“It’s okay,” I said. “It just grazed you. You’ll be okay. You may not be able to smile for a few days, though.”
“Good thing there’s nothing to fucking smile about then, isn’t it?” she said. “It burns like hell.”
I yanked a bandana from my pocket and pressed it to the side of her head. “Hold this on the wound.”
“Great, a snot compress,” she mumbled.
She did as I asked, though, and I stood to assist Gary. He’d apparently checked everyone and was convinced they were no longer a threat. He was bent and digging in the pocket of one of the men.
“What you got?” I asked.
Gary held up a pack of Marlboro Lights. I held out my hand and he tossed them to me. I shook one loose and pulled it from the pack, sticking it between my lips. I took the lighter from my pocket, flicked it, and sucked the flame to the tip.
At the sound, Randi’s eyes opened and widened. I removed the cigarette from my mouth and handed it to her. “Good for what ails you.”
“Bless you,” she said.
“Don’t thank me,” I said. “Thank Gary.” I turned to him. “They all dead?”
“No, but they will be before long. Nothing we can do.”
Gary holstered his weapon and went to check Katie, who’d crawled over to Walt. Gary checked Walt first, then slowly drew his hand back. It was obvious that he was dead. I looked around, found a ratty old blanket in the ATV trailer, and draped it over Walt’s body. Katie was no longer crying, but emitted a tired, wailing moan. Gary helped her stand and led her to one of the ATVs, helping her take a seat on one of the racks. It looked like exhaustion, hysteria, and shock all rolled into one.
I jogged over to the shoulder of the road where we’d left our packs and returned with a first aid kit. I removed an antiseptic wipe and a butterfly closure, tossed the rest of the kit to Gary, and set to work on Randi’s cheek. She was in a much better state with a cigarette in her hand, but still winced when I applied the antiseptic to her cheek. She called me a variety of colorful names but I took it as a sign she was going to be fine. I wiped her cheek, my hands shaking as my body tried to burn off the excess adrenaline. It was a bad feeling, and I had become more familiar with it lately than I cared to be.
From the corner of my eye I could see that Gary really didn’t know where to start with Katie. He was working on wiping the blood off of her, first using a handkerchief and water, then using alcohol wipes from the first aid kit. From the noise she was making, it was clear that she needed more than just bandaging. When I finished with Randi’s cheek, she flipped her cigarette butt away and stood up.
“I can take care of her,” she said. “She needs a woman’s help.”
“I’m sure Gary won’t argue with you.”
With Katie in Randi’s hands, Gary and I set about checking the bodies of the dead and dying.
“Did we really have to kill all these people?” Gary asked. “This was a slaughter.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Did you see an option I missed?”
“Not one that would have saved Katie’s life. But this is a lot of dead people.”
“I agree. But I’d be a lot happier if there was one more among them. That one that escaped worries me.”
“Is this what we turn into when things start going to hell?” Gary asked.
I thought about his question for a moment. “Them or us?” I finally asked.
“All of us,” he said. “Them or us. Do we all just turn into animals?”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “I don’t feel like I’ve turned into anything. I just want to get home and I will rise to whatever level of violence is required to get me there. I don’t think we’ve killed anyone other than people who left us no choice. If that’s the kind of people that lay between us and home, I will pave the road with their bodies.”
I was dead fucking serious.
I could tell there was a lot going on in Gary’s head. Among all those things bouncing around in there, I was sure that he was asking himself if he had that level of resolve, if he was hard enough.
“That guy may come back,” I said. “We need to get our shit together and get out of here.”
