Forsaken World:Coming of Age

by Thomas A. Watson

  “We don’t have to attack them outright.” Ian grinned. “We can make their life very miserable without letting on we are around but only if we catch them before they set up. If they get set up in strength, it will be harder and take longer.”

  Seeing Ian’s grin turn malevolent, Jennifer suddenly felt sorry for anyone around them. “You’re that sure you can do it without them finding out someone is fucking with them?” she asked.

  Ian’s grin was replaced by shock as Allie and Carrie giggled. “You doubt us?” Ian choked out.

  “Never mind,” Jennifer said and continued fixing her plate. “I’m just worried that if they figure it out, they will start looking for us. It’s not like the teachers and the people in the neighborhood. These guys will be trying to kill us.”

  “If they could find us,” Lance said as he started eating. “It’s a big world out there, and trust me, we know how not to be found out.”

  Jennifer looked at him then over at Ian. “Will you two teach me how to be a big pain in the ass to someone?”

  “You can do that already,” Carrie shot out with a giggle.

  Before Jennifer could answer, Lance cleared his throat. “Yes and you will be helping us—as will you two,” Lance said, looking at the girls. “Everyone needs to be able to do everything.”

  Ian grabbed his glass, chuckling, “I always wanted to do this without the fear of getting in trouble and going to jail.”

  Nodding as he chuckled, Lance glanced over at Ian. “So you thinking we should scout first?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think we need some booby traps around us before setting off just in case someone comes calling,” Lance said then continued shoveling food in his mouth.

  Liking the sound of that, Ian gave a little nod. “So when do you want to scout around?”

  “I’ve thought about it a lot, and I think we should set up traps for three or four days, covering the easiest ways to us, then scout around. Just following Uncle Doug’s scouting area, that is going to take us a week. Maybe a little more,” Lance said.

  “You’re going to stay out a week or more?” Jennifer cried out with Allie and Carrie looking up in horror.

  “Hell no,” Lance shot back. “I’m not sleeping outside; Ian can if he wants to.”

  “Bullshit,” Ian blurted out.

  “But you said—” Jennifer started, and Lance held up his hand.

  “No, it means that’s how long it will take us to scout around us. You look around, getting the lay of the land, where everything is at and what it looks like, and when you come back, you see if anything has changed, letting you know if someone or something has been around. Uncle Doug has the scout area set up with a three-mile perimeter. That’s almost thirty square miles, and that takes some time to cover, especially if you’re moving carefully to not attract attention. From stinkers or bikers.”

  Jennifer, along with Allie and Carrie, sighed with relief that the boys weren’t going to be gone for a week as Ian glanced over at Lance. “How hard do you want to booby trap the area around us? Hurt bad, piss off, or scare them?”

  Lance looked over at Ian with a hard expression. “Lethal and very painful.”

  Chapter Ten

  The five days of preparing and setting up traps around them were hard and fast, yet every time they went outside the fence, it was always slow and methodical movement. When Jennifer looked at the layout Doug had for traps, Lance shook his head. “This is our area of expertise,” he said, pushing it away. The only hiccup was from the pigs; they refused to stay out from under their feet, so on the first day, the pig pen was built.

  All the branches that had been cut off the trees were cut down to their straightest lengths and turned into stakes. As Lance and Ian cut them up, one of the girls would carry them in the workshop, and Jennifer would use a band saw to cut sharp points on one end. They soon had huge piles of stakes stacked by length: the first was two to three feet long, another four to five, and the last six feet long. When Jennifer saw the piles of sharp sticks, she thought they were a lot, but the boys said no. They went to the bottom of the draw to a large stand of bamboo and carried up several trailers full, doubling what they had.

  Pulling the logs over to the shop, Jennifer started getting worried. She thought they were going to start chopping logs up for stakes but watched them load the logs up on the sawmill. After showing her how to cut slabs off them to make a square and cut boards out of it, they stacked all the slabs to the side until they had several dozen. Then, they pulled one slab over and drove nails through the flat side in neat rows a few inches apart. Next, they drove long screws between each nail.

