Raymond turned, and he too raised an arm to the others. Each man, as he realized the man ahead had stopped, also stopped and awaited the next command.
Hank yelled, “What’s up?”
Raymond made a downward gesture with his right hand, the signal they’d agreed would mean to be quiet, but Hank just laughed his boisterous laugh and Abby sat regally poised on her sled as if ignoring it.
With the entire procession now stalled, Raymond turned his attention back to De Angelis who was peering over the crest. De Angelis finally looked back and alternately beckoned them with his left hand then made downward motions telling them all to be quiet.
There was something up ahead.
Raymond used his arm in the same manner, beckoning the others while at the same time telling them to be quiet, and he went on to meet De Angelis near the crest. He got down low as he reached him and whispered, “What’s up?”
“There’s a cabin just over the hill,” De Angelis replied softly. “Smoke’s comin’ out the chimney. What d’ya wanna do, now?”
Raymond saw it.
“We’ll wait for Peterson before we do anything,” Raymond whispered.
From where they lay, they could see a cabin below in a small valley.
“Yup, they’re home,” Raymond said when he saw the smoke and he looked back to see the others arriving.
Like Raymond and De Angelis, Mayfield and Jerry Brady crawled the final few feet through the snow.
Hank stopped below the crest, Abby stayed on the toboggan, and Ingram stopped with them. Though Ingram was here to see if he could find his backbone, he suddenly lost the courage to find out what was just over the rise.
Peterson, on the other hand, walked past them to join the others at the top. He knew what he was here for and hoped to end it all with one or two carefully placed shots. He felt a certain amount of exhilaration rising up in him that he hadn’t felt in years. He embraced his rifle like he’d just recognized an old friend he’d thought he’d never see again. When he got close enough to the ridge, he too got down and crawled the rest of the way to their position.
Raymond was surveying the area below with his binoculars and Peterson took his own out from inside his jacket and glassed the cabin and its environs.
The cabin was set against the trees. There were solar panels on the roof. Not only was there smoke from the chimney, there were tracks, some leading to a shed about thirty feet from the cabin.
“How do you take them?” Raymond asked Peterson.
“Wait. No sense in risking any of our own. There may be others there or even people out in the trees. We don’t even know if we’ve been seen.”
“Pussy,” Hank said and, when the others turned to him, he was now standing right behind them in full view of the cabin and he was grinning.
“Get down and be quiet,” Raymond growled in a whisper.
Hank smiled.
De Angelis said, “There’s a dog down there, too. He’s behind the cabin, now. The wind’s right, so it won’t smell us and it won’t hear us if we’re quiet.”
“We ain’t gonna wait all day,” Hank said in his loud voice.
Turning again, Raymond whispered, “Hank, get down and keep it down.”
Hank grinned again and snorted. He stepped to the top of the ridge knowing this would piss off Raymond.
“Get down,” Raymond ordered in a loud whisper.
Instead, Hank turned and walked about twenty feet from the group.
Raymond shook his head, but he was glad Hank had gotten out of sight of the cabin below. He turned back to observe what was going on down the hill. “A couple of us should circle around to surround the place,” he said softly.
“You make the assignments,” Peterson whispered.
Lying in the snow, Raymond took stock of his men. He had only seven to work with since Abby had come along. But he was sure the seven of them would be enough.
He said, “Fred, I want you and Jerry to cut around through the woods and cut off any escape.” Putting the cousins together made sense to him. They were more apt to cooperate with each other. “And be quiet about it.”
“Brian,” he said to Peterson, “Give Fred your walkie-talkie.”
Peterson took it from inside his jacket and handed it to Mayfield.
Looking back at Mayfield, Raymond said, “Don’t use it unless you absolutely have to; only if you see trouble or if they’re trying to escape out a back door.”
He looked around back to see what Hank was doing. In full view of the others, he’d dropped his pants and was defecating in the snow.
“Jesus,” Raymond whispered and shook his head. The others glanced back and grimaced in disgust.
Abby had joined them and tried to stay low without lying in the snow. Behind her was Ingram, still hanging back and afraid to see what was on the other side of the ridge.
Abby quickly got uncomfortable trying to crouch on her old legs. She’d obviously decided not to lie down like the others. She suddenly stood up in full view of the cabin, turned, and went back to her sled.
Raymond shook his head again. But he was sure they still hadn’t been seen.
“There’s the dog,” Peterson whispered.
Raymond looked back and there was the dog. It was white. It had come out from behind the cabin, stopped, and stared into the trees where they hid.
“Don’t move, and be quiet,” Peterson whispered.
“That fuckin’ dog don’t know we’re up here,” Hank suddenly said.
With that the dog started barking.
The door to the cabin opened and a woman briefly appeared. Then she disappeared, closing the door behind her.
“Shut the fuck up,” Raymond said in a threatening voice.
Hank just smirked and in the same voice he’d been using said, “Well, looks like they know we’re here, now.”
“Fred, Jerry,” Raymond said, “get going and work your way around…”
But, before the men could move, the first bullet from the cabin came up through the trees and all the men hunkered down beneath the branches, including Hank.
