“No,” I said.
“Yes,” Young replied. “More like … news. But it can wait for later. Your solar expansion lets you run the lights and fridge now?” he asked, looking around the place.
“Only if we use LEDs,” I said. “And we mainly run the fridge for a few hours off a battery bank that gets recharged from the barn’s solar setup.”
“Interesting,” Young said. “Can your engineer Michael talk with our folks about this?”
“Sure thing,” I said, mildly interested in the news, but I was more interested in the story that Linda had come to tell us. All the gaps had been filled in, all secrets revealed. Nobody but Linda had known all of it, putting the last of the pieces together after I’d been captured.
“What is tonight then?” Mary asked Jessica.
“Story time. Save your questions, little one,” she said, kissing her on the head.
“Ok, but if it’s scary, warn me and I’ll cover my ears.”
“We will, now shhhhh,” I whispered.
Grandma poured coffee out of a carafe she’d been filling, with more being made on the wood stove.
“Some of it you might not understand,” Linda said, “and some of it is about your mother.” She took a sip of coffee Grandma had poured. “But let me tell the story all the way through, ok?”
“I’ll be good,” Mary assured them.
Liz Flagg had been a wild child since she’d been born. She was a looker, and Grandpa and Grandma Flagg had to chase the boys away from her since she turned twelve. She never looked her age nor acted like it. At age fifteen, Grandma and Grandpa allowed her to go out with a couple of friends. They had no idea that it was two boys, brothers as it turned out, instead of a double date with her best friend Sally.
Those boys were older, but it wasn’t highly unusual in the South for young ladies to marry at age sixteen or seventeen. Courtship, courting, dating… It had to happen at some point, and she had promised there’d be chaperones. There hadn’t been. Grandpa Flagg would have been furious with her if she hadn’t come home with bloodstains down the insides of her legs, barely able to walk from the pain and the force of the tears.
She couldn’t say sorry enough, and every time she apologized, her father became even more furious. Sheriff Jackson’s father had been the sheriff at the time, and he was called out to the farm. He’d warned them that it might turn into a he said, she said, but he was going to investigate. The problem was the boys were the son of a local politician and owner of a nearby bank in another town. He’d have money and power to fight the charges if they could even be brought.
Liz Flagg just wanted this to be over with. She wanted an escape. She wasn’t even sure she wanted there to be a trial. Grandpa Flagg, on the other hand, knew there’d be no trial. He’d put on his canvass ghillie suit and made his way over to the farm the boys’ father owned. With the same gun Wes recovered from the bunker, he shot both boys from ambush and dragged them away to be buried on the family property.
The sheriff had been alerted that the boys had suddenly gone missing, after missing work, and he investigated. While walking the property, he found what had looked like a couple of areas where blood had soaked into the ground, but had been mostly rinsed away by the previous night’s solid rain. There were no tracks in and out, and the boys’ trucks were there, at the farm.
No sign of them had been found there or elsewhere. With a heavy heart, the sheriff went back to the Flagg homestead to question Bud. There he’d found both of them hovering over Liz. She was lying on the family couch, a heavy quilt under her, being examined by a local doctor. Liz had an infection as a result of the abuse she’d gotten from the two boys, and the doc had told the sheriff that nobody had hardly left the girl’s side in days.
Eventually, the sheriff pulled Bud aside and asked him if he’d seen the banker’s boys. Bud said no, but if he did, he planned on killing them. Without another word, the sheriff left, feeling the man’s anger was still on the rise. A man planning on killing two boys who were already missing or dead wasn’t the man he was looking for, or if there was ever justification for an outright murder, this might have been it. The later part had only been mentioned aloud once to his son as a possibility, and only on a night in the late years of his life when he’d drank too much. The old sheriff thought it likely that they’d run off rather than face Flagg’s wrath, which local legend had said, was a terrible thing.