  “Won’t a screw puncture a shoe if you step on it?” Jennifer asked when they flipped the slab over on the ground with the flat side down, exposing the lines of nails and screws.

  “Hell yeah,” Ian laughed. “And it’s a hell of a lot harder to pull out after you step on a screw.”

  She looked at both of them in horror. “You’ve done this before?”

  They looked at her with straight faces. “No,” they said in unison.

  “That would’ve been illegal,” Ian said, grabbing another slab.

  It looked like a thorn tree from Hell, and Jennifer said as much, so that’s what the boys named it: Hell Tree.

  Inside the storeroom behind the workshop, Lance pulled out two large boxes that he could barely carry and opened them, showing Jennifer hundreds of caltrops in each box. In one box, the caltrops were just solid pieces of sharp metal with each arm two inches long. When Lance tossed one on the ground, he said with a grin, “See, one pointed rod always points up.”

  When he pulled another caltrop from the other box, Jennifer sucked in a breath. They were the same size, but each rod had a barb below the point. “Uncle Doug showed us these last year, and we never got to use them,” Lance said, holding it up.

  “He never let them out of his sight,” Ian added.

  “True,” Lance said. “The others are great for popping tires, but these are made for people and look hard as hell to pull out. There is a barrel of caltrops in there that Uncle Doug made, and they look like the others.” Jennifer just gawked at the evil looking caltrop and shivered at the thought of stepping on it.

  After a day and a half of making stakes and driving nails in slabs of logs, the boys gathered all the small limbs that were left over, none bigger around than a finger, and started weaving them together to make mats. Some of the mats were big while others were just a few feet square.

  After working for two days making stakes, Hell Trees, and mats, they loaded up trailers and moved outside the fence. With Jennifer covering them and the girls watching the monitors, Ian and Lance went to work on the area around them.

  Any hole or small ravine they found, they would plant stakes in then cut down a few saplings. They laid the saplings over the hole or ravine then grabbed the mats of woven branches, lay it on top, then covered it with leaves. When they left, it looked like the forest floor. If a hole wasn’t where they wanted one, they dug one.

  On any flat area, they strung up barbwire a foot or so off the ground and laid the Hell Tree slabs always on the closest side to the cabin. When Jennifer saw them step over the barbwire, she understood it was just to make someone step up and over, driving their foot down on the nails and screws. With the rounded bark side up, it was hard to see the nails and screws sticking up.

  Further out, they ran barbwire between trees then tied the six-foot-long stakes to it in a row facing away from the cabin. The scary part about those was that Ian and Lance put them between trees with bushes they couldn’t be seen easily.

  Watching them work, Jennifer was starting to get scared to even come out of the fence, afraid she would get caught up in the deadly maze the two were building, and she said so. Lance stopped working on a pit he was lining with stakes and motioned her over. He pulled her close, whispering, “You have to stay on the trails, but anywhere a trail is straight, we are going to put ca
ltrops. Any time you are out, just face the cabin, and walk to the right off the trail until the trail curves again. And always remember: If it’s an easy place to cross the stream, don’t.” Jennifer nodded, remembering all the caltrops they had tossed in the water.

  She looked around, knowing there were several pits, barbwire with stakes, Hell Trees, and one trap that had a small tree bent back with stakes tied to it to whip out and stab anyone who tripped it, but she could barely make them out. “You know where you’re putting all of this?”

  Lance grinned. “Yes, and we’ll show you how to avoid them. Trust me, we’re not making this up as we go.”

  Her mouth fell open in shock. “You’ve done something like this before?”

  “No,” he grinned and went back to work.

  Jennifer shook her head and glanced around, making sure the area was clear. “You two are starting to scare me,” she mumbled as Dino weaved around all their work. “Hope you’re smart, Dino, because I’m not coming out here without one of them.”

  On the fifth day as the sun set, they headed back to the cabin. By no means was the whole area booby trapped, but all the easiest approaches were. As the boys made clear, they were far from done.

