Half Past Midnight

by Jeff Brackett

  The smoke bombs burned for two more minutes before the cloud slowly began fading. It was difficult to see through the brush of our hiding place but, after a minute or two, we could hear the marauders cautiously moving past. For a second, I entertained the wild idea that it would be the perfect time to impetuously spring to our feet spewing bullets in all directions in a glorious attempt to take out the last of them at a single stroke. Unfortunately, I could tell from the sounds of their passage that they were much too spread out. They were all around us, whispering orders designed to “herd them back to their house.”

  We would never be able to get them all. Though the wait was maddening, I sat silently in the briars with Megan and Ken, ignoring the multitude of scratches, bruises, and abrasions our nasty little game of hide and seek produced.

  A few minutes later, when we were finally sure that they were past us, we raced back to the Robertson’s home. Ken reached the house first and rushed straight for the back porch.

  “Damn! Damn them all!”

  I rounded the corner of the house to find Ken kneeling next to the table to which Pat Robertson was tied. As I neared, I could see the bruised and bloody condition she was in. He looked up as Megan and I came toward him. “She’s dead.” Anguish lined his features as he spoke. Pain for the woman and her husband… for his neighbors, his friends. “The filthy animals beat her to death,” he sobbed.

  I hesitated a moment, then walked over and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Ken? Ken, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, man. But we have to go.”

  He was unresponsive, his grief overwhelming.

  “Ken! I understand, but the others are still on that trail. We don’t have time for this.”

  “What the hell do you mean, no time?” He slung my hand violently from his shoulder and stood. “Pat’s dead. John’s dead. We didn’t save anyone. All this,” his arm swept out to indicate the bodies littering the area, “was for nothing!” He stepped over to the nearest of the bodies and kicked it. I heard the distinct cracking sound of breaking ribs. He kicked it again and again, caving in an entire side of the corpse. The whole time we could hear him sobbing and saying, “All for nothing!”

  The violence of Ken’s reaction startled me. I really didn’t know what to say to get through to him. I was about to try to reason with him when Megan stepped in.

  “Where did the rest of them go, Ken?” She asked it quietly, simply, and somehow it got through to him. He stopped the destruction of the corpse and turned to face her, uncertainty on his face.

  “Isn’t that trail they’re on the same trail we took from the house?” she prodded. “Where will they end up if they follow it all the way out? Back at the house, right? Back to your wife and my mom and brother.”

  The change was immediate. He wiped his eyes. “Okay.” He sniffed, and I could see the difference in his eyes. He was back with us. For now. “Yeah, let’s finish this. How long ago did they pass us on the trail?”

  “Nearly five minutes,” I estimated.

  “Do you think we can catch them in time?” Megan asked. Five minutes on those trails could translate to more than a mile, and the distance grew as we spoke.

  “We can do better than that.” I jerked my thumb at their truck. “If we can find the keys.”

  When the interior of the truck failed to yield anything but broken glass, the windshield having been one of the casualties of the fire fight, we had no choice but to search the bodies, something none of us were thrilled about. Feeling sympathy for Megan, I gave her a choice. She could go and retrieve the crossbow and rifle she had lost earlier, along with as many other weapons as she could find lying around, or she could help search the bodies. She took one look at the men in the back of the truck and left to find her weapons.

  Meanwhile, Ken and I readied ourselves for the grisly work ahead. “Which one do you want?” he asked.

  I noticed that one of the four in the truck bed had a sunburn on his left arm, as if he’d had that arm exposed to the intense sunlight. The right arm was fine. “This one.” I was pretty sure I had found the driver.

  Sure enough, his right pants pocket clinked when I patted it. Digging the keys out still proved to be a nasty business, though. The man had evidently been drinking for quite some time before Ken shot him, if the amount of urine staining his pants was any indication. We got the keys, and I started to drag the bodies out of the truck.

  “Leave ‘em in the truck.” Ken’s voice was gruff. “I have an idea.”

  I gave him a quizzical look but, after his earlier outburst, I wasn’t about to argue. Together, we rolled the bodies further into the bed of the truck and closed the tailgate. Megan returned with several rifles slung over her shoulders and, within minutes, we were flying down the road at eighty miles an hour.

  I had never been a conservative driver, but the way Ken slid and whipped around blind turns scared the hell out of me. “Think we’ll make it?” I shouted to be heard above the combined roars of the engine and the wind screaming through the broken windshield.

  Ken nodded. “No problem!”

  “Think we’ll make it in one piece?”

  He grinned maliciously and eased the speed all the way down to seventy-five. “Better?”

  Before I could reply, he slowed abruptly and swerved right at a mailbox marked “Kindley.” The sudden turn slammed Megan into me and me into Ken. I was just getting ready to shout a commentary on his driving skills when he slammed on the brake, throwing us into the dash. The entire trip had lasted less than four minutes.

  “End of the line, folks. Megan hurry and open the garage door. We don’t want them to recognize the truck.”

