After what he figured to be a half-hour of running, and perhaps three miles of distance, Ragus allowed himself to stop on the bridge over Busthead Creek and take a break. Oddly-shaped scuff marks in the hot asphalt told him he was headed in the right direction. It was like some of the horses had irregular shoes that were homemade or something. He didn’t know much about horses but he recognized a horse shoe when he saw it and these didn’t look like proper ones.
He took off his pack and retrieved a water bottle, dropping the pack on the ground. His t-shirt was soaked with sweat. He pulled it off, mopped his face and hair with it, then tucked it under a strap in his pack, hoping it would dry while he was running. He saw some pink blotches on the t-shirt and realized the pack was chafing blisters on his skin that had popped already.
The pack wasn't loaded for fast and light travel. Following Conor’s advice, the pack was set up so Ragus could survive in the woods for a night or two if he didn't make it back home. There were things in there that would be useful in that scenario, but perhaps not so helpful in the one he found himself in at the moment.
He flipped open the pack lid and scanned for the heaviest items. There were a few cans of soup, a hatchet, and the hydration bladder full of water. It was immediately obvious he could lose a couple of pounds of pack weight just by ditching some of the cans of food and the hatchet. As he drank the water in the hydration bladder, he would stick with the smaller water bottle he carried and not refill the heavier bladder. He had a few small cans of tuna and chicken and he planned to eat those next to lighten his load. Every ounce would help. He didn't know how far he had to run. Hell, he didn't know how many days he might have to run.
If three miles felt like this what would thirty miles feel like? A hundred? Yet if that was how far he had to run, he would do it. He would stay on the trail until he could not lift his legs to move another step.
Not wanting to leave his excess gear there to be stolen, Ragus hurried around the corner of the bridge and stashed the gear in a narrow recess where it met the bank. He could retrieve it at a future date if nobody else found it first. There may be more he could get rid of but he’d wasted enough time taking a break. The urgency of the situation was pulling at him again.
“Don’t be weak,” he scolded himself. “If you stop or slow down, you better have a damn good reason for it.”
He fastened the pack shut, then slung it over his bare back, the raw, blistered skin burning as it made contact with the pack. He picked up the Henry rifle and started running again.
His muscles had stiffened up during the break but they also welcomed the exertion. The sensation was familiar and comforting. It cleared his head and gave him something to focus on. It helped him to forget some of what went on in his life. It helped him forget some of what he'd seen his mother go through as she died. It seemed odd to him that the pain of running, the suffering it inflicted, gave him some of the only peace he’d experienced in a long time.
His mother’s last days were awful. She'd run out of pain medication and he'd made several trips to town to try to find more but it wasn’t easy. Pharmacies weren’t open and they weren’t going to let a kid refill an opiate prescription even if they were. Because of the opioid epidemic, pain pills were among the most regulated medications available.
Desperate, he’d even raided his mother’s emergency money, kept in the family bible, and gone to the home of a man he’d heard was a drug dealer. There were indeed men there and they looked like they were of the type who would be hanging out at a drug dealer’s house. They said they could help him and showed him into the house. Once there, they beat him up and robbed him, then laughed when he explained he needed the pills for his mother.
“I heard that before,” one of the men said.
“Hell, I’ve used that story before,” the other man said, both of them breaking into laughter.
“She’s dying,” Ragus pleaded. “Help me.”
“Then why waste good dope on her?” one of the men said. “It ain’t going to do her a damn bit of good.”
They let him go and Ragus limped off, bruised and bleeding. His eye was swollen shut for days and his jaw hurt when he moved it. Ragus made a pledge on his painful walk home. Before this disaster was over, while there was still no law in place, he intended to go back there and take his revenge on those men. He would make them beg for their lives and he would kill them anyway.
When he reached home, he could hear his mother’s screams from the yard. It was hard to force himself to go back inside but what could he do? She had no one else. He had no one else.
He didn’t understand the details of what inside her was causing the pain. He didn't understand how the cancer worked, how it was killing her, but it caused her great pain. At times he suspected she was sending him on pointless errands just to get him out of the house, knowing her cries of pain were upsetting him. He didn’t want to leave her side though. As much as he wanted the suffering to be over, he didn’t want to lose her. He didn’t want to be gone when she died. He was all she had and he couldn't abandon her, no matter how much she asked.
He could tell something was changing within her when the long bouts of screaming and crying began to be replaced by periods of unconsciousness. Those periods of unconsciousness became longer and longer. One day she woke with utter lucidity for the first time in weeks. She did not cry or scream. She did not arch and writhe in discomfort.
She looked around the dark room, the bedsheet curtains pulled to aid her sleep, until she found her son in the dark interior of the bedroom. He sat in a chair against the wall, his knees drawn up to his chest and his arms wrapped around his legs, like a child hiding in the closet. When she found his familiar shape it took her a moment to focus. She extended her hand and beckoned him to her side. He moved to the bed and knelt there, taking his mother's hand in both of his.