  When they pulled back inside, they radioed the girls to come help feed the animals. “Guys,” Jennifer said, getting out of the electric buggy and slinging her AR over her shoulder. “Please don’t make me go out there alone.”

  They looked at each other then back to her, and Lance said, “Ah, nobody goes outside the fence alone—ever.”

  “Thank God,” Jennifer gasped as the girls ran over. “We have the animals; why don’t you two get cleaned up?”

  Ian looked down at himself and saw he was covered in dirt. “Man, I thought we were dirty yesterday. It’s going to take forever to get our gear cleaned.”

  “Well, let’s work on that first,” Lance huffed, plugging the buggy up.

  They stripped down to underwear outside and first hosed off their gear. Carrying it all inside, they laid their vests out and started taking all their equipment out, stacking it on the coffee table. Then, they started cleaning weapons and gear.

  “Jennifer did really good keeping us covered,” Ian said, taking his AR apart.

  Lance nodded with a chuckle. “She almost shot that damn doe that has scared us a dozen times.”

  “I hope the damn thing gets caught in one of our traps.”

  “I don’t. I don’t want the smell of something dead to give up that we have traps out,” Lance said. “When we start on traps past the motion detectors, we are going to have to start rounds to make sure nothing is caught that could attract stinkers or anything else.”

  Ian gave a nod. “So you think Jennifer will be able to swap out with one of us later as we scout around us?”

  “She’s going to have to,” Lance said, digging dirt out of his AR. “You and I can’t be the only ones moving around out there; we will need a break.”

  “How long you think before she can go?”

  Lance inspected his AR then started to wipe it down with an oil rag. “Maybe a month. She’s getting good, but she doesn’t know how to move in the woods, and that’s not something you learn from reading or TV. You have to do it.”

  Grabbing a cleaning rod, Ian wet the patch with oil and ran it down his barrel. “Yeah, I think the ladybugs can move better than her in the woods right now.”

  “They will have to go out sometimes too, you know,” Lance said as he grabbed his cleaning rod, and Ian jerked his head up, looking at Lance and thinking he was joking. “Ian, if we have to leave, they have to know how to move by foot. I’m not talking about taking them scouting but just around the perimeter. If we have to run it really isn’t the best time to learn.”

  Ian sighed. “I understand, but it’s not right.”

  “Dude, none of this is right,” Lance said, looking over at him. “We should be in school and doing stuff at home, not teaching ourselves to become SEALs. Like you said, we never make the same mistake twice, but we need to try not to make a mistake in the first place.”

  Looking down his barrel, Ian saw it was clean and started putting his AR back together. “I know, but it still sucks.”

  “A long, hard one,” Lance said, reassembling his AR.

  With his AR back together, Ian racked the charging handle and made sure everything was working. “How do you want to do the scouting? Start in a circle and work out?”

  “Brah, you know how long that shit would take?” Lance said, checking his AR. “Let’s get cleaned up and check all the areas Uncle Doug wanted to monitor and come up with a plan. No matter what I think, we need to start on the west side toward Girdler then the southwest toward Hinkle. That is where most houses are and will take the longest.”

  Grabbing his XD Lipsey, Ian started breaking it down. “Brother, I’m not kidding. I’m not sleeping in the woods with stinkers out there. It was scary before, but shit, just the thought of it now makes my pecker shrivel up. I want to be back before sunset.”

  “Bitch, you sleep outside, you’re doing it alone,” Lance said, grabbing his Ruger pistol. “My ass is coming back before sunset.”

  Ian looked up with a grave face. “What about all those books and training DVDs that tell us moving at night with night optics is safer in a tactical environment?”

  “Fuck those sons of bitches,” Lance snapped, jumping up. “Let their stupid asses run around outside with fuckers trying to eat them. I can show you a hundred posts saying stinkers are more active at night.”

  “I know, I read them after you showed them to me,” Ian said. “But they also said stinkers can’t see any better than we can.”

  “How in the fuck would they know?” Lance asked, dropping back down on the couch. “Stinkers can’t talk.”

