A Root from Infertile Ground

by Thomas H. Reed

  When she reached a fairly shaded place near where she had washed afoul of the tangle, she decided to stop for a breather, even though the air here smelled even worse.

  While readjusting her backpack she looked down and caught her breath sharply. Just a few feet below her, she saw something she had missed on her first trip downriver: three bodies in varying degrees of decay. Two of the bodies she could tell were women, but the third was too far gone to tell if it was a male or a female, and then she spotted the piece of sun-bleached red ribbon and a small section of gold chain near the head part of the decayed body. No question about it, those remains had also been a woman.

  Jody climbed down the embankment, and then reached down and gently pulled the chain from the dirt and discovered a tiny gold locket still attached to it.

  She rinsed the locket and chain in the river, carefully dried it off, and then pried the locket open, expecting to find a photograph, but instead found a tightly folded piece of paper inside. She removed the paper and read the words that had been typed in very small print:

  My precious daughter, I know for certain now that I will not be around to watch you grow into a young lady, or watch you walk down the aisles with a beloved husband, or hold your babies in my arms, but I want you to know that I have loved you more than I have ever loved anything in my life.

  Always with you… Mom

  Jodie felt the blood draining from her face and an invisible, icy hand clutching at the core of her soul as the intensity of the moment almost sent her reeling. She reached for a branch of a nearby mesquite bush to steady herself while waiting for a moment of dizziness to pass.

  “Well Baby Cakes. Looks like you ain’t the only one who got invited to the ball.”

  Ignoring the voice, she stood gazing at the decaying bodies as a surge of raging anger struck her like a bolt of lightning; even her hair had suddenly become electrified. “What kind of animals were these murdering pigs anyway?”

  She stood for a long while, still looking but not seeing the dead bodies while she continued to formulate a plan she had been working on unconsciously for days now. Her plan was to set forth on a road of vengeance, the likes of which this land had never know. She vowed that if need required it, she would make it her life’s goal to see that these sick bastards paid for what they had done to her and these women they’d murdered then left for the buzzards to pick their bones.

  Her life had been worthless in the past, and there was no end in sight if she continued on the road she had been traveling.

  For the first time in conscious memory, she was fairly clear headed after failing to find food for her monkey in the dismal camp. Now that she had decided upon a course of action that might help to rectify her worthless past, she was glad to be free of the monkey.

  She looked up with a start as the sound from the first explosions from the camp reached her.

  “Time to get going, Baby Cakes; someone is going to see that fire and come looking.”

  “Good!” She said. “Then I could get the hell out of this no-man’s land. All I have to do is wait until someone comes to investigate, and then I’ll have my ticket out of here.”

  “Uh huh, and who do you think will be coming to investigate the explosion?”

  She cursed under her breath, and then said. “It doesn’t have to be them, does it?”

  “In a make believe world? No, it doesn’t. But in the real world those that come will not be looking to save your ass, but finish what they started. You can take that chance if you really want to. Might be that some ranger or quail hunter will see the smoke and come to investigate. But take my word for it, Baby Cakes, this is the real world where those that have things they want kept under wraps have some really big and very bad men keeping watch over their wraps. The ones that will come will not be lending you a helping hand, unless it’s a hand that helps you right into another world.”

  She understood that, and she couldn’t risk it. She adjusted the heavy pack, stepped into the shallow water and continued downstream. Walking in water with the weight of the backpack, and in her weakened condition, would slow her down, but it would also erase any signs that she had ever been here.

  She made less than two miles before yielding to total exhaustion. She stepped ashore and looked back. She could see the jagged boulders behind where the cabin and other buildings had sat. A thin tendril of smoke still rose from the spot. Then without warning, the earth suddenly heaved up in a gigantic cloud of dust, rocks and trees.

  “Now there is something you don’t see every day, Baby Cakes.”

  “What was under that cabin? Explosives?”

  “Enough to blow the hell out of a small mountain! That’s for sure! Girl you need to get moving.”

  “I can’t! I’m exhausted; I’ve got to rest for a while. I couldn’t make another step if my life depended on it.”

  “Your life depends on it, babe. So get your ass in gear and move!”

  She managed another three miles before collapsing in a heap. After sitting a spell, she maneuvered the backpack off her shoulders and set it on the ground. She lifted her shirt to look at the scar under her breast. It was red and angry where one of the straps had irritated it, and it hurt like hell, but it didn’t seem to be swollen, and there was no sign that she had done any permanent damage to it. Her left lung hurt, and once during her trek downstream she was forced to stop due to a coughing spell. She had hacked up a lot of rust colored phlegm, but no actual blood.

