Forsaken World:Coming of Age

by Thomas A. Watson

  “They don’t seem to stay long but do come back every few days,” Ian said, moving up beside Lance.

  “And each has survivors near them that they know about and some they don’t,” Lance said, thinking. Finally, he threw his hands up. “Fuck if I know why they haven’t attacked the survivors they know about. We know they don’t play well with others.”

  “Maybe they are saving them because they know them,” Allie said behind them.

  Lance looked at Ian, and Ian shrugged and said, “Best idea I’ve heard about the white pins.”

  “Yeah, they might be collaborators,” Lance nodded.

  “Are we going to warn the ones they haven’t found?” Jennifer asked, walking over.

  “Why, they know the gang is moving around. Shit, that first group has grizzly traps out for people,” Ian said with a shiver.

  “No, we don’t make contact,” Lance said. “We can’t afford to let anyone know we are here. If they get caught, they could be forced to tell about us.”

  Ian moved over to the map marked with pins. “Okay, the red pins are places they are going after for supplies, and we know they are hitting those further out first. We don’t know what the blue or silver pins are for, and none of those are in our perimeter.”

  “There’s that silver one just outside of section four. It’s only half a mile,” Jennifer said, pointing. “We can go see what’s there.”

  “Not yet,” Lance said, wanting to remind her that was outside the perimeter, and the closest blue pin was six miles to the south. “Ian, we need for them to think we are to the southwest. That area has a lot of towns, and that means stinkers. If they look for us there, they will take losses. How do we do that?”

  “Leave false clues at places,” Ian said, and Lance looked over at him, confused. “We have a printer. Print a brochure of a spot, and leave it at a place we get them at with a deed.”

  “Damn, that’s good,” Lance mumbled. “Anything else?”

  “Use the radio,” Allie said.

  They looked at each other, nodding. “She’s learning,” Lance said with a grin.

  “Shit, hanging around you two, she hasn’t got a choice,” Jennifer laughed.

  “Only do stuff at the pins outside our circle that way,” Carrie said.

  They looked back at her then turned to the map. “It’s risky but has merit,” Ian said. “Concentrate on the red areas to the southwest before they go for supplies, leave a fake clue or two, and I would buy it.”

  “What about inside our perimeter?” Jennifer asked.

  Lance glanced at Ian then turned to Jennifer with a grin. “We can hit them without them knowing they were being hit by a deed,” he said.

  Getting worried, Jennifer stepped back. “I’m scared to ask, but how?”

  “Not letting them know they are being attacked,” Lance said, and Ian started laughing.

  “Oh man, you really want to do that?”

  Lance nodded. “I think it would be fun.”

  “Well then my friend, let the games begin,” Ian said, holding out his hand, and Lance reached out and shook it. They turned and held out their hands to Jennifer and the girls, and they all shook hands. If the Devil Lords would have known what was coming, they would’ve pulled up camp and left. Kids or not, Lance and Ian were masters at what they called deeds: any action or prank used on others. A deed was used to get even.

  Over the next two days, Jennifer got to watch two masters go to work. Ian and Lance poured over the map, finding several spots to attack and then backup spots. For each spot, they planned something different and a couple of their past favorites. Unlike in the past, it didn’t matter if someone got hurt. In fact, that was the priority. The level of intrigue and planning for the deeds blew her away.

  With their surprises ready, Ian and Lance headed out.

  It was three days after the boys headed out that the Devil Lords found trouble. It started at Bones’, but nobody ever knew. Bones and over a dozen other bikers were at the house with some women that didn’t want to be there. They had only been there for a few hours when every one of the bikers started shitting.

  All five commodes in the house quit working after one flush, and everyone had to go outside to take a shit. By the second day, none of the gang was doing anything but shitting their brains out. It never occurred to them to notice none of the women who were tied up got the shits.

  One of the bikers, after falling back in his shit as he squatted down, cut a hole in a lawn chair outside so he could sit down as his bowels exploded. The five women would watch them lie around then run outside most of the time with liquid brown shooting out of their ass. None of the bikers wore clothes after the first day.

