My conclusion from all this was that one of the men from the night before had been injured in the argument and was now somewhere nearby in the trees. I was tempted to explore further and try to find him, but I was afraid that if I didn’t return to Petra soon, she might come looking for me. I went back and assured her that I was all right, but that she needed to stay concealed and quiet while I explored a little further.
Once again reaching the location of the blood and scuff marks, I took my only weapon to hand, the screwdriver, and crept into the trees parallel to the track and several yards away. Not ten full paces in, I saw the sole and outside ankle of a booted foot. It was sticking out from a jumble of branches and brush on the ground. By its awkward position, I knew its owner was either dead or unconscious.
The other party to this violence was forced to mind at that point. I felt if the incident as I envisioned it was accurate — argument, fight, this one running off, the other shooting him, this one stumbling into the trees and finally going down — it probably meant the other party was still ambulatory and still dangerous. But the morning was well advanced by this time, and I thought that if the other man were indeed able, he would have already searched out his companion. But there was no evidence another man had been this way.
Death made it hard to judge his age, but he was a young man, I can tell you that. He wasn’t very big either, maybe only five foot six or seven, and there was something odd about his proportions, too. It seemed his legs were too short for his upper body. As you would expect, his clothes showed wear from much travel and were muddy on the front from crawling the last few feet. His boots were so noticeably ground down on the outsides that it made me wonder if he wasn’t bow legged, too. The wound he suffer; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4tifed was to one of his legs, and by the amount of blood present on the ground, my guess was that his femoral artery had been severed and he just bled out.
He was wearing a brown leather jacket that appeared to be intact, so I stripped it off him, thinking it might be another layer for Petra against the cold. There was a gold chain in one pocket and a cloth rag in the other. On his belt was an empty leather sheath for a hunting knife. I took this from him and slid it on my own belt, pushing the screwdriver down inside. In his pants pockets were nothing much of use; a broken comb, a three foot length of heavy twine, and a vinyl wallet that only held a photograph of a woman I would have guessed was in her fifties. I left him at that point, acknowledging him with just one more thought — I wondered if he had been a good man or a bad man?
I re-emerged from the trees, dropped the jacket on the ground, and followed his footprints further west toward the river, cautious as before. Ten yards along, in the dirt, was the man’s hunting knife covered in blood. I picked it up and wiped it off on a clump of grass before throwing aside the screwdriver and replacing it with the knife. It wasn’t a vast improvement, but at least now I had a tool that I could use for more than just self-defense.
Not quite to the west end of the tree line, I found their camp. I also found the other man. He was sitting on the ground with his back supported by the trunk of a large tree that had these long, thin strips of grey-green bark hanging loose from it. His legs were spread wide, straight out in front of him, with his toes pointed right and left. His head hung down revealing a crown just starting to show through thinning brown hair. There was a stab wound to his chest that still trickled blood, which, over the last few hours, had thoroughly soaked his clothing to the waist.
Much to my surprise, he was alive. And when he became aware of my presence, he looked up at me with dark hooded eyes. I saw his right hand fumble about on the ground next to his leg before coming up with an ugly, black, short barreled revolver. So I quickly side stepped behind a different tree, to give myself some protection, and peeked out at him, showing only the edge of my body. “I won’t hurt you,” I said, and added “Maybe I can help.” I want you to know, however, I had no illusions about his condition. He was well beyond anything I, or anyone else for that matter, could do to save him.
He motioned with his pistol as if pointing at me, and when I didn’t respond, he motioned again. Finally, I figured out that he was indicating the knife strapped to my hip. “Oh this,” I said tapping it. “I took it off the body of a dead man back there in the brush,” and pointed back the way I had come. He smiled and dropped his hand as if he no longer had the strength to support it.
I asked him if the other man had stabbed him, and he bobbed his head ever so slightly, answering in the affirmative.
I took a chance at that point and stepped out from behind the tree and started toward him. My mistake because the man suddenly raised the pistol back up and pulled the trigger. Twice it clicked before he dropped his hand, looked at me, gave a faint smile, and somehow mustered the strength to shrug his shoulders as if to say, “Oh well, am I doing this because deifI tried.” I continued forward, madder than hell at myself for being so stupid, my face burning, stepped on the pistol and his hand, and grabbed it up. It was a .44 revolver with a full cylinder, but the bullets had all been fired.
As I write this out, I’m wondering to myself when it is that I’m going to make that one bad decision that will finally do me in. This could have been it.
I squatted down to eye level, to call him the son of a bitch he was, but there wasn’t much point. His eyes were just slits, his skin opaque and sagging, and his breaths so shallow they were impossible to count.
“Are there more of you?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. I can’t even say for sure he heard me.
I poked him a couple of times hard on the shoulder and saw his face register pain. “Are there others like you nearby,” I asked again
His eyes opened a little bit, and I thought I saw him nod, but that might have only been my imagination. It’s also possible that it was just his neck muscles struggling to keep his head upright. He was failing fast. I could see it.