  As the sun went down, the area began to grow cold and she thought of building a fire, and then decided against it. She scraped together a shelter of sticks and branches, and pulled the thin plastic sheet from her backpack to cover it. It was a cramped space but it would keep her warm.

  She slept the rest of that day and all of the next. Finally the need to empty her bladder and eat something became an urgent matter. So she dragged herself painfully up from a fitful slumber to full wakefulness. She sat for several moments, feeling around her body, trying to locate the places that hurt the most. After deciding they all hurt about the same, she leaned forward, rested her head on arms that rested on her knees and thought about peeing and eating.

  “Girl you are going to have to do better than this if you plan on getting out of here”.

  “Why don’t you give me a break?” She said without lifting her head.

  “You know them boys are coming, and they are pissed as hell. You blew up their fort.”

  “I know it would be easier to think if you’d just shut the hell up!”

  “That isn’t my job; not what I was programmed for.”

  “Then reprogram yourself.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  Look it up in psychology 101; you might even find it under “Road to longevity.”

  “Now there’s a subject you could use a few lessons in. You’re dragging your feet and it’s going to get us both taken out.”

  She knew the voice was right, and after a long moment she said under her breath, “I’m doing the best I can.”

  “It ain’t good enough Baby Cakes!”

  When she tried to move, every muscle in her body protested the action. Cramps set in and pain shot through her legs, shoulders and back. Ten minutes passed before the pain subsided, enabling her to move without screaming.

  Jodie found a secluded spot and after peeing for what seemed like an hour, she worked her way from under the salt cedar trees and into the open. When she made it to the river, she saw that the water level had dropped considerably. After washing her face in the cold, clear water, she cupped her hands and drank heartily, the water catching in her dry throat.

  “Damn girl! Slow down!”

  “I’m thirsty!”

  “You are going to be sick if you drink cold water that fast. Take your time.”

  Chapter 5

  Jodie took stock of her situation and didn’t like it. She made her way back to her shelter under the cedar, and opened the backpack. She took out an MRE, peeled the foil back
and took out the contents. She ate slowly, chewing the flat-tasting stuff into mush before swallowing it. Some sixth-sense told her not to eat fast, even though she was starving.

  “Hungry is a good thing girl, it means you are getting better.”

  “I don’t feel better!”

  “You ain’t dead!”

  “What do I do when the food runs out?”

  “There are all kinds of varmints out here. Snakes, rabbits, lizards, and bugs.”

  “Hey! I’m eating, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Worry about that later, for now you got to get moving. Them boys may not be here yet, but you can bet they’re coming.”

  She knew she had to keep moving, but all she wanted to do was to curl up and just rest for a week.

  “Anyway, why would they come looking for me? For all they know I’m dead. Any trace that I was there was wiped out when the mountain blew up”

  “Because, you dumb assed nit, they are going to want to know what happened. They will look around and sooner or later they are going to think about you, then they will ask themselves,” Did she survive? If they conclude there’s a possibility you did, then they will also know that you had reason enough to blow up the camp.”

  “Still they would have to find something to lead them to believe I wasn’t dead. And, after that explosion I don’t think there is anything left of the place.”

  “When they don’t find your body, they might begin to wonder what happened to it. The other bodies are there, so where is yours. When no answers are coming their way, they might just begin to wonder if you somehow survived. And since somebody will have to answer to someone for what happened at that camp, they are going to look until they find the responsible party. Eventually they’ll find your tracks, and then they will put two and two together. They aren’t in Jail, so they know you didn’t go to the cops. So, either you made it out of here and are in hiding, or you are still somewhere in the desert. They’ll start shaking down the girls in town looking for you, and when they don’t find you there, they are going to come out here and search for you until they find you.”

  “So, what you’re saying is that sooner or later they’re going to figure out it was me?”

  “In most ways, those boys are dumb as dirt. But you can bet your skinny ass that when their necks are on the line they can and will use those melons on their shoulders. They like living. They’ll notice little things like your shoes and clothes being removed from the creek bed, and all the tracks you left behind that didn’t get blown up with the buildings ...”

  “How long? How long before they finally figure it out?”

  “As soon as they see their little camp has been blown into toothpicks … anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of weeks.”

  Chapter 6

  Once every two or three months, Jake would send someone up to the camp to make sure that things were as they had left them. This time it was Joey McPherson, AKA Boomer. When Boomer saw the smoke, his first instinct was to call Jake, but thought he best check it out first and find out where the smoke was coming from.

  Boomer knew if he called Jake without knowing the details, all he would get for his effort was an earful from Jake. A minute before rounding the bend that hid the camp from view of the maintenance road, the floor of the burning building fell through. Boomer had just pushed the phone back in his pocket when the explosion rocked the earth.

