Nick took a look and I could see him grinding his teeth.
“We need to get him buried.”
“What about the others?” Scott asked.
“What others?” I asked, while stripping off the blood soaked jacket to get at the minor wound on my arm. Mark saw the burn and started digging some ointment and a bandage out of his first aid kit. He was working hard to avoid looking at the ruined face and body that had once been a man.
“I found what I have to assume is a body dump. Four more. All show signs of torture as well.” Scott sounded disgusted and horrified.
I remembered then, and shook my head. Mark looked up but I let him know the ointment wasn’t causing me any pain. Really, I’d done more damage to myself leaning against a tractor exhaust pipe one time. Still, that bullet had come awfully close. Maybe the wound would scar. That might remind me to stay the heck down in the middle of a firefight.
“I was just thinking,” I went on to say to no one in particular. “One of the guys I killed, he asked me why I did it. At the time, I said it was because he was here. Really, this is why.” I gestured to the mutilated body. “None of these animals can be allowed to live.”
Nick agreed, simply saying he would take care of it. I knew what he meant. Once Mark finished taping up my arm, I told the others I would go try to bring back the freed prisoners.
“If ya’ll find any clothes fit to wear, just set them in a pile. I’ll get the lady and her girls over to one of the empty tents for now.”
Scott gave me a questioning look.
“They look about ten and twelve years old, but that’s just a guess. The lady with them is their mama, and I can’t say her age. I also didn’t get any names. They don’t have any clothes.”
“Mark, you keep a lookout. I’m gonna help Nick.”
There was no question in Scott’s voice. No prisoners amongst these raiders indeed.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In the end, we decided to bring in trucks from the farm to haul us home. Really, the stumbling block was the Trimble family. Sarah Trimble and her two daughters, Shay and Delilah, were waiting for me right where I said. And there was no way they could travel far in their condition.
“Hi,” I said softly as I approached, holding up my hands to show they were empty. In all the confusion, this lady might have crawled back into the camp for a weapon. However, I found the poor lady nearly unconscious, the two girls tucked in protectively behind where she lay. She looked up and regarded me with empty eyes.
“Don’t worry,” I said softly, kneeling down several feet away from the naked lady. She’d removed the thin tee shirt and apparently tried to tear it for some reason but her strength failed her.
“My name’s Luke. What’s your name?”
“Sarah. Sarah Trimble. Did they…kill my husband back there? Sean?”
I knew who she meant. I nodded my head slowly.
“I’m sorry. There was nothing we could do. We just got here this afternoon, and he was already gone,” I lied. In reality, even if we’d attacked the camp as soon as we arrived, he would not have survived the injuries done to him. I decided to spare her that thought.
She did that dry sobbing thing I’d seen before, from people too dehydrated to actually form tears. I slowly removed my canteen, exaggerating the motion so she could see what I was doing. I sat the canteen on the ground in front of Sarah and backed away slowly.
Sarah did the most amazing thing then. With trembling hands, she cracked the top on the canteen and dribbled a little into the cap, then brought it to the lips of one her daughters, then the other. Here she was dying of dehydration, and her first move is to take care of these little girls.
The water seemed to revive both girls, for they began to move slowly, stretching their arms and legs as if fighting cramps. The sight made my own eyes tear up as their mother tried to comfort them. That’s where I learned their names, listening to Mrs. Trimble. Shay was the older, Delilah the younger.
“Are these your daughters?”
Sarah nodded her head but did not reply until the two girls seemed to relax into her touch and fall asleep again. I knew their medical condition would need to be monitored carefully or we could lose them both. Both looked haggard and terribly thin, like concentration camp survivors.
I wondered how long they had been held captive, and realized then Plan B would need to be activated. They would never survive the half mile walk back to the ATVs we had stashed.
“Sarah, me and my friends are from a farm nearby. The Keller’s farm. Are you from around here?”
Sarah nodded, and then she spoke. Her voice was hoarse and sounded damaged. Like you get when you scream too hard at a football game. I didn’t want to think about what caused her to scream like that, but I could imagine.
“Yes, we live…lived on the old Hempstead place, about three miles down the road from Mr. and Mrs. Keller, down near the intersection. Only been there about five years. Wanted a better place to raise our daughters. Oh, God…”
Mrs. Trimble seemed to lose her reason for a few moments, as if reliving memories better left forgotten. She looked up at me with her bloodshot eyes, her expression imploring.
“What are you going to do now? About us, I mean?”
“Darwin Keller’s two sons and his youngest brother Scott are here with me. It isn’t for me to say, but I think we will be transporting you and your daughters back to their farm.”
“And Sean?”
“I suspect we will be transporting…your husband back as well for burial.”
“Can I see him?”
I shook my head and dared to look into her eyes once more. They might have been a pretty shade of brown, once, like caramel candy. Now had that scary intensity I’d come to expect in the faces of folks driven nearly beyond despair. Her pupils were dilated, eyes round.
“Remember him as he was, ma’am. Remember the good and think of him when you look at your little girls. You are alive, and we’ll do everything we can to keep you safe.”
