Desolated

by Lou Cadle

  It brought something up, fast and hard, and the soldier jerked. He was lifted with the force of the blow and he grunted.

  Sierra came to her senses then. Of course it was a person. And the enemy of her enemy was her friend. She turned her head, and the other man had raised his rifle, aiming at the surprise attack. He started to walk forward, which brought him closer to the grappling figures.

  And closer to her.

  She pulled the pin on the grenade, just as Arch had showed them, wound up, and hurled it out in front of the walking gunman, hoping the thing would roll toward him.

  It didn’t roll. It hit, and it jumped up. The gunman raised his rifle, well trained, automatically going for the moving object with his rifle. He must have recognized it only then as a danger, for he pivoted.

  The grenade reached the top of its arc and fell again. The man made it one step before it exploded.

  The sound made her close her eyes instinctively. She forced her eyes open, and the man was falling.

  She ran down the slope, as hard as she could, going for him, for the rifle he was about to drop. She nearly lost her balance on the steep slope but barely managed to stay upright, skidding the last six feet. The man and the rifle were both on the ground, and his hand was still on the rifle. She ran right up anyway, kicked at the rifle, and it skittered two feet.

  She bent down to look at the man and saw the back of his head was half torn away. No reason to fear this one any longer. She ran for the rifle, which was intact, made sure there was no safety engaged, and ran over to where the bloody person had encountered the other soldier. He was down too, and the bloody figure was hitting him, over and over.

  No, Sierra saw, as she drew closer—stabbing him. “He’s dead,” Sierra said. “He’s dead. You got him.”

  The figure stopped, and then looked up, and that’s when Sierra recognized it as someone she knew. “Misha?”

  “Sierra,” she said. Then she dropped her arm and her knife fell from senseless fingers. “They killed Rod. The bastards killed Rod.”

  “Oh, Misha. I’m so sorry.” So much grief today. “Arch is gone too. And Yasmin is hit. Somewhere up around there.” She pointed back up the hill to where the dummies were. She hadn’t seen Yasmin, she realized. But Dev had said she was up there. “Can you go to her? We need your medical skills.”

  “I—” Misha said. “I have to, don’t I?”

  “If you can manage.”

  Misha pulled herself together, straightening. She looked at herself and all the blood. “I shouldn’t touch anyone. Not an open wound, certainly.”

  “Go up the road to the Quinn place. Yell for Dev and the boys to let them know it’s you. You can wash quickly there and if Dev is there, he can grab you a clean shirt and take you right to her.”

  “I don’t have my things—my medical bag.”

  “Send one of the guys or C.J. for them.” She walked forward and touched Misha’s shoulder, tacky with mostly dried blood. “Can I have the knife?”

  “What? Yes, there it is down there where I dropped it. I should go.” She took off at a jog.

  Sierra grabbed the bloody knife. A gunshot startled her. Right, there was that one guy alive. She fired back. It took three rounds to hit her target. She walked along the highway, making sure first he and each of the enemy was dead. She kept count of the bodies. She was looking for twelve, right? She found one alive, bloodied by shrapnel, probably from the mine going off. He begged her not to hurt him. She grabbed him by the nose, tilted his head back, and plunged the knife into his throat. “That’s for Arch,” she said.

  The clattering of hooves from uphill made her swing her rifle around.

  “Whoa, it’s me!” Curt’s deep, unmistakable voice snapped her out of her reaction. Funny how fast she had done that, as if twenty-five years had not passed since the last time she’d had battle-honed reactions. Curt was mounted on the horse, trying to get it to stop whirling around.

  “Have you seen Zoe up there?”

  “I have. She’s tending the prisoner.”

  “Prisoner?”

  “Yeah. Injured soldier. I—shit,” he said, as the horse shifted under him. “I’m no rider.”

  “I think all these are dead out here. Let’s see. There’s seven bodies here. Three on the highway.”

  “One I shot is up there a ways, dead.” He pointed. “And the prisoner. That’s twelve. All of them.”

