It was sheer luck that I pulled away from my rifle scope for a moment to wipe sweat off on my arm, noticing movement on the slope to my side, vaguely from the direction I’d come after rolling off the truck. I scanned the area over my shoulder, feeling unease creep up my spine. I turned back to my rifle, but kept my focus on the very edge of my vision. Yup, there it was again. Someone was sneaking up on me—or trying to.
I considered what to do. I could of course jump up and try to shoot them first, but the fact that I still had something attached to my shoulders above my neck told me that they weren’t carrying a sniper rifle themselves. I couldn’t really count on them only having short-range weapons like a shotgun or pistol. That left me with a dilemma—did I try to shoot them before they were too close for the sniper rifle to be effective and risk getting gunned down? Or did I wait until they were close enough for the shotgun to be of use?
What made me decide to go for option two wasn’t common sense, but our people barging into the barn from the back, making a couple of men step into my direct line of sight as they tried to put up defensive fire. If taking a few more of the bastards down meant that I was going to bite it, so be it.
I didn’t hesitate, didn’t even take the time to line up perfect shots. I emptied the remaining four shells into the bastards below, quickly reloading to take another five shots. Rustling in the grass made me tense and the last two shots went wide, but I didn’t care. As soon as the last round left the barrel, I dropped the M24, gripped my shotgun, and threw myself to the right, rolling twice before I ended up on my back. Rearing up in a half-crunch that strained my abs, I brought the Mossberg up and fired, immediately pumping another round into the chamber and firing again. The first shot went wide, making the guy that was maybe twenty feet away from me jerk up. The second didn’t miss.
I didn’t bother with getting up but threw my body into another roll, making the two shots from a small caliber handgun hit the bare ground where I’d been seconds ago. As soon as the moment of vertigo passed, I aimed and shot, coming to my feet in one jerky motion due to the recoil slamming into my chest. I hit, but only his leg, making him crumble and drop his gun, screaming. And because it was that kind of a day, I didn’t leave him there but shot him straight in the face, finishing him off.
With my cover blown for good, there was no sense to stealth, so I simply snatched up my rifle, slung it across my back, and high-tailed it down the slope and into the fray. It was probably more dumb luck that got me down there unscathed, my shotgun fully loaded once more. Across the yard I saw Burns crouch behind the red pickup, so I made my way over to him, whistling softly as I advanced to let him know I was there. He briefly looked back, giving me a jerk with his chin to fall in behind him. He laid down a barrage of fire as soon as he stepped out of cover, and I followed suit, aiming at slightly below chest area at the three men coming at us. Burns’s rapid-fire rifle staccato made them duck—leaving their heads right where my slugs chewed into them. I reloaded as soon as my back hit the side of the barn, giving Burns the “go” as I chambered the next round.
That was what I continued to do until I ran out of ammo, then ran out of the shotgun shells I managed to scavenge from the dead. Few of them carried good weapons, and even fewer the grade of ammunition I’d gotten used to. Then I was down to my Beretta, and more shooting and slamming fresh mags into the gun.
And then there was no one left to shoot anymore.
Not quite, I realized, as I followed Burns back into the center of the yard that was now heaped with the dead and the dying. The guys had five of the fuckers lined up, kneeling on the hard-packed dirt, arms locked behind their backs with zip-ties—among them the guy who had first shot Burns.
Adrenaline surged, burning the exhaustion right out of my veins as my gaze fell on him. I’d never understood the meaning of something bringing your blood to boiling, but that was exactly how I felt right now. My breath came in heavy pants that had nothing to do with being out of air, and I felt my fingers grip the gun so hard that they hurt.
