“Tell all of it, mister.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” The man could not meet Matt’s eyes.
“You had plans for us, didn’t you?”
Whitman remained silent.
“Believe me, partner,” Matt said, “I’ll kick you till you’re dead and not lose one second’s sleep over it.”
“If we was to join with y’all, after we whupped the links we was gonna kill all you folks . . . after we had our way with the women.”
“There are children in this group,” Matt reminded him.
“Inferiors. So that don’t make no difference.”
“You would kill a child because of the color of their skin or their religion?” Wade asked.
“Why not? Niggers is takin’ jobs that white people ought to have. Worst thing that ever happened to this country was when slavery ended.” Whitman had him a pretty good idea that this pale-eyed man was gonna kill him. He felt it in his guts. Thinking he had nothing to lose, he then unleashed his lopsided, bigoted fury on everything he felt was responsible for his current station in life. Everybody who wasn’t White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant should be sterilized so’s they couldn’t breed no more, then pretty soon the race would be pure. The United States should declare war on the rest of the world. Kill’em all. Every book except the Bible should be burned; all writers was pinko commies anyway. All actors and actresses and the like was all “commonists.” Anybody who didn’t pick or sing country music was a fag. There wasn’t nothin’ important in school ’cept sports.
He finally wound down and sat on the ground with his head bowed, waiting for the bullet he was sure was coming.
“My God,” Dennis said. “You read about men like this, you hear it on the evening news, but you really don’t want to believe they exist. And on the off chance they are for real, spewing their hate, you pray there is some hope for them. But there isn’t any hope for men like that. They’re the Nazis of this generation.”
Whitman raised his head and stared at Dennis. “To hell with you. In a couple of days somebody in the CWA is gonna be butt-fuckin’ your wife and a listenin’ to her squall while they pump the meat to her.”
Matt lifted his Mini-14 and shot the man between the eyes. Whitman’s head snapped back and he rolled over, trembled once, and lay still. Matt stepped forward and took the man’s guns and ammo from him, then shoved the man down the slope. Whitman’s body went tumbling down the hill.
“Pick up your trash and carry him with you!” Matt shouted to the startled little group of CWA men by the stream. “Stay on your side of the valley.”
“If you hadn’t shot him, Matt,” Dennis said, “I was going to.”
“Mighty cold man yonder,” Monroe said, lowering his binoculars. “Mighty cold. We got to take him out. If we do that, the rest of the group will fall apart, I’m thinkin’.”
“Monroe,” Jones said. “Let’s get the hell gone from this place.” Jones had realized he was in with the wrong crowd ten minutes after he took the oath over in Indiana. Jones really didn’t hate anybody, and the thought of harming a child made him sick to his stomach. Jones wanted out of the CWA. These guys were all a bunch of nuts!
And what an oath it had been. All about loving God and country, and preserving the purity of the Aryan race, and a bunch of other stuff that didn’t make any sense back then and made even less sense now.
“You turning yeller on me, boy?” Monroe said, looking at Jones through hard, mean little pig eyes.
“I pulled my time in ’Nam, Monroe. As an LRRP. Two tours. Don’t you call me yellow.”
Monroe noticed that Jones had lifted the muzzle of his AR-15 ever so slightly and that he had moved his finger from the trigger guard to the trigger. Monroe knew, too, that of all the men in this contingent of the CWA, Jones was the one who had seen hard combat with the paratroopers.
“Aw, hell, Jones!” Monroe said. “Don’t get your drawers in a wad, boy. We’s all wound a little too tight. We can’t leave now. Are you forgettin’ the oath you took?”
I’m trying, he thought. He shook his head. “Get to it, Monroe.”
“Whitman’s got to be avenged. We swore a brotherhood to one another. Them folks over ’crost the valley got to go, boy. We got to get them all.”
Jones stared at him for a moment, then turned and walked away.
“I’m gonna have to deal with him, I reckon,” Monroe said.
