Before Joseph could reply, “You didn’t do that?” Chad asked in surprise.
Not able to flip Chad off with his right hand since all his fingers were bandaged up, Arthur flipped Chad off with his left since only the palm was wrapped up. “Bitch, I told you we weren’t preppers. Yes, we did three gun, and even Joseph did some in high school, but reloading magazines in combat isn’t something I ever considered,” Arthur replied. “I’m lucky as shit Jason practiced that shit, otherwise I would’ve pulled the pin on my grenade.”
“That was over five thousand dogs,” Yvonne blurted out.
“Won’t find me arguing,” Arthur replied, and everyone nodded in agreement. “I learned real fast to hit to wound because most of the time, the dog shot would attack the dog closest to it. When they came up from the south in that clearing, I bet there were over a hundred dogs fighting in that first two minutes from the ones we wounded. That kept the ones behind from just charging us and bought us time.”
“That’s good to know,” Chad said, looking at the bandages covering Arthur. “I’m telling you now, we ever see a group of large cats that big, I’m not leaving our area, ever,” Chad declared. “I’ll extend the height of our wall to a hundred feet and stay behind it until I die.”
“Chad, I’ll agree with you on that,” Arthur chimed in.
Chapter Sixteen
I Caught a Pokémon
With only a few clouds in the night sky, crouched low, Wendy eased through the trees slow and steady, trying to ignore the bone-chilling temperature. The quad tube night vision gave the forest a sinister and eerie feeling that she damn sure didn’t like. Waiting for a day after Arthur and Jason had run into the pack of dogs, she and Samantha had volunteered to go when Arthur didn’t ask them. Wendy had been waiting for Arthur to ask, since Chad and others in his group had gone out that night. When Arthur didn’t, Wendy had told him she and Samantha were going to scout the next night. Many in the group had been surprised Arthur had only told Wendy to ‘keep her head on task’. Every night since then, Wendy and Samantha, along with LL taking another team, had headed out from the ranch as two teams had left with Chad’s group, but nobody had gotten out of the vehicles until Joseph had given the all-clear.
This was the seventh-night scouting, and the temperature was negative eighteen when she and Samantha had left the twins and Shawn in the Suburban. It did surprise Wendy when she’d asked Shawn to go, the twins had never complained.
Feeling Samantha stop, Wendy froze and just shifted her eyes to Samantha. Her gaze confirmed that Samantha was stopped and looking off to her right. Rotating her head slightly Wendy saw where Samantha was looking, fifty yards away and twenty feet in the air. It looked like a treehouse, but it was actually a guard post for the group they were currently scouting. This was the largest group that’d been found and so far, had been the most scouted.
Wendy let Samantha watch the guard house as she turned her head to the left to keep watch on the area. With her AR held low and ready, she fought not to shiver and really wished they could move a bit faster, just so they could keep warm. The adrenaline rush had dissipated hours ago at the first camp they’d scouted. When they saw no changes in routine from the group of kids at that camp, they’d headed back to Shawn and the twins and had driven south.
This group was near Ross, which wasn’t anything. There wasn’t even a crossroad only a T-intersection, and at the intersection there wasn’t even a stop sign, much less a blinking light, only a yield sign. They had all driven through here nearly a dozen times since the outbreak but unless you took a dead-end dirt road, you weren’t going to find the camp.
In all reality, they should’ve thought of the area because it used to be a youth camp, but it had closed the year before the outbreak. A kid had gotten stung by a wasp and the family had sued the camp and won. It’d made national headlines, and the thing that was fucked was the kid hadn’t even been allergic to stings and was fine. But the judge had ruled ‘A safe environment’ hadn’t been maintained. So, the county and group of churches who’d owned the camp had let their insurance settle the suit and they’d just closed the camp.
Feeling Samantha move, which meant the guard house was empty, Wendy eased ahead and was very proud of how she was moving. There wasn’t any doubt, if a sloth would’ve been moving with them, the sloth would’ve won. That was why Kit and Kat were in the Suburban. Neither had ever grasped the concept of ‘sneak’, no matter how many times she and Arthur had tried to teach the labs. Donald and Daisy could sneak, but Kit and Kat, they were a lost cause.
