“Nah, man.” Darnell shook his head. “I see what she’s saying. I don’t really get off on killing people either, but these motherf—” He glanced at Harper. “These dudes ain’t worth the food they’d take, keepin’ slaves. There’s kids in there, too.”
“Please tell me they didn’t put the little ones in cuffs.” Sadie stared at him.
“Nah. Don’t look like it.” Darnell cracked his neck side to side. “Ain’t even making them work. ’Course they’re really little, like five.”
Harper exhaled in relief.
“Can you take out that AR?” Cliff glanced at Darnell.
Darnell leaned back, making a face that said ‘shit, man, who you think you’re talking to’. “Straight up.”
“All right.” Cliff looked around at everyone else. “Here’s the plan. We got a scoped rifle, might as well use it. Darnell’s going to get into position at the top of the hill and give us sniper cover. The rest of us will get as close as we can before they see us. Sanchez, Walker, with me. Owens, Zhang, Harper, you three head toward the goat pen. Neutralize the three hostiles there as fast as you can, then cut across to the vegetable field and pincer the rest from behind if we haven’t finished them by then.”
Everyone murmured agreement.
“Weird they don’t have scouts and sentries out in the town,” whispered Sadie.
Cliff grinned. “We already took care of those scouts and sentries back home. These guys had no idea what they were dealing with. Probably expected some little camp they could roll over.”
The militia formed into their groups and crept up the hill. Cliff, Sadie Walker, and Edie Sanchez on the left, Darnell in the middle. Harper, Deacon, and Ken moved to the right. She looked up at Ken, hoping he planned on being in command of their little ‘platoon’ since she neither felt right doing it nor wanted to.
Everyone crouched low, except for Darnell who flattened out on his belly behind his hunting rifle.
From the top of the hill among the pine trees, Harper had a clear view down a hill covered in underbrush and trees. A house stood nearby a little to the left, offering cover from the slope. More or less straight in front of her, the ground angled downward past a pair of dirt roads that led to another more distant house. Beyond that house in a shallow valley, the convicts had constructed a fenced-in area full of goats. From this distance, she made out about six or seven people in the pen among the animals, but couldn’t tell gang from prisoner without binoculars or a scope.
The area with vegetables occupied a small field at the bottom of the hill to the left, about half the distance away compared to the goat pen. Two white trailers sat at the rearmost end, most likely where the prisoners were forced to sleep. She figured the convicts helped themselves to houses back in the town proper. Fortunately, more of them attacked Evergreen—and died doing it—than remained in the field. If not for the forced labor, the overwhelmingly brown and green landscape in front of her would have been beautiful.
“We’re going to need to hustle,” said Ken. “Let’s follow that road, head for the house, use it as cover. When the shooting starts, the bad guys from the goat pen might run to the field and we can get them from behind.”
Harper nodded. “Okay.”
“Right, everyone,” said Cliff. “Check your god damned targets. Watch your line of fire. We got civilians down there who don’t deserve to be shot.”
Crap. She worried how she’d tell the bad guys from the innocent people in a split second. Anyone pointing a gun at me is a pretty good sign they’re hostile.
Murmurs of acknowledgement came from everyone.
“Guys like this give ex-cons a bad name,” muttered Deacon.
Harper smiled at him. “You’re not a criminal. What you did hurt big banks, not the little guy.”
He chuckled. “Well, would have hurt the banks if I succeeded.”
“Get a bead on the AR,” said Cliff.
Darnell aimed. “I’m on him.”
“Take him down as soon as we’re spotted or we open fire.”
“You got it.”
Cliff looked at Harper and made a hand signal for ‘go.’
She nudged Ken and hurried down the hillside, heading for the dirt road that ran in a slight curve to the house in the distance. Ken and Deacon rushed after her, trying to be quiet, but a guy Deacon’s size could do only so much insofar as stealth. She focused entirely on the house where she planned to take cover, not looking over to see where Cliff and his squad went.