  “Hey,” came a voice from down the hill. A young man’s face poked out. “Is it safe yet?”

  “Who are you?” Sierra said, raising the rifle and taking aim.

  He stepped out, not wearing fatigues. “I’m Mark. I come from—your people said you know it as Wes’s neighborhood. But Wes died four years ago. We’re conscripts. These guys wanted us to repair the highway.”

  “Right. Sorry to hear about Wes.” She lowered the rifle. “How many of you are there?”

  “Four of us. Fourteen from Payson. And your two, but I think one of them is dead.”

  “Who?” Curt said.

  “The male.”

  “Rod,” Sierra said. She’d seen the body as she was finishing off the enemy and fought off the urge to grieve for him while she still had work to do. She said to Curt, “Arch is dead too, and Yasmin was shot. I think that’s all our casualties.”

  Curt grimaced. “One would be too many.”

  “I know,” she said. “It doesn’t feel much like winning, does it?” She turned to Mark. “Whose kid are you?”

  “Jackson—” he managed to get out before Sierra interrupted him.

  “I know your father well. We fought together.” He looked a little like Jackson.

  “Then I bet I know who you are too. I forget your name, but he invoked you a lot when he trained us as kids.”

  Sierra felt an old stab of guilt. Times best forgotten. “I want to hear all about him, and about your community. But we have other things to do first.”

  “I want to get back home. Everyone does.”

  “I know. I’m sure you do, but we need to talk, to know what’s going on, what you did against these men, what you negotiated with them.”

  His expression darkened. “We didn’t negotiate. They just rolled over us.”

  “We need to know that too. And to talk about what might come next, after we did this.” She gestured around.

  “I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Okay,” he said. “We can spare an hour.”

  “We can give you all water too. And food.”

  “I’ll get the others,” he said, and went back into the woods.

  Curt was still fighting the horse. Maybe it didn’t like the sight or smell of the other dead horses, or maybe it knew it had an amateur on its back. He said, “I’ll go get Zoe and the prisoner. Maybe we’ll be able to convince him to tell us more.”

  “Don’t lead them down our little road. Please. Keep Zoe away from there. I don’t want her to see what’s left of Arch. Come up the highway and climb the hill through the woods, or go around the grain fields and beyond the very end. Up my driveway, and then back to the Quinn place through the backyard. But stay away from the area right by the Quinns’ driveway entrance.” Sierra hoped someone else was up for torturing the prisoner if it came to that. She wouldn’t be. But she flashed back to Misha, covered with blood, stabbing the dead soldier over and over, and thought someone would be. Even Joan might not object to torture, once she learned her son was dead. “Meet you at the Quinn place. While Mark goes and gets the others, I’m going to hunt for weapons and ammo.”

  Curt nodded and turned the horse, who happily picked up speed to get away from the carnage.

  Mark was gone from sight, hunting for the other captives.

  Sierra hunted through the destruction. There were bits and pieces they might be able to use around the farms.

  But then she realized nothing she saw would be able to stay with them. All evidence needed to be destroyed or at least hidden for the time another group of military men came looking for this
group. But look at the destruction. The spot in the highway where the mine went off, clearly new, and clear evidence that violence had taken place here. All the dead horses, which would have to be burned. They couldn’t butcher them. Not with the damage they had, and not after they sat out here for a few more hours of this heat. Fragments of the wagon were everywhere, and it’d take days to pick up every bit. It’d take a full day to drag the horse bodies and set them burning. Even then, after a week of clean-up, there’d be signs of the battle. Bullets in trees, the highway.

  All the thoughts they had about getting away with this, all the plans they’d made for driving the horses up the hill, that was all wasted energy, she realized. They wouldn’t get away with it. And either they’d have to take on a whole army when they figured out who had killed their men...or they’d have to leave.

  She shook off those thoughts. They had time to decide what to do. If they could get more information out of their prisoner, they’d know exactly how many the enemy would send their way next, and when.

