Forsaken World | Book 6 | Redemption

by Watson, Thomas A.

  “What are you chuckling about?” Dwain asked looking out over the valley.

  “Rhonda,” was all Heath said.

  Nodding with a sigh, “I’ve never seen her push herself like this for anything,” Dwain said. “I hated losing her at the house, but I’m glad she moved over. I never knew the girl was that smart, but she damn sure surprised me.”

  “I’m just glad I can understand Holly now,” Heath grunted. Just in the few weeks at the cabin, Holly’s enunciation had improved tenfold. Oh, she still sounded country, but didn’t talk like she had marbles in her mouth anymore. Watching Holly over the last few weeks Heath knew she was smart, but nowhere near those at the cabin. Like everyone, including Rhonda, Holly did pushups when she didn’t get her answers right. It seemed to Heath that every time he saw Holly, she was doing pushups. It was two days ago when Lilly had told Holly she couldn’t do them anymore.

  Not liking that, Holly had wanted to protest but Lilly had never wavered because Holly was nearly seven months pregnant. In Lilly’s defense, Holly was doing over a hundred pushups a day, and she didn’t want a pregnant woman to stress her body that much. Mainly because Holly did pushups until her arms gave out and fell on her face. In truth, Holly may have wanted to push it but was very respectful of those at the cabin, not to mention the fact Rhonda would’ve beat her down. Despite the age difference, Rhonda and Holly acted like sisters.

  “You have any idea why they called us?” Dwain asked, looking over the valley.

  Shaking his head, “Nope. They called and said be here by seven, so I wanted to get here at six-thirty,” Heath replied.

  Glancing back toward the build house, Heath couldn’t help but shiver. Two new bots were beside the house. They were nearly as big as a battle bot but had a turret mounted at the top. The turret was a gun bot. It was one of their new creations, and the reason everyone wanted the boys to let others do work, to free the boys up. There wasn’t one person in the coalition who wasn’t scared of their creations, but they wanted those creations around them to kill anything that tried to get in the perimeter. Heath knew he shouldn’t have been surprised when they’d rolled the first one out, but he was.

  The boys had called these thunder bots and because there were two, the second was on the other side of the house. It was the day the moms had returned when the gun bots they’d had out started having failures and shutting down. Ian and Lance would head out and fix it, only to get a message that another was down. For two weeks it seemed they were always heading to a gun bot. Heath and Dwain had both been expecting a tantrum at any minute, but neither Lance nor Ian had seemed pissed.

  If they couldn’t fix it out in the field they brought it back, fixed it, and then took it back out. What impressed Heath was when they fixed one, they would go and check the others at the same area of failure. The area that broke down on one gun bot was checked on all. After two weeks the breakdowns became less frequent, and none of the gun bots had shut down in the last three weeks, so Heath was keeping his fingers crossed.

  One thing Lance and Ian had to do on all the gun bots was slow down how fast it could feed ball bearings. The maximum went from six thousand to no more than four thousand a minute, but they did speed the disk up to throw the balls out faster. Heath couldn’t tell a difference because the ball bearings would still punch through metal. Then they’d had to redesign the feed mechanism, and he prayed for the gun bots to function properly so they wouldn’t fall to the wrath of Lance and Ian.

  Glancing over at Heath, Dwain could tell he was lost in thought. “You think Sandy’s going to say anything?” he threw out.

  Scoffing, “Shit if I know,” Heath mumbled. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind, Sandy didn’t like Lilly. To Heath, it was hate. Sandy was always coldly cordial and never outright mean, but she was hostile. Everyone knew Sandy didn’t like Lilly, and Heath prayed Sandy didn’t upset Lance because everyone could tell, Lance loved that girl. There was no doubt by anyone that Lilly was head-over-heels in love with Lance, but she was very submissive to Sandy. Out of everyone at the cabin, Lilly was the only one who called Sandy: Sandy.

  The kids, his kids, Jodi, and even Holly called her Momma Sandy, just as they called Mary, Momma Mary. Rhonda called her Ms. Sandy. When Heath had asked Rhonda about the ‘Lilly’ situation, Rhonda had just sighed and told him she’d asked Lilly. That first day when the moms had gotten back, Lilly had called her Ms. Sandy just like she’d called Mary, Ms. Mary. There was no way she was going to call her ‘Momma Sandy’. The next day, Sandy had told Lilly, “My name is Sandy.”

