“Whoever is out there is a weak force. If they had more men than we did, they would have overrun the compound, not just taken out three of us. We probably scared them off when we went into the forest looking for them. They likely didn’t expect that. They expected to take out three of us and see the rest of us run off. They expected us to just abandon the farm that we all fought so hard to take. Well, I say bullshit to that.”
It was a pretty speech, and Swain was able to convince most of his men that the crisis was over. That they’d likely never know why they were attacked or by who. But that the danger had passed, the threat gone.
But still, Dave’s guerilla tactics took their toll. A few of Swain’s men were secretly starting to doubt Swain’s leadership abilities. They were all military men before they were incarcerated. Many of them were infantry and knew tactics as well or better than Swain did.
They wondered whether it was unwise to just write off the attacks as a one-time thing. Swain’s only adjustment in response to the deaths of his men was to order the area inside the hayloft door sandbagged so the sentry had a place to hide behind.
But the men on horseback, and the men who randomly roamed the grounds were more vulnerable.
Horses didn’t carry sandbags.
Still, no one dared question Swain’s judgement. They’d seen how brutal he could be, even with his own men. He was not a man who accepted disloyalty or disrespect, and either slight was punishable by death.
After two days without any further incidents, things settled into an uneasy calm.
Sarah had been in the living room reading a book, when she thought she heard something break on the other side of the wall. It sounded something like a small glass shattering. She looked around to the others in the room, though, and no one else seemed to have heard it. So she just wrote it off as one of those undefined creaking and settling sounds an old house makes. She went back to her reading.
It was Lindsey’s turn as Swain’s “insurance policy” that morning, and Sarah had taken her a short stack of pancakes and bacon for breakfast.
She hated seeing Lindsey chained up, sitting in the middle of that bed, an armed gunman within arm’s length. At least the man tasked with guarding her on this morning was Eddie Campos. He was one of the nicer of Swain’s men, and not one who insisted on pointing his rifle at Lindsey’s head constantly, as some of the others did.
That was Swain’s idea. It was meant to intimidate his hostages by reminding them constantly that they were just an itchy finger away from dying.
And reminding them also that it was he and he alone who decided their fate.
Campos told Sarah and Lindsey that he once had a daughter about Lindsey’s age. He’d lost her to the plague which followed the blackout, but still held her in his heart, and that he saw a lot of his daughter in Lindsey’s eyes.
Sarah hoped if Campos was the one standing guard over her Lindsey on the day Swain ordered her death that he would rebel against his leader and refuse to pull the trigger.
But even after getting to know Campos over the previous year, and having some long conversations with him about the rights and wrongs of their situation, she still couldn’t say for sure.
Her sister Karen was feeling under the weather that morning and had one of her migraines.
“Let’s go sit on the porch for a while,” Sarah suggested. “It’ll do you good.”
“I tried getting up a little bit ago, but the knee just hurts too darn bad.”
Karen had been shot when the farm was overrun, and her right knee was pretty much worthless now.
“Want me to get you some ibuprofen?”
“I took some already. Didn’t seem to help. I think the knee is trying to tell me there’s a storm coming.”
“You know, I wish that knee put as much effort into helping you get around as it does into predicting the weather. Hold on, and I’ll get the chair.”
Sarah went into the other room and returned with a collapsible wheelchair. It was just one of many things Karen and Tommy had included in their hoarding supplies, hoping they’d never have a real need for it.
Tommy was gone now, executed by Swain and then thrown in a pile with the other dead men, doused with gasoline and set afire. Wasn’t even given a proper burial, and Karen still hated Swain for that.
She hated Swain for a lot of reasons.
Sarah parked the chair next to the bed and set its wheel brakes.
“You need any help?”
“Nope. I can handle it. Thank you for taking such good care of me.”
“Hey, I can’t help it. You’re my favorite sister in the whole world.”
“I’m the only sister you’ve ever had, silly.”
“I know. But it still counts.”
Karen moved from the bed to the chair and Sarah released the brakes and pushed her toward the bedroom door.
Karen said, “Wait a minute, before we go out there.”
“Okay. What’s up?”
“What’s your asshole friend doing this morning?”
“He’s still sleeping.”
“Is he still taking that junk?”
“Yes, but he’s slowing down. Instead of shooting up, he’s just smoking a gram a day. That’s his way of cutting back, he says. Says he has to be more alert now that someone is shooting his men. Then he crashes and is dead to the world. Go figure.”
“I wish he was dead to the world.”
“Yep. Me too.”
“I fantasize sometimes about walking up on him while he’s sleeping and plunging a knife deeply into his hard cold heart. Does that make me evil?”
“Honey, if that makes you evil then I’m the devil on earth. Because I’ve fantasized about killing him a thousand different ways myself.”
“I guess him sleeping is the next best thing. I hope he sleeps for days.”
“How come his men aren’t angry with him for keeping them out there even after three of them were shot?”
