by Ryan Schow
Nothing but pain.
Damn.
He did it again and still nothing but misery. By now his head was throbbing and he was pissed off beyond measure. Relax, he told himself.
Breathe.
Tilting his head the other direction, he gave it two solid jerks to the side and got a small pop for his effort. For whatever reason, this seemed to free up something in the other side of his neck. He tilted his head back to his stiff side, which now felt ten times better, and gave it a sharp jolt. This resulted in a deep, satisfying pop! Everything loosened from there. Rolling his shoulders and neck, he felt a thousand times better.
When he cracked open the barn door leading into the property, he saw the front yard was clear. The sun was now low on the horizon, the air a touch chillier than he expected. Had he really slept the entire day? It appeared so. Off to the right leading away from the home, he saw more field equipment: a plow blade, a stack of shovels, a plastic bin with the lid kicked off. There was also a fifties style pick-up with whitewall tires and the hood propped up.
Jagger slunk toward the truck, keeping his eyes peeled and his ears open. He got to the old Chevy, ducked behind it. The baby blue paint was faded down to the primer; large patches of rust marred the truck’s already disgraceful body. He glanced inside the open hood, saw nothing but the bare dirt below.
Great. No engine.
Inside, the seats had been pulled and presumably thrown out since they were no where to be found. This must be someone’s idea of a restoration in progress.
No seats and no engine? Talk about useless!
Along the back of the truck it looked like the rear fender had been dented in an accident. Set up along the fender were tools, one of them being an old claw hammer. There was a rumpled blanket lying under the bed of the truck. By the look of it, someone was trying to hammer out the dent from the inside. Clearly that hadn’t worked. For him, though, the claw hammer would most certainly work.
Taking the hammer, he hurried low and fast toward the house, his body protesting mightily but working nevertheless. When he got to the clapboard side of the farm house, he moved to a back door, ducked under a dirty pane of glass, glanced inside.
Nothing.
He tried the knob and it turned. Just as he was about to open the door, he saw movement through the glass and stood back. A second later the door opened up and a man walked out. Jagger spun the hammer in his hand, gripping the clawed head. When the moment was right, he drove the wood handle down on the guy’s head with such force he staggered twice and dropped the shotgun he was holding. Merle. The guy who took off Camila’s clothes.
He wasn’t dead, he was just out cold.
Jagger dropped the hammer and grabbed the shotgun. The very sight of the man left him seething. He couldn’t forget what this cockroach had done. How disrespectful he’d been with his co-pilot and his longtime friend. With three ferocious strikes, Jagger used the butt end of the shotgun to hammer in the side of the man’s head.
Face down in the dirt, Jagger was certain he was dead.
He wiped down the bloody end of the weapon then lowered himself to a knee and patted down the corpse. Jagger stopped on a lump just under the heavy jacket. He drew back the jacket and found his service revolver tucked in the back of Merle’s pants.
“Maggot,” he muttered.
After dragging Merle off to the side of the house, Jagger snuck inside the house, moving quietly down a dark hall and to the nearest room. He held Merle’s shotgun so he could either shoot it or crack someone over the head with the stock. He tried the first room’s doorknob. It turned. Ignoring the clamoring of his heart and the sweat gathering along his neckline, he eased open the door, prepared for whatever awaited him.
What he found was the girl. She was tied to the bed. Her wrists and ankles were bound by rope that had cut into her skin. The room was cold, a foul smelling odor creeping up to meet him. He turned away, his eyes watering instantly. This was a horrible, choking stench, one he could not forget: death.
Alongside the wall were two people, a man and a woman about his age, both deceased. The rot of their corpses was a stench so thick it seemed to bear weight. He gagged, then dry heaved once, mightily ashamed of himself.
The girl didn’t seem to notice. She just looked at him with dead eyes and that thousand yard stare you see in victims of extreme violence or abuse.
“Are you okay?” he whispered.
She said nothing. He took in the sight of her, measuring it all, hating what he was seeing. Her sandy-blonde hair looked unwashed and unkempt. Her face was dirty, her eyes a crystal blue that should have held more life than they did. And that bruised little face of hers...his heart ached for all the horrors she must have endured.
“I’m here to help you,” he finally managed to say.
Bound to the bedframe, the girl was in light green underwear and a filthy white tank top. Her little body was tarnished by bruises, not just her face. Some of these bruises looked fresh while others bore the greenish-yellow hues of being a few days old. Jagger shut the bedroom door behind him and quickly undid the ropes, blushing at the red welts and scraping that marred her wrists and ankles. He put his finger over his lips, telling her to be quiet. She didn’t say a word. In fact, when he pulled the ropes loose, she didn’t even move.
He marveled at the landscape of abuse upon her. By the look of it, she’d suffered a brutal exploitation far longer than he first imagined, a reality that left him sick to his stomach. When he pulled the last rope off her ankle, he saw a toenail was missing.
“They do this to you?” he asked. She looked away. Refused to meet his eyes. Son of a bitch. “Stay here.”
