Surviving Home

by A. American

  “Yeah, he doesn’t know how many, though.”

  Reggie looked out at the road. “He still alive?”

  Rick looked up at Reggie, oblivious to what was coming, “Yeah, Mark’s trying to find out where their camp is.”

  Reggie started out toward the road. Mark was still there by the man, who was now only barely alive. Reggie stopped by Mark’s side and looked down at the stricken man on the pavement. “You get what you needed from him?”

  Mark looked up. “Yeah, I got a pretty good idea of where they are.”

  “Looks like he needs a bandage,” Reggie said. He knelt and pulled his Buck 110 from its sheath and rammed it into the man’s chest. The wounded man couldn’t even muster a scream. His mouth opened, he raised his head from the road, the veins on his neck bulging with the little blood still in him. Reggie twisted the knife and the man twitched with every rotation of the blade. The dying man looked at Reggie as he let out his last breath, and as his head fell to the road, Reggie said, “That’s for the boy,” before pulling the blade out, wiping the blood on the tattered shirt before standing to sheath the blade.

  Mark sat on the road looking up at Reggie. He rose, his eyes locked on Reggie. The big man just stood there looking at the deputy as he stood. Mark raised his carbine and pointed it at Reggie. “What the fuck is wrong with you damn people?” he screamed.

  Reggie didn’t reply, he just looked back at him. Mark flipped the safety off his carbine and demanded, “Why? Why did you do that?”

  “He was responsible for Robbie; he earned it.”

  “We can’t just kill everyone we come across.” Mark shouted, the carbine still pointed at Reggie.

  I took a step toward Mark. “Lower the rifle, man.”

  “No! We can’t keep doing this. You fucking people can’t keep killing people whenever you want!”

  “He killed two of ours! What were you going to do with him, put him in jail?” I asked.

  Mark kept the rifle trained on Reggie. “He was already dying. I was just going to let him die on his own. Now put your fucking hands up, Reggie!”

  “Take it easy, Mark, chill out,” I said.

  “Shut the fuck up, Morgan. Get on the ground, Reggie!” Mark shouted.

  I raised my carbine, pointing it at Mark. “Mark, you need to chill the fuck out.”

  Mark cut his eyes toward me, but before he could speak I said, “Mark, lower the weapon. You’re out of line. They killed his nephew, his niece is already dead, what the fuck do you expect him to do? They killed two of ours; what the fuck do you care how he died anyway?”

  Danny ran out into the road. “What the hell is wrong with you guys? Mark, you’re pointing a rifle at Reggie; Morgan, you’re pointing a damn rifle at Mark; you guys all going to start shooting one another now? We need to work together! This is bullshit! Put the damn guns down!”

  Mark and I both glanced at Danny, and I lowered my rifle. “He’s right, Mark, put the rifle down.”

  Reggie looked at Mark and said, “Shoot me if you’re going to. Otherwise get that shit out of my face.” He stepped past Mark and walked toward the barricade, passing Danny in the road. Reggie gave him a little nod and asked, “Can you take him to the house for me?”

  “Sure, let’s load him up.”

  I gave them a wave and headed down the road toward my house. From behind me I heard Mark call out, “Who’s going to man the barricade?”

  I turned in the road. “You are. I’m going to Lance’s house to tell his wife he isn’t coming home for dinner. Get one of these guys to tell your wife you’re okay.” Turning around, I headed for the house. As I passed the man in the road that I shot while in the driveway, I paused and knelt down. He was dead, way dead. The two rounds I put in him did the job. He had bled out on the road. I patted his chest and then his pants. In his right pants pocket I found five 30-30 rounds, and in his back pocket was a wallet.

  The wallet contained what it probably had on the day things had fallen apart. There were three one-dollar bills, a Blockbuster card and a driver’s license with the name Clint Arnold. There was also a picture of him, his wife and kids. The woman looked vaguely like one of the women who had come up to get water from the keg the day they came by. I could only imagine the desperation he must have felt to attempt this. I could see his wife and kids huddled under a thatch of palmettos with a small smoky fire in front of them. And now he would never come back to them. I could just see my girls sitting there, Mel dirty, hungry and cold, and I vowed it would never happen, not as long as I was alive.

