Beyond the New Horizon (Book 4): Dark Times

by Conaway, Christine

  Mark had no way of knowing the time, but when it seemed to him that the sky was beginning to lighten, he woke the other two. Fifteen minutes later they were saddled and packed up ready to move out. After listening for several minutes with few words exchanged, they mounted, and John led the way back to the trail they had been on the day before.

  They found several likely trails going up into the hills, but each one dead-ended or became un-passable, so they would have to return to the valley floor.

  Mark had taken the lead when Red planted his feet, snorted long and loud and refused to move forward. Mark kicked him several times, but the horse began to turn in circles and tried to bolt back in the direction they'd come from.

  “Darn horse! Come on, get up there.” Mark pounded his heels on the horse's sides.

  The behavior was so unlike the normally submissive horse that Charlie intervened, “Hold up Mark. Come on back here and let him stand for a minute. Getting him all riled up like that isn’t accomplishing anything.”

  When Red had settled down, they started off with Charlie in the lead. Jack stopped the same place as Red had. He threw his head up and bugled from his nose. Charlie didn’t kick him or try to force him forward, but turned him and rode to a rise on the shoulder. He slid off the horses back with a grunt. He led Jack to where John sat on Walker.

  “Hold him for a minute. I’m going to walk ahead and see what’s got these horses all upset. Jack doesn’t ever refuse when asked.”

  John watched Charlie as he disappeared into the brush. They had already passed several places of bare blacktop, complete in places with a white line and John was sure they were on what used to be the road to St. Regis. He had no explanation for where the Saint Joe had gone, but his conclusion felt right to him.

  John listened to Charlie's progress through the bush and was surprised when he heard the other man vomiting. He slid down and handed both sets of reins to Mark.

  “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

  A hundred feet up the undefined trail, he found Charlie on his knees wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Hey, are you alright?”

  Charlie nodded and held his hand up to stop John from walking by him. “Wait!”

  John did stop and held his hand out to help Charlie to his feet. Charlie’s face was green, and John wondered if the pemmican had gone bad. That and the jerky was all they had eaten, but he and Mark were both okay.

  “It was a slaughter. I never saw anything that bad, not even in Nam,” he muttered.

  John turned to look past Charlie, but brush blocked his view. “Who or what was slaughtered? The cows?”

  Charlie put his hand on John’s shoulder, “Not cows. People. Men, women and I think some kids too. Someone massacred them…tortured them, cut them all up into little pieces.”

  John drew in a breath and wondered if his breakfast would be safe. Side by side they walked through the bush until they broke through into a clearing…another place where the pavement showed through. Nothing Charlie said could have prepared him for the carnage spread out before him.

  John felt his chest grow tight and couldn’t breathe. He sank to his knees, sucking in air through his mouth. On his hands and knees, John closed his eyes until he could control himself. The gnawing pain in his chest began to recede, and he opened one eye and then the other. An ant scurried over the top of his hand carrying something. Without thought, John pounded the tiny creature until it blended with the dirt.

  He felt Charlie’s hand settle on his shoulder and looked up. Charlie’s face was wet with tears, and John felt one trickle down his own cheek. Charlie patted his shoulder, but it wasn’t to say, “It’ll be okay.” The steel in Charlie's eyes and iron grip, said, “We need to put a stop to this!”

  In front of them, the ground was bathed in rusty red where the blood had already dried and darker pools where it looked to still be wet in the center. Bodies and parts of bodies were thrown randomly around the area. A man or what was left of him was hanging over a dead fire, and John hoped he was dead when they hung him up and he said a silent prayer that the parts of him that were missing hadn’t been eaten. Sam had confessed to him about Matts stepmother, and he had not been able to shake the vision.

  Seeing this body hanging over the dead firepit set his imagination into overdrive.