We set to work. For lack of any better options, we piled the scant useful possessions of this group into the ATV trailer. There was a .270 caliber bolt-action rifle, an old Smith & Wesson .38 revolver, and the .22 mini-revolver that Randi had been shot with. I’d seen those before but never held one. It was indeed not much larger than a cigarette lighter. There was no boxed ammo, but we found several spare rounds for each weapon in the pockets of the people we’d killed. There were several knives of various sizes, all of low quality and, except for a fixed blade hunting knife, we left them all on the bodies. We also collected several more packs of cigarettes and some lighters. If Randi didn’t smoke the damn things, maybe we could trade them off for ammo or something useful. There was also a feed sack already in the trailer that held some canned food and utensils, as well as a couple of flashlights.
“We need to get rid of these bodies, Gary. I don’t want people seeing this and thinking we murdered innocent people.”
“I agree,” he said. “But I want someone keeping watch. I don’t want that bastard shooting us in the back if he returns.”
“Can we keep the ATVs?” Randi asked.
“I guess so,” I shrugged. “If we use these, we could be at Lloyd’s in less than an hour, I bet.”
Randi maintained watch while I fetched our remaining gear from over the hill. Then Gary and I carried all the bodies – all dead now – and tossed them over the embankment. He got the feet, I got the shoulders, and it was tiring work. It was completely clear to me now where the term “dead weight” came from. When we were done, Gary stepped over to a rhododendron and sprayed it with the meager contents of his stomach. I turned my back. Killing didn’t have any adverse effect on me, but seeing people throw up always weakened my stomach. Didn’t make a lot of sense, that’s just how I was made. What the hell could I do about it?
While Gary lost his lunch, I took all of the gear that we didn’t need and tossed it over the shoulder onto the bodies. As I stood staring over the bank at the results of our conflict, Gary walked up to my side.
“I think we should conceal them a little better,” I said.
Gary nodded. We each pulled out our belt knives and began hacking off branches that we threw down on the bodies. We spread out and collected branches from a wide area to avoid making any one area look too cut back and perhaps draw undue attention. When we were done, the bodies were at least camouflaged and would only be spotted by someone taking more than a casual glance over the hill.
Gary and I were then confronted by Walt’s body, still lying on the road beneath the blanket I’d placed over it. We looked at Randi for help. She shrugged and took the direct approach.
“Katie, what do you want to do with Walt’s body?”
Katie looked at Randi, unsure. “I don’t know,” she said. “What should we do?”
Randi looked back at us.
“We don’t have anything for burying him, Katie,” I said. “We can leave him here or we can take him with us and see if the town has any arrangements for the dead.”
She sighed heavily, her eyes tearing again. “Let’s take him. Can we do that? I don’t want to leave him here with the people that took his life.”
The arrangement for transporting Walt’s body was less dignified than I would have preferred. The ATV trailer was on the small side, about four feet wide and six feet long. In order to make everything fit, and to avoid soaking all the gear in Walt’s blood, we had to place his body on the bottom, still wrapped in the blanket. We placed the guns beside him, along with the sack of gear we’d recovered from the people who’d attacked Katie. We covered the guns and Walt’s body with our individual packs. We would still keep our personal weapons handy, but it seemed prudent not to ride into a strange town on stolen ATVs with weapons on display.
As we prepared
to head out, I looked at Randi. “You ever drive one of these?”She gave me that look again. “I’m a country girl,” she said. “I was practically born on one of these.”
“Gary?” I asked. “What about you?”
“I’ve ridden motorcycles all my life. ATVs only a couple of times. I know the basics, though.”
“Then how about I drive the ATV with the trailer,” I suggested. “Gary you take one for yourself. Randi, you take the other, and Katie can ride with you. We have a little more than seven miles to go. Surely to God we can get there without getting killed or having to kill someone else.”
Chapter 21
The day was somber and quiet for Ellen and her family. Pete had been very upset last night after shooting the two intruders. Pops had taken guard duty for the rest of the night so Ellen could lay with Pete and help him get to sleep. He’d asked a lot of questions and she didn’t have answers for all of them. She grieved for what circumstances had forced their son to do. It made her worry more for Jim and long for his return. It was only after Pete fell asleep that she could think about her own actions and how she had reached the point where she could so resolutely and easily end a man’s life.
