The Renegades (Book 3): Fortress

by Jack Hunt

  For that reason alone, I was willing to go back into that camp and get them out. My promise to Elijah’s father before he died was that I would watch out for him. Keep an eye on him. I had never told Elijah that. But that was why I was here.

  I snapped back into the present moment as Big Al cut loose his binds. There was a moment of tension. What would they do?

  “Now you can shoot us or help us,” I said.

  All of them looked at us as if we were mad. Baldy shook his head.

  “And why the hell should we help three men who tied us up and took our weapons?”

  “Maybe because we didn’t kill you and we could have. We’re not the threat here. As fucked up as this situation is. This whole apocalypse. We are all still human. We are all on the same team. There might not be a government out there, an army that’s in control, or even a police department. But that doesn’t and shouldn’t take away from the fact that human life matters. And right now our friends are sitting like ducks waiting to be slaughtered if they haven’t already been shot. So I’m asking you not as military personnel but as one human to another. Help us get them out.”

  It was a long shot but I had to take a chance.

  “Give us a moment.”

  We had the keys to the jeep so they weren’t going to bolt. We also had their weapons. Sure they could attempt to overpower us but we were packing and they weren’t. I moved with Elijah over into a corner while they talked among themselves. Occasionally I caught Dixon looking over at me. I had to wonder if he was speaking on our behalf. It was risky. There was no doubt about that. But we weren’t going to be able to launch a sneak attack or build an army overnight. The best way, the only way in would be under the pretense that these five had heard the commotion, seen us bolt, and then picked us up. Once inside we could work together to get out.

  Eventually Big Al and Dixon got up while the others sat.

  “What do you propose?”

  I cast a glance at Elijah. My mind went back to that final meeting in the café with him.

  Elijah went to get up from the table.

  “Your father is dying,” I told him.

  Elijah paused and turned back.

  “They’ve given him three months to live. Cancer.”

  “What? Am I meant to care?”

  “Elijah, it’s your father. Whatever resentment you have for him you might want to put that aside for now and go visit him. It might be the last time you see him.”

  Elijah snorted. “I don’t know what it is with you and my father. Whether you were missing a father or desperate to get out of the gangs, but let me be clear with you. My father died a long time ago. He means nothing to me. And all his attempts to get me out of the gangs have been for nothing.”

  “So you want him to die knowing he didn’t reach you?”

  He stifled a laugh then took a puff of cigarette. “I want him to die knowing that he failed as a father. And that if he had been around and actually given a shit about me and my brother maybe we wouldn’t have ended up on the wrong side of the law. Maybe he would still be alive and perhaps we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”

  I drifted back into the moment.

  “Let’s discuss how we are going to do this,” I said to Dixon.

  JARHEADS

  Benjamin had clearly lost the plot. He wanted me to trust these jarheads? I think not. His bright idea was to have them take us in there like prisoners. To which I replied, why don’t I just drop my pants now and take it up the ass? Sure, he was thinking of going all Trojan horse on them but in the event these whack jobs decided to turn the table on us I sure as hell wasn’t going to be stuck inside that lodge.

  After a fair amount of back and forth — ‘Operation let’s get our tits shot off’ was about to go down.

  “We’ve known these people for exactly how many months?”

  “Yeah, yeah if you have a better idea I’m all ears.”

  “Hours, Benjamin. That’s it. And you want to place your trust in them.”

  Benjamin’s eyes swept around him as he wanted to make sure they were out of earshot.

  “I’m not.”

  “Not what?” I said, unloading some of the crap out of the back of their jeep.

  “Just stick close to me, and I’ll make sure you don’t wind up with a bullet.”

  “Why the hell am I following your orders? You should be the one listening to me.”

  Benjamin’s eyebrows rose. “Right, and you didn’t get all your men killed by the Grim Reapers back in Salt Lake.”

  “At least I didn’t abandon them.”

  “Um, yeah you did.”

