by Robert Brown
*
Walking through the living room, most of the group is sitting down in silence. Several are asleep. It will take weeks for all of us to recover from the emotional drain we’ve been through so far. Eleanor stands up as I approach, and I stop walking, expecting to hear some plea for compassion or saving my own humanity.
“Arthur left and wanted me to tell you where everyone is,” she says. “Conner and Samantha are taking turns running the tractor and have started clearing bodies to a pile at the east fence. Arthur is out with them helping to stand guard and keep an eye out for any of our people’s bodies. If we can find them during the clean-up, we will bury them. Donald, and his son, Joshua, are keeping watch over the two men covered by bodies in the yard. Jake and Hannah are keeping watch over the man tied up in the stable. And Brian and Melissa are on the roof again keeping watch and listening for anyone or anything else. They will let us know if any infected come back to the property.”
“Thank you, Eleanor,” I say relieved for not having to argue with her, and she sits down as I take a step.
“Eddie?” The voice is Patricia Langford’s, and I stop and drop my head before turning around.
“Eddie. We all know you have to get answers from these people. Just don’t lose yourself while you do it. They will be judged for what they have done once they die.”
“Patricia….” I stop and take a deep breath. “It is very difficult for me to be respectful toward you right now, and you do deserve respect and compassion even without the loss you are dealing with. I am an Atheist, you know this. There is no afterlife, there is no forgiveness. And no punishment or judgment takes place after people die. There is no higher purpose to the deaths that occurred here today, ours or theirs. The only retribution these men will face is what I put them through. When they die, their suffering and their joy will all be over, just like those people we lost.”
“But you have to believe in something, Eddie. Why else would you want so desperately to live?”
“I want to live because life is all that I have. You religious people don’t seem to understand what life means to an Atheist. Life is more beautiful and precious for an Atheist because we have only one. You, you think you will go to heaven. That this life is just a trial run and something better exists than what is here. I know this is my only existence, so I cherish it, and want it to last forever. I wonder why people like you want to live when you think there is something better than this.”
“There has to be something better than this,” Rebecca Anderson says holding onto her daughter Rachel.
“For me there isn’t. It is just this, but even this disaster of a world is better than not existing. Even with the pain of loss, there is still life to cling to. I have my wife and kids. You have your husband and daughter. In a way we all lost everything we thought we couldn’t live without, but if you look around, we still have everything and everyone around us that make life worth living, if only for one more day. All I need is a blade of grass,” I say and look at Simone before walking out the door.
“What did he mean with the grass, Simone?” Patricia asks.
“It’s just something Eddie used to say when we were talking about people with depression or those that try to commit suicide. I always thought it was a bit silly, but I guess he really means it. He would say, “All I need as a reason to live is to have one blade of grass growing somewhere in the world. That’s enough to sustain him.”
*
On my way to the stable I stop at the shed next to the house and grab a few items; a fishing tackle box, a tool box, and my cordless drill. As soon as I step into the stable and Chad sees me, he starts whimpering and whining about how he is sorry and was forced into staging the attacks.
I stop in front of him and put down my tools without saying a word. He is tied to one of the stalls with his arms and legs spread in the shape of the letter ‘X.’ I don’t want to look directly at him. Not because I am ashamed of what I am about to do, but because I fear that my rage will make me just kill him.
I look at Jake and Hannah, who have been guarding him. “You two may want to stand outside,” is all I say. It isn’t an order or a demand, but I’m sure they understand my meaning that this will be ugly.
I open up the tool box and pull out a heavy duty wire cutter. The kind with two curved blades that make a hole the right size to wrap around a basic electric cable that runs through the average house. The hole on this cutter is also the same size as the average man’s fingers. Chad doesn’t like the look I have on my face while I examine them and starts sputtering and crying.
I’ll need the cutter later, but what I want now is a small box of drill bits for my cordless drill. I grab the drill bit box, remove the 3/32 bit, and put it into my drill. I squeeze the drill trigger to make sure it is still charged, and it screams to life. So does Chad. He is screaming his head off, and I’m at least ten feet away from him.
I walk up to him with the drill in my left hand and punch him in the face several times. He finally shuts up long enough for me to speak.
“Olivia Murphy, age three.”
“What? Who’s that?”
“Olivia Murphy, age three,” I say again, and then crouch and pull off his left shoe and sock. Even though his leg is tied tight at the ankle, I kneel on his foot so it can’t move. Taking the drill, I place the bit at the center of the toenail on his big toe.
He is screaming and bucking with his hips trying to knock me away from his foot, but I won’t budge. I squeeze the trigger, and the drill whines to life, boring a hole through the nail, flesh, and bone of this asshole’s big toe. The scream he emits gives me a warm feeling, like a blush after getting caught looking at a pretty girl. The sound of his agony makes me feel good.