Pete had slept late that morning and felt somewhat better after breakfast. He helped Pops use the excavator to block the gate with a series of steel beams. The beams were scrap from an old bridge and weighed more than five hundred pounds each. They had several of them and placed them at intervals all the way up the driveway. It would make it very difficult for anyone to drive up to the house. With the lay of the land being so steep in this area, you couldn’t just drive around them. There was a hill on one side and a steep embankment on the other. With this road blocked, the farm road at the back of the house would be their primary way in and out.
With more time on their hands now, Pete and Pops also took the box of driveway alarms Jim had purchased and began installing them around the house. They had a limited range, but would set off an alarm in the house when the devices sensed movement. Pops explained that the sensitivity of the device may require some fine tuning to avoid false alarms. In the meantime, they could expect dogs, cats, possums, or even cows to trigger an alarm so every signal would have to be visually verified. By the same measure, they couldn’t depend entirely on them and forego guard duty. There would still need to be a live sentry at night.
By afternoon, everyone was focusing on their chores. Ellen was cycling the generator to keep the freezers and refrigerators cold. Nana and Ariel were running a canning operation. They’d hot-packed many of the meats from the freezers and there were jars cooling on every flat surface of the kitchen. They had the pressure canner on the back porch, heating on the side burner of the gas grill. They still had a lot of frozen foods left but were trying to save as much as possible. They’d already put up thin sliced beef for sandwiches, beef cubes for stews and soups, and several varieties of chicken and pork. One of the nice things about this canned meat was that it would be much easier to prepare than the original roasts.
Pete had also led Pops to some of Jim’s tools and they’d decided to barricade the front windows. They’d found some scraps of 1/8” plate steel that they’d pieced over the windows using three-inch lag screws. Some windows were covered with a single piece while others were pieced together from two smaller scraps. This method left a shooting port that could be accessed by raising the window sash from inside the house and sticking a gun barrel through the horizontal gap between the plates. When they ran out of steel plate, they found some pieces of ¾” plywood that they could double up over the remaining front windows, creating a 1 ½” thick barrier. These barriers might not stop a bullet but they would slow one down and would minimize the risk of flying glass.
While Pops and Pete were putting up their tools, they heard a call from the gate. Pops spun around and put his hand on the butt of his pistol. Pete ran for his rifle that he’d leaned against the house.
“That’s Henry, isn’t it?” Pops asked, squinting toward the road.
Pete returned with his rifle and looked. “I think so,” he said.
The man at the gate waved at them, then started climbing over it. Pops started walking down the road toward him.
“Go tell your mother that Henry’s here,” Pops said.
Pete ran for the house.
Henry and Pops met up about halfway down the driveway.
“Well, hey there,” Henry said. “Didn’t know you were staying here.”
Pops shook Henry’s hand. They’d known each other for years, although Henry was about ten years younger than Pops.
“We came down yesterday,” Pops said. “Ellen was a little worried about being here by herself. We decided to come help her out with the kids and all.”
Henry nodded. “Probably a good thing,” he said. “That trailer park worries me a little.”
“Ellen has been saying the same thing,” Pops said, not wanting to bring up last night.
“It’s like they’re turning into some damn tribe,” Henry said. “I came by there last night and I swear they were roasting big chunks of beef over an open fire. They had a fire built out of a wooden deck they’d torn off one of their trailers and were roasting some meat they’d skewered with a piece of rebar. I stopped by because I knew it was somebody’s cow and I wanted to make sure it wasn’t mine.”
“How’d that go?” Pops asked.
“I got out of the truck with a rifle in my hand and asked where they’d got the meat. They didn’t want to say. I kept asking and one of them tells me he hit a cow with his truck and they butchered it.”
“You believe it?” Pops asked.
