The Abandon Series | Book 2 | These Times of Retribution

by Schow, Ryan

  Gator laughed. “I’m gonna get my stuff, move into the man-cave. I saw some cars stalled on the road, and my phone doesn’t work. Which means we might have a big problem.”

  “Nah, man,” Colt said. “I got this, but thanks.”

  “It would be nice to have an extra gun around here,” Faith said. “Just to keep an eye on things.”

  “I heard they had bad weather in Leighton’s neck of the woods,” Gator said. “You guys get any word on that?”

  “You do realize we’ve been hit by an EMP, or something like that, right?” Faith said.

  “Just figuring it out,” Gator replied. “I was on my way into town when I met a damsel in distress and my protector instincts flared up.”

  Colt laughed. “Yeah?”

  “Trixie.”

  Now, he watched Colt’s face turn red.

  “It looked like she ran into a few doors, if you catch my drift.”

  “I got the same impression last time I saw her,” Colt said. “Don’t think you can save this one. I think she’s too deep into her life to change direction.”

  “That faraday cage in the man-cave,” Gator said, hooking a thumb over his shoulder, “did that actually work?”

  “Yeah, surprisingly,” Colt said. “I have to get gas for the generator, but I’ll set up the Kodiak and the solar panels after I make sure that idiot, Keaton, isn’t going to come up and take them like he took the gas-powered generator.”

  “What about the coffee maker?” he asked. “Did that survive?”

  “It did,” Faith said with a smile. “You want a cup of Joe?”

  “Does a pig want mud?”

  “Apparently so,” Faith said. “Kick off those dirty shoes and come inside.”

  “How about I get mine to go,” he said, kicking his boots off anyway. “I have to go to town and see if I can get extra supplies now that everything’s changed. I’m not terribly excited about dipping into my reserves.”

  “If you want it ‘to go,’ then ‘to go’ it is,” Faith said, fetching him some coffee. “If you want it iced, I can do that, too.”

  To Faith, he said, “I like my coffee like the dead of night…pitch black for maximum octane.” More quietly, to Colt, he said, “You want me to stop by in a few hours? Check on things with you?”

  Colt seemed relieved, but his words didn’t reflect his reaction.

  “I got this,” Colt said. “You’re a good friend, Gator. I really do appreciate you.”

  “That might be my only redeeming value.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short,” Colt said.

  When Faith returned with a cup of hot, black coffee, Gator smelled the bitter brew and smiled.

  “Hot damn, Mrs. McDaniel. This is perfect.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Keaton Dodd

  Keaton stood on the porch with the binoculars watching the big man talk to Colt and Faith. This guy looked hard—a brute with a Viking’s beard and substantial bulk. Could Keaton take him in a fair fight? He didn’t even know what a fair fight was, because he never fought fair in his life.

  “Trixie, come here!” he screamed over his shoulder.

  She appeared moments later, scared. Keaton was tired of the way she looked at him. Trixie needed to thicken her skin if she wanted to be with him. But she also needed to not get picked up by strangers who looked like lumberjacks.

  “What did that guy say to you?”

  “Nothing, really.”

  “Your ugly face is running, which means the bruises you managed to get yourself are plain as day.”

  “No one said nothing about them.”

  He looked her over, read the fear in her eyes, then said, “I don’t believe you.” She pressed her lips together, her eyes filling with shine. “Make me believe you, Trixie.”

  Without a word, she got on her knees and started to undo his zipper. He smacked her face away, knocking her on the floor.

  “C’mon, Keaton,” Remy said, irritated. “Give her a break already.”

  “Shut your trap,” he said. “You just shut it if you know what’s best for you.”

  Trixie looked up at him and said, “You said you’d save me from my old life.”

  “I did,” he said.

  “But you didn’t say this would be my new life.”

  “Well, it is. Aren’t I providing for you? Keeping you fed and clothed?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And aren’t you grateful?”

  “I am.”