I stand up and look behind me. Hannah and Jake are still here. “Grab that rope over there, and tie him down better. Tie him tight at his waist so he can’t move around so much.” Jake gets the rope and starts securing Chad’s waist while I talk to Hannah.
“Are you sure you want to stay? It’s going to get worse.”
“They were my friends too. Steven and I were close, and Nana. He’s getting what he deserves.”
I nod and know I should feel ashamed of myself for allowing my twelve year old to witness this, but instead, feel proud that she is strong enough to deal with it. I was upset that Hannah was so furious with these people. She has always had a short fuse. She’s very emotional and can get deeply angry over little things, and won’t let whatever issue it is go. Now I know she gets it from me. I know I should rise above this, and be the better man, especially in front of her. I can’t stop. I mean, I can, if I choose to, but I don’t want to stop.
I’ve been the good guy my whole life, always obeying the laws, and following rules. I used to fume at how criminals and the true bad guys in life always got off too easy. I used to say at my gun shop, “criminals don’t belong in jail, they belong in the graveyard.” The criminals won’t get away with hurting people anymore. In this world they will pay, and I get to be the man that makes sure they get more than their fair share of punishment.
It takes me half an hour to go through the thirteen names of our dead. I drill all of Chad’s toes and three of the fingers on his left hand, and say nothing more to him than the name and age of each person that died before drilling each digit. Twice I had to slap him awake, because he passed out from the pain.
During his torture session, there was a rotation of our people walking by the stable entrance with a few staying to watch for a while. I’m not sure who or how many came, only that Jake and Hannah chose to stay the whole time, and remained close to what I was doing.
“Are you awake?” I say and slap Chad in the face one more time.
“Yes, yes please. I’m awake. Please stop! Please.”
“I’m going to start asking you questions, Chad, and if you don’t answer me, or if I don’t like the answer you give, I will start making this painful for you.”
He actually chuckles
a bit in disbelief when he hears me say that last part.
“What? Don’t you think this has been painful for me?” he says with desperation.
“Do you remember the morning I turned you away from my store?”
Chad just nods.
“Do you remember what I said to you, Chad? I told you I would shoot you and tell the sheriff you were bitten, and you knew when I said it that I was telling the truth.”
“I remember.”
“I grab his chin and lift his head so he has to look into my eyes. I drilled one hole in you for each person that you killed on my ranch, and I promise you that whatever you felt while I drilled you was nothing compared to the pain I will make you feel if I don’t like what I hear. Do you believe me?”
He says, Yes, and tries to nod his head, but can’t until I finally let go.
“Okay, then. Let’s get started.” I put a small hay bale in front of Chad and sit on it. “How many more people are in your group besides those that came today?”
“Four…” He hesitates, “Well, actually, five.”
I shake my head and grab the wire cutters and a rag. He is yelling, “Wait! Wait! Wait!” when I cram the rag in his mouth and start cutting.
I snip his pinky finger off of his right hand in three chunks, one snip at each knuckle.
I wait for his screaming and crying to subside before remove his gag and talk to him again. “It is important that I get the right answers from you, Chad. If you hesitate I will assume you are lying or trying to hide something, and you will lose more fingers and toes. Please take the time to think about your answers before spitting them out.
“Now how many more people are there in your group besides those that came today?”
Poor Chad looks terrible. His face is covered in sweat, tears, blood and his left eyebrow is slightly swollen. He is shaking and crying while he talks. “I was trying to tell you. We have four men, but there is a woman that they captured and are holding.”
“They captured?”
“Yes, yes, they captured her, but we as a group have been holding her.”
“Why didn’t the other four men come with your group today?”
“Gerald, our boss or leader, he didn’t want them along. They were loyal to Lloyd since they came in with him, and Gerald thought Lloyd might try something once we captured this place.”
“More specifics, Chad. I don’t know any of these people.”
“Lloyd wanted the top spot, and Gerald knew it. Lloyd was in our truck and was standing up in the back when we drove in. Gerald thought Lloyd and his men would try to kill him once we captured this place, so he made Lloyds men stay at our base.”
“When do Lloyd’s men expect your group to return? Or are you expecting them to show up here at some point?”
“We’re supposed to return there tomorrow. We didn’t know how many infected we’d have to clear out of here before we could check for supplies and didn’t want to travel back at night. We took the only running vehicles we had, and those four guys were completely drunk when we left earlier today, so they wouldn’t be able to make it here even if they wanted to.”
“Is there anything else I should know about your group and its base?”
“I’ll tell you how to get there—”
I raise my hand and cut him off. “One of you will show me how to get there. Is there anything else I need to know?”
“We have lots of guns and ammo. I mean, we brought a lot with us in the trucks because we thought… well we sent about twenty-five thousand of those things here—”
I slap him again. “Get back on track, what about the guns?”
