After what she’d been forced to endure, Sarah would always bear her scars, but Scott knew she was far more than the sum of her hurts. Thinking of the tortured and beaten woman he’d first met, the transformation had been amazing. He knew this was part of her vow to never become a victim ever again. The prey now became the hunter.
What he felt wasn’t love, or at least, not the romantic ideal spun by what his sister-in-law, Hazel, derisively referred to as bodice rippers or the greeting card industry. More, he carried an acute appreciation of her qualities coupled with a deep respect and no little amount of affection. Whether there might ever be anything more, Scott couldn’t say, but he had to admit they made a good team.
Glancing at his wind-up watch, Scott was surprised to see nearly three hours had passed since he’d reached the ditch. Not one for long bouts of introspection despite his usually solitary nature, Scott wondered where the time had gone. Willing himself to relax, he spent the rest of his downtime engaged in a series of isometric exercises as well as some surreptitious stretching. Yoga my ass, he thought, as he worked to loosen tight muscle groups and carefully warm up his balky ligaments and tendons.
Scott was ready to begin the next leg of his infiltration at eleven p.m. by his watch. Starting “early” was necessary, so as to avoid the guard change at midnight. Not very original on the part of the cannibals, but they’d still managed to screw it up when Scott and his team were observing.
Fully half the guards visible to the watchers eventually fell asleep at their posts after no one came to relieve them. Their replacements, either drunk, stoned or dead, made no appearance. On the surface, this fact argued for acting later, but the guards who did show up always managed to wake more than just the sentries they were replacing. Those areas of the camp continued to stir well after midnight, and trying to pick which way the dice would roll smacked of Russian roulette to Scott.
So, Scott slithered over the lip of the weed-filled ditch, pack now riding on his back for once, all too aware of the chances his dead water moccasin was only one of many in the immediate area. Though currently dry, the drainage ditch fed into the little year-round creek and offered a nice area for snakes and other critters to range. With that in mind, the scout took ever greater pains to pass unnoticed in the night. With a half moon and plentiful cloud cover, Scott timed his movements to coincide with the deepening darkness.
When he reached the chain-link fence, Scott stayed low to the ground and tried to look like a misplaced tumbleweed as he shucked the pack again and worked the bolt cutter, snipping five wires and readied himself to slither through the narrow gap. The cutter was overkill for the narrow-gauge wire, but using the bolt cutters meant less weight attached to his pack. The wire parted like thread and he had his path inside. Other than a scare when his backpack snagged against the top of the uncut strands of the chain link fence, causing a heart-stopping rattle, Scott managed to enter the compound without incident.
The first thing he noticed was the stink of the place. While observing the compound, Scott had caught the wind blowing in the wrong direction a few times, and on his approach the smell became gradually more loathsome. Here, right on top of the source of the corruption, the foul odors made him want to gag. The stink reminded Scott of a feedlot filled with cattle, but worse, much worse.
Going back down into a prone position, Scott wiggled his way across the short expanse of open ground until he was adjacent to the small portable building housing the old, repurposed diesel generator used to power the pump to refill the tank. Unfastening the stays to his Ghillie suit, Scott dropped it and the heavy pack behind the tin building and used the suit to wrap up the dark gray backpack, and the deadly cargo encased inside.
Disabling the generator might not have been critical to the success of his plan, but Scott wanted to leave nothing to chance. He doubted he would get another opportunity to kill the cannibals in wholesale numbers, so he resolved to make sure the ten-thousand-gallon tank could not easily be dumped and flushed.
Feeling almost lighter than air with the fifty plus pounds of weight off his back, Scott glided around the building and nearly bumped into one of the creatures he was here to kill. Cursing his temporary loss of situational awareness, Scott had the knife drawn and poised to strike before the wretched thing even registered Scott was less than a foot away.
“Who? Who you be?” the scraggy man demanded, and reached out with grubby, blood-stained hands in Scott’s direction. The thing that used to be a man was short, maybe five feet six inches, and carried an eye-watering body odor that stank of rotted meat and fermented piss that overcame the general stink of the camp itself.