She didn’t move.
“It’s going to be okay, little girl.”
Still nothing.
He pulled his pistol out of his pants, ejected the magazine, checked the load. It was full. He slapped the magazine home, drew back the slide and checked the chamber. A round slid in place and he knew he had nine rounds left.
He tucked the pistol away.
Shotgun in hand, he opened the door, moved into the hallway. A short walk down the hallway took him to the mouth of an open kitchen and living room. A girl of maybe twenty or twenty-five was sitting in a chair at the kitchen table facing the family room and the black screen of a dead TV. She had her bare feet up on the table and hadn’t heard a thing. He crept up on her and saw she was reading a paperback novel.
On the couch were two other heads, both facing away from him, but at angles. His first thought was that they were playing cards. But on second thought, he was sure they were asleep.
He moved onto the girl, spun the weapon around and cracked her in the back of her head almost hard enough to kill her. She slumped over sideways just as the two heads on the couch turned and jumped to their feet.
He wheeled the shotgun back around and said, “You move, you die. Simple as that.” They both stopped fast enough for him to hear movement from upstairs.
Great.
When he looked up, a third head was popping up off the couch. He fired the shotgun, caught the hearty edge of the crown. The red mist told him he was good. He quickly shifted the weapon back to the two standing. Both thought they could get to their guns—they were wrong. He racked a load, fired, then racked another load and fired again.
Both boys fell.
Gunfire from the stairway sent splinters of wood flying. He scrambled for cover just beside the foot of the stairway as more men came bounding down the stairs. He dropped low and around the corner. The second he saw a body in the stairwell, he opened up and aimed for the knees.
The shot was like a cannon in the compressed space. The first load tore through the attacker’s knee and he face-planted straight into the kitchen floor with a yelp and an oof! Then the God-awful screaming started.
He heard more movement from upstairs.
The rush stopped.
Whomever was upstairs was now waiting. For that one long moment, Jagger heard his hea
rt kicking and felt the rush of blood to his ears. Seconds later, what had been a trample of feet on the wrapped side of the stairs turned and scampered back up.
Jagger leaned down and grabbed the screaming man’s handgun just as someone lit up the stairwell with gunfire. The bullets slapped into the fallen man’s body and his screaming stopped. Jagger slipped sideways on a spreading pool of blood and crashed into the cabinets. He scrambled to his feet, grabbed the slumped over girl and pressed the stolen handgun to her head. She was still unconscious, so this made things easy.
“If you don’t come down by the time I’m done counting to ten,” he announced, “I’m going to empty this magazine into your girl’s head.”
He started counting aloud. By the time he hit eight, he saw the first man coming down the stairs with this hands up and an enraged look on his ugly face.
“All of you,” he said, then resumed his count. “Nine.”
“We’re coming,” a second voice in the stairwell said. He heard two more sets of feet moving, and this surprised him.
He didn’t expect all of them to be there.
“Toss your guns to the far wall,” Jagger growled. Four weapons were thrown down, and thankfully none of them discharged. “Slowly come out with your fingers laced and your hands behind your heads. By the time I count to five, all of you had better be in front of me or I start shooting. First the woman, then all of you.”
All four men emerged.
He checked the woman’s pulse, found it, then let her slump back over. He was afraid he’d hit her too hard, but thinking about that little girl beaten and tied down like an animal, he stowed those feelings without an ounce of remorse.
Leaning back on his training as a Marine, thinking about the combat he saw in Afghanistan, he slowed his mind, spurred his senses and realized he didn’t see Rowdy.
“Rowdy, you fat headed cuck! C’mon down here or I start plugging your buddies in all the wrong places!”
He heard movement overhead, and a second later the idiot started shooting through the floorboards blowing out the acoustic ceiling and peppering the hardwood floors with lead.
He scrambled away from the gunfire, used the stolen pistol to fire four rounds into the four men’s thighs. They all screamed and fell down. The gunfire stopped. Eyes still on the four of them, Jagger shot out a bay window and, one by one, starting tossing the confiscated weapons out the window. Two shotguns, two handguns. The gunfire from above started back up.
When Rowdy stopped shooting long enough to reload, Jagger bounded up the stairs, ignoring the merciless protesting of his body. His toe bumped the last stair on the way up and went down hard on his knee. Still, he managed to keep his weapon. Rowdy kicked open a bedroom door looking high for Jagger, not seeing him low until that last moment.
Jagger fired twice, each round finding a knee. The big man toppled into the doorway, growling and cursing. Jagger aimed his weapon at Rowdy’s crotch and said, “You so much as try to lift your weapon in my direction and I turn you into a girl.”
Rowdy’s body heaved a defeated, agonizing sigh. His pistol fell to the hardwood floor in a sharp clatter, and by the look of him, he was too in shock to retrieve it.
Refusing to tear his eyes from the injured man, Jagger seized the fallen weapon. Rowdy reached for it, but Jagger was quicker. He grabbed the mewling Rowdy by the ankle and pulled him screaming into the hallway, every muscle in Jagger’s body protesting.
