After a while, he went back to the HumVee. If nothing else, the sign had reinforced what the medallion wearers said, and his experience here confirmed that he was in an area where there were some very dangerous people prowling around.
He looked down at Reb.
“Hey, buddy,” he said, “we got some nuts around here. And not the kind squirrels gather.”
Reb wagged his tail rapidly in affirmation.
Jim put the HumVee in gear and moved forward. For a moment, he thought about turning around and heading back, but just as quickly realized that it was too late for that. The medallion wearers had told him if he went through the barricade he was on a one-way trip.
Jim hoped again that he didn’t meet anyone. The last thing he wanted was some firefight with nutcases. Just leave me alone, he thought, and I’ll leave you alone.
But another thing Jim knew was that life doesn’t care what an individual wants, it just plays out the way it wishes. A miles down the road as he rounded yet another curve he got another surprise, this one even worse than the barricade and the sign. Hanging from the lowest branch of an oak tree was a dead person.
He drove close to it. It looked like a woman—the body had long blond hair—and she had large breasts. Her thick tongue was protruding from her lips, her eyes were bulging, weird looking like people with the plague because the pupils were fixed and dilated, and her body was obviously bloated around the belly and feces and urine had collected in a pool beneath her bloody bare feet, two feet off the ground. Her legs and arms were cut and bruised. And she stunk. Around her neck was hung a crudely lettered sign: BELIEVER.
Jim got out of the vehicle, first shoving the Glock in his pocket, and walked around the body. He looked at its shape . . . and then something hit him in a profoundly sad way. The body was not bloated by death alone. The woman had been pregnant.
“God Almighty,” Jim said out loud. “God Almighty.”
No way, he thought, was he going to leave her like this. It was going to be a messy, stomach-churning job but he was going to bury her, albeit in a shallow grave. All he had to do was get up high enough so he could cut her free. Standing on the HumVee would allow him to do that easily. And he also had to cover himself or dress in some sort of protective gear, or wrap her, so that the oozings from her body would not get on him. Yes, it was not, he thought, going to be a pleasant task.
He was about to pull the HumVee next to the woman, calculating at the same time where he might bury here, when he heard a sound in the distance, like thunder. He realized it was approaching from the road to his right.
He had been so preoccupied with the woman that he had not really examined the area. Now he did, because instinct had told him to get away from that sound as quickly as he could. Directly across from the end of the road and set back somewhat was an ordinary-looking residence with beige vinyl siding, a brown asphalt shingle roof, a patch of grass in front, bushes lined up all around it, and all set on a crawl-space type of foundation. And—all important—a backyard.
Quickly, he drove the HumVee up a driveway that flanked the left side of the house and then pulled it around to the back. Fortunately, there was no deck, just grass.
Room for the HumVee. He turned it off, then rubbed Reb on the side of the head and said, “Be quiet, boy.”
Reb looked at him, Jim swore, as if he understood. He didn’t even shake his head in response. This would be an acid test.
He grabbed the Glock, the AK-47, and the Thompson submachine gun, which were under the driver’s-side seat, and moving in a half crouch, went up along the right side of the building, then set himself up at the corner behind a couple of thick holly bushes. He had a clear view of the entire scene. He placed the Thompson on the ground and checked the AK-47. The clip was firmly in place, safety off. The Glock was shoved down into his back pocket.
A fleeting thought. He was a hell of a shot. In fact—and he was legend in his hometown for this—once he squeezed off a round at an animal he sighted, he never missed.
A thought. Now he was about to find out again just how good he was with automatic weapons. Well, he had done pretty well with the Thompson when with Raines.
Abruptly, the scene was filled with smoke, dust, and noise as vehicles emerged from the woods. One by one they stopped, and before the engines were turned off, people—or more specifically, uniformed people—were starting to pour out of them.
There were five vehicles in all, three jeeps, and two SUVs. All were painted dull flat black and had an insignia painted on the doors, the letter R with a red lightning bolt through it.
All of the people were dressed in gray uniforms, the kind that convicts wore, and all wore soft gray caps and were armed to the teeth. He counted twenty people—or soldiers. Most brandished AK-47s. By everything human it should have been a nerve-racking sight for one man. But, as was usual in hazardous situations, Jim found himself getting calmer, able to think as clearly as if he were standing in the middle of a river trying to hook a nice big walleye.
“Hey,” one of the people said, “look who’s still hanging around!”
Jim blinked. He felt something cold and hard, and had a momentary urge to shoot the wise guy right in the mouth. No, he told himself, not yet.
Some of the other people laughed, but a tall man with a very deep voice was all business. He acted as if he had not heard the joke at all.
“Let’s find that other bitch,” he said to no one in particular. “You sure you seen her around here?”
“I’m sure,” one of the people, a man, replied. “She was right here not more than half an hour ago.”
“Anyone else with her?” Deep Voice said.
“I didn’t see nobody else.”
“We’ll search that house for her,” Deep Voice said, pointing with an AK-47 in Jim’s direction. “When we find her, don’t shoot her. Take her alive. I want to crucify the bitch as an example to all of them that followed her and her pa.”