  John nodded and with Charlie’s help, got to his feet. He began to walk the area, taking stock of the people who had died. He didn’t see the torn, dismembered bodies or the way one old woman was spread out on her back. He didn’t see the bullet holes in one young man that had probably been dealt one at a time from his feet to his head, or the way he was tied between two small pine trees. John saw the people, probably a family who wanted nothing more than to escape whatever was behind them.

  “I tied the horses up…Holy mother of God!” Mark immediately vomited. Mumbling the whole time.

  John walked to where Mark leaned against a tree trunk, wiping his mouth. Charlie was right behind him, and they each took an arm and led him back through the brush.

  Seated by the horses, they sat. Ten or so minutes went by without a word, the silence punctuated by sniffles and throat clearing.

  High overhead an eagle flew, circling above them. It’s screech, reminded the men that they needed to do something for the people who had died.

  “What can we do?” John finally asked. “We have to do something. We can’t just leave them like that.”

  “We need to bury them. Give them some dignity.”

  They sat in silence until the eagle called again.

  John sighed heavily looking up at the bird who had flown lower, circling the trees above them. “We can bury them, but that will tell whoever did this we’re here, or we can leave them where they are and leave. Neither way sits right with me, so if those are our choices, I say we find some way to at least give them a burial.” He looked from Mark to Charlie. Both men nodded their heads in agreement. John took in their surroundings, trying to decide what to do. “We have no shovel or anything to dig with,” he stomped his foot to show how hard the dirt was, “We’d need a backhoe to dig a grave here. Let me see what I can find.”

  John walked off toward the hillside. As he neared the slope, he saw that trees had been uprooted and remembered the huge divot left by the roots of the trees that had fallen around them during the quakes.

  It didn’t take long to find exactly what he was looking for. He turned and walked back. From Mark’s horse he took one of the blankets and half dragging it, he went to where Mark and Charlie were talking quietly.

  “Let’s get this done. Those men could come back at any time, and I don’t want them to find us until we’re ready for them.”

  Several hours later, the people were laid out in the shallow grave, and Charlies spread the blanket over the top of the bodies and climbed up beside John, who stood above them prepared to push the loose dirt down on top of them.

  They dropped their chins, and Mark said a brief prayer. The three men covered the bodies as best they could. By the time they were finished, their hands were cut and bruised. The grave was not deep enough nor was there enough loose dirt to adequately cover it, so they carried rocks of all sizes and placed them on top of the grave. The hope was that they would be covered enough that wild animals couldn’t feast on the bodies.

  Exhausted and emotionally drained, they went back to where the horses were tied. Without speaking they mounted and with John leading the way, they skirted the clearing and rode on. The first roadway they came to that went north, John turned up it, with Mark and Charlie following.

  Maybe as some sort of reward or just sheer luck, they rode up a draw, crossed over an area where the terrain was nearly impassable when John reined in and pointed.

  Between two trees he showed them a brown forestry sign. It read, “Service Road 1870.” Beyond the sign as if nothing had touched it was a gravel road. Weeds had begun to take over, and limbs extended overhead as if it had been a while since any main
tenance had been done.

  Mark shrugged, “It’s going the right way so why not?”

  Charlie nodded and nudged Jack forward. As he rode, he watched for tracks or indications that others had used the road. When he saw nothing, he wondered if the brush had blocked it from sight if a person followed the gulley they’d come up from. It would make sense that no one had been up it if whoever the men were that had slaughtered the family had used the path down below for travel. He didn’t want to remember the carnage and cleared his mind. He would save the memories for when he could be alone to deal with them appropriately. He didn’t know about Mark or John, and he had little left to live for with his boys all gone, but he would extract some kind of revenge on his terms or die trying.

  When the road ended at a junction they saw another sign the white writing barely legible, it said Mullan was seventeen miles to the left. They went right. They found several water bars crossing the road, and one of them had a significant amount of water running in it and they decided to let the horses drink while they decided what to do.