“I think some of them are. They won’t voice it, because they’re terrified of him. But I can tell by the looks on some of their faces that they’re getting tired of his crap. They know the dope is starting to affect his judgement.”
“Do you think any of them are upset enough to overthrow him?”
“I don’t think so. Not yet. They’d need the support of some of the others to keep from being killed. And they’re afraid of talking bad about him between themselves, for fear of being branded a traitor and shot.”
“If they ever get brave enough to do it, do you think it’ll be a good thing or bad?”
“I don’t know, honey. It would depend on who they anointed their new ‘king.’ A couple of them, like Flores, are just as bad as he is. Some of the others, though, might treat us a little better. Do you really think it’ll ever happen? Them overthrow him, I mean?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. It probably depends on whether the killing continues.”
“Yeah, about that. Swain keeps saying that it was an isolated case of other men from Leavenworth, trying to scare them off the property so they could take it themselves. He says that they didn’t realize how many men were here, and when they went searching for the attackers they scattered. But…”
“But you’ve been thinking the same thing I’ve been thinking, haven’t you?”
Karen managed a weak smile.
“What exactly have you been thinking?”
“That maybe it’s Dave.”
Chapter 30
Sarah and Karen had no idea things were going to escalate once again.
As they debated their future, Dave was a mere four hundred yards away, waiting for a rider on horseback to come into view.
Dave had been a Marine for only four short years, but he learned some lifelong habits. Some were elaborate changes in his character. He’d learned to be more empathetic with others in the world who didn’t have the same opportunities he had.
He learned to go out of his way to help the weak and oppressed. And he learned to
prepare for the worst case scenario in every situation.
But he’d learned some small things too, like the myriad of sayings Marines use to motivate themselves and steer them in the right direction.
One of those sayings in particular was so near and dear to Dave’s heart that he printed it out and hung it above his desk at home, before the power went out and his whole world came crashing down.
OTHERS STUMBLE FROM SITUATION TO SITUATION. UNITED STATES MARINES EVALUATE, ADAPT AND OVERCOME. WE KICK SITUATION’S ASS
.
It was an old saying, made up by a Marine many generations before Dave. But it still applied, and it bounced around the back of Dave’s head, reminding him to constantly think out his plans looking for flaws or a better way to do things.
That was why he took his crossbow and bolts back to the tunnel. He’d planned to sneak onto the property and to hide behind the ancient oak tree, then to use the crossbow to pick off mounted sentries as they rode by.
And it probably would be effective.
But there were a couple of problems with it.
First of all, because Dave had to actually enter the property for the plan to take effect.
Once he fired his first shot, and the first rider hit the dirt, he’d have given away his position. If someone had seen him, even from a distance, they could fire a shot to send up an alarm, and reinforcements would likely come from all directions.
And riders on full gallop could cover ground a lot faster than Dave could on foot. They’d like overwhelm him before he made it back to the safety of the forest.
The other flaw in his plan was the fact that they outnumbered him maybe as much as a dozen to one. He still wasn’t sure of the enemy’s troop strength.
He was, however, aware that with numbers came other critical benefits.
Like, for example, the ability to break into shifts. The bad guys could run non-stop, twenty-four hour shifts. And Dave had to sleep occasionally. Also, Dave could only be in one place at a time. Even if he was doing reconnaissance on one side of the property, activities could go on out of his view, on the other side of the property, without his knowledge.
And it was those two factors which made him scrap the crossbow-behind-the-oak-tree plan.
It was just too risky and necessary.
While Dave slept, the bad guys could place their own snipers out, hidden in the tall grass of the meadows, or in the corn fields, to watch for intruders.
Dave had no infrared capability, and the night vision goggles would be useless against a man lying in heavy ground cover.
He might walk right into an ambush and not even know it.
They might, in essence, do the same thing to Dave that he’d done to them.
So he put the crossbow up for the time being. It was a very effective weapon in another situation. But not this one. For now, until the bad guys went to ground, his sniper rifle would continue to be his best option.
He nested in moderately heavy brush, about three hundred yards from where he’d carried out his first attack a couple of days before. In the distance, he could see the shrub he’d used to hide in, and the barbed wire he’d cut, which was now repaired.
He hadn’t seen them repair the fence. They’d done it while he was sleeping, perhaps, or watching the other side of the compound. And while they were repairing the fence, they could have been planting booby traps or hidden snipers.
Yes. Holding off on the crossbow for now was the right move.
His rider finally crested the hill. Like the others, his rifle was out of its sheathe and laying across the saddle in front of him. No doubt he was locked and loaded and capable of returning fire within a couple of seconds.
But he wouldn’t have those couple of seconds. Dave planned to kill him on the first shot.
As the horse and rider sauntered along, seemingly in no real hurry to get anywhere, the rider kept his eyes focused on the woods. That was the logical place for an attack to come from.
But Dave wasn’t worried about being spotted. He was well hidden, and from that distance even a man with binoculars would have a hard time picking him out in the shrubs.