The big man was laying down curse words like automatic gunfire, and then at the last minute he grabbed a hold of the doorframe and held on tight. Jagger jerked him, but the man didn’t budge. He drew his pistol, shot Rowdy in the hand and ended that struggle.
Now free, Jagger dragged the wailing brute down the wooden stairs and into the living room. The four men he shot earlier tried to escape, but he’d wounded them enough to slow them down. One was halfway out the window. Jagger saw him turn and look up. He shot the guy in the butt cheek, which caused him to flail in pain. He then shot the other cheek before turning his gun on the other three trying to get away.
“Get back here boys.”
The remaining guys did as they were told. By now the girl he’d knocked out earlier was coming around. She was scared and mad, but she was too stupid to look around and realize her anger was worth exactly squat.
“Line up with them,” he said to her.
She f-bombed him, then spit in his direction.
“Spit at me again and this thing will spit back,” he said, giving his handgun a small shake.
She lined up with the others.
“On your butts, hands behind your head.” They all complied. “What’s the little girl’s name?”
No one said anything, so he turned to Rowdy who was shoulder to shoulder with the first corpse, but face up, alive and furious.
Cursing under his breath, the man gave him nothing.
“Rowdy, you freaking doggyknobber, tell me her name or I clip your jaw and shut you up for good.”
“We don’t know her name!” he screamed, his hands on his knee, blood all over them and the floor he was sprawled out on.
Just then the little girl appeared in the hallway. She was still in her underwear and dirty tank top. Her little body was so fragile it hurt to look at her. He remembered when his boys were that young, how delicate they looked, how breakable they were.
“Come here,” he said.
Reluctantly she walked toward him, ending up at his side with her eyes on her former captors. Jagger glanced down at the straight head of dirty hair, then cleared his throat. She looked up, her eyes vacant, but slowly coming to life. If she had trust issues before, she was seeing what Jagger did to the ones abusing her and knew he was the lesser of two evils.
“Which of these people hurt you?” he asked. She looked back down at her feet. “You can tell me. They won’t ever hurt you again.”
“Not only are we going to hurt you,” Rowdy snarled, “we’re going to cut you up in pieces and feed you to the pigs.”
“Shut up,” Jagger growled. He thought of shooting the man, but he was too close to the girl to discharge his weapon.
Jagger knelt down despite his screaming limbs, then gently took her chin and raised her eyes to his. “They can’t hurt you anymore.”
Her little terrified eyes glanced around the room at them. They were bloody and beaten, they were crying and captured and not hurting her.
“What did they do to you?” he asked.
She looked back down at her bare feet, at that one torn off toenail, then she stepped forward and whispered in his ear all the horrors she’d endured. The blood drained from his face and he said, “Get your shoes, your pants, a shirt and a warm jacket and meet me outside.”
The girl turned and padded off without a word. She walked down the hallway, back to where her dead parents were, back to the bed that…those things happened in. The thought of going back left her feeling revulsion, but nothing was as bad as the smell her parents’ bodies left behind.
The man who saved her, he said to get dressed, so she’d get dressed. In the corner of the room, she put on her pants, then her shirt, socks and shoes, and finally her jacket. She looked at her mother one last time, at the lifeless shell she’d become. She did not look at her father. There was a hole in his head where they shot him and his face looked slack with shock. Plus those dead eyes wouldn’t stop scaring her.
When she went outside, into the cold, she waited for a few minutes, and then there were the sounds of gunfire coming from inside the house.
Six shots.
She counted them all and knew the man who saved her was telling the truth. That they wouldn’t hurt her anymore. When he came outside with a jug of water and his guns, he was speckled with red but alive and not hurt.
“Do you have a bike?” he asked. Without answering, she went around the side of the house, the returned a few minutes later with a red wagon.
“Do your parents have bikes?”
She nodded.
She nodded her head.
“Where?”
She pointed down the street.
“Get two blankets and a flat pillow from inside, whatever food you can grab, and those short guns outside the broken window. Leave the longer guns.”
She did as she was told and he tied the rope and the wagon to the bike. When she came back out, her face was white as a sheet. He’d dragged the bodies behind the couch, but blood smears were all over the floor and the girl must have seen them.
“Did you look at them?” She looked away. Damn. “Just to make sure they were gone?”
She gave a short nod and he felt a bit of relief.
“So you’re going to ride in this wagon over to your friend’s house. We’re going to take her bike so you can ride it and then we’re going to pack as much food and supplies in your wagon as we can fit.”
She didn’t speak, but she was actively listening.
“Do you have any family in town? Maybe a grandma or grandpa?”
She shook her head.
“Aunts or uncles?”
Another shake of the head.
“Do you want to come with me?” he asked.
She looked down, didn’t say anything with her mouth or body language. That must mean yes.
“I will protect you from people like that.”
Now she looked up.
“You okay coming with me?”
She nodded.
“My name is Jagger, by the way. Jagger Justus.”