The idea of running down there and opening fire on people still bothered her, but she didn’t slow down. These guys almost took my family. A mental image of Madison enslaved on a farm let her push past her unease at being the attacker. She wouldn’t shoot anyone in the back, but wouldn’t hesitate if they came at her.
Her group made it only about halfway to the house before Darnell’s rifle went off with a sharp bang. She poured herself into a hard sprint, racing to get behind the rectangular grey building past a dirt lot at the bottom of the hill. Seconds later, a series of rifle cracks came from the left. Men shouted and roared war cries, other men yelled things like ‘get down.’ A woman shouted, “Kelsey, stay down.”
Harper jumped over a small rock, weaved among a cluster of trees, and ran hard until she crashed shoulder-first against the building, gasping for breath. Hopefully, the house blocked her team from view and the bad guys coming from the goat area didn’t notice them.
Ken hit the wall next to her, his rifle aimed to the right. Deacon stopped a few steps back, trying to watch both corners. More shouts, screams, and gunfire came from the planting area. A little child shrieked for Daddy.
The tiny voice kicked Harper in the ass, urging her into motion. She ran to the corner on the left, aiming around. Three men ran up the hill less than forty feet away from her, heading for the other site. One had a katana, one a sledgehammer, and the other a monstrosity of a club made out of rebar and concrete.
She had only a few seconds to react before they got out of range.
They take slaves.
Harper aimed at the big dude carrying the rebar club, imagining his head as a low-flying clay pigeon. She acquired the target and squeezed the trigger with an ease born from thousands of practice hours.
Blam.
The left side of his face turned into a ruin of red tatters. He staggered to the right and collapsed. The other two guys near him spotted her. Sledgehammer man roared like an idiot and came charging at her while the katana guy appeared momentarily torn between rushing at her or fleeing.
Boom.
Deacon’s shotgun left a ringing in Harper’s left ear. Sledgehammer guy ate dirt, his chest awash in red dots. Harper aimed at the guy holding the katana, but couldn’t bring herself to kill him or shout something lame like ‘drop it.’
Two shots in rapid succession from the opposite side of the house accompanied a spurt of blood from katana man’s chest. Ken’s AR-15 ended him where he stood. Watching him die didn’t bother Harper anywhere near as much as shooting him would have. She dismissed guilt and ran around the corner, heading toward the goat pen.
A quick visual check found no more bad guys, merely four men lying on the ground.
She ran left, rushing toward the farm. The fighting had migrated away from the field except for one guy. A seriously tall man with a shaved head and an ornate cross tattooed on his face held a blonde woman as a body shield to his chest while taking pot shots from a pistol one-handed. At his size, the woman’s feet didn’t reach the ground, the chain between her ankles rattled as she struggled to get away from him. The hostage prevented Cliff, Sadie, or Sanchez from shooting him back, but her thrashing—plus extreme range for a handgun—also prevented him from hitting them.
Harper had him dead to rights from behind, sight unseen, but his head and the woman’s head came awfully close for comfort, especially using buckshot. If he saw her running toward him, he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot. Considering he hadn’t yet died from a long-distance bullet,
Darnell probably also worried about hitting the woman by accident.
Deacon surged forward, sprinting way faster than she expected a musclebound giant to be able to move. The man heard him coming and glanced back only briefly, probably expecting him to be one of the other gang members from the goat pen. He realized too late the bull charging at him wasn’t one of his buddies and spun to aim at Deacon, but the big guy flattened him—and the woman—in a bear hug tackle.
Harper ran up and pointed the Mossberg in the guy’s face as he lay on his back.
The tall man froze.
Deacon pinned the guy’s wrist to the ground with one hand while pulling the woman away from him and giving her a light shove. She crawled toward Harper, shackles clicking.
“If you’re not hostile, stay on the ground,” shouted Cliff from a fair distance off to the left.
“Now what?” asked Harper, still aiming at the man’s face.
Deacon stood, taking the handgun. “Pretty sure you know what now.”
“I can’t execute a guy.” She fidgeted.
“Umm.” Deacon glanced at the handgun, sorta aimed it at the man. “Not really my thing, either.”
