“I’ve been riding for seven straight days. I haven’t shampooed my hair in a week.”
“Well, perhaps he thought you were another possum then.”
“Very funny.”
Then his words sunk in.
“Did that really happen?”
“Did what really happen?”
“A possum. Sniffing my hair.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not sure I believe you.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s very dark out here. And you’re twenty feet away. And I can’t see you at all. I don’t think you can see that well in the dark. I think you’re just teasing me.”
“Okay. Believe what you want.”
“How many fingers am I holding up?”
“I can’t tell. It’s too dark.”
“Ha! I knew it!”
“There’s a big difference between not being able to count fingers from twenty feet away and seeing a possum from the same distance.”
“Still don’t believe you…”
“Would you believe me if I told you that right now you’re scratching your butt?”
“Oh, my God!”
“Hey, you wanted me to prove it.”
“I think I’m going to sleep farther away from you from now on.”
-52-
Tom had regained consciousness an hour before, while Sara and Randy were talking about possums and stars and Sara’s itchy butt.
But Tom was in a much uglier place. No stars were visible from his prison cell. And he wouldn’t have been able to see them anyway.
For his eyes were both swollen shut.
The black of his swollen eyes matched pretty much the rest of his face.
He lay there for a time, wondering if the beating was finally over for good.
He hoped they weren’t just taking a break.
His broken nose had finally stopped bleeding, but he had to breathe through his mouth because both nostrils were clogged with dried blood.
His tongue was cut in two places. He seemed to very vaguely remember biting it when someone kicked him in the jaw.
With his sore and swollen tongue he counted the number of missing teeth in his mouth.
Three.
He supposed it could have been worse. One swing of the bat from the right angle and he’d have lost all of them.
As far as he could tell, the only broken bones he’d suffered were to his left forearm and his right hand.
Defensive wounds, as he’d tried to ward off the first few blows.
Once he’d realized that was futile, he’d gone into a defensive position by curling into a ball and trying to protect his vital organs as best he could.
It was a move that probably saved his life.
He was stiff and sore all over, but as far as he knew his organs were still working.
It was hard for him to breathe, but he was able to wince and draw a full but very painful breath. That was actually a good sign. It meant his lungs weren’t punctured. A couple of his ribs might be fractured, but they hadn’t splintered enough to poke any holes in his lungs.
He vaguely seemed to remember coming to a bit earlier, feeling he needed to urinate.
Now the ground beneath him was wet and cold. He assumed his bladder emptied itself after he passed out again.
Slowly, methodically, he tried to move each of his limbs.
They worked, mostly.
But they hurt like sin.
He wondered what lay ahead of him in the coming hours, then caught himself.
He was probably better off not knowing.
So instead, he wondered about Sara and Randy.
What they were doing. Whether or not they’d come for him.
He hoped if they did, they were a little smarter than he’d been.
He thought that Payton would behave rationally. Accept his offer of gold with a promise of more later.
He hadn’t known that Payton was much too greedy for that.
Payton saw life from a completely different view.
With Payton, there was no such thing as payment over time.
With Payton, there was an overpowering need to grab whatever was available, to grab it fast, and to grab it all.
What worked with other men didn’t work with Payton.
Tom knew that now.
He just hoped it wasn’t too late to regroup and go to Plan B.
His limbs all seemed to work.
That was a good sign.
When he moved his right leg, though, a heavy chain rattled.
That was a very bad sign.
Whatever building he was in, he was apparently alone.
And chained to the floor.
Tom had no way of knowing, but he was locked in the huge hay barn in the middle of the Lazy R Ranch.
He also had no way of knowing that his new friend Randy was a mere twenty feet away from him, on the other side of the north wall of the barn.
Randy was making his way through the ranch, trying to find a building with open shades and lights on, so he could peer inside and look for Tom.
But there were no lights in the hay barn.
And no windows, for that matter.
As Tom passed out again, Randy stole past the side of the barn and made his way toward the main house.
-53-
The San Antonio Zoo had once been a bustling place, full of little kids’ laughter and the overpowering odor of elephant dung.
These days the animals were all gone.
So were most of the smells.
And the laughter died when most of the children did.
The animals had been taken by poachers, or set free by zoo workers on the off-chance they could survive on their own.
The smells slowly faded as the dung became washed away a little at a time by rainstorms.
And the children… some were taken by desperate family members who’d decided a quick death was preferable to starvation.
The plague took many more tiny souls to heaven.
The ten percent or so of the city’s children who’d lived through the waves of murder/suicide as well as the plague were still struggling to survive.
They had much more important things to do than to go to a zoo that was no longer open, to see animals that were no longer there.
So Robbie Benton had the place all to himself.