That was an awful lot to promise but I couldn’t say anything else.
I asked her to sit tight while I went to confer with Nick. The decision would be his, but I would try to convince him to do the right thing here. These survivors needed help, and I imagined their status as neighbors instead of strangers might tip the balance.
CHAPTER TWELVE
As I expected, Nick agreed the Trimbles would need better transportation and care. He asked Scott to go back and retrieve one of the ATVs for a run to the farm, and the older man agreed.
While we waited, Mark scavenged an unused tent from the camp and set it up in a small clearing well back from the sight of the dead. The men had gathered some scraps of clothing before Scott left and I brought them for the ladies. For some reason, the three of them seemed to be tolerant of my presence, but whenever one of the other men stepped too close, they shrank away in fear. The two girls seemed to go almost catatonic. I could see their reaction had an effect on all three of the Keller men, and I just shrugged.
I also retrieved several buckets of water from the nearby creek and gave them to Mrs. Trimble. She wanted to get the girls, and herself, cleaned up a bit before dressing in the cast off clothes. While she worked, wiping away the blood and filth using her torn t shirt as a rag, I knelt with my back to them and quickly heated a can of soup in an old metal sauce pan.
“How did you know to come for us? I thought no one knew where we were, or cared.”
Mrs. Trimble’s voice caught me off guard and I flinched a bit before answering. Her voice still sounded raw, low, and I wondered idly if her vocal cords would ever heal.
“Yeah, actually they did it to themselves,” I replied and gave her a synopsis of what had occurred. I added in a little about myself, just mentioning I was new to the area and the farm.
“That’s what they do. They raid farms and steal food. And people.”
Mrs. Trimble paused, as if collecting herself.
“They came upon
our house one day, just rolled up the driveway in broad daylight. Sean wanted to fight them at first, but there were too many. They wanted the food, and Sean agreed to give them all we had to spare our lives.”
I waited, barely breathing, as Mrs. Trimble spun out her terrible tale.
“We didn’t have much left to eat, and when their leader saw what was in our pantry he got really mad. That’s when the men, those bastards, started doing things. To us. They made Sean watch, and their leader kept demanding he tell them where the rest of the food was hidden.”
I felt my anger begin to grow again as I heard the story. I realized Sean Trimble made a terrible mistake. I was thinking he should have sent the family out a back door and made a stand. He paid for his mistake, and his family did, too. I wondered how long they would continue paying.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Trimble. Very, very sorry. No one should have to go through that.”
I really didn’t have anything else I could say, so I went back to my simple chores. The soup heated quickly and I poured some into a cup for easier use. Mrs. Trimble gave small sips to her daughters, alternating between them until at last the older girl, Shay, held up her hand.
“Mom, you drink some too,” the young girl directed. Reluctantly, the mother drank some of the cooling liquid.
I stood slowly, letting the three see me move so as not to startle them.
“Ladies, I need to go see about helping my friends in the camp. Ya’ll stay here and I’ll be back in a few minutes, okay?”
When Sarah nodded cautiously, I turned and made my way through the sparse undergrowth back to the camp full of dead raiders. While I was occupied with the freed prisoners, Nick and Mark kept busy separating the dead from their weapons and making piles. The stack of rifles made me blink at the numbers.
“What was the total count of these guys?” I asked Nick as he came back to the pile and added four more rifles. Three AR-15s and a FAL, it looked like.
“Nineteen,” he replied with a dark chuckle. I gave him a cold look and he turned up his palms.
“I missed the two you stashed in their tents, first time I made a circuit of the camp. Mark found them when he was looking for clothes and nearly shit himself.”
I nodded, but I would have thought the blood might have been a dead giveaway. Then I saw Mark walking up burdened with two metal ammo cans. He set them down in the ammunition pile and stepped back, as if admiring the view. Maybe he was. Then he turned to me.
“Cutting the odds? Seriously? I counted four you took out with knives, I think. Two messy, like you were butchering hogs, and the other two, well, they scared the hell out of me. I thought they were still asleep at first. Did I miss any?”
I thought for a second, counting. “Yep, that was all. I ran out of time on the second two and had to hurry. I thought the more I killed early, the fewer would be shooting at us later.”
“Oh, how’s the arm?” Mark asked. He still seemed a little freaked out by the day’s events.
Honestly, I’d forgotten about the bullet burn on my forearm, and told Mark it was fine. Then I got back to business.
“So, I see these guys were set on guns and ammo. Find anything else? Mrs. Trimble said these bastards were looking hard for food.”
I emphasized the word hard, and both men flinched. Without asking, they seemed to know the score with Mrs. Trimble and her daughters.
“You know, we checked their homeplace just a week ago. Everything looked fine and I saw Sean out chopping wood. This is insane,” Nick said. Clearly they were both disturbed by this raid so close to home. Hell, if only Sean had gotten a few shots off, the gunfire might have prompted the Keller boys to come running to help. Or so I would like to think.
“Did you know them, before?”
