by Ben Brown
Callum stood suddenly. A rage like he had never felt before filled him. Tilly looked up at him, and he saw how truly heartbroken she was. “Was your baby born with defects?” he asked as calmly as he could.
“My little girl had no eyes.” She began to weep uncontrollably. “She were my Pa’s baby too, but he just threw her to those things like she meant nothing to him. I hate that man; I hate him with every piece of my heart.”
For more than half an hour, all Tilly could do was cry. The three Rangers watched her, but none said a word. Anderson simply held her hand. Finally, her weeping subsided, and she struggled on.
“Now they don’t even wait to see if the babies are born ruined, they just feed ‘em to the Lingerers anyway. Pa says it’s the End of Days, and all new born babes must die to avoid going to hell. Truth is, he’s created hell, and he’s the devil in charge.”
“How many men does he have?” Callum asked softly.
“Around thirty to fifty. It’s hard to say for sure because they come and go so much. There are only fifteen women now, and they’re raped and beaten daily. He keeps the women locked in the barn across from the Lingerers’ pens. He keeps ‘em there to remind them of where the babies will end up. Over half the women are pregnant.”
“Can you give us a detailed layout of the encampment?” La Roux asked.
“Yep.”
The Cajun nodded and asked another question. “Are they well-armed?”
“Mostly muskets and bows, but they do have some pistols and rifles too.”
La Roux nodded again. “I want you to describe the whole encampment to us, especially were the women are held. Tell us the quickest route there, and how long it’ll take us to get there on foot.”
For the next hour, Tilly drew plans of her old prison in the dirt. As they only had the light of the fire to illuminate her illustrations, the three Rangers huddled close. She left nothing out. She told them of the quickest, safest route to the camp, plus what to expect when they got there. She told them of the hundred or more Lingerers held in pens dotted around the camp. She warned that all the undead now had the taste of blood, and that her pa had told all the men under his command to release them if ever an attack was mounted on the camp. This added an extra level of risk to their mission, but not one they had not faced before. Finally, she described her father’s appearance in great detail. When found, he would bear the full wrath of the Rangers.
La Roux stood and stretched his back. “We leave at first light. Anderson, you’ll take Tilly and the baby down the mountain. Me and Callum will deal with the Maxwell clan.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Anderson protested. “You’ll be heavily outnumbered, so you’ll need all the fire power you can get.”
“True,” the Cajun said as he twisted side to side. “But do you want Tilly or the baby falling back into their hands? Whether there’s two or three of us really won’t make much difference, but I know I want that little woman and that child well out of harm’s way when the bullets start flying.”
Anderson looked at the tired woman sat beside him. She looked just about spent. “Yer right,” he said, “I’ll take them to Fort Miles and then I’ll head back up here with a couple of squads of men. I won’t be back for over a week … maybe as much as ten days. Will you and Callum be alright ‘til then?”
“We’ll have to be,” La Roux said as he undid his bedroll. “Callum, you take first watch. Anderson, you next. I’ll take last watch. Tomorrow’s going to be a big day for all of us, so let’s all get some sleep.”
Tilly had already laid down beside her dead sister’s baby. Snoring quietly, she finally seemed at peace. Anderson looked at her and said. “I wish I could be there to put a bullet in her pa’s head.”
“I ain’t going to waist a bullet on him,” Callum uttered as he settled on a nearby rock and began his watch.
Both Anderson and La Roux looked in his direction.
“Boy, you scare me at times,” La Roux said as he laid down. “In fact, you scare me more than any Lingerer.”
Callum’s cold eyes turned in the Cajun’s direction. “Why?”
The Cajun let out a yawn, then said, “The undead don’t know what they’re doing, but you do. You do things that make my blood run cold. Do you know why my blood runs cold, Callum?”
Callum considered La Roux’s question. “No, I have no idea.”
“There’s your answer, boy. You don’t realize how good a killing machine you are, or how brutal you can be. When you cut that fella’s throat earlier today, you did it with the same unfeeling coldness of a Lingerer. You could’ve just killed him, but that weren’t good enough for you. Now I’m not saying the sonofabitch didn’t deserve it, but that’s a whole different matter.”
Callum’s brow furrowed. “What are you trying to say?”
La Roux turned his head in Callum’s direction and raised himself up on one elbow. “Yer a human, Callum, not a Lingerer, so don’t act like one. If someone deserves to die, then just kill ‘em, don’t torture ‘em. If you keep doing things like you did earlier, then you’ve missed the point of being a Ranger. We’re trying to return humanity to the badlands. We can only do that by being better than those we punish. We shouldn’t go beyond that mandate; otherwise we’re no better than ‘em.”
Callum stared off into the night and allowed La Roux’s words to sink in. “Yer right, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, be better.”
Chapter 6
After Callum’s watch was over, he joined the others sleeping by the fire, but sleep alluded him for quite some time. La Roux’s words had bothered him. He had always believed himself to be just and fair, but others clearly saw him as something else. He knew he could do things others would not, he also knew this was because he had something missing in his makeup. Some would call it a heart, but Callum thought calling the ability to feel loss, love, and remorse, nothing more than heart, was too simplistic. What he lacked had nothing to do with the heart, and everything to do with the mind.
