He helped her fit the sheath to her pack and watched her practice drawing the unloaded shotgun. They added her Glock 19 to the mix and he studied her draw, offering suggestions as she reloaded from the mag pouches. He quizzed her on the contents of the various pouches until she could accurately recall the contents of each.
“There’s one more piece of advice,” he said. “You’ll have to find your groove out there. You’ll have to be different than you are here. I can’t tell you how to become that person. It’s something you’ll have to figure out in the heat of things. All I can say is that it’s okay to become that person. You’ve seen Conor in action. He becomes a heartless berserker who has no limits on the battlefield, but that’s not who he is with us and with his family. You may have to become something else too, so just remember that’s okay.”
“Got it, Dad,” Shannon said, though she wasn’t certain she really did. What he was saying was so vague and so out of context for her that she wasn’t sure what it even meant. She had to assume it would become clear in battle.
“Oh and there’s one more thing,” Doc Marty said. “You always listen to Conor. I don’t care how you feel about his orders, you follow them anyway. You don’t think about it, you don’t second-guess it, you just do it. I’ve been in the shit with the Mad Mick more times than I can even count. He’s kept me alive and he’ll keep you alive too. He’s probably killed more people than the plague.”
“You say that like it’s a good thing,” Shannon said uncertainly.
“In this case it is.”
31
The Huntington, West Virginia, area had been good to The Bond. They’d done well everywhere they stopped but Huntington was the only place where they’d ever had goods delivered right to their doorstep like they’d put in an order at Amazon. They had no real plan of action when they hit town. They weren’t sure if they were going to stay there or keep rolling down the road, then the lead truck lurched to a stop and Mundo broke radio silence.
“Hold the phone, boys. Anyone up for a good night’s sleep in a real bed?”
“If you’re suggesting a hotel, we haven’t found one yet that wasn’t trashed,” Thomas replied. “They’re all full of hookers, hobos, and dead junkies.”
“What about a furniture store full of pristine, unsoiled mattresses?” Mundo said. “What’s your fucking sleep number, T?”
Mundo pulled off the four-lane highway into the large parking lot of a clean but older furniture store. For whatever reason, no one had looted it or even broken a single window. The showroom windows were lined with beautiful mattresses in every size and softness.
“I bet they got clean sheets in there too,” He-Man piped in.
“And comforters,” Jawbone added. “I ain’t slept under a comforter in a long damn time.”
Everyone was as excited about the unspoiled furniture as they were about anything they’d seen in a long time. Even Thomas, as cool and staid as a snowman, broke a grin at the inviting scene. They had set up a hasty camp. Buddha Boy and Shootah had food remaining from the last stop. They set up their bulky camp stove with its encrustation of spilled food around the burners. Other men broke into the front doors with a crowbar and built a fire in the parking lot from whatever they could drag out the door, as long as it wasn’t a mattress. Expensive dressers were smashed into dry kindling and they burned well. Bookcases and wooden coffee tables went next.
Thomas dispatched a pair of two-man teams to set up guard posts on the road in and the road out of their camp. Their routine was to put each guard post just out of sight of the main camp. That allowed them to turn away gawkers without letting them see any details about the main camp, such as the size of the force, what they were driving, or what kind of supplies they had.
Lawdog was in charge of leading a truck convoy outside the perimeter to perform a sweep of the area. They needed to know what the neighbors were like, whether the natives were friendly. It was likely that the noise, light, and smells of their camp would draw the attention of folks nearby at some point during their stay. It was best to be proactive about that. Sometimes driving their vehicles through the area and firing off some rounds was enough to dispel any interest by residents remaining in the area. The smart ones would usually decide it was best to stay low key and hope this new threat eventually moved on.
That didn’t always work. There was a certain kind of neighbor that didn’t respond with the appropriate level of fear. They didn’t run and hide; they met The Bond with hostility and aggression. Thomas and Lawdog had learned that only one approach worked with those folks. They would inevitably present a threat. They would eventually challenge the presence of the newcomers. It was best to deal with them proactively and kill them before they had time to come up with a plan.
The gauge by which they measured the threat posed by locals was very simple. There was either a yes or a no decision to be made. Those who watched from behind curtains or scurried immediately from sight were allowed to live. Those who met The Bond with defiance were deemed to be a potential threat and dealt with accordingly. Lawdog usually gave the order if he was on point. The reaction of his force was to instantly open fire on the person eyeballing them. Once they were reduced to a bullet-riddled corpse, Bond soldiers would burn their house to the ground with everyone in it. If they couldn’t determine which house the offending individual came from they would burn down several surrounding houses just to make clear their point. As the saying went, they painted with a broad brush.
On the evening that Pepe’s group ran into The Bond, there were very few men remaining at camp other than the guards on the highway, the cooks, some soldiers performing camp security, and Thomas himself. It was almost completely dark, with the exception of the campfire and some lanterns set up by the men remaining at camp. The first indication of trouble came with the sound of gunfire.