  Ian shook his head. “Lance, we went out in camo and found out they didn’t see us. It can be tested.”

  Holding up his hands, Lance stared at Ian with wide eyes. “Are you suggesting that we move around at night?”

  “Not now,” Ian said, looking away. “But like you said, we need to know how and not have to learn it if shit goes bad.” Lance just gaped at Ian as he turned back to look at him. “But by no means do I suggest we sleep out there.”

  Closing his mouth and shaking his head, Lance closed his eyes. “Just when do you suggest we try this nighttime bullshit?”

  Ian took a deep breath. “Before Jennifer and the girls go out.”

  Tossing his pistol on the coffee table, Lance jumped up. “Ian, I’m not scared of the dark. I’m scared of what’s in the dark.”

  “You think I’m not?” Ian snapped. “Any way you look at it, you and I are the ones responsible for the others’ safety. We are the men. Man card rules: The men are the first line of protection.”

  Lance almost ran to the bedroom to get his wallet and give up his man card but just stared at Ian. Sitting back down, Lance thought about it and nodded with a long sigh. “You’re right; we need to do it.”

  Without saying anything else, they cleaned their gear as the girls came in laughing. When Jennifer walked by, she saw the somber looks and stopped. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” they said together, never looking over as they continued cleaning their gear.

  Walking into her bedroom, Jennifer hung up her AR. “Nothing my ass,” she mumbled. Since she wasn’t covered in dirt, Jennifer grabbed some clothes and headed for the shower. As she walked in, she heard Allie and Carrie giggling in the kitchen. Glad someone was happy, Jennifer walked in the bathroom.

  Feeling better after her shower, Jennifer walked out and didn’t see Ian and Lance. She glanced over at the “men’s” bathroom, saw the door closed, and heard water running. Just out of curiosity, she walked over to the back of the sectional and sighed, seeing all their gear was gone. “Hell, I was going to help them,” she mumbled and headed to the kitchen just in time to “help” the girls cook spaghetti.

  When she put the garlic bread in the oven, she
glanced at her watch. “They fall asleep in the shower?” she looked over and saw the door to their bathroom and bedroom open. “Girls, I want both of you to take a quick shower before we eat, okay?” They just smiled at her and ran to the bedroom, grabbing clothes.

  Making sure the food wasn’t going to burn, Jennifer walked over to Ian and Lance’s bedroom and stuck her head inside. Like always, the room looked great, but they weren’t in it. Stepping out, she tilted her head to see if she heard them in the loft but only heard the girls giggling in the bathroom.

  Checking the food again, she ran downstairs to the bunker. When she walked in, she heard them talking but didn’t see them at the control desk. Walking to the back, she found them looking at the massive, ten-by-ten-foot map of the area on the sliding false wall, which led into, the other storage areas. The scale of the glass-covered satellite topographical map was large. They could see the houses and cars in the driveways.

  “Lance, in this one area, Uncle Doug has over a hundred houses marked for us to check,” Ian said, drawing a circle on the map with his finger. “Then we have to move to this hill north of Girdler and look over the valley it sits in. I’m sure Uncle Doug wouldn’t want us to do that with stinkers trying to eat our ass.”

  “Ian, it’s not a real town,” Lance said, running his finger down Highway 11, which passed through Girdler. “We’ve been there, and you know besides a few stores and a school, it’s nothing but all these houses beside the road. We don’t have to check those houses; just look at them through binoculars.”

  Ian started pointing at the houses in Girdler along the highway. “You realize we aren’t going to find people, right? If anyone is there, it’s going to be stinkers unless that gang has a strong hold there.”

  Lance pointed at several small areas he had drawn stars over with a dry erase marker. “Here are the places they have called from more than once in this area.”

  Looking at the four stars, Ian took the marker and grabbed a yard stick. Holding the ruler to the map, he drew a large circle around the cabin then sectioned it in four slices. “How in the hell do you know they don’t do like us? Only use short distance radios close. This is our three-mile circle, and they could be set up anywhere in here.”