Masters of Mayhem

by Franklin Horton

  One of the horses in the second row was startled by the cries and desperation of the injured horses. It reared and staggered on its hind legs, one of those steps going over the side and spilling horse and rider into the creek. This horse too landed upon its rider, crushing the man from skull to groin and staining the water with his blood.

  The rest of the procession managed to get off the bridge without loss of life. The main body of Bryan’s army heard the distressed cries of the horses and the shouts of the men and came back to them, shocked at what they saw.

  Bryan wove his way through the gawking men to reach the head of the crowd.

  “What the hell happened?” he asked, directed at anyone who might have an answer.

  “The bridge was a trap,” a scrawny, scared kid replied. “It fell through with them.”

  Bryan had to bite his tongue to restrain himself. He wanted to scream and curse but it would not instill faith in his men. He needed them to move forward with him and they wouldn’t do that if they thought he was losing it.

  “Abandon the bridge,” Bryan said. “We go through the creek. You’ll have to lead your horses but I think they can make it.”

  “That water is cold,” one of the men complained. He was beanpole thin.

  Bryan stared at him, uncertain if the man’s weight was a lifelong condition or a result of the deprivation he’d experienced since the collapse.

  “You can go first,” Bryan said.

  “If I get my shoes wet, they’ll take forever to dry,” the man complained.

  Bryan pulled his .45 automatic and pointed it at the man’s head. “My offer for you to go first was not me being polite!” Bryan bellowed, his face reddening and spittle flying. “It was a command. Now do it!”

  The man climbed down from his horse and stepped off the shoulder of the road. The horse was reluctant and it took a combination of tugging and coaxing to make him cooperate. Once they’d managed to make their way down the slope, the man hesitantly stuck a foot in the water like a cat dabbing a paw at a puddle.

  He shot Bryan a quick, spiteful look. Bryan tightened his grip on the pistol and was nearly provoked into shooting the man. Troop strength, he reminded himself. I need him.

  “Aw, to hell with it,” the man muttered, plunging forward into the creek, and tugging at his horse.

  At the opposite bank, the man had to lean forward, tugging at roots and weeds to pull himself up. The horse required several powerful lunges to make it to the top. Proud of himself, the skinny man held the reins of his horse aloft and took a bow. As he straightened back up he took a step, preparing to mount his horse. Then he sank to his waist, an agonizing scream erupting from his mouth.

  “Damn,” Doc Marty whispered to Conor, watching from the hillside. “Fucking brutal.”

  “Help me!” the skinny man cried.

  Bryan was wide-eyed with panic, his horse scuttling from the sound of terror. He fought to control it. “Someone help him! Get across that bridge!”

  One of the men climbed off his horse and walked tentatively across the bridge, testing each step to see it would hold him. Progress seemed painfully slow but he was across in less than a minute, running to the aid of the injured man. Then he was down too, one leg sinking into the ground knee deep. His body pitched forward, a round steel disc encircling his leg, jagged teeth embedded in his flesh.

  “What the hell?” someone yelled.

  Another man started across the bridge, trying to stay within the footprints of the first, hoping to render aid to both of his screaming companions. Once across, he went to the closest man, the one trapped around the leg, and found that he couldn’t remove the steel circle without inflicting more pain. He moved to the second man, finding that the skinny man had sunk to his midsection within the hacked up drum lid. Wedge-shaped barbs of the thin steel were buried in his flesh.

  The man there to render aid had no clue what do. Any attempt to remove the barrel lids from their bodies only inflicted more pain. He turned to make his way back to the bridge. Three steps into his escape, he hit a drum lid too, sinking his calf through the jagged steel and falling to the ground.

  “Position One, men down,” Conor said into his radio. “Position Two, men down. Good job, boys.”

  “What’s happening down there?” Doc Marty said. “I didn’t see you all set that up. I was helping saw down the tree.”

