by Ryan Schow
“Pencil pusher,” Rider says.
“Yeah me, too,” Stanton replies. Then, more serious: “It’s good to be in the company of capable men.”
“Indeed it is.”
“Are you guys bonding or measuring your dicks right now?” I ask.
“Bonding,” they both say at the same time.
“We’ll be ready to go at first light,” I say, looking first at Rider, then at Stanton. Stanton isn’t looking at me, though. He’s looking at Rider and there isn’t an ounce of no in his expression. Staying together is the right thing to do.
Strength in numbers.
Chapter Seventy-One
Before he’d fallen asleep, before unconsciousness gripped him, Jagger had scooted next to Camila and pulled her into his arms. Her lifeless body sunk against his as darkness swallowed him whole. The nightmares were relentless. He shifted and shook; he cried out and jolted. In his trauma-induced sleep, he relived the crash over and over and over again.
The ground raced up on them with both speed and force. He drew a panicked breath, heard Camila call out his name, and then they hit. The second they slammed into the valley floor, he knew he’d botched the landing.
Jagger thought he could lay the flat belly of the helo on the tilled soil and skid it out, but the ground wasn’t flat and he came in at too hard an angle. The forward facing prop was the problem, which he knew it would be. The second they hit, the blades dug into the soil, ripping the propeller wings off completely and shoving the nose forward.
The tail end drove up at a sideways angle, twisting the fuselage into a spin that ripped the tail section off and threw them into a nasty barrel roll. The jarring, jerking, downright hellish sounds of the hull being torn apart had his teeth snapping and his eyeballs shaking so bad the world was reduced to a shuddering, lurid blur.
Time slowed and sped up at concurrently. For whatever reason he remembered everything. The gun-shot sounds of bolts snapping and welds breaking, the whine and whinny of sheet metal ripping apart, the screech of the helo’s frame bending against too much strain and abuse.
Strapped in tight, Jagger’s body thrashed and wrenched about with such force he wondered if his popping, striving bones could withstand the beating. He couldn’t even think, except for that half second where he might have prayed for it all to end, his death or otherwise.
The last thought he had before the roaring wreck became too much for his brain to handle was that if the helo broke apart, he would never see Lenna or the boys again. He’d be crushed, pitched free, or simply battered to death by the time this thing stopped.
And then it all went black.
More jarring about (his dragging legs); his already battered body bumping off hard objects, pointed objects (rocks?); the slow, canvas-like sounds of his flight suit scraping over a hard pack (dirt?—am I alive?); pain sparking up every last nerve; the faraway sounds of voices to let him know death sounded a lot like the chaos of life.
Delirium tickled the once stable synapses of his mind, leaving him weary but agitated, unable to open his eyes, speak or even move.
Is this hell?
If so, he’d be the least surprised person down there. It wasn’t death, though. Someone was dragging him backwards by his flight suit. His butt and his heels dragged along the dirt, and just as he started to wonder who was pulling him, they dropped him without care or concern, causing his head to thunk! off the ground.
“They’re all dead,” he heard a woman say. She was either a million miles away or standing over the top of him.
“Mother of Christ,” another replied from an even farther distance. “This guy looks like he got shot to death after everything was over.”
“Are we the first people out here?” Jagger heard a female voice ask.
He fought with all his might to crack an eyelid open. Then he worked on the other. Sunlight shot through his cornea, slammed into his brain like a battering ram. He snapped his eyes closed while wincing and turning his head away from the light. He drew a labored breath but held it the second he heard a girl’s yelping.
“This one’s alive!” she shouted.
Pretty soon the sunlight that threatened to blind him, the sunlight that made the once dark sides of his eyelids a soft glowing pink, was blotted out by a gathering of bodies above him. Thank God, he thought, about to open his eyes. He’d been saved.
“Who’s going to kill him?” he heard one of them ask.
Wait, what?
“I’ll do it,” the girl said.
“No,” a stern voice replied.