  At the end of the second day, Bones called back and told Boss what was going on, and Boss told him to stay put and not infect the rest of the gang. A doctor they had acquired told Bones to make sure they all drank plenty of water and washed their hands, and if they could find some anti-diarrhea medicine, take it.

  The morning of the third day, all the women had escaped, but none of the bikers cared. Some of them had lost over twenty pounds in two days, and they still couldn’t stop shitting. Being the smartest, Bones went and checked the water pump. It was a top-of-the-line system with UV light emitter and triple filtration with a water softener. All the filters were clean, and the readouts showed it was putting out clean water, and the flavoring system was still putting in the soft berry flavor, but Bones did change the flavor bottles.

  On the third night, one of the gang died. He may not have been able to move alive, but he could dead; he was still shooting liquid brown out of his body as he attacked one of the others. By the morning of the fourth day, Bones was the only one alive.

  Bones had crawled in his closet in his bedroom as over a dozen stinkers that used to be part of his gang beat on the door. He didn’t understand it. His computer had crashed, wiping everything, then everyone got sick, and Boss wouldn’t allow anyone to come and check on them. It wasn’t even noon when Bones closed his eyes as he lay on the closet floor that was covered in watery brown liquid, but he was up and banging on the door trying to get out only to join his friends once again an hour later.

  If Bones would have taken the water softener filter apart, he would’ve found the problem. Lance had cooked down the boxes of laxatives and several waxes he had gotten from the supply houses and made a ten-pound block of super concentrated polyethylene glycol. Lance went to the pump house, took out the softener filter, and took it apart then put in his block of polyethylene glycol. Putting the filter back together, he and Ian went to all the toilets and shoved hard plastic down them so they would overflow.

  Luckily for the women, they never drank the water, and Lance didn’t figure the bikers would, so he went around and dropped some concentrated tablets in bottles of whiskey around the house. Ian did laugh when he saw the bottle he pissed in was half empty.

  Once the bikers started shitting, they started drinking water. One thing about the human body: If it needs water, it will drive you to find it. And find it the Devil Lords did—in the mouth and out the ass at almost supersonic speeds. What no one, not even Lance knew, was his concentrated diarrhea bomb wasn’t needed after the bikers drank the whiskey. The only way they wouldn’t have shit themselves to death would’ve been in a hospital. The contaminated water was just insurance.

  When nobody answered from Bones’ safe house, Boss made it off limits so the rest of the group wouldn’t catch what they had.

  As Bones was shitting his brains out on the second day, one of Boss’s lieutenants was walking into the bathroom at a safe house just north of Artemus, Warlock. If he would’ve looked into the bottom of the bowl, he would’ve seen a little bit of salt. And if he would have looked harder back up into the sump, he would have seen two exposed wires.

  But Warlock was hung over and had just arrived as he unzipped and moved up to the toilet. Under the carpet, his weight closed the circuit, waking up the two wires in the toilet. W
hen Warlock’s urine hit the water, six thousand watts traveled up the stream of urine. Warlock’s body flung back, crashing into the plaster, and became lodged into the wall.

  Several of his buddies came running in to find him stuck half in the wall with his dick hanging out and peeing on the floor. They tried to wake him up for several minutes before one finally checked his pulse and found he didn’t have one. Knowing what that meant, they carried him outside and shot him in the head. They called the Boss and told him Warlock had a heart attack, which was kind of right, but they had no other explanations, and Warlock was a big guy.

  It wasn’t until the fourth day that one of the guys with Warlock went to the same bathroom to take a dump that anyone got suspicious. Nothing happened when the Devil Lord dropped his logs, but when he pissed, his body catapulted across the bathroom.

  When his buddies heard the noise and came in, they found him with his head lodged in the wall Warlock had been stuck in. None of them even checked his pulse; they just pulled him outside and shot him in the head. It was then that several of them carefully inspected the toilet. When they lifted the lid of the tank, they saw it was full of a grainy powder.

