Bleeding (Oil Apocalypse Book 2)

by Lou Cadle

  “I never have,” she said.

  “Would you? Would you shoot at the men who raped your daughter?”

  “I would,” she said, her voice firm.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Joan Kershaw.”

  “I know this is really sudden, but we have a safe place. Food, room for your kids. A garden already planted and hens laying eggs.”

  “Now? You want to go right now?”

  “Now. We have to be miles away from here, in the woods, in eighteen hours or I’ll be in worse trouble than I am already.”

  “Why are you in trouble?”

  “I didn’t ask permission. I just came.”

  Joan Kershaw moved the light again and studied her face. “I don’t know you.”

  “I know you feel rushed, but you should get out of here before the invaders understand you had something to do with their dead men.”

  “Can I trust you? Are you even who you say you are? Maybe you’re from them.”

  “Check this with your daughter. One man dragged her up the street. She went limp and he hit her. The other man who forced her to suck on him—” she was being blunt on purpose, reminding Joan Kershaw what was at stake “—was white, tall, and dark-haired. She heard three shots, or maybe only two. She had blood and possibly brains on her when she got home. That was me and my friend doing the shooting.”

  “God save me,” the woman whispered.

  “She hadn’t told you that?”

  “She hasn’t spoken a word in two weeks. Since they took her the first time.”

  “Wait. Then how did you know what happened?”

  “She wrote me two sentences. She used to write more. Even that ability seems to be deserting her.”

  “Let’s get her out of here then. Minimize the damage, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “A man tried to mess with me up at my house. I blew his face off with a shotgun. Never had thought of shooting a person before. But I did it. Do you think you could do that?”

  “To defend my girls, yes, I think I could.”

  “Do you want to come or not?” Sierra needed to get back to Dev, ideally before he woke, if this woman said no. “At least let me take—Emily, you said her name was? Let me take her out of here and to safety.”

  “Okay. Come with me,” she said, and she flipped off the flashlight.

  When she heard the door slide open, Sierra said, “Take that light with you. We’ll need the light in the woods.” She waited in the dark while Joan brushed past her and opened the side door of the church. Moonlight lit their way across the parking lot and to a light-colored house next door.

  “It’s Mom,” Joan said as she opened the door with another key. “There’s someone with me. A young woman.” There was a votive candle burning in the middle of the table.

  There were two girls in the kitchen, looking terrified. “Hi,” Sierra said.

  “This is—Sierra, you said?”

  “Right.”

  “And these are Emily and Misha.”

  “Hi,” Sierra said again. The girls looked as if they were in shock, either registering nothing or registering everything around them as danger. And who could blame them? She wondered if the little one, Misha, had been raped by the men too. Or Joan, come to think of it. She’d ask later, when Joan trusted her a little more. For now, she just wanted to get them out of here.

  “We’re going to visit Sierra for a while. So let’s everybody pack a backpack. Underwear, socks. Put on your good tennis shoes.” Joan herded the kids back through a living room.

  Sierra called after her, “Put on plain dark clothes and jeans,” and then looked through the refrigerator, realized it was off and empty, and then glanced through a few cabinets. Not any food beyond a few vegetables on the counter. There was far more back home than they had here. Even without the guards and the rape and the terror, it would be a better life for them up the hill. She tried the tap, and water trickled out. She took the opportunity to fill all her empty water bottles and found more under the sink and filled those for the Kershaw family to use.

  It took them a half-hour to pack, which seemed like forever, but which Sierra thought was probably pretty quick for getting two pre-teen girls on the move. The three of them came out carrying or wearing backpacks. Joan took another few minutes to root through her daughters’ packs, nodded, said, “Just a minute,” and ran back again to the bedrooms with her pack dangling from her hand. She saw the water bottles on the counter and distributed them between their three packs. “Thank you. We’re ready.”

  “Okay, guys. We need to be fast, and we need to be quiet. Let me show you a couple signals.”

