Draconian Measures

by Chris Lowry

  “These men are going to escort you through the woods, out of our territory and make sure you never come back.”

  “Without my kids?”

  “They’re staying here where we can keep them safe.”

  I grunted.

  The Colonel’s inserted themselves between us and the men at the gate grabbed me by the arms.

  They need not have bothered.

  The drugs were still pulsing through me, I was still weak. I’m not sure what threat they thought I posed, but they weren’t taking any chances.

  “The Council has decided to let you go,” Mags told me and wiggled her fingers in a childish wave good bye.

  The men at the gate dragged me out and I almost cried out when it slammed closed and a bar fell across it with a loud metal clang.

  They hustled me to the edge of the woods and along a beaten path.

  I could smell the scent of smoke on the air, remnants of my fire maybe, or the forest fire they claimed I set.

  I tried to watch the group around me, head swiveling between the men and the ground, my bare foot swishing under the Mylar blanket.

  I’m not sure how I knew what they planned, but they weren’t going to let me go. Was it the sneer on the face of the one with long greasy hair? The other with the hard looking grimace surrounded by pockmarks?

  I didn’t know.

  All I knew was they were planning to take me out of range of the walls, and put one in my head.

  Go back and tell the kids Daddy is loose and fine and living on his own.

  There are plans and machinations that people put into motion, when all most really want is just a live and let live world.

  The six men trailing after me weren’t going to let that happen.

  They were going to live, and plan for me to die.

  I wondered how long I had before they would make their move.

  I wondered how I was going to get back in to rescue my children. All the fog in my head swirled, while I stumbled along.

  The six men bunched up, three in front, three behind.

  It gave me an idea.

  I tripped, and slowed down.

  The three in front pulled ahead, and the next guy in line behind me reached out to grab my arm.

  They should have tied me up.

  Hell, they should have shot me in the hospital courtyard instead of thinking it was a good idea to get me away from the compound so no one would see their dirty work.

  When he grabbed my arm, I twisted and pulled him off balance. I thrust a fist into his throat, and shoved him back into the other two before he could yell.

  Then I dashed through the trees, zigging and zagging as they yelled behind me.

  It's funny what your mind thinks of as you're running through the woods being chased by armed madmen.

  I remember reading an article about "prepping" or being prepared for the end of the world.

  A lot of those guys had systems, and bunkers, full of weapons and food and plans to survive in a post-apocalyptic society.

  This particular article focused on workouts that would help you survive Armageddon, though it didn't say one word about zombies, not even as a joke.

  Something like, run a really long time to make sure your endurance is ready to go longer than the undead.

  Nope, it skipped that part.

  It talked about CrossFit exercises that would help you chop wood, and carry heavy game back to the bunker.

  Which was smart.

  It also suggested going barefoot as often as possible to toughen up the soles of the feet.

  Because one never knew when the shite was going to punch through the fan, and if you got caught

  with your shoes off, or worse yet, some enterprising bandits decided to abscond with your boots,

  being a shoeless joe wouldn't hamper the escape effort.

  Maybe it wasn't so funny the article was on my mind as I winced my way through the woods.

  My toes hurt.

  My head hurt.

  It all hurt, but the sharp twigs and angry rocks that gashed out for my tender footprints kept my mind on one thing.

  Moving forward so the men after me couldn't catch up.

  I just wished I'd paid more attention to their suggestion.

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  We were two miles from the compound.

  I could run it in twenty minutes and still have enough energy to climb wall, find the kids and bust them loose.

  But I needed weapons.

  There was six men between me and the walls and they all had guns.

  Seriously, no one watched Rambo and Die Hard growing up?

  Six against one was nothing.

  A cake walk.

  I leaned against the rough back of the tree and smelled the wet leaves, trying to recall what happened in both.

  I didn’t have a tower to hide in or an elevator to climb in, nor did I hear a waterfall I could jump off of and escape into a deep pool of water.

  All I heard were the men scrambling through the dead leaves as they hunted for me.

  Then I remembered.

  Hunters don’t look up.

  I searched the ground around the tree and picked up a couple of pieces of dead branch. I slid it in the waist at my back and climbed the tree.

  It was not as easy as I remembered from being a kid.

  In the movies, the branch is just in reach and the hero grabs it, vaults to the crown of the tree like Tarzan in his glory days.

  The lowest branch to this tree was fifteen feet off the ground.

  I had to grip the trunk with my hands and forearms, use my feet to push up. Then clench the inside of me feet against the circle of the bole and inch my arms up.

  It did not feel good.

  I made the branch and settled on it to catch my breath and tried to listen.

  The men were closer, moving now toward the noise I made on the tree.

  They would be here any minute.

  I moved up two more limbs and wished for thicker foliage. I wished for bark covered camo that would let me blend into the tree trunk. I wished for a rifle and scope.