  Not thinking, one of them reached in and was thrown across the bathroom, breaking the sink. When his buddies checked him, they found him dead. Leaving the body, those who remained jumped on motorcycles and left the house with the demonic toilet.

  The grainy powder was ordinary table salt. Water alone doesn’t conduct electricity, but salt water conducts it very well. To make sure he didn’t get electrocuted, Ian had pulled up the carpet around the toilet and placed two strips of metal down. When Warlock stepped on them, the demon toilet came alive.

  The group leaving Warlock’s headed back to Pineville and was hauling ass down the road, trying to get there before sundown. When they came around a curve, none of them saw the quarter-inch steel cable stretched across the road about chest high to someone on a motorcycle.

  The eighteen bikers were riding in two columns, doing sixty and weaving around stinkers that moved at them on the road. Only when they were attacking did a truck lead the group.

  When the first two hit the cable, they came to an instant stop, but their bikes didn’t. The wire had no give, but the trees it was tied to did, and they shot back as the next two hit before the trees could release the tension.

  Like lemmings falling, the bikers plowed into the cable. Only the last two managed to slow down and try to duck below the wire, but that didn’t help them to dodge all the bodies and motorcycles in the way. They crashed and were thrown across the road, sliding into the ditch.

  Only a few were coherent when moans sounded around them in the woods, and the smell of rotten eggs filled the roadway. Over a hundred stinkers poured out each side of the road from the trees, drawn by the sound of the motorcycles and the crash. None of those coherent ever got a shot off before the stinkers got there.

  Knowing help would come, Ian and Lance put the cable across the road and led a few dozen stinkers fifty yards in the woods where they put the cable. They shot them quietly then went and led more, taking them out until they had several piles and it was hard to breathe. Like stinkers do, others came to the smell and just stood around the pile until supper was served.

  It wasn’t until the next day that anyone knew what happened. Luckily for the Devil Lords, dump trucks were leading the way and were going slow, but one snapped the cable as it slowed, wondering why all the motorcycles were in the road.

  It didn’t stay stopped for long because stinkers started pouring out of the woods. Several of the bikers behind the dump trucks and several cargo trucks were pulled off before the plows cleared a path through the bikes so they could leave. Several stopped at Warlock’s safe house, and the demonic toilet claimed its last victim.

  One of the bikers there figured out the last dead man had been shocked and turned off the breaker from the solar panels. Then, he found the heart of the demonic toilet and pulled the wires out.

  The rest of the group headed south of Barbourville to a warehouse. It was marked with a red pin. Lance and Ian didn’t know when the Devil Lords would show up, just that they would. Of all the stuff they did, this was the most dangerous.

  Rolling into the fenced off warehouse, the cargo trucks backed up to overhead doors as the gates were closed. A few bikers cleared the area inside the fence, and the rest ran inside. When one of them grabbed a pallet jack to load the trucks, he pulled a small string that released a weight, which slid down the wall, opening a door to a refrigerated room in the back corner of the warehouse.

  The first group to notice something strange was the men trying to roll up the overhead doors. All of them had four padlocks on each door. When the freezer door opened, it pulled a rope, releasing another weight that shut the pedestrian door by the dock, and a bar slammed over it so it couldn’t open until the bar was lifted.

  The bar was wired to an inverter connected to a battery. It would shock the shit out of any that touched it but wouldn’t kill them. As the stinkers poured out of the refrigerated room, a man found out just how bad that bar across the door could shock someone. His friends saw him jerk when he touched the door, and they all ran for other doors, but those were screwed shut. Two men tried to shoot the locks off the overhead doors but only got three of the four locks off before the stinkers took them down.

  Outside, the two bikers and the dump truck drivers heard the screaming from over twenty men and the moans of almost a hundred stinkers. The men on bikes didn’t wait; they headed to the gate, pulled it open, and took off. Afraid to go back to Pineville and face Boss, they headed south.

  For an entire day, Ian and Lance led stinkers in the warehouse then into the refrigerated room, packing the six-thousand-square-foot room with stinkers. When it was full, they closed the door and led what they could away but did manage to clear the warehouse so they could set up a masterpiece.

