun it hard and faced his army. He studied their faces. If there was any reaction, any disagreement to what he’d done, they hid it.

  “Be on guard!” he shouted. “We’re close!”

  Bryan kicked his horse to a gallop and tore off in the direction of town. Wisdom might have dictated a slower pace, one that granted the ability to more carefully probe for an ambush, but he rode with a singular determination. While some in his army were aware of the danger of riding so blindly into unknown territory, they were also afraid of the consequences of falling behind so irrational and impulsive a leader. Better to rush into the unknown than suffer at the hand of the known.

  A quarter hour of hard riding brought Bryan to the immense steel bridge crossing one of the biggest rivers in the state. Four lanes of traffic could travel the bridge in better times. In its current state it was impassible. Abandoned vehicles were strewn at the approach to the bridge and on the bridge itself. They lay asunder and without orientation, as if tossed like dice by the hand of a bored mountain god. Some were burned, some had bullet holes, others had doors open and their contents strung out onto the road like the entrails of a shattered pumpkin.

  Bryan slowed at the bridge, still not seeing anything that gave evidence his missing men had died here. So much of the highway system looked like a battlefield anymore that it was hard to recognize those places which had actually earned the title through spilled blood. His men caught up with him and he raised a hand to stop them. The group did as instructed, their excited horses stamping shod feet and snorting. The horses read the mood and anxiety of the group as a whole, their eyes rolling and wide, their heads slinging and pitching.

  Bryan moved forward alone, forced to kick his horse into overcoming its hesitancy. Maybe it sensed what its rider could not yet see. Bryan studied an overturned van without stopping. He moved onto the bridge itself, the sound of the river louder in his ears, and found a car with all of its windows shot out. In this time of deprivation and shortage, men did not shoot this many rounds for entertainment. There were dozens of holes in this car alone.

  Leaves carpeted the bridge, damp and brown, clinging to the ground and muffling the steps of the horse. They packed wind-blown against the rotting body of a saddled horse. The saddle was unfastened as if someone had tried to steal it but had been unable to free it from beneath the carcass. Just beyond it was the first human body. Those items of clothing not damaged and gore-encrusted had been stripped from the body. The man lay shirtless and waxen, a portion of his face crushed inward by a devastating blow that, to the extent of Bryan’s knowledge, could have come either from bullet or bludgeon.

  Other odd bits of gear lay scattered around the bridge. It looked like the aftermath of an outdoor music festival where all that remained was trash and lost clothing. The lighter items had blown to the side and gathered in piles that mixed with more leaves. Further on he began to find shell casings. There were pistols of all calibers, rifles, and shotguns.

  Bryan slipped from his horse, dizzied by the ruin and annihilation that surrounded him. There were more dead horses and more dead men. The men lay in the awkward attitudes in which they died or the even more awkward postures in which desperate ghouls positioned them as they ransacked the bodies. Bryan did not know enough about horses or their gear to tell one from the other. They could have been Douthat Farms animals or perhaps not.

  Soon after finding the second dead horse, he found the first man he recognized.

  He couldn’t remember the man’s name but had seen him around Douthat Farms on a daily basis. He had a good attitude and seemed appreciative of the opportunity he’d been given. He had some mechanical aptitude and was often seen working on the mechanical systems of the farm, running water lines, installing solar panels, or making repairs.

  The man was stripped of all gear and clothing. His neck was a black and brown encrustation of dense gore. His throat had been cut or ripped out with an edged weapon. His bare body was covered in bite marks from predation. Crows had dug at eyes and anus. Rats favored lips and fingers. What remained had taken on the sallow yellow tone of a scrap of fat ignored in a dog’s bowl.

  The carnage only increased as Bryan walked further, giving more evidence to what had taken place here. This was indeed a battlefield. Shell casings rang as he kicked them or rolled beneath his feet when he stepped on them. There were many more dead bodies. He hadn’t counted them all but it looked as if it was roughly equivalent to the force he sent out.

  This was likely all his men and they were all dead. He would have his men take an exact count later. It left him with a sick feeling, unrelated to what he saw but closely bound to the blow dealt him by this loss. It had been one thing to imagine that he’d lost such a number of his men. It was quite another to have his worst fears actualized and decaying in front of his very eyes.