Scott might have talked his way out. This wretched excuse for a raider seemed partially night-blind and addled, but Scott realized he just couldn’t take the chance. Another part of Scott’s mind, the beast that lurked, seemed primed to act out against this abomination. Thrusting from the waist, Scott’s aim was true and he sank the six-inch blade in under the ribs, angled up to shred the bottom of the thing’s heart.
“Nobody you want to know,” Scott hissed, giving the knife a wicked twist as he withdrew from his killing stroke. Forced to grab the shoulders of the now-slumping form, Scott watched with detached interest as the dying thing tried to draw a last, ragged breath. Rather than wait around for the inevitable end, Scott stepped around behind and delivered another strike, this one sinking the steel into the soft flesh at the base of his spine.
Stuffing the corpse unceremoniously into the shadowed space behind the shed, Scott took a few moments to scan the darkness but no one seemed to have noticed the murder. Either that, or such violence passed without comment inside the fence.
Getting back to the mayhem at hand, Scott forced the flimsy door on the shelter and walked inside like he belonged. A quick examination using a red-filtered pen light showed Scott a familiar-looking shape, a squat Generac generator cradled in a metal cage for safekeeping. Wrecking the diesel generator might have been beyond Scott’s skills, but he had consulted with Stan and three other diesel mechanics while planning for the mission, so he knew which parts he could remove to at least temporarily disable the device.
Using his fingers and a set of small wrenches placed conveniently on a shelf next to the door, Scott was finished unbolting the pieces in less than five minutes. Stuffing them in his pocket along with the wrench, Scott made sure to look both ways before emerging from the dubious cover of the portable building.
Retracing his steps, Scott returned for the canister of arsenic and felt like a pack mule as he hoisted the load onto his back once again. At least he could forgo the stifling Ghillie suit for the moment and left it hidden. Now, all he had to do was climb a twenty-foot ladder while carrying a small piano on his back in plain view of any more late-night denizens of the enemy encampment who happened to look up. Piece of cake, he thought.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Getting to the top of the tank looked like only a short climb, but the need to do it in full sight of the camp made for another potential hurdle. Even in the dark, all he needed was one person to look up in his direction to ruin the entire plan. Fortunately, Scott had friends on the outside, friends eager to draw attention away at the critical moment.
Crouching by the ladder, Scott dared to check the luminous dial of his watch again. Eleven twenty-eight, he saw. Any minute now.
The shots came thirty seconds early, but Scott started his climb as soon as he registered the first report of the rifle. Six of his men, including Ben and Keith, opened up on the series of listening post positions set up just inside a narrow band of trees out in front of the complex. Clearly, these fighters were a response to the apparently failed attack launched by Scott and his scouts.
Deploying a screening force might have made sense, but the execution left a lot to be desired. Their shallow holes barely offered enough room for the men to lay down, and the stacks of cut tree limbs offered them a little concealment, but nearly no cover from the heavy hunting rifles
the distraction team was using.
And that was their job, for they offered Scott the misdirection he needed. Forcing his body into sudden motion, Scott took the rungs two at a time and almost before he realized it, the sloped top of the tank came into sight. Collapsing on the corrugated steel, Scott assumed a spread-eagle position and waited for the shooting to die down. Despite the assault on the listening posts only being needed as a distraction, Scott could tell from the volume of fire that his boys and the other volunteers were doing their best to eliminate the nominal threat presented by the thin line of enemy fighters. Clearly, everybody was desirous of getting their licks in on these ghouls.
“Give ‘em hell, boys.” Scott whispered to himself, and then he reached out to locate the lid of the tank. Even in the darkness, his gloved fingers quickly found the hump of the top access port, and feeling around the sides, he detected an indentation running around the cap. So, a screw type mechanism, he guessed.