  Tossing the wallet on his chest, I stood up and started to the house to get the Suburban to go back and pick up Lance’s body to take home to his wife. Mel met me in the driveway as I came up. “You okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah, but Lance and Reggie’s nephew were killed.”

  “What happened?”

  “They were a group that came through a few days ago. They had some women and kids with them, so we gave them water and talked to them a little. They seemed okay, but they were heading into the forest. I had a feeling they wouldn’t make it, and they didn’t. They ran out of food and they thought they would come back here. Mark found one of them still alive and he said they thought they would scare us, get some food from us.”

  “Did you shoot any of them?”

  I nodded. “One for sure, and I may have hit another, but everyone was shooting at him. The one I shot is lying out there on the road in front of the house. I looked in his wallet and he has pictures of his family in it; you know, mom, dad and the kids all together. He was just trying to feed his family.”

  “We can’t feed everyone. The girls come first.” Mel crossed her arms. “If people want to come and try and take what we have, make our kids go hungry, then they need to pay the price.”

  “You’re right, and they did. But think about it this way: if we didn’t have what little we do then I might be faced with trying the same thing they did.”

  “But you planned ahead. We sacrificed for a long time to prepare for this and I’m not about to give it away to anyone.”

  I looked at her with a little half smile. “Yeah, we sacrificed all right, and you bitched the whole time as I recall.”

  She pressed her lips together, lowered her chin and looked up at me. It was her “you’re an asshole” look, and I knew it well. “What are you doing now?”

  “I’m going to take the truck and get Lance’s body, take him home to his wife. Thank God they don’t have any kids.”

  “Be careful,” she said as she turned and headed for the house.

  I went back to the shop and opened one of the cans of loose rounds I had bought from Palmetto Armory. I topped off the mag and saw I had fired twelve rounds. I started thinking about the whole thing for a minute. I remembered firing at the first guy, but I didn’t remember how many and I hardly remembered the rest of it. They had invented that camera technique called “bullet time” for the Matrix films, the one that made everything super slow-motion. But my bullet time was the opposite; everything was too fast and the details were all jumbled together.

  I knew I had to take Lance home, but I took a few minutes to clean and field strip my rifle. It was kind of cathartic, sitting on a stool scraping the carbon out of the chamber of the Bushmaster.

  “What’cha doin, Daddy?”

  I looked over my shoulder to see Little Bit standing in the door. “Cleaning my rifle, what’re you doin?”

  “I’m bored. Lee Ann and Taylor won’t play with me.”

  “I’m sorry, baby, I’ll talk to them,” I responded as I ran a chamber brush into the rifle without looking up.

  She came into the shop and looked into the open ammo can. She knelt down and reached into the can and grabbed a fistful of rounds. “These are big bullets, Daddy. The ones for my Crickett are a lot smaller.”

  I slid the bolt carrier
back into the upper I looked over at her. “Yeah, they’re a little bigger,” I said with a smile, then closed the upper onto the lower and snapped the pin back in. With the carbine back together, I slid the mag back in and pulled the charging handle back to chamber a round. Putting the rifle on safe, I told Little Bit, “Let’s put these away, okay?”

  She stood up and I closed the can, securing the lid with the latch. She said she wanted to put it away, so I moved back so she could try and pick it up. With a grunt she grabbed the handle and pulled, but it didn’t budge. She stepped over it with one foot on either side and grabbed it with both hands, and again with a groan she strained against the can. This time it actually came off the floor a little. She dropped it back to the floor and hung her tongue out of her mouth. With wide eyes she looked at me and said, “That’s heavy!”

  I smiled at her and she cracked up. “It sure is.” I pushed the can back into its place under the shelves.

