Journal

by Craig Buckhout

  “Where is she?” he asked.

  That told me they hadn’t found mom and Alan yet and they didn’t even know there was an Alan.

  “Dead.” I gave him a real hard look when I said it, like I wanted to do something back to him for what happened to her, (which of course I did) hoping to convince him I was telling the truth. He didn’t buy it, though.

  “I don’t believe you. Where is she?”

  I told him I buried her shortly after they spotted us back by the river. I added, “She bled to death, you asshole,” again hoping the extra information and the name calling would convince him I was telling the truth.

  He stepped to one side at that point, motioned me down the road with a wave of his pistol and said, “Show me.” As soon as he said it, toothless gave me a hard shove that snapped my head back, and I started off, wondering at the same time why we were walking that way instead of back the way I had come. I soon found out.

  About fifty yards down this road I’ve been speaking of, and around a slight curve, sat our little car, and seeing it caught me completely off guard, big time. I must have showed my surprise, because Eric’s face lit up like he’d just been given the keys to Woburn’s front gate. I guess we didn’t hide it well enough. It made me mad that he’d found it. It was another insult. Nothing seemed to be going our way. It was taking the stuffing right out of me.

  Toothless tied my hands in front of me and motioned for me to get into the front passenger seat. He got in the back, right behind me, looped a section of rope across the front of my throat, and snugged it up nice and tight, giving it a little jerk just to let me know not to try anything.

  Eric, though, remained standing on the roadway and in a couple of minutes I saw why. A group of men, six in all, came into view and approached him. I think they were part of that same group I saw following me. They talked among themselves for a few minutes, allagreementwot of them at one time or another looking my way, especially this one guy wearing a red baseball cap and dark glasses, but I couldn’t quite hear what they were saying. There was some sort of agreement reached, though, because they nodded their heads to Eric and turned around and went back the direction I had come. I took it from this that Eric had sent them back to find mom.

  After they took off, Eric sat down in the driver’s seat, said, “Let’s go dig her up,” and drove off. We hadn’t gone twenty yards before he swung his right elbow toward my head, sharp like. I saw it coming in enough time to tuck my head a little and turn it to my right but not soon enough to avoid the blow altogether. It hit me a good one, almost squarely on my left eyebrow, opening a cut and knocking me goofy. As soon as the sparklers burned themselves out, I felt the blood, warm and thick, flow down into my eye, onto my cheek and watched it drip from there onto my pants. I remember telling myself that more was coming, and I was just going to have to take it.

  “So are you going to tell me where she is or do I really mess you up?” he said. “There’s too much at stake to let that little tramp ruin it.”

  What I said back to him must not have been to his liking because it just got me another elbow, this one to my nose and you know how those feel.

  At that point, I faked passing out, which wasn’t too much of a fake to be honest with you. Everything was swimming round and round about then. I needed a little time to think about how to get out of this mess, instead of worrying about what he was going to do to me next. As my head slumped forward, I could feel the rope around my throat go slack.

  I also felt Eric pickup speed. He got to really flying, too, and we started bouncing all over the place because of all the potholes and other things on the road. Over all the noise, the engine, the wind, and the bouncing, I heard Eric shout to Toothless, “To be safe we’ll step things up a day. I still want her found, though.”

  I guess I should have been deep down scared. I mean just for starters, he split open the skin over my eye and on top of that it felt like he busted my nose (it turned out he did). He also had my gun, and I was tied-up like a chicken ready for cooking. But instead of being afraid, I just remember feeling really, really mad; insane mad, kill him with my bare hands mad. So mad in fact that I didn’t really care what happened to me as long as I could make Eric dead. So what did I do? I let out this loud growl, reached over and grabbed the steering wheel, and pulled it hard and quick clockwise. With the car driving fast like it was, the sudden turn flipped it over on its driver’s side. It skidded several feet before coming to a rest in a drainage ditch next to the road.

  I don’t actually remember the flipping over part or, for that matter, the skidding part, either. I just remember feeling the feeling of it, kind of like banging around inside a cement mixer or something. Dust, light and dark, colors of green and brown, all mixed together and zoomed past my eyes. When I had my first clear thought, I found that I was face down on top of Eric with my butt up against the steering wheel. He was partially pinned under the driver’s side of the car and his face was covered with blood">Anna interrupted at with t . I had no idea where Toothless was. (Later I found him lying in the road with a broken leg and another missing tooth.)

  After that, it was like the God of misery twisted the pain dial all the way to high. It was my shoulder. It popped out of its socket …again. Not as bad as last time, so I guess you could say just partially out. But with my hands tied and one shoulder half out of socket, it still made it almost impossible to get myself out of the wreck and on my feet, but I did it. I even managed to get around to the side where I could give dead Eric a kick in the head. He may not have felt it, but it sure made me feel good.

  After the kick, my first order of business was to free my hands. That wasn’t as hard as it would seem. I just rested my elbows on the upside of the car and used my teeth to work the knot apart. Next, it was a weapon. They were lying all over the place, but I could only get Eric’s pistol and my rifle. The gun Toothless was carrying was stuck underneath the car.