  He finally found Top Cat and Lester, his former lieutenants, amidst the carnage of burned vehicles and more stripped corpses. Some of the dead appeared fortunate enough to have died neatly from bullet wounds. Others had died ugly deaths, their corpses beaten, battered, and bruised. Some were cut, a few hacked to death.

  There were no weapons or gear left to recover. Bryan could not say if the men who killed his force took their weapons or if they were looted by local folks in the aftermath. It was significant to him that there were no dead women among the bodies at all. Whatever happened here was undoubtedly chaotic but there was no evidence that any prisoners at all had been killed.

  Bryan wondered about that. Had Top Cat stolen some women whose families organized a pursuit? It was possible, but to kill every single man he’d sent out? That was either the result of incredible odds or the product of a very diligent and determined pursuer.

  Rage surged in Bryan like a volcano bursting and pouring its fire upon the land. He screamed long and loud. His horse spooked, pulling away from him and running back toward the rest of his men. He kept yelling until his voice filled the gorge like fog and wound its way into the creases of distant hollows. He only stopped when his voice failed him.

  In that sudden quiet, he heard the shifting of a horse behind him. He found Zach standing there watching him, his face not giving any hint of how he felt about Bryan’s outburst. That little thing somehow impressed Bryan, even in the strangeness of the moment.

  “Anything I can do?” Zach asked.

  Bryan cleared his throat. He tried to speak and it took a few tries to find his voice again. “Can you organize a search to make sure we find all the bodies? I need a count.”

  “You want a number or you want the bodies piled up?”

  “No need to handle the bodies,” Bryan said. “That may be a little too much for folks. Just get a count.”

  It was only as the body count neared completion and people began to think about the next meal that someone noticed the horse-drawn wagon carrying their supplies had not caught up with the rest of the group. It had been with them when Bryan shot the woman. When the men surged off in pursuit of Bryan, they all assumed it was behind them and would catch up. It never did.

  When someone finally noticed, word spread among the men. No one wanted to tell Bryan about it because he seemed wound a little tight today. When Zach heard what was being discussed by the men, he relayed the news to Bryan. He didn’t have the same fear of him that the former Douthat Farms employees had, nor was he as terrified as those recruited through Bryan’s Shining Path “join or die” technique.

  “Take a half-dozen men, damn it!” Bryan shouted. “That wagon has all our food and a lot of our gear. Find it!”

  Zach grabbed two of his trucker buddies, a man named Andre and the redheaded woman, Carrie. He singled out three other men simply by proximity and the fact they were already mounted on horses.

  “You three! Come on!”

  The group shot away from the bridge at full gallop, hooves clattering and riders shouting to urge their horses onward. They made the ride at a faster pace than earlier but it still
took them a full ten minutes to return to where they’d left the wagon. They found the driver sprawled like a starfish at the side of the road. He’d seemingly stopped to take a piss, as indicated by his exposed manhood and the bloom of wet pavement spreading out from his body, a mixture of both blood and urine.

  “Shit,” Zach mumbled upon seeing the man. He checked his surroundings and saw no sign of the wagon. “Spread out. Look for tracks.”

  After a few minutes of frantic searching, Carrie shook her head in frustration. “There ain’t nothing here.”

  Zach pointed a finger up the road, the bearing from which they’d come earlier in the day. The group galloped off in that direction.

  “They’ve got a head start but they can’t make good time in that wagon,” Zach said. “If they’re still on the road, we’ll catch them.”

  They rode for a few minutes, searching the shoulders for any clues the wagon may have strayed, but keeping mostly to the pavement.

  “There!” said one of Bryan’s men, pointing at a set of ruts in the soft soil of a puddle. “They turned off here.” Without waiting on anyone to join him, he headed off in that direction, following what might have been a driveway or a logging road. It was hard to tell in its current overgrown state.

  “Careful!” Zach called. He turned to Carrie. “Son of a bitch is going to get himself killed riding off like that.”

  “I smell smoke,” Carrie said.

  “We’ve smelled smoke all day,” Zach said. “It’s cold and people don’t have anything else. It’s probably some poor guy burning his coffee table to keep warm.”

  After a few twists and turns on the unkempt mountain lane, the riders found the wagon abandoned and fully-engulfed in flames. Every mind in the group reverberated with profanity but no one said a word. There was nothing to say that would change the outcome.