The woman yanked the .45 from Harper’s hip and shot the tall man in the chest three times while shouting, “Die, you son of a bitch.”
Harper lowered the shotgun. Oh, no. “Guess I won’t ask if you’re okay.”
“I’m not okay. I’m Amy.” She handed the gun back to Harper and walked as fast as the leg irons let her move toward the trailers.
Harper holstered her .45 and headed for the farm area, doing the ‘soldier walk’ Cliff taught her. She kept her vision sighted over the Mossberg, ready to fire on anything threatening while navigating among potato plants barely up to her shins, past one other woman and four men all face down on the ground like citizens in the midst of a bank robbery. Bruises covered their faces and arms, the two men in corrections officer uniforms by far the most battered. All the adults had police style shackles on their ankles and red marks on their wrists.
No hostiles appeared to remain alive.
She hurried over to where the former body-shield woman had taken a seat on the ground by one of the trailers, clinging to a pair of little girls who appeared about six and four, both in Disney shirts and jeans too small for them—likely the same clothes they’d been wearing for a year.
The older girl, also a redhead, spotted Harper and broke out in a huge smile. “She looks like me!”
The younger sister clung to the woman, her face concealed under a thick wall of black hair.
“Hi. My name’s Harper. Don’t be scared of us. We’re here to help.”
“I’m Rain,” said the little redhead. “My sister’s Kelsey, and this is my mommy.”
The blonde woman focused a thousand-mile stare off to the side, not looking directly at Harper. “You killed them all, right?”
“Not me, personally. But yeah. They’re all dead. I got a few of them.”
“Good.”
Harper crouched, gently grasped Rain’s arm and examined her wrist. No sign of bruising there or on the girl’s face. She almost even looked well fed. “Did those men hurt you?”
“Not really. The bad guys weren’t mean to me or Kelsey. But they said if we ran away, they’d hurt Mommy and Daddy, so we didn’t run away.”
“They’re not going to hurt anyone now.” Harper stood and approached the open trailer door.
A thick tow chain hung from a hole where the knob used to be, an open padlock dangling from the end. Another hole in the wall served as a place to lock the door shut, trapping people. She poked her head inside, peering around at clumps of bedding. A cardboard box containing handcuffs sat against the wall next to the door. Two foul buckets served as bathrooms at the far corner. She imagined the gang put handcuffs on all the workers at night to make it harder for them to escape, then left them locked inside the trailer overnight.
At the thought Madison almost wound up in here, rage tears gathered in the corners of Harper’s eyes. I should have shot him. Why did I wimp out? They would’ve done horrible things to the girls and Jonathan.
“Will you please get my doll?” asked Rain. “I don’t wanna go in there ’cause it’s scary an’ the door never opens. If I go in, the door will shut and I can’t get out.”
“Sure.” Harper stepped up into the trailer, holding her breath at the stink of human waste, urine, and general funk.
She found the doll on a pile of bedding, wearing a dress made from a scrap of cloth. Harper picked it up and hurried back to the door in search of fresh air. She found Ken crouched in front of Amy unlocking the shackles from her ankles. A thirtyish man, also with red hair, a swollen purple left eye, and a strong resemblance to the girls, sat on the ground beside her, both kids clinging to him. Harper handed Rain her doll, nodded at them, and walked off to give the family some privacy. She headed toward Cliff and Sadie who de-shackled the rest of the laborers by the edge of the potato plants.
“Damn good to see you,” said a grey-haired man in uniform. “Started to wonder if the world had any decent people left.”
“Dunno about decent, but I ain’t got no patience for this kind of bullshit.” Cliff smiled. “You folks been here long?”
“’Bout six months. Kinda hard to say.” The former guard scratched his head. “Them sons of bitches hit me in the head so much I barely remember my own name. Charles St. John, I think.”
“Cliff Barton.” He nodded left. “Sadie.” He nodded right. “Harper.”
“Hi.” Harper waved.