Jagger opened his eyes, saw the people standing all around him. The people safeguarding his eyes from the direct shine of the sun.
“You’re the pilot, right?” someone asked, kicking him in the side with a boot like they were checking for a response, or trying to force one. He’d been kicked the same way you’d kick a dog you thought was dead or unresponsive. Jagger managed a grunt in the affirmative.
“Your entire crew is dead. You know that, right?”
Jagger managed to sit up, but he was eye level with everyone’s crotch at that point and they didn’t look like anything special. Just a bunch of college dropouts in dirty clothes and old shoes.
“Yeah,” he managed to say, tasting blood and stickiness in his mouth.
“How’d they die?”
He looked up, shielded his eyes from the slivers of sun but he still couldn’t see their faces that well.
“In the crash.”
“So this guy got all them bullet holes in ‘em from crashing?” a voice said.
“Stranger things have happened.”
“Not that strange. ‘Cause in wrecks like this, real bad ones where most everything is damn near disintegrated, guns don’t go off and pop folks square in the forehead like that.”
He held his tongue.
“You know who they are?” the same voice said. Looking around at his peers, he said, “Do any of ya? That there is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
“And you know that how?” someone asked.
“Well?” another voice said to Jagger. “Is it true? Is he the Joint, the Chairman of Staff, or whatever?”
“Something like that.”
Now everyone got real quiet and Jagger knew he’d come to the end of his life. He knew he’d have to one day answer for his violent transgressions, he just didn’t think it would be today. Much less by a mob of halfwits, thugs and would-be murderers.
“You sure?” one guy said to the other. “Because it could be anybody.”
Jagger remained silent.
“Of course I’m sure,” the first guy said. “I’m pos-ee-tive. That’s why we ain’t killin’ the pilot. Doing something like that…popping this dude afterwards—or just before—he’s earned the right to live in my book.” Now looking down at Jagger, he said, “But we’re taking your stuff, an’ all their stuff. You survived this crash, so you’ll survive this, too. But we came for things and things we’ll have, and if you try to stop us, we’ll shoot you dead.”
Jagger lowered himself back to the earth, his brain still foggy, all of this feeling like some twisted continuation of the bad dream that started with the drone strike in Texas.
For the next half hour, the pack that dragged him from the beaten side of the helo managed to loot the surviving sections of the craft, salvaging whatever they could including Jagger’s service weapon. He heard them taking the clothes off the victims that weren’t ruined beyond repair and he was extra pissed off when he heard them whistling as they stripped off Camila’s clothes.
“If those tits are real, then I’m thinking dead or not, we take her with us,” one of them said with a sort of dripping lust.
When Jagger turned over and heaved, a few voices fell silent. One of them came over and said, “What about his flight suit? There’s not much blood, and it looks hearty.”
“Hey Bobby, come check out this chick’s cans. My God they’re beautiful!”
The girl stomped o
ver and Jagger heard the cocking sounds of a round being chambered.
“Put her shirt back on and get away from her. Goddammit Merle. I swear on my mother’s life if you pull down her panties I’ll sink two in the back of your skull!”
Jagger planted his hands preparing to get up and go after this piece of—a foot stomped down on his shoulder, pinning him to the earth. The person holding him down was but a shadow standing before a bright afternoon sun.
“Gonna kill you,” Jagger growled.
A shotgun racked its load, the barrel hovering mere inches from his face. Jagger stopped speaking. Instead, he turned his head sideways and blew throw up snot from his nose.
“Okay, okay,” the guy violating Camila’s body said. “We’s just funnin.’”
“Well stop,” the girl said. “Now.”
The idiot named Merle stopped, but Jagger’s blood was already boiling. Hearing what those boys were doing, what they’d done, inside Jagger’s head walls were coming down and entire buildings were collapsing and crumbling to ruin. He was rage and retribution; he was cold hard vengeance. If not now, when he had his wits, he’d make them pay for what they did, that much he promised himself.