  They had all seen the faded wheel tracks from at least one four wheeler with no way of telling how old they were. John thought they should have been erased by the snowfall they’d had before the earthquakes, but they had no way of knowing for sure.

  “Does anything look familiar to you guys?”

  Mark looked at John as if contemplating his question and using his water bottle pointed to a tree, “Well, there’s a tree that at one time in my life I may have peed on and some of the bushes look like ones we’ve all seen before.”

  Charlie snorted water out his nose and began to cough. John walked to him and slapped him on the back. “Holy crap John I’m laughing, not choking,” Charlie coughed out.

  “Too bad it wasn’t you,” he said to Mark and then laughed at himself, “I guess that was kind of an asinine thing to say wasn’t it? I meant the terrain or if one of you had been over this road before. I wasn’t talking about a specific tree or bush.”

  “Actually, I think if we come to another junction we should go to the right. It’s been a long time since I went fly fishing in Avery, but it seems to me I would have come this way. If we go down a grade soon, I’ll know that I’m right. If not, then your guess is as good as mine. I used to have a forestry map of all these roads, and I sure wish I had it now.”

  “We sure wish you did too, but we don’t, so I guess we do this by the braille method. We’ll reach out and touch everywhere we go. Now, let’s get to it. We’ve wasted enough time today.”

  They rode until dark, using John’s method. When the road disappeared into a crevasse, they couldn’t navigate they turned around, and in many places, they were forced to abandon the roadway completely. By full nightfall, the men had begun to lose hope they would ever find any of the wagons. The last earthquake had changed the topography enough that they had no idea where they were in relation to the area they’d left the wagons in. They stopped, overlooking another ravine. If it hadn’t been for Red refusing to go another step, Mark might have tumbled off the edge. He couldn’t see down the chasm at all and didn’t feel it would be safe climbing down in the dark.

  “That’s it for me until morning. This horse probably just saved my life. I’m beginning to wonder if somehow those guys didn’t get the tractors started and moved them out. I sure would have thought that we’d come across them by now.”

  “I’m not giving up that easily. There are things we need in those wagons and finding them should be our priority and finding them was the only reason for leaving our families alone. We’ve only been out two days, and if we gave up now, I’d always wonder if they were over the next hill, so for that reason alone I say we’re not going to give up so easily.”

  “I’m with you John. There have to be hundreds of uncharted acres up here and like you, there are things in my wagon, I’d rather not leave behind. Mark, you may not remember, but the box with your radio equipment was put into my wagon when we were shuffling things around at the ranch.”

  Mark sagged against the tree trunk he was leaning on, “If you guys knew how sore my backside was right now, you’d understand.”

  John was in the process of handing a square of the pemmican to Mark and almost dropped it in his lap, “Your ass? What the heck Mark, you’re the one with the saddle. Maybe you want to try riding Jack or Walker for a day. Then you can complain about what's hurting and what's not.”

  They sat in silence until Charlie got up and began stripping the tack off the horses. When he had them tied to separate trees so they could graze on whatever foliage was on the ground around them, he handed Mark the only blanket they had left and shrugged at John, “sorry, guess you’ll have to make do. I’ll take the first watch if it’s okay with you guys. I’m going to take the horses one at a time and let them graze some if they want.”

  “I’ll give you a hand. I couldn’t sleep yet anyhow,” John told him and shoved the last bite of pemmican into his mouth.

  Before they had even gotten the three horses untied, they could hear soft snoring noises coming from Mark. Charlie led Jack and Walker back the way they had come from with John following with Red.

  “Is it my imagination or is Mark looking a little flushed tonight and he’s kind of cranky too?”

  “Nope, it’s not your imagination at all. With everything we’ve gone through today and this whole shit storm, Mark’s probably missing his meds right now. I haven’t asked him to go into it too much because if he wanted to say anything, it’s up to him, but Evelyn told Mary who of course told me that Mark has been a diabetic most of his life. He ran out a couple of months ago, and she’s been trying to control it by his diet, but with only pemmican the past two days and not eating a balanced diet for the past few weeks, his blood sugar is probably way out of whack.”