  As far as Toothless went, he was lying on his back, kind of propped half-up on his elbows, with his left foot twisted completely to the outside. I shot him with Eric’s pistol. He knew he had it coming. He never said a word when I pointed the gun at his face. I only saw his neck muscles tighten up, that was it. The way I figure it, he would have killed me without a second thought. Enough about him.

  Before starting off, I grabbed hold of the car with the hand of my bad shoulder, relaxed the muscles in that area as best I could and leaned back slipping it into joint. There was a quick surge of pain right when it popped back in, and then it just became a dull ache that only today, what, seventeen days later, is just starting to go away.

  I started south after that, with my left hand gripping the waist of my pants to give my bad shoulder some support and holding the rifle in my right. I can’t begin to describe how I hurt, from one end, every inch to the other. The way I figured it, though, feeling anything was a hell of a lot better than feeling nothing, if you know what I mean.

  While I was walking, I was thinking. The smart safe thing would have been to stick to the woods and avoid the roads. It would be less likely I’d be spotted that way. I knew this. I also knew that the patrols from Woburn stayed pretty much to the roads because that’s where they set up their checkpoints. So if I wanted to have a better chance of getting help and getting it fast, I’d have to at least stay within eyesight of the road.

  In my head, I tried to picture the map we’d looked at the day before. I thought that if I angled off to my right, I would meet up with a main road, which I could follow to Woburn. If I was lucky enough to come across some of the town’s people, and not Eric’s people, I could deliver my warning to them and right away turn around and start back to help mom and Alan. It would be even better if I could get some of them to go with me.

  So that’s how I played it. I angled my way pretty much to my right, through the same type of terrain I’ve already told you about, with a pretty hard wind and a black sky behind me. It soon began to sprinkle, and I started to get wet
and cold. that’s what I didwotDoes it ever stop?

  It kind of makes you wonder doesn’t it, about all the things that seemed to go against us all the time. Is there a force out there, something other than just bad luck, mixing stuff together like the wind and rain and prickly bushes, with people of different types, some good, some bad, some strong minded, some not, to make a happening? Is there someone out there who pulls all the strings, and who also has it in for us?

  I heard or read somewhere that God might not be the nice, fatherly figure everyone thinks he is. Instead, he’s this jokester who plays us like a bunch of puppets, all for his own amusement. Personally, I don’t think there really is a God, but if there is, I vote for that one. If so, I just wish he’d pull someone else’s string for a while and leave us the hell alone.

  About a half hour went by before I started to hear people talking, so I slowed way, way down and moved toward the voices. After another ten minutes or so, I came to the source. It was a group of seventeen men bunched up near a two lane road going generally north and south. Some of them were sitting on the ground, or on a rock, or whatever, while others were standing. There were several guns in view. Some of them were held and some of them were stacked.

  From my angle and distance, and because of the heavy clothes they were wearing, I couldn’t tell if they were good guys or bad guys. Meaning I didn’t recognize any of them, but that still didn’t mean they weren’t from Woburn. So I settled-in to watch for a while in the hope I would be able to figure it out. The sprinkles turned to rain at this point, so a lot of them moved back under the trees.

  Another half hour passed, no more than that, and I heard the sound of yet another motor car coming from back down the road. A short time after that, I got the shock of my life. It was Eric riding in the passenger seat of our little car with the guy in the red baseball cap and dark glasses driving. Oh I felt like such an idiot. He looked dead when I left him. I assumed he was dead. He wasn’t moving. He was bloody. He was stuck under the car. But here he was, very much alive and about to make my life rotten once again. I cursed myself, for the second time of the day, for not putting a bullet in him to make sure — idiot, screw-up, a boy trying to do a man’s job, all of that and more. It was a mistake, a big, big mistake.

  It did make me feel a little better that Eric looked a mess. Yeah, at least there was that. His head was swelled up like a pumpkin, and there was only what could be dried blood on his face near the hairline and smeared down next to his ear. When he got out of the car, he moved as if every joint in his body ached, too. I did that to him. I should have done more. I shouldn’t have even had to look at his ugly face again.

  I didn’t have much time to sour myself or think about more bad luck because, as I watched all this happen, I saw several in their group raise their guns and point them down the road. A few seconds later, I saw a man stagger, more than run toward them. Once he was in their view, the guns began to drop back down one at a time. This man joined the group that was gathered around Eric and stopped, bent over, with his hands on his knees. I could see that several people were tagreementwotalking to him, but his only answer, at least as far as I could tell, was to raise one hand just long enough to hold it up, palm out, as if to tell them to hold their questions until he caught his breath.

  There seemed to be a wait of several seconds while everyone kind of just stood around looking at him, before Eric hauled off and kicked the man hard in the butt, causing him to grab the spot and kind of hop and limp around in a circle. After that, he started talking and pointing back down the roadway, still half bent over and still holding his butt. I know how he felt. I got Eric’s foot a few times also.

  Eric started giving orders then, real fast. The first thing that happened was two guys grabbed their guns and jogged back the way the man Eric kicked had come from. The others began to pick up their gear and garbage and fade back into the trees and find places to hide themselves.

  My guess — someone was coming, and Eric’s crew was going to jump them.

