Brodie whispered, “I’d bet a million to one Riley has guards outside, especially if he’s sure you’re coming for your women He’s a no-good, obnoxious asshole, but he’s not stupid. Watch for movement to learn where they’re hiding.” Smokey lay between them in the light drizzle the rain had morphed into. Sam reached to his backpack beside him and removed a bag of jerky. He took three, gave Smokey one and passed the bag to Brodie. “You’ve already dealt with part of his gang,” Brodie said, “are you sure you’re ready to kill the rest? Otherwise there’s no need for us being here. If you aren’t up to wiping them out, they’ll come at you again and be wary and prepared the next time.” He bit off a length of jerky and stuffed it in his mouth and chewed.
“Ready?” Sam whispered, “If they were lined up unarmed with their hands raised to surrender, I’d shoot each one in the head including their sluts. There’s no turning back; and I’ll not chicken out and let you down if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Brodie nodded grimly in the moonless dark.
Several minutes passed before Brodie whispered, “That white box truck to the right of the house and out about fifty feet; the rear overhead door is raised; there’s a guy standing just inside out of the rain; he just stepped to the back and lit a cigarette. If there’s a second guard, he’ll be on the other side of the house and likely in that corrugated metal shop building where the overhead door is up.”
Sam checked the time at 06:13, then looked up. “A second guy stepped out from that building to piss against the wall. Now he’s going back inside.”
“Yeah, I saw that too. Stay here. I’m going down to take care of them quietly. No matter what happens, you don’t leave this spot till I get back.”
Brodie stood. “I’m leaving my rifle here.” Then he was gone.
Sam watched both guard’s positions. Finally, he barely noticed slight movement outside the box truck. The sky had gone from near black to a dark blue-gray haze in the predawn before sunrise. The rain had diminished, then stopped shortly after Brodie left him.
He barely detected a figure hunched low and sliding along the side of the box truck. Then the guard leaned around the edge of the van, and Brodie made his move. Two figures engaged in a momentary scuffle, then a lone figure dragged a body by its feet across the muddy ground back among the wrecked cars.
Sam switched his gaze to the shop. Long minutes passed as the sky lighten slightly. Suddenly, a figure in camouflage hustled from the shop to one of four pickups parked in front of the house. Sam hoped it was Brodie. A driver’s side door opened, interior lights flashed on, and then after two seconds the door closed with barely a sound. The man moved to another truck, opened the door, hesitated, then closed it again. Quickly the figure sprinted back to the shop only to return seconds later carrying a body over its shoulder. The dead guard was carefully dumped in the back of the second truck. Then the driver’s door opened and closed again, the engine cranked and started, and the truck backed up before weaving and sliding toward the highway with the engine racing. The red Dodge’s taillights were out of sight before a figure rushed from the house to the porch.
“Doug . . . Doug, damn it, answer me. You better not be sleeping in there or I’ll kick your skinny ass.” He walked to the end of the porch and yelled. “Oscar . . . Oscar, God damn it man answer me, where are you?” A door slammed as the angry man stormed back inside the house. Seconds later dim light from a lantern glowed inside.
JR woke when she heard a truck engine race loudly in the quiet night. The sound roared and then faded as it drove away. She hurt all over when she moved. Someone ran down the creaking stairs and out the front door, then yelled names several times; it sounded like Riley. The door slammed as the man came back inside. A match flickered at a kerosene lantern before Riley Hooper lit it. He stopped in his tracks, then said, “Those sons of bitches.” After lighting a second lantern Riley stomped to the stairs with it in his hand.
She looked across to see Mona staring back at her. In the flickering light, she saw Mona’s black eye and bruised chin and knew that wasn’t the extent of Mona’s physical damage. Mona had resisted her tormentors aggressively too. JR imagined she looked the same from the soreness all over her body. JR’s features tightened as her eyes locked on a nearby item while a plan hastily formed.
