Into the River Lands (Darkness After Series Book 2)

by Williams, Scott B.

  The safest way to do that was to backtrack a bit and circle around, flanking them from the upstream side, opposite the direction the third man had gone. The two were focusing all their attention on the other side of the creek anyway, so it wasn’t hard for Mitch to pull this off. Keeping behind tree trunks as much as possible, he moved slowly until he was near the edge of the top bank some seventy to eighty yards upstream from the two watchers. From this new vantage point, Mitch could see a clearing across the creek and this explained their actions. It was obvious that someone had been camping there. The remains of a recent campfire were visible from where he was too, and these guys had seen it and intended to check it out. Mitch scanned the woods on the other side for movement but didn’t see any signs of life. If whoever fired that shotgun had been camping there, they were gone now or else very well hidden.

  Mitch waited where he was until he saw the one man who had left the other two sneaking quietly through the trees just downstream of the clearing. He was approaching with caution and a decent stalking technique, and Mitch figured he was probably the most experienced of the four when it came to hunting skills. It was good that he was on the other side, because those skills made him more dangerous and it would be easier to deal with him alone.

  The minutes seemed to pass like hours as he waited for the man to make his next move. He was careful; Mitch had to give him credit for that. When he was at last apparently satisfied that the clearing was deserted, Mitch saw him step into the open with his AK held at ready. A hand-signal telling the other two to “hold on” was his only deviation from the task at hand. Once he reached the fire pit area in the campsite, Mitch saw him freeze and then raise the AK to his shoulder. Pointing at something lying in the grass, he turned back to face the two covering him and drew a finger across his throat. Someone over there was dead, so the shotgun had indeed been fired from there. But who did the shooting and who was shot? Mitch figured it probably didn’t have anything to do with April and the other man who had taken her and Kimberly. There was no sign of the canoe or any other reason to believe they had stopped here. They would likely have had time to get past the spot before those shots were fired too, even with one person paddling. At least that’s what Mitch wanted to believe. But after the man in the clearing was certain he was alone there, he once again faced his waiting partners and this time called out to them. What he said renewed Mitch’s fear for April and Kimberly’s safety and put a whole new twist on any hope he had of finding them quickly.

  “It’s Wayne! He’s dead!”

  When the other two replied with a barrage of questions, the man across the creek waved them to silence and motioned them to come on over instead of answering. Then he turned and started scouring the ground around the edge of the clearing, obviously looking for footprints or any other clues. Mitch saw the two on his side of the creek get to their feet and start moving downstream, headed for the place the first one had crossed.

  Mitch was determined not to let that happen. Now was his chance to eliminate these thugs; probably the best one he would get. He slid the AR sling around so that the rifle was on his back and switched back to his bow, nocking an arrow as he set out to follow them. He had no more time to waste tracking these three, so he wasn’t about to let them out of his sight again. If someone had shot the man who took April and Kimberly, then whoever it was must have continued on downriver with them in the canoe and he needed to catch up. But he wouldn’t know for sure until he examined the tracks in that clearing himself. He had no desire to wait for these men to move on before he did that, so taking them out immediately was his best option. After what they had done, he would show them no mercy. The world would be a better place without them.

  He quickened his pace to close the gap as he followed, having little fear they would detect his presence as they were focused on getting over there and finding out what happened to their dead friend. Mitch waited until the first one entered the creek wading into chest-deep water, holding his rifle high overhead. Feeling his way along the bottom to keep from stepping into a deep hole, he would not be looking back at his partner who was still on the bank. Mitch drew his bow and took aim at the second one, who was still squatting down to remove his boots while the first one was about halfway across. He had a clear shot at the side of the man’s neck, and he watched in satisfaction, as the flight of his arrow was straight and true. The man clutched at his throat for a second before he fell forward on his face in the mud, but Mitch was no longer focused on him and already had his second arrow on the string and his bow fully drawn. With only his head and shoulders exposed above the water and a small backpack high in the middle of his back, this one presented a more challenging target. Mitch knew from past experience that head shots worked just fine with a bow and arrow, at least with the heavy broad heads he favored. He centered his aim on the base of the man’s skull and let the arrow fly, but at just that moment, his target stumbled and his head went under. Mitch’s arrow sliced into the empty water beyond where his head had been, a clean miss that left him grabbing for a third arrow to follow-up. Fortunately for Mitch but not for the man in the creek, his sudden dunking made him completely unaware of the deadly missile that had missed him by inches. When he regained his footing and turned back to mutter a curse to his partner he thought was right behind him, he didn’t have time to comprehend what had just happened and why the other man was lying in the mud. The third arrow that left Mitch’s bow that day caught him just above the collar bone, passing through his neck and into the water beyond, almost in the same trajectory as the one that missed. The man collapsed and his head went under again, a stain of blood visible in the current just moments later as Mitch nocked a forth arrow and made his way down to the bank.