Crucify! Jim thought. Where am I! Caught up in some time warp going back two thousand years? What in the hell is going on here?
That silent question was answered in the next heartbeat when one of the women, the bustier of the two, said: “Killing Beverly will go a long way toward dropping this God crap that’s springing up around here unless they want to die for their beliefs.”
God crap? Jim thought. God crap!
Jim waited, calm and clear. He knew a lot of people were close to dying, and maybe him as well. But it didn’t bother him. Death was an abstract thought. If he died, he died. So be it. Certain things you had to do in life, and if you didn’t you were dead anyway.
He raised the Kalashnikov. If someone had taken his pulse at that moment it would be about fifty-five.
Then Deep Voice motioned forward with his arm and the entire group started to saunter slowly toward the house.
It occurred to Jim that he might pop up and tell them to freeze. But then what? An instinct told him that they then would spend their time looking for him to drop his guard for a millisecond so they could blow him away.
Then a question occurred to him: how would Ben Raines handle it? Jim knew, and in the same mental breath, as it were, he knew the die was cast. These were killers and if he didn’t kill them they would kill him. It was just a matter of them getting close enough. He would unload on them from the bushes. He would start firing from the left, then sweep back to the right Hopefully the last man would discover where the firing was coming from just as he died.
If he needed more firepower, he would use the Thompson.
He was ready. They marched slowly toward him.
Then, abruptly, he heard a noise to his left that raised the hair on his neck. He looked. There, on her hands and knees under the crawl space, was a young woman. She looked thoroughly spooked.
“Please,” she whispered.
“Be quiet, “Jim barely whispered back, putting his finger on his mouth.
“If they catch me they’ll kill me and you.”
“I mean it,” the young woman persisted.
“Shut up! If you don’t, we’re going to have problems for sure.”
Without the element of surprise, he thought, he would have very big problems.
The woman, Jim guessed, keeping his eye on the group advancing toward him, was the Beverly the group was looking to nail to a cross. She slipped back under the house and out of sight. Jim made a motion with his hand that said stay there. He got a sense that Beverly didn’t need to be told again.
Jim drew a bead on the person to the far left, which was a woman.
He took a deep breath and then held his sights on her as still as a stone and slowly started to squeeze the trigger. He was less than a millisecond from all hell breaking loose when the crackle of a walkie-talkie made him release the pressure. Deep Voice stopped as if frozen and so did everyone else. Deep Voice picked a walkie-talkie off his belt and put it on his ear and said, “Unit Five.”
Deep Voice listened for ten seconds. Then: “They want us back at the compound. Let’s go.”
Jim had not lowered his rifle. Whatever, he thought.
“What about the bitch?” one of the men asked. “What if she’s in the house?”
“No one would go into the house and hide fifty yards from where her best friend was hung,” Deep Voice said. “I was just checking it out routinely. And by the way, what the fuck do you have in your head, brains or sawdust?”
The rest of group laughed and Jim was close enough to see the face of the man who was chewed out get red.
“Okay! She can wait,” Deep Voice said. “Hell, she’s running scared. She’ll screw up and we’ll get her eventually.”
Jim, trigger finger still at the ready, watched as the group turned en masse and walked back across the road. He lowered the rifle as they got into their vehicles, started them up in a cacophony of dust, exhaust, and noise, then pulled out and formed a caravan that headed back up the dirt road they had arrived on, raising yet another cloud of dust. Jim waited until he could no longer hear the rev of the engines before he turned his attention to the woman. He looked into the crawl space. The woman looked back at him, her face filled with anticipation—and fear . . . and maybe a little relief.
“C’mon out,” Jim said. “They’re gone.”
The young woman crawled out and stood up. For the first time, Jim got a good look at her. She was about five feet five inches tall, he guessed. She had light brown hair cut almost as short as a boy’s, large dark brown eyes, and full, pouty lips. And very shapely in her jeans. Quite pretty, Jim thought, except she was covered with assorted dirt and smelled like a dead polecat.
“I guess you’re Beverly, “Jim said. “You want to tell me what is going on around here?”
“Who are you?”
“Jim LaDoux. No affiliations, no nothing. Just traveling. So?”
“They’re Rejects. My friend Ida and I were trying to start a church around here, and they found out and starting about a week ago hunted us down. They raped her repeatedly and then hung her.”
She paused, and tears came to her eyes.
“I narrowly missed the same thing. And they might come back at any time looking for me. They’re unpredictable. I’ve got to get out of here. But . . . I have to bury her first.”
“What exactly is a Reject?”
“Where have you been?” She paused. “They’re a group of fanatics who, based on what has happened in the world now and in the recent past, deny the existence of God, any concept of God. They’re a group of different people, good and bad, including ex-cons, ordinary people, ex-religious, soldiers, you name it, but the thing that binds them all together is the common belief that any God who could put humanity through what has happened to it in the last few decades isn’t worth believing in. So God is, for them, in effect, dead. And they’re determined to establish a society that God is a not a part of—which includes terminating those who believe in Him.”
