Adrian hit the door hard and it shut with a loud bang. Reggie and Lacy jumped and spun around, fear on their faces, eyes bulging and their skin whitened by shock. As soon as Reggie saw Adrian, he began to raise the pistol towards him. Adrian leaped forward, slapping the gun hand to the side, plunging his knife into Reggie’s throat. Ripping the knife out sideways, he cut Reggie’s head almost halfway off.
The pistol fell to the floor, then Reggie fell and began thrashing around, spraying blood all over as he tried to slow the bleeding with his hands. Reggie’s face was rigid with extreme shock and terror, his mouth moving as though to form words, words that there was no air to form.
While Adrian’s attention was on Reggie, Lacy pulled a razor-sharp filet knife from the folds of her dress and slashed at Adrian. He pulled back just in time, and what might have been a fatal blow became a shallow cut across his collar bone. As he stepped closer to slap the knife from her hand, Adrian slipped in Reggie’s blood, giving Lacy the chance to make another stab at Adrian, this time aiming at his groin.
Adrian blocked the knife, then grabbed her by the wrist and slung her out and away from him. Lacy flew across the room, hitting the far wall and bouncing off it, landing on the floor in a heap.
Adrian watched as she slowly stood, then turned toward Adrian, the knife handle protruding from her chest. She stared at Adrian for a second, her eyes not seeing him. Then she settled down into a sitting position, almost as if her legs had melted from beneath her. She died sitting up.
Adrian looked around the dimly-lit, blood-splattered room. Reggie was dead, lying on the floor. The “customer” was unconscious, his arm mangled. Lacy was still sitting up, her bones and muscles holding up her lifeless body in precarious balance. That fella is going to wake up to one hell of a gruesome scene, and in his own extreme pain. Son of a bitch deserves every bit of the pain, too.
Using a clean towel and the wash-basin Adrian rapidly washed the blood off his face and arms as much as he could before heading down the stairs. As he stepped into the hallway, the other “customer” was cautiously coming up the stairwell. He saw Adrian and stopped, then suddenly turned and ran down the stairs and out the front door. Adrian never saw him again.
Descending the stairs he saw the girls. Many of them were huddled around the oldest girl. They all looked frightened.
Rita and Lila came running up to Adrian as soon as they recognized him, but even they stopped a few feet short of him and stared.
His clothes were sprayed with fresh, dark, red blood. His face and arms were mostly clear of blood, except for the cut across his collar bone that was bleeding freely. But it was his face that stopped them. He wore an expression that, as Lila would later say, “Would’ve scared the Grim Reaper into taking a dirt road.”
Then Lila came up to him, looked at the cut and said, “We need to get something on that cut, it’s pretty deep.”
Adrian looked at her hard, as though he didn’t recognize her, then he looked around the room at sixteen scared girls staring back at him, sixteen girls that he just that moment realized were now his responsibility, and said, “Aw shit,” then he sat down in the nearest chair.
He had accidentally rescued two girls, tried to get rid of them and wound up with fourteen more.
“Aw shit!” he said again.
Chapter 4
The oldest girl, Racy, was seventeen. She quickly took charge of the situation.
“Lorna, bring that lantern in off the porch and lock the door. Gina, you and Tracy get some water boiling, some clean cloths and the sewing kit. Erin, you take charge of the rest of the girls and get dinner started. All of you change out of those whore clothes as soon as you can, start packing up to travel. You’ll need to pack light, so pack practical clothes, wear your best walking shoes. We’ll need every bit of food in the house. Get moving now!”
The girls all responded quickly to Racy’s orders, even Lila and Rita jumped to obey. Adrian sat in the chair, watching with a vacant look. All he could think of was, Sixteen girls. My God what am I going to do with sixteen girls. I can’t leave them on their own, that wouldn’t be right. They can’t stay here, there’ll be too many former “customers” that won’t leave them alone. Sixteen girls, holy shit.
