by Ryan Walker
He woke a few hours later to the sound of someone knocking on the RV’s door. He would have liked a lot more sleep, but it was enough to refresh him.
“Chow and mission brief in five. Rolling out right after that,” Robert said from outside. The mention of food made his stomach gurgle very loudly.
He’d burned through every single calorie he’d put into his body since Thomas’s capture, and even after putting away a decent lunch, he was still famished from the effort, and anticipation of even more work to come.
Around a late, the family filled Randall in on the plan. Christine used to visit the Compound’s little farmers’ market every few months, trading cash and fresh fish from Priest Lake for vegetables.
It gave them a little bit of insight on the layout of the compound, and a couple options for the most likely place that Thomas was being held.
In Robert’s manner of speaking, the rescue was going to be Lean and Mean, just Randall, Marcus, Bruce, Jane, Robert, and Claire were going after Thomas.
Susan, Barry, Christine, and Angela would stay at the cabin, on high alert to defend it if necessary. Their job was also to set up an emergency room of sorts, in case anybody came back badly wounded.
Both Robert and Randall had insisted that everybody in the family learn field first aid and CPR.
Susan had also gotten a basic EMT license, and used to run with the local volunteer ambulance crew a few days a month to keep her skills sharp.
In the more than three weeks since the EMP, the family members at the cabin had explored the immediate area quite extensively. They knew which neighbors were friendly and which to avoid, for about a five mile radius.
They also had enough bicycles for everybody on the rescue mission. As long as they could use the roads, they would make a lot better time than going on foot.
And with Thomas captured, they knew time was critical before he either gave up the homestead’s location, or died trying to protect the information.
Three of the rescuers (Robert, Claire, and Marcus) were armed with AR-15s, each of them the Ruger AR-556. Before the EMP had struck, the Ruger had been one of the highest quality budget AR-15s on the market.
Robert naturally preferred the AR platform since it was the civilian version of the M4 carbine he had trained with and used constantly as an infantryman.
Claire, his wife, used one as well so that she and Robert could both practice with and supply the same type of weapon. Robert, Claire, and Marcus each carried several spare magazines for their ARs either in chest rigs or in the pockets of their cargo pants.
Jane tried to talk Robert into letting her use one of the AR-15s, but Robert explained to her that she wasn’t as familiar with it as she was with the old Winchester .30-30 she used for hunting. A mission as important as Thomas’s rescue was not the right time to adopt a new weapon.
Randall stuck to his his beloved Springfield M1A in .308, and Bruce to his sporterized Springfield M1903 bolt action rifle in .30-06. Both Randall’s M1A and Bruce’s M1903 were outfitted with quality Leupold scopes, and this combined with the larger calibers made them superior choices than the AR-15s for anti-personnel use at long distances.
For sidearms, the family’s weaponry remained equally diverse: Randall kept his Colt 1911 and Beretta 92FS, Marcus packed a Glock 22 .40 caliber and Bruce a Colt 1911 .45 very similar to Randall’s, while Robert preferred the accuracy and stopping power of his Ruger GP100 .357 Magnum revolver with a 6 inch stainless barrel. Neither Jane or Claire was carrying a handgun.
Randall looked at his family with pride, they’d survived the EMP and were looking tight and strong. They needed a minimum of words to make their final preparations to head out and rescue his brother.
But with the Compound having about two thousand residents, he knew they were facing a very rough day ahead.
He said a silent prayer that they would all make it back to the cabin alive when all was said and done.
They filled canteens and put energy bars and other snacks into their pockets, and each packed one of their precious supply of MREs.
Robert and Randall consulted the map one last time, verifying the best route for riding bicycles in the dark and where the two firefights with the Compound’s men had happened.
Just as the last rays of sunlight were vanishing over the mountains, they mounted and rode away.
Chapter Six
The Compound
When Lewis Butler hit somebody, they knew they’d been hit. He had a pub brawler’s instincts already when he took boxing lessons at a gym in his early twenties.
Butler never liked the artificial rules and conventions of boxing, so he stuck around long enough to learn how to throw punches harder and more efficiently, how to protect himself best if he needed to take a few punches on the way in to a target, then he left.
If he wanted to, Butler could have killed Thomas, who was tied to a chair in front of him, with a single punch. It wouldn’t be an immediate death, but a slow one as internal organs would be damaged by cracked ribs and hemorrhaged bleeding would occur.
The thing is, Lewis Butler did want to kill Thomas in revenge for the loss of his son. After all, this was the man that had fired the fatal shots.
Killing Thomas right off, though, meant Butler would still have to hunt down the other man responsible for his son’s death.