The Bond camp was not immediately alarmed by the gunfire. They assumed it to be Lawdog’s team dealing with an unwelcoming local. That happened at least once every time he took teams out. The camp security didn’t even react. The cooks didn’t break their routine. Then there were more shots and it began to sound like a battle rather than an execution.
Thomas raised his radio. “Thomas for Lawdog, Thomas for Lawdog. We good, man? You guys okay?”
“Ain’t us, Boss,” Lawdog replied. “You need us to come back?”
Their exchange was interrupted by a frantic call on the radio. The voice was so high-pitched and terror-stricken Thomas couldn’t immediately identify it, nor could he tell what they were saying.
“Slow down and identify yourself!” Thomas demanded.
“This is Villain on the north guard post. There’s a big civilian convoy rolled up on us and opened fire. I got a man down and I’m hit bad. We need help now.”
“Coming back, T!” Lawdog barked into his radio. “Three minutes out!”
“Get on that north position!” Thomas yelled to his security team. “Buddha Boy and Shootah, guard the camp.”
“Roger that,” Buddha Boy replied, turning off the propane camp stove.
Thomas ran toward the north position himself. There was more gunfire and the sound of squealing tires. There was the crunch of metal. It could have been vehicles hitting each other or vehicles hitting the guardrail. He couldn’t see far enough to know yet.
Reaching the scene revealed chaos. Some of the civilian vehicles had headlights on, making a futile effort to get their vehicles turned. Others had seen the writing on the wall and abandoned their trucks, fleeing with only what they could carry.
“Light’em up!” Thomas bellowed.
The men did as they were told, shooting at the backs of the fleeing civilians, uncertain if they even hit them in the darkness. There was the roar of approaching engines from behind them and a flood of more men as Lawdog’s teams arrived back from their patrol.
“You want us to chase’em down?” he asked.
“Fire on what you see but don’t chase them,” Thomas said. “
We get men out too far ahead of the firing line and we’re gonna shoot some of our own.”
Lawdog relayed the orders to his men. “What about Villain?”
Thomas shook his head, visible in the light of Lawdog’s headlamp. “Ain’t seen him yet.”
“Over there,” Mundo said. He pointed toward the front bumper of a pickup with both doors open.
“You check those vehicles, Mundo,” Lawdog said. “Make sure there ain’t no people hiding inside them.” Lawdog followed Thomas to Villain’s side.
Villain was stretched out in a pool of his own blood, illuminated by the stark beam of headlamps. He looked like an actor in the spotlight, performing a very convincing death scene. He wore a chest rig with no plates in it. A bloody hole in the vest bubbled and frothed as Villain struggled to breathe.
“He’s shot in the lungs,” He-Man said. “You want me to put a chest seal on him?”
Thomas stared at the injured man. “No point. What we going to do with him then? No ER, no doctor around. Can’t fix it ourselves. He’s fucked.”
“You gotta help me,” Villain said. “You can’t leave me like this.”
Thomas tipped the barrel of his rifle in Villain’s direction and fired one round, then another. Villain arched his body and then it relaxed into death. “Consider yourself helped.”
“Where you want us, Thomas?” Lawdog asked.
“Send a truck to the south guard post as reinforcement. Keep your truck here as a barricade. Send two more back to camp to establish an inner perimeter.”
“What about Villain?” Lawdog asked.
“Take his shit,” Thomas said. He was aware Lawdog was asking about burying their companion but that wasn’t how they rolled. “I need to see what’s on these vehicles.”
Lawdog found Villain’s rifle and then stripped him of his personal gear. He hated to see a fellow member of The Bond die but it was impractical to let good gear go to waste. They weren’t Vikings. They didn’t get buried with their shit. In fact, it was obvious they weren’t likely to get buried at all.
When Lawdog was done he joined Thomas and Mundo at the abandoned vehicles. Mundo was playing a light around the interiors, running from truck to truck with a grin on his face.
“We got four trucks, four trailers, and a car. It’s like Christmas,” Mundo said.
“Indeed it is,” Thomas agreed.
Lawdog leaned his head into the trucks and saw what the other men were talking about. These were heavy duty pickups with contractor-type caps and ladder racks on the back, each towing a trailer. Three were enclosed cargo trailers and one was an open utility trailer. Every inch of space was crammed with gear and it told the story of who these people were. This was a group who had decided to make a run for it. They’d packed everything with survival value into these vehicles and hit the road, headed for somewhere. They had food, spare fuel, weapons, and camping gear. Things probably seemed pretty good for them until a few minutes ago.
Then they ran into The Bond.
“We need to get this shit down to our camp. We can’t watch it up here,” Thomas said. “They might try to come back for it.”
“They might come anyway, even if we move it,” Lawdog warned.
“If they’re dumbass enough to come into our camp hunting for it, we’ll make sure they’re nicely rewarded for their trouble,” Mundo said. “Right, Thomas?”
“That’s right, Mundo. All these got keys in them?”
“Two trucks have keys,” Mundo said. “Two trucks and the car don’t.”
“Lawdog, get some men to move these rigs down to our camp and pitch everything out of them. Transfer everything from the trucks with no keys to the trucks we can drive. Once we have all the gear down at camp, send someone back to drain these fuel tanks.”
