As she made her way through the maze, she was suddenly alerted by a loud, cracking sound. A whole section of rotting branches had broken loose overhead and shifted toward her as she worked her way to the bank.
Her heart jumped as the mass begin to slide into the water. She scrambled in an attempt to free herself, but instead, sank to the river below with a splash. While flailing around, she struck her foot against a boulder and cried out in pain.
While she had drifted in and out of consciousness, the river had slowly receded. She was guessing now that the river had been formed, or at least aided, by a flash flood from somewhere above her location. Once again she began her trek through the tangled mass back to the river’s edge.
With a fractured arm and a stab wound to the chest, any effort Jodie exerted to pull herself from the debris was a new experience in pain.
The morning air rapidly became hotter and a new run of sweat collected over her body, leaving it sticky and smelling like garbage. A horde of flies buzzed around her, some feasting on the wound in her chest while small gnats and other insects were attacking and sticking to her skin. Her effort to fight them off threatened to send her back down the steep slope of the bank.
By the time she made it to the top, her injured arm throbbed and ached like hell and a rush of nausea hit her like a sledgehammer in the breadbasket. The open wound in her chest had started bleeding again, and she felt blood began to ooze from her forehead. She reached up to check her damaged head and shuddered when she probed a swollen, gooey mess.
Her skull didn’t feel as if it was broken, but there was a large gash just under her hairline, and her head pulsed as if something in there was trying to escape. She looked down at the swollen arm with an apathetic eye. No bone sticking out anywhere, didn’t even look crooked or misshapen, just swollen. Must be what they call a green break. Still it isn’t good to move it around much.
I need to put it in a sling or something to support it.
She looked down at herself and saw for the first time that she was naked as the day she was born. The only thing covering her skin was black, purple and yellow bruises.
“Not to mention that one-inch wide, nasty stab wound is raw, infected, and has developed a purplish-red glow…”
She glanced down at the wound and saw a soupy, rust-colored liquid oozing freely. She wrapped her arms around her naked body and shivered in the late morning heat.
“Girl, you may be having second thoughts about dying, but you sure don’t look like you’re in any shape to keep on living, not for very long anyway. You got choices though. You can listen to the wise one here, or you can just go on and jump back in the river. You got a broken arm, a hole in your chest, and no cloths. Just how do you plan on staying alive out here? Better yet, where is ‘out here?’ Seems to me those boys took you on one hell of a long ride. How long was it anyway? A day? Or was it a day and a half? You’re in the desert, but what desert? What state? I got a bad feeling about this. Those boys may not have been geniuses when it comes to killing skinny assed girls, but they weren’t stupid enough to leave your body to be found by some hiker out for a walk. Looks to me like you’re screwed, regardless of how you might feel about it. You just think you were screwed before. Believe me, what’s yet to come is the big squishy, and you’re in it up to your eyeballs, Baby Cakes.”
She wanted to argue but didn’t. The voice, regardless of how annoying, was right on. She tried to close her mind to it, but today nothing was working in her favor.
“While we are at it, babes, let’s not forget the monkey. Sooner or later it’s going to come looking for its treat, and when you don’t have it, it’s going to be on your back big time, and sooner or late r — likely sooner — it’s going to start insisting. You got something for your little monkey? No? I didn’t think so. You think you’re hurting now? Just wait a while. No food, no cloths, no water and no candy for the monkey!”
“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Just shut the hell up!”
The voice in her head went quiet again and she began to look around. Just what in hell was she supposed to do? Okay, girl scouts 101!
“Naaa girl, don’t go there. What do you know about girl scouts? The closest you’ve ever been to being a girl scout was when you did that trick for the old guy down on second street. Remember him? Now there was one messed up dude!”
She tried again to ignore the voice as she studied her surroundings. What was it she could remember about following the river? Follow it down stream and it will lead to civilization. She turned and looked downstream then paused, looked upstream and said. “I came from there! That’s where they threw me in the river.”
“There you go girl! Just go on and trot your skinny bruised ass on back up there. Then they can finish the job they started.”
“But they might be gone now. If they are, I can look for my cloths. I need my shoes anyway because without them I’m not going anywhere.”
“You got that right, honey.”
“So, Ill just work my way back up the river until I get close enough to see if anyone’s there. I have to have my shoes!”
“Yeah baby! Go get them shoes, and maybe they left a little candy for your monkey, too. Get going, girl. That monkey ain’t gonna wait all day!”
Chapter 3
Jodie slowly made her way up river, picking her way through thorns and sharp rocks, staying to the trees and underbrush to hide from the view of anyone who might still be interested in finding her.
