Tolliver walked back to his cronies. All but one of them followed him as he left. The remaining guy settled down against a tree with the whiskey bottle in his hands. He said nothing. Every so often he stuck the neck of the bottle deep into his mouth and drank.
I kept trying to loosen one of the stakes. I thought the one tied to my right hand had some give now, so I focused my efforts on that one. My wrists were hurting. Soon they were bleeding as well. I watched bright red drops of blood fall to the ground but I kept working on the stake.
Finally, the stake was loose. I managed to pull it out of the ground. Mr. Swigs-a-Lot finally noticed, stood, and walked toward me. I reached for the pistol inside my waistband under my tucked in shirt. As the man came closer I pulled at my shirttail. It was hung up and didn’t want to come free.
I gave a hard jerk and my shirt tore. I reached through the tear and grabbed the pistol grip, thumbed the snap on the inside-the-waistband holster loose, and pulled the pistol.
The man was coming closer. It was the other man, the one who had been with Tolliver when they raped and murdered my sisters.
Just as he reached me, I shot him upwards through his chin. He collapsed at my feet before he could say a word. I tucked the gun back in the holster and pulled the knife from my left sleeve sheath and cut the rope that bound my left hand. As I pulled myself up to cut the rope binding my feet, I smelled shit. The dead man’s bowels had cut loose and there sure was something rotten in Denmark. As scared as I was, I was surprised I hadn’t defecated myself. It was a good thing though. I couldn’t imagine a worse way to poop, hanging upside down, and having shit run right down your back.
I held myself up with one hand, my head almost against my feet, and cut the rope. I fell on my ass against the man I’d killed. The impact forced air from his lungs and he croaked. I almost peed my pants at the sound. I rolled off of the man, freed my feet, and ran like I was a member of the Olympic track team.
And I ran hard. I ran to where I left Sackett and waved for him to follow me. He came along and we both ran. We ran for damn near three days.
Two down and one to go I told myself even as I just wanted to keep running and never come back after Tolliver. Shit, the next time I saw him, he’d probably be driving a fucking tank. A grown man in a boy’s body, my ass. Right now I was just a scared kid.
Me and Sackett camped somewhere north of the national forest. I was careful to find a hidden spot and keep a watch in case we were followed. We weren’t followed, but it took me a full three weeks to be sure.
Once I was sure we weren’t followed, we moved camp and waded five miles in a shallow stream to hide our tracks. We found another hidden spot for a camp. We subsisted on rabbits that Sackett caught until I made some deadfalls, and built a couple of fish traps. Then I made me another bow and a few arrows.
The bow wasn’t great but it served to kill a deer. The meat and hide were welcome. I dried the meat into jerky while I thought about what to do next.
My mind was blank. I couldn’t think of a single way to get at Tolliver. I wasn’t even sure if I had the guts for another try at the man.
It would be so easy to just move on and try to forget about Tolliver, my mom, my sisters, King, and Al. Nobody would ever know I quit, and if they did, they wouldn’t think so badly of me. After all, I was just a kid.
But I’d know. I’d know for the rest of my life that I was a coward and not worthy of the name King gave me. I’d never in my own mind be a real Kingcade if I gave up now.
I knew I had to kill Tolliver, or die trying. I also knew I had to be smarter about it than I’d ever been before, smarter than I ever thought I was capable of being.
I never thought of myself as being smart, even though I made mostly B’s in school. But what you think you are, you are. King told me that. I didn’t understand when he told me, but now I got it.
So I asked myself what is smart? Is it something you’re born with, or something attached to a way of thinking? Shit, Einstein damn near failed out of graduate school. He only graduated when he withdrew his first thesis and wrote and submitted another. And Thomas Edison’s teachers thought he was retarded.
So smart must be a way of thinking that most people never do. If I wanted to kill Tolliver and survive, I had to come up with a plan that was so unexpected, so audacious, it couldn’t fail. But first, I had to make myself believe that I could do just that.
Chapter 27
I spent a few days thinking. What was the difference between me and really smart people? I thought about Bobby Beasley. He was the smartest kid in school. He always made straight A’s. I wondered if he was okay. His house was now one of the empty ones. Maybe his family moved to a better place?
It took me a couple of days to figure out at least one of the differences between me and Bobby. Bobby always paid attention. I didn’t think he let his mind wander the way I did. In school, almost every time the teacher said something, I was daydreaming about being in the woods instead of in school. So I often missed homework assignments and the like. Bobby never did. I think several of us had slipped into the habit of ‘just ask Bobby. He’ll know.’ But there was no Bobby for me to ask questions of now. So the first thing I tried to do was pay more attention.
I figured I’d been doing pretty well at paying close attention to survival shit. But, after thinking about it for a while, I realized that, once I learned a skill, I got lazy and did it automatically.
That would have been fine in normal times, but now it might get me killed. I went over all the close calls I’d had, the flood, the fire, the bear, the shits, the dog pack, and Tolliver. None of them would have happened if I was paying deep attention and had the knowledge I needed about nature and men.
