by A J Newman
Jane and Sarah watched Cole, and Cloe heard a cow back to the temporary coral, and Sarah asked, “Jane does it bother you that Cloe dropped Butch so quickly and latched on to your son?”
“Not at all. See, I know Cloe, and she wants the same thing I do for my son. Hell, I want the same thing for myself,” Jane replied.
Sarah looked perplexed and asked, “What does she want?”
“She wants a strong man that can protect her and her family. Cloe will help Cole become a stronger man as she molds him over the next few years,” Jane said.
Sarah was now certain that Jane was just the woman for her Ben.
“Jane, can we talk about a major problem that I need your help with?” Sarah asked.
“Yes, what can I do for you?”
“The short story is that I’m dying and will be gone in the next few weeks or months. My Ben will need a strong woman just like your Cole does. I want you to be that woman,” Sarah said.
“What? How long have you known? I’m so sorry. Does Ben know about this?” Jane stammered.
“He doesn’t know that I want you to be his new wife. I’ve been pairing you two up on hunting and scavenging trips so you would know each other when I spoke to both of you. I need to know if you are interested in Ben and filling a dying woman’s wish, are you interested?” Sarah asked.
“Sarah, this is very serious, and I need time to think. Any woman would be interested in Ben. If he weren’t married, I would have been flirting with him during our work together. He is kind, gentle, and thoughtful. He’s not bad looking to boot. Are you sure you can go through with this and is Ben comfortable with it?” Jane asked.
“I’m looking death in the face, or I couldn’t imagine doing this, but yes I can do it and have to do it to save the man I love. Ben needs you more than you need him. He would sulk and die before looking for a mate. I know he is attracted to you because I made him discuss every detail of this wish of mine. Ben is everything you said, and he’s very good in bed I might add,” Sarah said as her face turned red and she got quiet.
After a moment of silence, Sarah regained her composure. “Yes, it’s weird adding that to my sales pitch, but I don’t think he will sleep with you before I’m gone. I want you two to quickly spend time together, and I’m perfectly okay where that might lead. We haven’t had sex for many months so Ben might forget himself around you and I hope he does,” Sarah said.
Jane blushed and was speechless. She felt very sorry for Sarah, but she had grown quite fond of Ben; he had replaced Joe in her nightly fantasies. She felt guilty that she liked the idea of being with Ben, but hated herself because she would be taking him away from a dying woman.
“When does the meeting with Ben take place and the dating start? Jane tenderly asked. “I promise to take good care of him and not keep him from thinking about you. This will be very traumatic for him.”
“As soon as possible. Jane I would kill to keep a woman away from Ben, but I’ll be dead soon. I am at peace with my death, and Ben needs you. He will die without someone to watch over him and keep him from grieving himself to death.”
☆
Chapter 8
Joe slept late that day but took the time to read one of his Grandma’s letters.
Dear Joe:
I had a great day today. Your Dad called and had me in stitches telling me about your last camping trip. I told him that he was too old to keep up with your alcohol consumption. The stories were funny and help keep me close to you and your dad. You are due to call me tomorrow after work. You don’t know how much these calls mean to this old woman.
I’ll be nice and not ask you about your lady troubles. I also didn’t mention that or prepping in this letter. You lied to me the other day. LMAO as the kids say.
Love Grandma.
After his breakfast, he spent his time studying maps of the area. He had been killing the criminals for two weeks and had accomplished his goal of getting them to attack each other. His success was based on no one knowing he existed. He only worked at night and kept the contact with the locals to the daytime.
His only failure was that he had never found the truck or Cobie. He thought about her every day and dreaded telling Cloe that he couldn’t find her mother. He knew Cloe would take it very hard and he stuck around the cities longer than necessary to avoid the confrontation. He felt the longer he waited to return that perhaps it would sink into Cloe that she would never see her mother again.
He had personally killed the leaders of the gang from Northern California that ruled Ashland and now had to eliminate the Portland gang’s leaders that controlled Medford. Both groups had been decimated, and he had helped the local people arm themselves with the guns taken from dead thugs. The locals ambushed the gang during the daytime, and Joe killed them during the night. Once the leaders of the Medford group were dead Joe’s job was done.
The problem was the gang’s leaders were too afraid to come out of their fortress at the National Guard Armory. They took the lightly guarded Armory the first week after the lights went out and used the weapons and vehicles to strike fear in the local population.
The only minor problem was there were a couple of copycats shooting up the gangs at night and drawing too much attention. Several of his contacts told him about a woman and a girl killing men for holding sex slaves. While he sympathized with their goal, they were making the gangs begin to question who their real enemy was. Joe wanted the gangs to focus on killing each other.
Joe left his hilltop hideout a few hours after sunset and walked the two miles down to Talent where he found the gang’s outpost. There were three men posted on the north end of Talent and were responsible for keeping the locals in line in their area. Joe had killed a few of the guards posted there but didn’t wipe them all out as he had so many times at other posts. They had two old vehicles parked in a garage that they used to get to Medford and back. Joe needed one of those vehicles that night.