  She started to get up, but he stepped forward, standing right over the top of her. He glared down at her, then he spat a loogie in her hair.

  “I don’t believe you, Trixie.”

  The weight and gravity of the phlegm caused it to slide down the front of her bangs. It brushed over an eyelash before falling on the floor.

  “Clean it up.”

  “I’ll need a cloth,” she said.

  “Lap it up like a dog, Trixie.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Lap it up. Like. A. DOG.”

  “No!” she screamed.

  He kneed her in the face, knocking her over on her back. Remy charged him, but Keaton grabbed the man, swung him around, and sent him flying through a perfectly good screen door.

  He followed Remy outside, kicked him in the butt, then said, “You can’t save this ho!”

  Back in the house, he grabbed Trixie by the hair and picked her up. She grabbed his hands, crying. He could already see her face swelling. Meanwhile, Booger walked out, chewing on a sandwich he made. Peanut butter and grape jelly.

  “You got an issue?” he asked Booger.

  “Just here for the show.”

  Keaton dragged Trixie out of the house by the hair, kicked Remy as he passed him, then threw Trixie off the porch. She started to come back to the house, but he screamed, “Go get another ride with your boyfriend!”

  “He’s not my boyfriend!”

  “I’m not either, so now what are you going to do?”

  “Please, Keaton!”

  “You’re going to have to beg!” Keaton roared.

  “You spat in my hair.”

  “Yep, and I spat on your face, too, like a dog who needs to learn to beg.”

  “Stop this, Keaton,” she pleaded. “I didn’t want this. Please, I don’t want it like this!”

  “You’re nothing, Trixie. You’re just two tits and a hole, a warm body at night, a built-in gopher. Go for this, go for that. Go-for.”

  “Well, you’re just a weak-dick lover, never up to my standards,” she said, getting up and brushing herself off. “I won’t beg for substandard, and I certainly won’t sit around here anymore getting hit, or—”

  He cracked her on the skull with a solid right hook that had her falling against the Jeep. She dropped down in the dirt and started to cry.

  “The little tough-girl act doesn’t work on me, sister. You need to understand that you have a place to stay, so long as you know your place. Now beg.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Colt McDaniel

  “Colt!” Faith screamed from the hallway by the front door. Spurred to life, he jumped up, ran down the hall, grabbed the M82, then booked it to the foyer.

  “Is he back?” Colt asked, breathless and ready.

  “Worse,” she said, staring out the window with a pair of binoculars.

  He began to set the rifle down, but she said, “No, take it out on the porch, the Barret’s scope is better than the binoculars.”

  The two of them hurried out front.

  Faith said, “He’s beating her.”

  “What?”

  “It’s really bad.”

  He set up the rifle on the porch railing, scoped in on the house, and saw Trixie lying beaten in the dirt. Keaton was standing over her, screaming at her, motioning for her to get up. She looked like she was crying.

  “This freaking guy,” he growled under his breath.

  Flexing his jaw like he was gritting his teeth, Keaton kicked dirt in
to Trixie’s face, causing her to turn and cry even harder.

  Inside Colt’s head, things were changing. He felt himself wanting to revert back to the way he was, the way he used to be, his old self. The beast inside him stood in its cage, stepped out of the shadows, curled its war-beaten fingers around the bars.

  “You need to stop him,” Faith all but whispered.

  “It’s not our squabble.”

  Down the hill, just beyond the brush, where he got a halfway decent shot, Colt watched Keaton grab Trixie by the hair and slam her head into the car.

  The beast began to growl, to rattle the cage.

  Colt stood up straight and turned to Faith, but she had the binos to her face and was watching the whole thing.

  “We can’t just sit and watch this,” she said, pulling the field glasses away.

  “I already told you,” he hissed.

  The beast wanted eyes on the scene, so Colt felt himself turn around, line up the M82, scope in the scene once more.