He saw the girls moving around briskly, but he hadn’t been paying attention and had no idea what they were doing, and at the moment didn’t care. I was just minding my own damn business, taking a nice little trip to Corpus Christi, and then WHAM! Sixteen girls. What the hell am I going to do now?
Adrian sat like that for several more minutes, lost in his own thoughts, wondering what he was going to do with all these girls when Racy told him to stand up and follow her into the kitchen. Adrian followed her instructions mechanically, his subconscious mind responding while his conscious mind was in a state of shock, and not from the brief violence upstairs.
Racy sat him down at the table where the light was best, then began cleaning his wound. With a businesslike efficiency and workmanlike fingers, she soon had the knife cut sewed up and bandaged.
Racy had been in charge of the girls for so long it was second nature to her. She had nursed them through sickness, doctored their wounds, held their hands and been a nurse and surrogate mother for two years, ever since Jane had died and left Racy as the oldest. Adrian sat through her ministrations without flinching, or acknowledging she was in the room.
“There Mr. Hunter,” she said. “You’re all fixed up now. Is there any point in my going upstairs?”
Adrian, forced by her direct question into responding said, “No, no reason at all. Lacy and Reggie are dead, the other man has a badly broken arm. When he comes to he won’t pose a problem for anyone, he’ll be in too much pain. Just let him leave the way he is, don’t try to fix his arm. Son of a bitch deserves a lot more pain than that. On the other hand, you might run up there and fetch Reggie’s pistol, don’t want to leave that where he can find it when he wakes up.”
Racy went up the stairs and spotted the open door with light coming from the room. She stopped on the threshold, aghast at the carnage and the creepy site of Lacy sitting on her heels but dead. She suddenly had a mounting fear of Adrian. Had she seen this room first, she might not have been so cavalier at ordering him around and stitching him up. She had been amazed that while stitching him he had shown no signs of pain.
After seeing this room she now thought that was a bit of a minor point.
Racy took a deep breath, then walked into the room, carefully stepping around the various pools of blood and retrieved the pistol.
When she returned downstairs Adrian was sitting just as she had left him. She laid the pistol on the table next to him and diffidently asked “What do you want me to do next?”
“Yeah, that’s the question isn’t it? I’ve been thinking about that. What do I do next? I can’t go off and leave you girls here. You might be able to feed yourselves, but you won’t be able to protect yourselves. You could probably fight off one or two men, maybe even half a dozen. But sooner or later there will be a group of men that you can’t fight off, and your odds of ending back up in this situation…or worse…are too high for comfort.”
“How in hell do I take you with me though? And where can I leave you off? I didn’t plan on keeping Rita and Lila to raise, I’m sure not planning on raising sixteen girls. Good Lord what a fubar this is. Can’t take you with me, can’t leave you behind, and probably never find a safe place to leave you.” Adrian looked directly at Racy, seeming to seeing her for the first time. “Thank you for sewing me up, I appreciate it.”
“You said you were going to Corpus Christi, why not take us with you? It’ll be slower with all of us walking, and the young ones not able to walk fast, but we’ll get there eventually and unless you have some reason to rush then why not? Eating will be the biggest problem on the trip. Takes a lot of food for this many g
irls you know, and the food we have will be hard to carry. There’s lots of food in the pantry and store room—mostly what the men traded for us. There’re quite a few guns and lots of bullets, too; that was another favorite trade item. Reggie traded us for whatever he thought he could trade again and gain on. People stopped by here not just to take a girl upstairs but often just to trade. If we could find a wagon of some kind, we could carry most of it with us. Take two wagons probably to carry it all.”
Adrian perked up a little at hearing this news. “That might be an idea…if there’s enough valuables here, and if we can carry them with us, then we might be able to find a place for you in Corpus, a safe place maybe since the Navy is down there. Oh crap, what am I thinking? Sailors and girls? That doesn’t sound safe.”
“We can handle a lot more than you might think. We won’t be safe here—I agree with you on that,—maybe we’ll be okay in Corpus Christi, and maybe we won’t. We won’t know until we get there and look it over. We might as well check it out though don’t you think?”