  Chapter 21

  Yasmin was not going to make it, Sierra feared. There was little Misha could do for her, and all anyone else could do for her was to sit and witness her struggles. The youngest men and women, who’d been as close as brothers and sisters to her, took turns sitting by her, wiping her brow and talking to her. Distracting her from pain with talk was the best they could do.

  They kept the prisoner tied up for now, bound at wrists and ankles, and then chained by a leg to a tree where they could see him but he couldn’t hear them. They’d get to questioning him after other matters had been dealt with.

  The freed prisoners from Payson and Wes’s neighborhood had been convinced to stay with them overnight. Mark, Jackson’s kid, was as natural a leader as his father had been. He organized that group to dig the graves for their loved ones. Sierra pulled him aside and thanked him. “Dig two here at the Quinns’. One by Kelly’s. The other is for the girl.” If Yasmin by some miracle pulled through, Sierra would apologize for her pessimism, and the grave could be filled in.

  Mark looked somber and nodded.

  Joan’s family was hit hard by Rod’s death. Misha swung from despair to anger, and Sierra suspected she’d have a long time healing. Watching someone you loved die of violence was about the worst thing Sierra could imagine. They excused themselves for an hour and went home to grieve out of sight of everyone else.

  Zoe and Dev were nearly as devastated as Joan’s family. Arch had been older, and sick, and they’d both been mentally preparing themselves for his inevitable death, but it still hit them hard. No one was ever ready to lose someone they loved. Sierra had to fight with both of them to keep them from going to look at his body.

  “I don’t want either of you to spend the rest of your lives having nightmares about it.”

  “I need to see,” Zoe said.

  “You don’t need to see. I saw.”

  “You’re sure he’s dead?” Dev asked. He was clinging to Zoe’s hand.

  “One hundred percent sure,” she said. In fact, they’d have a hard time deciding which bits to bury to represent the top half of him. She didn’t say anything about that to them, but she’d sent her father down as soon as she’d walked the freed prisoners up to the Quinns’, asking him to cover Arch’s remains with a tarp, and warning him about what he was going to see. She wished she could protect everyone from the sight, but she had other things to think about, and until Dev recovered himself, she was going to be in charge of organizing the work, all of which had to be done now.

  “I don’t know,” said Dev. “It seems I should look.”

  “Guys,” she said to her family. She looked around. Everyone else was giving them space. The younger people were talking quietly among themselves, near Yasmin. Curt had ridden the horse up to fetch Brandie, Emily, and Nina out of the woods. C.J. she’d asked to go out scavenging among the scattered bits on the highway to find bullets. She knew she was making him look at dead bodies, but maybe that wasn’t all bad. He needed to lose that romantic notion of what a battle was. Cruel of her? Maybe. It was a cruel damned world.

  To Dev and her daughter, she said, “You know I hate talking about this, but I will now, because I love you both, and I don’t want you to be hurt any more than you already are.”

  Zoe’s eyes were leaking tears steadily. She had gotten her sobs under control just a few minutes before.

  “I saw some bad stuff down in Payson. That was before you were born, Zoe. And it tore at me. I had nightmares. I hated myself. I thought about killing myself, even.”

  Dev said, his voice rough with grief and sympathy, “Sierra.”

  She held her hand up. “That’s all the detail I want to go into—to ever go into—but I don’t want you both to experience that. It’s bad enough what you have seen—what you will see, more than likely, in the future.”

  “It seems wrong to not pay my respects,” Dev said. It was clear he didn’t want to see what had become of his father, but he felt an obligation. His face showed her how torn he felt.

  Sierra understood where that sense of duty came from. “Arch wouldn’t want you to. Kelly wouldn’t, were she here. Both of them would tell you what I’m telling you.”

  “If she was here, she’d go.”

