“Pleasure,” he said, tipping his hat slightly and turning to look at the approaching duo.
Make that trio, or more. Another motor had fired up and the Sheriff and another deputy pulled even to us, both red in the face. Neither of them were smiling and both pulled their guns on us.
“Drop the weapons,” Steve said, holding a Barret Light .50.
“Not on your life,” I told him, getting the .45 I’d dropped and regaining my feet.
I put a fresh mag in it and pulled the slide. I holstered the pistol and drew myself up to my full height, stretching and popping every sore tendon and bone in my body, noting where I hurt the worst. Everywhere. I kept my hands free of the weapons, but I could only guess what they had seen, and without context, what it must be perceived as.
“Doc, you, too,” Steve said, motioning with the oversized rifle.
“Steve, you’re going to listen to me here a minute. Thing is—”
The shot sounded like an explosion and the dirt erupted between me and Courtney. Doc was hit by flying dirt, but I had launched myself at the two cops, the instant the smoke came out the end of the Barret. Knowing I’d pay for it later, I hit both of them in a cross body block that sent the three of us over the side of the ATV. Steve tried to push back with the rifle, pushing me off, but I was using my weight and the arms and legs tangled up from the other deputy to keep him from taking another shot. Even though I was weak from everything, I was still heavier and I used my weight to advantage.
I drew the pistol at my hip, my ribs and chest on fire, and brought it down savagely. The deputy trying to untangle himself from Steve caught the pistol whip across the face. He went limp. Steve gave up on trying to push me off with the big rifle and started fumbling for his sidearm. I put the .45 against his right eye socket and he went very still.
“I’m tired of you assholes shooting and taking a swing me. If you weren’t Mel’s dad and Jamie’s husband, I’d shoot you and leave you the fuck here!” I screamed with a rage I hadn’t felt in a long, long time.
“You killed our men! What are you people, some kind of plant?! Double agents working for the DHS?!” he raged back, though his hands were no longer trying for a weapon.
Total exhaustion was about to make me pass out again, exhaustion and my overloaded pain receptors. I was glad when Courtney came over, pulled the Sheriff’s pistol out of his holster and tossed it back. Then she helped me to my feet. I leaned against the quad with legs that were more Jell-O than bone and muscle.
“It’s like Dick said,” Courtney told him, “Your man shot first. Doc here put a slug through Scott’s worthless brain after he tried to punch me out.”
“It looked to me like he punched you because you were preventing him from stopping Dick from executing the men across the fence, without due process.”
“There is no due process,” Doc said. “It’s Martial Law, and we’re all in violation for even going around armed or breaking out from the FEMA camp. Have you forgotten that?”
Steve turned and looked at the doctor. “Soams, what the hell, man? What happened?
“Dick,” he said, nodding at me, “saw something was off. He was trying to prevent the ambush. He gave the men a chance to disarm, but they refused. They’re not even Americans.”
“You noticed that too, Doc?” I asked, gasping for breath.
Doc nodded and a look of shock replaced Steve’s indignation as the second quad pulled up. Both of them had guns drawn, but weren’t aiming at anybody.
“Sheriff? Steve?” one of the men asked, looking bewildered.
“It’s ok, guys. Stand down. We’ve got to sort this mess out, and we don’t need any more friendly fire.” Steve’s voice was soft, commanding, even after I’d taken both him and his man off the quad.
I offered my hand to Steve, who pulled himself up with one leg. The other he moved stiffly, from more than just the bandages that wrapped it. I pointed to a spot on his leg where blood was starting to seep through the gauze.
“Yer leaking, Sheriff,” I said.
“Well shit, must have popped a stitch,” he said, the color draining out of his cheeks as he surveyed the scene.
I took a chance to look around. The first group of men hadn’t been entirely mowed down. Seven of them lay lifeless. On our side, it was bad. Really bad. Of the deputies, four of them were down hard: Wright, Scott, and two others that I’d never learned the names of. Of them all, only Crowder remained, plus, Doc, Courtney and I.