  But all I had were six men hunting me and two short pieces of wood.

  Stupid.

  This was a stupid plan and I was a stupid man about to die.

  My kids would be trapped inside the wall and never know. They would think I chose to leave them, chose to abandon them.

  There it was, the gurgle of rage.

  I fed the flames. These men were trying to keep me from my kids. They were trying to kill me.

  I held out one of the sticks and tossed it into another tree past the one I was in.

  It hit with a clack and fell with a clatter.

  That brought two of the men toward me.

  I could hear them approach, trying to be quiet, trying to sneak up on the noise and see what it was.

  They reached the bottom of the tree I was in and did exactly what hunters the world over do.

  They did not look up.

  The only reason anyone looks up into a tree is if they’re hunting squirrel or trying to shoot mistletoe out of the heights.

  That’s it.

  The rest of the time, hunters are searching the sight lines in the woods, which can get confusing and hypnotic with the different patterns created by branches, shadows, wind, and leaves.

  The eye gets lazy and instead of trying to catalog everything, the vision goes sort of soft as the brain searches for anomalies.

  Except they don’t look up.

  I tossed the second branch a few meters to the right and when it hit, they both turned.

  I dropped on top of them.

  I’ve lost a lot of weight since the Zpocalypse. Part of it was starving a lot, but most of it was just sheer movement. The amount of time I spent still on any given day was practically nil.

  But one hundred and seventy pounds dropping twenty feet is a lot of mass to crash down on top of someone.

  I hit with a foot on each of their shoulder
s.

  It knocked me on my ass because there was no stable surface to land on, but it slammed the first guy into the tree trunk and sent his gun careening.

  The second guy, long hair, folded under me with a cracked clavicle.

  I tried to land a roll, and mostly succeeded, and made it to my feet.

  Then I was on them.

  I sent a foot into long hair’s face and kept him occupied with a squirting nose.

  The other guy was on his hands and knees crawling fast for his lost gun.

  I landed a knee into the spine between his shoulder blades and sent him sprawling. Then I grabbed his chin, planted both knees against his back and pulled until something cracked.

  He stopped moving.

  I should have grabbed his knife.

  I should have grabbed the rifle.

  But hindsight is always 20/20.

  Instead I went for long hair and he screamed.

  It was more of a gurgle than a scream and it sprayed blood all over the moist leaves.

  That brought the others running.

  They shot, but couldn’t hit me because it’s tough to shoot straight when you’re pounding through slippery leaves and aiming through trees.

  I ran.

  And left a trail they could follow.

  Tracking is a skill I don’t possess, but I do know if you want someone to trail you, turn over dirt and leaves. Scrape bark off trees.

  It’s tough to do when you’re trying to be obvious about it, and don’t want the person tracking you to know you’re being obvious.

  The subtlety of it was lost with me.

  All I knew is I wanted them after me once I put a little distance between us.

  In the movies, they had time to build all sorts of booby traps learned in the jungles of Vietnam.

  I think jumping from the tree was my one trick pony, but it took out two of them, plus one stayed behind to take care of long hair.

  That’s what I figured when he stopped screaming.

  Either that or they killed him.

  Three kept up with me.

  It’s easy to get lost in the woods.

  Terribly easy.

  It happened to me once when I was fourteen. I was spending Christmas break with my Dad at the home he had in the country. This sounds a lot fancier than it actually was.

  The truth was my Dad lived in the woods, in a house owned by my grandfather. We would go visit him on the weekends, and stay longer when school was out, even though we lived in the same town.

  That time it snowed.

  It didn’t often snow in the small town where I lived, maybe once every other year. This time it put almost eight inches on the ground.

  I’d never been on a walk in the woods when it was white and quiet, the snow muffling very step.

  I bundled up and took off for a hike on the logging and three wheeler trails carved through the pine forest.

  After an hour, I turned around and followed my footsteps back.

  Only they weren’t my footsteps.

  After three hours, I tried to pick one direction and kept walking.

  At the end of the day I ended up almost thirty miles from my house when I stepped out on an ice covered highway.

  It was almost twilight, I was half frozen and terrified when a couple in a four wheel drive picked me up and drove me home.

  Getting lost in the woods is easy.

  I tried to think about that when I ran, because I needed to be able to find my way back to the compound.

  I was thinking about it when I hit the edge of a shallow slope and pitched down a mud slicked side of creek.

  I slid to the bottom, tried to catch my breath and listened to the men chasing me.

  They pounded through the leaves, clucking and whistling to each other as they tried to zero in on my position.

  I sat up, felt the mud slurp around me and glanced at the lip of the bank where I tripped.

  It was an easy trail to follow.

  But the creek had flooded in the past and carved a shallow depression under the hill.

  It wasn’t deep, just a few inches, but it was on the shadowed side of the creek, and I had an idea.

  I slathered mud across my face and rolled over so it coated me.