  “I doubt I could have stopped her without tying her to a tree like our prisoner,” Sierra said. “But please let me stop you. I know Arch would want you to remember him as he was. Standing up to Vargas. Offering his knowledge when we made the plans. Hoeing. Doing dishes. Laughing. With Kelly, the way they used to be. Remember how they flirted with each other, even when you were a teenager? That’s how you should remember him. A man who loved his wife without stopping for the thirty years they had together, and who took good care of his family.”

  Zoe nodded.

  Dev said, “I wonder.”

  “What?” Sierra braced herself for another round of argument.

  “If he knew he was going to do that all along.” He’d realized by now, and from what she’d said, that Arch had chosen his final act.

  “Why would you say that?” Sierra asked.

  “I thought it was strange that he backed down and let me sort of lead the past day. That didn’t seem like him. I hoped he’d finally come to respect me.” Dev shook his head. “But he was abdicating. Knew he’d do something like this, I bet. I should have seen it as the sign he was planning something crazy. Damn it.”

  “No,” Sierra said sharply. “He did respect you. Don’t doubt that.” She thought about Dev’s theory. “He might have known he could die, but not that he would. He was old and slow and shaky. I believe he’d come to terms with that and knew it put him at more risk. He couldn’t possibly have anticipated every move of theirs or known he’d get close enough to do what he did.” She remembered Arch walking forward, so calmly, extending the grenade like offering a handshake, and she thought maybe she had been witnessing an act somewhere between heroic sacrifice and suicide. Or maybe he had been shaking badly enough he couldn’t throw the damned thing. Whichever, it didn’t matter now. What mattered was protecting those she loved from further harm, including the harm their own imaginations could do to them. “And I know he believed he’d be with your mom again. Hold on to that thought—that they’ll be together now.”

  Dev swiped at his eyes. “I know you don’t believe that.”

  “Hell, Dev, I don’t know. How can any of us know what comes after death? If there’s any justice in the universe, they are together. And you’ll be with them again. But not any time soon.” She looked sternly at her daughter. “No time soon.”

  Zoe said, “I didn’t really know the damage that guns could do. I mean, I knew sort of.” She sniffled. “But when Curt and I came up the highway and I saw the dead men—and Rod....” She started sobbing again.

  “I know, I know,” Sierra said. “It’s awful.” She would have spared her daughter that sight too, if she could have.

  Between sobs, she managed to get out a few w
ords. “So I guess I don’t want to see Gramps like that.”

  “No,” Sierra said. “Neither of you do.”

  “Was it quick?” Dev said.

  “Instantaneous,” Sierra said, her voice firm and certain. “He felt no pain. And he chose the way he died. Not a lot of us get to. He sacrificed himself for you two. For all of us, but because he loved you both an awful lot. Hold on to that thought.” She stood. “I’ll leave you alone to grieve. My father and I are the only ones who didn’t lose someone in our family, so we’ll be the ones to make sure everything gets done. First, we have to think about feeding our guests.”

  “What about the prisoner?” Dev asked. “We need to question him.”

  “When Joan and them come back here, we’ll get to that,” Sierra said. And she’d get Mark, and someone to represent Payson as well, to witness the interrogation. They might have questions of their own, and they’d be able to convey everything they learned from the prisoner back to their own people.

  Dev said, “You know, we can’t let those bodies just sit there. It’s broiling out here already. They’ll smell.”

  Zoe let out a sob at that.

  “We’ll have Arch buried before sundown,” Sierra said. “I promise.”

  Dev said, “What about the others? Vargas and his men?”

  “We’ll burn them tonight or tomorrow,” she said. “With the horse we have, we can carry the bones that are left from the fire and dump them far out in the woods.”

  “We’ll have to get rid of that horse,” Dev said.

  She was glad he was dragging his mind off thinking about his father. Distraction from grief was useful to maintaining your sanity, as she well knew. But she was thinking more about that horse and its potential uses. She wasn’t going to let it go anytime soon. “I gotta go deal with food. You two, promise me you won’t go down there to our road.”

  Dev nodded and pulled Zoe closer.