“What…” the deputy I’d pistol whipped, moaned and rolled over, throwing up.
“Great, another concussion to treat. It’s bad enough when our own assholes are trying to kill us,” Doc raged.
“What happened?” Steve asked me.
“We came up for the last half. Wright was telling them to head out. They said they wanted in, just for the night, and they weren’t taking no for an answer.”
“But you saw something off?” he asked, as another deputy helped Doc get the one I’d pistol whipped to his feet.
Steve joined me, sitting on the back of the quad to get the weight off his bum leg.
“Yeah, they were all clean cut, and clean. Their clothing wasn’t dirty, and they looked like they were right out of a Marlboro commercial.”
“They don’t advertise tobacco on TV anymore, it’s illegal,” a young deputy interjected.
“They did when you were nursing on your mommas titties, now shut up,” I replied blandly.
He gave me an angry look and I stared at him a while, till he turned away.
“As I was saying, I started to talk to them. I noticed one of the guys had a slight accent and I remembered when Jamie had tried to contact you on the road… it wasn’t the same voice, but the same accented English.”
“Yeah, that’s the NATO regiment,” Steve said.
I nodded, it made sense. “So I had Wright open the gate. The rest of the men were backing off to give themselves more space to bring their guns to arms when you blew the front out of the first truck. Nice shot, by the way.”
“Thanks,” Steve said with a half-hearted smile.
“That’s when we got the complete drop on them. The guy I had dead to rights kept crying about his rights, and I heard Scott behind me start some ruckus. I didn’t know it, but he’d cuffed Courtney. I counted the man down to disarm and he never took me serious till his head was turned into pink mist. The second guy I did the same way, thinking after that, they would be easy to manage. That’s when I was shot in the back.” I turned and spit toward Scott’s body. “Oxygen thief. And that’s when they sprang the trap. You saw the rest, I think?”
“They opened up with a SAW, you caught more lead and fell. Then I saw Doc blow Scott’s brains apart, and when the others tried to disarm him, your lady friend started firing on my own men.”
“They weren’t trying to disarm us,” Courtney said pointedly. “You keep forgetting; this isn’t police action out here. They were going to kill us. They were probably good men, but if I have to choose between me and a stranger, the stranger is going to lose every time. They never should have tried shooting Doc and me. Besides, it would have been better to have four or five more guns on the men who attacked us, instead of your men trying to kill us.”
Courtney was mad, and although some of her anger was righteous, I also knew it had a ton of mitigating factors as well. Still, I knew she could use that anger to put off some of the pain of losing Luis such a short time ago.
“Yeah, that was a cluster,” Steve admitted after a long pause.
“Ya think?” Doc asked.
The phrase coming out of an eighty-three-year-old man’s mouth, just as snarky as Maggie had been when I’d last seen her in the flesh, caught me funny. I started chuckling and pretty soon Courtney joined in. The deputies just stood there slack jawed, looking at us, obviously finding no humor in the apocalypse.
“Hey, if they can’t take a joke, fuck ‘em,” Doc said angrily.
That more than anything, made everyo
ne else bust up.
39
I spent a good portion of a week healing up and staying out of sight. The men we’d killed, the cops, had family at the compound. Courtney and I stayed in the room upstairs and out of the public eye. It was just easier that way. At first, we’d thought we were going to get lynched at the general meeting that Steve had held after the attack, but he was more than just a cop. The sheriff was a politician of sorts, and was practiced in the art of well… politics. He had the gift of gab. Although he did not like our final solution and how everything had panned out, he understood that under fire, we’d had no other choice. I’d just been bastard lucky to have been wearing one of the vests, otherwise I would have been dead five times over.