Butler wanted to get that information first. Once the wheels were in motion to take his revenge on the rest, he would settle the score with the beaten up man in front of him.
“Let’s try this again,” Butler said, stepping up to the chair. “Who the hell are you?”
Thomas, his face beaten to a bloody pulp, looked up at him with bleary eyes. His left eye was almost completely swollen over.
Butler had rung his bell pretty good a couple of times already.
“Who the hell are you?” Butler asked again, squatting down to look him straight in the eye. “It doesn’t have to be this way. You can tell me what I want to know, and we can make this a civil conversation.”
Butler stood and up sent a wide, arcing punch across Thomas’ temple. It was a show punch, not one of the powerful jabs he’d learned in his boxing lessons. It was meant to intimidate as his fist wound up and flew in, more than it was meant to injure.
Thomas had taken enough honest blows from Lewis that it still just about knocked him out.
Also in the room watching were Gale and George. Seeing the man who had killed their brother helplessly getting the wind knocked out of him gave them both immense satisfaction.
“Let’s give the face a rest, dad,” Gale stepped up.
Gale walked up to Thomas on the chair, with a wet rag in his hand. He dabbed at a trickle of blood running down Thomas’ temple.
“Not until he tells us what we need to know,” replied Butler, rubbing his bruised fists.
“You knock his brain out of his ears, we’ll never know what’s inside it,” continued Gale.
Leaning close to Thomas in the chair, Gale whispered, “You can’t hold out against this forever, you know. You can’t even hold out long enough for it to do anybody any good. You may as well just start speaking up. This isn’t going to get any easier.”
“Good cop, bad cop, really?” Thomas slurred.
Gale chuckled quietly. “No cops in this room, buddy. Just two very angry men, one that wants some information out of you, one that doesn’t actually care if he gets it or not. That one just might want to make this last longer just for the sake of dragging it out.”
Gale stood up and turned as if he were going to walk away from the chair. Instead of stepping away, though, he swept the chair with his foot.
Thomas crashed to the ground on his side. He grunted from the impact.
He’d been tied to the chair in such a way that his right arm was being painfully trapped between the chair and the concrete floor.
Gale sat down on the chair back, facing away from his prisoner. He heard the man start to groan as the extra weight hurt his trapped
arm more.
“You got a name?” Gale asked, starting to rock gently back and forth.
Thomas gritted his teeth against the pain, but said nothing.
“I know you’ve got a name. I want to know what to call you.” Gale rocked back and forth a little more vigorously. “I mean, if you won’t give me your name I might as well give you one.”
Thomas continued to moan and struggle, but still said nothing.
“Hey, dad, why don’t you come over here for a sit-down,” Gale said.
Butler took his place, his greater weight causing Thomas more pain.
“Listen here,” Gale said. “You’re going to swallow your pride and start cooperating. We are going to break you, and we’re going to find that other murderer you were with, and we’re going to find where you were going. It’s going to happen. The only thing you gain by holding out on us is a little bit of pride knowing you didn’t give them up, but in the end, they die, too. The total number of dead people doesn’t change. The only thing in this equation that’s going to change is how much you suffer before getting moved from the live column to the dead column.”
“You’re not getting anywhere any faster than I did,” Butler told his son.
“You think so? Watch this,” Gale said. Instead of tying Thomas’ hands together behind his back, they’d tied them to the chair legs.
This put the Thomas’ right hand on the floor, just behind the back of the chair. Gale put the toe of his boot on Thomas’ fingers, and started leaning forward, shifting more weight to that foot.
Thomas’ ability to stifle his groans failed as Butler rocked back and forth and George applied more pressure to his fingers.
Thomas finally let out a scream of pain. His torturers kept slowly increasing the intensity until Thomas wasn’t able to yell anymore. The pain had reached the point where he was starting to hover at the edge of consciousness.
“Let’s sit him back up,” Gale said, and his father helped him right Thomas’ chair.
Gale grabbed his rag again, dunking it in a bowl of cold water and wringing it out before going to dab more blood from the man’s face.
“I’m glad to see you learned to cooperate,” he said.
Thomas wearily looked at him with a confused look on his face.
“You don’t remember giving me your name just a minute ago? Thomas.”
The look on Thomas’s face become even more perplexed.
“Said it plain as day, you did,” Gale told him. “Why don’t you have a good think on that while we go off to get some dinner.”
Their prisoner had been very fastidious about not carrying anything with any identifying information on him: no ID, no credit cards, no permits. A card with his blood type and that he was allergic to penicillin.