The dog started across the field in their direction until a voice from the cabin called it back.
The dog stopped, then started racing back to the cabin.
“Take the dog!” Raymond commanded.
Peterson’s rifle came up quickly, he gauged the dog’s direction and speed. Even for a superb marksman, a running shot is difficult. But Peterson pulled the trigger, and the dog was about thirty feet from the door when it fell. He worked the bolt to chamber another round as a matter of habit.
“Good shot,” Raymond said.
It lay still for a moment, then its front legs started moving as if it was trying to swim through the snow. Raymond looked at the dog through his binoculars.
“You broke its back.”
Peterson looked down through his scope, again, but Raymond immediately said, “No! Don’t waste good ammo.”
Peterson took his eye away from the scope.
The others fired at the cabin. Peterson lay there watching the window near the door through the crosshairs of his scope. Just one motion through the window and he would send a minion of death into the cabin.
Sporadic shooting went on for nearly sixty seconds until Peterson suddenly yelled, “Wait!”
The front door of the cabin opened a crack and a white flag dangled out the door.
“Hold your fire!” Raymond yelled.
A few more shots rang out.
“Hold your fucking fire,” he yelled, again.
An abrupt silence fell over the forest. Then Hank laughed.
Raymond turned to Abby and said, “You tell that son of a bitch to hold his fire or I’ll put a bullet in him.”
“Those people have to pay for what they did to my Sweety,” Abby said.
“We have to find out who those people are connected with before we do anything to them,” Raymond snarled. “So you control him, or I will.”
“Hold
your fire,” Abby said to Hank.
Hank smirked, again. “Sure.” And he brought his rifle down.
“What now?” Peterson asked.
Raymond considered his options.
“I’m going in,” he finally said. “Watch the windows and the door,” he said to Peterson. “Any movement and send a bullet in.”
With that, he was on his skis and going down the hill
Δ Δ Δ
Raymond stopped about fifty yards from the cabin. “Come on out,” he yelled.
The door opened slowly and the man stepped out with the white flag in his hand.
He stood on the top step.
“What do you want?” he asked.
Raymond approached him.
The others were now coming down the hill, three on skis, two walking, and Hank was running down doing a remarkably good job of staying ahead of Abby and the sled.
The man seemed relieved when he saw Hank, Jerry, and Ingram in police uniforms.
“Who else is in there?” Raymond asked.
It’s just my girlfriend and our daughter,” the man said.
Raymond said, “Tell everyone to come out or we’ll riddle the place with bullets until it’s quiet inside.”
“You can come out, honey. It’s just the police.”
A woman holding the baby came out.
“That ain’t the bitch,” Abby said of the woman in the doorway when she arrived.
“What do you want?” the man asked.
“We’re looking for Zachary Amaral,” Raymond said.
“Who?”
“Do you know Zachary Amaral?”
The man looked surprised.
“Yeah, but you’re not going to find him here.”
“Where is he?”
“Last I knew, he was living up river. He has a cabin a few miles up. What did he do?”
“Never you mind.”
“What do they want?” the woman asked.
“It’s okay, honey,” he said. “I’ve got it under control.”
“Are you looking to arrest him?” the man asked, his hands coming down.
“Keep your arms up,” Raymond warned, and the man’s arms went back up. “Tell me where his cabin is.”
“It’s hard to explain how to get there,” the man said. But he explained as best he could with Raymond making mental notes of every detail.
When he finished, Raymond asked, “You guys friends?”
The man was guarded. “Not really. We did some trading with him a year or so ago. But we ain’t seen nothing of him since his family died.”
“What do you want to do?” Peterson asked.’
“Look around, but we’re done here,” Raymond said.
From nowhere a shot rang out and the man crumpled onto the snow.
The woman shrieked and ran out to her boyfriend.
Hank laughed, the barrel of his rifle pointing at the body now in the snow.
“What did you do that for? You fucking idiot!” Raymond yelled.
“They gotta pay,” Abby suddenly said. “He admitted he knows the guy who shot my Sweetie. Every one of these people gotta pay for my Joel, my Sweetie, for what they done to him.”
The woman was on her knees beside her boyfriend, hysterically screaming. She put the baby on his stomach and cradled his head. The man looked confused. He was gasping, trying to talk to his woman, but no words came out. He was dying.
Hank suddenly grabbed her by her hair and jerked her to her feet and the man’s head fell to the ground. He looked at his girlfriend, tried to speak, and died.
“My baby! My baby! Let me have my baby!” the woman screamed.
Abby solved the problem when she pointed a small handgun at the baby and announced, “They’re all sinners.”
“No!” Raymond yelled, but it was too late. Abby stopped the baby’s cries when she sent a bullet through its head.
“What did you do that for?” Raymond yelled at Abby.
“They’s livin’ in sin,” Abby said. “What does it matter to you, anyway?”
Then, yelling at everybody, Raymond asked, “What are we doing?”
The woman was frantic, now. But she couldn’t match Hank’s strength and he ran her back into the cabin while holding a fistful of her hair and he slammed the door behind them.
From inside they heard the woman scream and beg.