  “It’s dark out,” said Joan. “How can we see them?”

  “You’ll see better than you think in the bit of moonlight. Just three to memorize, okay? Stop, come ahead, and down.” She demonstrated—intuitive signs, really, but she wanted to make sure they knew what she meant. “Let’s practice with your mom, okay? Joan, go over to the door to the hall, and I’ll signal you.” She signaled come ahead, then stop, then down. “Good job. Just get down faster, okay? Emily, Misha, you think you can do that?”

  Misha nodded. Emily said nothing.

  She felt deep sympathy for the poor child. It had been a terrible day for the girl. Sierra was glad she was getting her out of here. Tomorrow would be a better day for them all.

  If she didn’t get them all killed before tomorrow came.

  Chapter 9

  She told them in a dozen words her plan for escape. Straight out of town, up the hill through the brush and trees, and then around the town to the west. It might be safer to go the other way, the long way around, but she didn’t think she could get all three of them there in a day. Not unless they had a lot more experience at hiking than seemed likely.

  They had to return to the scene of the crime earlier today. Not her and Dev shooting those bastards. She didn’t mean that—that was no crime. That was justice being served.

  Sierra hoped Emily wouldn’t freeze at the sight of the spot, so she picked up her own pace and signaled them forward, hoping to hurry them along, trying to outrun the girl’s trauma. Impossible, of course.

  No one was out on the street, no neighbors looked out a window that she noticed, though the footsteps of four people seemed loud to her.

  She took a jog down one street and then up another and came to a barrier at the end of that road where the brush began. Time to go cross-country. She checked to make sure they were all keeping up, and they were. She pointed up the hill and started climbing as fast as she could.

  With all the bushes, it wasn’t a quiet ascent. Thorns snagged at her T-shirt and scratched her arms. But she struggled ahead anyway, not looking back. If they were spotted, she’d know soon enough. There’d be yelling or gunfire. The sooner the others were hidden by the brush, the better. The sooner she was up there, balanced, her rifle in hand, the sooner she could defend them. She heard the noise behind her. They were falling behind. “C’mon, hon,” Joan said to one of her girls.

  Sierra spared a thought for how drastically their lives had changed in the past two months. Everyone’s had, but imagine being a kid, comfortable at home, your mom employed and respected in town, going to school, looking forward to summer vacation. Then no gas, no food, plus violence, invasion, rape. They must feel they were stuck in a bad dream. At least Sierra and Dev understood what was going on. Two girls that looked to be ten and twelve? It had to be beyond confusing.

  She wondered how Joan had kept them fed. The three of them were thin, and Joan’s clothes in particular hung on her, suggesting recent weight loss. It stunted a kid’s growth to eat too little, didn’t it?

  They’d get good food once they were settled in the Morrow house. Eggs, fresh vegetables. The other families had emptied out the Morrow refrigerator and freezer after the suicide, but once they got the power up and working there again, they’d return most of that food, if Sierra had anything to say about it.

/>   She came out onto a flat spot and flipped Joan’s flashlight on for just a second. It wasn’t where she and Dev had fired from, not exactly, but the spot had to be near here.

  They were over halfway up to where she wanted to be, which was considerably lower than where Dev was sleeping. Sierra shifted her position until she could see down into town. No sign of anyone following. She’d been lucky. She hoped the luck held through the night.

  * * *

  Later, looking back on it, Sierra wasn’t quite sure how they’d made it as far as they did before the girls had to stop. By that point, Joan was carrying Misha, and Sierra was carrying Joan’s backpack, which was heavy. She made sure they were well hidden and turned on the flashlight again, long enough to spread out her thin sleeping bag for the two girls. She and Joan lay on the forest floor, tired enough not to care about that, and Joan pulled out a spare shirt to use as a pillow. Sierra let herself doze but never fell entirely asleep, keeping an ear out for the sound of any other humans. When she heard the first bird stir, she woke them and got them on the road again.