  More than once, Heath had seen Sandy glare at Lilly when she worked with Lance and Ian here at the build house. The first time was the second week back when the boys had started on their ‘master plan’. He could tell Lance was a momma’s boy, hell, anyone could. But Lance had been becoming a little hostile toward Sandy over the last month. It was just yesterday he’d yelled at her when Sandy had popped off at Lilly about nothing. What had shocked Heath, and everyone else, Lilly had taken Sandy’s side and had asked Lance to drop it.

  “Yeah, I hope and pray they work it out,” Heath finally said. He could understand to a certain degree with Sandy. But he still had trouble thinking of Lance as a thirteen-year-old boy. Nearly every male in the group had said ‘Sir’ to Lance or Ian, at least once a day. Only to have the boys glare at them and they would call them by name after. But Heath could see Sandy only saw her little boy, not a badass motherfucker who could terrify people and was smarter than any ten people put together that Heath had known before the infection.

  Hearing an electric motor, they both turned to see Ian’s tracked buggy come out of the trees. It was a sight to behold every time Heath saw it. The tracked buggy had over two and a half feet of ground clearance and you had to climb up to get in it. In the front center, Ian was driving. There were two seats just behind him but they didn’t look forward, they both faced out forty-five degrees so the passengers could cover from the front to the sides much easier. Then there were two more seats behind those, but they also faced back at forty-five degrees so the rear passengers could cover from the side to the rear. Then at the back was a small truck bed.

  On the top was a true open gun turret and of course, it had the same centrifugal gun that was on the gun bots. But this one could be fired by a trigger and was only full auto. The turret was operated by pedals and could spin all the way around. Spotting a figure in the turret, even with the skull mask on, Heath knew it was Lance in the gun turret.

  “I want to build one,” Dwain stated with awe, drooling over the creation as Ian parked.

  “Go ahead, I’ll help. Just tell me what to do,” Heath offered.

  “Pfft,” Dwain scoffed. “I might could in gas, but not electric.”

  Cocking his head to the side, Heath had to agree. Just the fact he had never seen the tracked buggy plugged up to charge astounded him. All Ian or Lance would say was it had special batteries. He knew for a fact the damn thing could drive around for ten hours nonstop because that’s what the boys had taken to work on the gun bots after it was done. Heath and Dwain had asked if it had an engine to charge the batteries, but Ian had said no and had opened it up to show them. In the front compartment were computer towers and other electronics.

  At the back was the enclosed storage area, like the bed of a truck where four people could sit or haul stuff. The bed floor was the hood to the engine compartment. When the back compartment was opened, they could only see the motors at the rear with batteries and a metal box that Ian had called their ‘special battery’. On the thick metal box they had seen ‘22K’ painted in yellow. Then Ian had shown them the rest and they’d nearly fainted. There were thermal cameras on the front, sides, rear, and one on a boom that could lift twenty feet up. Every seat had a flat touch screen monitor, and in the gunner’s seat there were two. A small one mounted on top of the centrifugal gun that could be used to aim nine hundred yards and the other, mounted to the frame. Each monitor at the seats and t
urret was touch screen, so the passenger could change cameras, pull up a map, change radio frequencies or other functions. But in the driver’s area there were four monitors, and Heath still didn’t know what all of them were for.

  When Ian had shown them the air conditioner, they’d both nearly dropped. It wasn’t a car A/C, it was a disassembled 20k BTU window unit. Each seat had a vent that blasted the person with cold air. There was a metal roof over all the seats and the buggy had doors. The doors didn’t open out, they slid to the side like a shower door and were only four feet tall. When you climbed in, you climbed ‘in’ and dropped down into your seat. The gunner’s seat up top had a roof and was enclosed with thick wire mesh, and the top had a metal hatch one had to drop through to man the gun. It could be closed off to seal up the position as well. After the dog attack, Heath understood very well why all the buggies and UTVs should be enclosed.

