by A. R. Shaw
“Mae, what are you and Nicole doing here?” Kent asked noticing Nicole standing behind her in the dark as he approached.
“Mom said to wait until you made it over. She doesn’t want anyone going down there until he’s disarmed. He probably has weapons on him still.”
“Well, he’s sure making a lot of noise.”
After he said those words, the banging ceased.
“He must have heard my voice,” Kent said in a whisper. “I thought the room was sealed. There was nothing in there except for a mattress so he didn’t break his neck. What’s he using to bang on things? It sounded like metal.”
“Duh…his gun,” Mae said.
Nicole brought her hands to her mouth.
“Ah…why isn’t he shooting with it then?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe he’s afraid the bullet will ricochet off the sides?”
A moment later, the sound of a round striking the metal wall went off, causing both of them to jump.
“Maybe not,” Mae said.
“Okay. You two go find your mom. I’ll wait here.”
He watched both girls run off. It was already dusk then. As soon as the sun dropped behind the clouds, the cold wind seeped into every open crevice of his jacket. He shivered with each gust. In an unsteady voice he said, “Hey. I know you can hear me. What’s your name?”
There was no reply for a short time. Then a voice echoed, “Let me go. You don’t understand the trouble you’re in.” The man grunted then as if letting out a suppressed moan.
“This will not end well for you,” he strained to say.
Kent believed him. Choosing to ignore the warning, Kent said. “Look…my name’s Kent. I’m a doctor. Are you injured?”
The man in the chamber let out a chuckle. “Man, I’m not telling you anything.”
“You just told me we’re in big trouble. By the sound of your voice I’d say you’re in a lot of pain. The rest of it’s not my area. I’m just here to help you,” Kent said as he watched the silhouette of the woman he loved walk his way. The gun holster strapped to her thigh swung with her hips. He couldn’t get over how beautiful she was or how much he’d come to love her, even in these perilous times.
Sloane must have detected his sudden lusty mood. He found her eyes smiling at him as she came out of the darkness.
She held his stare with a smirk as she neared. “Hello, Mister.”
Kent held a finger quickly to his smiling lips. “He can hear everything we say. Isn’t that right?” he said a little louder.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the guy below.
Sloane nodded.
“What’s your name?” she asked a little louder.
“Not giving you any information…lady.”
“Fine. Stay down there,” Sloane said.
“He’s injured,” Kent whispered.
She shook her head. “Not my area.”
He was about to say something, protest for the living, when another round went off in the chamber below them. The guy wasn’t making it easy on himself.
“He may have just shot himself,” said Kent.
“Still…not my problem,” Sloane said and turned away.
Kent let the silence linger for a while as he watched Sloane walk away. Then he said, “Hey, I’ll return in the morning. You’ll be treated well. Just come out without a fight. Give us the information we need.”
The wind off the shoreline gusted for a moment. The man below said nothing. Then Kent heard, “How’d you know I didn’t just kill myself?”
“A man in the apocalypse with a big box of Twinkies? Nah, you have riches, my friend. You wouldn’t give it all up.”
“Dickhead.”
“Yup. See you in the morning.”
He was exhausted. The emotional highs and lows of the day took a toll. On his way back to his truck, somewhere beyond the street to the left, glowing flames caught his attention as they edged up a hill. One person stood still in his path. He soon realized it was the crazy old lady. She seemed to be staring at the same thing. “What is that?” he asked her.
“They’re carrying torches up the hill.”
“Why?” Though he felt he should know the answer.
The old lady turned to him, her right cheek pulled up against her eye as she gave him the stink eye. She looked at him like he was the crazy one. “That’s where they’re burying the dead. Doesn’t she tell you anything?”
By ‘she,’ he supposed the old woman meant Sloane. And no, she didn’t tell him everything. Only he wasn’t going to admit that to the old lady. Instead, he said, “Have a good evening.” Then, instead of going to his truck, he took a deep breath and set out for the line of torches meandering their way up the nearby hill like a glowing serpent. The exhaustion would have to wait.
He hustled up the path, finally catching up to them as the wet dirt slipped under his heels. The rain began to pelt with a vengeance. Grim, every one of them. That’s what he saw in each raindrop-covered face. At least they weren’t celebrating. Of course, carrying dead bodies over your shoulder as you marched up a muddy hill in the rain with only torchlight to see by didn’t make for a happy occasion. At least he hoped not. When he reached Chuck, the first thing the man said was, “At least it was them and not us.”
That statement stunned Kent. It landed in the pit of his stomach and spread like dread through his veins.
They landed the bodies on the sodden ground with reverent ease. Kent couldn’t help but wonder if they would handle the bodies with such care the next time. The time after that? Or would they simply let the body weight crash to the earth with a splatter, making a crater in the mud? He had taken lives, rightfully so, on his own. He wasn’t sure why he was struggling suddenly with humanity or the lack thereof.
“We have to dig the grave,” Chuck yelled over the pelting rain.
It was Boyd that asked the question on Kent’s mind. “One for each of them?”
Chuck was already shaking his head. Rain was coming down faster now. “No. One big grave. We don’t have time for more.”