  By the time they passed the highway to the south of town—there was still no one guarding it even this far out—it was well past noon. There was no sign of Dev, though she thought the chance of meeting up with him was slim. She apologized to Joan but said they had another several miles of cross-country hiking to do before sunset. No food, but thanks to her refilling the bottles at their sink, they had enough water.

  Misha was whining by then, and Sierra felt like whining herself. Emily stayed mute. Joan was as encouraging as she could be, and Sierra appreciated how patient she was with her kids, a kind mother who could summon up patience though she was tired, and hungry, and frightened, and headed into the unknown. Whatever anger Sierra had been harboring for her about her not protecting Emily from what happened evaporated. It must have broken her heart to not be able to keep her girls safe.

  They made it to the main road that led to their own neighborhood, and Sierra risked letting them walk up it until they were at the area where the car was parked. She wasn’t sure they had another hour of bushwhacking in them, and she was working on no sleep. It was twilight by the time she turned for the car. She whistled a warning to Dev as she approached.

  When she saw him march out of the woods toward her, she nearly dropped to her knees in relief. She’d been afraid that he’d gone looking for her and gotten himself into trouble because of her. “Dev,” she said, her voice shaking with that relief.

  “What the hell have you been doing?” He was really pissed off.

  She couldn’t blame him. “Shh. I brought people. Don’t scare them.”

  “What?” He was up in her face now, and though she couldn’t see him well, she could feel the anger radiating off him. She wanted to hug him but was afraid he’d push her to the ground if she tried.

  “The little girl. The one from earlier. And her mom and sister.” She flipped on the flashlight and pointed it at them. They had stopped and the two girls were clinging to the mother, exhausted but still managing to find enough energy to be afraid. Emily looked like she might sprint away at any moment. “It’s okay,” she said to them. “This is a friend. My friend. Dev, this is Joan and Emily and Misha.”

  Dev was breathing hard from his anger, but his next words were not loud. “Pastor,” he said, by way of greeting. He’d never sounded so much like his father.

  “Just Joan, please.”

  “Joan, then. I’m sorry if I scared your kids just now, but I need to talk to Sierra for a minute. If it gets loud, it has nothing to do with any of you. Just wait here, okay?” And so saying, he grabbed Sierra by the wrist and dragged her back to the car.

  “Dev, I’m sorry.”

  “Get inside. I can yell in there.” He slid into the passenger seat.

  She opened the driver’s door. “You’re not a yeller.”

  “I’ve changed in the last twenty-four hours.” He yanked open the door. “Get in.”

  “Okay, okay,” she said. She dropped her pack on the ground and moaned with relief when she sat. “Talk slowly. I didn’t sleep last night, and I may not be thinking straight enough to understand otherwise.”

  “I’ll say you aren’t thinking straight!” He pounded the dash with a fist. “First taking the shot at those guys, and now this?”

  “I couldn’t let them stay there. I couldn’t let that keep happening to her. To Emily.”

  “That’s not our business. We solved the problem she had yesterday. Now it’s their turn to make the solution permanent.”

  “I don’t think that’s possible.” She told him what Joan had said about the town. “She’s defending them with a steak knife against rifles. And besides, we need more people to defend our place.”

  “Soldiers!” he yelled. “We need more trained soldiers, not two little kids.”

  “I bet you could shoot really well at ten or twelve.”

  “Damn it, Sierra!” he said.

  “I couldn’t, Dev. I’m sorry, but I couldn’t live with the thought of them getting hurt like that any more. I wasn’t going to sleep last night anyway for worrying about it. I’m not sure I’d have ever slept right again. You know?”

  He said nothing. Then he sighed deeply. “Well, it’s done. At least you weren’t going to get some boyfriend or something like that.”

  “Of course not!” She was shocked he’d think that of her.

  “We can’t change it now.”

  “And we’re all alive.”

  “I doubt I’ll live long. You turned me into an old man. I’m going to die of old age in about a week now.”

