by Howard, Bob
“We’re movin’ out,” said Randal.
“In the middle of the night?”
Sarah Beth couldn’t have sounded more surprised when she stepped in front of Randal and asked the question.
“That skinny kid woke up, and the first thing out of his mouth was what the Army would do to us if we didn’t let them go. And there’s some guy he called the Chief who’s some kind of super hero to the kid. The boss said we’re out of here tonight.”
Sarah Beth brushed past Randal with Gervais on her heels.
“Don’t do it,” he said as he grabbed her by the back of her arm.
She pulled herself loose but stopped trying to go inside. She knew the secluded house wasn’t going to be a permanent solution to their survival, and the time would come sooner or later when they had to move on. She just wasn’t so sure about Stokes’ plan to go south to the Gulf of Mexico.
Sarah Beth had always believed they should find a barrier island that didn’t have any ripe meat wandering around on it. They could build a fort and then carry supplies out to it. Stokes liked her idea, but he wanted to take the idea a bit further. He wanted to go to the Gulf of Mexico and take over an oil rig. He wasn’t sure how they were going to do it, but he felt like it would be pretty easy. He kept saying they would figure that out when they got there.
The part that bothered Sarah Beth the most was that Stokes never took prisoners. Now that the boy had figuratively spilled his guts, Stokes was likely to spill them literally.
Before she had a chance to think about it, and before Gervais could stop her, she wheeled around and went inside. Stokes was on his couch with a map spread out on the coffee table. He was going over the best route to New Orleans with several of his officers.
“Stokes, why not let the kids go? We could leave them somewhere. There’s no need to kill them.”
Stokes tilted his head to one side, which he tended to do when he was actually thinking about something, but sometimes he did it for show. It made people think he was considering what they were suggesting. Sarah Beth didn’t know which tilt she was getting.
“Okay, Sarah Beth. I won’t kill them. I’ll find a place to leave them just for you.”
Gervais had come up behind Sarah Beth, and he arrived in time to hear everything. If he had watched Stokes the way Sarah Beth had, he would have missed the grins from the other men. Whatever Stokes planned, he was sure it didn’t include letting the prisoners go.
The best thing Gervais could do was get Sarah Beth out of there before Stokes decided she should share the fate of the two teenagers, whatever it was. He took her by the back of the arm for a second time and gently pulled her from the room. Stokes must have said something funny after they left because his officers all laughed.
******
Molly had regained consciousness after Sam. She had a splitting headache, and she wanted him to shut up. He was yelling at someone about how they would pay for taking them prisoner. She heard a door slam shut, and they were alone.
Sam could tell in the darkness that she was trying to sit up and went to help her even though their hands were tied behind their backs. Through the fog in her mind, Molly knew that was a bad sign.
“Molly, are you okay? You’ve been out for a long time.”
Besides her head hurting so bad that the sound of his voice was like a needle in her eye, she was furious with him about the things he had been yelling at whoever that was who had left the room.
“When did you become such an idiot?” she yelled.
Molly thought she would pass out from the pain she caused herself when she yelled at Sam.
Sam recoiled from her, expecting Molly to be glad to see him standing up to their captors.
“What did I do?”
“I can’t believe you actually yelled at that guy that our friends would take care of him. That’s just the kind of information they would want. Numbers, firepower, location. What else did you tell them?”
“Nothing.”
Sam broke eye contact with Molly when he answered, and she turned her back on him.
“I may have said Fort Sumter.”
Sam’s voice was low, but it was loud enough for Molly to know Sam may have said more than just Fort Sumter.
Molly stepped over to a boarded up window and looked for gaps. Even if she found one, it was still dark outside. The only light in their room was coming from a gap under the door, and it was only enough to make the area by the door a little bit gray. She couldn’t really tell yet if their room was small or large. The corners were so dark that there could be someone in there with them.
Sam was whimpering something about getting hit on the head and being worried about Molly. Molly was wondering where her knight in shining armor had gone.
“Does anything look familiar to you?” she asked.
“I’ve only seen this one room. I don’t think I’ve ever been here before.”
Sam had been on the outside for a long time after the apocalypse began. He and his friends had foraged for food through a lot of the houses in downtown Charleston. If they had somehow been carried over to the mainland, they may be in a house he had searched.
“Besides,” he continued, “a lot of those places burned down, and the Chief says that the buildings are really crumbling.”
“This room looks kind of modern,” she said. “I think we’re still on James Island somewhere.
They heard footsteps coming from somewhere else in the house. It sounded like people were moving from one place to another like they were in a hurry.
The door burst open so suddenly that they almost fell over trying to move away from it. One guy pushed Molly onto a bed that had only become visible in the light that came from the hallway. The other two grabbed Sam by the arms and lifted him easily between them. Without a word from them, they left just as quickly as they had arrived.
Sam had resumed his yelling as if Molly had never mentioned it. Before the door shut behind them, he said enough that he might as well have given them a written diagram of the shelter.