As they were leaving, one of them stood over the top of him, frothing at the mouth, clearly not right in the head. The shadow hid most of his features. Still, something of a chilled fear shot straight into Jagger’s heart as this creep stared down at him.
“C’mon Rowdy!” someone barked.
“He’s a witness,” Rowdy said in a voice like crushed gravel. The tenor was deep and cruel sounding. Like killing was not a necessity but a need. Some baseline response to breathing, to seeing something wounded, to leaving nothing behind to stop him from killing over and over again. Someone else joined Rowdy. They both stood over the top of him, two shadows against the burning afternoon sun.
“Witness to what?” the other person asked. “There ain’t no cops, no judges, no courts of law. This is the wild west man. Who cares if he lives or dies?”
“I care,” Jagger said.
Rowdy fired his weapon and a sharp spit of dirt kicked up in Jagger’s face, cutting his cheek and making his ear ring. He rolled over, a silent scream pulling his body tight against itself while Rowdy laughed and laughed and laughed.
Then they were gone. Walking out of the fields toward an old farmhouse sitting along the horizon.
With the sun beating on his already crash-hammered face, and his body damn near obliterated from the wreck, he dropped his head back in the dirt and fought to settle his thoughts. For a long time he measured the pros and cons of two very different scenarios: get back home to Lenna and the boys, or find that pack of savages and tear their spines from their bodies. In the end, as pissed off as he was about that Rowdy character and the one looking at Camila’s body, Jagger realized these clowns were a hell of a lot closer to him than home was.
Yeah, Lenna and the boys would have to wait just a little bit longer.
Despite the rage that afflicted him earlier, Jagger felt incredibly weak as he lay there in the dirt. With a bit of concentrated effort, he dragged his body up and staggered over to Camila. She was flopped over in a pair of panties with her pants pulled roughly to her ankles and her bra sitting in the dirt beside her like a coiled snake. He couldn’t bare to see her like that.
It revolted him, left him so sick to his stomach he felt like screaming. Had every bone in his body not ached straight down to the marrow, he would have kicked the wreckage and pitched a righteous tantrum. But everything hurt, including his broken heart.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her.
There was enough light in the day to see the brutal effects of the crash upon her body. She had bruises everywhere, compound fractures on her left leg and arm, and half her face was crushed in. Tears streamed down his cheeks and he shook with a swift, indelible pain. He got out of his flight suit, unable to stop the roar of grief washing over him. Slowly, reverently, he worked her broken body into his flight suit, averting his eyes as best as he could, cursing God and those dumbass kids and every one of those scumbags in Silicon Valley that brought the civilized world to its knees.
When he was done protecting Camila’s virtue, Jagger leaned down, placed the lightest of kisses on her lips and begged for her forgiveness. And then he wiped his eyes, looked in the direction that the pack of heathens had gone and imagined a retribution so ferocious he all but worked himself into a fit.
He was weak though, exhausted, so the anger burned off fast leaving him in dire need of rest. He sat down in the dirt beside Camila. A second later, he laid beside her and put a protective arm around her. As he imagined her soul floating in the heavens above him, seeing his thoughts, knowing the depth of his pain, his eyes fell shut on their own and he drifted off under the pulsing rays of the afternoon sun.
He woke sometime during the night. It was time to go. He said a long good-bye to Camila, then stood and headed toward the nearest farm house. Along the way, he found foot prints in the dirt, so he followed them.
He staggered on through the fields for what felt like forever, passing two gorgeous mansions on his way to…wherever he was going. The tracks took him to a road where he sat until first light. He walked the road up to a landscaped thatch of property with a house, a barn and some old farming equipment.
In the faint, pre-dawn light he saw the glimmer of a candle flickering against a window.
Jagger’s legs weighed a thousand pounds and his frozen cold body ached, but he had to check it out, just in case it was them. When he pressed his face to the dirty window, he saw the girl from the field. Instantly his senses flared.