  I went over to the other side of the shop and grabbed a roll of clear plastic off one of the shelves. As I turned to head for the door, Little Bit asked if she could go with me. I wanted to take her—I liked hanging out with my girls—but this wasn’t something for her to see. “Sorry, baby, you can’t come with me for this.”

  She said, “Why not?”

  I decided to tell her the truth. “Because I’m going to get a man that was killed earlier. He’s dead and I’m going to take him home to his wife.”

  She stood there for a minute. She asked, “It isn’t Danny, is it?”

  “Oh no, baby, Danny’s fine, it’s not him.”

  She stood there for another minute. “I want to come. I want to help.”

  She sure looked determined, and I thought maybe I should let her see it. She’d never seen a dead body before, and maybe she needed to. “Okay, Little Bit, if you want to come you can, but remember what I said I’m going to do; it isn’t going to be fun.”

  “I know, but I’m going. Let me get my stuff.”

  “Hurry up, I’ll meet you at the truck.”

  She took off at a run and disappeared into the house. God only knew what she was going to get.

  Chapter 19

  Chuck started to come around. His head was pounding and his face hurt like hell and his DHS uniform had blood on it. His vision was blurry, but he was able to make out Marty tied to a chair beside him. It looked as if he was in a barn of some sort, but he couldn’t see much other than the metal siding and all the crap scattered around. He tried to pull his arms up, but they were tied tight and there was no way he could get them out. His legs were likewise tied and he couldn’t even move his feet. Outside the barn he could hear some animal noises. He hoped they were animals.

  Thad had never really thought the whole thing through. His plan only went so far as to try and get the men responsible for the death of Anita and Little Tony. But now he had them and he wasn’t sure what to do. Like he did every evening, Thad had put a couple scoops of the dwindling feed into a bucket. He went out behind the barn and thumped the side of the bucket with his hand while shaking the feed. It wasn’t long before the eight hogs he had turned out to forage came running toward him. He fed them every night; no sense in wasting the hog feed.

  As the hogs came trotting up, Thad looked back at the pen behind him and the big old oak in the center of the pen. He swung the gate open and walked into the pen. The hogs dutifully trotted in behind him. Thad dumped the feed into the trough and went out the gate, closing it behind him. He turned and looked at the old tree again, then back at the hogs, who were noisily consuming the feed he had dumped. He had an idea.

  Chuck looked up when he heard the door open and a big black man came in, leaving the door open. He was still having a hard time seeing. His broken nose and all the blood on his face added to the hangover effects he felt from whatever happened earlier.

  The black man walked past him, not even indicating he saw him. “Hey, what the fuck do you think you’re doing? You know who we are?” Chuck asked.

  Thad didn’t even acknowledge him. He picked up a hank of rope hanging from a large nail driven into a pole on the far side of the barn. As Thad headed back out, Chuck said, “Hey, fucker, untie me! You’ll untie me if you know what’s good for you!”

  The black man never showed anything to indicate he had heard and continued outside. Marty started to come around after the black man went outside. “Marty! Hey, Marty,” Chuck whispered.

  Marty raised his head and said, “Chuck, that you?”

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “Where are we? What happened, last thing I remember was a truck coming at us.”

  “Can you move? I’m tied tight and can’t move a damn muscle.”

  Marty tried to move his arms, hands and legs but he was trussed up tight as well. “No, man, I can’t move shit. Where the fuck are we?”

  The black guy stepped through the door again. Marty said, “What the fuck, man! What the fuck are you doing?”

  Chuck looked over at Marty. He didn’t know what was going on, but Marty’s reaction scared him. He said, “Dude, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

  Before Marty could say anything, the guy stepped up behind Chuck and wrapped his forearm around his neck. Chuck tried to drive his chin down, but Thad was too strong.

  “What do you want, you big black—”

  The man applied more pressure to his neck and he was out. Marty went apeshit.

  “What the fuck, man, what are you doing, what do you want?” he screamed.