I’d been hit in the back twice and stitched three times by the SAW in the front. Usual trauma plates would have probably cracked or shattered under the onslaught of the SAW’s ammunition, but Steve had ordered some 10x12” plates from a company in Florida that had promised that they would stop up to a .350 WinMag round. Still, I needed a week. I’d ended up purple from the nipples to my belly button on the front, and my back was one solid bruise in the shape of the plate, from getting hit at close range. Part of me wondered if that had been Scott’s plan all along, to just knock me down, or had he been trying to kill me?
Those were the pleasant thoughts that I dealt with on a day to day basis, as I played endless hands of cards with Courtney, when I wasn’t talking strategy with Steve and gobbling Tylenol. I’d given him a list of items to pick up, to try to make the place more defensible, and he’d actually smiled at the items. He’d been able to source all of it easily, even the materials to make thermite. How easy it was to get the stuff had been a surprise to me at first, but he’d pointed out that it was farming country, and that made it easy to source.
“You seem like you’re a thousand miles away,” Mel said, walking into the room.
I’d been sitting in the chair, thinking again. I knew we needed to bring the fight to them, but I wasn’t sure where they were yet, and I was still shaky. A lot of naps, a lot of rest, and food had all helped. I was almost back on my feet, but every additional day that I could rest up, helped a lot.
“Sort of,” I told her. “Just thinking about everything. About making it safe for me to leave you here at the farm, so I can go home to Mary and Maggie.”
“Do you think that’s going to happen soon?”
I nodded. “I’ll hate to go, but I think we’re going to wrap things up here soon, for better or worse.”
“I hope it’s for the better…”
I’d been sharing the room with Courtney; she hadn’t wanted to be alone and was having horrible nightmares, just like me. Either of us or both of us could have used the bunks in the basement or the bunker, but we hadn’t wanted to mix with the general population of the farm because of the bad feelings that still lingered… so other than washing the bedding of the bed I’d detoxed in, we’d stayed in the room. The big plus was it had its own bathroom, a luxury of luxuries, and the shower turned off.
“Listen, it would mean a lot to me and Mom if you would come down for dinner tonight. I know that things aren’t the best with everyone right now, but… I kind of miss you two. I know Mom does, too.”
That made me almost turn crimson. Jamie missed me? That was news to me. She’d been avoiding me as much as I’d been avoiding her. For me, it was about me letting her go. I hadn’t even realized I’d started falling for her until Courtney had pointed it out. Dealing with the shame and guilt was one thing, but when I’d kissed her, it had seemed like everything was all right in the world. Part of me knew that it’d been the smack talking, or at least some of it, but she’d kissed me back. Then her husband had gotten involved and the rest, as we say, was finito.
“I’ll talk to Courtney. If I can talk her into it, we’ll be down.”
“Good, dinner is at six tonight, in about two hours.” She walked over and gave me an impulsive hug.
I hugged her back, smiling. Since coming to the farm, things had been stiff, impersonal. Part of it was because of Steve and Jamie and my hang-ups, the other was because of everything that had gone down. That was probably why nobody had objected to me and Courtney bunking in the same room. We’d stayed out of sight, both of us in mourning and fighting our own demons.
“Good, I’ll see you then, I hope,” I said, and let her go.
Like no other fifteen going on sixteen-year-old, she all but skipped out of the room, closing the door behind her. The bathroom door opened a crack and a billow of steamy air filled the already muggy bedroom.
“Dick, can you come here a second?” Courtney asked.
“Sure,” I said, rising and heading toward the bathroom.
I knew she’d have her robe on. While we’d all lived and traveled together, modesty had been somewhat thrown out the window; that happens, and it wasn’t something that was weird between all of us. But now that we were back in a house and small community, certain protocols were to be followed. Even though we had an unusual arrangement in sharing space, it was honored.
Courtney was standing on the tiled floor, wiping the mirror with a hand towel. The sink was littered with dry corn silk colored hair. She’d cut it almost to her shoulders and had probably showered afterward.
“Is this straight?” she asked.
I ran my hand along the back of her hair. She’d towel dried it, but it was still damp. I grabbed a brush off the sink and started running it through her hair, to pull it down and see how good of a job she’d done trimming it up.