However, tucked into one box of ammunition for the AR-15 had been a forgotten credit card receipt dated a couple of weeks before the EMP. At the top was the cardholder’s name. “Williams, Thomas G.”
After a couple of hours, the Butlers came back to find that Thomas had fallen asleep. Gale dumped a pail of cold water over his head to wake him up.
He laughed when he saw Thomas open his mouth to try and capture any of the water running down his face.
“Thirsty, are you, Tommy boy?” Butler said sadistically.
He nodded to Gale, who refilled the pail from a five-gallon bucket in the corner of the small room. Gale set the pail down on the floor a couple of feet from Thomas.
“Let’s talk about a trade,” Gale said, setting the pail down a few feet from Thomas. “You can trade information for water, or silence for a few more rounds with my dad here. What will it be?”
“How about you untie me so your pop and I can have a fair fight,” Thomas retorted.
“I’ll give you one thing,” Butler said. “At least you’ve got some spirit to you. My son didn’t get killed by a coward.”
Thomas looked up at Butler. “I wasn’t looking to kill anybody. We were just passing through.”
“From where to where?” Butler asked.
“If they had just let us go on our way, nobody would have been hurt.”
“From where, to where?” Butler asked again, more insistently this time.
“We didn’t even know we were trespassing,” Thomas said.
Butler stormed up to him, kicking the pail of water across the room. He launched a short right jab that hit Thomas hard enough in the face to knock the chair over.
Thomas’s head bounced off the hard floor, the impact enough to make an audible cracking sound. He went unconscious.
Butler saw the lights switch off again and turned to George, who had been watching from the corner the whole time without a word.
“George, help out for a change and wake him up.”
George stepped over to sit the chair back up, then doused Thomas with a fresh pail of water, slapping his cheeks until the bound man’s eyes opened and slowly focused.
“You’re really going to want to start cooperating with us,” he said. “Now, the deal still stands. You can trade us information for water, or silence for pain.”
* * *
It was a little after 4am and still dark when the rescue party got to the Compound.
They’d ditched their bikes a mile back and finished the trek cross country on foot, picking out a route that brought them over a small ridge that they hoped would give them a view over the walls.
Robert led the way, having plenty of practice leading night patrols.
He had to do the duty of both team leader and point man, navigating and also trying to detect any traps or warning devices the Compound had set up.
Three times, Robert pointed out a trip wire, barely visible under the weak light of a crescent moon.
From the top of the ridge, they were able to see some of the Compound over its wall. They spent some time scanning the area with their binoculars.
There were a few lights on in some of the buildings, probably solar powered LEDs, that gave a hint of the layout inside.
A couple of small fires burned here and there, but otherwise it was dark. The only people they could make out were most likely guards, hanging out around the fires.
In the center of the compound was its largest building, a long two-story common building that Christine had told them to look for. That building held the Compound offices and meeting rooms and an arms vault. It seemed the most likely place that they’d keep a prisoner.
Robert gathered the team around and they compared their observations. “Are we still confident that a small diversion to draw attention away from the main building is the way to go?”
There were slow nods of agreement.
“Small. Something to get the patrols’ attention, but not enough to get them to wake up the entire camp,” Randall said.
“OK. Remember that Grandma said it looked like they keep most of their vehicles in a small motor pool. It’s probably near this back gate here,” Robert said, pointing to an area of their hand-drawn map of the compound. “Bruce, Marcus, Claire, you’re going to get us wheels and cause the diversion. Precisely five minutes, right?”
All three agreed.
“Jane, Randall. At T-plus four, we need to be in position on the building ready to move in and find Thomas. Quiet takedowns are the best option. Shoot only if necessary, but if it’s necessary don’t hesitate, right?” continued Robert.
Jane and Randall nodded.
“It’s not that big of a building, probably no residents, so it should be mostly deserted except for Thomas and anybody with him. We’ll have wheels coming our way at T-plus ten, or at the first sign that we’re in a shootout. Let’s hope for the former, because the latter is going to make things a lot harder.”
Everybody was silent as the weight of what was about to happen sank in. Robert was a seasoned combat veteran, having served in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Randall had survived his first combat experience less than 48 hours earlier. None of the others had faced a gunfight before.
J
ane was just fifteen, Bruce had served as an MP during the Gulf War, but hadn’t seen action. Marcus had served in the Air Force twenty years ago and had also never seen combat.
“Look. I don’t have a suicidal bone in my body,” Robert told them. “I wouldn’t be leading this mission if I thought it was going to fail. We’re family, and we’ve been preparing for this. We’re solid, and we’re tight. We’re going to get Thomas out of there, and we’re going to get him home. All of us. Right?”