“Got it, Thomas,” Lawdog replied.
“Want me to go ahead and drive one of these trucks in?” Mundo asked.
“Go for it,” Lawdog said. “I’ll get the other one.”
The men drove the two trucks to the furniture store. With the help of the other men, they unloaded them and unhooked the cargo trailers. Men piled into the trucks with them and returned to the scene of the shootout. The remaining trucks would not have been easy to move even if they had keys. One was hung up on the guardrail and another had jack-knifed the trailer in such a way as to bend the trailer fender into the tire, flattening it.
There was a lot of debate about what to do. Someone suggested unhooking the trailers and re-hooking them to the running trucks but that wasn’t so easy. The hitches had locks that prevented anyone from unhooking the trailer. This hadn’t been an issue with the trucks they had keys for, but was an issue for the ones in which the keys had been taken by the owner. No one was eager to offload all the gear and then have to handle it again to unload back at the camp. In the end, they opted for brute force. They put the trucks in neutral, hooked them with heavy towing chains, and tugged them loose. They dragged them back to camp where they could siphon the fuel and unload them at their convenience.
It was a big night at The Bond camp. The unexpected windfall made the men feel like they’d accomplished a lot with very little effort. It would make the coming days easier. They would loot the area for weapons and anything else that caught their eye but they would not have to spend as much time searching for food. The trucks were packed with it.
There were canned goods, dried goods, and even some freeze-fried stuff, though not in any quantity. These were not preppers, but refugees. What little long-term food storage they had was most likely part of their storm kits for the occasional blizzard or tornado that knocked power out in the north. There were lots of clothes. The men took any good socks they could wear but drew the line at wearing another man’s underwear. That went into the fire, along with all of the women’s clothing. They kept a few coats that were decent and a few pairs of boots, but their uniforms were part of their identity and they had no plans to stray from that. It was their strength. Their bond.
There were weapons and ammo too. In the first days of The Bond’s journey, they kept every weapon they found, imagining a scenario where they might need them. They soon discovered this was impractical. At the rate they were acquiring weapons there would soon be the need for a tractor-trailer just to carry the guns they acquired. They didn’t want to leave weapons behind though, not wanting to arm anyone who might use the weapons against them.
They assigned Droopy to the role of armorer. He was the one who made decisions on weapons. If they found a weapon better than that which one of the men was carrying, he would issue it and replace their weapon. They kept a supply of high-end optics, weapons lights, and other accessories as spares. Low end stuff got tossed.
When they found hunting shotguns, they effectively disabled them by beating the barrel against a rock until the barrel crimped closed. With revolvers, they took the cylinders and left the frames. With bolt-action hunting rifles, they removed the bolts. With cheap automatics, they removed the slides. The parts were scattered along their route and tossed off bridges into muddy rivers with the hope that they would never be reunited with their missing parts.
For a week they kept every AR and M4 variant they found, which quickly became impractical. With the rifles being so common, it made more sense to save the parts they might need. They kept magazines, which they loaded at night by the fire, usually while smoking pilfered weed. They kept the variety of springs found in the lower receiver and spare takedown pins. They kept a few mil-spec bolts, charging handles, and grips. The rest were scattered. By the time they reached Huntington, their system of weapons salvage functioned like a well-oiled machine. While going through all the vehicles, they piled the weapons by the fire to be dealt with after dinner.
Buddha Boy went through the food and made the meal decisions for the night based on anything perishable the stolen trucks carried. He had fresh, smoked pork roasts from the previous stop and they cooked some of the stolen food that wouldn’t travel well. There was pasta in thin
boxes and sauce in fragile glass jars. There were net bags of onions and sacks of potatoes. It was not a well-balanced meal, more like the kind of dinner a four year old kid might plan, but it was good and there was plenty of it.
In going through the trucks, Mundo found a bottle of Early Times whiskey he stashed away in his gear. Thomas had a zero-tolerance policy toward drinking. He’d killed a man on the spot for being drunk, but Mundo wasn’t the only man to carry a bottle for a little nip on sentry duty. Those night watches could be long and boring. No one was ever dumb enough to make a move on their camp, so most nights were nothing but pacing around, trying to stay awake.
Thomas knew he could never enforce the same Draconian policy with marijuana. It was the thing many of these men missed most while they were in the service. They spoke of it with a reverent fondness. It wasn’t easy to find but they found it. It was one of the things they asked for when they interrogated people. They offered hollow promises that they would go on their way without hurting anyone in exchange for weed or the whereabouts of people known to grow it. Although they always reneged on those promises, it was an effective search tool.
The night they arrived in Huntington the men were all smiles. Things had gone well beyond all hope. They had an excellent meal. They’d sorted their loot, keeping those things they needed and discarding the rest. They’d done the same with the weapons and had scattered the unwanted parts up and down the road, making a game of seeing what they could hit as they threw them for distance. They’d siphoned all the fuel from the unwanted vehicles and transferred it to their own. They had a supply of good weed from their stay in Chillicothe and passed joints late into the night.
Brutal Business: Book Three in the Mad Mick Series Page 19