“You’re going back out with them, aren’t you?”
There was no accusation in her voice, just a sad acceptance.
“Yes. They are going to need me out there. The numbers aren’t bad but these raiders are a nasty bunch. We can’t risk them hitting the house.”
As my words were spoken, I saw Amy’s head drop. Then she raised her face and when she looked up I saw tears. No sobbing, none of that mournful wailing, just the tears.
“I know you feel like you need to help. That’s part of who you are. I would say be careful, but that don’t track with what you have to do. So kill them quick and then come home to me.”
She paused then continued, her voice going low so only I could hear her words.
“I know you think I’m too young, Luke. But I won’t always be.”
She spoke that last sentence like a promise, and I felt my cheeks redden a bit. I gathered her up into a hug and a kiss on her cheek. Again, nothing inappropriate but I knew Amy would see it as the promise I was making.
“Someday, sweetheart, someday,” I replied. “For now, I have to go kill some bad guys. We all do our part and that means you as well. I got chewed out yesterday by Dr. Cass for being a little underweight, so I want you to go see her today.”
I gave her cheek a slow caress and then released my hold on Amy Landon. My girl now, as such things go.
CHAPTER NINE
I never asked Nick how he got his prisoner to talk. Willing as I was to use some not-so-gentle persuasion on the road bandits from Harrison, I didn’t care what methods he or Mark used. Whatever the process, we did discover the directions were spot on. We found the camp situated in an ugly sprawl right next to a gentle bend on the Saw Creek. As for the rest of his story, well, my Daddy would say he lied like a ten term Congressman.
“That’s a lot more than seven,” Nick whispered, easing back into the brush next to me.
“I count fourteen, but I think there’s more,” I added, and looked to Mark for confirmation.
“I got fifteen, plus that poor bastard they are working over,” Mark replied through gritted teeth. Mark was a solid looking guy in his late twenties, and he seemed to have gotten over his earlier suspicions about me. Since he was close buddies with Stan, I figured the guy had shared a bit more about our brief adventures together. For good or ill. After getting a look at that camp, I wish we had Stan here to back us up with his Savage.
Scott, probably the best woodsman of the four of us, had volunteered to watch our back trail and allowed us to scout the ground behind the campsite. He could move through the woods like smoke and I wanted to learn more from him if I had the chance. After a few minutes comparing counts and identifying which of the tents likely held the prisoners, Scott came ghosting back to join us. His face looked grim as he reported a body dump on the other side of the clearing.
“How are you feeling?” Nick asked me, and I could tell he didn’t want to hear the rah-rah bull, but really needed to know the truth.
“Sore, but not too bad. I’m up for this.”
Really, my chest still ached every breath, and my arms no longer tingled but I worried about holding a steady aim. Any killing I would need to do would have to be close up work.
Nick looked me in the eye for a long moment and sighed.
“Can you really do it? Get in close enough and carry through?”
“Yeah, I can. I’m really looking forward to killing these guys.”
As if to punctuate my statement, the poor fellow strapped down in the center of camp let loose another agonized cry. We’d been on site for over two hours, and the animals who walked like men in that camp had been torturing him off and on throughout that time. I tried not to look, but like a car wreck my eyes kept drifting back. Apparently, someone there was trying to skin him alive using razor blades and cauterizing the wounds with a torch. I shivered.
“Get going then. Give us a squawk when you are in position, and we’ll start the party after five minutes.”
A sane leader might have aborted this operation when we saw how badly the numbers weighed against us, but I thought Nick had that little bit of crazy necessary to carry this off. Maybe. We had a plan, and a determination to stick to it. All I had to do was extract the prisoners, if they were still alive, and move back out of range. The heavy lifting fell on the other three men, and I decided right then to suspend my ‘three bandit’ bag limit for the duration.