Flexing his fingers, Scott strained but failed to turn the cap one-handed. Slowly, carefully, he wriggled out of the back pack and set the canvas gingerly on the slightly sloped metal surface. Once he was satisfied the load wasn’t going to slide off the side of the tank, Scott dared to reach into the left-side pocket and remove the cloth-wrapped package inside. The short-handled, adjustable pipe wrench barely fit around the stubborn metal cap, and his awkward, crouched position made using his arms to achieve full leverage that much more difficult.
Gradually, after several minutes of vein-popping exertion, Scott thought he detected movement. Braced yet again, Scott tried anew and this time he felt the cap slowly begin to rotate. Then, the metal gave a sharp squeal of metal-on-metal and Scott halted, digging out a small spray can from the other side pocket on his pack. WD-40 to the rescue, he thought as he sprayed the exposed threads with a liberal dose of the lubricating liquid. Not for use with any water sources, he thought he recalled from the warning on the can. Not going to be a problem soon.
Once the lubrication soaked in, the cap turned much easier, and within a few minutes, Scott had the cap off and resting on the corrugated metal decking. If he had time, the cap would be going back on after he finished. No reason to make his attack that obvious.
Satisfied he had access, Scott cautiously unfastened the straps on the side of the backpack and removed the bagged, dual filter respirator supplied by Lem Brewster. The respirator covered him from forehead to chin, and after fogging the eyepieces a couple of times, he was ready to work. Next, he removed a pair of rubber, shoulder length rubber gloves and rapidly slid his arms into the holes and wriggled them tight fit. These replaced the thick leather gloves he’d been wearing before, and Scott made sure to stow them in the bag for later use.
Only then did he retrieve the stainless-steel cylinder from the backpack. The canister resembled an oxygen tank and Scott had no idea where Lem had found such a thing or what it was originally used for, but the thick metal walls kept the highly toxic arsenic compound from leaking. That was all Scott cared about at the moment.
After all the planning and nail-biting, Scott found the moment a bit anticlimactic as he tipped the cylinder over and began dumping the poison into the tank. Despite the gloves, Scott was careful to avoid getting any of the powder on him. He didn’t want to have to wear the protective gear all the way back to the rendezvous.
Thirty seconds and he was done. Thirty-five pounds of arsenic added to ten thousand gallons of water. Probably less, since he could tell the tank wasn’t completely full. Another minute to refasten the cap, tightened with the wrench, then rewrapping and replacing it along with the near empty can of WD-40, and Scott was ready to depart. So far, so good.
He wasn’t sure just how much the ten thousand gallons, or less, would dilute the thirty- five pounds of arsenic, but his research indicated that at the very least, anyone drinking that water would eventually become quite ill. How sick, and how quick, even Lem couldn’t be sure.
Research on how much arsenic was needed to kill a person outright wasn’t that easy to find, not even in the old encyclopedia he’d consulted. Lem had provided Scott with the old MSDS sheets for the compound, but strangely enough they didn’t tell Scott how much was too much, either. For maybe the thousandth time since the lights went out, Scott cursed the loss of Google and the internet. In the electronic world, Scott felt sure he could have gotten an on-line calculator telling him how big a dose for how long to kill. Whether the information was accurate, well, that was one of the dangers of the internet, where everybody claimed to be an expert in something.
This time, now that he was already in place, Scott withdrew the last major item from his backpack and uncoiled a hundred-foot coil of sturdy climbing rope. With the last shots of the distraction already fading away from the fierce skirmish, Scott planned to avoid going back down the exposed front of the tank, visible to the majority of the compound. Looking at the sloped, corrugated top of the water tank, Scott quickly decided the six-inch protrusion of the cap was enough, and looped his rope around the now-closed access point. Shrugging back into the pack, Scott decided to leave the mask and gloves on until he was on the ground. No reason to forego the precaution at this stage. Leaning back, he easily rappelled down the back side of the tank.