  “Drum lids. Take an ax and cut wedges into them like you’re cutting a pie. It’s like a plastic cup lid from a fast food place. You stick a straw through the opening and those little flaps of plastic push inward. In this case, they’re made of steel and dig into the flesh.”

  “That’s nasty,” Doc Marty said. “It’s an easy shot with a rifle. Should we finish them off?”

  Conor shook his head. “We need to stop them but we also need to leave a few alive to tell the story of what happened. That story becomes part of the legend that will help protect us in the future.”

  Doc Marty smiled. “The legend of the Mad Mick?”

  “That’s right.”

  Below them, more men were attempting to cross the bridge and render aid, stepping carefully, tapping their rifles on the ground to listen for steel. Some were reaching the injured and finding it difficult to help them. The easiest solution would have been if they had some way to cut the edge of the drum lid and unwrap them from the victim, but they had nothing capable of cutting through steel that thick.

  “Two of you can stay to care for the wounded!” Bryan bellowed. “The rest of us are going to go back and climb over that tree!”

  “Two men?” an injured man asked. “What can two men do for us?”

  “They can euthanize you if you become a pain in the ass!” Bryan snapped.

  The rest of Bryan’s men returned to the tree.

  “Tie off your horses. The rest of us are moving forward on foot,” Bryan told his men.

  A lot of questioning looks were going back and forth. For some of these men, the prospect of walking was no more pleasant than the prospect of moving forward against an enemy who clearly had no compunction against maiming and cruelly injuring them.

  “That was not a question,” Bryan said. “That was an order.”

  Men began responding, reluctantly climbing from their horses and tying them off to anything they could find. Men shouldered their gear and weapons. Bryan led the way, climbing and ducking through the maze of branches like a child on the monkey bars.

  Far above them, Conor watched. “I expected more to go AWOL by this point. I thought for sure those barrel lids would have more of a psychological affect.”

  Doc Marty shrugged. “This guy has a hold on them. They’re obviously scared.”

  The pair followed the men with their optics, watching them tie off their horses and move single file to the massive tree. Then Conor smiled. He saw that one flicker of hesitation and he knew he had them.

  Maybe two-thirds of the men were beyond the tree and hiking up the road when one man at the end of the line, waiting his turn to climb through, simply turned tail and ran. It created some kind of instinctual reaction and more men fell in behind him, running to their freedom. They saw the writing on the wall and wanted no part of the story.

  “Those are the smart ones,” Conor said. He keyed his radio. “Moving to Position Three.”

  42

  Barb was pissed at herself. She had little tolerance for failure and even less tolerance for her own failures. She’d stayed on Zach and his men for hours, stalking them through the night, but it was incredibly difficult to follow men in the darkness. She had the benefit of top-notch night vision equipment but it was still difficult going. She had to stay far enough back that the group wouldn’t hear her horse. That distance turned out to be just enough that she lost them at a remote intersection of two gravel roads and never found them again.

  She rode to a high ridge and searched the night for their lights but never caught any. Maybe they stopped to bed down for the night and turned them off. Maybe they
’d heard her, despite her best efforts, and were hiding to lose her. Either way, she’d lost them. She spent all night trying to find their trail but the hard gravel road gave up no clues.

  She was both disgusted and exhausted, but she didn’t feel comfortable bedding down in the woods during daylight. Using her GPS, she found a gas well road that would take her roughly back in the direction of Jewell Ridge. She guessed it might be a two-hour ride. She would ride toward the compound, catch the road, then find her dad. Maybe there was still time for her to get in the fight. She had skin in this game. It would be the conclusion to something that started when she was abducted from her friend Joann’s house. There was no way she was missing it.

  She rode hard, pushing her horse and her riding ability to the limits. She took shortcuts, trying to work the contours and topography of the land to avoid getting stuck in steep valleys or at the base of cliffs.