Getting into position turned out to not be that difficult. After making my way wide around the perimeter of the camp, I wormed through the thick underbrush at a steady, careful pace. My paint spattered gray sweat shirt allowed me to blend into the summer foliage just as well as my three older companions in their digital camo outfits. We’d discussed using Ghillie suits but the weight and heat forced us to reconsider.
The back of the tent in question butted up next to a large thorny bush, which some city dwelling raider must have thought would make a nice barrier. Instead, it allowed me to crawl unseen on my belly right up to the nylon wall. The space was tight, but doable.
We’d selected this tent based on the guard standing sentry outside. That was a no-brainer. Either I’d find the ‘guests’ Murray described inside, or maybe the leader of this wretched band of murderers. When I cut the tiny slit in the tent wall and peeked inside, I knew this had to be the prisoners. The smell gave away the truth.
The tent stank of unwashed bodies and bodily waste, like a backed up sewer. Though the hazy light of the semi opaque tent panels, I saw three bundles in sleeping bags tied up and stacked close together in the cramped space. Two smaller and one a bit larger, crammed into what was generously described as a two man tent. I waited, watching the shapes, until I saw all three move a bit with the rise and fall of respiration. So, prisoners instead of sack lunches.
Extending my incision carefully from the top of the domed tent to the base, I made a new entrance for the small tent and eeled my head and arms inside.
“Quiet,” I said softly as I began cutting the ropes binding these prisoners. Whispers actually make more sound than just speaking softly. I’d read that in a story once and it turned out to be true.
I freed the larger bundle first, and silently unwrapped the filthy blanket to reveal a battered and blood streaked woman. She wore only a tattered white t shirt. In the dim light, I saw her cracked lips move and I realized she was mouthing the words ‘thank you’ over and over. Had she not been so severely dehydrated, I am sure she would have been crying.
In the tiny space I barely had room to work in freeing the other two prisoners, who turned out to be a pair of little girls, maybe ten and twelve years old. Like the woman, they were streaked with blood and bodily fluids and seeing their condition made my anger rise once again.
Throttling down my hate, I leaned over so my lips where a scant inch from the woman’s ear.
“Crawl out under that bush. I’ll hand the girls out to you. Once you get clear, stay down and go straight back another ten yards. Lie down flat on the ground and wait for me. There will be shooting.”
I wanted to say more, but already the clock was ticking down.
“Kill them all,” she said with a voice so soft I thought I imagined it. Then I saw the fierce look in her blood shot eyes and knew I had heard her correctly.
“Oh, you can count on it,” I replied.
Then we were out of time as the zipper on the front of the tent started sliding down. I got the two girls out just before the guard stuck his head into the opening.
“I told you whiny fuckers…”
Whatever he was about to say died with him as the tip of my blade slammed through his eye socket and into his brain. I twisted viciously, completing his sudden lobotomy, and then I tilted the blade up to create a handle as I drug the corpse inside.
He was a tall, skinny man dressed in filthy jeans and a stinking, faded camo pattern jacket over a beer logo tee shirt. I found a rusty revolver thrust into one pocket of the jacket. I thought about our plan f
or a second, and then wrestled the dead asshole out of his jacket. My jacket, now.
I pulled the small radio and risked a call to my companions.
“Three extracted. One guard down. Give me that five minutes to cut the odds. Watch for my new Army camo jacket.”
“Copy” was all Nick had to say.
Cut the odds? At least fourteen more armed, aggressive hostiles in the camp and I was going out there to cull the herd. A distant part of my mind was wondering if this was how it felt to lose your marbles, but I didn’t dwell on that thought. As I took a moment to center myself, I realized, for the first time in months, I wasn’t afraid. Fear had been such a constant, like gravity, that I suddenly felt giddy as I checked my knives.
I would use the knives first, until the shooting started, then go to pistols. I would fight until all of them were dead, or I was. I’d seen too many horrible scenes and endured too fear these last months. The world was a terrible place to live and I’d had enough. No bag limit today.
