The Borrowed World (Book 4): No Time For Mourning

by Franklin Horton

  “We’re pulling an all-nighter. Once it’s dark, I need all hands loading gear,” Baxter continued. “We’re not bothering with the food that’s already offloaded into the community center. The residents can keep that. Anything in the trailers is going with us. We’re also taking the fuel tanker. Anything you can think of that we might need gets loaded tonight. I figure that we won’t be welcome back after tonight so there won’t be any returning to pick up things we forgot.”

  Some of the group smiled at that comment. Baxter had mixed feelings about that reaction. These were the kind of men that he needed working for him, but the fact that they took pleasure in the misfortune of others revealed something of their character. He was certainly not in a place to be pointing fingers. His character was clearly questionable as well.

  With everyone on board with the plan and having assignments to take care of, Baxter retreated to the house he shared with some of the other guys. He had his own gear to square away, and was going to work on a list of things he wanted to get that night. As he’d told his men, they needed to be thorough. There would be no coming back. There were things he wanted to make sure were not missed.

  There were other men working in the house doing the same thing. Baxter had a supply of military duffel bags and he began throwing items into them. He still had a tiny house outside of town and he wondered for a moment how it was faring. Had people broken in? Was someone living there? He might have to swing by and check on it when he left town. What did it matter? It was a relic of an old life. An old world.

  He grabbed the corner of a sheet and started rolling his bedding up, cramming it into a duffle bag. He heard the front door open and close. There was conversation and someone turned some music on. He hoped the guys were focusing and doing what he told them. Maybe the music kept them motivated.

  He hoped his guys remembered not to be carrying their gear outside yet. He didn’t want to draw undue attention. He heard a sound from downstairs that he didn’t recognize. He paused for a second then went back to work. He had a lot to do. He continued trying to fit his bedding into the mouth of the bag. It didn’t want to go. He was shoving with all his might when he heard the sound again. It sounded like a cough.

  “Going somewhere?”

  Baxter spun, then froze in his tracks. He couldn’t believe his eyes. His legs went weak and he sat down on the bed. Lester stood in front of him, a fat automatic in his hand. Behind him was another man of about the same age. He carried a similar automatic with a long cylindrical attachment on the front.

  “You’re dead,” Baxter said. “I saw you get shot. I saw your dead body on the ground.”

  Lester stepped into the room. “I did get shot. But as you can see, I’m not dead.”

  “That’s great. How?” Baxter asked. He was questioning his sanity. Had the whole thing been a setup? Had it been a show put on for his benefit? “Are the others alive?”

  “No,” Lester replied. “They made the mistake of trusting your sorry ass. Richard back here was the chief of security for my mining operations. He set me up with some body armor before we left. I’m lucky that fucker was a good shot. Had he missed the ceramic plate, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  “I didn’t mean for that to happen,” Baxter said. “You saw that right? You heard me yelling at him.”

  “I believe that,” Lester said. “Still, that doesn’t change the basic facts of the situation.”

  “What facts?”

  “That you were planning on stealing all our food and supplies.”

  Baxter started to protest but Lester pointed the gun at him. “Save it. Don’t waste your breath on me. You’ll have a chance to plead your case.”

  “I will?” Baxter asked hopefully.

  Lester grinned. “Definitely.”

  It was not a reassuring expression.

  Richard came into the room and secured Baxter’s hands with sturdy zip ties. Baxter held out hope that his men might be aware of what was going on and try to rescue him as they left the house. It wasn’t to be. As they walked down the hall he passed three men dead of gunshot wounds.

  “I didn’t hear a thing,” Baxter mumbled.

  “Smith and Wesson .22 with a suppressor and subsonic loads,” Richard said. “It’s pretty damn quiet.”

  They led Baxter out the front door and across the green to the clubhouse. He noticed that the decorative cherry trees that lined the drive looked unusual. He squinted against the sun and saw that most of his men were now zip tied to those trees.

  “Shit.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up because a few of them are missing,” Lester said. “No one escaped. If they’re missing, that means we had to kill them before they got this far.”

  Baxter swallowed hard. In short order, he was tied to a tree as well.

  “Richard, go ring the bell for happy hour,” Lester instructed, pointing out its location to the other man. He leaned toward Baxter. “Don’t let the word happy hour confuse you. I don’t think it will be your happiest hour. I could be wrong, though.”

  Richard walked to the brass bell and shook the white rope for nearly a minute. Assuming it to be an emergency or something of importance, people began to stream out of their homes.

  “Everyone come this way!” Lester shouted. “We need to have a community meeting.”

  It took about five minutes for the residents to assemble. It was a long five minutes for Baxter. He felt the eyes of the residents upon him, questioning why he was tied to a tree. He was used to them looking to him for answers. These were different looks: accusing, distrustful, angry, and suspicious.

  When every family was present, Lester called for silence.

  “We have something important to discuss,” he began. “The first order of business is that I need to inform you I am the only remaining member of the board of directors. Mr. Baxter over there saw to that. To summarize what has taken place, Mr. Baxter and his employees have been stealing our food and supplies. They’ve been transporting them to an off-site location with a plan to move there and use our supplies to start their own community. When the board of directors became aware of this and confronted Mr. Baxter, they were shot and killed.”