  When she reached the compound, she didn’t slow but began working her radio. For nearly a mile she heard nothing in the earpiece, then out of nowhere, she heard her dad’s voice. He was handing out instructions and calmly directing people where he needed them.

  She keyed the microphone. “Dad!”

  “Barb?”

  “It’s me. I’m about a mile past the compound, coming down the road.”

  “Stop where you are,” Conor instructed. “I don’t want to give up our position on the radio. I’ll send Ragus for you. Tether your horse in the woods and start walking the road in this direction. Over.”

  “Roger that, Dad. Over and out.” Barb steered the horse into the woods and tied him off on a long lead. She was relieved to have found the group. Not so much for the comfort of their presence, but because she didn’t want to miss any of the action. Although there were a lot of questions she’d wanted to ask, they would have to wait. She needed to find out if they’d heard from Shannon. It was all stuff she could ask Ragus when they crossed paths.

  She jogged back to the road and turned down the ridge.

  43

  Zach had not lost Barb through stealth or cunning, but through his own difficulty navigating the confusing mountain terrain. He’d learned the hard way that it was often impossible to tell what was a private gas well road owned by an energy company and what was a public road. They looked indistinguishable and often neither was marked in any way. Whoever maintained these roads seemed to have the attitude that if you were on this mountain you should know where you were going.

  By sheer accident, he’d led his group onto a gas well road, missing the turn they should have taken. That wrong turn was enough to allow them to escape Barb’s tracking. Once Zach noticed his mistake and found the correct road, his team travelled until the wee hours of early morning, finally bedding down in the woods for a few hours sleep.

  Once they awoke, stiff and cold as corpses, they choked down a quick breakfast of questionable jerky and got on the road. After an hour’s ride in a cold fog, they hit the community of Hell Creek and were finally certain they’d navigated to the correct spot.

  “According to the map, we’ll be on Jewell Ridge in a few hours,” Zach said. “My guess is this Mad Mick character won’t expect anyone to sneak up behind him. This could be what tips the scales in our favor. If Bryan screws up the attack, maybe we can save it.”

  Carrie flipped the hood of her green Carhartt off the top of her head and scowled. “I’m not sure why we’re even doing this. We could just as easily have gone the other way and put some distance between us and this crazy asshole.”

  “The Mad Mick?” Zach asked.

  “No, Bryan. I’m not sure coming with him was such a great idea. It seemed like a good idea at the time but I’m kind of soured on it at this point.”

  Zach shrugged. “I agree he’s a few sockets short of a set but a better opportunity hasn’t come along yet. If one presents itself, maybe we jump ship. Until now, he’s kept us fed and I’ve been pretty comfortable.”

  “I’m not comfortable. I’m cold and I’m tired of sleeping on the ground. I had a decent bed in the sleeper of a truck back at the rest area. I was out of the weather.”

  “Things will get better. We just caught this guy in the middle of waging war. Once they’re done with that, they have a place with cabins, greenhouses, and solar power. I’ve heard all about it and not just from Bryan. It’s real.”

  Carrie looked uncertain.

  “What?” Zach asked, seeing there was something still bothering her.

  “I don’t get this whole battle thing he’s so obsessed with now. I know there’s times you have to kill folks, but big battles with a lot of shooting seems like a senseless risk to me. I only like to go into fights I know I’m going to win.”

  “You think we’re not going to win this one?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied. That’s the whole problem.” She flipped her hood back in place, signaling an end to the conversation.

  They rode on in silence. To one side of the road, a broad river of greenish-brown water rolled along. Zach thought it looked like good fishing water. He wished for a fishing pole and the time to stop to use it. Even cold weather fishing would be better than no fishing and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone.

  The scent of wood smoke was in the air, a sure sign folks were alive and hiding behind locked doors in the houses they passed. It made the group a little uneasy, as if there were crosshairs tracking them as they plodded by unlit windows. They went unchallenged, either unnoticed or deemed unworthy of attention.