“You better pack you a lunch ’fore you start,” Jim Bob warned him. “When the courts turned that nigger loose who raped his wife, it took half a dozen cops to control him so’s they could get him out of the courtroom. All that ’cause he wasn’t read his rights or some shit while he was bein’ arrested. After his wife went in-sane and finally committed suicide, Jones spent a year and all his money trackin’ down that ape. Found him in Las Vegas and hauled him out in the desert and went to work on him. I heard it took that nigger about three days to die . . . and they was hard days. I’d leave Jones alone if I was you, Monroe.”
“He ain’t got the right attitude, Jim Bob. I can’t have no breach of discipline here.”
“I’ll talk to him. You just leave him alone. We got to get ready for tonight; them things is gonna be comin’ at us, I’m thinkin’.”
* * *
Matt and the others had dragged off the Sataw’s body and left it in the woods after Matt had taken pictures of it. None of them had ever seen anything like it.
“This one was a real throwback,” Nick explained. “More animal than human, but with the ability to walk upright, make simple tools, and reason to some degree. That’s what makes them so dangerous. You don’t have to bury it. The others will be back for the body.”
Matt reattached his perimeter bangers under the watchful eyes of Nick.
“They’ll figure them out after the first night they set them off,” Nick said.
“Then I’ll move them,” Matt replied. “I plan to add something a bit more deadly after we throw back the first night’s attack.”
“You real sure we will?”
“Oh, yeah, I’m sure. Let’s get busy plugging up the chinks in the stockade. We’ve got a lot of daylight left.”
Back in the stockade, he tossed a canvas bag to Norm. Norm grunted with the effort of catching the heavy bag and Matt grinned at him. “Surprises in there, buddy.”
Norm unzipped and unsnapped, looked inside, and returned the grin. “All right!”
The grenades were really hand-thrown mini-Claymores, each one with an astonishing kill radius as it released its deadly shrapnel.
“We don’t want to use these unless we absolutely have to, Norm. We’ll see what happens after tonight. I brought some other surprises.”
“I’m sure you did,” his old high school buddy said dryly.
* * *
The screaming began just after dark, coming from the center of the long valley, midway between the two camps.
“They got somebody from the other camp,” Nick said.
“I hope that doesn’t last long,” Wade said.
“It probably won’t,” the guide told him. “The Sataws ain’t much for torture. They don’t have the finesse to make it last very long.”
The man’s screaming intensified.
“What in God’s name are they doing to him?” Polly asked.
“You really don’t want to know, Mrs. Hunt.”
They were pulling the man’s intestines out of his stomach, slowly, after having broken his arms and legs.
“Jonathan’s gone, Monroe,” Luther said. “They slipped in here and took him.” He swallowed hard. “Why don’t they just go ahead and kill him?”
Jonathan stopped screaming. The silence was very nearly as terrifying as the man’s howlings of pain.
“Will they come after us now?” Judy asked, her voice containing a trembling.
“We’ll be all right, girl,” Nick told her. “It’ll get noisy around here, and they’ll be lots of guns goin’ off and shoutin’ and yellin’
, but you young’uns will be all right.”
“Mr. Nick?” Sara called softly.
“Yes, girl?”
“Your kids and grandkids, do they know what they are? I mean, you know what I mean.”
“The older ones do, child. We start preparing them for the changes in the moon early.”
Milli asked, “Have you had any born ... well . . . ?”
He knew what she meant. “Yes,” Nick’s words were soft. “Thank the gods only one wasn’t right. A boy.”
“Is he in one of those caretaking places you talked about?”
“No. I destroyed it. I don’t believe in those places.”
“I am sorry,” Milli said.
“No need to be. He wouldn’t have had any kind of life, and I want all that bred out of future generations. Get ready, people, here they come.”
“I don’t see or hear a thing!” Dennis said.
“I can smell them,” Nick said. He raised his voice to a shout and began speaking in a twisted and strange tongue. He shouted for a full minute.