  She laughed, relieved that he wasn’t yelling any more.

  “It’s not funny.”

  She didn’t point out that he was the one who had made a joke of it first. “I know. I’ll take whatever punishment everyone decides I deserve, and without a word of complaint. I’ll cook, I’ll clean bathrooms, I’ll do all the shit work I hate doing and nothing but that if you all want.”

  “You’re lucky you have your dad and not mine. I’d hate to think what my father would do to me if I pulled something like this.”

  “I know,” she said, and she did. “I’m lucky to have Pilar. And these girls are lucky to have us, Dev. You know it’s the right thing to do. I know you. You’re a good guy. You’ll be glad this happened once you calm down.”

  “You realize, don’t you, that you may have triggered their coming up to find us? The men in Payson? The invaders?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “That’s just it. You don’t think.”

  She felt ashamed. “No.”

  “You just go on your feelings.”

  “I guess I do.”

  “Think more,” he said, and he pushed open the door of the car. After he was out, he leaned back in. “I’ve been seeing the dog, but she won’t come near me. Definitely a girl dog. And I managed to get the battery back in myself.”

  “Wow.” It was pretty.

  “Anger lent me strength,” he said.

  Sierra was too tired to feel much emotional turmoil over this, but she suspected she would tomorrow. And if she had triggered the Payson invaders coming up to find them, she’d feel guilt for as long as she lived—which might not be long if there were forty-five of them with guns. She climbed back out of the car, promptly tripped over her backpack, opened the trunk and put it in, and then went back to the family.

  When she turned on the flashlight, she jerked back in surprise. The dog was there, and she was right with them, wagging her tail, leaning against Emily. Misha was on her knees petting her, and laughing when she got a doggy kiss.

  Another unforeseen benefit to bringing the girls here. She wouldn’t mention it to Dev though. He was right. She had acted without thinking, and she hadn’t let him be part of her decision (because he would have said no, an inner voice insisted), and he had every right to be angry. If it brought retribution on them, it would be all her fault.

  But there
was no way the invaders in town would know where the attack had come from. It could be anywhere and anyone. She just wished there were more roads out of town for them to hunt along.

  Dev said, “If you can get the dog in the car, I’ll wait here while you drive them back.”

  “No, that’s okay. We can all fit.”

  “She likes the kids. She’s most afraid of me for some reason. Let her sit with them in the back seat. I’ll be fine here until you get back.”

  “I drank all the water I had, or I’d leave you some. I’m sorry.”

  “It won’t be a long wait. Drive them straight up the hill, leave them with my mother, and come right back for me. I’ll be here. If I’m asleep, don’t drive over me, for God’s sake.”

  The packs fit in the trunk easily. The dog in the back seat, not so much. But she had attached herself to the girls, and with a lot of coaxing, and everyone else standing far back from the car, Misha enticed her in.

  Sierra drove up the hill, headlights off. The girls would have fallen asleep but for the dog, who was nervous about being trapped inside a strange vehicle and wouldn’t settle down. “It won’t be long,” Sierra said to the girls and the dog. She checked the charge of the car. Still charged with enough juice to get her back to Dev and home. At the road that led to the neighborhood where Dev had been shot at, she gunned the car.

  “So you live up here?” Joan said.

  “A bit farther, yeah.”

  “And the boy you were talking to, the angry one, I’ve seen him, I think.”

  “His family is Christian. He said he knew Emily from some Teens for Christ thing.”

  “Had to be Easter. It was the first time she was a teen.”

  “She’s thirteen? Looks younger.”

  “In January.”

  Sierra glanced in the rearview mirror, but she couldn’t see the girl. “And Dev isn’t angry, really. He’s a good guy. He’s frustrated with me, and I totally understand why. He’ll forgive me quickly. Just watch.”

  “I’ve had my fill of angry men.”

  “I imagine. You’ll like my dad. Pilar Crocker.”