In recent years, a new and relatively obscure field of medicine had come to his attention. Psychiatric medicine now dealt with more than just locking away the insane. It not only tried to diagnose different disorders, but it tried to treat them. In his spare time, Callum had read as much as he could on the subject, and as a result of his extensive reading, he had come to the conclusion he suffered from some kind of mind disorder.
How else could he explain his disconnect from those around him. He had once thought his disconnected nature a good thing. If he could no longer feel the pain of loss and love, then it would make it easier for him to do his job. But was he allowing his disconnected emotional state to get the better of him? Was he turning into as much of a monster as the Lingerers?
His mind turned to his family, and especially his father. Jon Wentworth was the finest man Callum had ever known. He knew most sons’ felt that way about their fathers, but in his case, others felt the same as he. Everyone in Hope Cove knew Jon Wentworth to be a good man. Not only that, he was loving and kind to his wife and children, which was something of a rarity in Hope Cove. How would his father view his actions? Would he see them as the acts of a good man? Somehow, Callum doubted it. La Roux was right. He was allowing brutality to become his favorite weapon.
After hours of wakeful contemplation, Callum finally slipped into a deep slumber—and like every other night since the death of his dog, Hector—Callum slept with dreams of death and blood. However, his damaged mind somehow controlled the harrowing effects of the dreams, and simply shutdown his fatigued body so it could rest.
To him, as with food and drink, sleep had become nothing more than an annoying part of life. It brought him neither pleasure nor discomfort. It was just something the body needed to keep it functioning, so he slept when sleep was needed, and ate when food was needed. To him, his body was nothing more than a machine that needed fuel and maintenance.
***
Callum woke to the sound of a p
an being placed on the fire. Tilly looked over at him and smiled.
“Would ya like some bacon before you head out?” she asked as she pulled a lump of smoked meat from a sack.
He nodded. “Yes please.” He stood and looked out at the river. “Tilly….” She looked up at him. “…I’m sorry for treating your brother so badly.”
She followed his gaze to the river. “That man stopped being my brother the first time he raped me.”
Callum crouched beside her. “What I did … did it upset you?”
She looked at the pan of sizzling meat. “Well, yes, a little. I’ve seen a lot of awful things over the past few years, but they were always committed by bad people. You ain’t bad, Callum, but what you did was. It frightened me in the same way my Pa frightens me.” She looked at him. “Callum, as one who has suffered, I can see the same suffering in others. I can tell you’ve suffered greatly, maybe more than most, but don’t let the suffering turn you into something ya will later despise. Yer a good man who is starting to stray down the wrong path, but you still have time to turn back. Being a Ranger is honorable; don’t dishonor it by becoming like those you hunt.”
Callum looked away, but her hand found his. She squeezed it, and he nodded. “Thank you, Tilly. Yer a gift when I needed it the most.” He looked back at her. “My sister’s name was Tilly, and I feel like I’m speaking to her when I speak to you.”
She leaned forward and kissed his cheek. “I’m guessing she’s one of the ones you’ve lost. Try to make her proud.”
Then something happened that had not happened in many years, a single tear rolled from his eye. “I’ll try,” he said in a horse whisper.
Callum stood and walked into the river. La Roux, who had been listening to Tilly and Callum’s exchange, stood. He watched on in worried silence as Callum moved deeper into the river. Finally, he stopped and pulled his knife, then he reached below the surface and pulled up the head of the Lingerer he had dragged there the day before. The creature gnashed and tried to bite him, but Callum held it at bay with ease. Then, after a short prayer, Callum drove his knife through the creature’s eye.
Callum dropped the dead thing back into the water and started wading rapidly toward shore. Once ashore, he headed back to Tilly and stood before her, dripping.
“I’m sorry for upsetting ya with the way I treated yer brother. He deserved to die, but he didn’t deserve what I did to him … no one deserves that. I promise ya that I’ll remember to be better than those I pursue, and I will never sink that low again.”
Tilly rose and slowly moved toward him. For several moments, she simply stood there, just staring at him, but then she embraced him.
“Yer sister would be proud,” she whispered as her mouth drew close to his ear.
La Roux moved to Callum’s side, and he slapped him on the back. “Come on,” the Cajun said as a smile lit his face. “We have a long way to go, so we best be getting on the move. Once we’ve eaten, we’re heading out.”
With breakfast finished, and the farewells out of the way, the group broke into two. With Anderson and Tilly heading for relative safety, Callum and La Roux headed in to danger.
* * *
La Roux and Callum walked in silence for close to three hours, but finally La Roux broke the quiet.
“Why do you never talk about your family?”
Callum stopped in his tracks and turned to look at the Cajun. The two had been alone many times, but La Roux had never broached this topic before.