  “You want to do this now? Cause I’m ready to leave.”

  “Just get your shit together.” Benjamin called for the others to come out. Each of us squeezed into that tiny jeep, I felt like a sardine waiting to be plucked out and eaten. Did I trust them? Not one bit. Benjamin had his plan, I had my own, and there was no way in hell I was going to share it. Before we left we siphoned some more gas from abandoned vehicles. Each of us checked our ammo and then we peeled out.

  * * *

  The atmosphere in the jeep as we started seeing signs for the ski lodge was tense. None of them had turned their guns on us when they could have, but that didn’t mean they weren’t going to side with the lunatics holed up at the lodge. They were all army. Military stuck together. In many ways I saw them like any other gang. In the city you didn’t trust anyone. It didn’t matter if you had spared someone’s life. It was the way of the jungle. You don’t throw gazelles in with lions. I learned not to trust anyone, including Dax, Johnny, and the others. I still had my reservations about them. Their incessant need to help others was going to get them killed, and at this rate I would likely end up dead too.

  “Pull over here,” Benjamin tapped Dixon. He swerved onto the hard shoulder, gravel spit and we hopped out.

  “So you know what to do?”

  “Yeah,” Dixon replied.

  I cast a glance over the others and shook my head. They were going to screw us the first chance they got. We watched them rejoin the road and take off towards a sign that led up to the lodge. Ducking into the tree line, we were to move into position. Thomas was still hobbling on his leg. We had told him to hang back but he would have none of it. I think even he realized that the odds of us returning were slim to none.

  “So now they’re gone, tell me what you have in mind?” Benjamin asked.

  “What makes you think I have anything in mind?”

  “Please. Do me the courtesy of not talking shit.”

  We trudged our way through the thick undergrowth of the forest. Sticks snapped beneath our boots. A flock of birds broke from a tree, startling us. We kept our assault rifles at hip height, ready for anything unexpected. By unexpected I meant deserting jarheads.

  Sweat trickled down the side of my face, I wiped it with the back of my hand. The heat of the day made the air feel humid. When we reached the clearing we had told them about, it was now meant to be a waiting game. If they were accepted by the others, no doubt they would put them to work straight away. All that mattered was one of them getting to the others and letting them out. We were going to create a diversion using a few grenades they had in the jeep. This would create enough chaos and draw them out so that they had a chance to get to Dax and the others. At least that was the plan.

  Then again plans had a tendency to go awry.

  My mind drifted back to Salt Lake City. If my father couldn’t save me from the gang life, he did the next best thing and made sure that I didn’t wind up in jail or dead. Our relationship hadn’t always been bad. There had been a time when things were good. It had been Zack who had got caught up in the gang life first. He said it was a means to an end. A way to earn big money without having to work some shitty job. Unfortunately, he ended up like most who got into gangs. They rarely got out. If they did it was usually in a body bag.

  My father was never the same after Zack was murdered. By then I h
ad already got a taste for gang life. It was addictive. Big money, fast cars, no one telling you what to do or when to do it.

  “You want to die like your brother?”

  Before Zack’s death I listened to my father. After, it was the last time. I’m sure he thought that none of what he had said sunk in but it had. The only times we spoke was when he’d get a call from Benjamin telling him where I was. If I knew he was in the neighborhood I would have never stuck around. It was the same every time. Him ragging on me. Trying to save me. That was all that mattered. At times I had to wonder why he went through all the trouble. Was it his reputation or me he was concerned about? Of course he would say he wasn’t doing anything that any other father wouldn’t do. But that was a lie. How many fathers arrested their kid?

  “Elijah,” Benjamin said. I snapped back to the present moment. “Take a look at this.”

  On the ground Benjamin stepped on a piece of plywood covered in branches, moss, and dirt. He lifted it. Inside was a small dug out area. There was enough room for four people. It didn’t look as if it had been used for anything but as a temporary place to seek refuge. Possibly dug out by survivors in the event of being chased by Z’s. Benjamin climbed down the ladder. It was about seven feet high inside. The sides, floor, and ceiling above us had been made from old scrap metal. There was a small tube at one end to allow for air.