All of a sudden I was anxious to get the hell out of there. The man in front of me stunk of death. It was thick and oily. I could smell it. I could taste it. It was coming from his pores, his mouth, everywhere. He was rotten with it from the inside out, and it made me want to get away from him before it invaded my body, too, and took over.
Despite this feeling and the urge to just turn and run like hell, I needed bullets for his pistol, so I took the knife, now my knife, and cut open his pockets. Even just one cartridge would be better than what I had now. I didn’t find any, though. Apparently the last he had were fired into the body of his companion. I kept the pistol anyway. I remember thinking I might be able to bluff with it. It was an ugly enough looking piece.
Next, I turned my attention to their camp. It was in a hollowed out area where the trees were not so close together. There were a couple of blankets, still damp from the night air, wadded up on the ground. There was also a canvas bag with a single strap and a water bottle tucked in an outside pocket. There was another water bottle on the ground but the liquid in it didn’t look anything like water, so I picked it up. Once the top was off, the odor jumped out at me, making me turn my head — hooch, made at least partially from fruit. I poured it out on the ground. God it smelled awful. It was another piece of the puzzle, though.
I now figured they were drunk last night and that’s what sparked the argument. But one answer gets you another question. Where’d they get it? It’s something that takes several days and a warm environment to make. You aren’t going to make this stuff while on the road, walking in the rain.
I then went through the canvas bag. Inside was some dried meat wrapped in cloth, two spoons, two metal cups and half a dozen carrots with flecks of dir; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4tift still clinging to their end root. It was something. The dried meat would give us a little protein. We needed protein.
I gathered everything up and headed back to Petra. As I passed by the man I spoke of, I felt his eyes on me, but I didn’t look at him …I didn’t want to look at him. There was nothing else about him
I wanted to remember. I refused to make him any more of me than he already was.
I know this isn’t a very compassionate thing to say, but I thought “to hell with you.” He killed his companion, no doubt others, too, and the bastard would have done the same to me if he could have. I had no compassion to spare his kind.
When I got back to Petra, I put the leather jacket around her shoulders and gave her a piece of the dried meat to chew on while I rolled the blankets and tied the ends together with the wire I found two days before. I also ate a piece of the meat, slipped the strap of the canvas bag over my head and onto one shoulder, one of the blankets onto the other shoulder and pulled Petra to her feet. I arranged the other blanket onto one of her shoulders, in a similar fashion as mine, and we started off looking like we are — a couple of refugees in search of a home.
I figured that we had roughly one hundred fifteen to one hundred twenty miles to go before we reached Woburn. I based this on my initial assessment that we were nearly two hundred miles away when Anna first pointed out our destination on my map, the same day we found Petra, and estimating how many miles we had traveled since. If we could get at least twenty miles a day from now on, even if we had to walk past dark, we could make it in a little over five days. I didn’t know if that would be in time to warn the town of the attack or not, but we’d do our best.
We trudged on the entire morning, and the terrain stayed pretty much the same. It was still farm country, fields and orchards, so it was relatively flat. Several times, we saw buildings off in the distance, probably houses and barns and such. Under other circumstances, I might have been inclined to check them out, but it would take too much time away from our main objective, getting to Woburn, so bypass them we did.
Once or twice, as we walked along, Petra talked about what her room would look like in “the safe place,” and the games she’d play with her new friends, and how maybe they’d even have a school for her to attend, but for the most part she was quiet, which was a good thing. With no ambient noise from cars, trucks, music, or at the present, wind, a voice can be heard from quite a distance, and no telling how close our enemies were. Still, when she did talk about these things, I didn’t shush her. It made me feel good to hear someone who was looking forward with such hope and promise. I had enough worry and sadness for the both of us.
About mid-day, our surroundings began to change. We encountered a set of rolling hills that steepened to our east. The slopes near the lower elevations were well timbered, and the bottoms drained toward the river. Several times we walked over sections of the road that bridged drainage pipes, conducting water west. All this of course slowed our progress.
As always, we still passed dark brownwot cars and trucks on flattened tires, streaked brown, falling to rust. At one point we encountered an open trench running along the side of the road. On one end was a piece of heavy equipment, painted yellow, a trencher I think. At the bottom of this hole was a length of corrugated pipe about three feet in diameter, half submerged in muddy water. Nearby, other twenty-foot sections of the same pipe were stacked in threes, and it looked like animals had been using them for shelter. There were paw prints on the ground near the openings. There was also what looked like a human jawbone with teeth intact.
On the other side of the river, we could see a set of buildings I assumed to have once been a charging station, small grocery, and a fast food joint for travelers along Highway 97. The roof of one of the structures was burned through and toppled inward. Crows roosted on the two that were left.
Eventually we took a break in a small grove of trees not but fifty yards from our course of travel. There, we each ate another piece of dried meat and some of the carrots I’d liberated at the first of the morning. After a time, I walked off a short distance and filled our water bottles from a nearby stream. When I came back, Petra was laying on her back sound asleep, so I decided to give her a few minutes and sat down nearby.
Our place wasn’t particularly advantageous for concealment but well enough so to avoid detection on just a casual glance. It did, however, provide a good vantage point for me to view the road we traveled, so that’s where I turned my attention while Petra slept.