  I didn’t waste time thinking about it. Even if those headed toward Eric’s group weren’t from Woburn, as far as I was concerned, if they were his enemies, I was their new best friend. So, I moved south as quickly as I thought was safe, alongside the road, the wind and rain helping to cover up the noise I was making. After a good five minutes, no, a little more than that, I saw one of the men Eric had sent forward. He was piling branches on the ground between a tree and a rock about twenty yards from the edge of the road. The other man was just standing watch, facing south. But the man doing the work suddenly stopped what he was doing and looked in my direction. He must have heard me or more likely saw my movement. I dropped to the ground and waited, my heart pounding away like crazy.

  After only a minute or so, the man went back to what he was doing, and I started to rise up. Without thinking, I used my bum arm to lift myself and the pain caused me to drop back down again. It was a good thing, too, because the guy doing the work looked back up. It was a nice trick on his part, and he almost caught me with it. I’ll do my best to remember that one.

  After that, I crawled back away from the road, far enough I couldn’t see them, which meant they couldn’t see me, before rising to my feet and moving south again.

  Another ten minutes, so I guess about another mile, and I found the ones Eric was waiting for. There were ten in all, one of them quite a ways out in front, and another lagging a little to the rear. I was also pretty sure I recognized one of them. I later learned his name was Arvid, but at the time, I kept thinking it was Everett or Delbert. No matter. I don’t know why I even added that. It’s really not important to anything. Anyway, what made me remember him is that around town he always wore this plaid beret like thing with a little fuzzy ball on top, and he was wearing it then.

  The next thing I had to do was get their attention without getting my butt shot, and there wasn’t much time to do it either. See, I wasn’t sure that they’d recognize me, especially with my face all beat up the way it was. I could also feel my nose was all swollen up. I had no idea what that made me look like. It sure made it after the rain had stopped22it hard to breathe. I can tell you that.

  If I could have planned it out, I probably would have done it differently. There was no time, though, so I put my guns on the ground, took off my coat and walked toward them with my hands high up in the air.

  One of the men in the middle saw me and turned with his shotgun pointed dead on. I tell you, I could almost feel the pellets hitting me. It was a weird, weird feeling but one I was feeling a lot.

  One person told me to “freeze.” Another person told me to keep my hands up and keep walking. A third person told me to put my hands on top of my head. I didn’t know what to do, but I definitely wanted them to stop shouting. I wasn’t sure if their voices would carry to Eric’s lookouts.

  So in a very slow motion, I lowered one hand to my mouth, put my index finger to my lips, pointed in the direction of Eric’s men, put my finger back to my lips, and put my hands on top of my head. I placed my hands there instead of leaving them up because raising them like they had been was killing my shoulder.

  After that, I saw a couple of the men look in the direction I pointed while the others looked at one another as if they were trying to figure out what was going on. A couple of seconds later, one of them gave me a hand signal to move toward them, at the same time keeping his gun pointed at me. As I was walking forward, I saw more and more heads looking both in front of them and behind them. Some even got off the road altogether and into the bushes with their guns ready to go.

  When I got close enough that I could talk in a normal voice, I said what you’d expect me to say, “don’t shoot,” followed by all kinds of things I thought they might recognize; my name, mom’s name, that we’d been kidnapped and escaped, the town’s name, the crops we grew, the names of every person I could remember and finally, “there are people waiting up ahead to shoot you.” That made them perk up.

  Still,
it took them a while to wind down. First, they had me lay on the ground face down. Next, one of them approached and searched me and in the process hurt my shoulder, I might add. After that, I heard a woman’s voice, so they weren’t all men, which was common (many women went out on patrol). She said, “I know him, he’s Anna’s son,” and I felt a hand on my arm, my bad one again, lifting me up. It made me cry out and grab it.

  I told them again about the ambush up ahead, and the two lookouts, and the plan to attack the town, and that I needed to get back to mom and Alan. It all came out pretty much in a string of words without much detail attached to it.

  The man named Arvid was the leader, and he told everyone to get off the road. He next signaled the man up ahead to stay where he was and the woman who was behind them to join him. As they all grouped up, I started to step in, but he directed me away and told the woman who recognized me to, “Stay with him.” That kind of made me mad, but I didn’t say anything. I guess I was just glad to be with people who weren’t going to try to hurt me.

  This woman I’m speaking of said her name was Tracy Pickens. She’s maybe five feet tall and big chested, with dark brown eyes and black hair showing a few strands of early gray, and cut short enough to show her ears. She was wearing a tan canvas coat with a hood attached to it, black pants with mud on the knees, and heavy brown boots that made her feet look too large for her body. She smiled a lot as well, which was nice to see for a change. Mom, Alan, and I haven’t been doing a lot of smiling lately.

  So while the others talked, I put the time to use by explaining to Tracy in a little more detail about mom and Alan being hurt, and how I needed to get back to them as soon as possible.

  She started to ask me questions to fill in the blanks when Arvid walked back up and interrupted her. He informed us that he had decided to sneak around the two lookouts using my route back, (with me in the lead), cross over the road, and come up behind the group waiting for them. So that’s what we started about doing, right after I collected my guns.