  There were gasps and some outbursts of sobbing. Lester tore open his jacket, revealing his body armor. “You can see from the holes in my vest that I was a target. I wore this because I did not trust Mr. Baxter. I could not convince my fellow board members. They believed his lies and it cost them their lives.”

  Baxter was getting a lot of angry looks now. “No, it’s not like—” he tried to interject.

  “I will have Richard gag you if you don’t shut up, Baxter,” Lester said. “I’ve heard enough of your lies.”

  There were murmurs of agreement from the crowd. Their fervor elevated Baxter’s fear.

  “The reason I’ve called you all together is that we need to make a decision as to the fate of these men,” Lester said. “They conspired together to steal the food from your mouths and your children’s mouths. They intended to leave us here to our own devices with no food, no supplies, and no weapons. What would be a suitable punishment for such a thing?”

  There was a chorus of suggestions.

  Lester raised his hands to quell the shouting. “I have a suggestion, if you are willing to entertain it. You are welcome to take my suggestion or you may go home, close your door, and not take part.”

  “What’s your suggestion?” someone shouted.

  “I’m glad you asked that,” Lester said with a smile. He spoke into a radio.

  From behind the clubhouse came several golf carts. The backs of the golf carts were packed with dozens of golf bags containing hundreds of heavy wood and steel clubs. The golf carts stopped in front of the crowd. Lester made a sweeping gesture toward the carts, an offering to the crowd. The glow of awareness and understanding spread across the assembly like a ray of sunlight moving across a pasture.

  With a variety of expressions on the assembled faces, the people
began to come forward. Everyone took a club. Not a single person left to go home. The golf carts pulled out of the way and Baxter faced the crowd. There were men, women, children, and grandmothers. Some smiled in anticipation. Others wore a mask of grim anger. Without a word from Lester, the crowd surged forward.

  Baxter screamed.

  Chapter 49

  The Valley

  The black Humvee cruised the length of the valley. Pete and Gary’s warnings on the radio had hopefully reached all of the families in the valley, making them aware of the presence of the strangers. Either way, Valentine and his crew did not see a soul. They drove until they ran into the section of road that Jim had blown up.

  “I guess it’s safe to say that our men didn’t drive out this way,” Valentine said. “So either they drove out the other way or they’re dead and their vehicle is hidden somewhere in this valley.”

  The driver idled in the road, parked at the edge of the demolished asphalt. “What do you want to do?”

  “Turn around,” Valentine said. “I’m not sure we have enough men to go house-to-house doing a search. Let’s go back and secure our camp for now. We’ll come up with something.”

  “The other men will be back soon enough,” another of the team suggested. “We could wait until they get here. That’s a bigger show of force.”

  Except for the Humvee that went missing with them, those men weren’t of that much value. If they were injured, as the blood indicated, they might be nothing more than a burden if Valentine did find them. They might be able to eat and consume resources while unable to work. He didn’t need that.

  “The fewer mouths, the longer the food will last,” Valentine said.

  They drove back to their camp as slowly as their first pass through the valley. They didn’t see a single soul outside moving around, although the presence of dogs and penned livestock seemed to indicate that people lived here. There was even a trickle of smoke from one chimney.

  “This isn’t a bad little spot,” Parker commented. He had once been a sheriff’s deputy. When the county government changed hands after the last election, he’d been let go. He was working at a sock factory when the terror attacks occurred.

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Valentine said.

  “You cut off both roads into this place and it would be like a castle surrounded by a moat,” Parker said. “You’d still have foot traffic to worry about though you could set up security against that.”

  “There would be a lot of families to take on,” Valentine said. “I’m sure they wouldn’t give up their homes without a fight.”

  “You wouldn’t have to take them all at once,” Parker said. “That’s not how I’d do it. I’d start at one end and work my way through the valley, dealing with one family at a time. Take one house, occupy it, then take the next. In a week or two, you’d have the entire valley.”

  “You take enough of them, the rest may pack their shit and run off,” Valentine said, nodding.

  “Except we might need their shit,” Parker replied. “So they probably can’t take it. I’m not sure we could allow that.”

  “Good point,” Valentine said.

  He stared out the window at the houses they passed. The people who lived in those houses probably lived in them because they liked being out in the country. Valentine hadn’t ever lived off to himself like this. As a child he’d lived in the crowded coal camps where the houses butted up against each other and had tiny yards. As an adult he’d always lived in cramped trailer parks or in cheap little apartments on the edge of town. This kind of space seemed nice. He could learn to like this. It gave a man some breathing room.

  He wondered if this was how warlords started out, finding themselves in a unique position to take advantage of an opportunity. He could own this valley. They could control the cattle and livestock. That made him wonder if it was better to physically take the valley and drive everyone out or if it was better to terrorize the valley until everyone agreed to work for him.

  He certainly didn’t know anything about raising cattle. He’d have to think about this. He could be the lord and they could be the serfs. He’d never thought like this before, but the mind had the luxury of wandering when everything was going your way. When you got on a winning streak in life it was hard not to wonder how far that streak might take you.