Riley Hooper raced to the top of the stairs yelling. “Get up, God damn it, get up. Everyone up and get dressed. Doug and Oscar took a truck and left. Danny and Claude, take a truck and go after them. What the hell are they doing? They were on guard duty for Christ’s sake. Get a move on there’s work to be done.“
As soon as Riley was out of sight, JR kicked off the single blanket and stretched her leg to reach an empty beer bottle. Her foot gingerly rolled it toward her until she grasped it by the neck with her left hand. She drew back her arm and smashed the bottle against the thick eyebolt her rope was hooked to. Riley’s screaming tirade upstairs covered the sharp noise as the thin, brown bottle broke. She tossed the bottom piece of their weapons over to Mona, made a sawing motion with the bottle, then hid the neck piece under her cover. Then she set to work.
Minutes later everyone was downstairs finishing dressing and drinking lots of water to clear the yucky liquor taste from their mouths. They stood in a clump.
Riley gave orders. “You men get outside and keep watch but stay here; we need to talk about what to do next. I can’t believe those two assholes ran off and left us. Women! Make breakfast. We’re all hungry. And lots of coffee. Lots of it and strong as mud. God damn those two assholes.”
JR had scooted close to the wall on the bare floor with the blanket pulled up over her head. The slack in the line let her silently work the broken bottle fragment back and forth on the half inch thick rope. A few frayed threads were felt as she worked. She prayed Mona was following her lead. Something had happened with the guards posted outside. Maybe, just maybe. She prayed Sam played a prominent role in whatever was going on.
Sam thought about Brodie’s actions and appreciated the diversion he’d created by disposing of the two guards and then making it appear they had run away. Devious but effective. Finding dead bodies would have alerted Hopper that he had come for the women.
The first sunrays were striking the tops of trees on the western ridge across from Sam and Smokey. Visibility was steadily improving. He couldn’t decide if that was a positive or a negative.
Shortly after the pickup left, a man ran out onto the porch, yelled, and then ran back inside.
Next, dim light showed on the first floor, then on the second floor. Smokey heard noise behind them before Sam did. A minute passed as Smokey softly growled before Brodie raced up the hillside and flopped beside them. He wasn’t even breathing hard. Sam’s rifle pointed at the front porch and his crosshairs were positioned ten feet from the steps. Brodie grabbed his rifle and removed the plastic covering it, then put his eye to the scope. “Make sure all four men are outside before you fire.”
The front screen door flew open, and four men ambled out and down the steps. They stopped on the wet gravel amid puddles in a tight group and spoke in low tones.
Brodie mumbled, “Shit, Riley isn’t with them. There’s more than four of the bastards.”
The brunette Sam wounded hobbled out gingerly to stand at the top of the steps. She was barefoot and wore a man’s shirt with long tails. A white bandage showed high on her left thigh. She spoke and the men turned toward her.
“Be ready to take those four now when a grenade explodes; we’ll deal with the others later. Get the two on the left, I’ll go right, then to the woman. We’ll likely have to storm the place at night with handguns to clear them out.” Brodie pulled the pin on a grenade, then tossed it with a strong overhead lob. The wounded woman saw the grenade and followed it’s dropping arc. She yelled a questioning comment when it was head high and pointed. It landed five feet past the targets, hit, and bounced and rolled ten feet into a puddle where it exploded. Gravel, water and smoke were thrown in all
directions along with metal shrapnel.
Everyone instinctively turned toward where the woman pointed. The blast was loud, and several were hit with fragments, but they weren’t inside the kill zone.
Sam took out two men with four shots. Brodie was three for three but used three, three round bursts. The four men dropped near where they stood. The lone woman hesitated with her mouth and eyes wide open, pivoted on her good leg, then fell and slid on the porch boards in her own blood as she attempted to run inside.