After a few seconds, they could hear shouted words coming from the south side of the flat. Nick listened for a minute. A disgusted look appeared on his face. When the shouting fell silent, Nick said, “He says he was told soldiers was comin’ in here. He says those on the outside told him so. They’ve been lied to, people. I expected it, so it don’t come as any surprise.”
Cathy lay in her tent and struggled against the ropes that held her and the gag that was in her mouth. But all she could do was make muffled sounds.
Nick shouted something into the darkness. He received shrill cries in return. All who listened behind the stockade could tell they were shouts of ridicule.
“Foolish, foolish creatures,” Nick muttered. “So easily led.”
“What happens now?” Tom asked.
“I might have bought us some time. I don’t know. They mocked me, but they might pull back and think on what I said. I told them their real enemy was across the valley. Those ol’ boys over yonder are in for a rough night.”
Frank was sitting just outside the tent where his wife lay bound and gagged, trying to talk to her, but she was having none of it. When she scooted around on the tent floor and tried to kick him, he gave up and walked away, shaking his head.
“This is going to be a very interesting divorce,” he said to Wade. “I can just see it now, me telling the judge: ‘I can no longer live with this woman, your honor, she changes into a monster when the moon is full.’ ” He managed a sad smile.
“Maybe this camping trip was a blessing for you, Frank.”
“Jesus, how?”
“You might have waked up some night to find her tearing out your throat.”
Frank shuddered visibly. “She really pushed this camping trip. She had to convince me to come. They—the others like her—knew this was going to happen. My God, they planned it. She was going to kill me out here. I can see it in her eyes.”
“You don’t know that for sure, Frank,” Nancy told him.
“Go look at her and then tell me you don’t believe it. I just don’t understand it; I don’t understand how I could be married to a woman for twenty years and not know what she really is. And I wonder how many more marriages there are like mine?”
A scream turned them around and they all ran to the neat row of tents. Traci was on the ground, struggling to get up. They could all see the slickness of blood staining one side of the teenager’s head, a black smear in the faint moonlight pushing through the gathering clouds.
Susan used a flashlight to inspect the cut on her daughter’s head. Though bloody, it was only a small cut and did not appear serious. Nancy wet a cloth and handed it to Susan.
“She’s gone!” the teenager said, sitting up. “Cathy’s gone!”
Matt looked inside the tent. The ropes that had been around the woman’s ankles had been chewed through. He had no way of knowing how she’d freed herself from the ropes around her wrists, but she had. Her pack was gone.
“I was walking back to check on the kids when she ran out of the tent and hit me with a club. She went over the wall like a deer jumping over a log.”
“Norm?” Matt called. Norm was stationed at the rear, taking his turn at guarding the horses. “You all right?”
“I’m fine. She didn’t come this way.”
“Now the breakaways have a leader on site,” Nick remarked. “One who knows every inch of this camp and just how vulnerable we really are.”
“She also knows that Dan is out there,” Dennis said.
“Oh, don’t worry about Dan,” the guide replied. “He can take care of himself. It’s us you’d better worry about. Cathy can’t let any of us leave here alive. She knows about the backup teams on the outside and knows they’ll be in here in two or three days. They’ve got to destroy us within that time frame. She’ll work those breakaways up into a fury by telling them all sorts of lies about us. She’s a smart one, and I’ll bet that right now she’s working on making a deal with the CWA.”
“What kind of deal?” Polly asked.
Matt picked it up. “She’ll convince them that if they help destroy us, she’ll let them go free. But of course she won’t. As soon as we’re destroyed, she’ll have the Sataws turn on them. And as stupid as Monroe Bishner is, he’ll jump at that if it’s offered.”
“How about fire?” Dennis asked. “Are the Sataws afraid of fire?”
“No,” Nick nixed that. “Hell, the tribe’s been usin’ fire for centuries to cook and heat with. We’ve just got to hold on until Matt’s backup people can get in here.”