  It was still day. We had over six hours before we would create the distraction. We planned on using the cover of night. Thomas stumbled coming down. He gripped his leg again.

  “Here, let me take a look at that,” Benjamin said. I brought the cover over our heads. At least for now we wouldn’t be out in the open. Who had created this? There was an old wind-up light. I wound it and yellow illuminated the small space. Inside was a single bed, a metal cabinet, and a small stack of shelving. I went over to the far end. Whoever had made this must have done it a long time ago, as there was a fine layer of dust and dirt covering everything.

  “Guessing they didn’t make it here,” I said, wiping my hand over a photograph of a family.

  I continued rooting around while Benjamin played doctor. I reached into a container and felt my hand touch glass. It was round. I pulled it out.

  “Well now we’re talking.”

  It was a bottle of bourbon. I twisted the cap, breaking the seal, and took the first swig.

  “Hey, here,” I said passing it back to Benjamin. To my horror he didn’t take a swig, instead he poured a good portion of it all over Thomas’s leg.

  “What a waste.”

  He handed it back to me.

  “Is there ever a time you don’t think about yourself?” he asked.

  I scoffed and took another sip. I took a seat on the cold rusted metal and watched Benjamin tear off another piece from Thomas’s shirt and replace the bloodied bandage with a new one.

  Swigging on the bourbon I cast a glance at the photo of the unknown family. Instantly my thoughts drifted back to when I was twelve. It was my brother’s birthday. There was three years’ difference between us. It was the one and only time I remember all of us being together. Before he died, before my father tried saving me, and before life became a matter of survival.

  “Elijah, squeeze in between your mother and brother. That’s it. Okay, hold that.”

  My father set the timer on the digital camera and rushed back over to us. He wrapped his arms around our mother. I felt my brother’s hand grip my shoulder.

  “Okay, smile,” he yelled.

  The flash of the camera, then my father showing us the image. We had very few photos of us in our home. It had been the only one that I liked.

  By the time I was fifteen I had left home and was running with the Dark Kings. I had never felt such a sense of belonging. But the reality was harder than what it looked like on the surface. By the age of sixteen I had committed my first murder. Things spiraled down from there. By seventeen I had robbed more stores in the Salt Lake City region that I could count. By nineteen other members in the gang were expecting me to take the position of leader. By twenty-one I knew that I was either going to die or end up in jail.

  Benjamin was like my father in many ways. Before he became a cop I had seen him around when my brother had first got involved. Back then he was a badass who rarely took shit from anyone. How the heck my father had managed to pull him from the grips of gang life was a mystery. I always figured he wasn’t cut out for it. But now, I wasn’t sure. Maybe there was something to all his mad ramblings.

  I shook my head and rubbed my eyes, trying to not think about the past. It only hurt.

  The hours passed slowly. Benjamin kept peeking out every now and again to see if it was getting dark. When it was, we slipped out and moved into a completely different position. Somewhere we could get a clear view of what was going on.

  That night they had a large fire outside. At first we thought it was nothing more than a party. A drunken evening to blow off some steam. The fact they had been drinking only increased the odds of being able to catch them off guard.

  As we waited there in the bushes we used a pair of military binoculars to get a better view of what was going on. Everything was lit up green when I placed them to my eyes. I scanned the ground until I spotted Dixon. He stood with the other four watching the men drinking beer.

  “When do you think we should do this?”

  I could sense uncertainty in Benjamin’s voice. It was very possible that this was all going to go sideways on us. We were about to move when I spotted two military guys holding what looked like a large tree limb over their shoulders. Attached to it facing the ground was one of the people from the fortress. A man. Ray. The tweaker dude. He was yelling for them to let him go but they wouldn’t pay attention. They were drunk and finding pleasure in his fear.