Moving her left leg forward, she angled more to the side to miss the covered pit to her front, and could tell Samantha was going around on the opposite side. All the kid locations they’d scouted so far had traps around the perimeter, but this group had the most, both in quantity and type. The pits had been dug out with mini excavators, ten feet deep and then filled with spikes. Not wooden spikes, three-foot-long, quarter-inch round, metal spikes that had ground-down needle sharp points. They knew mini excavators had been used because on Arthur’s first trip here, one pit was still being dug at 2300 hours. This group just kept adding more traps and every morning a group came out, making sure nothing had been caught or a trap triggered.
And that was how Arthur had learned where to move. By watching those patrols, he’d made a map that Wendy had committed to memory before her first trip. After she’d gotten here to scout, Wendy realized she would’ve seen many, if not all, the traps placed throughout the woods and fields outside the perimeter. They were kids, but not woodsmen by a long shot, and they damn sure weren’t Arthur because when he set a trap, even he had a hard time finding it. That was how Wendy and Joseph had learned to look for traps, Arthur would set some up and take them in the woods to let them find what he’d put out.
Of all the kid camps they’d found, this was the one that’d impressed Arthur the most. When he’d told Wendy what all was there, she’d really thought he was just blowing smoke up her ass, but he wasn’t. The one thing that awed both of them was the moat the kids had built. It was ten feet wide but only three feet deep. After his first trip, Arthur had admitted that if it hadn’t been for all the traps, he might’ve just stepped in the moat. He still almost did, but had smelled the heavy aroma of salt.
Getting to his knees and sniffing, Arthur had realized it was coming from the water. That night he’d had to use night vision goggles and had a hard time looking in the water. Finally moving away, he’d found a spot where he could turn on a UV light that couldn’t be seen by any guard post, since some of the kids had night vision goggles. Before Arthur had turned on the light, he’d seen the bodies of rats floating in the water.
Very nervous, Arthur had turned on the UV light and saw the moat was lined with heavy-duty plastic and at the bottom, he saw suspended cables. Realizing he was looking at exposed electrical lines, Arthur had shut the light off and taken a step back. Not wanting to tempt fate, he’d moved back to Jason and they’d headed home. The next night he’d returned with a voltmeter and had found that the current in the water was enough to kill.
Across the moat, a ten-foot-tall chain-link fence stood right at the edge. There wasn’t enough room to land if one did attempt to jump across. After he’d discovered the electrified water, Arthur had studied the fence closer and finally spotted strands of wire running along the face of the fence and realized it was electric fence wire.
There were two primitive drawbridges across the moat. Well, primitive to Arthur, but something very cool for the kids inside the perimeter. One was for vehicles and the other was used to walk or drive buggies and ATVs across. That night, the small one was down and when nobody was looking, Arthur had slipped inside. He’d tested the wire along the chain-link fence and had found it was just an ordinary electric fence. Anyone who jumped across and tried to latch onto the chain link fence would get the shit shocked out of them and let go. Thereby falling into the moat from hell and dying.
After moving around inside
for a few hours, Arthur had found he couldn’t use the small bridge to leave because it’d been raised. The camp sat in a huge oxbow formed by the river, and the kids had sealed the end off with the two-mile-long moat from hell. Since he was inside the perimeter, Arthur had decided to map the inside and found the moat water wasn’t taken from the small river around the oxbow, it was circulated from the ends back to the center.
The river was the same one that ran through the ranch but traveled forty miles to make it to here, twenty-eight miles from the ranch. Along its route, over two dozen creeks emptied into the river. Before the fall it’d been a small river. Now, it was a nice-sized river. As the lake at the ranch had been filling up, they’d checked where Piney Creek emptied in Lake Dardanelle, and couldn’t really tell a difference in the flow.
After exploring, when Jason called him over the radio saying it was time to pull out, Arthur had moved to the river and found another chain-link fence, but at the bottom, quarter-inch mesh had been placed and ran halfway up the ten-foot-tall chain link fence that was now topped with barbed wire. On the outside, where the mesh ended was the electric fence, and Arthur knew the reason for the mesh was rats and mice. Having no desire to test the electric wires on the fence, Arthur had climbed the fence and just jumped. Only when he’d hit the water had he realized that hadn’t been the smartest course.
