Masters of Mayhem

by Franklin Horton

  While being outside, moving around in the dark, was spooky, Ragus preferred it over sitting inside and worrying about what was out there. He didn’t have night vision on a helmet like Barb and Conor but he did have a night vision rifle scope. Within the presumed safety of the compound, Ragus was wearing a headlamp to help him navigate. He also had a much more powerful LED flashlight on his vest if he needed a spotlight. He hated to wear a headlamp because Barb and Conor had both drilled into him that wearing any sort of light at night only provided an illuminated target for your enemy, but he didn’t see a choice. There were a lot of things to fall over or fall off at the compound and all of them hurt.

  Despite the size of the property Conor owned, they mostly stayed on the same twenty acres. That was the area where the coal company’s offices, workshops, parking, and helipad had been located. The twenty acres was fenced with eight foot high chain link fence with barbed wire on the top. The coal company had installed the fence to keep locals from wandering onto the property to steal copper, tools, and equipment. It wouldn’t keep out a determined trespasser but it sent a message that you were entering restricted space. In educating Ragus about life on the compound, Conor pointed to the fence and summed it up with a simple statement: they climb the wire, we open fire.

  If Ragus took his time patrolling, checking that the fences were intact and all the buildings were secure, a circumnavigation of the property took him about forty-five minutes. He intentionally dawdled at points along his route, turning off his headlamp and sitting in the dark to listen for noises. There were always noises. With most of the leaves gone from the trees, sounds carried for great distances. Located high on the mountain, you would once have been able to hear cars on the distant roads and the twenty-four hour clamor of heavy equipment from coal mining operations. Now the night sounds were more subtle. The scampering of a rat. The crack of a limb as a larger animal moved in the shadowy forest. It was the movement of the compound’s livestock as it shifted in its bedding or got up to wander.

  Ragus felt proud of himself upon the completion of his first circuit. He felt braver than he expected, never once feeling as if he was being crept up upon by some imaginary monster or being stalked by a bear. In fact, he never experienced any fear at all. The only emotion he could recall was pure wonderment at how the sky opened up above him and how the deep silence of the world folded around him.

  He returned to the living quarters, hanging all his gear by the door for quick access. He made a sandwich, realizing he’d missed dinner because of the way the evening had been disrupted by the events at Johnny Jacks’ house. He made a wrap of goat, cheese, olives, and pickles. He went to the living room area and put in a movie Conor recently made him watch. It was called Billy Jack and was about a mixed-blood Native American trying to find peace on the reservation after the Vietnam War. The movie was one of Conor’s favorites and he couldn’t watch it without making Ragus watch some particular scenes over and over. Ragus had to admit that there was something satisfying about the movie, watching bad people get what was coming to them.

  When he finished his sandwich, Ragus made sure to clean up his mess. He’d once had the habit of leaving his dirty plates and empty cups on the end tables but Barb broke him of that. Every time she picked up one of his dirty dishes, she clouted him on the head.

  Ragus would shield himself and scowl at her. “I was going to get that when I got up,” he’d say.

  “It’s a bad habit,” she’d reply. “Don’t leave messes.”

  Through her power of negative reinforcement she’d nearly broken him of ever leaving a mess anywhere. It wasn’t like he was a pig or anything, but she and Conor were two of the most organized people he’d ever seen in his life. It went way beyond the way normal people lived. At first he’d thought there was something wrong with them. Gradually, Conor made him understand that it was related to the type of work he did. Not the machine shop work but the actual work. Loose ends and sloppiness got you killed. Fastidiousness, attention to detail, and never letting down your guard kept you alive.

  Being that he wanted to remain alive, Ragus felt there may be some benefit in adopting the habits of those around him. Besides the small stuff, like cleaning up his messes, Ragus was training to be a better shot and learning some of the basics of fighting tactics, like how to work together as a team. As much as he hated getting his ass handed to him by Barb, he’d also been allowing her to teach him some of the fighting techniques she used. He had to admit she wasn’t just good, she was scary good. He’d never been aware, due to the sheltered nature of his life, that there were so many people out there with the ability to kill you bare-handed. There were, though, and she was one of them.

  After returning from the kitchen, Ragus added a log to the fire and settled back into his movie. He checked his watch. He would wait one hour and then make another sweep of the compound. It was still early in the evening. His plan was to patrol for one hour then break for one hour up until midnight. After midnight, he would do two patrols with two hours in between them.

  He was pretty confident they wouldn’t have any trouble at the compound. They never had before. By rumor, reputation, or frequency of gunfire, people understood to avoid the place. Anyone who went by on the road usually kept moving. Still, it was the first time he’d been left alone with such responsibility and he wanted to demonstrate the he could handle it.

  When bedtime finally came, he didn’t sleep well. It wasn’t fear or the weight of the responsibility as much as it was the feeling of aloneness. For some reason, that sense of aloneness pushed thoughts and emotions onto him that he’d successfully kept at bay since moving onto the compound. The last year of his life replayed through his head, an inescapable loop that he already knew the ending to. He saw the lows of going to high school and dealing with their stupid crap while his mom was sick. Then there were the highs of becoming a wrestler and finding something he was good at that simultaneously helped exorcise the demons created by the stress of his mom’s illness.