  She jumped out and hastened to comply. I scrambled out after her and ran to the front door, which was of course, unlocked. As Ken pulled the truck into the garage, I rushed to the fireplace and opened the flue. Our hastily constructed plan called for us to attract the attention of the approaching bandits. As far as they knew, we were just ahead of them. Hopefully, they still thought they were driving us back to our home. We needed them to think this was it.

  We started a fire and pulled the four bodies out of the back of the truck, dragging them inside through the garage door. We propped them up at various windows behind their own rifles. By the time we finished, from the outside of the house, it looked as if someone was standing guard, waiting for trouble.

  “This is what you wanted them for?”

  “Yeah.”

  I shuddered. “What exactly did you do in the Marines?”

  “Whatever needed to be done.” He turned away without further comment.

  Ken and I took positions in the brush around the house. Megan climbed a massive oak and hid in its huge branches above a small fork in the trail. From there, she would have a perfect sniper’s view of the two possible routes to the house. I ducked into some bushes on the side of the trail nearest the edge of the clearing. Ken handed me one end of a roll of kite string he had found in the Kindley’s house and ran further down the trail unwinding it behind him.

  We would wait until the bandits were busy watching the house, then Megan would start things rolling with some strategically placed shots. Ken and I had opted to depend upon our knives and surprise rather than firearms since our positioning would put us in each other’s line of fire.

  So we waited. And waited. It reminded me of the night of the bombs. Each time I checked my watch, I expected to find that ten minutes had slipped by. Instead, only two had passed. My imagination kicked into overdrive. They must have slipped around us. Maybe they realized that we’d circled back to the Robertson’s, and they had turned back after us. I knew a thousand things could have gone wrong, and I convinced myself that at least one of them had.

  Then I heard them. Five miles of hiking through the woods had obviously not improved their stalking skills at all. If anything, they sounded louder than ever. Many of them dragged their feet through the leaves and pine needles, stumbling over roots and branches as they walked, while others whispered com
plaints to their companions. A group of four of them came within five yards of where I squatted in the bushes between two trees. They peered out of the trees at the Kindley house, saying something about smoke, but I couldn’t tell if they were worried about my smoke bombs, or if they were talking about the smoke from the fireplace. I didn’t care, as long as they kept their attention focused on the house.

  Trying not to move any more than absolutely necessary, I quietly scanned the area for the others. I knew there were still at least four more in the band, but where were they? A hint of movement to my right revealed that two more had just passed beneath Megan’s hiding place.

  That left two. I looked back down the trail and saw them trudging along, completely ignorant of the slight movement in the pile of pine needles between two trees. A moment after they passed it, I tugged on the kite string and the needles rose and dispersed, leaving Ken’s dark form in their place as he stood and began to sneak up behind the pair, a knife in each hand, eyes hard. From my vantage, I could see their deaths in Ken’s eyes and felt a moment of compassion. Then I remembered Pat Robinson. I turned to my group, machete in my right hand, Bowie in my left.

  Careful to keep a tree between myself and Ken’s quarry, I stood slowly, catching Megan’s eye. I nodded, and she rose to her knees in the crook of those two enormous branches, raised the Kalashnikov, sighted in on the two below her, and opened fire.

  As soon as she did, the four in front of me spun to face her. I waded in from behind with the machete, and things moved in a blur from there. I decapitated the first of them before the others even knew I was on them. At almost the same time, I drove the Bowie knife high into the back of another and felt it lodge in his spine. With no time to work it loose, I left it, spinning to confront the other two. Both of them tried to bring their rifles to bear, but the quarters were too close. I slashed one across his left shoulder as he turned, then reversed direction and jabbed the point upward through his throat. He died instantly, wrenching the machete from my grip as he fell.

  The last man succeeded in getting his barrel up, but I was practically on top of him. I slid right, parried the rifle barrel, and slipped up alongside him. A head butt and a hard uppercut broke his nose and cracked ribs, loosening his grip on the rifle. I yanked it out of his grasp and slammed the butt into his diaphragm as hard as I could. He went to his knees with a wheezing exhalation, gagging until I silenced him with the rifle stock on the base of his skull.

  I whirled to see how Ken was doing just in time to see the last of his two drop to the ground, bleeding profusely from the neck. Looking back toward the oak tree, I saw Megan jumping down from the lowest branch.

  It was over.

  Less than ten seconds had passed since Megan’s first shot. Megan’s two were unequivocally dead, as were both of Ken’s. Of my group, two were dead, and one was dying with a knife in his back. The last one was unconscious with a bloody nose, broken ribs, and a nasty bump on the back of his skull.

  With no minor trepidation, I yanked the knife from the spine of the dying freebooter, knowing as I did so that it would likely kill him. It did, leaving us with a lone survivor and an ethical question that none of us wanted to deal with.

  Should we kill him, finishing what we had started, or rather, what they had started? Or should we let him live? To be, or not to be? This perverted version of Hamlet’s dilemma now faced us squarely in the guise of this helpless young man.

  “Kill him,” Ken said bluntly. He looked at me with the pained expression of a person caught between two equally distasteful choices. “You’re the one who said we would have to kill them all.”

  He pointed to the unconscious form on the ground. “Kill him, and it’s over.”

  He was right but, still, I hesitated, my emotions clashing with my logic. “How will you feel about it when we do kill him?”