  It would be another day, before Jake began to worry why Boomer had not returned, or called him to let him know everything was okay up at the camp. Jake waited another twenty-four hours, and this time he sent Carlos Morton, AKA Rat Man.

  Carlos had earned the name in Vietnam as a tunnel rat. It was Rat Man’s excited and somewhat awed voice that gave Jake the news over the phone.

  A day later Jake stood at the edge of the crater caused by the blast while others from his group scouted around the area sifting through the rubble.

  Jake was contemptible, cruel, and a cold-blooded killer, but he wasn’t totally stupid. Standing there with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops he understood two things. One: he was a dead man because there were people he had to answer to, and they would not accept this total wipe-out with any sort of grace. Two: the woman he stabbed was still alive. He didn’t know how he knew, but having lived a lifetime with an intuition for such things, he recognized all the symptoms. He should have put a bullet through her head before dumping her body into the river. At the time he didn’t think she was worth wasting a bullet on, now his screw-up had come back to bite him in the ass.

  He yelled down at the men below “Rat Man! Cherry! Mel! Start at the center and work your way outwards and see what you can find.”

  Rat man looked up at him and shaded his eyes. “What are we looking for?”

  “How the hell should I know? Anything that looks out of place or just doesn’t fit, I want to know about it.”

  He went back to his truck and fished around in the cooler for a beer. The ice had practically melted and the cooler was half filled with murky slush that looked like something from a sewer. Jake knew the filth had come from his crew’s hands as they fished around for a beer; possibly the only time any of their hands ever met with water except for the times they pissed on them.

  He glared at the beer that was still dripping, and then tossed it back into the cooler.

  He opened a six pack of warm Avian water, pulled a bottle from the pack, twisted off the cap and emptied the bottle in one long pull. As much as he would love to get shit-faced, now was not the time for it. He needed his head clear and sharp, and the way things were going it looked as though he’d be sober for a while.

  There was no doubt that the people he worked for wouldn’t let him live a minute past the time they learned he’d let their supply of drugs, firearms and explosives be destroyed, and excuses wouldn’t matter. He’d been responsible for its safekeeping, and he’d be the one they staked out in a red ant den after stripping the hide off his body. They would not be sympathetic to reasons or apology. His death would be as a lesson to anyone who might think about getting careless with the big guy’s property in the future; and most likely he’d be betrayed by one of his own men.

  He needed to figure out what to do next. Any thought of going to the big-wigs and letting them know what had happened was out of the question. They didn’t give a rat’s ass how this happened, the fact that it had happened was plenty sufficient to take him out.

  He needed to get the hell out if he wanted to keep on living. He had to travel far and by the quickest means possible. But, first he needed money. The organization had a little over $400,000.00 in a secret bank account, and by total accident Jake had discovered it, and with a little effort on his part he had learned the account number.

  It would be easy enough to get his hands on the money; still, he had the problem of witnesses. They would torture and slaughter every man here to find out what happened to their drugs, firearms and explosives. He was going to have to arrange it so there was no one to talk to. But before he did that, he needed to find that ugly cunt of a whore and eliminate her, and for that chore he needed his men. Once she was dead, he would simply kill the rest of them and then disappear with the money.

  Two hours later, Mel came trotting up and said. “We’ve found some tracks about three hundred yards down the other side of the riverbank. I almost missed the first tracks because the person who made them was being careful about foot placement after leaving the river. Then we found more about a mile farther down the river, looks as if the person might have been gaining a bit of confidence about how not to leave tracks. Whoever it is is moving slow and carrying a lot of weight.”

  Mel took Jake to the place where the tracks were found and they began following them along the south ridge of the river. They finally came to a place where the tracks were clear and clean. Jake looked at Mel and asked. “What do you make of them?”

  For a long time Mel didn’t say anything. From the look on his face Jake could tell Mel w
as digesting the pattern, gauging the stride, depth, and the size of the track. From this Mel could tell almost everything about the person he tracked, and whether it was male or female. How he did it Jake didn’t know, nor did he much care as long as he found the bitch.

  Finally Mel said, “From the stride, I would say it was someone about five foot five or six. The depth and the pattern of the tracks indicate the person is carrying something heavy, probably a backpack. The weight is on the balls of the feet rather than the heel, suggesting the person is leaning forward. I would say that whoever is carrying the pack is about a hundred five to a hundred and fifteen pounds; the pack is forty to fifty pounds.

  There is more weight on the right foot, suggesting the person is favoring the left side. It’s a female because I found where she stopped to take a leak. The way she’s moving is slow and staggering. I doubt she made more than a mile, no more than three at the most. If we start now we can probably catch up with her in a couple of hours.”