As she talked, Racy noticed how normal Adrian was acting now, more or less as he had at dinner. It was hard to reconcile the mayhem she had seen upstairs and the fierceness of the man as he had descended the stairs with this seemingly gentle giant whose biggest concern seemed to be what to do with the sixteen girls on his hands.
She looked him over carefully; her life might well depend on him for some time to come. He was, she noted, very tall, maybe six-five, and as handsome as any man she had ever seen, but in a rough kind of way. He was heavily muscled, and she would bet his weight was somewhere around two-hundred-seventy or more, but no fat. He had a large scar that ran from the lower portion of his cheek, on down his neck and into his shirt, the scar he had gotten from fighting a grizzly bear in the Colorado mountains. She knew this from the stories that circulated about him. He was famous after all—the most famous man since the grid had dropped. She’d heard all the stories.
A massive coronal mass ejection had destroyed the electric grids worldwide four years previously, and civilization had come to an abrupt end. But Adrian Hunter was one of those men whose exploits had spread, first by ham radio, and then by word of mouth. Only the most reclusive and isolated of people hadn’t heard of “General Bear,” as he was known. Even some of them must have heard the stories of his breeding with a grizzly bear and having cubs all over the Colorado mountains, or speculated over the news of his semi-engagement to Colonel Linda Hunter. Those kinds of stories spread far and fast.
“Racy…is that your real name?”
“You mean is that my real name or my ‘working name’?” she asked with sudden anger.
“Well, yeah. I guess you got me there. I didn’t want to insult you by calling you something you didn’t like. Maybe I was a bit heavy handed in asking, but I didn’t mean it as an insult.”
“Oh…I’m sorry. It was nice of you to ask.” Her sudden anger faded as quickly as it had come. “I didn’t want to be a prostitute, don’t ever want to be one again either. I was forced into it, beaten into unconsciousness several times. After being raped so many times that I lost count I just quit resisting. My real name is Rachel, but my family used to call me Racy because when I was little I ran really fast everywhere I went. I’ll keep the name, thank you.”
“Okay Racy, do you have any idea where we might get some wagons as you suggested?”
“Wagons? No, not really. But I know where there’s a big truck that runs on wood, and it belongs to a son of a bitch that I’m going to kill before we leave. He’s one of the most frequent customers, and the roughest. It’s not far from here. Let me have that pistol and I’ll go get it.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Racy repeated patiently, “Let me have the pistol and I’ll go get the truck. I think it will carry all the valuables and all the girls—and no walking will be needed. We can get to Corpus a lot faster.”
“You planning on just driving the truck off, or do you plan on killing its owner first? Or maybe you plan to take him hostage and make him drive it?”
Racy’s voice was serious. “I plan on killing him first. I plan on killing him regardless of the truck. I’m not leaving here with him alive, on foot or by truck or by any means there is. I aim to kill him, he’s got it coming, just ask any of the girls.”
“Is there anyone else on your list or is he the only one?”
“There would be plenty more, but I don’t know where they are. I know where this one is and he was the worst of the bunch. Once I kill him, I can take the truck, and whatever else he has worth taking. Since he uses the truck to go out trading and scavenging he probably has a lot of good stuff.”
Adrian studied her face for a long moment. She was dead serious, she wasn’t joking around. Adrian smiled a little, for the first time all day. “Racy, I believe you would do just as you say. Trouble is you might be overloading yourself. Maybe you could kill him, but then maybe he won’t die so easy. You thought about that?”
“Thought about it? I’ve been thinking about it for two years Mr. Hunter. It’s a thought that has kept me going on many a night. I have thought about it, planned it, visualized it, dreamed of it and swore myself to do it when the time came where I could. I am going to do it, it’s as simple as that. He may be hard to kill, but I’ll get six bullets into him no matter what else happens, or what may happen to me. Using Reggie’s gun just adds a bit of irony to it.”