Molly began frantically searching the room, trying to remember the locations of furniture and doors she had seen during the brief period of light. From the bed she had seen two other doors. It was a fair guess that one was a bathroom, and one was a closet. Maybe she could find something in one of them that she could use to cut the ropes around her wrists.
She found the first one and put her back to the doorknob. Her wrists were bound so tightly that she couldn’t grab the smooth piece of metal at first, but she eventually got her hand around it. It turned, but the door didn’t open. She tried turning it in the other direction, and this time she felt the door move inward as soon as there was a metal click by the knob.
The room beyond the door could have been either a closet or a bathroom. With no light coming from anywhere, she couldn’t tell. Molly shut her eyes and tried to breathe evenly. She pictured a bathroom and imagined she had been there before. In her mind she looked around for anything familiar, something she would find in any bathroom.
She saw the vanity in front of a mirror and realized the first thing she would have done if her hands had been free was turn on the light switch that would be to the left of the door. She turned her back that way and leaned hard against the wall, sliding along until her back scraped against the switch. There was no way she was going to get her hands high enough to push the switch upward, so she tried using the flat of her back between her shoulders.
A couple of minutes of effort went unrewarded, and suddenly Molly knew she had let the situation get the best of her. Otherwise, she would have turned the lights on much sooner.
Molly turned around and faced the wall. She started searching again, and it didn’t take long to find the switch with her mouth. She bit down on the piece of plastic and pushed upward.
The lights came on and blinded her, but she smiled at herself in a big vanity mirror to the right because she had been mildly successful. The smile disappeared from her face because the second reflectio
n in the mirror was big and ugly. He towered over her, and his amused smile revealed yellow, nicotine stained teeth.
Before she could start her scream, his hands came up behind her head with speed she wouldn’t have believed possible from someone his size. A black burlap bag whipped downward over her head, and once again she was in darkness.
If she could have seen him raise his fist, she would have fainted before it arrived at its target. His punch was to the right side of her head, and her legs crumbled under her. He caught her and easily lifted her in the air and draped her limp body over his shoulder.
******
Sam was taken back to the living room where he was unceremoniously dumped on the floor in front of Stokes. He never stopped complaining and threatening the men who had carried him from the dark room, and Stokes wasn’t sure how much of what he was hearing was true. Still, he preferred to question the boy because he had a feeling he was going to be short on time. He didn’t know if the girl would give up information as easily as the boy, but could save time by just encouraging the boy to threaten him.
Stokes leaned toward the boy and said, “When your friends get here, I’m going to kill them all.”
Maybe it was because Sam was scared, but he took the bait.
“Oh, yeah? Do you have over a hundred men?” he spouted. “Do you have helicopters?”
Stokes had seen the helicopters coming and going from Fort Sumter since about a year or so after they had discovered the secluded house not far from Fort Johnson. It was perfectly situated in the middle of an overgrown island that was surrounded by tidal creeks and mud. A narrow gravel road led to the front gate that could keep out a fair number of the ripe meat, but it had become their second line of defense when he had his men dig out a big section of the road. It had flooded from both sides as soon as the dirt was removed and had effectively stopped the ripe meat from using the road to reach them.
The helicopters had passed overhead plenty of times. They would have seen the roof of the house, but it was doubtful that they could see his small gang. They had made it a habit to turn off the lights whenever possible, and the small generator that gave them power for brief periods of time wasn’t used every day.
Tonight was one of those rare occasions when they needed the lights. They were packing their gear to leave, and they needed to go in a hurry. If the people at Fort Sumter were as dangerous to them as Stokes thought they were, they had to be gone before they arrived. He had no doubt that they would be sending out search parties at sunrise.
“Shut up, kid.”
Stokes didn’t have to say it loud. The menace in his voice was enough to stop Sam from saying another word.
“I don’t need to know everything about you. I just need to know one thing. How long will the people at Fort Sumter search for you?”
Sam was confused by the simplicity of the question.
“How long?” asked Sam.
“Did I stutter? Will they search for you until they find you, or will they give up in a day or two?”
Sam still didn’t understand the point of the question, but there was no doubt in his mind that the Mud Island family would tear the place apart to find them. He didn’t know that Stokes planned to leave and assumed all along that Stokes planned to hold them for ransom.
He defiantly said, “They’ll never give up searching for us, and when they find us, you’re going to be sorry.”
Stokes motioned with his hand to someone behind Sam, and he tried to see what was happening. His face turned right into a fist that knocked a tooth out. He didn’t feel it because it also knocked him out.
A bag was pulled over his head, and he was carried off to join Molly.
******
Stokes was ruthless, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew he had to keep the search party busy for as long as possible. He had to keep them in the area until he had his people far enough away, and that meant he had to give them something to look for. He couldn’t just kill the teenagers. If they found the bodies, they would want revenge.