  Then I backed up into the dark ground under the lip of the creek.

  It was a great hiding spot, but I saw a rock about the size of my fist next to the water and I yanked it up, just as someone stopped at the edge of the overhang and sent a shower of dead leaves across me.

  I tried not to breath.

  He didn’t jump.

  He sat down, put both legs over the rim and jumped to splotch in front of me, studying the ground I had just wallowed on.

  I listened for anyone close and decided to chance it.

  He turned as I lunged from the mud, the two steps between us too tight for him to bring the gun to bear.

  Then I beaned him with the rock.

  He fell backwards into the creek and I was on top of him, pounding with the rock twice, three times.

  I grabbed his rifle and pushed back toward the shadows, hoping to use his body as bait.

  It worked.

  The next guy stopped at the top a few meters away.

  “Tom?”

  He leaped down, fought for balance and recovered to kneel next to his buddy.

  “Don’t move,” I said as he checked for vital signs.

  He glanced over at me, and I’m not sure what he saw.

  A mud covered monster holding a rifle at him from the shadows under a patch of ground.

  I might have been scared too.

  He dropped his rifle and held up his hands.

  “Don’t kill me,” he said in a loud voice. “Please.”

  His eyes flicked up.

  I raised the rifle and sent a shot back over the edge and heard a yelp.

  The guy down here with me threw himself forward to try to grab his rifle, but we were close. I stepped out and slammed the butt into his chin, then went to check on the mewling man above.

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  I tied them to the trees, the ones that were alive at least. I circled back to gather long hair and his crunched nose and his would be rescue party, stepping out of the shadows to take them by surprise.

  I marched them back to join their buddies.

  Four of them.

  Then I built a small fire made of twigs in a hole I scooped out of the ground, the tiny flames just enough warmth to work by.

  I stripped them all of clothes, then washed the mud off me in the creek before putting on a little fashion show to find what fit.

  They were not appreciative, or maybe they were quiet because of the sweaty socks I tied into their mouths.

  All of their feet were smaller than mine, so I had to forego boots, but I doubled up on socks that weren’t being chewed on at the moment.

  I sat on the ground in front of the fire, working over the actions of the rifles, checking the magazines and cleaning them as best I could with a scrap of cloth ripped from the dead man’s shirt.

  I finished and pulled a gag off the man closest to me.

  “You killed Sid,” one of them croaked through parched lips and I looked up to see which one.

  He caught my eye and tried to hold it with his scared blue ones, the left twitching like an electric current ran under it from stress.

  “Where are my kids?”

  “They’re safe,” he answered, then cackled.

  It sounded wet and phlegmy, like a smoker when they first wake up. “We kept ‘em all good and safe. It’s what we do with all the cattle.”

  Cattle.

  I didn’t like the way it sounded and the way he said it.

  “Tell me.”

  “Tell you what? There’s nothing you can do,” he crowed in a braggart’s voice. “They’ll send others to find us, too many for you to handle on your own and then you’ll be dead.”

  “I thought your Council wanted me alive.”

  “Mags
don’t,” said the braggart. “And the Colonel’s work for Mags.”

  “Tell me more.”

  But he shut up after a glance at the others.

  I held up one of the rifles and let him watch me feed in the bullets.

  “You don’t scare me,” he sniffed. “You can kill me or let me live. I don’t care much either way.”

  A man who isn’t afraid to die isn’t scared easily.

  I knew from personal experience.

  But I also knew a secret.

  “There are worse things than death,” I told him.

  He must not have liked the way I said it because I saw him gulp then, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down on his thin throat.

  Then he dug deep and bolstered his resolve.

  I almost admired him for that.

  Men and women have an infinite capacity for willpower, for being able to marshal reserves of strength that boggle the human mind.

  I’d seen it hundreds of times over, and we’ve all heard stories about people who do extraordinary things that seem superhuman.

  Scientists explain it is willpower and an adrenaline dump, the kind strong enough to let a mother lift a car to save her child, or a soldier like Audi Murphy to fight off a German battalion by himself after being wounded.

  This man had that much willpower.

  In another life, he could have been a hero too.

  But in this one, his will met mine.

  He didn’t stand a chance.

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  My ex wife had a habit that I hated. Whenever she wanted a chore done, or a lot of tasks knocked off the honey do list, she would pick a fight.

  I would bottle up my anger and let it out through activity, which meant she learned how to selectively direct my behavior.

  She didn't feel like doing the dishes? Pick a fight about money.

  Wanted the yard work finished?

  Start an argument about affection, or jealousy or any other tiny little thing.

  She was an ace at it too with the ability to use digs and sarcasm in a single most annoying way.

  The result was a lot of bad blood, a lot of housework and eventually a divorce.

  After that, I was able to do some introspection.

  Especially as I discovered long distance running. There is a lot of time to think during so many miles.