Dave went through his firing ritual of counting his breaths to help regulate his breathing and relax his body. Clearing his mind of anything not related to the task at hand. Stretching his fingers and rotating his wrists to prevent them from going numb or cramping when it was time to fire.
Then he placed his finger on the trigger and lined up the crosshairs on the man’s chest.
It was a clean shot, obliterating his heart and exiting his back, taking with it a good amount of mass. He tumbled off the back of the horse and landed on his side. But he didn’t feel anything when he hit the ground like a sack of potatoes. He was beyond feeling.
The horse spooked, but not badly. Even more important, he didn’t run. Dave had been afraid the man’s boots would get stuck in the stirrups. He’d go off the side and get hung up, and the horse would freak and bolt, trying to shake the man loose.
That would have created a ruckus and ruined any chance Dave had for a second shot at the next sentry. But as it was, the horse bolted a short distance, then returned to his rider.
He walked to the dead man and nuzzled him, not understanding why he didn’t move, yet somehow sensing something was wrong. Dave guessed they’d been paired up for quite a while. A good horse bonds with his owner, in the same manner a good dog does. The rider must have treated the horse well.
But how he treated his horse wasn’t the issue. He was one of the bastards who’d taken Dave’s family hostage and was holding them against their will.
And for that the man had to die.
He wouldn’t have as much time to line up his next shot. In all likelihood, the next rider would spot the loose horse as soon as his head came over the horizon. Dave had to be ready to take his shot then, before the man had the chance to wheel around and disappear again from view.
So he focused the crosshairs there. At the top of the hill where the first rider had appeared just a couple of minutes before.
This would likely be a head shot. He doubted the rider would keep moving forward once he saw the riderless horse.
A head shot from this distance was less a certainty than center mass. He focused, going through his relaxation exercises, slowly breathing and counting his breaths.
Twenty two breaths, two full minutes, went by. Then thirty three breaths. Any time now, Dave knew.
A brown cowboy hat poked its head over the rise, followed by a pudgy face a split second later. Dave squeezed the trigger, even as he thought he could make out a look of alarm on the rider’s face through the long range scope.
The bullet entered the man’s right eye and his head exploded. His body collapsed and he fell forward onto the horse’s neck, then rolled off to the right side.
This one didn’t fall as cleanly as the first. His right boot was tangled in the stirrup and his body bounced around against the ground while the horse ran in a large circle, trying to shake loose the dead weight. Finally, he fell away and the horse bolted back over the hill from where he’d come, surely alerting the next sentry.
Dave’s operation was over. He heard several shots, and everyone in the compound now knew he’d killed more of their own.
But wait… the shots were coming from the other side of the compound, near its entrance. Even a sentry with a high vantage point would have trouble seeing the loose horse from that angle.
He placed the binoculars to his face and scanned the area to the north, where the shots had come from.
“Shit.”
It was a driver in a black Ford Explorer. Dave’s black Ford Explorer. He had just entered the compound and was driving around in circles, kicking up dust. Leaning halfway out the shattered driver’s side window was a man who appeared to be drunk, firing a handgun into the air, in an effort to alert everyone to come and see his trophy.
Dave watched as two men came out of the house. He wasn’t sure who they were, but
only one of them appeared to be armed. The unarmed man, Swain, would have made a sweet target, except that Dave thought he might be a hostage.
Swain could well have owed his life at that moment to the fact that he wasn’t carrying a rifle.
The other man was, however, and Dave started to sight him in as he walked across the yard.
Then he had a better idea.
His Explorer ground to a halt, the driver sticking his head out of the broken window to converse with the approaching men.
No doubt bragging about the vehicle he’d found and hotwired, and all the booty it contained.
But the driver wouldn’t be laughing for long. Dave would get the last laugh.
As Swain walked up to the SUV and asked, “Where the hell did you find this, Snyder?” a small round hole suddenly appeared in the center of Snyder’s forehead.
It was a question he’d never answer.
Snyder never turned off the secondary ignition and never placed the vehicle into park. As his head slumped forward in death, his foot slipped off the brake. The big SUV crept forward, first knocking over a decorative garden gnome, which probably deserved to be crushed anyway, then came to a stop in the flowerbed on the east side of the house.
The two men, meanwhile, put their heads down and scampered back toward the relative safety of the farm house.
One of them made it. The other almost did.
Dave had to rush his shot. He actually had a better angle on the unarmed man, but left him alone because he still didn’t know if he was friend or foe. And to be sure, the unarmed man would have been an easier shot, since he was moving more slowly and staggering just a bit.
But Dave let him live and shot the second man instead. The one carrying a rifle, and obviously playing for the wrong team.
Because he rushed his shot, though, the bullet missed the man’s heart, entering his lower left lung and exiting out his chest. It was probably a mortal shot, unless there was a very talented surgical team and fully functional operating room inside the house. But even a wounded man can handle a weapon, and Dave cursed himself for being sloppy.
The Battle: Alone: Book 4 Page 12