“Our base is the sheriff’s office. We have all of the guns and ammo they had in their little armory. Lots of riot gear, shotguns, rifles handguns and ammo, but also weird stuff like grenades, night vision scopes, all kinds of stuff. I found some transfer documents that a bunch of this stuff was Homeland Security allocations. We don’t have much food or water, though, and the city just has too many of those things for us to stay.”
“And so you told them about my ranch, didn’t you?” I can’t help but punch him several more times in the face.
“Hannah, Jake? Can you two tell whoever is watching the other two prisoners to bring one of them here to the stable? It’s time to verify this imbecile’s story.”
“I can go myself,” Hannah says.
“I don’t want anyone walking around out there alone. Even I shouldn’t have come here by myself. There is still the occasional gunshot out there taking out an infected, the grounds aren’t secure, and won’t be until we clear the land and mend the fences.” She nods and they both walk out.
I called him an imbecile. I know it isn’t much of an insult to the average person, but this guy was a newspaper reporter, and from what I remember, completely full of himself. That word combined with his current situation might hurt him almost as much as what I’ve done to him physically.
I shove the rag I have back into his mouth and wait for the next captive to arrive for questioning.
Donald and Joshua bring the next guy in, and he reeks of the guts and corpses that were piled on top of him. “Take a good look at what happened to Chad’s hands and feet. I want you to take these and hang on to them for him, okay?” I say and show him the three pieces of Chad’s pinky before shoving them in the new guy’s pants pocket.
The guy looks nervous but so far is completely silent. There is a far greater reaction from Donald and his son to what I’ve done. They seem completely mortified, but Donald still whispers to me, “This guy was so terrified of being under those bodies that I think he may be in shock.”
“Tie him up across from Chad here so he can look at him while we talk,” I say and I pick up the drill and rev the motor a couple times to make my point. His eyes open wide so I know he’s paying attention, but still doesn’t say anything.
Donald and Joshua leave after they tie this new guy up, and after I put an empty feed bag over Chad’s head, I move my hay bale over to sit in front of the new guy. “You are covered in infected blood right now, so I can’t do the same type of questioning with you as I did with Chad. As you saw, I drilled a few holes in his fingers and toes, and removed his finger for him. But until we get you cleaned off, I can’t afford you getting infected, so I’ll have to drill you somewhere that doesn’t have any blood on it yet. Do you know where that might be?”
He shakes his head no.
“Your mouth,” I reply with a smile. “If you don’t give me the answers I want, or if they don’t match what Chad said, then I will start drilling into your teeth. Trust me when I say there is a good reason dentists use injections to numb the mouth. Drilling into the root of a healthy tooth will be quite painful. So my first question is, Are there any people in your group beside those that came here today?”
I’m not sure what particular brand of stupid this guy is, but for me personally, if I had walked into a room where someone was missing a finger and had holes drilled in him all over the place, I would have been more forthcoming with any answers I gave. This guy just looks at me and instead if giving me a firm answer like he knows he’s telling the truth, he asks me, “None?” as if he is trying to guess the state capitol for a teacher in school.
So, I force his mouth open with a horse bit, and tie it in place behind his head. I shiver a bit as I drill into one of the upper molars on his left side. The smell of burning tooth reminds me of that horrible odor while sitting in a dentist chair. He yanks his head away screaming and my drill bit jumps around in his mouth, cutting up his gums. I stop and tie his head back to the post and finish drilling through until I know I’ve hit the root, because blood comes out and the pitch of his scream changes.
He answers every question after I drill his first tooth, and apparently, Chad was telling the truth. I think this man got the worst treatment so far. After he answered all of my questions, I re-secured his head, and quickly drilled into thirteen more teeth after telling him his victims’ names
and ages, like I did with Chad.
Chapter Nine
Finishing the Job
I don’t bother questioning the third man. I just have Donald and Joshua bring him into the stable and tied up next to the other two prisoners. He has enough fear put into him from the other men tearfully explaining what I did to them that he won’t be a problem if I need to question him. And if he is a problem, I’ll just torture him as well. For now, though, I think we should act on what I’ve found out so far.
“Donald, could you and Joshua please tell Arthur, Conner, and Samantha to come to the main house? We all have something to decide. Hannah, Jake, come on back with me. These three aren’t going anywhere,” I say and point to the three limp headed captives tied to the stalls.
*
Back at the house after getting cleaned up yet again, I am facing the whole group, excluding Hannah and Jake, who took the watch position on the roof for Brian and Melissa.
I head right into my explanation of what I found. “There are four more of them out there holding up at the Sheriff’s office, if the information I got is accurate. They also have one woman that they captured and are…keeping her there against her will. Those four men aren’t expecting the group that attacked us to return until tomorrow and are supposed to be totally drunk right now, or at least they were five hours ago, when this group left their base to come here.”
“How can you be sure they aren’t lying? I’ve heard people will say anything when they’re being tortured,” Rebecca says derisively.