Robbie had grown up in the neighborhood, just on the other side of Brackenridge Park. The zoo, on the outskirts of the park, had been his favorite hangout since he was a young boy.
In his childhood, the zoo was a place for Robbie to escape a very abusive and very unhappy home life. Each year, in the spring, Robbie would start stealing money from his parents.
Stealing it was easy enough. It was just a matter of waiting until they were both passed out drunk.
And that happened several times a week.
But he had to be careful not to take too much.
For if either of them noticed that any money was missing, he’d receive another in a long string of vicious beatings.
Or perhaps he’d be punished in other ways.
Like eating crackers and water three times a day for a week.
Even now, at age thirty three, Robbie still cringed at the mere thought of eating saltine crackers.
Stealing money from his parents was a great risk. He knew that, even back then.
But it was a risk he had to take.
Because he needed a place to escape.
So young Robbie, a mere lad of seven back then, had started by lifting a single dollar from his father’s wallet while his father lay passed out on the couch.
A couple of days later he took seventy five cents from his mother’s purse. She’d been passed out sitting in a chair at the dining room table.
Her head had rested on the table, a long line of saliva from her open mouth making a puddle on the table’s surface.
That first year, it had taken Robbie a full two weeks to get the seven dollars he needed for a sea
son pass to the San Antonio zoo. And from that moment on he had a safe place to run to on the days when his parents got that look in their eyes and he knew a beating was coming.
For the rest of his childhood his life followed more or less the same pattern. Each spring, before his pass was up, he’d steal money for another one. Eventually he came to realize it was safer to steal from his friends than from his parents. It cost him some friends, but at least he didn’t risk a beating.
He was fifteen when Bexar County finally took him out of the home.
He’d hoped to be adopted and to finally have real parents and a real home life, like his friends had.
But he soon learned the sad reality that people just don’t adopt fifteen year old boys with bad attitudes and troubled pasts.
When he graduated from the Boy’s Town High School and turned eighteen a month later, he was set free.
And he put most of the parts of his miserable life behind him, now that he was able to go to work and make his own money.
But he still got that annual pass. He still spent most of his free time at the zoo.
He was still closer to the zoo’s animals than he was to any human being.
That was, perhaps, because he considered himself little more than an animal too.
After a couple of years working dead-end jobs he joined the Army, and was trained as a military policeman. He spent his entire enlistment at Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio. Most of his weekends were spent alone, at the zoo, with his true friends.
Once out of the Army it was an easy transition from the military police to the San Antonio Police Department.
And once again, he spent most of his free time with those who would listen to him without judging him. Those who wouldn’t scold him for being socially inept, or call him a freak or other hurtful things.
When the zoo closed on his days off, he went to his apartment, where he felt truly alone.
After the blackout, when the animals at the zoo began being slaughtered, he tried his best to save them. On his days off he stayed at the zoo, patrolling its grounds and chasing off anyone who tried to enter. He even slept there, on one of the park benches, or lying in the soft green grass of the play park.
But he couldn’t be awake all the time. And he couldn’t be at the zoo all of the time.
Eventually the animals were all gone.
Well, not all of them.
An animal named Robbie still came.
He’d claimed the zoo as his very own. He boarded up the ticket window and the wrought iron gates. He put a high security padlock on the entrance gates, and he had the only key.
Curious passersby always assumed that zoo officials placed the lock there when they finally closed the place for good. But that wasn’t the case.
The last man standing at the zoo, a lion keeper named Sal, had tried to convince Robbie that he couldn’t come to the zoo anymore.
The zoo was city property, he’d said.
It had to be locked up and secured, and perhaps someday it could open again.
But in the meantime, no one could live there.
Not even a cop.
Sal was buried in the giraffe enclosure, and had been for several months.
Robbie waited for weeks for someone from the city to come looking for Sal.
“Sal said he was leaving,” he’d have told them. “He said now that the animals are gone, there’s nothing left for him to do.”
But nobody ever came looking for Sal.
It seemed no one missed him at all.
With Sal out of the way, there was nothing or no one to keep Robbie from coming and going at will.
The abandoned zoo became his sanctuary. His home away from home.
His go-to place to get away from it all.
Even when Hannah took the girls to the compound in Junction to avoid the plague, Robbie came here. His Hannah gone, he was heartbroken and miserable. And the only place he felt even mild comfort was the zoo.
He’d accepted John’s invitation to move into the Castro house until Hannah returned.
But he didn’t do it because he considered John a friend, necessarily.
He did it to feel closer to his sweet Hannah.
And when no one else was around, he would rifle through Hannah’s clothing, even stealing some of her lingerie. Late at night, when he’d find sanctuary in the elephant house, he’d hold the lingerie against his face. Soaking in Hannah’s scent. And dreaming of her.