  The black guy picked Chuck up still tied to the chair and carried him out of the barn. Marty’s imagination ran wild as to what was happening outside and what was surely about to happen to him. He began to cry and called out, begging for his life, asking what he wanted and shouting threats. It felt like an eternity to Marty as he sat tied in the chair, but soon the black man came back through the door. Marty started to bounce up and down in his chair, and spittle flew out of his mouth as he cried and pleaded. The man never said a word and simply carried him, chair and all, outside.

  He set Marty down beside the fence facing a pigpen. Marty could see Chuck still in his chair sitting in the middle of it. There were several large hogs and sows milling around the pen. A couple of them were checking Chuck out, pushing their big wet noses against him. Chuck came around as one large hog shoved his snout into his crotch.

  “What the hell?” Chuck cried out as he came to. He tried to rock in the chair, but there was nothing he could do.

  Both men were startled by the rumbling sound of a tractor starting up off to the side of the pigpen. The two men looked over to see the big black man sitting on the tractor and looking back over his shoulder at them. Before they could say anything, the tractor lurched and started to inch forward. Chuck’s arms were tied behind his back and they started to rise, pulled up by the rope running through a block on a large limb of the tree. The other end was connected to the three-point hitch of the tractor.

  When the tractor stopped, Chuck was completely off the ground, the chair still tied to him and his arms pulled up over his head, dislocating both of his shoulders. The black guy climbed off the tractor and went into the pen. Chuck was screaming in pain and this caused the pigs to squeal, adding to the racket. The black man drew a big knife and cut the chair off of Chuck, then bent down and untied his boots and took them off, tossing them to the side.

  Chuck was in so much pain he could hardly speak. With the boots off, the man stood and looked at Chuck. “You the one who killed my family?”

  In a low breathy voice, Chuck replied, “Fuuck yew.”

  The answer came from Marty. “He did, he shot them, I swear to God, I didn’t do it!”

  The man looked back at Marty. “Why?”

  “We came back to the house, we knew you weren’t going to go and we were going to try and scare you. She shot at us and he shot her.”

 
; Chuck was slowly spinning around from his rope. In a pain-filled voice, he said, “You sorry fucker, you set ’em on fire.”

  Marty said, “They were dead, he shot ’em both, they were already dead!”

  The man turned back to Chuck. He tilted his head to the side to look into his eyes. “You kill my boy?”

  Chuck tried to spit in his face. The man stepped back, a little of the sputum landing on his coat. He quickly stepped forward and landed a quick right-left combination to Chuck’s ribs. The wind left him and he could hardly get a breath. The man turned and walked back into the barn and came out with a small jar and a paintbrush, one of those cheap blond-bristled throwaway-type brushes. Chuck couldn’t see him as he came up. He opened the jar and dipped the brush in and then, taking it out, he held it down to the pigs. One of them started to lick the bristles, and then another pushed in.

  The man pushed past the pigs to Chuck, dipping the brush again. He began to brush the stuff Chuck’s bare feet. Chuck could smell molasses. He tried to protest, but he was in too much pain. Marty was still in hysterics, and shouted, “What the fuck are you doing!”

  The pigs could smell the sweet goo on the feet dangling just over their heads. The man went over to the tractor and took up the strain on the rope Chuck was hanging from. He pulled on the tag end of the line, and the half hitches came loose. He lowered Chuck down toward the pigs. Chuck tried to pick up his legs to keep his naked feet away from the snouts of the swine below him. The man hitched the rope off when Chuck’s feet were just in reach of the pigs.

  Thad stood there looking at the man. He said, “What’s your name?”

  Chuck looked up and said, “Chuck. Chuck Henry.”

  Thad said, “You killed my boy an’ my wife, Chuck Henry. Now you’re going to pay for both of them.” He turned to the mailman. “And you’re next.”

  Chuck yelled, “They weren’t dead!”

  “What?”

  “They weren’t dead when Marty set the fire,” Chuck groaned through clenched teeth.