  I intentionally used the plural pronoun so that he couldn’t distance himself from the event. “He’s beaten and helpless. Hell, Ken, he may die anyway! But do you really want to live with the idea that we killed him in cold blood?”

  “Don’t try that judge, jury, and executioner philosophical crap on me! This guy is a murderer and a rapist! He and his buddies killed John and Pat. How many others have they killed? For that matter, how many more would they have killed if we hadn’t gotten them today?”

  “I don’t know.” I shook my head wearily. I was exhausted, tired of the whole situation, both mentally and physically. Still shaking my head, I handed Ken the crimson coated knife that I had just pulled from the other man. “If you’re that determined, if you are that sure you’re right, then go ahead. Because I honestly don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong at this point. All I know is, I don’t want anything to do with it.” I took the coward’s way out and headed for the house.

  Megan followed behind me, and we left Ken staring at the bloody knife in his hand.

  A couple of minutes after Megan and I walked into the house, I heard the back door slam behind us. Turning, I saw Ken standing in the kitchen with the would-be bandit slung over his shoulders. “We need to get him to the hospital.”

  Chapter 9

  July 4 / Evening

  Le ciel (de Plencus la cite) nous presage,

  Par clers insignes amp; par estoilles fixes,

  Que de son change subit s’approche l’aage,

  Ne pour son bien, ne pour ses malefices.

  The sky (of Plancus’ city) forebodes to us

  Through clear signs and fixed stars,

  That the time of its sudden change is approaching,

  Neither for its good, nor for its evils.

  Nostradamus — Century 3, Quatrain 46

  The next few hours were difficult for all of us. At first the police, led by the intrepid Chief James Kelland, confiscated our weapons and threw Ken and me in jail. Of course, the weapons we had when we walked into the hospital were not the same weapons we had used against the freebooters. We had dropped them and Megan off at the house with instructions for the women to hide them, as well as all of our other firearms. Then Ken and I told Kelland a story wherein we had disarmed a few of the bandits and turned their own weapons against them.

  He wasn’t having any of it. It was a stupid idea on our part anyway. We hadn’t taken into consideration a major flaw in our reasoning. It was soon brought to our attention when the kid we had lugged into the hospital recovered enough to talk almost immediately. He told a story about a group of men who had attacked him and his innocent friends as they partied. He claimed several men and a young girl had attacked his friends for no apparent reason. He stated that the young girl had killed two men with a rifle, two with a crossbow, and one with her bare hands.

  The questioning began in earnest, and I began to have second thoughts on the wisdom of having spared the kid’s life.

  In light of his story, I figured it was time for us to tell the truth, starting with the gunshots we’d heard earlier that afternoon. The only thing we held back was the existence of our supply stash. I was still unwilling to give that up, and I guessed by Ken’s silence on the subject that he agreed.

  Our only problem was that since we had already lied once, Kelland was trying very hard to try to rip our story to shreds. And he loved every minute of it. The first thing he did was separate us so they could question us individually and hopefully get conflicting stories. We each went into interrogation rooms just like in the movies, only they always appeared larger in the movies. I didn’t think this was terribly smart of him. After all, he’d already allowed us to stay together earlier while I told him what had happened.

  After we were separated, Kelland sent an officer to question Ken. He evidently wanted the pleasure of making me squirm all to himself. Most of the questioning was pretty predictable.

  “Y’all heard gunshots?”

  “Yeah, we already told you that.”

  “How far away were they?”

  “We couldn’t tell.”

  “So you decided to find out?�
��

  “Yes.”

  “Y’all dressed up like GI Joe, went trompin’ off through the woods huntin’ for a few gunshots?”

  “It wasn’t just a few gunshots; it sounded more like a war.”

  “And y’all went lookin’ for a war? Sounds pretty stupid to me.”

  “We had to find out what was going on. With the phones out, we couldn’t very well call the police.”

  “You gettin’ smart with me? I don’t like it when folks smart off to me.”

  “I’m not smarting off. Just stating facts. We couldn’t call the police. Amber had the van, so we couldn’t send someone to get the police. The only option we had left was to investigate for ourselves.”

  “So you ran through the forest, found your war, jumped into the middle of it, and whooped up on twenty to twenty-five men? That’s seven to one odds, boy! You expect us to believe that you, your nigger friend, and a scrawny little girl could each take on six grown men?”

  I held my anger in check. “We took them by surprise, in small groups. That way we only had to take a few at a time.”

  “So you admit you jumped them without provocation!”

  “They killed John Robinson!”

  “You saw ‘em do it?”

  “No. But we saw them raping Pat Robinson!”

  “Was she protestin’?”

  “She was tied to a table!”

  “Maybe she liked it that way.”

  “With her husband’s dead body lying in the yard a few yards away?”

  “How did you know he was dead? Could be havin’ her husband play dead while she got it on with a bunch of men was just some kinky sex thing with them.”

  It went on like that for nearly an hour. It seemed his main goal was to try to implicate me, or rather us, in the murder of several innocent individuals. I knew he didn’t like me, but I hadn’t thought it was anywhere near that bad.