“Yeah, I know. I’ll do anything you want Adrian, you know that.”
“We’re gonna have to spy on their camp and figure out their habits. Sarah Mae is the only one of us that can sneak around without being seen. I’ll probably need you to take everyone else back to the homestead and keep them out of sight while we do that. I don’t wanna leave them here alone, until we get to know them.”
“Sure thing. I think Maya has been a little scared with just the two of us there anyhow. It’ll probably make her feel better to have more people around.”
“Thanks Donald. Now, let’s go inside, but don’t say anything in front of everyone, ok?” We find everyone in the kitchen. Maya is teaching Sarah Mae how to make oatmeal in coffee cups, in the microwave. All it takes is one part oatmeal and two parts water! I have to admit, that’s pretty cool! “Umm, what’s that ‘boing’ sound coming from your pack Maya?”
She raced over to it and dug out her iPod. “Oh my God! I have signal!” she says, practically jumping up and down.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Wi-Fi. I have a Wi-Fi signal! Internet! They must have a router here. Where is it?” She starts racing from room to room. “Here it is!” she yells from the office. On the ceiling, over the door to the deck! This is SO cool! It’s unprotected, probably for their customers to use.”
“How do they get Internet way out here?” Donald asks her.
“There must be a satellite dish somewhere. There’s no way its cable, this far out.” She heads outside, crosses the parking lot and looks back at the office. “Yep! There’s one on the roof of the office!”
~
Everyone stayed the night here last night. They were all so excited to play Internet radio and dance that time got away from us. Sarah Mae and I get up just before dawn and leave everyone else sleeping while we gear up and take kayaks down the channel. Our first plan is to find where the waterway that we heard the motor boat use yesterday. “Do you think we can hide somewhere nearby their camp and watch them and listen to them?” I ask her.
“I’m sure there’s a way,” she assures me. “We have to be careful though. We don’t know for sure how many of them there are, or what kind of weapons they have. The one I saw just had an old shotgun, but that doesn’t mean all of them do. We’re probably best off just finding the waterway, seeing how big it is, and then listening to them from behind them, where we were yesterday.”
“Sounds good,” I tell her, and that’s exactly what we do. The mouth of the channel that they used yesterday is a little further than we expected, and much wider than the channel we had snuck in behind them on. There isn’t much of anywhere to hide if a boat comes, because of the heavy mangrove roots on both sides, so we turn right around and go back where we had been before. Maybe an hour later, we’re hiding there, just listening. We can’t see them, but we can hear them. One thing we hadn’t noticed yesterday was the source of the stink. There’s an outhouse behind the shack, a little closer to where we are. There seems to be a steady parade of people using it this morning, no different than we do at the homestead. Sara Mae whispers to me to step exactly where she steps, and follow her. Slowly. After a couple of minutes, we stop and listen, sitting on a fallen tree, just above the damp ground. There’s a scraggly looking white heirloom man, not very old, leaned against a tree with a shotgun, watching the kids go into the outhouse one at a time and waiting for them to come back out. He looks bored and disgusted. The other two men, the heavy black man and one we haven’t seen yet but sounds younger, are doing something over by the boat. We can’t quite see them. The younger sounding one says, “It’ll probably take me a couple o’ hours to get it.” Then we hear the outboard start up again, and the boat leave, but this time it goes off to the left. The older, heavy black man comes back and sits in the same chair as yesterday. Right after he’d sat down, the scraggly white guy says, “Hey, watch ‘em all for a minute, I gots to take a dump m’self.”
Sarah Mae’s eyes lit up. “You stay right here. I’m gonna go shoot that one in the head. When this one comes running out of the outhouse, you shoot him. Don’t miss!”