"Is it over?" he asked. The naïve intention of his question was to determine whether she had defeated the cancer and whether the sickness was over. Her cancer was serious, but Ragus assumed it could be overcome in the way pneumonia or the flu could be.
When she nodded, his heart soared. He thought it was finally over and she would get back to being herself again. She would start taking care of him the way it was supposed to be, instead of him having to take care of her.
“It is almost over,” she agreed. “I can feel it.”
The overwhelming sadness with which she said those words made him realize this was not a triumph but a goodbye. His face ran through a range of emotions and finally to an unbearable anguish that erupted from him in violent sobs. She tried to pull him to her in a hug but didn’t have the strength. She barely got a frail arm to his shoulder. She rested the hand there, unable to even orient the hand in a way that would allow her to comfort him. It didn’t matter though. Ragus was so blinded by tears he didn’t even notice the gesture.
When she next entered sleep, she never regained consciousness. There were several times he thought she was dead but discovered she was still breathing when he held a hand mirror over her mouth. It was something he’d seen on a TV show. When finally her body began to cool to the touch, he knew she was gone. He hadn’t even been aware of the moment of her passing.
He buried her underneath the tree where they played so often. When the yard wasn’t overgrown, it was a pretty spot and they had good times there. The digging was hard, with tree roots crossing like steel reinforcement embedded in concrete. He had to use a shovel as often as an axe to get the hole deep enough. When it was complete, he wrapped her in a blanket and carried her outside, shocked at how little she weighed. It felt like he was carrying a child.
Her loss left him in a dark place. He brooded in the stale house, unable to find even a candle or flashlight with which to cut the darkness. Instead he sat there in the floor, listening to his stomach growl and rodents scratch inside the walls. In the daylight, he tore through every inch of the home trying to find any morsel of something he might eat. He ate ketchup pack
ets, old Halloween candy, and a few packets of sugar. He even found a package of crackers that had come with a fast food salad in the sticky filth beneath the car seat. A devoted hater of salads and other “rabbit food,” Ragus would have killed for a salad at the moment.
He eventually realized there was nothing at the house that would keep him alive. In a few weeks he would end up as weak as his mother. Shortly after, he would end up just as dead. So while he was still able to walk, he took the pistol from his mother’s nightstand and went looking for food, ending up in the Irishman’s chicken house. Part of him hoped the man would shoot him. He was that far beyond caring.
Instead, the family, or at least Conor, had taken him under their wing. He’d given the boy a way to take care of himself. He taught him about channeling his anger and preventing it from consuming him, something Conor said he knew a lot about. Ragus owed him his life. If he lost his trying to save Barb that was okay, because he’d have been dead anyway if the family hadn’t saved him. If it hurt pursuing her, that was fine too, because he knew about pain now as well. There was nothing the road could throw at him that he hadn’t suffered already.
He ran harder, sweat starting to pour again. He clenched his jaw, pumped his arms, and pushed himself harder, making it hurt. “Bring it,” he hissed.
He was speaking to the road, to the men, and to the very world itself.
“Bring it!” he bellowed.
9
Along the highway outside of Tazewell, Virginia, the party from Douthat Farms gathered in the parking lot of an eating establishment in the middle of nowhere. The men were ravenous and they knew their growing collection of prisoners had to be hungry too. Not that their comfort was of any concern.
While they’d been successful in their effort to gather a new female labor force for the farm, they’d been less successful at finding food. They’d brought little with them, counting on their looting to feed them. The problem was they were trying to steal from folks who had nothing to steal. Blinded by their own abundance, they’d greatly overestimated the resources of the population at large.
When they came across the abandoned barbecue joint located in a garishly painted barn miles from any town, they were all overcome with memories of what a roadside barbecue place smelled like with its roasting meats and spicy sauces. They could have continued on, stopping someplace with fewer epicurean associations with which to torture them, but this was the first good spot they’d come across.
“Break the fucking door down,” Top Cat ordered, scratching at the rash around his raw neck. “The place is empty. Maybe they left some canned food behind.”
Lester took a small group of men, kicked out a kitchen door, and rooted around. The rest of the men kept an eye on the hooded and bound prisoners, balanced uneasily atop their tired mounts. At Top Cat’s urging, they’d sought to kidnap women in pairs–mothers and daughters, sisters, friends. They knew from experience women were less likely to run away if they were leaving someone behind that they cared about. They felt an obligation to stay together, even if that meant suffering and dying together.
“Nothing in there except barbecue sauce and spices,” Lester reported back, digging at his oozing armpit.
Just the thought of meat cooked in that sauce and those spices made Top Cat’s mouth water. He was sure the other men felt the same. He’d kill for a plate of ribs, baked beans, coleslaw, and a hot buttered roll. And some pie for dessert. A couple of nice cold beers to wash it all down with.
“They’ve got a hell of a smoker though,” Lester said. “We kill a cow and we’d have the makings of a mighty nice cookout. There’s even a spring coming off the mountain for cool, clean water.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t see any cattle,” Top Cat grumbled. “So I guess we might as well stop slobbering over it.”
Lester grinned. “I did.”
“Where?”