Moving around the pit Wendy couldn’t help but grin under her shemagh, remembering Arthur still shivering when he and Jason had gotten back to the ranch. He’d taken off and jumped in the hot tub, and had stayed there for two hours.
Stepping over a tripwire, Wendy eased along. Suddenly to her right she heard a dog yelping loudly, then it stopped. “Puppy tried to get across the moat I’ll bet,” she mumbled and continued easing through the forest.
Tonight, their target was the trail that was used from the perimeter to the tallest point outside of Ross. It was over eleven hundred feet high and gave a very nice commanding view of the area for miles. Wendy had no doubt the kids here had watched the Caravan Man drive the roads and pass right under their lookout spot. To be honest, Wendy had expected Arthur to have reservations about her plan, but he’d just smiled at her and had told her to try it. But, he’d told her to only go through with it just as she’d planned and explained to him, no making changes on the fly.
Twenty minutes later, Wendy slowly went to one knee as Samantha eased up and knelt beside her. “We’re early,” Samantha breathed, and Wendy just gave a nod. It wasn’t even midnight yet. There wasn’t a set time to change the lookouts, but they usually moved from the camp to the lookout spot between 0100-0230.
The only problem Wendy had with waiting was, it was as cold as fuck. They were in the middle of a large belt of booby traps, so she wasn’t that worried about animals. “I’m going to set up,” Wendy replied and Samantha just gave a nod, taking a deep breath to deal with the cold as she covered Wendy and waited.
Dropping to her belly and cradling her AR, Wendy crawled forward as Samantha went prone. Thirty yards ahead after crawling around another trap, Wendy stopped a few yards back from a well-used footpath. Tucked under a six-foot-tall cedar tree, Wendy could feel the chill fighting through the layers of clothes she had on. Like Samantha, she was wearing a fedora. Wendy had put on a skull cap, then the fedora. With the shemagh wrapped tightly around her face, Wendy had no exposed skin. Samantha had on a ski mask and then her shemagh. At the time Wendy had thought the ski mask would hinder more than help, but she was having serious doubts about that issue now.
After an hour, Wendy was again talking herself out of just going to the camp and grabbing a kid. The only thing that stopped her was she’d promised Arthur she wouldn’t deviate from her plan. Curling her toes in her boots to get feeling back in her feet, Wendy nearly jumped to her feet and took off running when Samantha’s voice sounded in her earbud. “Three coming.”
Taking a deep breath to calm down and answer in a steady yet shivering voice, “Copy,” Wendy answered.
It wasn’t long before she saw the three figures walking abreast along the path. With her night vision goggles she could see two were wearing night vision, but it was the cheap first-generation kind. The kid in the middle was carrying a low-lumen flashlight. Not surprised, Wendy noticed he was the one having the least amount of trouble walking. One thing that had impressed her was the light discipline all the kid gangs showed. At night, they didn’t have bright lights out. Just a bunch of low-lumen lights around their areas.
Even now, there were pinpoints of light across the countryside from solar-powered lights on homes. There were even stretches of interstate lit up from the solar lights on the highway.
“None of these three are the ones we wanted,” Samantha called back, and Wendy almost jumped to her feet and shot the three kids still a hundred yards away. They, Arthur and Jason, had watched this group and spotted sixteen kids who’d seemed very high up in the command. Of those, seven had been spotted going to the lookout spot.
Pressing her PTT, “One of the shits is coming with us. I didn’t freeze my tits off to come back empty-handed,” Wendy replied, fighting to not let her teeth chatter.
“Hey, I’m with you,” Samantha replied. “Let’s just grab all three.”
Thinking about that and very tempted, Wendy pressed her PTT. “No, I’ll grab one and we’re getting the fuck in the truck with the heater on high.”
When the three came closer, Wendy confirmed they were all boys. She’d thought that by how they were walking, but this group had both boys and girls. Gripping her AR tight, she waited until they were ten yards away and rose up slowly.