Nate stepping into my field of vision briefly diverted my attention, but what I really wanted to do was stalk over to that guy, ram my Beretta into his damn mouth, and blow his brains to hell, right where he belonged. And maybe punch him in the face before that until my knuckles were bruised and hurting. And castrate him. Cut him limb from limb, just as he had his men do to Bates. And—
“I think you will be needing these,” Nate said. I forced my eyes up to his face, scanning it without the words taking on any meaning. When he looked down at where his hand was between us, I did so, too, recognizing what he held as some of the shotgun slugs from my pack. That they were actually mine was no question. I doubted any of the cannibals had been so fucking bored during the past week that they’d started drawing doodles on the shells of their spare ammo.
My gaze shifted to what was making those disgusting noises over by the shed.
My fault. My business.
My grip on the Beretta went slack and I put it back where it belonged before I could fumble and drop it. Inhaling sharply, I plucked the shells up and slammed them one after the other into my Mossberg, not needing to take my eyes off the spectacle to do what had long since engraved itself into my brain.
Stepping up to where what was left of Bates was happily tearing into the remains of a heap of flesh, I hefted the shotgun, feeling my throat burn with tears that I would never allow myself to shed. The sound of me transferring the first round into the chamber made him look up, blood and strings of saliva dripping from his mouth. He screamed, or tried to, his mouth too full to let much of a sound come out.
“I’m so fucking sorry,” I said, my voice so raw that the words were barely audible.
I shot him in the face, decapitating him with a second shot.
Another piece of me, deep down inside, died for good.
The repeat loud boom of the shotgun reverberated through my body, but shook me right back out of my funk. I waited a moment longer to turn away, making sure that the zombie wouldn’t come after me. Only then did I look back to Nate. His face was blank—and rather dirty, smeared with blood, grime, and sweat—but there was not a hint of blame in his eyes. Just a deep kind of understanding that I could tell he wished I’d never come to experience.
My gaze skipped to our captives, and whatever hint of a positive emotion had been forming in my heart was starkly quenched again. Only the sound of voices—several voices, too high to belong to anyone male above the age of thirteen—made my head snap up and turn toward the now open doors of the barn. I blinked, my mind needing a few moments to process what I was seeing.
“Guess we found the pantry,” Nate remarked wryly. How he managed to sound amused was beyond me.
Andrej and Pia were busy cutting chains and busting locks, freeing what were easily twenty women and children—all in rags, looking scared beyond relief as they were clutching at each other—from honest-to-God iron cages they had been kept in. Somehow, the fact that none of them looked particularly malnourished under all that filth just made it ten times worse. And while they let themselves be shooed out of the shed, they kept clinging to each other, eyeing us with the same wary gazes as their captors. Guess we weren’t looking like the most trustworthy bunch right now. I couldn’t exactly fault them for that, even if my first reaction was contempt—something I really wasn’t proud of. I knew that it should have been compassion or something similar.
This was one more variant of madness that I so didn’t want to deal with. Thankfully, there was something else I could occupy myself with right in front of me.
“What about them?” I asked Nate, not needing to look at the captives—ours, not theirs—for him to know who I was referring to.
His shrug could have meant anything, but in this context I was pretty sure it was a true, “What do I care?” if there’d ever been one.
With everyone else busy with guard duty or liberating the women and children, I thought it might as well be me who dealt with wh
at remained of the scourge of Illinois.
Walking up to the captives, I focused on the one who had shot Bates, ignoring the others for now. Covered in just as much dirt as the others, I couldn’t have made a very neat picture, but he still held a manner of contempt in his eyes as he leered up at me. Without saying a word, I rammed the stock of my shotgun into his face, busting his nose. He grunted but didn’t even scream—most dissatisfying, that.
Glaring down at him, I brought the shotgun back into a ready position in front of my chest.
“Recognize me? Not that your good-for-nothing trackers actually found me.”
Through the blood streaming down his face, he grinned. “You’re his bitch, aren’t you? Thought you were so smart when you tried to hide your panties? Guess in a way you got what you deserved. Want more? Just untie me, and I’ll gladly give you what a whore like you is asking for.”
I wasn’t sure if he was simply baiting me into killing him quickly, but that wasn’t what I intended for him. For some reason that I didn’t want to explore, grinning back at him was easy.