  When the terror attacks came, Ragus thought it was one of the worst things that could happen but he was wrong. The world around him and his mother slowly went quiet and dark. There was no more school, no more wrestling, no more friends, and no more support. It was just him watching her die slowly in their crappy home stuck on the side of a remote mountain.

  Looking back, he didn’t know how he survived it. Many times he wished he was dead and no longer having to watch his mother suffer. When she finally passed, he thought the pain of that would finally kill him but it didn’t. Now it seemed so long ago that the memories might belong to someone else, like something remembered from a book or movie.

  He’d gotten stronger since her passing. While his past and the memory of his mother still battered him like a typhoon, he finally felt anchored again. He felt able to resist the buffeting of those waves of sadness and bottomless grief. He felt like he could survive despite what the world threw at him. Certainly he understood that part of his newfound resilience was due to the support of Conor and Barb, but not all of it. Part of it was him changing and growing.

  He checked his watch. It was 5 AM. He’d gotten back in from his last patrol an hour ago and there’d been nothing going on out there. If he’d been keeping a log it would have simply stated cold and dark. Even at this early hour, the light outside was changing enough that he felt a need to get up and get started with his day. He’d fed the fire each time he awoke but probably needed to again. Ashes needed to be taken out, animals needed to be fed, and the ice broken up on their water if it had frozen last night. There were too many things needed doing to just lay in bed.

  He made a cup of strong black tea, a drink he’d developed a fondness for. He’d slept in his clothes, not wanting to be caught unprepared. He was standing in his sock feet drinking tea in the kitchen when he heard a goat start bellowing.

  “I’ll feed you in a minute,” Ragus muttered. “Bossy goat.”

  When the goat persisted, Ragus went to
the window and looked out but couldn’t see anything. Conor had made ballistic shields for any windows exposed to the outside perimeter of the compound. The shields were heavy steel but stood off from the window about eight inches so that some light made its way inside, though they did restrict the view.

  Ragus slipped his boots on, then his coat, and stepped out onto the porch. He heard the faint rattle of chain link, as if the gate were being touched. Or opened.

  Or breached.

  He slipped back inside the house, quickly throwing on the rest of his gear. He slipped out the door and circled the office building. There was a dozer there expressly for the purpose of providing a ballistic barricade. Ragus could get behind it and watch what was taking place at the gate. It could be Conor and Barb returning. It could even be Shannon and Doc Marty. It could also be someone he didn’t know at all, deciding it was time to climb this gate and see what goodies were on the other side.

  The dozer was a John Deere 450, thick, old steel with few of the creature comforts found on modern machines. The machine was angled in such a way that Ragus could get on the ground and look around the blade. Conor assured him that no one with standard weaponry was going to put a round through that heavy blade.

  Peering over the top, he saw two men at the gate. They were bundled up in warm hunting gear and both held rifles. Whatever their mission, it couldn’t be good, and they had no business reaching this side of the gate. One man appeared to be nearly stuck, trying to squeeze himself through the point where the rolling gate was chained to a steel post.

  “It’s no good,” the other man said. “You can’t get through there.”

  “What the hell am I supposed to do?”

  “Maybe you should just keep yelling like I told you. If this guy is as mean as they say, he might not like you crossing his fence. He locked it for a reason.”

  The stuck man disengaged himself and pulled back from the gate. “I been yelling and nobody answered. I ain’t going to stand here all day and scream my head off like a damn fool.”

  “What do you want?” Ragus bellowed, trying to make his voice deeper, more intimidating that normal.

  Both men jerked in surprise.

  “Don’t move! I’ve got a gun on you!” Ragus ordered. “Are you seriously trying to break in here? Don’t you know who you’re messing with?”

  “We’re not breaking in,” said the man who was at that moment extricating himself from the gate.

  “I just watched you pull yourself out of the fence. What were you trying to do?”

  “I’ve been screaming my head off out here for about fifteen minutes,” the man countered. “Nobody came outside.”

  The men couldn’t fully see Ragus with most of his body concealed. Apparently they could tell enough from what they did see and from his voice. What they saw disappointed them.

  “Don’t tell me you’re the Mad Mick,” the gate crasher said. “You’re just a kid.”

  “I’m not the Mad Mick, I work for him. This is his place. I can give him a message.”

  “Where is he?” asked the other man.

  “I don’t think that’s any of your business,” Ragus replied. “Why are you asking?”

  “Listen kid, we’re just here to deliver a message. We’ve seen all the signs about this area being protected by the Mad Mick. We’ve heard the stories. Are they true?”

  “They’re true.”

  The two men looked at each other, perhaps finding confirmation that coming here had been the right thing to do. “We were on a hunting trip. Buddy of ours had some horses and we took out north along the highway. We ran into some folks on an ATV who were headed south. They warned us there was an army coming our way.”

  “An army?” Ragus echoed.