He snuck up to the house and saw the guard on the front porch hidden behind the logs and sandbags. He looked in several windows before he saw one of the men in a room with two young teens. The girls had just been captured, and the man was trying to be nice to get what he wanted from them. Joe listened to the man offer the two teens food for sex, and when they turned him down, he slapped the oldest and took his belt off to beat them. Joe stuck the suppressor and barrel of the .22 through the open window and shot the man in the head. He fell to the floor, and Joe warned the girls to be quiet.
“Do you two have a place to go?”
“Yes, our parents are just a mile from here,” the oldest girl answered.
Joe handed the girl a .38 revolver and said, “Don’t shoot unless someone attacks you or tries to kidnap you. Go home.”
Joe shot the man on the front porch with an arrow to the heart and then killed the last man when he found him in the bathroom. Joe shot him in the back of the head with the .22 as he primped in the mirror. Joe completed the act as if he were swatting a fly. It meant nothing to him to kill a human being as long as he knew they were the scum of the Earth.
Joe took the truck with the most gas and headed out to Medford and the National Guard building. The NG building was six miles from the gang’s outpost, so Joe decided to drive along the rail tracks that went through Talent and on to Medford. The Armory was only a block from the tracks.
The drive got exciting when several bullets hit the truck and Joe couldn’t shoot back. The people shooting at him were the locals of Phoenix who recognized the truck belonging to the Medford gang. Joe sped up and was out of range quickly but not quick enough to avoid being showered with glass from the back window. The dozen small cuts stung but were only an annoyance to Joe who was focused on completing his mission and getting back to his cabin and Cloe.
He parked the truck a half mile away from the Armory in an abandoned subdivision and walked to the Armory. He climbed to the top of the Walmart on the southeast side of the Armory and watched the building until midnight.
He then moved to the back of the store and watched the back of the armory from a hundred yards away. He continued surveilling the building from all angles the rest of the night and into the morning. He didn’t see any hope of shooting the leaders from long range, which would be the safest for him.
Joe slept for a few hours between watching for any movement by the leaders and saw his only opportunity was when they grouped for meals in a room on the right front corner of the building. He could shoot through the glass and only get one before all hell broke loose. He wanted all the leaders dead plus as many of the thugs as possible. He went back to his hiding spot on top of a building behind the Armory and thought about the problem until he decided on a solution.
He needed a giant bomb and a truck to deliver it to the target. He thumbed through his book on improvised munitions and explosives and paid attention to bomb-making. He read enough to know he needed to head to the nearest farm supply and chemical supply stores to get the ingredients. He waited until the sun was down, left the top of the building, and walked through the open gate to the fenced in vehicle storage yard behind the Armory. The lot was full of vehicles with several backed up to a loading dock at a smaller building.
Most of the vehicles were Humvees, trucks, and other vehicles that an Army engineering company would use. Joe was deep in thought about making ammonia nitrate from ammonia and nitric acid to make the main ingredient of his IED when an idea struck him. This is the Army, and Army Engineers sometimes have explosives. He broke into the building and after a thorough search found that the engineers to be the type who used computers and premade bridges rather than explosives. He did find several M4 rifles and a case of 5.56 ammo in a locked cage in an office. Then he found several tactical vests, radio headsets, and other military gear. He took them all to the pickup and drove to the nearest chemical and industrial supply store. He parked the truck inside the drive through door at the loading dock and began to search for what he needed.
It took a while, but he found the ammonia and nitric acid and then searched for protective gloves, a large glass container to mix the concoction, and a mask that would filter out the dangerous fumes. He found everything but the gas mask; however, he did see a breathing mask and oxygen tank for entering enclosed vessels.
There were more bottles of nitric acid and ammonia than he would ever need to make his large bomb, so the only issue was that he had to make small batches at a time. He went over the instructions again and was delighted when he started dropping the acid into the Ammonia and saw the crystals forming. After four hours, he only had twenty-one pans with five-ten pounds of the nasty stuff air-drying. The book told him to make sure the product was dry and in the crystalline state for the most powerful explosion.
He blended and poured the goo into every shallow pan he could find until he had over two hundred pounds of the stuff. He had to change oxygen tanks several times and burned his arm twice but finally had enough of the material to blow that end of the Armory to pieces. He figured he only needed a hundred pounds to do the job but never wanted to mess with the nasty process again, so he made extra to take home with him. The ammonium nitrate would burn but wouldn’t explode until a fuel source was added.
Joe took a break from the fumes by lying behind the air conditioning units on top of the building to get fresh air without being seen. After an hour, he went back into the building and manufactured several blasting caps using bullets per the instructions in the books. He decided to make three bombs since he needed over a hundred pounds of the explosive to ensure the deaths of the gang leaders. He now had three 40-pound bombs that only needed diesel fuel mixed with the ammonia nitrate.
He tried the firing pins on 9mm shells after removing the bullet and gunpowder. They worked every time. This also allowed him to test how long a piece of duct tape he needed for the fuses.
He packed his extra explosives back to the old truck and rested again. Joe waited until just before dawn to mix in the diesel fuel and then lugged each bomb into place. He stayed hidden until time to light the fuses. He saw the gang leaders gather for breakfast through the window and went to light the fuses.