“No way we can do that,” Matt said. “Monroe’s people can rush us and overwhelm us during the first wave. The Sataws would have done it if they’d had any firepower.”
Clouds had begun moving in quickly and the moon was now hidden. All could smell the approaching rain.
“Shit!” Matt said.
“What’s the matter?” Susan asked.
“I was going to start a forest fire to draw attention,” he told her.
“You can forget that,” Nick said. “It’ll be pouring in minutes. Besides, unless it’s a raging monster of a fire, the Forest Service usually lets smaller ones burn out. Clears the underbrush and so forth. They’d probably order a flyby to check it out. But with all the smoke, it’s very doubtful we’d be spotted.”
The first scattered raindrops began falling. Great big fat raindrops that chilled those it touched.
“Get to shelter,” Matt ordered. “Those on watch get into rain gear. It’s going to be a long, wet, miserable night, people.”
“Beats being dead,” Nancy said.
3
The handwritten note was wrapped in bark to keep it dry. It had been tied onto a stick and the stick tossed into the camp of the CWA men.
Monroe read the note several times. “None of them horrible things wrote this,” he guessed accurately. “This was done by a human being. So them things got real people on their side. Whoever wrote this wants a meetin’ with us. But where?”
“Right behind you,” Cathy’s voice came out of the edge of the woods.
Monroe and Luther and Jim Bob and Judd damn near shit in their underwear. They spun around, weapons at the ready. But they could see nothing.
“Who is that out there?” Monroe demanded. “Show yourself or we’ll spray the woods with lead.”
“You wouldn’t hit anything,” Cathy told him. “Don’t be foolish. How about a deal?”
“What kind of deal?”
“You aren’t in a very good position to ask. If you’re interested, say so.”
“We’re interested.”
She talked, her voice carrying over the slow-falling rain. Monroe began smiling, as did Luther and Jim Bob. Jones was listening, but he was not smiling. To him the deal smelled bad. He looked around. He had been sitting by his tent, near the eastern perimeter, far away from any fire. The other men had left their tents and walked toward the mysterious voice. Jon
es looked around him. He was alone. He pulled his pack toward him and leaned back, lying flat on the wet ground. Slowly he shifted position and allowed himself to roll over the edge of the small rise, knowing the sounds of the falling rain would cover any noise he might make.
It was about a mile across the valley to that government campsite—if it was a government campsite, and Jones had his doubts. If he didn’t come up on one of those damn things out here, he’d make it. To hell with the CWA. He had allowed himself to be recruited because at that time he was filled with hatred toward the black race, flat broke, and running from the law for killing that son-of-a-bitch who’d raped and assaulted his wife . . . and walked free on a technicality. But Jones was not an unreasonable hater. He knew there were both good and bad people in every race. And he couldn’t bring himself to the point of hating an entire race of people. It was stupid. How can you hate someone you don’t even know?
He chanced a look back. Even at this short distance, the falling rain was obscuring the camp’s fires. Jones slipped into his heavy pack and started across the valley.
“Somebody’s crossin’ the stream,” Nick said. “And he’s walkin’ like a man carryin’ a load.”
“Jesus!” Dennis said. “I can hardly even see the damn stream, much less somebody crossing it.”
“Two things most of us crossovers keep is good eyesight and a good sense of smell. My smeller is about gone, but my eyes are still good.”
“What’s up?” Matt asked, walking to the log-and-stake wall.
“We got company. One man.”
“I’m awful vulnerable out here,” Jones called. “I’m friendly. To hell with that bunch of nuts across the valley. And I won’t blame you if you don’t believe a word I’m saying.”
“Come on up,” Matt called. “For some reason the Sataws have gone.”
“The what?”
“Links.”
“They’re probably with that fancy-talking woman over at the other camp. She popped up out of nowhere. Or at least her voice did. I never did see her.”
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