  “I wonder if there is anything other than a better diet that can help him?”

  “I don’t know, and I suspect neither does he. Maybe Journey will have a solution when they get here.”

  “Maybe.” They walked on letting the three horses pick what they could until they came to their last intersection. When John went to turn back and graze the opposite side of the road Charlie stopped him.

  “You know, in the morning, I’ve about half a mind to go that way for just a bit. Who says there isn’t another road cutting off the direction we need to go?”

  “I thought the same thing when we turned here. It might not be a bad idea. I’m not sure what the morning light will show in the direction we’re going, but I guess we’ll see when the sun comes up.”

  “With the way we all got down below, there’s no telling which is the best way to go. Going back to the cave the way the kids and I went is not a good option. It was bad enough coming down the first time, we almost lost Jack when he fell.”

  “We followed your trail, and that’s what happened to Sham in almost the same spot. Mary and Lucas were going up to climb it and get the things we had to leave behind.”

  “Do you think they heard all the gunshots? I’ll bet you have to be pretty worried right now. I know it’s been on my mind.”

  John frowned, “Actually, I’m not. We would have heard more shooting if they found our cave and we didn’t. I trust Mary to keep everyone well hidden, and she wouldn’t let anything happen to them, at least not without a fight, and we would have heard her.”

  “We’re going to take care of those guys? My soul won’t rest until those people are in hell. I can’t get the picture of that little girl out of my mind. What kind of person does something like that?”

  John knew exactly which little girl Charlie was talking about. Blond curls, tiny broken body. Charlie had taken his shirt off and wrapped her in it before carrying her to the grave. She had been raped, beaten and tortured before someone had ended her life. John didn’t think she could have been any older than Maggie or Sherry. What had been done to the other three women was unspeakable. John shuddered, “I can’t think about that right now, but yes. Someday
we will meet those men.”

  Charlie nodded, cleared his throat and walked a few more steps. Both horses seemed reluctant to move as if being tired was more important than grazing.

  “We may as well go back now. They seem more interested in sleeping than eating. Sometimes it’s hard to believe these big guys don’t eat any more than an average horse. You’d think they required more for sure, but I guess it’s like dogs once they reach full growth it’s just sustaining what’s already there.”

  “Never heard it put quite like that but I guess it is.”

  When they got back to where Mark was still sleeping Charlie told John to go ahead and lie down for a while, and he’d wake Mark when he got tired.

  Even though he had only gotten a few hours sleep, Charlie woke at dawn. Mark was back asleep, and John was sitting watching the horses.

  Charlie had some water, declined any of the pemmican and threw his bridle on Jack. With a leg up from John, Charlie told him he’d be back before the sun was very high.

  “We won’t lose any time John, in fact, who knows it could save us some time too.”

  John nodded, “Be careful. You know the signal if you have a problem.”

  Charlie rode off, thinking about what he would label trouble. He didn’t want to think about the day before so as he rode he thought about his boys and felt the sadness that washed over him. If it weren’t for getting with John’s bunch, Charlie wasn’t sure he would have gone on. Now he found Lucas and Abby filling his thoughts and Lucas wanting to learn everything about his team, made Charlie feel useful again. When the boys had grown up and seemed to be set on heading off in directions of their own, Charlie had felt a twinge of regret that none of them wanted to continue farming. When Bernice was alive, Charlie could have handled them moving on, but when she’d been diagnosed with stage four cancer and died three months later, it had almost finished him. He’d walked around like a lost soul until Joe had shown up with the sudden desire to farm with him, followed by Jesse and Kenny. He’d thought it was some kind of conspiracy to keep him occupied. Charlie hadn’t cared what brought them home, he’d rejoiced in the fact they were there.