  “I know. It sounds crazy. We didn’t believe it either, but we ran into them the next day. There were probably a hundred riders.”

  “They could just be refugees,” Ragus said. “Maybe they’re fleeing south because of the weather.”

  The gate crasher shook his head. “Rumor is they destroyed a whole town where the highway crosses the river. Said it was revenge for something that happened there.”

  “On the Greenbrier River?”

  “That’s the place. Destroyed the town. Looted it and killed folks. Those guys on the ATV said they’re looting their way south.”

  “You think they’re headed here?”

  The man shrugged. “I don’t know for sure but the thought scares the crap out of me. I got family here. I thought the Mad Mick might want to check it out. Unless those signs were just a bunch of BS.”

  “They’re not BS,” Ragus said. “I’ll let him know.”

  “You better let him know fast,” the man said. “They may not be more than a day or two behind us. We rode all night to get here.”

  “I’ll pass it on. For future reference, don’t ever try to get through that fence. That’s an automatic death penalty.”

  The man who’d attempted to get through the fence swallowed hard. His buddy swatted him on the arm in an “I told you so” gesture. The men were off without a word.

  Ragus watched until they were gone. Then he waited longer to make sure they weren’t doubling back. For the entire time he laid there on the cold ground, huddled behind that dozer blade, he thought about what the men had said. There was only one town where the highway crossed the Greenbrier River. It was the same town where Conor had caught up with the men who kidnapped Barb. It was where the battle took place and where Conor exacted his revenge. Could this be related? Could the army these men were referring to have ties to the men Conor killed?

  When he’d waited for a half-hour, he got up, stretched his stiff body, and went inside for breakfast. He ended up eating oatmeal. He’d never been a fan of it but Conor assured him that its finest quality was that it stuck to your ribs, which was kind of what Ragus imagined it doing as he ate it, pasting itself to his insides. He stared off lost in thought, eating robotically, trying to figure out what he should do.

  Should he go and see what the men were talking about or should he wait for Conor to return? He knew the route and he had a horse this time. He also had explicit instructions from Conor, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to ignore those. If the army was that close, he might have a little time to wait and see if Conor got back. But not much.

  24

  The last two days of riding reminded Bryan of being very sick with fever, bouncing in and out of consciousness, unsure what was a dream and what was reality. He had very lucid moments of clarity that he could recall in vivid detail. Other times he was only vaguely aware of people trying to talk to him and of being so lost in thought that he could not muster a response. He hoped they didn’t think he was nuts, and saw him as a determined leader completely immersed in trying to make important command decisions.

  One of the moments he remembered with great clarity was ordering his army down an on-ramp to expand their ranks with local conscriptions. His recruiting speech had evolved over time. While still talking about their great and noble mission to build an estate, he focused more and more on appealing to each person’s individual greed. He pointed out how a group of this size had more opportunities to line their pockets than each of them as an individual might. There was a strength in numbers that was beyond the sum of their parts. He spoke about how his group was actively going out and seizing fortune rather than sitting at home foraging and living off scraps. When describing life in his army, he conveniently left out any details on how robbery, murder, and enslavement might be required.

  Regardless of how motivational and inspiring his speech was, regardless of how the audience seemed to be responding, the grand finale of the performance was always the same. The men were stood in a straight line and Bryan worked his way down the line asking each man if he would join or not. It was his Shining Path technique. It never failed to amaze him how that first guy always mustered the bravado and defiance to say no. After those first few “no” responses were dealt with in the customar
y manner, a bullet to the face, the refusal rate declined drastically. It put a smile on Bryan’s face to see it in action.

  Still, he asked each man the question rather than just rounding them up en masse. If there was ever an issue later, Bryan wanted to be able to point out that each man had come willingly, that each man had accepted his invitation. In this clear vignette of memory, rising from the fog of his mind like a shark’s fin rising above water, Bryan had about fifteen men lined up. They all had some type of familial bond, were related in some way. Brothers, uncles, in-laws, or some sort of kinship. Under armed guard, their wives and small children watched from a distance.

  When the first man refused to join, as expected, Bryan dropped him with a gunshot. There was an audible gasp, choked sobs, and the other men clenched their fists, wanting to act but unable to do so without risking death to themselves or their families. The second man’s eyes were filled with tears but his mouth screwed up in defiance. Rage and hatred seethed from him like a bad smell.

  “Will you join us, my friend?” Bryan asked.

  The struggle was evident, as if everything within the man was conspiring to prevent his agreement. Everything inside him knew it was wrong to join and that it would lead him down the road of participating in acts he wanted no part of. Yet, not only did he not want to die, he especially did not want to die here in front of people that loved him. He did not want that memory etched in their brain. If he survived, he might one day make his way back to them. If he died here and now, it was over and there would never be a reunion.

  “I will,” the man replied. Bryan was already moving to the next man in line when another word escaped his lips. “But…”

  Bryan stopped in his tracks, cocking his head to the side like a puppy trying to understand someone speaking to him. He backed up a step. “Excuse me? Did you have something to add?”