The ever-increasing heat of the sun was baking her skin to a medium rare. No more than fifty yards from where she’d been tossed into the river, she spotted something yellow, it was half way down the bank on the opposite side of the riverbed, her shirt! Further down was one of her tennis shoes, the other hung from its string on a scrubby bush that clung to the bank’s wall. In her excitement at finding her shoes, she almost burst from the underbrush and went charging across the river after them. Then she heard the voices; men laughing; someone saying something she couldn’t quite understand but wished she could. An empty beer bottle went sailing out into the riverbed, shattering into a million pieces on a mound of jagged rock. She looked down and saw hundreds of broken bottles. Most were beer bottles, mixed with a few whiskey bottles.
It was going to be tricky getting across there without cutting her feet to shreds. But she needed her shoes and cloths if she could find them. She moved back into the underbrush and waited. When it gets dark, I can go across and get my shoes. She found a spot that was as comfortable as it was likely to get, and began the long wait for nightfall. She knew she should be hungry but she wasn’t, and she thought she might have a fever.
“Well I don’t know why you should have a fever Baby Cakes. It isn’t like the man picked his teeth with that pig sticker before he stuck it in you. Probably never used it for anything but stabbing skinny, white, crack head girls. Ain’t no need to worry about a fever now, is there? You’re dead anyway, all you’re doing is just playing the game until it is time to give it up one last time — for good.”
“Okay, you’re right! I’m dead. But until I roll over and stay dead, I’m going to play the game, right up to the bitter end. Okay?”
“It’s your game, baby. You play it any way you want to”.
“I plan to!”
She maneuvered herself a bit further up the river until she had a good view of the campsite where the men were milling around. She was surprised to see it was much more than just a camp. There was one main building and several smaller outbuildings with camouflage netting and two vehicles parked underneath it. One of which she recognized as the automobile she had gotten into in Bakersfield. She also recognized the man that had been driving it, the one with a promise of lots of nose candy and a good time.
“Yep, Baby Cakes, they sure enough showed you one hell of a real good time.”
From a distance, someone bellowed out orders and she looked to see a big man coming out of the main building. She recognized him as the man who had stabbed her.
“You ass holes get moving! I don’t plan on staying here all day. Get that fire out and the rest of the gear in the truck!” He pointed to the buildings to his left and said, “And make damn sure those buildings are nailed down tight this time.”
She saw one of the men pick up her jeans and fling them over the side of the bank. She watched them flutter down to the bottom and settle next to her shirt. He was holding her panties to his face and making a groaning noise, his hips grinding as he did so, saying “Oh you lovely thing.”
One of the other men laughed, “What in hell are you talking about? That cunt was the ugliest, most messed up piece of ass we ever brought up here.” The man held out the panties then said. “At least you got a piece of it. Jake over there stuck her and tossed her in the river before I even got a chance to find out.”
Jake spat a stream of brown juice toward the speaker then said. “Quit your pissing around and get busy. There are more where she came from. This place needs to be locked up tight and secure before we leave. Three months is a long time to be leaving things open to the wilds, so just you be damn sure it’s done proper. Or someone is going to be joining that bitch at the bottom of the river.”
She waited and watched as they loaded up the vehicles, put out the campfires and locked things up. The man named Jake went to the edge of the river with a pair of field glasses and scanned the surrounding area, then walked to the other side of the camp and scanned the desert, below. He let the glasses drop and said, “Okay, let’s get the hell out of here.”
They started up the vehicles and drove away slowly. Leaving very little dust in their wake as they went.
She waited until she could no longer hear the trucks, then she waited another five minutes before making her way down the side of the river bank where she picked her way across the slippery rocks and on to where her shoes waited. Once her shoes were on her feet, she was able to move faster with less care for the sharp rocks and broken glass.
After gathering the rest of her clothes, she made her way up the other bank and into the compound. Looking carefully around at the place with a somewhat clearer head, it reminded her of a military camp rather than a regular campsite; and some of the men had been wearing uniforms, BDU pants and olive green shirts. The men had their hair cut short in military style, and Jake’s manner, when he spoke to the crew, was like a drill sergeant or some high ranking official. Somehow though, she didn’t think they were military. What was it her ex-boyfriend had called people like these? Military nuts? Militia-wannabe-war-heroes? She couldn’t remember, but it didn’t matter. People like this band of hooligans always brought to mind the likes of Timothy McVeigh and the Branch Dividian assemblage. Or, that guy the FBI and ATF went after in the mountains several years back.
She went to the door of the main cabin and found it locked, then on to the out- buildings. She found large padlocks on all those doors as well. Looking around, she found a large, solid rock and walked to the door of the main Cabin. With one lucky, well placed blow, the cast iron lock splintered. She pushed the door open and went inside. The first room consisted of a kitchen and a bathroom. The second had several cots and a large table with benches along both sides. On one wall was a large map of the United States, along with smaller maps of California, Nevada, and Arizona and New Mexico. Folding chairs sat facing the maps, a podium stood directly in front of the maps. The opposite wall consisted of storage lockers that went from floor to ceiling and corner to corner. All the lockers were locked except one which contained a first aid kit and twelve cases of MREs. (Meals ready to eat) She pulled the first aid kit from the locker, placed it on the floor and unzipped it, then unfolded it to expose, gauze, bandages, splints, surgical tubing, prep blades, hypodermic needles and enough drugs to start a pharmacy.