One of the bombs was hidden behind some bushes against the front of the building, and it was the last one to be lit. Joe crept from the second bomb along the wall under the windows to stay hidden from the servants prepping the room for the leader’s breakfast. He made his way to the bomb when a Humvee drove up and parked between him and his escape route. The driver left the vehicle running and stood at the back talking with another guard.
The fuse had to be lit, so Joe lit it and looked for a way to escape and found none. There were several men behind the Humvee shooting the breeze; they could kill him if he tried to run across the parking lot. Joe pitched his rifle through the vehicle’s window, opened the door to the Humvee, and jumped into the vehicle. He threw it in gear and jammed the gas pedal to the floor speeding off toward the vehicle storage lot in the rear of the building. The men began firing at the fleeing Humvee until it turned the corner. They chased the vehicle on foot when suddenly the first bomb exploded a few feet from them.
The other two IEDs exploded a few seconds later, and the entire Armory and the back half of the Walmart disappeared into a cloud of black smoke and debris falling from the sky. The truck behind the Humvee was blasted into the air and turned circles as it landed on top of the AT&T store a block away.
Joe kept driving while looking back in the mirror and said to himself, “Ya’ think ya’ used too much bang bang powder?”
Joe ditched the Humvee at the house and drove the old truck back to his hiding spot on the hill to wait until dark for his next move. He arrived after the sun came up, which made him very nervous. He hid a half mile down the road and waited to see if anyone followed him. Joe watched for an hour and never saw anyone, so he headed back up the hill to a place where he could observe the south end of Medford with his rifle’s scope. He was five miles away and could still see fire and a cloud of smoke rising from the place where the Armory had been.
Joe went back to his hideout in the woods behind the house and slept until late afternoon. He woke up refreshed and in a great mood since he had accomplished his goals. He loaded the truck up with everything he’d gathered over the past few weeks to take back to his cabin. Joe was proud that he had found several cases of vegetables, a case of canned chocolate frosting, and half a pickup load of pasta and flour. He couldn’t wait until Cloe saw the chocolate frosting.
He was ready to go, but it was still daylight, so he cleaned all of his weapons and checked the truck for the third time until it was dark. He decided not to take chances and drove around Ashland on the west side through the mountains. He rode with his lights off, which made for a prolonged trip. It took six hours to arrive below Ashland and cross Highway 5 and then to Green Springs Highway, where he veered east up into the hills.
The truck was an old two-wheeled drive, and he had to choose his route up the mountain carefully. He stuck to former Forest Service roads until close to the neighbor’s cabin and then cut north. It was a little after 5:00am when he pulled up to the cabin and Dan confronted him with a shotgun. He rolled down the window and stuck his hands out.
Joe yelled, “It’s me, Joe.”
“Joe is back. Tell everyone Joe is back,” Dan yelled.
☆
Chapter 9
“Sarah this just ain’t right. Me dating a woman before you die,” Ben, pleaded.
“Ben, you know how much this means to me. Jane and I have discussed my wish, and she is willing to try it if you are. If you don’t, I’ll go into the woods to die today. This is my last wish, and I need you to grant it to me. I will sit with you two for a minute and then go tend my little garden. I know it will be tough but do this for me,” Sarah said.
“I’ll sit and talk with her, but that’s all. If it goes well we’ll start dating six months after … ugh … I can’t say it.”
“Ben, I want you two to date now, and you have my permission t
o sleep with her if you two find the urge. I don’t think she has been with a man in months and I know we haven’t had sex for many months. Do what comes naturally. Please,” Sarah begged.
“How can you suggest this? I thought that you’d back out once you really thought about Jane and me being together.”
“I have got to know Jane much better over the past few weeks, and I am more convinced than ever that I want you two to be together. Stop the crap and please do this for me,” Sarah begged.
“I will talk with her and take some long walks, but I could never sleep with her until …”
“I’m dead. Say it. It’s going to happen, and you have to deal with it. Ben, damn it, I know you love me, and I love you. That’s why I’m doing this. You will grieve yourself to death alone in this house if you don’t have anyone to take care of you. Jane is a strong woman and is up to the task. She has spent several days with you, and she is developing feelings for you. Don’t screw this up or I’ll haunt you from my grave,” Sarah said.
“I’ll do it. Sarah no one could ever replace you, but I’ll do it for you,” Ben said with tears in his eyes.
Sarah looked over at Ben and joked, “I looked for a fat ugly woman for you so you wouldn’t enjoy my wish too much. Jane is the only single woman for miles, and I think you will find her assets to your liking.”
Ben laughed for a second then said, “How can you joke about this?”
“When you’re staring death in the eye not much else matters but taking care of your loved ones,” Sarah said.
The next day she sent Ben down to invite Jane back up to the cabin. He was very quiet until Jane broke the ice.
“Ben I know Sarah has talked with you and me about her wish. Can you talk with me? Obviously, this is not the best way to start a relationship, but I promised Sarah that I would do my best to take care of you and be a good companion if you want me.”