“Good on you for killing those bastards.” The other guard, a black guy with an equal amount of bruises as Charles but no grey hair, spat to the side.
“Guessing they objected to your former job.” Cliff offered him a hand up.
“Yeah. Tyreek and I are the only two guards from that bus to make it this long. Used to be five of us. We was takin’ a busload of eighteen of the worst to ADX Florence. Used ta be a supermax facility for anyone society wanted to forget existed. Damn nuke punted us straight off the road like a matchbox car. Bus ended up flipped in a culvert upside down. By the time I woke up, they’d gotten loose… game over.”
“They dragged us around for amusement at first,” said Tyreek. “But when they found this place, decided to put down roots. You can assume the rest.”
The only other woman among the laborers also had a far-off look in her eyes. It didn’t take a genius to assume what a busload of escaped prisoners in a world without any semblance of law would have done to two women. Deacon and Sanchez escorted the three laborers from the goat pen over, having unlocked their restraints.
Harper kept an eye on the surrounding area while Cliff and Sadie explained about Evergreen, the militia, and apologized multiple times for being so close but never noticing this situation.
“They came through here scavenging stuff before I made it to Evergreen, so I can’t really say what happened then. I’m guessing the people who lived here when you and the convicts showed up must have taken up residence after our militia left.”
“Most likely.” Charles coughed, winced, and coughed again. “You said something about a doctor? Think I oughta see him on the sooner side.”
Amy and her husband approached, each one carrying a child. He went around shaking hands with the militia, introducing himself as Michael Ryan and thanking them for ‘making sure those bastards all died.’ Once the laborers gathered in one area, Cliff started a discussion about what to do.
“We’re not going to drag you anywhere you don’t want to go.” Cliff smiled. “But this place is a bit far afield for us to keep secure. You’re welcome to come back with us.”
All the former captives readily agreed. None appeared to have any interest in staying here.
They discussed relocating the goats to the main farm at Evergreen, and possibly transplanting the potatoes as well. Apparently, they had carrots as well in there somewhere. Deacon decided to collect all the shackles and handcu
ffs to bring back, intending to dump them in a militia storeroom so no other gang could use them for sinister purposes. Maybe if someone figured out how to blacksmith, they could even melt them down and put the metal to better use.
Harper kept quiet so no one would hear the emotion in her voice. Her siblings almost wound up as prisoners kept by a gang of convicts—and not merely convicts, supermax convicts who’d probably done the most horrible things. Serial killers, rapists, murderers, arsonists, and so on. Worse, the only reason they didn’t end up here is that a ten-year-old girl had shot two men in the head. A little girl who herself had been kidnapped and forcibly trained by a complete psycho.
The world is going crazy, isn’t it? How much longer can we hold it together?
14
Delivery Run
The combat patrol into Kittredge would haunt Harper for a while.
Not for having to shoot a guy, nor for anything she witnessed; rather, it would haunt her for what almost happened to Madison and the other kids. She couldn’t stop picturing her siblings locked in that trailer, forced to work like a chain gang. It depressed and infuriated Harper. More so because that brutality called into question her hope that civilized society would return. How could it be possible something like that could go on so close to Evergreen for months and no one here knew?
Having to walk—or bike—everywhere made the world a lot bigger. A matter of a few miles now meant an entirely different world. The people of Evergreen had been so focused inward, they didn’t even think to routinely check the nearest town over. Why would they? The militia had already scoured it of everything they considered useful.
She had zero regrets over wiping that gang out to the last man, and even second-guessed her opinion that Mila was right not to finish off the two she let run away. But… she couldn’t expect a ten-year-old to execute people, even scum like that.
It hadn’t yet been a full year after the war and already, a gang had resorted to slavery. She tried to find comfort in the idea that they hadn’t been ordinary citizens who’d descended into feral savagery but a busload of men on their way to a supermax prison. Those men had been anything but normal. Half of them probably counted as clinically psychotic—most likely why they rushed a line of armed militia when they only carried bats, axes, and swords.
Evergreen (Book 4): Nuclear Summer Page 13