“Could be true,” Henry said. “Could be a lie. There are a lot of cows running loose right now. People are too damn busy living like pioneers to check their fences like they need to.”
Pops nodded.
“They showed me the cowhide and it wasn’t my cow,” he continued. “I told them that I better not have any cows turn up missing or I would be straight up there to pay them a visit.”
“How’d they take that?”
“There are some rough characters in that trailer park. If it does come to that, I’ll take some backup and be prepared to shoot. I halfway expected someone to start something yesterday but they let it go.”
Pops nodded but didn’t say anything.
Henry looked around, feeling no pressure to speak. Farmers were like that – content just to stare at the land and not say much, sometimes. Henry threw up his hand and waved. Pops turned to find Ellen and Pete approaching.
“What brings you down, Henry?” Ellen asked.
“Just wanted to check on you guys,” Henry said. “The Kaisers that live between me and the trailer park said they thought someone tried to break in on them last night. Their dog got a hold of them, though, and they ran off. You all seen any trouble?”
Pops turned to Ellen, gauging her reaction.
“No,” Ellen said. “Not really. A bunch from the trailer park came down here yesterday wanting food and I had nothing to give them. And we heard some shots last night.”
“Really?” Henry asked.
Ellen nodded. “There were several,” she said. “I got up and looked out the window but didn’t see anything. I couldn’t really tell where they were coming from.”
“That right?” Henry said. “Couldn’t hear anything from my place, but that ain’t surprising, the way sounds bounce around in these hills.”
“Yeah,” Ellen said. “I reckon it could have been anywhere up or down the road, I couldn’t tell.”
Henry mulled this over. “Well, I got to get back to work,” he said. “Keep your eyes open. I think things with these folks will get worse before they get better.”
Pops nodded. “I think you’re right about that, Henry.”
“Call me on the radio if you need to,” Henry reminded them. “We may have to team up on these trailer park people if they keep acting the way they are. They seem to feel like they’re entitled to take wha
t they want. I’ve got news for them, though.”
With that, Henry turned and walked off.
Chapter 22
In the end, it was my eternal predisposition toward sightseeing that saved my life. I was in the lead, and we were puttering along cautiously on the ATVs, winding our way down the mountain. Coming around one bend I could see Lloyd’s town in the distance, easily recognizable by the tower of the town hall. I turned sideways, raising my arm to point toward it.
“There’s the town,” I called to the others.
I had barely closed my mouth when everything went to shit. A strand of barbed wire that had been lying across the road hidden by leaves was suddenly jerked tight to the level of my neck. Because of the way I was turned sideways with my arm upraised, the wire caught the inside of my bicep and dislocated my shoulder rather than catching the inside of my neck and dislocating my head. In an instant, I was lifted from the seat of my ATV and thrown backward. In another fluke of timing, I landed on my back in the trailer I was pulling, then continued rolling backward into the road. The trailer broke my fall sufficiently that I was not severely injured but I hit the back of my head on the pavement and lay there stunned. Randi, riding behind me, reacted quickly and swerved to the left, only missing me by a tight margin.
A little further back, Gary eased off the throttle and slammed on his brakes. Even with my eyes closed, I could identify the hollow sound of ATV tires skidding on pavement. I could not tell that everyone was focused on me but they must have been because no one noticed the man with the gun climbing down the high inside bank of the road until it was too late.
“Don’t move a damn muscle,” he said, leveling a pistol at them.
I recognized the voice, but continued to lay still, my eyes closed, my head spinning. I could feel warmth spreading under my arm, blood running from the deep burn of a gash. The son of a bitch had sliced me open with the wire. A barb had gone under my arm pit and cut me at the same time that it was dislocating my shoulder. The pain of the dislocated joint was excruciating and my only defense right now was to feign unconsciousness and hope that I could get a jump on the guy. My shoulder screamed, and it was all I could do not to writhe with the pain. It felt like a red hot knife was being twisted around inside the joint.
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