Again, I realized I’d been lazily cheating my way through life, neither paying deep attention, nor focusing on what was important. Although I had improved my focus since the lights went out, it wasn’t enough.
So I worked on improving my focus on everything I did. And you know what? It helped. It helped immensely.
Now, when I made a figure four trigger for a deadfall, I examined everything all over again. It was no longer acceptable to me to make notches that worked. Now I wanted to know how to make notches that worked perfectly and to choose the best woods to use rather than just any old stick will do.
I also thought deeply about the critters I wanted to trap, about their habits, and about subtle things I could do to guide them into a deadfall from some distance away.
It is amazing how much work you can save yourself when you pay attention. I found I needed less than half as many deadfalls to provide me and Sackett with meat and I was catching more than just field mice too. Shit, who knew smart people were so lazy?
But my real problem was how to eliminate Tolliver. I didn’t even want to think about the word kill, even though the only way to eliminate him I could think of was to kill him. I had given myself my Bible word that I’d eliminate him so he couldn’t hurt more women and girls.
I liked to think that I was just trying to do the world a favor by eliminating Tolliver, but my new-found concentration showed me that I really did hate the man for what he had done to my families. My mom always waved the Bible at me and spouted some nonsense about the milk of human kindness when I’d done something wrong, which I had to admit was often. She said I should forgive the trespasses of others, but I couldn’t forgive Tolliver. I knew that now. It’d be him or me and that was that. I just wanted to make damn sure it was him.
But how to kill him? He’d be wearing his body armor anytime he went outside. My arrows and guns were worthless against that. But what if I could kill him inside the house?
They would expect someone to enter through the doors, or even the windows. Both would be too risky. I didn’t want to get caught crawling through a window. That would suck for sure. Besides, if they caught me again, they’d just kill me. There would be no more reprieves.
I thought about dropping down from the ceiling. I could climb in
to the attic from the outside and maybe do that. But, if I did, I’d have to escape through a door or a window after I killed Tolliver. That had a low probability of success. They would probably shoot me before I could escape. No, I needed a better way.
How about I pop up from the floor, shoot Tolliver, and drop back out of sight. I could then crawl out from under the house and escape.
That sounded good. I gathered up my shit and Sackett and I took off to do just that. I was almost back to town when it occurred to me that I wasn’t even sure if my plan could work. What was it the Army guys said about intel? Yeah, I needed some intel. I had no idea how to get it or what intel I needed.
“Sackett, I’m a dumb-ass.”
Sackett rolled his eyes at me, as if to say, you just now figured that out? Damned if my dog wasn’t smarter than I was.
So how could I get the intel I needed? I needed to recon, just like the military guys. Of course, I had no idea how to do that.
I crawled under the house on a rainy, starless night. The afternoon before, the birds were hunkering down and the clouds were increasingly gray. I knew it was gonna rain, but the rain was my friend. The sound of the rain covered any noises I might make. There was a raincoat in my gear, but it was made of noisy, crinkly plastic, so I left it in camp with Sackett.
I was dripping wet when I crawled under the house. I pulled the big old board that closed off the crawlspace entrance into place behind me and settled down to let my eyes acclimate to the pitch-blackness. I didn’t bring a flashlight because any cracks in the floor above me might give my presence away.
I was going to bring a tape measure before I realized there wouldn’t be enough light to read it under the house. Instead I brought a bundle of thin sticks and a roll of duct tape.
After my eyes were accustomed to the lack of light, I could see a faint light filtering down from two of the rooms above. It was enough for what I had to do, although I’d practiced for hours doing it in total darkness just by feel.
I took two sticks and held them together. By extending one of the sticks until it touched a floorboard above, and then taping the sticks together, I had a measure of the height of the floor above the dirt. These sticks were carved with marks I could feel in the dark so I would know what measurement was which. After that it just took an hour to get the rest of the measurements I needed.
The rain was falling like all of Hell was pissing on me as I crawled out with my bundle of sticks and ran across the yard to safety. All of the lights in the house were out.
I ran most of the way back to camp, only using a flashlight when I was out of sight of Tolliver’s house.
I was elated. My plan worked this time without a hitch. I was embarrassed to think of how long it took me to plan every detail, but being smart seemed to get easier with practice. As I approached camp I thanked Bobby for being such a good example and hoped he was okay.
I crawled under the lean-to and under a blanket with Sackett and fell into a smug sleep.
As I watched the rain from inside the lean-to, I thought about Bobby Beasley again. Bobby played trumpet in the band, and man, he was good.
I’d wanted to be in the sixth-grade band too, but my mom said no way we were gonna spend a shit-load of money on some stupid musical instrument I’d just goof with for a while before abandoning it. At the time I argued that I wanted an instrument, maybe a saxophone, and that I’d stick with it. Now I knew Mom had been right. I would have just goofed with it. I lacked discipline before the lights went out. I think I knew that I would never have spent the four hours a day practicing that Bobby did, even though I dreamed of becoming a great musician.
Damn, I was pretty stupid back then. But not so much now. I knew I needed to rehearse my plan, to test every facet, to be absolutely sure that I hadn’t forgotten any eventuality, and could perform every task blindfolded.