  * * *

  When Gary Haggard found Wayne’s body and knelt beside it to see what happened, there was no question as to the cause of death. His friend had caught a load of buckshot square in the chest, and from close range, too. Gary figured it had to have been the second shot they’d heard, but why was Wayne here, on the bank and not in the canoe? Since the canoe and the woman and her little kid were nowhere to be seen, Gary figured it was pretty certain that whoever had shot Wayne had taken off with them. If they had, then it had been nearly and hour and whoever it was had a good head start with the help of the current. Gary didn’t give a damn whether he ever saw that girl again. She was the reason Wayne did something stupid and ended up dead after all, but he did want to find whoever did this and make he or them pay for what they did to his buddy.

  That was going to be a challenge, but they had to go downstream anyway to get home. He began by looking around the body and the rest of the clearing for footprints. There were none from the woman, so he doubted she ever got out of the canoe. He found a lot of man-sized tracks other than Wayne’s that had no tread pattern and seemed to be made by moccasins or something similar. These crisscrossed the mud and sand in the clearing and around the edges and Gary couldn’t tell whether they were made by one man over the course of several days or by more than one in a shorter period of time. He checked the fire pit in the middle of the clearing and when he kicked over the coals and put his hand near them, he could feel the heat from the buried embers. Someone had only recently put out the fire, but the pile of coals and the extra wood heaped nearby suggested that whoever had camped here might have been here several days or even longer.

  Gary went back over to Wayne’s body. If Paul and Jared would hurry up, they could quickly bury him in the soft sand if they worked quickly. Though they’d had their differences on occasion, he and Wayne had been friends for a long time and he hated to leave him lying there like that for the coyotes and vultures. His fallen comrade had been stripped of his weapons; the Glock 20 and its spare magazines, his compound bow and his Ka-Bar were all gone. His backpack with his other gear was missing too, but Gary figured that was probably still in the canoe where he had tied it to a thwart when he shoved off. Gary checked his pockets for the Spyderco folding knife he
had taken from the woman when she was forced to drop it and found it missing too. He had nothing else on him of value.

  Gary glanced downstream in the direction from which he expected Paul and Jared to follow him over here from the other side. He wondered what was taking them so long and he was going to be aggravated if they had gone farther out of the way to look for a shallower place to cross. Both of them had been cussing under their breath every time they’d had to wade a slough. He scanned the bank opposite where they had been watching and saw that they were not there, so he figured they should be coming along any minute.

  He returned to the creek’s edge and examined the drag marks in the sand. It was obvious that a canoe had landed and shoved off from here, but it was odd that it had done so in two different places. Could there have already been another canoe here when Wayne and the woman came along, or had the stranger that took it after killing him have pulled it back up on a different part of the bank for some reason before leaving? It made sense that the stranger or strangers may have arrived here by canoe, considering that they were camped right on the riverbank. He also had to consider that there was some slight possibility that the woman had not been lying about others in her group traveling the river separately. Could it be that whoever shot Wayne knew her, and maybe she had left willingly with them? It made sense that they wouldn’t hang around here long if that were the case, since she knew that he and Paul and Jared were paralleling the creek on foot as close to its course as possible.

  Gary couldn’t be sure what any of the tracks or drag marks meant, but what he was sure of was that they’d left here by canoe. And to his mind, that meant that they were somewhere downstream. With the way the current was running, he figured they might already have covered two or three miles since leaving here. He and Paul and Jared may not be able to catch up to them while they were paddling, but he figured they would eventually have to stop somewhere. All he wanted was to get them within rifle range. When he did, he would kill them all, the woman and kid too. They had caused him more than enough trouble already.

  He’d had enough of waiting for Paul and Jared too and he was going to let them know it. He stormed back downstream to the place where he’d crossed the creek and stopped in his tracks at what he saw on the opposite bank in the mud. It was Paul, facedown and still in a totally unnatural position. As soon as he realized what he was seeing, he heard something sing past his right ear at high speed, followed by the solid whack of an impact. A glance in the direction of the second sound revealed a heavy wooden arrow buried in the trunk of a tree six feet behind him. Gary leveled the AK in the direction from which it seemed to have flown and pulled the trigger. A ten-round burst from the converted weapon would force the attacker to keep his head down and prevent him from shooting another arrow—that is, if one of the steel-jacket rounds didn’t find him or her by chance and eliminate the problem.

  Twenty-seven

  APRIL STIFFENED WITH FEAR on the canoe seat at the sudden sound of machine gun fire ripping through the silence just a short distance away downstream. Benny paused mid-stroke with his pole in the canoe in front of her from which he was towing hers. His son, Tommy, the bleeding from his arm finally under control, also turned to look back as the staccato echoes of rifle shots faded away.

  Before anyone could speak, there was another short burst, then another and another, followed by several single shots in rapid succession.

  “That sounded like an AK-47,” Benny whispered. “In fact, I know it was. You reckon that fellow’s friends have found our campsite already?”