  A new job could have you wondering if you could one day be running the company. A profitable business dealing could have you wondering what it would be like to be a billionaire. A winning twenty dollar lottery ticket could have you wondering what a four hundred and twenty million dollar lottery ticket would be like. It was human nature to dream and aspire. When the course of one’s life is altered and skewed by circumstance, those dreams and aspirations can become twisted, sending a man in a trajectory that he’d never imagined.

  That was what was happening to Valentine now. His life had gone in a completely unexpected direction and the world was opening up to him in completely unforeseen ways.

  The grand visions ended with the return to camp and the grim work that awaited. There was never a shortage of flies in cattle pastures and they now coated the dead bodies, which had grown stiff from their encrustation of gore. Fluids had seeped and dried in the sun, gluing them to the long pasture grasses. Buzzards had strung out entrails and punctured vile cavities that released noxious and inescapable odors.

  “What the hell are we going to do with this?” Valentine asked, standing with the three men he’d retained. “That’s a lot of damn graves.”

  “I grew up on a farm,” Grayson said. He was a scrawny heavy equipment operator that had worked for the county. “When we had a cow die, we tied them to the tractor and dragged them off to a sink hole at the far corner of the farm. Wasn’t worth the trouble to bury a cow. In a few days, the buzzards and coyotes would do away with everything but the bones.”

  Valentine looked at Grayson with a frown on his face.

  He shrugged. “Sorry,” he said. “Just an idea.”

  “Reckon I’d rather do that than dig graves,” Parker agreed. “There’s rope in one of those containers. We could tie them to the pintle hitch on that Humvee and pull them off somewhere they won’t contaminate the water.””

  “These were our friends,” Valentine said. “Our coworkers.”

  “Somehow I doubt they’ll be complaining,” Grayson said.

  “Then fuck it. Let’s get it done,” Valentine said. “After that, I want you guys to grab some rest. I’ll keep watch. Tonight I’ll need you guys out on recon. We need to know what we’re dealing with in this valley.”

  “Do we have any of the night vision devices?” Parker asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Valentine said. “There were only a couple and I think the guards at the golf course were using them. We should have them tomorrow. I don’t want to wait that long. I’d like to take that first house tomorrow.”

  “The one where we talked to that guy?” Grayson asked.

  Valentine nodded. “Just one guy with a family.”

  “Did you notice his pistol?” Parker asked.

  “I saw he had one,” Valentine said. “I had the AK on him so I wasn’t too worried.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Parker said. “He had a Glock in a top-end retention holster.”

  “I didn’t notice,” Valentine said.

  “It might not mean anything,” Parker said. “Or it might mean that he knows guns and is well-armed.”

  “Your concern is noted,” Valentine said. “Now get these fucking bodies out of here before the buzzards come back.”

  Chapter 50

  The Valley

  Jim, Buddy, and Lloyd wrapped the bodies of the executed men in a sheet of dirty black plastic and tied them shut with baling twine. They didn’t want to take a chance on any of Randi’s family finding them, so they put them in the Humvee along with the man Gary had shot with the .338 for Jim to dispose of later.

  “We need to scramble,” Jim said. “Things a
re as critical as they’ve ever been for us. We need someone from every family. Have them at my house in one hour. We need to make some plans.”

  “Can I call them on the radio?” Randi asked.

  “No.” He turned to Buddy and Lloyd. “Could you guys hit each house on horseback? We don’t know what kind of scanning technology these guys might have. They could be listening to our transmissions. We need to be careful what we say from this point forward.”

  “That’s too slow,” Randi said.

  “Then go to my house and get the tractor,” Jim said. “It’s got a full tank of heating oil. Just make it quick. Make sure they know it’s an emergency.”

  Buddy and Lloyd slid the shed door open and headed out. In a moment they were trotting across the field toward Jim’s house.

  “Randi, take your family to my house,” Jim said. “Tell my wife that I’m going to be sending some of Gary’s people there. His house is closest to this mess and I don’t want those grandkids in harm’s way.”

  “Got it,” Randi said. “I appreciate it. And again, I’m sorry about bringing those guys to your house. It was a reaction.”

  “It’s done,” Jim said, holding up a hand. “But I do need you to talk to Pete while you’re there. Tell him what’s happening and to minimize radio transmissions.”

  “Then what?”

  “Wait at my house until the other families get there,” he said. “I’ve got to get Gary up to speed and then I’ll come over.”

  Chapter 51

  The Valley

  After speaking with Gary and his family, Jim walked the fields back toward his house. Gary and Will remained behind to keep an eye out for any suspicious activity. Brenda, Gary’s daughters, and his grandchildren all followed Jim. Brenda carried a grandchild in one arm and had a rifle slung over her shoulder. Jim was carrying a child piggyback, the little girl using his pack as a seat. He carried his M4 at the ready, his adrenaline simmering. Each of Gary’s daughters was armed, even Charlotte, who would not have been trusted with a firearm mere days ago. She’d been showing significant improvement. No one knew what Randi had done to break through to her but it appeared to have worked.