Adrian was blown away by Racy’s fervor. Yet, not only could he understand it, he agreed with her. She had this to do, and needed to do it. Even though she wasn’t grown up yet, she had some serious payback due to her. She had a lot of scores to settle, and this might be the only one she would ever have a chance to see through.
Adrian decided to help her.
“Racy, why don’t you get the girls started packing, keep them busy. Tell them you and I will be gone for a while. I probably shouldn’t do this, but I’ll help you settle up and then we’ll get his truck.”
“First,” she said, with infinite patience, “I already have the girls busy packing; you weren’t paying attention earlier. Second, this is mine to do, not yours. I will not be cheated of this by you or anyone else. I’ll kill him, no one else.”
“Understood, I’ll just go along to back you up. It’ll be your show. Plus, do you know how to operate the wood burner and drive the truck? I do. Besides, I won’t let you go alone, either I go or you don’t go at all.”
Racy folded her arms and studied him for a moment, then nodded quickly. “Yes sir. When do you want to leave?”
“Why not right now? How far is it?”
“Half an hour or so. I’ll change clothes and be right back.”
While she was gone Adrian took a moment to tell Lila and Rita and the rest of the girls that he and Racy were going to get a truck and would be back in a few hours, and to mind the next oldest girl while they were gone. He had no sooner finished talking to them, than Racy was back. She was dressed in jeans and boots and a plaid shirt, with a light jacket. She already had Reggie’s pistol in her jacket pocket. She was impatient to get going.
Chapter 5
“Come on Mr. Hunter!” said Racy. “The girls will be fine. I gave shotguns to the two oldest girls, they know how to use them. And I gave them a password for when we come back or they might use them on us. We’ll only be gone a little while. Let’s get going.”
Adrian studied her in silence. She really wants to kill this guy bad. He must be a real piece of shit, ’cause she seems like a nice enough girl otherwise. Maybe she’s psycho, but she doesn’t act like it—other than this one thing. “Okay, let’s get.”
The moon had crested the tree tops and shed enough light that a lantern wasn’t necessary. As they walked Adrian asked, “You ever kill anyone before?”
“Why?”
“Seems like a pertinent questio
n given what you’re up to doesn’t it?”
“Yes. I mean yes it’s a pertinent question. No, I’ve never killed anyone before.”
“Are you totally sure this is what you want to do? A lot of people spend the rest of their lives regretting killing someone, even though they thought it was a good idea at the time.”
“I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do or not.” Racy replied. “I don’t know if I’ll regret it the rest of my life, but I doubt it very much. I do know that I’ll regret not killing him for the rest of my life if I don’t. He’ll find some other girls to rape, and he likes them young Mr. Hunter, real young.”
“How about you call me Adrian. ‘Mr. Hunter’ seems a bit formal, given the circumstances. I can’t recall the last time I helped a young girl commit murder. How old are you anyway?”
“Seventeen, Adrian. And it’s not murder, its justice. It’s not the formal, legal kind of justice, its real justice. The kind you can only get for yourself. If you’re having second thoughts you can go on back.”
Adrian laughed out loud. “Go back, no I don’t think so. I’m not having second thoughts…I just want to be sure you don’t have second thoughts after it’s too late to change anything.” He pointed ahead of them. “I see a lit window up ahead, is that his house?”
“That’s it. That’s where that sick rat-bastard Charley lives.”
“Do you have a plan? You said you have planned this out. What are the details?”
“I’ve thought it over a thousand times,” she said, never looking away from the house. “Here’s my plan: I look in the windows to see if he’s alone. From all I’ve gathered, he lives alone so he most likely will be. If he has company, I wait until they leave or go to sleep. Then I knock on the door. When Charley answers, I shoot him. Six times with this pistol. It’s simple and should work. The key will be for me not to hesitate to shoot. No fancy speeches, or talking at all. No long stares. Soon as the door is clear enough to hit him I start shooting. If he doesn’t drop right there, I run. How’s that sound?”
B00C74WTKQ EBOK Page 3