Inside the house, Riley heard the blast followed by shots, ran to the door, and saw his girlfriend spraddled on the porch in a pool of blood. Past her he saw four bodies sprawled in the gravel. His jaw dropped, then he bellowed a high-pitched, earsplitting scream. In a run, he stopped beside JR and kicked her thigh to wake her as he dug in his pants pocket for the key to the lock on her rope at the wall. The lock and rope dropped in the dim light, and he grabbed JR by the hair and pulled her to her feet. She kept her blanket around her shoulders with her left hand, so it covered the broken bottle in her right hand, The cut piece of rope hung beside her leg.
Riley pushed through the other two women near the door while pulling a semiauto from a thigh holster. He propelled JR through the door roughly and onto the porch. His gun was at the back of her head as he pushed her down three steps to the blood spattered gravel. He stayed behind her at the edge of the four bloody corpses. “You up there,” he yelled. Come down here unarmed, or I’ll put a bullet in your woman’s head.”
JR prayed Riley would get sloppy and her opportunity would come. She was determined Riley wouldn’t live to rape anyone else or murder Sam.
“Now what?” Sam whispered without looking at Brodie.
“Leave your guns here and walk down at medium speed. But stay out of my line of fire. Apparently, he thinks you’re alone and his only threat.”
“I’m putting my trust in you. But above all see JR comes out of this even if he gets me.” He turned to Smokey and whispered. “Stay Smokey, stay here with Brodie.”
Riley was impatient and yelled his threat again.
Sam backed down the ridge, scurried twenty feet to his right, then stood and started down the gentle, weed-covered slope with his arms held high. Smokey whined softly until Brodie scratched behind the dog’s ear then laid his palm securely on Smokey’s coat.
JR still held the threadbare blanket around her. It slipped off her left shoulder and she clutched it in front of her. When Sam was at the bottom of the hill and still thirty feet away, she yelled, “Run Sam!” then dropped the blanket and latched onto Riley’s shirt front as she kicked both feet out in front of her and dropped to the ground on her bare butt dragging Riley down with her.
A woman on the porch screamed at JR’s move and raised a revolver.
Brodie was sighted on Riley’s head, but his target bent at the waist as JR dragged him over. She heard Sam yell as he ran toward her. JR had a death grip on the bottle neck in her right hand as she stared in Riley’s eyes. She jabbed the jagged, makeshift weapon upward into Riley’s neck and twisted it back and forth as blood flowed. His expression showed shock and disbelief as he dropped to his knees. JR said, “I shot your oldest brother’s dick and then killed the asshole.” Riley was off balance leaning forward with both hands against the gravel. He his lips formed a snarl as he shifted to raise his right hand with the gun in it as he raised his head and twisted sideways to evade her painful attack. As the gun raised above the gravel, his head exploded from the impact of three .223 caliber bullets. He collapsed onto JR and momentarily pinned her to the ground.
The woman with the revolver had it pointed it toward JR when Mona crashed through the screen door and raked the bottom portion of the broken bottle upward along her back, then jabbed it into the side of her neck to attack the right carotid artery. Both fell off the porch and onto the packed gravel in a tangle of arms and legs amid five dead bodies. Mona rolled to her right and stopped on her hands and knees in a crouched position. The woman she’d hit deftly scrambled to her feet and stared in awe feeling a river of blood flowing down her chest as her gun swung toward Mona and wavered. Mona thought her death was imminent when a burst of bullets ripped through her antagonist back and exited from her chest. The woman’s arm dropped as she stared unbelieving at blood spreading down her chest from six, quarter inch holes. Mona exhaled the breath she’d held and cried.
The third woman stood on the steps with her arms raised and yelled up the hill. “I’m unarmed. I didn’t have anything to do with any of this. I was a prisoner too.”
JR was pinned on her right side with Riley draped across her. She wiggled out from under the corpse and rose to her knees as Sam stopped beside her. She spotted Riley’s semiauto beside her in the gravel. With it in her bloody right hand, she aimed at the lone woman on the steps. “Prisoner my ass. You helped them strip us and rape us and laughed about it.” She pulled the trigger four times until the woman was driven backwards onto the porch deck on top of Riley’s girlfriend’s bloody form.
