by Rod Carstens
Tanner rushed back into the bedroom to Nikki, who was just sitting up in the bed. She was naked and had pulled the sheet up in front of her.
“Are you all right?” Tanner asked.
“Yeah,” she took a deep breath and let it out then said. “Yeah. They were just getting started. I’m okay.”
“Get dressed. We’ve got to clear the rest of the house. How many of them were there?”
“Four. There were four of them.”
Tanner quickly searched the bathroom off the bedroom and then went back into the living room as Nikki got dressed. Just as he emerged, Blondie came out of the other door on the opposite side of the room and said, “Clear. Is Nikki okay?” Blondie asked.
“Who the fuck are you?” one of the men on the floor said.
Mike kicked him in the head and said, “I’m the guy that will kill you if you open your mouth again.”
Tanner walked over to the three men and said, “Okay, get on your knees and cross your ankles, hands behind your head, fingers interlaced.”
The men did as they were told. Nikki came walking out of the bedroom, dressed, finger combing her hair out of her face.
“What happened, Nikki?” Blondie asked.
“These three scumbags grabbed me and drug me back here. Apparently, they’re from the City. Been out here for almost a month. They called it their yearly getaway. They come out here into a Free Fire Zone and hunt. They told me they kill game and people for fun. Then a tilt-rotor comes and takes them back to the City.”
Nikki walked over to the blond man and slapped him across the face as hard as she could. His lip started to bleed. “This one likes to slap women around. He worked me over good just for fun while the others watched.”
She slapped him a second time, just as hard. Blondie walked over to her and held out her big kitchen knife. Nikki looked down at it for a moment, then shook her head. “No, I can’t do that.”
“I can,” Blondie said, and moved toward the man.
“Stop,” Tanner said. “Not now. I need to talk to them.”
Tanner walked over and stood over them, looking down into their privileged faces. They were in complete shock. The naked one was trembling and had peed on himself.
“Okay, boys. You’re going to answer a few questions, and if I don’t like the answers you give me, I’m going to let Blondie take over. We clear?”
Blondie stood behind Tanner spinning her big kitchen knife. The three nodded yes. Tanner poked the naked man in the chest with his rifle and said, “What Nikki said, was that true? You come out here to hunt game and people?”
The man looked up, terrified, and nodded. Vin kicked him in the stomach, knocking him onto his back, and said, “I said talk, goddamn it! Not nod your fucking head.”
The man was curled up in the fetal position. He slowly got back on his knees and said, “Yes, yes.”
“You do it every year?”
“Yes, yes, please. We can explain.”
Tanner kicked him in the stomach again. He fell backward and lay gagging on his side. Tanner poked the naked man in the chest with his rifle and said, “I’m going to call you Mr. Pee. Now, Mr. Pee, how long have you been out here? Is what Nikki said right?”
“Yeah. We’ve been out here almost four weeks. The tilt-rotor was going to pick us up next week.”
“Have any of you been sick since you’ve been here?”
The man looked up at Tanner, a blank look on his face. Tanner lifted his rifle to give the man a butt stroke and he said, “No, no. None of us have been sick. Why—”
Tanner popped him in the head with the butt of his rifle and said, “Answer my fucking questions. You don’t get to ask any. Do you know about the sickness?”
“What sickness are you talking about?”
“In the City. The disease in the City.”
“No, no, I don’t know anything about the disease in the City. When we come out here, it’s to get away from everything. We don’t have any contact with anyone until the tilt-rotor comes for us.”
Tanner looked up at the others in the room. “I believe him. Nikki, anything to make you think they know?”
“No, I don’t believe that they do. I believe they’ve been out here drinking, drugging, and hunting anything they could find.”
Mike stepped forward and said, “I’m sorry, boss, but I can’t…” Mike’s big fist smashed into the naked man’s face and knocked him sprawling.
“Okay. Matos, Mike, you stay with our friends. The rest of us are going to look for anything useful.”
Blondie, Tanner, and Nikki quickly began to search the cabin. Blondie was the first to call out. She was out back in the yard. “Tanner, you need to see this!”
Tanner walked out a side door and found Blondie standing in a small clearing behind the cabin. “What’s up?”
Blondie just nodded toward the ground in front of her. There was a row of ten crude graves, some quite old.
“They’ve been coming up here hunting…” Blondie couldn’t finish what she was going to say.
“Fuck,” Tanner muttered. These city fucks thought that anybody out here was the same as animals. They must have been coming out for years and hunting people as well as game. Tanner went cold inside. He would have to come up with a very interesting and painful way to punish these assholes.
“You all right?” Tanner asked.
“Yeah…yeah. I will be, but it never ceases to amaze me what people will do when there are no consequences. No laws.”
“Not everybody, Blondie.”
She looked over at him.
“Not us. Not you.”
Blondie nodded, her face hard. Tanner could only imagine the thoughts that were going through her mind. She had been a captive for years. Those emotions had to be very close to the surface.
“Head on back inside. While I think of what I’m going to do with our friends.”
Tanner wasn’t much on praying. He never found it worked for him or those he prayed for. But he did promise always to remember these nameless souls, and to him, that was just as good.