After only three or four minute’s time, I was startled to see a man and woman come into view from the north, going our same direction of travel. The man was tall, thin, and hunched over, not like he was being sneaky or anything, but more like he was built that way. He was wearing a denim vest over a jacket, a baseball cap, and dirty, white high-top tennis shoes. The woman was large, built like a pear, and wearing a thigh length light brown coat and brown pants. The man was armed with a shotgun. The woman, as far as I could see, was unarmed.
The woman now, well for a few seconds there she teased at my memory. Where have I seen her before, I wondered? Finally I had her pegged. It was the woman I saw at the farm where I first encountered Gabriel and Anna; or so she appeared. At the time this was happening, I couldn’t manage her name. I didn’t dwell on it, though, because what was the point. Later I recalled it was Nora. I also recalled what Gabriel had told me about her — she was just as bad as the men.
The pair jogged a few yards, stopped and looked behind them; then jogged some more. At one point, the man with the shotgun lay down alongside a small red car with the engine hood standing open and aimed his weapon back the way they had come. He must have found that position uncomfortable because he then rose to one knee, still pointing the gun as if he were expecting someone to appear, sighting right down the barrel. This position must have been unsatisfactory, too, because after only a few seconds, no longer than a minute, he abandoned the car altogether and returned to running as they had before. A mere twenty steps after that, they stopped yet again, and while the man looked behind him, I saw the woman’s gaze settle on the trees that sheltered us. A couple of seconds later I saw he; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4tifr pull the shoulder of her companion’s jacket in our direction and start toward us but with their attention mostly on the road behind them.
At this, I dropped to the ground and crawled to Petra, where I shook her awake with one hand, while holding the other over her mouth. I whispered for her to keep very quiet and quickly gathered up our things and began moving farther up the hill and deeper into the trees. As we moved, I could hear the pair getting closer.
I found a place for us down low, behind a tree that had fallen and rested on another. We were fairly well concealed here and, once again, I cautioned Petra against making any noise. “Some bad people are near,” I told her.
I remember being just absolutely sure they were going to find us. I figured they would, without a doubt, see where we had crushed down the grass and see our tracks where we snuck off. How could they not help doing so? In my mind, I started preparing for a confrontation.
When they finally stopped, we were not but thirty feet beyond them. The man took a spot behind a tree, standing up, and pointed the shotgun back down at the road. I was really thinking about that shotgun at that moment; I surely was. Should we be discovered, as I envisioned, the best I could do would be to point an empty pistol at them and hope for a stand-off. That they would be fooled or intimidated seemed pretty unlikely. His weapon would be a terrible thing to face. And talk about facing things, what of the people they were waiting in ambush for? If we did in some way manage to avoid Nora and her friend, would the others be worse? Those were my thoughts anyway.
Nora grabbed the man’s sleeve and yanked on it a couple of times, but the man shook her off without even looking in her direction. She grabbed his sleeve again and this time said, “You fool, we’re too far away for that,” which was true, both parts of it — fool and being too far away. At fifty or sixty or more yards, the effectiveness of the shotgun was questionable. She said that they should just let them pass and follow after for a chance to catch them by surprise. She then said something that nearly put a stop to my heart. “I can’t wait to see that bitch’s face just before we pull the trigger. She won’t be so high and mi
ghty then.”
The man snorted out a laugh that sounded like a hog rooting tubers, and it was so loud that she called him a “dummy” this time, and told him to “shut-up.”
Now of course, you can guess what I was thinking, and it didn’t have anything to do with swine or ignorant, obnoxious women either. I was thinking of Anna. But at first, I fought the possibility as hard as I fought the acceptance of her and Gabriel’s deaths. Once again, it was a struggle between my rational/logical self and my emotional self. In my head I was saying, “I saw the boat with my own eyes. They couldn’t possibly have survived that kind of damage.” But all the while that was going on, the drumbeat of hope got louder, and louder, and louder until I couldn’t even hear myself think. Eventually the rhythm of it got to me, and I found myself keeping its time, singing its lyrics, and it soon became one of those songs you just can’t get out of your head no matter how hard you try.se people want you so bad?”
I made the leap and told myself they had to be talking about Anna, right? This Nora woman was at the farm where she and Gabriel were being held, right? Gabriel said she was mean and vindictive, right? So it made sense, right? Of course, right. They had to be talking about Anna. I tried to hear more.
They had huddled-up by that point, and it was much harder for me to eavesdrop. From the few words I could fathom, it sounded like they were excited about the reward they’d receive for the killing they now planned. That also made me think it was Gabriel and Anna they were talking about. I knew that Ponytail wanted to catch or kill both Anna and Gabriel, so it made sense that he offered some kind of inducement to get his minions to do it. From what I knew of him, that’s exactly the kind of thing he would do.
Nora cut off their conversation at this point and announced, almost with dramatic flair, “I gotta pee” and just like that, she walked a few yards away, pulled her pants down and did her business. While so engaged the man turned toward her and said, “Hey! Hurry up will ya? Here they come.”
Journal Page 16