Time had passed, and an almost adult Liz had moved on from the horror of the summer of her fifteenth year. Wanting a fresh break, she went out west to make her way as a young adult woman. Hollywood! What a thought it had been for her. She was young, beautiful, and just wild enough and wise enough in her ways she thought she’d had a great opportunity. It was in California where she’d fallen for a soldier who’d been cast to play a part in a movie. He was no actor, though. He was the real deal.
When the movie was over, they were dating, and soon Larry Killion had formed KGR, a private security / private military contracting business. In the beginning he’d worked security in South America for the Columbian cartels, sometimes somebody who carried out impossible missions to take out the competition. He made terrible enemies and picked up some bad vices. As a result, so did his wife. Larry cleaned himself up after a year, and when he found out his love was pregnant, he sent her home so he could make sure she and the baby would be safe. She thought that secret had been hers alone, but he’d known.
Liz had come home and cleaned herself up with the love and faith that her parents, Wes’ grandparents, had given her. Wes was born, and Liz was happy. She was torn, though; the man she’d loved lived a world away, and although she understood why he needed her gone, she was angry for being sent away. He was missing out on things, like his son. Her anger turned into a bitterness before it was resentment. It didn’t take much for Grandpa’s best friend to take advantage of the situation. It really complicated things, because Les was Larry’s point man for smuggling black market weapons and had been for more than a decade.
“You need to go. If your father ever finds out, he’ll kill Lester,” Grandma remembered saying.
So, she left. Les had no idea that Liz had been pregnant. He had no idea that Emily had been his daughter, that Mary was his granddaughter. All he knew was that Liz’s daughter had turned on all of them when it counted the most. But that was getting ahead of the story.
Les kept in contact with Larry, who now went by Spider and rode Harleys. He’d killed men on every major continent and even calling a man like that a friend, it had a wicked feeling to Les. But not so wicked that he ever wanted to stop. He’d made his deal with the devil and kept his word until his dying day. If anything had ever happened apocalyptic style, Pike County, Arkansas would become their new seat of power.
With enough labor working the farm fields, they had an old volcanic caldera full of precious gemstones, diamonds to mine on a large scale for when society started pulling themselves back together. They would have a large jumpstart on natural resources and wealth. There wasn’t anything they wouldn’t do to ensure they came out of the apocalypse richer than they had gone in, and their lusts were such that when it happened, they couldn’t be sated.
At some point, Emily had met her husband, a man who lived and worked in the same area that her father liked to frequent. They fell in love, and Mary was a result of that marriage. To her horror, the abuse she suffered at the hands of Larry growing up couldn’t be escaped in marriage. Her husband was even more of a sadist and a masochist. She had been planning on taking her husband hunting and killing him, leaving Mary with her sisters-in-law, but then the power went out. To her amused shock, the man who had saved her from her husband had been her half-brother. Her husband had died trying to protect the secret… The only other man in the area who knew what was coming was Lester.
After she’d been captured by Lance and Larry’s men, she’d kept quiet about her identity, waiting until she could get her chance to either escape, kill her way out, or pull
rank. Nobody was going to believe her, and she had her daughter to shield. Luckily, her half-brother had come in and saved her. Again. She’d wished she could have killed Les, but her father, having grown quite mad, had ordered her to remain silent and work as a double agent, or he’d kill her mother.
Liz had fallen back into drugs before the solar storm, and had been going to rehab and taking medication to help her stay off heroin. When the power went out, all the pharmacies and hospitals in the area had been raided, some by Spider’s men. It wasn’t enough, though, not with the trucks no longer delivering things. Surprisingly, it had become easier to find drugs than it had been finding her medications.
She’d mentioned to Larry once that Wes had gone to school as a chemist, and he’d recalled that as she suffered withdrawals one night. Larry was disgusted with his wife, but he allowed her to live. He’d have no problem bedding other women, whether or not they wanted him to, and even forced that information on his wife. Liz had been more abused than her daughter and lived most of her adult life with Killion in a drugged stupor. As much as he had grown to hate Liz, he still loved her in his own way, and that was when he decided to bring Wes into the family business. For both personal and professional reasons.