And now, now that they were onto him… now that they considered him a suspect, he’d come back to the zoo.
He’d stocked plenty of food and water there over previous months.
And now, despite everything, despite his world crashing down all around him, he still found solace at this lonely place.
He sat, in the northwest corner of the elephant house, with his arms wrapped around his legs, slowly rocking back and forth.
And plotting his revenge.
-54-
Randy neared the camp about an hour before first light.
He progressed slowly and cautiously. He suspected Sara was a bit nervous.
And he didn’t want to get shot.
“Now remember,” he’d told her before leaving her three hours before. “You won’t be able to see me coming until I’m right up on you. And I won’t call out to you in case you’re under duress. So I’ll whistle the whippoorwill call three times every fifteen or twenty seconds as I approach.
“When you first hear the whippoorwill, listen closely. If you hear it a second time, and you’re not under duress, then call out my name. Only then will I answer you and tell you I’m coming in.”
She’d asked what a whippoorwill sounded like and he’d demonstrated.
“Oh, that sounds rather pretty,” she’d said.
“Did you have any other questions before I leave?”
“Yes. You said something about a dress. What did you mean?”
He laughed openly at her.
“Not dress, silly. Duress. Like, for example, somebody is holding you hostage and is using you as bait to lure me closer so they can ambush me. If that were to happen, all you have to do is to ignore the whippoorwill call. You’ll know I’m out there close, so you can get ready to duck or hide or lash out when the time is ready.
“But because you’re under duress, you won’t call out to me. That’ll tell me you’re under duress, and not to come into camp. I’ll back slowly away and find a vantage point where I can see your captors and try to take them out.”
“Cool. Got it.”
Randy liked Sara. She was a sweet girl. Just a bit naïve, but that was part of her charm.
It was because he liked her that he dreaded returning to camp empty handed. He was hoping to bring Tom back, unharmed.
Failing that, he at least wanted to bring back the news that Tom was still alive and well.
But he couldn’t do that either.
He whistled the whippoorwill’s call.
There was no response.
Good. Sara had paid attention. She wouldn’t call out to him until she heard a second call.
He moved forward a few feet, then stopped again.
He scanned the darkness in front of him for any sign of movement and saw none.
He moved forward a few more feet.
When he was fifty feet away, he whistled again.
“Randy, it’s safe. Come on in.”
Randy rose and walked into camp.
Even in the darkness where he couldn’t clearly make out her face, he could somehow sense her disappointment when she saw only one shadowy figure approaching her.
“Is he… okay?”
“I don’t know, Sara. I certainly hope so. I scoured the whole ranch. There were only a couple of sentries out. That was a good thing. They weren’t on their war footing, which means if they encountered him they didn’t figure him to be a lawman. If they had, they’d be expecting reinforcements and have a lot more men out there.”
“What else did yo
u learn?”
“Not much. Most of the buildings were blacked out. The farm house was lit. Electrically. No candles or lanterns. They apparently found a generator that was working and repaired some of the light fixtures.
“Still, most of the house was darkened. All of the lighted rooms had their shades drawn. But I was able to peek into a couple of them.
“I didn’t see much at all. A couple of ranch hands playing cards. Another one boozing it up with a girl. That’s about it.”
Sara was perplexed. And almost nauseous with worry.
“Okay, Mr. Ranger. You’ve got way more experience in this than I ever want to have. In your best estimation, what do you think happened to Tom?”
“I don’t know. If it was daylight, I would have looked for his horse. That would at least tell us whether he made it that far.
“Of course, if it was daylight, I wouldn’t have made it that far.
“He might have been shot. He could have been taken hostage, but I doubt it. There wouldn’t have been any reason to.
“I think the only other possibility is that Payton made him stay the night as a guest. He’s not the kind of man who’ll take no for an answer, and Tom wouldn’t have any way of telling us he was staying over.”
“Do you really think that’s what happened?”
“I don’t know. But I hope so. It beats the heck out of the other theory.”
“So what do we do now?”
“We wait. The sun will be up in a few minutes. If Tom stayed the night as Payton’s guest, he’ll find a reason to leave not long after breakfast, and will be back here by noon.”
“And if he’s not here by noon, then what?”
“Then we’ll have to try my backup plan.”
“Which is?”
“I’ll tell you. But you won’t like it.”
Thank you for reading
THE QUEST
Please enjoy this preview of the next installment in the series,
Countdown to Armageddon, Book 7:
CASTROVILLE
From her vantage point in the darkened hayloft, Sara commanded an unobstructed view of much of the lower part of the barn. The light from the torches danced across the faces of those assembled below and left a medieval feel to the scene playing out before her.
The Quest: Countdown to Armageddon: Book 6 Page 17