Mona grabbed JR’s tattered blanket from the ground and wrapped it around herself. “Jesus H. Christ! I don’t know who’s up there shooting, but I’ve never imagined seeing so many dead bodies. This is worse than the E.R. on a bad weekend.” She watched in awe as a tall, camouflaged figure stood atop the ridge.
Sam and JR were locked tight in an embrace kissing and murmuring thankfulness’s between them. More than a few tears flowed down their cheeks as they thanked God they both survived the gruesome ordeal. Smokey raced to them and stood on his hind legs dancing and licking JR’s bare skin.
Brodie sauntered down the hill with Sam’s equipment.
JR finally noticed she and Mona were buck naked and suggested they go inside to wash and find clothes to fit them. Smokey followed her closely.
Brodie passed Sam’s guns and backpack to him. “You didn’t tell me we were coming to rescue two beautiful pinup models. And man, are they wildcats; I’ve never seen women braver or fiercer than those two.”
Sam grinned. “I’ll introduce you to JR and Mona when they come out. . . . What do we do now with this place?”
“After we take everything either of us can use or want, we drag the bodies inside and burn the house. I don’t ever want to come back here to fight more renegades.”
“Alright. We can use one of these pickups to haul the loot to our place, then you can use the motorcycle to get it to back to your place if you want.”
“Thanks, Sam. I’ll do that. The trail between our places is a much easier ride than the one we made this morning.”
Inside the house Mona ask, “Who is that guy dressed like a soldier?” She followed JR into the kitchen where the stench of overcooked bacon and scorched grease drew them.
“I’m not positive, but it must be a guy named Brodie. He lives somewhere deep in the woods and was in the Army.” JR grinned. “I think he’s about your age.” With both hands gripping a towel on the large cast iron skillet’s handle, she moved it from the wood burning stove to a wood tabletop. She smirked at Mona. “Liked his looks, huh?”
Mona blushed.
JR grinned. “Uh huh. That’s what I thought.”
Their boots lay in the corner near where they’d been confined. After washing the blood and grime off their bodies at a granite lined wash pan, they scrounged clothing from the bedrooms upstairs. JR said, “One of the first things I’m doing when I get home is burn these clothes that belonged to those crude sluts.”
Mona nodded. “Amen to that. They were incredibly vicious.”
The women exited their old house of horrors in ‘borrowed’ clothing. Both showed bruises on exposed skin, but neither was seriously injured physically. In due time, with loving care the emotional trauma they’d suffered would ease and finally pass but would never be forgotten. Introductions were made and the men’s plan for the corpuses and the house was approved by all. Both women thanked Brodie profusely for assisting Sam. “Hell, without Brodie we’d all be dead; I couldn
’t have done what he did.” Sam uttered. “But if he’s willing to teach me, I’m eager to learn combat skills.”
Brodie nodded.
JR said, “Charlie told us you lived further back in the forest than we are and said we might see you once in a while at a distance. Plan on coming to our place in a few days for a bar-b-que so we can say thanks properly.” Both women hugged Brodie and kissed his cheeks; he blushed at the unanticipated attention. Sam and JR exchanged smug looks when each noticed Mona clung to Brodie’s hand long after her thank-you was said.
In several hours a pickup bed was piled full of plunder. Canned and dry foods were the primary objects everyone focused on. A few firearms and many thousands rounds of ammunition would be split between Sam and Brodie. Sam searched the shop building and liberated hand tools and a small three foot tall cast-iron wood burner to heat the cabin when the temperature wasn’t cold enough to build a roaring fire in the fireplace. Simple meals could be prepared on the stove’s ten inch flat iron top. Brodie confiscated his own array of hand tools and an old two man saw hanging above a doorway. One of the sheds yielded a single blade plow with wood handles Sam latched onto. A horse would be needed to pull it to break ground for a garden.
Running To Escape: A Sam & JR Zombie Thriller Page 19