“Oh, don’t worry, you and me? We’re going to have some fun with each other.” Looking over to the other four, I tried to get a better read of them. Two looked scared enough that they’d likely already shit their pants—one was crying and sobbing quietly—while the others seemed more petulant but still clearly afraid. Considering what had happened to all the others, they didn’t seem to harbor any false hopes about their fate.
The urge to just have a go at them with my fists and boots, or maybe a baseball bat if I found one, was strong enough that it threatened to choke me, but I did my best to keep a lid on the hot fury raging through me. From Nate I knew that cold, restrained anger was much more powerful than just lashing out—at least until I got what I wanted.
“I have a proposition for you,” I told the captives, letting my eyes flicker to the guy with the busted nose, too, although I’d already mentally excluded him from my offer. “First one that talks gets away easy.” I hadn’t really expected them to spill their guts, but the guy who was scared but hadn’t completely lost it looked up at me with a sudden glimmer of hope. The one next to the leader just spat at the bloody ground in front of my feet. I ignored him.
“What you wanna know?” Scared Guy asked, ignoring the growl coming from the man kneeling right next to him.
“Situational intel,” I forced myself to say, because screaming at him how the fuck they could ever have sunk so low just didn’t cut it. “How many men are here at this compound? Do you have patrols out that haven’t returned yet? A second base or hideouts? Weapon caches or food stashed away that didn’t come from dubious origins?”
From the corner of my eye I could see Nate take position behind and slightly to my side, but he looked completely at ease—which he obviously wasn’t—and a strange sense of… could that be actual approval that he was radiating? The captives seemed unaware of that, mostly focusing their low cursing on me.
Scared Guy hedged for a few seconds, but when the sobbing one opened his mouth and tried to cough up some garbled words, he quickly started to talk.
“Thirty-seven men. No, thirty-six, we lost one last week to sepsis from a broken ankle.” I wondered if he’d ended up on the grill, too. “No hideouts, and all patrols should have come in. You can count.”
I glanced at the guards, and Burns spoke up when my eyes skipped to him. “Thirty-one bodies. All accounted for.” I nodded my silent thanks to him. It seemed reasonable that the guy was speaking the truth then; there was no way he could have given a good estimate if he was lying. Hell, just looking at all the bodies around made it impossible to guess whether there were twenty or forty dead.
“See, I’m telling the truth!” Scared Guy shouted, panic pitching his voice higher.
I shrugged, letting him know that in the end it was the same to me, although it wasn’t. Not completely.
“Weapons? Food? Gear?” I prodded.
“Just what we have here,” he explained. “There are some tools in the garage over there.” He indicated the larger structure of the barn. “And I guess some canned stuff in the main house. There should still be something left from the last—“ He cut off there, looking guilty as shit.
“From the last convoy that you ambushed and killed?” I proposed, surprised how light my tone was. His slow nod made me want to shoot him right there, but he wasn’t done talking.
“Not all. There’s one girl left, I think. And one of the kids.” I looked at the huddled figures, wondering if they’d belonged to one of the groups that Shayla’s people had lost.
“Anything else?” I asked, not having to work hard on letting emotion drain from my voice.
He shook his head, but when he saw me tense, he started babbling, tears streaming down his cheeks. “You don’t understand! It was either join them or die! And they don’t just slaughter them like animals. They cut them piece by piece, so the meat doesn’t spoil in the meantime! They always do that first to one from a group, as encouragement, you know? They forced me to eat my own brother! They—“
He didn’t get a chance to say more because I shot him in the head from a foot of distance, feeling gore splatter against my lower torso and legs. The body slumped backward, blood continuing to spread where it hit.
Sobbing Guy completely lost it. “You shot him! You fucking shot him! You said that if we’d talk you…” The rest was lost in hysteric hiccups, but I doubted that he had anything qualified to contribute to the conversation.