That’s where Kent found himself for the next hour. With dwindling torchlight, Kent grabbed a shovel from one of the others and began digging. Alongside them, they were guilty of digging a mass grave into the ground only three feet deep. Afterward, they picked up each body, one at the head, one at the feet, and laid them gently down. The worst part of all was shoveling the wet sandy loam over the faces of the lives they’d taken that morning. In death, they were not the enemy. Instead, they were men, young and old, with lives spent too soon. It affected him more than he cared to admit. Thankful for the fleeting light of the torch, the group wound their way back down the narrow path. The rain picked up. Each of them was soaked through. No one said a word. But without fail, Kent witnessed the same expression on everyone’s face. They had done something bad. They’d committed this crime as a group. Willingly. Each of them, guilty of murder. As everyone dispersed, one of the women, her face cast in shock, said under her breath, or at least he imagined she did, “Why didn’t we just let them go?”
He stopped in his tracks. Perhaps to comfort her? She walked past him without notice. He cast his eyes to the sodden ground, the same question rolling through his mind.
Rain was good at masking emotions. Once he made it to the cab of his truck, he closed the door with a slam. His hands were covered in dirt. He hadn’t realized he was shaking from the cold, so much that even inserting the key into the ignition was a challenge. Once he turned on the engine, he realized there was a drop of rain about to drip from the tip of his nose. He wiped it away with his dirt-covered shirt sleeve. Then another formed. And then for some reason rain streamed down his cheeks as well. He wiped away the incessant moisture and drove home.
7
Davis
Well past the ink stain of night, Davis kept reminding himself to place one foot in front of the other. Despite his heels’ raw flesh rubbing away against the backs of his leather
boots, he counted himself lucky. Lucky to be alive. Even still, like times past, with his eyes wide open against the dark night sky, images of dead Jerry leaking blood from his skull flashed before his view intermittently. That and a periodic buzzing kept coming and going with the gusts of wind.
He was used to this by now. He’d served his duty to his country in Iraq. That hellhole never ceased. It was like a scab festering for eternity. Buddies died. Enemies died. Buddies died again. Their last images were seared forevermore into his memory, only to rise once again from the gray ashes to peek at Davis’ current life.
He used to fight them. In vain, he’d urge the dead to stay dead…down deep, in the dark. But they refused in the end, and he wasn’t surprised to have Jerry visit so soon.
“You could’ve fucking listened. I don’t feel sorry for you.”
At times he talked to them too. Hell, if they were going to bother him…he might as well get in a few good words.
The wind had picked up and with it the constant moisture common in the Northwest. He was dampened through, and even though the adrenaline flooding his system was long gone, his hands shook uncontrollably. They were numb despite his efforts to warm them in his pockets as he walked on, ignoring the pain in his heels.
Never without a weapon, he kept grabbing for the one he’d discarded to save his life back at the crazy gates of hell. “Dammit.”
Then he reached behind his jacket and pulled his concealed carry weapon. In the chaos behind the gates earlier, he willed himself not to comply with his own automatic training and resisted the urge to reach for it. Had he even thought about it, he was certain he’d have a hole matching Jerry’s in his head. They could be twins in the afterlife someday. That wasn’t comforting. His pace quickened. He knew his family’s lives were at stake.
The living ones flashed before him. His wife…he couldn’t even go there. His boys were still so young. They were the only reason he still choked down air every miserable moment. Without them, he welcomed Death’s sickle.
To him she was anything but a grim reaper. Nope, Death to him was a sultry seductress, forever letting him know that the pain could end here and now. From her sweet lips to his, he could let all the agony and exhaustion slip away. She was a sweetheart. He liked her. And for now, because of the living, he’d blush and say, No, thank you…just a little while longer, darling. Someday soon…I promise.
A few more steps on the dark road and his left boot landed on the edge where the asphalt met its mother. Correcting east, Davis instinctively widened his eyes a little more in the dark, desperately trying to seek a bit of light. With another gust of wind, came a slight buzzing in his ear.
“This is bullshit. I need to stop. All I need now is a broken leg to deal with.”
Seeking the edge once again, he knew there was a ditch leading to a berm and the ever-present evergreen haven above. Though he couldn’t see a damn thing, he carefully placed one foot on the soft earth and kept going at a snail’s pace. The ocean, according to his damaged hearing, had descended south about an hour ago, so he was fairly certain he would not fall off the edge of a cliff. Oh well…if he did, it wasn’t intentional. Not a bad way to go. Shit luck for him. Death would be smiling then.
Leading one foot after the other, he crossed the muddy ditch and felt the upward climb coming. It was an easy thing to jump a ditch and scurry up a berm in the daylight but terrifying without any light at all. Once up the berm, his hands scrambled for rocks, roots anything to grab onto. And then he was there, feeling around on the forest floor like a blind man searching for change. Just a damn tree to lean against out of the wind. That’s all he was after. That and pine needles to cover himself to steal some warmth for the night. There was no short supply of those. With rough, numb hands he didn’t feel the pricks as he heaped forest debris up and over his legs.