Killion had been free to abuse Emily as well as train her. He had either the best of the best, or the worst of the worst depending on who you asked, as her mentors and trainers. Many of her tutors had been former intelligence agents, and although the petite woman had never served the country in uniform, she’d been crafted and molded to be used as a weapon. Killion himself hadn’t known of Emily’s husband’s abuse at first, and when he found out he’d ordered Emily to dispose of him, as much to assuage his territorialism, and the threat her breaking would cause, to himself and to the plan.
Conflicted after almost losing her daughter, Emily for the first time, truly lost it. Most of her craziness had been a carefully crafted mask. She was off for sure, but she hadn’t been anywhere near the level folks thought she was, until the night Wes had to sedate her. She’d gone into a blissful sleep wondering if this was why her mother loved drugs. All thoughts of responsibilities and worries just went away with a push of a plunger.
She’d awoken to horror as she’d realized how badly she’d hurt Wes, and even worse, how she’d terrified her daughter. She’d also been refusing to check in and had finally been confronted by Les about it. Do it, or her mom was on the chopping block. So she did what her mother had done. She’d left her child in the care of those who loved her, so she could protect her. She had been looking for her sisters-in-law on her way to confront her father when she’d run into Monty.
He'd been a counter-intelligence contractor who’d worked with Larry a time or two, and had trained Emily for a month on his specialty. He’d declined Killion’s offer to join the KGR and their doomsday cult. He had been forming his own small team. Working within the US Government, they eventually got tasked to Army, Marine, and Guard units. They were the insiders. The watchers who watched our side to make sure we were always on the side of angels.
For Monty to run across Lt. Col. Linda Carpenter, a woman he’d heard about, not only once, but again after the attack on the homestead, he figured the higher authority, not the ones in his chain of command, were talking to him. Linda provided his team with intel on Henry’s camp after the final raid, and after watching from afar as Killion’s men licked their wounds from the immediate counter attack, they’d gone to war again. With good intel and a superior and overwhelming amount of firepower, manpower and force, they’d killed and crushed any and all who did not immediately surrender.
Henry’s escape tunnel had been a rumor in Linda’s mind, but the team had been ten minutes too late in finding it when Les disappeared. They were searching for it still when Raider’s bark had signaled them. Yaeger and Diesel had run forward, helping drag Wes and Emily’s corpse out of the tunnel, hacking, throwing up, and a little shell shocked from being in a confined place when the mortar hit. Neither required long-term treatment, and arrangements were made to get everyone back to the homestead.
The stories were split between Linda, Young, Sheriff Jackson and Grandma. Mary had grown bored and was flipping pages of a book, but her eyes were half shut, and I could see she was sleepy from the heat of the wood stove.
“That answers a lot of gaps. How did you find out about my daughter’s years? When she wasn’t with me?” Grandma asked Linda.
“When we went searching for Liz, we found her things in her room. She had a journal,” Linda said, pulling a small leather bound book out of her pack and handed it to Grandma. “We found it the same time we went looking for her. I’m sorry.”
“My daughter… I wish I could have been the one who killed those boys,” Grandma said, tears coming from her eyes. “It all happened after they did what they did.”
“You don’t want to be the one, Grandma,” I said softly.
Everyone turned to look at me.
“I had a conversation with Lance a while back—”
“I’m still not sure you made the right decision there,” Grandma snapped back at me.
“Listen,” I said, holding both palms up, “we were talking about our pasts. He asked me for judgment.”
“That’s when you had the gun between his eyes?” Jessica asked me.
“Yes,” I answered. “And right then, I realized … I had done more and worse. Who was I to judge? Depending on the outcome, we can be our own worst villains in any story. It depends on perspective. I’ve killed men without hesitation. For a long time it bugged me, then it didn’t, then it does. What I’m saying, is you don’t want to have to be like that. I had a dream once, where everybody I’d killed was there. So many fathers and husbands,” I said, not meeting Jess’ gaze, “and in the dream they told me that to beat my enemies, I’d have to become like them. Or one of them.”