Lester pointed. Top Cat wheeled in his saddle and squinted toward the distant field behind the restaurant. Sure enough, a couple of red and white cows grazed peacefully in the distance.
“Those are Herefords,” Lester said. “We could cook steaks for everyone here and smoke the rest for the trip back.”
“How long would smoking take?”
Lester shrugged. “Overnight probably. The thinner you cut it, the faster it dries. We get a bed of coals going and we could be eating steak in an hour or two.”
“Let’s do it,” Top Cat said. “See any place to stash the prisoners?”
“There’s a cinderblock building around back near the smoker. An old garage or something. Only got one door and no windows. It’ll be perfect.”
A few minutes later, Top Cat was personally overseeing that the prisoners were properly secured in the garage when he heard a shot ring out, then a second. It was Lester dropping one of the steers. The women were hooded with their hands bound in front of them. They were paralyzed with fear, some of them crying, others too scared to even utter a sound. An empty five-gallon bucket was brought from the restaurant and placed in the cinderblock building for a toilet. A roll of toilet paper chewed full of holes from mice was found in a public restroom and tossed in with them.
“Cut’em loose,” Top Cat ordered, digging at his inflamed groin.
One of the men flicked open a folding knife, pausing to scratch his itching forearm with it, then carefully removed the zip ties. They needed each woman to be capable of work so it was worthwhile to protect them. It had been made clear to each and every man on this mission that no abuse of their precious cargo would be tolerated.
“You can take off your hoods for now but they go back on in the morning,” Top Cat said. “Don’t lose them or you’ll be wearing somebody’s drawers on your head for the rest of the trip.”
Taking permission to remove their hoods as permission to begin talking, some of the women bombarded Top Cat with questions, begging for freedom for themselves or another of their party. Some made promises, others threats. The chorus of desperate chatter overwhelmed him.
He drew his weapon and fired a round into the air to silence them. The women flinched at the eruption of deafening noise in the confined space, some yelping or screaming, but it had the desired effect. The women backed away, retreating to the most distant recess of the shadowy building.
Top Cat stood in the shaft of light coming through the open door, his pistol smoking in his hand. “Do not mistake me freeing you for the night as weakness. No one is going back home. No one is being released. You will never see your family or your home ever again so you better start accepting that. If you try to escape, I’ll kill you and whoever we picked you up with. We’ll bring you water in a moment and food when we have it. Until then, shut the fuck up and mind your manners.”
Top Cat backed out the single door to the structure and it was barricaded behind him. He holstered his pistol and checked Lester’s progress. In the distance, he could see him working on the downed steer with a large knife taken from the restaurant kitchen. “Anybody have firewood ready?”
A nearby member of his crew, formerly an assistant manager at Radio Shack, nodded. The poison ivy had spread to his face, covering it in crusty yellow sores. “There’s a shed piled full.”
“Get fires going,” Top Cat ordered. “One in the smoker, one in the grill beside it. We’re going to need lots of coals. We got a lot of food to cook.”
The man looked like a deer in the headlights.
“What?” Top Cat growled.
“I’ve never built a fire before.”
“Then find someone who can, dumbass.”
The man hurried off.
“Get the prisoners a bucket of drinking water,” Top Cat told another man. “See if there are any cups in the restaurant.”
He nodded and disappeared. Lester was soon back leading a horse with half a small steer draped over its back.
“Jesus, that’s a lot of meat,” Top Cat said.
“Steaks for all of us,” Lester said. “We can smoke more for tomorrow and m
ake jerky for the rest of the trip.”
“I guess we’re spending the night here,” Top Cat said. “I’d like to have put a little more distance between us and the towns where we gathered these women.”
Lester shrugged. “We’re armed. Let them catch up with us. We’ll send them running home with their tails between their legs.”
Barb slowly paced the interior of the cinderblock building, trying to assess her situation. JoAnn sat in the floor, desperately hugging another crying woman. JoAnn mourned her father but she didn’t know if the other woman cried from loss, fear, or anticipation of what their future was to be.
The pain of the ride had been exhausting. Barb thought she might have a few cracked ribs, perhaps a broken sternum, from the blunt arrow they’d hit her with. It hurt to move. It hurt to breathe. If she’d worn that damn body armor her father went on about the arrow wouldn’t have dropped her. But then there was no telling how it might have gone if the arrow hadn’t stopped the fight. She would probably have fought to the death. So maybe the lack of body armor actually saved her life, though it hurt like a bitch at the moment.
Part of her, the wounded child, wanted to curl up in a ball and cry, but that wasn’t who she was. She wasn’t one to lie on the floor and take the role of victim. She was an alpha. She would prefer to use her time trying to figure a way out of this situation. She would prefer to plot the deaths of her enemies.
“Where are they taking us?” someone asked.
Barb looked in the direction of the speaker but couldn’t see well in the gloom. Only small pinpricks of light came in around the door. It was enough to see a gritty patch of concrete in the center of the floor and little pockets of illumination around the room but that was all.
The Mad Mick: Book One of The Mad Mick Series Page 6