“I was stopped earlier by a group of people who wore medallions around their necks. How do they figure in? They told me that this was ‘the Zone.’”
“The Zone is wherever the Rejects control the land. It shifts. The people with the medallions are the other side of the coin. They’ve organized into a Christian army called the Believers to protect themselves. They’re the archenemies of the Rejects. They believe in God totally. But if you have different beliefs than theirs you’re ostracized by them, ostracized to the point where they’ll expel you from the country. They’re bad, misguided, not really true Christians in my book, whatever you want to say, but they’re not murderers like the Rejects are. And they’re the only group that we have right now that’s big enough and strong enough to stop the Rejects. In fact, that’s exactly what has been happening. The two groups are constantly battling, and the control of territory is constantly shifting. The Believers are trying to save people—add them to their army.”
“Neither,” Jim said, “sounds like they’re worth more than a bucket of warm spit.”
Beverly paused. Her eyes glittered with anger.
“I hope the Rejects are stopped—cold. They executed my father.”
“I’m sorry. Why? Spreading the word like you and Ida?”
“He was a minister of a nondenominational faith. They demanded that he renounce Christ and he refused. They hung him after a five-minute mock trial conducted by Alex Szabo.”
“Who’s he?”
“A muscle-bound geek who runs the Rejects. He is the so-called premier.”
“Why are you in this particular area?”
“We were trying to start the church in Nevada. I ran to here.”
“Is that where your father wanted to start the church?”
“Yes.”
“What are you going to do?”
“If things work out, start another church.”
“Are you a minister?”
“No, I’m not holy enough to be that.”
“You grow up around here?”
“No. I grew up mostly in Japan in various places where he was a missionary. After my mother died we moved to the States and ended up in a little town outside of Salt Lake City. But the Rejects invaded that and Salt Lake and killed a lot of the survivors of the plague. My dad and I escaped and ended up Nevada. He was trying to start a new church when the Rejects came here.”
“Sounds like a good man.”
“He was a great man. There was only one thing I disagreed with.”
“What was that?”
“He was too much of a pacifist. He never would take up arms.”
Jim nodded.
“You want some coffee, Beverly?”
“Coffee? You want to take time to make coffee? Man . . . you’re crazy! I haven’t time. I have to bury Ida.”
“They’re not coming back today.”
“How do you know that?”
“There’s no reason to.”
Jim paused.
“You don’t have a gun, I see,” he said.
“No,” she said, smiling. “I have an M-16 on my back and two six-guns belted around my waist.”
“It’s kind of crazy being on your own, particularly a woman, and unarmed.”
“I have weapons,” Beverly said. “I know empty-hand combat and a whole bunch of other stuff.”
“How’d you get to know it?”
“I started to train in that when I was a kid. But I have never used it in a violent way. Just to help myself spiritually.”
“Just what is empty-hand combat?”
“Like karate.” Jim nodded.
“Well,” he said, “empty-hand combat isn’t going to help if you have bullets coming at you. I have some guns. I’m going to give you something. And maybe we can find something even better if we search some of these wrecked houses.”
“Maybe not,” Beverly said. “The Rejects collect them all.”
“Well, let’s get to burying Ida.”
“You’re going to help?”
“Yeah. Follow me.”
Jim walked to the HumVee and took something off the back.
“Here’s an entrenching tool,” he said. “Why don’t you find a spot for a grave in the woods and start digging? I’ll take down Ida.”
“Okay.”
Bev went to find a spot, and Jim drove the HumVee back and next to Ida.
Over the next fifteen minutes Jim, his stomach somewhat used to the smell, cut Idea down, wrapping her in four sheets and some plastic he had in the HumVee. Then he carried her back to where Beverly was digging in a place just inside the woods but well out of sight. Jim came over and placed her on the ground. No part of her was visible to Beverly.
“Good spot,” he said. “Let me try for a while.”
Ten minutes later, the hole had been dug deep enough and long enough to accommodate her body. Jim placed her in and covered her over with dirt, then covered the grave with leaves and twigs. The grave was invisible. Beverly had placed a small stone at the head.
“Okay,” he said. “Do you want to say a prayer?”
“Yes, I do.”
With tears in her eyes, Beverly said a silent prayer and Jim stood by respectfully. Then Beverly wiped her eyes.
“Where are you headed?” she asked.
“I was going to go east. But I think I’m going to go north now. Maybe I can get out of the Zone.”
“Do you mind if I come with you?”
“Not at all,” Jim said.
“It could be dangerous. The Rejects are not going to stop looking for me.”
“It wouldn’t matter if you’re with me or not. These guys are into killing.”
“I think you’re right. By the way, my full name is Beverly Harper. Everybody calls me Bev.”
“Okay, Bev,” Jim said. “But before we leave we have to do one important thing.”
“What’s that?” she said.
“Have coffee, “Jim said with a straight face.
For a moment she didn’t read him. Then she did and smiled.
“I’m kidding,” he said. “By the way, I hope you like dogs. I have a puppy with me.”
“I love dogs. What kind of puppy is it?”
Survivor (The Ashes Book 36) Page 3