Leaning closer, I studied him. “I never said that I’d let any of you bastards live. I just promised that the one that talks first will get away easy. Chance is up. Bet you’ll regret not talking any minute now.”
I waited a moment, giving him and the others a chance to spill any more secrets—or last words—before I turned to Nate. “Any suggestions?”
He shrugged, clearly leaving the choice to me. Taking a deep breath—definitely not a good idea—I looked around, my gaze inevitably snagging to the charred remains of what used to be Bates’s leg on the grill, then on to the shed with the cages.
“You do like your barbecues, don’t you?” I taunted the cannibals. “How about this? We lock them in the cages, douse them in gasoline, and then we burn the whole place to the ground? Letting them suffocate sounds too gentle to me.”
I wasn’t sure if I actually wanted to do that, but when I glanced back at Nate, the twist of his mouth looked mighty approving.
“Any objections?” Nate asked around, ignoring the swearing coming from the ground. A chorus of approving murmurs and grim nods answered him. “Done,” he declared.
Before any of the captives got a chance to struggle, they were heaved to their feet, and in the case of the sobbing guy, simply carried toward the shed. They tried to put up a fight, but against the likes of Burns and Andrej they didn’t stand a chance. Nate remained standing next to me, watching me watch the proceedings. I looked at him, catching his gaze for a moment, not sure what he expected of me. I certainly wasn’t going to back down.
Under the increasingly more desperate chorus of the four men gas canisters were filled from the cars in the yard, Burns and Santos doing the honors of dousing the men and parts of the shed structure around them. After making sure that the women and children had been herded far enough away, Burns lit a cigarette—one from Bates’s pack, I realized, using his lighter. Very appropriate, I found—and chucked it at the end of the gasoline trail. It took a second for the flame to catch, but when it did, things went fast.
The straw and dry wood caught flame immediately, as did the gasoline-soaked clothes. I forced myself to watch what happened beyond the wide-open door of the shed; forced myself to listen to the screams.
And not a single cell of me felt even an ounce of sympathy or regret.
Chapter 19
The cleanup took a lot longer than the fight had, but in hindsight, I should have expected that we wouldn’t just turn around and leave the scene.
&nb
sp; Bodies needed to be burned—with the shed already in flames, it made sense to turn it into one giant pyre. As I helped the others drag the bodies over there, I noticed that two of the men had had strange marks, like a tattoo in the shape of an “X” across their necks. Gang signs, most likely. One of the surviving women bore a similar mark on her right hand, hiding it in the folds of her tattered skirt—a wife maybe? Girlfriend? Innocent who had been branded for life, not just on the inside but also for everyone to see? I didn’t find it in me to ask. It really didn’t seem important at the time.
Bad as it was to drag the dead toward the fire—and finish off the wounded, unconscious as most of them were, anyway—picking up the pieces that used to be Bates belonged to a different circle of hell entirely. We built a separate pyre for him, wrapping the remains in a sheet someone had found in the main house first. Before we set fire to it, Nate said a few words, but they didn’t even register with me. All I could do was stare at the blood-soaked bundle, placed in a rough approximation of a complete body, because anything else would have been blasphemy. And I continued watching as the fabric caught on, until there was nothing but charred ash disappearing in the flames.
The guys got busy in the meantime. While not ill-prepared, the cannibals hadn’t exactly lived a life of luxury. Relying mostly on the convoys they managed to overwhelm, their stocks were minimal compared to what we’d gathered on even the shortest loot run—but there were still some things that could be of use, and those were stripped down to the individual parts to be taken with us and put to better use. Nate sent a few people back to pick up the car Martinez had driven close, and several more with the pickup to get our cars. I resented the very idea that anyone was driving my car, but staring at the dying flames was more important than my comfort. The knowledge that we could have overwhelmed them any day without losing one of our own grated. Monsters we might have fought and slain—but in the light of day they proved to have been much less scary than their reputation had made them out to be.
The Green Fields Series Box Set: Books 1-3 Page 82