I took a long breath and saw Linda sitting there, her jaw hanging down, gaping at my words.
“And in a way, I had. Sure, they had been my enemies. I gassed them and shot them as they fled for their lives. But that’s my story—they were my enemies. In their story, I was their enemy, who had killed and tortured and executed many on their side. They wanted me dead; they wanted to get me. Much the same way that I—”
“Stop!” Sheriff Jackson said, smacking the table so hard that everybody’s coffee cups rattled.
I looked over at him, confused.
“I’ve heard you talking about man’s laws and God’s laws a lot the last month or two. Let me tell you something, kiddo.” He cleared his throat and took a sip. “A man isn’t judged only by his actions. In either man’s law or God’s. He’s also judged by his intent. You want to lay all the blame at your feet, feel free. None of us can talk you out of it, but I’m here to tell you, it’s bullshit.” He took another sip before going on. “You never intended on any innocent getting killed. You pulled together a rag tag group of refugees, police, former military, mothers, cousins, kids and all manner of folks. Your intentions were to help others. Period. Your intent is the reason why I, the sheriff of Pike County, the highest elected lawman in the area, live here and follow your guidance. You have a good track record.”
“And he’s got a cute butt,” Jessica said, giggling.
“Butts are stinky,” Mary shot back.
“Why are we talking about my… Never mind, what the what?” I asked, looking at everybody.
“Pretty much what they said,” said Linda, “A community of any size has to have a leader. You’re a natural, and if I thought your “intent”,” she said with finger quotes, “wasn’t pure, I’d kick your ass and take over myself.”
One of the dogs started barking in the next room. I started to get up, but Grandma waved me off.
“Hold the door for the mutts, would you?” she asked Young, who was closest to the door.
“Sure thing,” Young said as Grandma headed to my bedroom to let the three beasts out.
“What I don’t get,” I said to
Young, “is that fight with Jessica. Were you testing her?” I asked.
“No, I just messed up. Lost my cool in the heat of the moment and forgot the primary mission for a minute.”
“Sorry about siccing the dogs on you,” I said, a smile on my face.
“But not for punching me?” he asked.
“No, not really sorry about that,” I told him. “But I don’t think you’d do that again anyway.”
“I wouldn’t.” He opened the door as three streaks of fur made a beeline for outside.
When the door was closed it was silent a moment, and I heard soft snores. Grandma walked in and took her seat and motioned to Jessica’s side. I looked and saw Mary snoring softly. When I looked back up, I met Sheriff Jackson’s eyes.
“Intent?” I asked him, my voice hitching.
“Yes,” he said softly. “Any and all of that guilt you’re feeling … judge yourself. What was your intent? Has your intent ever been for pure evil?”
I felt the tears start. I wasn’t sobbing, but I was having trouble seeing with unshed tears.
“No,” I told him, “unless we’re talking about Jimmy or Lester. Those two I just killed because I wanted to.”
“But that’s not a fair assessment,” Jessica said. “Jimmy was already going to die, and Lester might have, but he ended it himself. You didn’t slice his throat; he did.”
“I…” I was crying now, the sobs coming in slowly, building.
One of the dogs pawed the door, and Young opened it. Through a blur of tears I saw the three dogs come in, shaking the snow off their coats. Raider approached me and jumped up, laying across mine and Jessica’s laps. She let out a little oof sound when he did, but she put her arm around him, petting him softly. Raider raised his head up and licked my neck, then buried his head in my lap until I was petting him.
“It can’t be that easy,” I said softly.
“The truth often is,” Grandma said. “Now, you gonna boo-hoo all night, or we gonna get the jars out and make some lemonade?”
Still Surviving (Book 5): Dark Secrets: Page 17