His only real fear was forest animals. Bears, cougars and moose. Yes, moose. Moose had the same reputation as hippopotamus on a safari. No one really feared hippos but piss one off and watch out. They actually killed more humans every year than lions or tigers. Same thing with moose. They were responsible for more injuries to humans than bears or cougars every year.
It was hard to tell if his eyes were open or closed after a while. He kept blinking them, not discerning any change in the darkest dark. After Jerry’s image visited him once more, the red in bright contrast against the black, he pushed the grisly scene away and focused on his boys. It took an effort. He was tired. He was hungry, and the hours felt like days to get back to Astoria and to Tale…empty-handed and bereft of his crew. He knew what that meant. It was like closing your distance to the devil because he had something you wanted. Something he cherished. Beyond all measure, his sons. No matter what, he had to pull that tether to hell as fast as he could.
8
Sloane
Sloane stood in the silent morning, staring out the cloudy window. There would be no sun today, like most days, to see as far as the ocean, not from her view. She felt his approach from behind her. For a tall man the silence of his step was surprising. “Good morning.”
“Same to you,” Kent said.
“I didn’t sleep much at all last night.”
“That makes two of us,” Kent said.
She couldn’t help but feel there was a distance between them now. She hoped it passed soon.
“Jason’s been tracking him all night. He sent a report this morning. I hope he knows what he’s doing. We’re depending on his expertise. Without knowing the location of these guys we’re taking unnecessary risks. It’s like feeling around in a dark closet. You never know what you’re going to find or what will find you first,” Sloane said. Speaking her thoughts out loud, she hoped Kent would close the void. “I just wish now we’d sent someone with him. He insisted on going alone.”
Kent shook his head with a blank look on his face while she talked. “I’m sure he has it under control. He’s healed up remarkably since we found him. I have to run. I have what I suspect is a broken leg to deal with. Despite the mattress, our prisoner’s in bad shape.”
She turned away from the windows then, her eyes forming slits. “Are you upset with me because our prisoner broke his leg?”
“I’m not upset with you at all. I don’t know how anyone could witness what we did yesterday and not have reservations. Hell, the music keeps replaying in my mind over and over again on a reel. I can’t make it stop.”
She almost chuckled. It wasn’t funny. It was never funny when you had to take lives. Yet to Sloane, the entire scene played like a movie, a disturbing movie. Only she was the writer and producer. “I didn’t choose the music. You can’t blame me for that one.”
Changing the subject, she said, “You’re not going down there, in the chamber, are you? He’s still armed. I thought we were waiting for him to spend all of his rounds before anyone approached.”
He did that thing she hated. He nodded his chin down at her. “I’ll be fine. Someone has to take care of his injuries. He’s going to want pain medication, trust me. I’ll barter for the gun.”
“How do you know his leg’s really broken?”
“Chuck radioed that he’s been groaning and yelling all night, off and on. He offered to put him out of his misery for us. The guy is begging for help. He hasn’t slept much at all according to the log. And…he’s apparently out of Twinkies.”
“Could be a ploy.”
“I know the difference between agony and fooling around,” Kent said with his tone raised. After a beat, he said more softly, “I think he’s really in trouble. I won’t know how much until I get down there.” He began to walk away, then stopped short, turned to her and said, “I’m sure Jason is all right. Have faith in him. I know it’s hard to delegate and not have control over everything, but sometimes you have to let people do what they do best.”
He pulled her toward him, kissed the top of her head and said, “I’ll see you later.”
She stared after him a moment longer after he clo
sed the door. There was something wrong there. Something she couldn’t fix. Maybe it wasn’t hers to fix.
He was right about one thing. She was worried about Jason. Not just about what he would discover, but what danger lay ahead of him still. Was she asking too much of the young man?
It wasn’t long after he came to live with them that they discovered his abilities. At first it was all about his recovery. He’s been through so much at the hands of their sadistic captor, Hyde. No one thought to ask him what he did before. Before the mayhem. Before the tsunami. Before the pandemic. Before the torture.
When he’d healed enough, he wanted to help. Before everything, Jason was a drone enthusiast. Not any drone enthusiast. He owned a drone shop in Cannon Beach. One where people flocked when they’d tired of flying kites in the blustery beach winds. Where bored teen boys on a family vacation pretended to check out the wildlife clinging to the sides of Haystack Rock but instead spied on pretty girls in swimsuits. Jason was an expert. He had equipment hidden away. It was what he was tortured for. But he never gave up the secrets. Until a few weeks ago.
It was Jason who demanded her attention one evening. Reluctant to speak, he’d found a yellow-lined pad and a pen, and began writing furiously, drawing out a sketched plan. It took her a while to understand what he’d meant. What he was after. He could speak limitedly now but rarely did. His hearing, however, was another story. He could detect some slight noises, but it had yet to return with any great acclaim. He was mostly dependent on lip reading. Even though Kent had fitted him with a found hearing device, he wouldn’t use it. She could tell by the cast of his eyes to the side when Kent had handed him the box. Her concern was letting him go out on surveillance alone. How would he detect the noises he made with his own feet or someone sneaking up on him? They had tested him and found that his observance skills were good enough. He just sensed things.