She sifted through the drugs not knowing what most of them were, but the sulfur powder, alcohol, and antibiotic’s instructions were easy to read and understand. First she needed to clean her wounds. The shower in the bathroom was just what a doctor would have ordered.
The water was still hot, even though the gas had been turned off from the heater. When she stepped under the shower, the hot water stung her skin in a hundred places from countless cuts and abrasions she hadn’t even known about. The stab wound hurt like hell, but it needed to be cleaned as well as possible. Once she had used up the hot water, she went to the first aid kit and used the sulfur powder, sprinkling it generously over the wound. Then she took two of the antibiotics tablets, she would need to take two more in four hours, and every four hours after that for seven days.
After seeing to her wounds and cuts, she went to the kitchen and searched the pantries and cupboards. They were completely empty; not so much as a jar of peanut butter. Still, there were the MREs. She wasn’t hungry but she hadn’t eaten in over 24 hours and she needed food. So she forced the food into her mouth and chewed without tasting it. She swallowed and ate more. Her fever was getting worse, and her skin felt as if she were on fire.
While dressing her major wound, she noticed it was an angry red and ringed with a purplish black hue. Red lines radiated away from the wound like road maps. She went to one of the cots and lay down. If she could just get a few hours of sleep she would feel better.
She suffered through a series of nightmarish dreams, a period of half wakefulness, then another series of cold sweats and tremors where she was either freezing or burning up. Following that, she spent a half hour vomiting up the rations she’d eaten. At one time she dreamed she had ransacked the cabin looking for drugs. She had gone about the cabin bashing locks from doors and ripping doors from hinges in a frantic search for drugs that were not there. She took the antibiotics, but didn’t remember if she took them every four hours, or once every hour. Then she would wonder if she had taken them at all. She would wake up and look at the bottle of pills and try to remember if she had taken them. In a dazed and confused nightmare, she had found an alarm clock and set it for four hours, then when it would go off she would take the pills, reset the clock and go back to sleep. She went through a coughing spell at one point that reopened her wound causing her to spit up blood. She had sloppily poured the sulfur powder over the wound again, and then redressed it before passing out again. That routine became the rule while hours turned into days and days into weeks with her mind clearing slowly.
Chapter 4
One month after entering the cabin, she finally woke up with a clear head. She was still weak, but she could live with that. The wound had almost healed, but it was still an ugly red pucker of a crescent below her left breast.
She knew she had to get out of the camp and soon, but where to? Which way should she go? Should she try following the road that her would-be killers had taken, and risk meeting them along the way, or simply follow the river until she reached civilization? There was no telling how far she was in the desert, and the road may or may not afford her water, but the river would be a constant supply as well as shade and protection from the sun and other unpleasant elements because it was lined with small and large shrubs, mesquites and salt cedars. She decided on the river.
The cabin was completely trashed. At first she had been frightened by the sight of its destruction, thinking that someone had done it while she slept. Then she remembered the search for drugs during one of her many nightmares, and knew well who was responsible for the chaos.
While searching the hurricane scatter of bottles, guns, ammo, cleaning kits, sleeping cots, gas masks, duffel bags and other such items, she came across a large back pack. Jodie took it over to the locker with the remaining twenty-four MREs, and packed it as full as possible with items she might need, and then added the MREs and six bottles of water. She had 24 days to make it out of the desert before she ran out of food. Could she find her way out by then? Was she that far out in the wilderness?
Looking around again, she found a .9 mm automatic pistol, six clips, a web belt, a holster, an assortment of clip holders, a machete and a Swiss army knife. Then she went to th
e first aid kit and found a smaller kit inside of the larger one. She traded her clothing for BDUs and military boots. When she looked in the mirror she looked like a skinny, dishwater-blond version of Rambo.
“Ramba would work much better on you, darling.”
In one of the lockers she found three cans of white gas. She opened one and poured it liberally over the floor, the cot and lockers, then with the second can she made a trail to the front door and out onto the front porch. She opened the third can and used it to douse the out buildings. Then she tossed road flares on the gas trail leading to the front door and two more on the out buildings. Everything went up in a blaze of roaring hell and stifling, rancid smelling smoke.
Jodie watched with satisfaction as the Flames eagerly engulfed the dry framework of the wooden buildings, and then she shouldered the backpack, adjusted the web belt and slowly moved down the bank of the river and up the other side, all the while wondering where the foul smell was coming from.
A Root from Infertile Ground Page 2