  Keaton was still on Trixie, smacking her in the head over and over again. She couldn’t seem to fall any farther into the dirt. Collapsed and on her side, it looked like she was almost hugging the ground to get away from him. Still, there was no escape, and he didn’t seem finished with her just yet.

  Towering over her, fists clenched at his sides, his eyes were a blazing heat and his jaw flicked as he waited for her to move. When all she did was lay there sobbing, he snorted really hard, coughed even harder, then hocked a massive loogie into pinkish-blond hair that was already dusted with the dirt he’d kicked at her earlier.

  Colt’s beast was shaking the cage, its throat ragged with a guttural roar.

  “You have to stop this, Colt!”

  Colt shut out all outside noise, turned the volume down on the beast, then focused only on Keaton.

  He couldn’t hear the beast, but he felt its lips pull back and its breathing change. The beast opened its mouth, its teeth shiny and slick, its eyes ferocious with need.

  “Kill him,” Faith said.

  This snapped him out of the quiet space, the force of her demands like sandpaper on his eyeballs.

  “No!” he roared back.

  Instead of backing off, she stepped up next to him and said, “I know you have it in you. Walker told me all about you. He told me what you guys did, why you’re so distant.”

  The beast inside grew louder than ever, shaking the cage so hard the bolts began to loosen and the drywall on this metaphorical cage started dropping in bits and dust.

  He couldn’t take his eyes off Keaton.

  From the porch, one of the guys was yelling for Keaton to stop. The maggot went straight for Trixie, picked her up by the hair, tried dragging her to her feet. It wasn’t like it looked in the movies. He couldn’t get her up, so the struggle was ugly and painful to watch, her screams echoing up the hillside for the first time.

  Through the M82’s scope he watched Trixie claw Keaton’s face, drawing blood. His response was swift and violent, topped off by a savage gut-punch that had her falling over yet again.

  “If you don’t do something, I will,” Faith said, raising her voice at him for the first time in years. “I’m not kidding. I can’t watch this, not for another minute!”

  That’s when Colt saw Keaton’s mouth move. It was that one word that fused Colt to the beast inside himself. It was the one word that stopped his skin from perspiring, his heart from wavering, his mind from dancing over the consequences of action.

  “I told you to beg,” Keaton’s mouth said.

  Beg.

  That was the word Colt saw that changed everything.

  “No,” he said again, but this time to Keaton rather than Faith.

  “I know you have a monster inside you,” Faith pleaded. “I know you bury it deep, but Colton McDaniel, it’s time to let him out.”

  He slid his finger over the trigger, let out his breath, squeezed the trigger.

  Down the hill, half of Keaton’s head blew clean off. He slid the rifle a hair to the left, squeezed the trigger, punched a hole in the other guy’s chest, sending him backward into the porch railing.

  Another guy came out on the porch, a sandwich in his hand, half the chewed food sitting in an opened mouth. He studied the dead bodies, then he looked up the hill, to where Colt was perched. The beast inside him sat back and sighed.

  Kill him, the beast said. But he didn’t. Colt just stared at the kid.

  He had a lazy look in his eye like he couldn’t care less, like somehow he wasn’t all that broken up about what had happened. His opened mouth closed and he started chewing again. He was safe and he knew it. Turning, he walked back into the house. A moment later, he returned with a damp cloth. He handed it to Trixie, but then he got into his old-as-hell beater, started it up, and drove away. He wasn’t in a rush, which was strange. And why did his car work? He thought the EMP destroyed almost everything.

  “Go help her,” Faith said. “I’ll cover you.”

  “You can’t shoot the big dog,” he said of the M82.

  “I know.”

  Colt now looked at her with different eyes. He was a killer again, the brute from Afghanistan, the fiend without a bleeding heart or a second’s hesitation. He’d carried this beast around for so long, caged, unfed, ignored. But now that he had let that monster out, it was time to plan for war.