CHAPTER TEN
The prison tent was in the center of a semicircle of other temporary dwellings, either tents or rough lean-to shacks. Keeping my head inside the tent and peeking out, I could see the shape of a man in the tent to the left of me. He looked to be laying or sitting in the shade, his head moving slightly to the beat of some inner rhythm.
Crawling casually out of the stinking prisoners’ tent, I stood for a moment and stretched, hoping my unseen companions would clock my whereabouts. I only had a few minutes before the shooting started, and I wanted to avoid friendly fire while killing as many of these monsters as possible.
The man in the tent never saw me coming. He was occupied with a dog eared Playboy magazine, apparently reading one of the articles, when I slid the blade of my eight inch stiletto into his left ear. This was a recent acquisition, picked up from one of the Harrison raiders, and I liked the way the grip fit my hand. Way better than using an old butcher knife, I decided.
Once I made sure the man was 100% dead, twisting the blade as I had with the earlier guard, I drug a filthy blanket up over the cooling corpse and moved on to the next objective. Instead of skulking around, I just stood and walked over like I belonged there. Trying to sneak around in broad daylight is hard, and with my need to hurry and the movement already going on in the camp I decided to take a gamble.
The next tent was vacant and I barely slowed as I continued walking. I was running out of time and needed to act fast if I wanted to whittle down the opposition. With that in mind I stepped in front of the next man to walk by, a black guy in his early twenties with a row of tattoos across his neck. He barely seemed to register my presence before I swept his legs out from underneath him.
Taking a firm grasp on his right arm in my left, I continued the motion and rolled both of us into the weeds bordering the tent. With my right arm cocked, I drove the point of the stiletto into his chest, angling up under the rib cage and aiming for the heart, even before my victim’s back hit the ground. I took several uncoordinated blows to my arms and a shot to my jaw before the struggling stopped. I pulled the blade free and quickly slit the man’s throat for good measure. I was still on my knees, knife in hand, when I heard a sharp intake of breath and looked up.
The man, another one of the raiders I’d seen standing near the poor bastard being tortured earlier, was clawing at the pistol holstered on his hip. His movements were panicked and he was making little progress. When I saw him open his mouth to cry out a warning, I lunged forward, the knife sinking into the man’s crotch. I ripped down, seeking the femoral artery, even as the mutilated man shrieked.
“Well, hell,” I muttered and continued cutting until the bright fountain of blood confirmed my job here was done. This guy wasn’t going to be much of a threat in a few minutes, but I couldn’t stick around that long. Those screams rivaled the guy getting butchered, who had now fallen silent.
Then the shooting started, and I dropped to the ground next to the dying man.
“Why?” the man whispered, his eyes glassy and rolling back in his head.
“Because you were here,” I replied in a conversational tone, as I used the edge of the knife to cut his throat. The dying man didn’t even flinch. Probably unnecessary, since very little blood leaked from that wound. Most of his blood was already on the ground, where it pooled under his body. And where I was laying, no doubt.
Keeping my head down, I still had a decent view of the camp as Nick, Scott and Mark began the task of killing the remaining raiders. At first, every shot seemed to bring down another one of the thugs, and I noticed my teammates were trying to shoot the men armed with rifles first. That made sense. A pistol is ultimately a defensive arm, while a rifle gave you the range to shoot back.
The AR-15 appeared to be the rifle of choice, since everyone either had one slung on their back or close at hand, except for the first guard I’d killed in the prisoners’ tent. Both of the dead men sprawled around me still had what looked like an AR-15 strapped to their backs. Not that is did them any good. They’d never seen me coming.
I debated picking up one of the rifles and using it, but decided to stick with my pistols. I didn’t want to confuse my teammates when I started moving and also, though I barely felt it with the adrenaline flooding my system, the bruising from being shot the day before still made my chest burn. Also, at the range I intended to work, a pistol would likely do the job.
After the first furious few minutes, I noted the fire coming into the camp began to fall off, either because Nick and company were running out of targets, ammunition, or were being forced to change positions. Given the heavy volume of return fire, I figured the last option was likely the cause.