Once on the ground, Scott gave a few tugs and the rope slid silently loose to lay at his feet. Rather than tie off the rope and leave signs of his presence, he’d simply doubled it up and used the top cap as a hook, lowering himself to safety while using both ends. The rope went back into the backpack, to cushion the now empty canister, along with the contaminated gloves and mask. The center pocket of the backpack featured a heavily reinforced plastic liner and stiff plastic lips overlapping the zipper which made the pack harder to close, but Lem thought might help contain any loose arsenic particles inside. The whole inner lining would be removed and discarded back at the Porter place.
As he picked his way out of the camp, Scott tried to keep his pace slow and steady. Don’t attract attention now, he kept reminding himself. For this reason, he’d left the Ghillie suit rolled and now attached via straps to the bottom of the pack, where he hoped would make it look more like a bedroll in the dark.
While he played hide-and-seek with the shadows, and waited for another wandering group of cannibals to wander by, Scott realized the urge for speed had nothing to do with any desire to flee for his own safety. Instead, he recognized the motivation stemming from his revulsion about merely setting foot in this abattoir. This was unclean earth. Forbidden.
Even this far from the cook fires and the killing grounds, the dirt under his feet felt contaminated. Touched by evil. Not matter how much time passed, he had a feeling no one would ever be able to visit this site and not feel the icy chill of terror. Okay, he finally admitted to himself, maybe some of his urges had to do with the way this camp made his skin crawl at the thought of being added to that Devil’s feast.
Scott prided himself on being unflappable in his job, and he never paid any credence to the occasional spooked hikers who claimed to have seen something scary in the woods. He blamed Hollywood, as there was simply nothing in the natural world he’d ever seen that allowed for haunts or the like.
This night, though, Scott secretly thought he might have heard a faint wailing in the night. Nothing solid, and almost like a whisper meant only for his ears. He stopped, twice, to listen, but either the crying finally stopped or, he suspected, the sound was only inside his head.
“You soon will be avenged,” he managed to say, voice as soft as the wind, as he sought to quiet the cries, and he wondered if this was how it felt to lose your mind.
Screw it. He knew his family worried. Not just that he would fail, but that if he succeeded, the guilt might drive him crazy. Hazel, God bless her, had openly said as much to him. She meant well. They all did. None of them could fully understand the feeling this camp and its inhabitants engendered.
Becoming a mass murderer, a killer on a massive scale, held no real horrors for Scott. No
t in this instance. Scott was no sociopath, but he was at peace with the idea that some people shouldn’t be allowed to continue drawing breath.
Whether compelled or not, violating some taboos simply could not be tolerated. He’d shared a vow, a solemn oath, that everyone inside this compound would die, and he meant to keep that promise. And if everything went according to plan, he would spring Mike from the tender mercies of his cousin, Cass, and get his ass on the line tomorrow. Wounded or not, Mike earned the right to be present when the payback started. He would want to see this through, even if all he could do was sit in the shade and help refill magazines.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Scott reached the rendezvous closing in on three a.m. Four miles from the hopefully doomed manufacturing facility, the site was chosen simply due to location and geographical features, mainly because the small copse of trees sat surrounded by acres of wide open hay fields. Signs showed others had camped here before, but the temporary layover was vacant when they’d checked it out before the mission. No one, except a sneak with the skills of his scouts, was going to infiltrate the area without being seen across the broad, open expanse.
Rather than doing something stupid, Scott stood at the edge of the hay field and used his clicker until he got the appropriate response. His sentries heard him and gave the countersign. He was exhausted when he limped into camp, but once he’d checked in with Yalonda and gotten the Icy-Hot treatment, complete with dropped trousers and a modicum of snickers, he found he couldn’t get to sleep. So he sat up, back to the low, flickering fire, and stared out at the darkness until dawn broke the spell.
“You get any sleep?”
The question roused Scott from his meditation, or fugue state. Sarah’s voice cut through the static in his head like a scalpel. She was kneeling in the grass, only a few feet away, and held a steaming mug of tea in both hands. The chill of the night still clung to the air, and Scott saw the dew sparkling like little diamond teardrops on the blades of grass in the hayfield.
Lines in Shadow: Walking in the Rain Page 26