  He walked down the driveway, crossed the empty street, found Trixie sitting in the dirt. She was a mess, looking at her dead boyfriend and his dead comrade.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “You did this?”

  “No, he did this to himself. I just delivered the message.”

  “What message?”

  “You don’t beat women.”

  She nodded, then started to cry again. She had a dirty face, swelling over her left eye, a cut on her mouth. He extended a hand; she took it.

  He picked her up and said, “I want you to come up to the house and let me and my wife clean you up.”

  “I have nowhere to go,” she sobbed.

  “You do right now.”

  “But he’s…he’s dead.”

  “He is.”

  “Diesel’s not going to like this.”

  “Who’s Diesel?”

  “I already told you. He’s the head of the Hayseed Rebellion.”

  Colt stopped.

  “What’s Diesel’s last name?”

  “I don’t know. I think it’s Daley or something like that.”

  Colt felt like the wind had been kicked out of him. He recognized that name…from Walker. “Former military, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “How well does Diesel like Keaton?”

  “He doesn’t like anyone, but he relies on him.”

  “For what?”

  “Stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “He wanted us watching you, seeing if you went anywhere, if anyone came to you.”

  “He wanted you watching me?” he asked, dumbfounded.

  It was starting to make sense. Somehow, Diesel was mixed up with Walker, and Walker was now dead. Were Diesel and Walker friends? Was that his gold and silver in the care package with the M82? Or was there something deeper, a more profound reason for this…hillbilly surveillance?

  “What exactly is this guy’s interest in me?”

  “I think maybe Diesel wants to do something to you himself, but he got injured a week or two ago. Plus a lot of his guys were killed.”

  “By whom?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I just get things for Keaton, and I do things…”

  “What do you mean?”

  She wiped her eyes, stared at him. “Do I really need to say it?”

  “No,” he said. “Let’s go up to the house.”

  He walked her up to the house, and when they arrived, Faith came off the porch and pulled her into a hug. “C’mon, sweetheart, let’s get you taken care of.”

  “I’m going to see Lance,” Co
lt said.

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “You remember what he said, right? You remember what he said to do if this situation presented itself.”

  “What if he changes his mind?” Faith asked. “Let’s take care of it on our own.”

  “I trust him,” Colt said. “If he changed his mind, I’ll know soon enough.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Colt McDaniel

  Colt wiped the moisture from the seat of his motorcycle, straddled it, then kick-started it to life. He revved the engine to warm it up, then dropped the transmission into gear and set out for town.

  All along the more populated streets, abandoned cars and trucks sat where they died. People were here and there, some walking down the side of the road, others moving in and around the vehicles. For some reason, they seemed more worried about him than he was about them. It started to rain again, which was no surprise.

  He cut his speed, reminded himself to be careful.

  As he neared the city, he saw columns of smoke rising into the damp skies. The rain intensified, the skies bleaker than ever. He took exit 29 to Wilmore/Nicholasville, turned right on 29/Wilmore Road heading to Nicholasville. KY-29/Wilmore Rd eventually became W. Maple Street.

  The residential neighborhoods looked peaceful despite the events unfolding. Even though the day was dreary-looking and the temperature had dropped significantly, the mixed smells of wood-burning stoves, moderate rain, and a saturated earth felt invigorating to his soul.

  He passed the utilitarian-looking Nicholasville Elementary School and then Nicholasville Apostolic Church knowing that just up the street was the sheriff’s office.

  At the corner of N. Maple and S. 3rd Street, a fight had broken out. He was able to get through it unscathed, even though a crowd had gathered. It wasn’t the Hayseed Rebellion so far as he could tell. This was just a couple of good old boys who could probably kill a keg and a few burgers between the two of them.

  Up ahead, across from the United Methodist Church, was a single-story brick building. It was small and unassuming with very little parking and nothing to stop the public from pouring in. This was the Jessamine County Sheriff’s Office. There was a small line of people forming outside the door, most of them looking scared, or worn down.