“In all honesty, I only remember small snippets of my life before the Lingering.” Callum knew this was not the entire truth, but it was close. “I remember what my family looked like, and I remember what kind of people they were, but I remember very little of my life with ‘em. I know they were good people, and I know that after the outbreak my father died trying to find my mother and sister. I remember fighting alongside him.” Callum stared at the ground. “I also remember how helpless I felt.” He looked back to La Roux. “I don’t feel helpless anymore.”
La Roux looked at him, then nodded slowly. “We’ve all lost people to the Lingering, and we all react differently to the loss. Eight years ago I lost my wife to ‘em, and that’s why I joined the Rangers.”
Callum felt shocked by La Roux’s admission. In all their missions together, the Cajun had never mentioned being married.
“I’m sorry … how did it happen?”
La Roux sighed and looked up the track on which they now walked. “She simply contracted the disease somewhere. She weren’t bit, and we’d never even seen one of the undead. She used to work at the town store, so I guess someone carrying the disease must’ve given it to her. Anyway, she died and I joined up two days later.”
“How old was she?”
“Let me see,” the Cajun said as he stared at the sky. “She would’ve been thirty-two this year, which means she were twenty-four when she died. She was one of the first to be shipped away, and I still regret letting ‘em take her. I should’ve ended her suffering, but I was too grief stricken to think straight. What I’m trying to say is we are all survivors of loss, but it’s how we deal with that loss that matters. I finally think yer going to handle your loss in the right way.”
The big Cajun headed off and Callum just trailed him with his eyes. Finally, he followed, head bowed in contemplation. This mission was getting harder by the minute, not because of any physical threat, but because it was making him look at himself, and Callum didn’t like what he saw.
Chapter 7
By the time Callum and La Roux reached the edge of the Maxwell’s encampment, dusk was falling. They sat on an outcrop of rocks perched high above the ragtag collection of huts and tents. Below them, men milled about, but they could see neither women nor Lingerers.
Callum pointed to the settlement below. “There’s the barn where the women are kept,” he said in a hushed tone.
La Roux looked toward where Callum pointed and nodded. “There’s only two fellas guarding ‘em, which is good for us. I say we wait ‘til the middle of the night and then we head down there and free the women. We’ll need to make sure we leave ‘em somewhere safe before we head back to sort out the rest of ‘em.”
Callum hunkered down behind the rock. “If we free the women, then we tip our hand. They’ll be looking for us.”
“I ain’t hitting that place while the women are still there.”
Callum nodded. “Alright. It shouldn’t be too hard to get the women out. After all, those guards hardly seem like they’re sharp.”
La Roux stifled a laugh. “It’s a full moon for the next few nights, so we should at least have a little light to work with. Of course, it also means we’ll be easier to see, but you can’t have everything.”
Callum pulled on a pair of leather gloves and peered over the rock again. “We could leave ‘em with a little present as we leave.”
“Like what?”
“While you lead the women out of the camp, I’ll let loose some of the undead. It should cause enough confusion to cover our tracks.”
“Sounds good to me.”
* * *
With the moon at the zenith of its arc over the Earth, the two Rangers positioned themselves either side of the barn holding the women. Callum drew his knife and let out a noise resembling an owl. A second later, a hoot from the opposite side of the barn indicated it was time to move. Callum leaped into action. Soundlessly, he darted to the front of the barn. La Roux was already there, and had made short work of his guard. The man assigned to Callum pointed his gun at the big Cajun, but Callum took him before he could fire. With a hand covering the guard’s mouth, Callum slit the man’s throat and lowered him to the dirt. La Roux moved to the barn’s large doors, and found them locked with a piece of wood used as a crossbar. He lifted the wood from its metal restraints and laid it on the ground. As quietly as he could, La Roux pulled open the doors and peered inside.
Fifteen pairs of eyes stared back at him, but not one of the women made a so
und. “We’re here to help,” he whispered, “Tilly sent us.”
On hearing the name, ‘Tilly’, the women in the barn began to whisper among themselves.
“Keep the noise down,” La Roux whispered as he peered over his shoulder. “We have to go.”
A woman who looked remarkably like Tilly stepped forward. “She be my sister, Tilly I mean. Is she safe?”
La Roux nodded. “Yes, now come on.”
The woman turned back into the darkened barn and gestured for her fellow prisoners to move. La Roux looked toward Callum and nodded. The young Ranger needed no further instruction. Instead, he simply bolted off toward the closest pen housing the Lingerers.
As Callum drew closer to the Lingerer’s pen, he could hear their groaning. Clearly, the smell of the blood from the two men he and La Roux had just killed excited them. Several started to throw themselves at gates that looked far to flimsy to hold them back. He peered through the slatted walls of the enclosure and saw it contained around thirty undead, all of whom were now getting more and more agitated.
He looked around, but saw no one guarding the pen. If he released the creatures now, they would more than likely head off in search of not only the blood, but the women too. He had to wait a little longer; otherwise, he could end up killing those he was trying to save. He crouched and kept an eye on his surroundings. Several minutes passed, and now the noise from the undead had grown too loud to ignore. It was time to release them.