  At an intersection just past Hell Creek, they met a group of riders roughly double them in size. Two of the men were ahead of the group, intently studying a map. In the obscurity of the dense fog, both groups were startled by the sudden appearance of the other, the river masking the sound of hooves until they were upon each other. No one had time to ready weapons prior to the encounter and to do so at this point might inflame the situation beyond salvage. At this close range, men would die for certain. Perhaps all of them would die, leaving behind a mystery for a future traveler to puzzle over, wondering why so many shot-up bodies lay in one place.

  Zach nodded at the man with the map but did not make eye contact, did not still his horse. “Excuse us. We’re just passing through. Didn’t mean to startle you folks.”

  Wayne nodded in response, a reaction unseen since the man was not looking at him. His mind was racing. Jason Jacks and that boy who’d come to see them at the fire hall warned there was an army approaching. He said they needed help. After discussing it with their families, they’d agreed to send a party to aid in the defense of the community. It was, in fact, this very group that was on their way to lend support to the Mad Mick, as soon as they could confirm which road led to the top of Jewell Ridge. This was not their country. They had a county map from the wall of the fire hall but no compass. The lack of signage in the sparse country was not helping matters.

  Something inside Wayne was sending up alarms. The other group didn’t seem like they belonged here. Wayne could say this with a degree of certainty because his group didn’t belong there either. There was a similarity in the manner both groups related to their environment that was telling. They seemed alien, uncertain in the surroundings in a way the locals did not.

  Was this other group also coming to lend support to the Mad Mick? Perhaps they were just outliers who’d been recruited, as Wayne and his people had, to help in this fight?

  “Y’all take care,” Zach said, and his group continued on their way.

  Wayne was wracking his brain, trying to figure out some way to determine if these guys were friend or foe. As the last rider moved past him, he blurted out a question. It was all he could think to do and he needed some way to delay them until he could make the call. “You guys from around here?”

  Zach paused, the riders behind him coming to a staggered stop. He didn’t turn around to address the man speaking to him. His back stiffened, as if he’d thought they were in the clear and now their fate was uncertain. “Why
do you ask, friend?”

  “We’re new here. Just trying to make sense of this map. Ain’t many signs around this damn place.”

  Zach was slow to respond, weighing the value, and the consequence, of each word that might come from his mouth. “Afraid we can’t help you there. Don’t know anything about this area either.”

  “Then where you going?” Wayne asked. “You seem to be on your way somewhere, which is a mite curious since you don’t seem to know the area any better than I do.” The entire time he was speaking, Wayne was drawing his pistol. It was a Glock and, unlike in the movies, there was no sound required to train it on a target. No safety, no hammer click, no random and senseless sounds, just silent death creeping from a holster.

  Detecting their leader’s actions, the rest of Wayne’s sizeable group all moved to ready their weapons as quietly as possible. Wayne saw Zach tilt his head to the side as if stretching his neck, perhaps just reacting to the hair standing up on the back of his neck.

  Zach spun his horse, drawing and shooting wildly into Wayne’s group. The rest of Zach’s party, not anticipating his move, was behind the eight-ball, still trying to figure out just what the hell happened. They caught on fast, pulling their weapons and jumping into the fray.

  Wayne’s group was not so hesitant. Their guns were out by the time Zach fired and they opened up at his shot, instantly dropping two of his party. Their horses side-stepped in terror, trampling their riders and eliciting a scream from the one who was still alive.

  Jumping to the ground, Zach tried to keep his horse between him and the larger force spraying rounds of all calibers in his direction. Unscathed by the flying bullets, Carrie bolted and ran, kicking her horse to top speed. She was done. This was her resignation.

  Then Wayne was off his horse, moving and firing. He’d served in Afghanistan and knew a little about shit kicking off with no warning. He shouted orders to his men, trying to get them to take cover. Zach took advantage of those slow to react or heed Wayne’s warning. He fired into areas of human density, striking several folks more out of luck than accuracy.