  They got parallel to the roaring fire. One man was on either side holding the thick branch Ray was attached to. Another group of men tied their bootlaces. Then, they began moving back and forth. Shuffling their way around the fire. While they were going around it, Ray was going through it. First it was fast like they were racing, then they would slow down. Every time they were aligned to the fire you heard screams as the fire began burning his skin. At one point one of the jarheads stumbled. That caused Ray to land face first in the middle of the fire. The screams cut through you. The last time I had heard that was when I had killed the men who had murdered my brother.

  Thomas was beside himself. He had known Ray for years. They had grown up together. They came from the same town, attended the same school.

  “If we are going to do this, we need to do it now.”

  “No. We need the signal.”

  “Fuck the signal,” I said, getting up and beginning to make my way to the lodge.

  “Don’t go fucking this up,” Benjamin said, spinning me around.

  “Get the hell off me.” I pushed him back and I don’t know if something was broken in him but the next thing I felt was a fist hit my jaw. I landed hard and spat blood. Still on the floor I looked back at him. I saw red. I spat more blood and got up and pulled my gun. In that moment both of us had our handguns pointing at each other.

  “Stop it,” Thomas said, trying to get between us, which was a bad move. I was liable to put a bullet through his head if it meant it was going to put this jackass on the floor. For a moment things were tense. Neither one of us wanted to drop our weapons. There we were in the middle of nowhere, darkness wrapped around us and our guns pointing at each other. Meanwhile, Ray was getting turned into a human s’more.

  “Enough,” Thomas said while his hands were shaking.

  Slowly, we lowered our guns. I walked off into the darkness under the illumination of the moon. I was going to do my own thing. Fuck his plan. I had four grenades, Thomas had two, and Benjamin had four. We were meant to hit the same area, somewhere in the forest. To create enough of an explosion that it would draw them away from the lodge and give us enough time to get in and get the others out. But that wasn’t going
to happen. Those fuckers needed to learn a lesson.

  Nothing less than death was going to be good enough for them.

  THE RAID

  I pulled the pin on the grenade. I nearly tore my arm out of its socket as I launched that sucker as hard as I could into the night sky. My chest rose and fell rapidly as I watched it soar through the air and disappear out of view. I crouched and instinctively shielded my face from the blast. I don’t know why I did that, perhaps instinct? A natural preservation to protect myself or just a small inkling that it was going to bounce off a tree limb and land a few feet from me? With the amount of shit luck that we’d had, anything was possible.

  Thankfully that wasn’t the case.

  The explosion was epic. Exactly as planned. The jarheads hit the floor looking at each other as though an air raid alarm had gone off. They reached for their weapons and did the complete opposite of what we thought they would do.

  We had hoped they would run out into the forest to see what all the commotion was about. Instead they stared on, holding their guns as if expecting an approaching army. A few rushed back into the lodge, others returned to where Dax and the others were. They weren’t idiots. I knew this was going to happen. I had told Benjamin that we would have been better off catching them off guard and blowing the shit out of them. Now we’d be lucky if we could get any of them together. It had been perfect. Most of them were circled around the fire finding pleasure in the demise of poor old Ray. Now they were spread out.

  To make matters worse, Ray was dead. After hearing the explosion, they had dropped him right into the flames. I had watched as he squirmed around in the fire, screaming and then silence.

  The only upside was they were looking off into the distance. To an area now enveloped by fire. I cast a glance towards Benjamin and Thomas who were positioned behind a large rock. We waited for what seemed like fifteen minutes until the jarheads decided to go investigate.

  Through the binoculars I spotted Dixon. He was looking off towards the area where we said we would be. Of course we weren’t there. Screw that shit. We might have been unlucky but we weren’t stupid. I found myself holding my breath waiting to see if he was going to alert the others. He didn’t. Instead he went along with a group of twenty after they were given orders to go and check it out. They dived into jeeps and peeled out of there.