I shake my head yes, and as soon as the door to the outhouse shuts, I start sneaking very slowly to my left, where I have a better shot. Sarah Mae disappears silently out to the far left. I get ready, and get my gun up. No nerves; this is a good plan. About the time I was beginning to wonder where she was, BANG! It was SO damn loud! The door to the outhouse flung open, and the scraggly white guy came stumbling out, pulling up his pants. I shot him in the left side as he was bent over. He fell to the ground, wounded, but not dead, so I shot him again in the head. We heard the outboard stop, then start coming back as fast as it could. The third man must have heard the rifle shots. Sarah Mae ran through the middle of the astounded kids, headed right towards the speeding motorboat. She waved for me to stay put. As the boat neared, BANG! BANG! BANG! Crash… and the motor stopped. The kids were all flat on the ground.
“You get him?” I yelled.
“Yep. Coming back now.”
I slog over to the big black man, to make sure he’s dead. He’s real dead. “Is that all of ‘em?” I ask the nearest boy.
There’s just the three of them sir,” he answers.
“All right! You can all get up now. We came here to bust you loose. You’re all free now!” One by one, they stood up and looked from me to Sarah Mae, shock all over their faces.
“Thank-you!” says the boy I’d spoken to before. He points to the shack. “And the girls?”
“Get ‘em outta there,” I tell him.
He ran over to the black man and fished around in his pocket for keys, then ran and opened the door for them. Three hybrid girls came rushing out. Sarah Mae met them as they came out and began crying. “Why are they crying?” I ask her.
“They’re just relieved is all Adrian. It’s ok.”
6
Adrian:
“You ok with how that went?” Sarah Mae asks me, sitting in her kayak.
“Of course,” I tell her, “there’ll be no mercy for the enemies of The Tribe!” She smiles broadly at me. ‘I wonder what that big ole smile means?’ “Everybody ready? Follow us then!” I holler over the two idling outboards, and off we go, headed back to Base Camp. There had actually been two skiffs there; one as big as the one we have and one somewhat smaller. There are eight kids in the big one, four in the smaller one.
One of the girls had seen where the old black man hid the money they got for the moonshine; under a floorboard in the shack. He always made the girls go stand outside after they had made a delivery and came back with cash. She had seen where he was putting it once. There was nearly $18,000 in a waterproof ammunition box there, and a few gold coins, I guess. I’ve never actually seen a gold coin, but that’s what they look like to me!
Before we left, I’d had the boys put out the fires and shut down and empty the stills. They said whenever they’re not in use, they need to be hidden, and they camouflaged them. They’d done that before, I could tell. “How hard would these be to move?” I ask the boy that seemed to be the most knowledgeable of the process.
“It wouldn’t be easy, but I was already here when they added the second, then the third one. It could be done,” he assures me.
“So business is that good, huh?”
“They could sell everything we could make to The Island, where ever that is,” he’d said. “They were planning to add a fourth, and buy more hybrid kids to run it. They treated us just like dogs. The girls even worse. They had to sleep in the shack with those pigs.”
“Well, it’s all over now. I have an idea of what to do with the stills. We’ll talk about it later,” I’d promised. We took all of the food and everything of value to us, except the stills themselves. We’d collected all of their weapons, as usual too. Each of them had had a shotgun, and each a pistol. None of them were anything fancy like the ones we took off the guards from The Island. Some of the kids had said that they knew how to use th
em, so we had some of them armed in each skiff, just in case. They no longer look frightened, they look determined, and maybe mad.
We did the usual with the bodies. We stripped them to their underwear and tied ropes to their ankles to drag them away from the camp with the skiffs. I’d instructed the kids to untie one of them from the ankle every so often as we travel, for the gators to feast on, but save the rope. They had got rid of all three of them before we hit the river.
‘Boy are the others ever gonna be surprised when we get back!’ I think, as I paddle. Sarah Mae and I both looked back to check the procession at the same time, and caught each other’s gaze. We both smiled huge. ‘I really love this girl!’
A note from Boyd:
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THE TRIBE 2 (GENETIC APOCALYPSE - THE TRIBE) Page 3