Nikki was the first to find something useful. She gave a yell from the kitchen. Tanner went in; she was standing in front of a cabinet, staring at its contents, her eyes wide with excitement.
“I’ve never seen so many spices in my life, and the refrigerator is full of food. And they’ve got real pots and pans. And real kitchen knives and spoons. Oh, my God.”
“Good. We’ll take it all. Begin loading up the ATVs outside with everything you can.”
“Hey, boss, look what I found!” Blondie called from a room off the kitchen. When Tanner stepped through the door, he was stopped in his tracks. It was a gun room with every type of civilian rifle you could imagine, one well-preserved M16, and boxes and boxes of ammunition for the weapons.
“Looks like we struck gold,” Vin said. “Like I told Nikki, load everything up on one of the ATVs outside as fast as you can.”
Tanner heard a commotion in the living room and rushed back in to see what was the matter. The naked man was crying in pain and had both hands covering his genitals. Mike was standing over him when Tanner came in. He looked up and Tanner said, “Go help Blondie and Nikki load the ATVs. I’ll take over here.”
Matos shoved the last man still kneeling to the floor and said, “Vin, what are we going to do with our friends here?”
“I’ve got plans for them that I think you’ll like.”
It took them close to an hour to load all of the guns, ammunition, food, spices, and even the men’s clothes onto the four ATVs. When they were all loaded and packed, Tanner walked over to the big water tank and opened a valve that began to drain it.
“What are you doing?” Nikki said.
“We are going to leave our friends in there naked and hog-tied, with no food, water, or clothing. From what Morgan and the others heard on the comm there will be no tilt-rotor to come for these guys. So they’ll find out if they can survive naked without any supplies. What do you think their cha
nces are?”
Nikki just smiled. “Not worth a shit,” she said. “I like it. It will take them a nice long time to die.”
“Yep, that’s what I thought,” Vin said. “Shooting them would be too quick.”
Blondie jumped out of the ATV she was driving and said, “Wait one. We forgot something.”
She walked a few steps away from the building and used her shotgun to blow a large hole in each of the solar panels.
“These boys don’t need any power, now do they?” she said with a smile.
Blondie jumped back into her vehicle and followed Tanner as he entered the tree line and began to work his way to the interstate.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Tanner and the others drove out of the tree line and turned onto the interstate. It was dark now, and the world was a cone of light from the ATV’s headlights. They had never moved at night before. Tanner had considered it too dangerous with the road conditions the way they were and not knowing where gang territories were. He had always moved during daylight hours.
Now he didn’t have that luxury. Their ATV convoy was making good time as they moved through the darkness with the rich haul from the cabin. Tanner was looking forward to a meal with the contents of the refrigerator and the spices Nikki had scrounged from the kitchen. He felt guilt about letting his stomach overcome the horror that had happened to Nikki.
This was a very different world, and it showed no signs of getting easier. They had gone about ten miles past where the convoy had stopped for the broken-down bus when Tanner began to slow down. He didn’t want to appear too quickly and get shot by one of his sentries. He came up over a rise in the interstate and could see far enough ahead to make out the lights of the convoy all harbored up.
He stopped, shut off the engine, and turned off the lights. The others in the convoy pulled up beside him. He noticed that Nikki had been riding with Mike, and he wondered if that was something starting. She had never shown interest in anyone up to this point.
“I’m going ahead and letting them know we’re coming. Nikki, can you drive my vehicle when I give the signal?”
“Yeah, I got it.”
Tanner moved through the darkness carefully, until he was near enough to call out to the sentries. “Friendlies coming in.”
“Is that you, boss?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you get her?”
“Yeah, we got her, and she’s all right.”
“They got her! They got her!” one of the sentries yelled.
Tanner pulled out the headlamp he always carried in his vest, turned it on, and began waving it to signal the others. He watched as they came rolling down the hill and into the middle of the camp. Tanner felt suddenly drained as he walked into the crowd surrounding the others.
Julia came running up to him and jumped into his arms. She whispered in his ear, “I was worried when it got dark. Are you all right?”
“Yeah, babe. I’m fine, just tired.”
Arms around each other’s waists, they walked to the second bus, where everyone was gathered around Nikki and the loot-filled ATVs.
Dr. Rule walked up and said, “God, what a haul. What in the world did you find out there?”
“Let me give some orders. Then I can tell you the whole story.”
Tanner walked up to the middle of the crowd and said, “Mike, you and Matos unload the weapons and ammunition. Distribute them to those who need them and give any ammunition to those that are low.”
“Got it, boss.”
“Cat, can you organize a working party to help Nikki unload all the kitchen equipment, food, and spices into the kitchen and help her get it stowed away?”
Nikki couldn’t contain herself. She held up a big chef’s knife. “Look at this! A real knife, spoon, and ladles. Pots! We’ve got real pots and spices! All the spices you could ask for in a real kitchen. Food! I got a refrigerator’s worth of food. Just wait until tomorrow! I’m going to fix a feast.”