  “Yes,” April whispered back. “It’s got to be them. One of them was definitely carrying an AK. I didn’t realize it was full-auto though.” April thought back to the brief education Mitch had given her about firearms during their time together. Before all this happened, she would have thought any black gun that looked as menacing as the patrol rifle his father used in his job as a game warden was a machine gun. But Mitch had told her no, that despite the common appearance of full-auto assault rifles in movies involving drug dealers and other criminals, they were rare in civilian hands. He told her they were highly illegal without a special permit and most of what people thought of as “assault rifles” were actually semi-auto lookalikes. He did say the AK-47 could be converted back to the original design fairly easily, however, but not many people would risk it because it was a serious federal crime to do so. The semi-auto versions were popular and common though, so April guessed that with no one to enforce restrictions like that now, it was probably happening a lot. To men like those four who had taken her and Kimberly, laws of any kind meant nothing, so she was hardly surprised.

  “I don’t know who they could be shooting at with that thing though,” Benny said. “Maybe just firing it off up in the air because they’re scared after finding their friend I shot.”

  “Yeah, that’s probably got them fellows pretty jumpy, Pop.” Tommy agreed.

  April wasn’t so sure about this. Those men didn’t seem to be the type to scare easy from what she’d seen. Whatever the reason for the machine gun bursts, the sound told her they were nearby and that she’d been right to urge Benny and Tommy to leave immediately. She hoped she was right about going upriver, and she was sure glad Benny had the knowledge and skill to get them out of sight going this way against the current. Paddling would have been a lot slower, and hopeless for her alone with Kimberly. But Benny had managed to get them around two big, sweeping bends of the creek before they heard the machine gun fire. With any luck at all, the three men would assume whoever took her and Kimberly and the canoe had gone the other way. Maybe they would take off that way in hopes of catching up. But whatever they did, she didn’t care as long as they didn’t find her and her child and she never had to lay eyes on them again. To that end, she urged Benny on in their quest to get upstream as far and as fast as possible.

  “We need to keep going,” she insisted. “They are still way too close for comfort.”

  “I agree,” Benny said. “I know I don’t want nothing to do with them fellows, especially with them toting full-auto rifles. They’re gonna be itching to shoot anything that moves after finding their buddy with that load of buckshot in his chest!”

  “We’re gonna give them the slip, going this way, Pop. I think she was right about that.”

  “Yep, it was the right choice all right. Like I always said, dead things go downstream, and we’d end up dead for sure if we went down that way now. Life is upriver, boy!”

  “Wish I could help you out with the poling.”

  “Don’t worry about that, son. I’ve got it. I’ve got to do something to keep myself young and spry!”

  April smiled at the exchange between this gentle father and his grown son. She knew she was incredibly fortunate that Benny had found her when he did, and that he had a good heart, unlike so many of the strangers she had encountered since the lights went out. She knew there had to be more good people just trying to survive after their world collapsed around them, but lately, they sure seemed few and far between. She’d seen so many of the other kind who were taking advantage of the misfortunes and weaknesses of others that she had about lost her faith in humanity. But she instinctively knew Benny and Tommy were good folks; simple country folks with enough knowledge of the outdoor life to be able to adapt to the sudden and severe changes the solar pulse had wrought. They didn’t need to hurt others to get what they needed to survive, because they were already pretty self-sufficient before the grid went down anyway. April figured that in a lot of ways, these two were much like Mitch and his family.

  With Benny’s ability to pole the canoe upstream at a reliable and efficient pace, she began to have hope once again that she would find Mitch. By looking more carefully, maybe she would see the path to the Henley land that she had somehow missed on the way downstream. But first, she knew they would reach the sandbar where David had been left for dead, but probably not before the end of the day tomorrow, because even with Benny’s skill at poling,
upstream travel was far slower than downstream. April dreaded what she would find there. She had little hope that he would be alive, if he still was when they’d left this morning. Kimberly was too young to be fully aware of what happened to her father, but she would know something was wrong and she was already looking for him expectantly. April would somehow have to hide from her the truth; while they were burying her daddy in some lonely shallow grave lost in this vast river land forest.

  * * *

  Mitch couldn’t believe his bad luck. After he made his way across the creek and started stalking his way upstream to the clearing, the third and last surviving man of the three he’d been trailing stepped into view in front of a tree. Still unaware anything was amiss regarding his companions; he presented a wide-open and clear shot just as he came within sight of the place the other two had crossed. Mitch had seized the opportunity and quickly drew his bow and released. This last man, who was clearly the most cautious and experienced of the three, once he knew something was up, would be a much more difficult and dangerous target.

  And that’s exactly what happened. Mitch had just released his arrow as the man spotted the fallen figure of the first one he’d killed on the opposite bank. Recognition that something was way wrong about the way his friend was lying face-down in the mud caused the man to instinctively flinch and duck, and Mitch’s arrow never even touched him. It was rare that Mitch missed a shot, and when he did, it was almost always due to something out of his control.