  Heath wasn’t stupid, and knew there weren’t batteries strong enough to last that long, but was at a total loss on how the buggy could operate for a full day without recharging. Just the damn A/C should’ve made the batteries drop dead in an hour, but Ian never turned the damn thing off. When he and Dwain had gone out with them one day to work on gun bots, well, watch over Lance and Ian as they worked on gun bots, Ian had never turned the buggy off. The A/C, computers, monitors, and radio had all stayed on.

  After they finished at each spot with the gun bot, Ian would just climb in, grab the two control levers, and push them forward to take off. “If this hadn’t happened, those boys would’ve ruled the world,” Heath mumbled watching everyone get out, and then amended that. “No, they would’ve owned the world.”

  It was the ‘master plan’ that had convinced Heath of that. The first part of construction were twenty feet long, seven feet wide steel pipes. It was when work started on the first pipe, Heath wanted to run away. The Ladybugs, Lori, and Denny were cutting out four-inch-long and two-inch-wide rectangles in perfect rows on the huge pipes. Off to the side, Rhonda and Lilly were cutting four-inch-wide and two-inch-thick steel beams. Each piece they cut was ten inches long, with one end cut straight across but the other end was cut at a forty-five degree angle, forming a long, sharp right triangle. It was when Allie took one of the steel pieces and put it in one of the cut-out holes in the pipe, Heath finally realized what they were making; a twenty feet long and seven feet tall shredder. Just like the ones on the battle bots, but beyond super-sized. Heath’s brain had gone into overdrive, thinking the boys were going to build a massive bot to roam the land, eating everything in its path. Only when Ian laughed, telling Heath that a machine that size was impossible did Heath relax, but he was still terrified of the ‘master plan’.

  Watching Lance climb out of the gunner’s seat and walk on the roof that covered the right side passengers, Heath thought Lance looked… tense. He wasn’t mad because Heath had seen that often enough. When Ian got out Heath relaxed because Ian was moving like he wasn’t tense, and that was one thing everyone had come to understand. A person only had to know how one was feeling to know how the other was acting. To date, he had never seen one boy get mad and the other not. But most importantly, one never threw a tantrum alone.

  Dino trotted out of the tree line and just laid down as Jennifer climbed out of the right front spot and Sandy the rear spot. When Lilly and Mary came from the other side Heath just raised his eyebrows, and was very thankful the mask was hiding his expression. “Lilly acts like a beat dog around Sandy,” Heath mumbled.

  “You just spotted that?” Dwain shot off quietly.

  Not realizing he’d said it out loud, “Dwain…” Heath started and then said, “Never mind.” He was going to ask if Dwain thought maybe Sandy had set the bar a little too high for her boy, but then remembered the ages. If he was being honest himself, Heath looked at Lance as being older than Lilly, despite the fact Lilly had been weeks away from having a PhD. in veterinary medicine.

  “Hey, guys,” Heath called out, grinning under his mask.

  Lance stopped in front of Heath and Dwain, then pushed up his mask. Again, Heath was happy for his mask because if Lance’s posture said ‘tense’, his facial expression was agitated. “We’re heading out of the perimeter to Bimble,” Lance told him as Ian stopped on Lance’s right side.

  Walking up on Lance’s left, “Lance!” Sandy snapped and nearly ripped her mask off. “They don’t need to come and neither do you! Mary and I can go get her!”

  Lance spun to Sandy so fast, Heath and Dwain both jumped back and instinctively brought up their hands to block. They had sparred with Lance and Ian. Despite being ‘boys’, the two were man-sized now and could take Dwain and Heath wrestling. “Mom, don’t!” Lance nearly yelled. “We do this our way!”

  “Young man, we crossed an ocean and over half the country to get here! Mary and I can get them!” Sandy did shout.

  “Whoopee-fucking-dooooo,” Lance sassed and Jennifer sighed behind them, really wanting to go back to bed. She knew why each was mad of course, but over the last two weeks, the tension in the cabin between Lance and Sandy had been skyrocketing. Jennifer had never heard Sandy ever raise her voice at Lance and she’d damn sure never heard Lance sass or yell back, but she damn sure had these last two weeks, from both of them. Hearing Sandy take a deep breath, Jennifer closed and rolled her eyes.