From where I lay, I could see several bodies hunkered behind the cover offered by a pair of fallen trees. We’d noted these earlier as the lounging raiders used the roughly carved trunks as seats. Several dead raiders lay around the trees, and these bodies and the trunks gave the survivors temporary shielding from the shooters. From the rifle barrels I saw pointing out, that was the main resistance to the Keller force’s attack.
Crawling carefully on my knees and elbows, I approached the raider bastion using the tents and other fallen bodies as concealment until only a dozen yards separated me from their position. This was it, the time to see if my trick might work.
“Guys, give me some cover. I’m coming in!”
Though I’d only heard the man speak a few words before I killed him, the heavy Southern accent of the tent guard stuck in my head. I tried to deepen my voice and hit that same twang, but filled with panic, as I jumped up and sprinted to the L shaped defensive position.
Head down and arms pumping, I scarcely noticed when a rifle barrel came up, froze on my form and dropped again just as suddenly.
“Fuck, Jimmy, get your ass in here,” one of the men hissed as I dove over the thick oak trunk and landed in the middle of the huddled raiders.
I landed hard in the dirt, managing to clear the bodies. I had no more time to plan as someone exclaimed, “Hey, that ain’t Jimmy!”
If any of the men had been fully facing me, I likely would have died right there. Fortunately, they were still facing out, those armed with rifles trying to pick off my teammates. I shot the closest man first, the one who called out and blew my cover. Before any of the other men could bring their weapons to bear, I was already shooting into their backs and sides. It was not in the least bit fair or sporting. This was fish in a barrel and pure slaughter. That’s why I did it.
I emptied the Glock in my right hand, dropped it, and switched to the P95 in my left until the slide locked back on that pistol as well. Blood seemed to hang in the air as the men jerked and shuddered from the close contact wounds.
By the time I transitioned to the knives, a Bowie in my right fist, the stiletto in my left, none of the men scattered around me were moving. Not even a twitch. I was hyperventilating and looking around for the next target. I could hear the wind and the sound of my heart beating in my ear
s.
A shot from an unseen source whizzed by, and a dull pain began in my left forearm. I dropped to the ground, landing partially on a corpse and released the knives. The mad spell driving me before seemed broken and I scooped up the Glock. I loaded a fresh magazine and chambered a round before searching out my radio. I noticed the gunfire had flared up briefly before dying down to nothing while I was reloading.
“Thanks for not shooting me, guys. What’s it looking like out there?”
“No more movement,” Nick finally replied. His voice sounded tinny, and tired, over the small radio speaker.
“You see where those prisoners are hiding?” I asked, rolling over to get a better view of the now deserted looking camp.
“Yeah,” Scott answered. “I saw them crawl out earlier and then they stayed put. I think they are okay.”
“Give it ten more minutes, boys. Keep on your toes and let’s see if anybody is playing possum.” Nick’s voice came through more clearly and I wondered if he had changed positions again. I knew these little radios had less than two miles of absolute range and even a few hundred yards could affect the quality of the broadcast.
After a series of “roger”s sounded over the channel, I set the radio aside and turned my attention to the stinging in my left arm.
“Crap” I whispered as I gingerly pushed up the ruined sleeve of my stolen jacket. Somebody had put a round through the fabric, and a ragged tear ran from wrist to elbow. Beneath, I saw the sweat shirt I was wearing also looked shredded, but I saw no blood. This felt like a real burn, from a hot stove, not a particular quality of the pain I was experiencing. Could a bullet do that? What I saw resembled a carpet burn, but worse, and fortunately it wasn’t bleeding.
After getting the all clear from Nick, I gathered up my pistols and knives and headed over to the middle of the camp where the tortured man was still tied up on a board. He was dead, and looked so awful I had to fight to keep from vomiting. I’d seen some bad shit but this was just something I could not comprehend. Why burn and disfigure a man like that?
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