Tanner smiled. Nikki seemed to have lost the memory of what had happened to her for a moment as she realized just what a change these tools were going to make for the whole community. He saw Kathy standing with her mother nearby. Vin said, “Nice job, Kathy. What you told us led us right to them. Could you and your mom organize a working party to go through the clothes we brought back and distribute them to anyone who needs them?”
Kathy ran up and kissed Tanner on the cheek. “Thank you.”
“We couldn’t have done it without you. Don’t forget to thank the others. Now can you do that?”
“Yes,” Kathy said, and she turned to her mother, who had already started going through the clothes.
Tanner saw Peter examining one of the ATVs and walked over to him. “What do you think, Peter? Can we use them somehow?”
“It would take several days to convert one or two over to bio, but it’s possible. Or we could just use gas until we reach the Mall.”
“How can we transport them? They don’t have enough gas to make it to the Mall, and I don’t want people riding in these without protection. They’d be too exposed on the interstate.”
Peter thought for a moment and then looked at the three buses. Tanner didn’t think there was room for them, as valuable as they could be.
“We might find space for two of them and strip the others for parts. Let me get my guys working on it.”
“Let me know if you need anything.”
“You got it,” Peter said, and he turned back to examining the vehicle.
Tanner walked over to where Dr. Rule and Julia were standing. Danielle was with them.
“Okay, now tell us where in heaven’s name you got all of this,” Rule said.
“The men who took Nikki were from the City. They had this small, off-the-grid cabin they came to every year to hunt. Apparently, they hunted whatever they found, including humans, since this is a Free Fire Zone.”
Tanner paused to let what he had said sink in. “Danielle, I questioned them closely and talked to Nikki. None of them had been sick, and I asked them about the sickness. They knew nothing. They said they come out here to get away from everything and had no contact with the City for close to a month. I thought long and hard about us being exposed, but I don’t think we were. They didn’t seem to know anything about the pandemic.”
Danielle thought for a long moment before she said, “I believe that it was a good call, given the situation. I don’t know the gestation period of the disease, but I don’t think it would take weeks for someone exposed to become symptomatic. I believe that we’re good.”
Tanner let out a sigh of relief. That had been in the back of his mind since they left the cabin.
“What did you do to them?” Julia asked hesitantly.
“We killed one who came at us with a gun when we took the house. We left the others hog-tied on the floor naked with no water, food, or power. From the information you got off the computer, I don’t think there will be a tilt-rotor out to pick them up.”
“They won’t last long,” Julia muttered.
“Yeah, but I couldn’t bring myself to execute them in cold blood. From what Nikki told us they had slapped her around and were just beginning to…well, you know. So I decided to let nature take its course.”
Julia looked at him carefully before she said, “Let’s get you something to eat. Are you hungry?”
“Starving.”
She led him over to the second bus to find him some food.
CHAPTER NINE
The next two days were event free, so they made good progress. Peter found a way to muscle two of the ATVs onto the top of the first and third buses after stripping the others for parts. He and the other mechanics stayed up all night to get that done. Nikki cooked the best meals Tanner had eaten in years with the food and spices she had found in the cabin.
Tanner had no idea how she stretched the food so far, but she did, and everyone was feeling better with their stomachs full of good food. The convoy now bristled with guns out eve
ry window. Every able-bodied man and woman was armed and had enough ammunition to fight off any ambush. Tanner had Cat, Mike, and Matos working with those new to being armed, teaching them how to use the weapons. Mike and Matos were riding in the second and third buses with some of the other new fighters so they could direct them through their first fight.
Tanner hoped they wouldn’t have another incident, but somehow he knew that there would always be something else down the road. He was standing in the gunner’s hatch in the first SUV when Johnny came roaring up on his dirt bike. Tanner had sent him ahead to scout the road for any trouble. He was waving an arm as he approached. Peter slowed them, then pulled it to a stop.
Johnny braked by the SUV and yelled up to Vin, “You’re not going to believe what’s up ahead!”
“Trouble?”
“I don’t know! You’ll have to take a look at this and decide.”
“What?”
“Trust me. I don’t know what to say about it. You need to come and see for yourself.”
“Okay.”
Tanner turned and yelled back to Cat, who was in the second SUV, “We’re going to scout ahead! You stay here. You’ve got command.”
“Check!” Cat yelled back.
Tanner pounded on the roof and yelled down to Peter, “Let’s go take a look!”
Terry Fallon, Kathy’s father, was riding shotgun with him and Peter. Tanner had put him in his car since Mike and Matos were babysitting the other new fighters. Terry wasn’t a fighter, and Tanner wanted to keep an eye on him.
Peter eased the SUV forward, and Tanner scanned the road ahead for what had spooked Johnny, who was riding beside them. They reached a small rise in the interstate, and what he saw made him pound on the roof for Peter to stop. In front of them was a large bridge over a river, and on that bridge was what looked like a small village. Along both sides were a series of shacks the whole length of the bridge. There was even a walkway that connected the eastbound bridge to the westbound side. Vin could see men, women, and children going about their daily routines on both bridges. A sophisticated roadblock lay between the SUV and the entrance to the bridge.