When the rain stopped the next day, I used a tape measure to measure my taped together sticks and committed the numbers to memory. I didn’t just tell myself I’d remember them, like I used to do with my schoolwork. I examined these numbers all sorts of different ways. I repeated them endlessly to myself as I went about my daily routine. I burned them into my mind until I was positive I’d be able to recite them as easily when I was ninety, if I lived that long anyway.
After the rains were gone, Sackett and I moved on to a neighboring town. I knew there were a few houses there just like the one Tolliver was living in. They would be my practice houses.
We moved into one of the houses in the still of the night. Only a faraway coyote howl broke the silence.
Before the lights went out, there was no such thing as the still of night. At all hours, there’d be the sound of cars and motorcycles passing, horns blaring somewhere in town, the occasional police siren, and the incessant babble of my sisters. Now, the still of the night was purified quiet, interspersed with occasional night sounds from the natural world.
For the first time in my life, I found the night hours quiet enough to think, so that’s what I did until I fell asleep against Sackett in the middle of the living room.
The next morning, I crawled under the house and wondered how in hell I was gonna cut a hole in the floorboards above so no one could hear me?
The problem was made more difficult because I didn’t have any power saws or drills. But those would have made too much noise anyway.
What did folks use before there was electricity? I had no idea. That set me off on a search for old-fashioned hand tools. I went through all of the garages in the neighborhood, mostly at night. I hit pay dirt when I found a small building in a backyard. After I broke the lock, and opened the door, I found myself in the past century.
Inside the small shop were hundreds of old tools, few of which I recognized. I saw hand planes and saws by the scads. But most impressive was a beautiful, half finished, carved table that stood on a workbench in the middle of the room. I think it was then when I understood how valuable a resource this shop could prove to be in coming years if the power didn’t come back on.
I vowed to find books in libraries about using old tools and teach myself to use them when I tired of living in the woods. With these tools I knew I could build everything from a house to the furniture that filled it—if I worked at learning how hard enough.
I replaced the padlock on the door. Over the next few days I found a brace and a box of bits inside the shop.
With the brace and a bit, I could drill a starting hole upwards into the floor.
I propped a piece of plywood over two sawhorses and clamped it in place. I tried various saws. None worked. After digging through the drawers in the shop I found a pointed saw. I tried it and it worked pretty well. Like every tool in the shop, it was sharp. I wished I had had a chance to know whoever had the shop. I thought I might have really liked him.
I took the brace and bit and the pointed saw back to my practice house and crawled underneath. I picked a spot in a back room, and made a hole in the floor. It took me four hours and when I was done my arms were shaking from the sawing and the saw was so dull from hitting nails that I doubted if it would cut Jello. I crawled through my hole in the floor and collapsed. Shit, rehearsal was fucking hard work.
I persevered. I found metal cutting jab saw blades, the long ones, and made several handles to fit them. By greasing the blades every few strokes, the cutting was fairly quiet. I got where I could cut the hole in an hour, and quietly.
After I was good at cutting the holes, I set up some targets around the room and practiced moving the wooden hatch out of the way and popping up to shoot the targets with my bow.
I thought I was good with a bow. After all, by taking aim, I could hit a rabbit most every time. But I realized I was far too slow. Anyone sitting in the room could shoot me before I released an arrow. I had to be faster, much faster.
And so I practiced every day for a month, only working on the rest of my plan when I was too tired to pull my bow.
And I got better. Now all I ha
d to do was look at the target and my arrow struck it with no further thought on my part. I wondered if the old time Indians had been this good with a bow and arrow. They had far more time to practice than I had, so they were most likely better than me, lot’s better. Suddenly I didn’t feel as confident anymore. Damn thinking anyway.
But I didn’t give up. King told me never to give up.
I kept refining the details of my plan and practicing, always practicing. The few days I took off to kill a few deer and make some jerky were a relief, but my mind would never be still now until Tolliver was gone. Was this an obsession? My mom always said I was obsessive about the damn woods, but not like this I wasn’t.
After two more recon trips, one inside the house itself when all the men were gone, and more practice, I was ready. Tomorrow I’d implement my plan to kill Tolliver.
Chapter 28
I crawled under Tolliver’s house in the middle of the night. It took me five trips to move my tools and supplies under the house.
Sackett was back at camp. I missed him, but, as well-behaved as he was, he’d give me away. And I didn’t want him hurt.
As soon as enough light trickled through holes in the foundation and the cracks in the boards over the entry, I went to work. I knew, once they knew I was under the house, they’d swarm to the crawlspace entry. So I was gonna dig me an escape tunnel out the other side.
I remembered that some famous general once said that no plan ever works perfectly in battle, but all I could do was do the very best I could.
Digging was slow. It was scoop up a single shovel full and then crawl backwards and dump it far from the hole. There wasn’t hardly any room for me to use the shovel, even though I’d sawed off the handle. And I had to do everything in complete silence.
EMP (Book 3): 12 Years Old and Alone Page 21