“You know, Jamie is the hair cutter person,” I told her.
She let out a small moan. “Do that for a second,” she said, leaning back slightly as I kept running the brush through and holding the ends with my free hand.
I put the brush down and got the scissors, taking care of a few spots in the back that she couldn’t have seen. I started brushing it back out, wondering why she hadn’t asked Jamie to cut her hair, and decided to chalk it up to not wanting to be harassed by the rest of the small community. Another moan escaped her lips and she backed up, pressing herself into me. I dropped the brush and backed up. She closed the distance faster than I’d moved away and pinned me in the doorjamb. To move would have meant brushing her with my body, but she reached back with her hands, caressing my cheek.
She turned and my breath hitched as I caught the scent of Mary’s freshly washed body. Soap, shampoo, and a slight fragrance that could only be the body spray that she knew drove me crazy. She dropped the robe and pushed me gently, directing me, until the back of my knees hit the bed. I fell backwards, pulling her on top of me.
“No talking,” Mary told me as she kissed me, her hands working at my belt and then the top button of my pants, pulling them off.
Oh shit, I knew my return home was going to be rocky, but I’d never expected to be greeted by my wife like—
The door banged open and a woman let out a surprised shriek and then the door slammed shut again, but not before I’d seen Jamie’s face. Full of hurt, shock, embarrassment. I looked up and saw Courtney, not Mary, her own face looking surprised, ashamed.
“Oh shit,” I said, rolling her off of me so I could get up.
“Dick, please,” Courtney said, pulling at me.
That stopped me. The way she’d asked. The raw pain. Instead of hopping off the bed I stopped, and looked into her eyes, both of us on our sides now. Difference was, I was still more or less clothed and I forced my eyes to only look at her face.
“I’m sorry, I thought you were Mary,” I said, feeling the tears forming.
“I just wanted to be close to somebody,” Courtney said starting to sob. “There’s something wrong with me. When Luis died, something broke. I need to be needed, Dick,” and then she buried her head in my chest, crying.
Something inside of me broke loose, and I started to cry as well. I knew I should have gone after Jamie, explained the situation, but I couldn’t leave Courtney like this. I even managed t
o get my britches more or less back in place. At some point, one of us must have pulled the afghan up, because I was suddenly warm and wrapped in her arms. We fell asleep, nose to nose, so intertwined in our grief that we lost all sense of time.
I recognized this place. We were all standing in a row, waiting for the preacher to say the final words. The military funeral had been skipped and instead, a smaller one in the hometown had been opted for. I was standing beside Mike, and he and James were standing on either side of Mary and Maggie, who were both dressed in black, black lace veils covering their faces.
“This must be a memory, a dream?” I asked myself, unable to move, to only watch.
Both Mike and James were dead, one by my hand, one by my hand not being where it should have been. James turned and smiled at me, his teeth filed to points. I shivered, despite the realization that this wasn’t real.
“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to honor…” The priest’s words weren’t right, and I barely listened, as I tried to catch the features of Mary and Maggie. Both were older than I remembered and Maggie had grown both taller and matured. My heart ached at seeing them, and I was having a hard time figuring out if this was some sort of amalgam of a dream, part fact, part fiction… and then we were moving.
“You’re going to love this,” James said, shooting me a toothy grin as we lined up to see the casket before it closed.
“Leave him alone,” Mike told the cannibal. “You’re going to be fine,” he told me, giving James a reproachful look.
My heart raced as I waited my turn. Every step closer to the casket was a step closer to Mary and Maggie. I didn’t understand why they were up front in the family section of a funeral, but this was a dream, and it’d been years since I’d seen the two of them. One by one, the people in front of us shuffled, waiting their turn to talk to the ladies, to speak words to whomever was in the casket. Then Mike’s turn was up. He turned and gave me a smile.
The Devil Dog Trilogy: Out Of The Dark Page 43