He looked back to where his helo crashed. It was in the distance and hardly visible at ground level. From the second story floor, however, they’d be able to see everything. No wonder they found him. He looked back at her again and wondered if she lived there alone, or if they were all holed up inside.
He prayed for the latter.
Jagger snuck around the house, peeking in the first floor windows until he’d seen into every single one of them. He found no one else. It was too dark. Peering up, he counted half a dozen windows on the second story floor. Those had to be bedrooms.
Turning his eyes to the horizon, the sun arrived, casting light and life upon the farmland.
Shivering, the crisp morning air smelling like moist earth and foliage, he staggered across the yard to a rectangular barn filled with tilling and reaping equipment. There was an old tractor sitting in the shadows and rows of rafters on either side of the barn. He found an old ladder, leaned it against the rafters, painfully made his way up top. Breathing heavy, he dragged the ladder up behind him. There was nothing up there but bare lumber and spider-webs. At least he’d be left alone to sleep and plan. He laid down, closed his eyes and waited. Somewhere along the way, his body began to ache, but then it tapered off and he managed to fall back to sleep.
He didn’t hear them in the barn until one of them fired their weapon. The gunshot tore Jagger from his sleep, but he was smart enough and alert enough to wake in perfect stillness, a measure of his training.
Down below there was giggling. Then the sounds of kissing.
“Make her watch,” a female voice said, followed by the squirming sounds of a child.
“Yeah,” a male voice said, “she ain’t gonna want to miss this.”
Jagger inched his face over the rafters, snuck a peek. Below there was the woman and one of the guys making out; standing beside them was Rowdy, the guy with the gravely voice and the serial killer vibe. Rowdy was holding a child who couldn’t be more than eight or nine years old. He had a fistful of her hair and was forcing her to watch.
The couple kept kissing and then the guy pulled her top down and Rowdy said, “Watch.” Rowdy held the squirming child’s head firm, gave it a jerk, then said, “Learn.”
Jagger couldn’t look anymore. What the hell kind of racket was this? Eventually he heard the sounds of the couple having sex and he pl
ugged his ears. The heat that warmed his neck now laid fire to his face and he swore he would put an end these vile creatures.
When it was over, Rowdy said, “Did you learn something?” When the girl said nothing, he said, “Speak!”
“Yes,” she whispered with anguish in her voice.
Jagger’s body went piano wire tight as he struggled to envision a way to help the child. But there was no way. He had no weapons, he was too broken to jump down and not break a leg or his back, and worst of all, he was too far away from where they were at to do any good. Giving away his position would mean his own death, so he sat there and listened to what was happening and he plotted.
When the foursome left the barn and headed outside, Jagger waited until it was safe, and then he waited a little longer. Finally he slid the ladder over the side, gingerly made his way down to the barn floor. Every single bit of his body screamed in revolt, enough for him to know his spine was severely out of alignment.
He turned his neck, which was stiff, made himself pop it on one side and then the other. After that, he set the ladder down, laid on his back across it and loosened his muscles until the arch cracked his vertebrae.
The pain was blinding and enormous, but he felt relief as the nearly unbearable static in his nerves settled down. He stood and walked a few feet, stopped at the flaring in his shoulder and the warm tingling of the nerves in his arm.
He found a dark corner—just in case someone returned—then slowly stretched his neck from side to side and from front to back. It was beyond rigid, aching to the point of his head hurting. Worst of all, the pain was messing with his back. When he was loose enough, he tilted it all the way to one side, relaxed, then jerked it enough for it to pop.
Already it felt better.
Moving to the other side was not so easy. He was stiff as hell there. He tried to relax, to move it, but it wouldn’t give. Jagger used his hand to slowly pull his head over. The applied pressure hurt, but each time he found his limit, Jagger forced himself to relax long enough to crane it a bit more. When he was tilted as far as he would go (which was half as far as he could normally go), he lowered his hand, held his head there, then gave it a solid jolt.