Suddenly not cold anymore, “Aim at me and I’ll kill all of you,” Wendy warned in a steady voice. The three froze as a shadow appeared from the ground. Well, to the boy in the middle without night vision goggles, it was a shadow. The other two saw a green blob.
Not surprised to see all three armed, Wendy noticed the two with goggles had stepped up and in front of the boy in the middle without goggles, shielding him. “Can you guess who I’m with?” Wendy asked, lowering the muzzle of her AR so she wasn’t aiming at the boys and this seemed to make them relax just a bit.
All three nodded as the one in the middle answered, “You’re with the Caravan Man.”
Stepping out on the path, Wendy nodded. “Very good. He wants to talk to you,” she said. Then, based on the way the boys were acting, she chose her target. “The one in the middle.”
The boys on the outside tensed up and Wendy’s AR came back up. “Boys, I’m not alone, and movement like that’ll get you killed,” she advised them. “If we wanted you dead, you’d all be dead. Think.”
Reaching out, the boy in the middle put his hand on the shoulders of the other two, “Golem, Blastoise, don’t,” he told them, and both eased their hands away from the weapons they were reaching for.
“Very good,” Wendy said with a grin, keeping her right hand on the AR grip but letting the rifle hang under her arm. “What’s your name? Sorry, but we only have pictures,” she somewhat lied, they just didn’t have his picture.
“Drew,” the boy in the middle answered.
“Drew, I’m taking you to meet the Caravan Man. You can keep your guns but if you try to use them on us, it won’t go well. I’m promising your friends you’ll be back here tomorrow, but you try to shoot any of us and I’ll be bringing you back with gunshots to your legs. We aren’t going to hurt you if you don’t try to hurt any of us.”
“What about others in the Caravan?” Golem asked.
Turning to Golem on the left, “None would dare try. But if they do, I’ll give their head to Drew to bring back with him tomorrow,” Wendy replied.
Drew stepped up moving between Golem and Blastoise. “What does the Caravan Man want?” he asked clearly afraid.
“To talk, and to give you the rules of this area for you to bring back and talk to the others about,” Wendy answered. “If you all agree to them, we’ll offer you our assistance if we can. As an exam
ple, like if you’re attacked or have questions. Provided you accept what the Caravan Man offers.”
The three looked perplexed as they glanced at one another, then Drew turned to Wendy. “But, we’re a gang,” he stated. “The Caravan Man kills gangs. Everyone knows that.”
Despite the situation, Wendy laughed. “Oh, boys,” she said, pulling down her shemagh to expose the lower part of her face. “We only kill gangs who rape and pillage.”
All three seemed to understand ‘rape’ but, “We only take vitamins, no other pills unless Nurse Joy tells us to,” Drew told her.
“No, ‘pillage’ means to run around and destroy other people who’re just trying to survive. Like capturing people and making them slaves,” Wendy explained briefly.
“Slaves are forbidden here in Pokémon, even for Team Rocket,” Drew informed her rather proudly.
Hearing the name of the largest kid gang, Wendy fought not to bust out laughing. “That’s why I’m here, Drew, and why the Caravan Man wants to talk to you,” Wendy told him.
“How do we know you’re really with the Caravan?” Blastoise asked boldly.
Scoffing, “Shit, if I’m not, just get on the radio, any frequency, and announce someone’s acting like they’re with the Caravan Man,” Wendy told him. “You’ll see the Caravan Man rolling across the land like a demon from hell.”
Drew took his eyes off Wendy to look at Golem and Blastoise, “Nobody’s that stupid. Not even the Witchers,” Drew told them with confidence, then turned back to Wendy. “You promise I’ll be back by tomorrow?”
Knowing why Drew asked, “Yes, Drew. We know your group is having a party every night until Christmas, with the first one starting tomorrow. That’s why I’m here tonight,” Wendy told him, and all three boys let out gasps. “Guys, the Caravan Man has been inside your camp. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here. I’ll give Drew some pictures to bring back to prove it. The Caravan Man goes where he wants to, when he wants to, and kills those he wants to. So you see, you’ve passed the first tests. You’re a gang, but so is the Caravan.”
Viral Misery | Book 3 | Revelations Page 29