“Not really. Dad made a map of the surrounding area and we rode a loop through the area that first week, introducing ourselves to anybody we didn’t already know. Scott went with me this last trip when we made contact with the Trimbles, but I think we only met Sean, Mr. Trimble, that day.”
“Well, I think we need to take every single item we can use from this camp and haul it back to the farm.”
Mark looked a little uneasy at my suggestion, and I just gave him a wave to speak.
“Man, I know things were hard out there for you, but I don’t think we need to be quite that, extreme. I wouldn’t feel right eating food or sleeping on blankets that I know were from, well, this place.”
The man was trying to be polite, and he didn’t specify what he meant by ‘out there’. I understood, somewhere inside where the scar tissue wasn’t so thick.
“Mark, I get it. But what makes you think times are going to be any easier around here? I hate to see it happen, but this is a pretty good sign. Or actually, a very bad sign, of things to come.”
I paused before going into monologue mode.
“Every piece of manufactured equipment or material should be carefully stored away. How long do you think it will take before somebody starts manufacturing plastic tarps, or flashlight batteries? Or the computer chips necessary to get the bulk of our vehicles back on the road. Or our power plants in operation. What you have available now is likely all there will be for a long, long time.”
Lecturing this grown man on the new realities made me uncomfortable, just like I felt when having a similar conversation with his brother. Mark, for his part, took it well enough.
“I know, man. This just seems like robbing the dead, is all.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I doubt any food or consumables you find here will have come from the Trimbles. Mrs. Trimble said they were running low on food when the raiders hit their place. I think that might have been part of why they were treated like that. The raider chief didn’t believe they were almost out of food.”
Mark looked down, and Nick spoke up.
“I offered Sean Trimble some supplies when we met him, but he seemed reluctant to accept anything. He said this was only a temporary thing, like a hurricane.”
Yes, I thought, a lot of people had that idea. Just the power lines down, or some other local problem. Until they were out of food and water, and the neighbors started eyeing their already starving pets. Or the neighbors themselves.
“Luke, I think we will do like you said. Nothing else, we can give the food to someone else in need.”
With that settled, we began our search of the camp in earnest. We rotated one man on guard duty at all times and the other two performed a quick survey of the lean-tos and larger tents used for storage. Nothing was removed but we all made note of what was found.
By the time I heard the familiar throaty purr of diesel engines approaching, the three of us had a good handle on what the raiders had stockpiled. I figured we would need to come back the next day with several trucks to load all the looted items. And bring the dead back to the farm for burial, I suggested as we walked back over closer to the road.
“Which ones?” Nick asked.
“Mr. Trimble and the other victims Scott said were at the body dump.”
“Oh,” Nick sighed with relief. “I thought you meant all of them. That would need a big hole, even with a back hoe.”
“What are we going to do with the dead raiders?”
“Fuck ‘em. Wild hogs and coyotes gotta eat, too. I’m not wasting time burying this bunch.” I spoke with considerable venom and neither of my companions suggested otherwise, but Nick had another idea.
“Let’s check their pockets for any identification first. I don’t recognize any of these guys, so we need to find out where they are coming from.”
Great idea, and that’s just what we were doing when Scott came walking up leading Cass McWorter and two more men from the farm. When Nick saw his aunt with the three men, he waved to get my attention.
“Luke, take Aunt Cass over to the Trimbles. I should have figured she would come.”
Nodding, I dropped the four wallets I’d recovered in the sack Nick was using to hold them and headed over to
Cass. All the guys I found had Little Rock addresses, which confirmed some of my fears.
“Hey, kid. I heard you got shot again.”
I had to grin at her offhand comment. Like she was talking about the weather.
“’It’s merely a flesh wound. ‘Tis but a scratch,” I replied, quoting from one of my favorite movies.
She gave me a mock glare as she approached. I could tell the men with her had no idea what I was talking about.
“Son, you are too young to even know who Monty Python is, much less quoting from that movie.”
“What can I say? I’m an old soul. Seriously, it is just what Nick calls a bullet burn. Didn’t even bleed. Now, follow me and I’ll get you to your new patients.”
With that grim reminder, Cass broke off from Scott and company to join me in approaching the makeshift camp we set up for the Trimbles.
“How bad is it?” Cass asked under her breath as she drew near. “Scott was being evasive when he said you found a mother and her two daughters. Just that they looked to be in poor shape.”
I looked down, not meeting the woman’s gaze.
“No food, no water for at least a couple of days. Maybe longer. Signs of dehydration and likely malnutrition. All three have been raped and beaten, multiple times. Probably sodomized as well. Oh, and they got to listen to Sean Trimble, husband and father, as he was tortured to death.”
When I dared look over at Cass, I found the older woman white faced and trying to avoid spilling tears. She tried to project a “tough old broad” demeanor as my grandfather would have called it, but in a few sentences I’d managed to break down that barrier.
“What the fuck is wrong with people? How can someone think this is okay to do?”
I could do nothing but shrug as I tried to maintain eye contact.
“Don’t look at me. I just kill the assholes. I can’t figure them out. Stealing food for your family is one thing, and I can see killing if you need to, but this is just evil for its own sake.”
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