  Before Sandy spoke Lance did, and it wasn’t in a normal tone, unless one was at a heavy metal concert. “You act like we’ve been here playing checkers since March!” Lance shouted but Sandy didn’t step or move back with the outburst, she stepped closer.

  “You will speak to me with respect, do you hear me?!” Sandy shouted back.

  “I fucking am!” Lance yelled. “Anyone else I’d beat the shit out of, but you’re my mom and I will never hit you, so I’m going to fucking yell until you show me some respect!”

  Standing just behind Lance and taking her mask off, “Lance,” Lilly said in a shaking voice, “don’t talk to your momma like that.”

  Jerking her eyes from Lance and spinning her head like a tank turret to Lilly, “Nobody asked you, so butt out!” Sandy screamed at Lilly, and she cringed but didn’t step back from Lance’s side. “Just shut up when I’m talking to my son! W-”

  Throwing his mask down and moving in front of Sandy’s gaze, “She has a name and it’s LILLY!” Lance shouted.

  Sandy let out a snarl as she spoke, “I know what her fucking name is and if she minded her own business, I might use it! You will stay here, do you hear me?! Mary and I will be back!”

  “You fucking try to go without us, and I’ll wrestle you down and tie your ass to a tree! I said I would never hit you, but I’ll damn sure wrestle you down.”

  Dropping her mask, “I will get a belt and spank your ass, young man!” Sandy shot back.

  Crossing his arms over his chest, “Oh, I would love to see you try,” Lance challenged, then started digging under his vest. “Fuck that. I’ll give you mine and let you try.”

  With her voice firm and harsh, Lilly spoke. “Lance, now that’s enough. You will not disrespect your mother like that.”

  Turning to Lilly, Lance’s face softened and he spoke in a much lower tone. “Lilly, she’s going to listen to me because Ian and I know what the fuck we’re doing.”

  Everyone was shocked at how Lance looked and spoke to Lilly, not Sandy. Seeing how Lance had changed for Lilly, Sandy became livid. “We’ve moved through the land past hordes of stinkers, gangs and rapists! Don’t you dare lecture me, ‘young man’,” Sandy stressed hard.

  “Lilly, please,” Lance said softly, then turned to his mom and his expression once again became pissed. “I guarantee you, we’ve killed more than you have. I’ve killed people and stinkers with my bare hands, bow and arrows, with a knife and a gun. We’ve secured this valley and wiped out three gangs, ‘Mother’,” Lance snarled the last.

  Jennifer nearly fainted because she could swear Lance was about to tell his mom that he and Ian hadn’t lost anyone, but she and
Mary had. But there was no denying Lance had inherited his mother’s temper. Before this, Sandy had never gotten hostile with Lance, but others in the neighborhood, Sandy damn sure did. Weird thing was the main reason Sandy unloaded on some in the neighborhood was because of Lance. Sandy had never yelled at Lance before this. Not that Jennifer had ever heard of, and the only spanking she could remember Lance ever getting was from his dad the year they’d moved into the neighborhood. Ian had gotten one also because they’d thrown rocks, on purpose, breaking two of Mr. Oliver’s windows. But they had only been eight years old then.

  “I’m still the parent here, son,” Sandy growled.

  Nodding with a scowl, “Yes, you are. Otherwise you’d be handcuffed to a tree,” Lance replied. “You will not do something stupid now and I can assure you, if you went without us, you would do something stupid.”

  As the two went back and forth, Heath glanced behind Lance at Lilly. She looked nothing like her former self. Before the moms returned, she had held her head high. Now, she looked like a battered wife with her posture slumped and timid body language. He could see tears running down Lilly’s cheeks and Heath felt very sorry for her.

  Glancing at the others, Jennifer was looking up at the sky, Ian had his eyes closed and was minutely shaking his head. With a scowl on her face, Mary was looking at Sandy and Lance.

  Dropping her eyes from the sky, Jennifer wished they would shut up. She could see each one’s side, but thought Lance was in the right here. Even when Lance had been little Sandy had always listened to him, treating him like a grown-up, but that had stopped the day after they’d returned home. There were times when they were eating and Jennifer was expecting Sandy to get up from the table and feed Lance or cut up his food. For the first time, Jennifer saw Sandy wanted to treat Lance like the little boy he used to be.