  In the space of four days, the Devil Lords lost over sixty, and the only ones that looked like attacks were at Warlock’s safe house and the road leading back to Pineville. Boss himself led over a hundred to Warlock’s, and it wasn’t long until they found an observation post that Ian and Lance had made. It looked like someone had stayed there for days, and in the trash of food wrappers and magazines, a brochure for a campground south of Williamsburg was found.

  It had some notes about Warlock’s house, but it also had a list of supplies that said “Need” at the top. Boss screamed at everyone to mount up, and they headed to Williamsburg. None realized all those they had lost had been planned by two thirteen-year-old boys who had driven a school board, a home owners’ association, mean neighbors, several bullies, an asshole paper delivery man, a man who stole Ian’s bike, and a police department totally insane for years. Intricate plots soon became their calling card, but not once could the two be tied to any of them.

  They had now come of age and were able to royally screw anyone in the head whenever they wanted. Now, their deeds were deadly.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “You see what you can do when you want to make a statement and don’t have to worry about going to jail,” Ian said with a grin, looking at Jennifer on the other side of the sectional. It was six days after they started jacking the Devil Lords. For two hours, he told them what he and Lance had done—the first time ever the two had let anyone in on their deeds.

  In total shock, Jennifer stared at him with her mouth hanging open. Allie and Carrie were sitting on each side of Jennifer and wore similar expressions. The three had sat at the control desk, listening to the chaos and mayhem Ian and Lance were creating over the radio.

  “Got it,” Lance said, coming up from the basement with his laptop.

  “Got what?” Jennifer asked in a monotone, still in shock. Allie and Carrie just blinked.

  Walking over the DVD player, Lance plugged his laptop up to it. “Our proof it was us,” he said, turning around.

  Still dumbfounded and staring straight ahead, Jennifer mu
mbled, “You hid and filmed it?”

  Lance laughed, joined by Ian. “No,” Lance scoffed. “We found some cellphones and broke them apart so we could hide them and keep their camera where we wanted them. Then I had them just broadcast out in wide-band. Here, I just recorded it since they just broadcasted it out at eight hundred megahertz.”

  When he turned to look at Jennifer, the grin fell off his face. “What happened to her?” Lance asked, seeing the lost, dumbfounded look on all three of their faces.

  “They wanted me to tell them what we did,” Ian said, shaking his head.

  “What’s wrong; they think we didn’t go far enough?”

  Shrugging, Ian studied them. “I don’t know. They started looking like that after I told them about the diarrhea kingdom we sent Bones and his buddies to.”

  Lance walked over and snapped his fingers in front of them. Jennifer blinked and looked up at him. Allie and Carrie never blinked and continued looking straight ahead blankly. “You made over a dozen men shit themselves to death,” Jennifer mumbled.

  “Yeah, ain’t it cool,” Lance laughed, throwing his head back. “Death by jet-powered diarrhea! One of those guys was holding onto that lawn chair, and I swear it was coming out of him so fast, I thought he was going to take off!”

  Holding his side as he laughed, Lance looked back at Jennifer and noticed she looked a little green around the gills. The laugh left him as he reached out and felt her face. It felt cool and a little clammy. “You don’t look so hot.”

  Closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, she huffed, “I’m okay.”

  “Why don’t you and the ladybugs lie down? It’s Sunday, and we aren’t really doing anything,” Lance said, pulling her up.

  “Yeah, that sounds good,” Jennifer said, letting Lance pull her up. It wasn’t that she felt sorry for the bikers; it was that Lance and Ian had killed them with pranks very easily. The ease with how they came up with the plans, knew how to chemically separate what they wanted, wire electricity, set traps, and the speed they could set up their deeds just unnerved her. She could’ve killed the bikers, especially after what the boys and she had found out; that wasn’t a problem for her. Jennifer just knew she couldn’t contribute on that level—ever—and it made her feel worthless. That and the fact she had seen a few of the videos of the men wallowing in their feces and getting ripped apart in the warehouse by stinkers.