“Stop him!” Raymond demanded of Abby.
But she walked away saying, “They’re sinners. They’re all sinners.”
And it became clear to Raymond and everyone else that the real leader of the group was Abby Brady.
From inside they could hear the woman call her boyfriend’s name; she called the baby’s name. She begged Hank for mercy. It went on for a minute.
As if bound with invisible shackles, Raymond was riveted to the spot where he stood.
Then it was quiet.
A minute later, the door opened and Hank stood on the top step, his police uniform covered with blood. He hitched up his pants, buttoned them, buckled his belt, and zipped up his fly. He stepped back into the cabin and, when he reappeared, his right hand was behind him. He was smirking, again.
He sauntered down the steps, hesitated, then in one motion, he brought his arm from behind himself and threw the woman’s head, eyes wide open, mouth agape, into the snow where they all stood.
“You fucking asshole!” Raymond screamed. “What are you doing this for?”
“They gotta pay!” Abby screamed. “Everyone’s gotta pay.”
“But they didn’t do nothing.”
Abby stepped up to him. “Someone’s gotta pay. They gotta pay. Everyone out here’s gotta pay for what they done to my Sweetie.”
“These people didn’t do it!” Raymond yelled.
“They’s friends of his. You heard ’im: They made trades with him. They’s his friends, so they gotta pay.”
“We’ve just gotta stop this one guy who’s killing us and keep him from killing any more of us,” Raymond yelled at her.
She fearlessly got right up in Raymond’s face. “That’s exactly what we’re doin’, Billy,” and Raymond stepped back.
“If you ain’t got the stomach for what we have to do, go home.” she said.
The baby was dead; the woman was dead; the man was dead. Things were completely out of Raymond’s control.
“Take the bodies out back,” he finally said. “We’ll stay here tonight; we’ll move on in the morning.”
He turned to Hank. “You too, fuckhead. Get the body out of the cabin and put it out back.”
But Hank just laughed at him. “Do it yourself,” he said and walked away.
Raymond didn’t know what to do.
In the end, he had Jerry Brady and Mayfield take the woman’s decapitated body from the cabin.
Mayfield puked as he helped carry her out. Jerry wanted to puke, but he couldn’t. He was already used to this kind of thing.
Raymond walked to the dog that now lay in the snow. Occasionally it paddled with its front legs and whined. Mostly it just lay there confused by its predicament and watched the others.
“Sorry about this, fella,” Raymond said, and he kneeled beside the dog and with a .22 he took from his pocket he dispatched the dog and ended its terror and misery.
He stood up and announced, “Let’s look in the cabin. We’ll reprovision with what they’ve got here.”
Abby said nothing. Hank was already back inside the cabin going through stuff.
“What are we doing?” Raymond asked Peterson. “There was no reason to kill those people.”
“You read stuff about things like this,” Peterson said.
“What do you mean?”
“Massacres, looting, pillaging, putting people in ovens…It’s in the Bible, it’s part of history. The Europeans have done it in all their intramural wars, African ethnic cleansing, we did it to the Indians, the Nazis to the Jews, French revolutionaries to each other, leftists to rightists and rightists to leftists, the religio
us, the nonreligious, we all do it. We’ve done it since before history was written. But you can’t comprehend it when you just read about it. And you don’t believe it when you’re in the middle of it; worse, you become inured to it when you’re a part of it, especially when there’s too much of it.” He looked at Jerry Brady when he said that. “You know what Stalin said? ‘A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.’”
“What about you?” Raymond asked. “How do you feel about this shit?”
“The important question is: How do you feel about it? How do you feel about being part of it?”
Raymond was horrified. “I’m not doing this stuff,” he said.
“But you’re standing by and watching it happen…and so am I.”
“So, what do we do?”
“You can only stop what you’re doing,” Peterson offered. “But that’s not going to stop them…” he said referring to the Bradys. “And you won’t stop me. There’s a man out here, maybe more than one, who killed my brother.” And he let it hang.
“We’re all going to go to hell over this,” Raymond said.
“We’re already there, Billy. We’ve been there since the day we were born,” Peterson said and walked away from him.
Δ Δ Δ
They stayed the night in the cabin. Abby got the big bed, Hank took a smaller bed, everyone else slept on the floor. Raymond, Jerry, and Mayfield slept the sleep of the damned. The others slept as though they were without souls.
At twilight Raymond woke to the sound of Abby giving orders. He rolled over and saw Hank, Ingram, Jerry, and even Mayfield bringing furniture and boxes out onto the snow.
“What are you doing?” Raymond yelled at Abby.
She didn’t answer him.
He went to the door and looked out. She had the men putting things in the snow away from the cabin. There was a treadle sewing machine, rifles, shotguns, boxes, chairs, and a desk. Mayfield was passing by him with jewelry in his hands.
“Put that shit down,” Raymond ordered.
Mayfield hesitated, then he placed the jewelry on the kitchen table.
“You take that stuff outside,” Abby calmly said to Ingram and he gladly rushed in to follow her orders and scooped up the jewelry.
Danielle Kidnapped: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Ice Age Page 28