He hadn’t been happy when Sarah Beth and Randal came back with the kids in the first place. He had asked Sarah Beth why they knocked them out and bagged them, and he could understand the part about being surprised when they dropped in from above. Sarah Beth thought they were ripe meat, and she had a split second reaction.
He had a hard time understanding the rest of it. Sarah Beth said Randal wanted to bring them back, and she wanted to leave them. Unless Randal had suddenly become the brains in their gang, Stokes couldn’t wrap his mind around why Sarah Beth had listened to him. She could have left them to become ripe meat, and the people in Fort Sumter would have assumed the teenagers had been bitten. Then again, he could do the same thing. He could take them out to the woods and shove them into a crowd of ripe meat.
Stokes felt like he was missing something, but then it came to him. If the people from Fort Sumter had a reason to believe their kids were alive and somewhere nearby, then they had a reason to stay in the area and keep searching for them. The last thing he needed was for them to think the kids were either killed by them or kidnapped. All he needed was a way to make sure they came to the conclusion that they were still on a search and rescue mission long enough for him to put some distance between himself and Charleston.
When the idea came to him, he wondered what had taken him so long. He needed to leave someone behind, and Sarah Beth was the perfect candidate. She didn’t want go to the Gulf, so she would jump at the chance to carry out the plan. He couldn’t understand why she was still so attached to Charleston. It was a dead city of overgrown and wet buildings. The smell alone was enough to keep people from going there.
Her job would be to put on an act for the people from Fort Sumter. The kids didn’t know she was the one who knocked them out, so she could pretend to be on their side and lead them to believe he and his men had gone north instead of south.
Stokes was fairly sure Sarah Beth would do it for him, or maybe there was a way to make her help him without knowing she was. After all, he was the one who had saved her back when the infection had started, so she owed him. If not for him, that ripe meat floating in the boat with her would have made a meal out of her a long time ago, and since that day he had protected and fed her. Actually, Randal had more to do with her rescue than Stokes, but the man in charge should always get the credit, according to his way of thinking.
Stokes had been out on a work release program from the county jail on the first day of the infection. They had assigned him to work for a cemetery digging graves and doing general maintenance. Most of it was landscaping, and he preferred to be outside, so it wasn’t that bad.
They had just finished the graveside service for someone, and people were filing out of the cemetery. He was waiting nearby for the word to be given to lower the casket and fill in the hole. He was bored and wished they would hurry up. When he thought about it, that was probably the last time he had ever been really bored.
The last of the mourners stumbled away from the grave, and he waved to the two halfwits that were going to help him. No one put him in charge, but they were the kind of people who had to be told what to do, so they had been quick to listen when he stepped up. He started folding up the chairs while they lowered the casket. It had looked like it might rain, so they had a pavilion to take down, too.
“Hey, Boss.”
Just hearing either of the halfwits speak grated on his nerves.
“What?”
His yell was loud enough for him to be heard by the last family members as they were getting into their cars. It earned him a few looks that he was sure the cemetery director would hear about.
“Now you got me in trouble, stupid. What do you want?” he snarled.
“Ah hear somethin’ in there.”
His thick southern drawl fit perfectly with the confused look on his face as he pointed at the coffin.
Stokes had understood clearly what the halfwit was telling him, and he stole a glance at the parking lot
before he answered.
“Keep your voice down, idiot. As a matter of fact, don’t speak until those people are gone.”
The other helper still had his hand on the crank that operated the chrome winch that lowered the casket, but he had stopped turning it. Some automatic feeling told him he wasn’t supposed to be lowering a coffin into the ground if there was someone moving around inside it.
“What are you waiting for? Start lowering that thing before those people decide to come see what’s wrong.”
He made a circular motion with his hand in the guy’s direction, and the winch started turning again. There was a steady clicking sound as the gears engaged and disengaged repeatedly.
Curiosity got the best of one of the family members, and he took a few steps in their direction. He had his head cocked to one side and was watching Stokes as if he had just asked a question and was waiting for an answer.
Stokes didn’t know why, but he felt like he had done something wrong and was about to be caught. At first the feeling was just guilt because that’s what he was used to. When you spend your whole life getting into and out of trouble, blame and guilt become everyday emotions. Not that he felt bad about what he did. He just felt like he was always found guilty in court.
He suddenly realized if a mistake had been made, he wasn’t the one who had made it. As a matter of fact, he would be the hero if someone was closed up inside that coffin and he rescued them.
“Hold up.”
The family member paused within hearing range as if the command was aimed at him. Stokes could see he was probably one of the sons. He couldn’t have been over twenty-five.
The guy turning the chrome handle stopped and waited for Stokes to give another order. Stokes reversed the hand motion he had done earlier.
“Bring ‘er up.”
That made the young family member start walking again, but this time he was walking with a purpose.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked.
Stokes didn’t have to answer as there was a loud thumping sound from inside the coffin.