by Steven Bird
Repeating his process of placing the candle on the floor so that he could open the door with his only free hand, Jessie nudged the door open to find yet another bed. This time, however, the bed contained an adult-sized body underneath the covers. The entire family must have gotten sick, he thought. Taking a step into the room after ascertaining that the curtains were closed to prevent exposure of the candlelight, Jessie began to look for an en-suite bathroom where the parents may have kept their medical supplies.
Several steps into the room, Jessie nudged something in the floor with his left foot. His heart skipping a beat, he held the candle lower to find the decayed corpse of a man lying face down on the floor, on top of what appeared to be old, dry blood stains on the carpet beneath him.
With a small entry hole and a large exit hole in the man’s skull, Jessie looked around on the floor to find a Smith & Wesson revolver lying just out of reach of the man’s hand, as if it had slid across the floor on impact.
I guess Dad just couldn’t deal with it, Jessie thought. Reflecting back to his own loss, Jessie understood the pain the man had gone through and knew that he had narrowly avoided such a self-inflicted fate.
As he entered the master bathroom, Jessie opened the bathroom closet to find washcloths and towels, as well as assorted hair and skin-care items on the shelves. Seeing a box of gauze bandages in the back of the closet, he reached inside to retrieve them, when all of a sudden he was slammed against the wall by a full speed tackle. Dropping the candle inside the closet during the impact, Jessie found himself lying on the floor being repeatedly punched by one of the men from Wolf’s gang.
As the man beat Jessie mercilessly while shouting expletives, Jessie struggled to block the blows, with little success. Giving up on his defensive blocks, Jessie reached into his waistband and gripped his .45 pistol, clicked off the thumb safety, and brought it to bear against the man. His attacker then immediately grabbed Jessie’s arm as the weapon discharged. Narrowly missing the man’s side, Jessie tried to shoot a second time to no avail. Jam! he thought, realizing that his awkward one-handed shooting position must have led to a limp-wrist-induced failure of the weapon to properly cycle another round into the chamber.
As the man struggled with Jessie for control of the pistol, he found Jessie’s wound and shoved his thumb forcefully inside, underneath Jessie’s collar bone, where the bullet was lodged. With excruciating pain surging through Jessie’s body, he let out a tremendous scream as he remembered his knife.
Pulling his knife from his belt, he slashed at the man, severely cutting into his arm and side, causing the man to release his grip on Jessie and fall backward, retreating from the blade, giving Jessie the opportunity to get some distance between himself and the threat.
As he struggled to his feet, Jessie turned to see that the closet was now engulfed in flames, with the fire quickly spreading. His injured attacker now standing back on his feet, illuminated by the fire that was quickly growing out of control behind Jessie, reached around his back and drew an old revolver from behind him. The man began slowly cocking the hammer as he took steps toward Jessie, backing him toward the far side of the room.
“My Colt,” Jessie murmured to himself, recognizing the man’s weapon. “Hey, you were on the bridge that day, weren’t you?”
“I guess we should have killed you right then and there,” the man said as he continued his slow advance toward Jessie. “You’ve caused us a lot of trouble and I’m gonna make sure you burn for it,” he said with a crooked smile as he glanced past Jessie’s shoulder to the growing fire behind him.
The fire now covering the wall behind the man, Jessie could see that his escape options were quickly becoming limited. As the man raised the pistol up, pointing it at Jessie’s head, Jessie tripped and fell backward onto the floor as the Colt discharged. The flash and muzzle report stunned Jessie with its shockwave as the bullet barely missed his head.
Landing on top of the deceased father’s remains, Jessie quickly reached for the Smith & Wesson revolver, raised it to the man’s stomach, and fired the remaining five shots in the cylinder.
The small .38 revolver, not having the knock-down power to take the attacker off his feet, caused the man to stumble and fall toward Jessie, continuing with the momentum of his advance. Jessie felt the weight of the man as he collapsed on top of him, pinning him to the floor.
Injured and disoriented from the struggle, Jessie strained to work his way loose from both the decomposed corpse beneath him and his now dead attacker on top of him. Finally breaking free as the room became completely engulfed in flames, Jessie retrieved his Colt revolver from the assailant and ran for the window, crashing through the glass.
As Jessie made the blind leap to escape the fire, he fell onto the roof over the front porch below and rolled off, freefalling to the cold hard ground below.
Chapter Twenty-Five
As the morning’s sun came up over the eastern horizon, Ash and the young girl who she now knew to be named Lillian, waited patiently at the reservoir for Jessie’s return.
Looking toward town, Ash could see smoke rising in the distance. A feeling of uncertainty and dread came over her that she hadn’t felt in quite some time. After her husband was killed, Ash had felt cold and emotionless, but now that Jessie had stumbled into her life, she had once again began to feel for other people. She had been so consumed by the desire to exact revenge on those who had taken everything from her, she had forgotten what it felt like to be truly alive—until this very moment.
“Do you think he will come?” Lillian asked, sitting concealed in the trees along the bank of the reservoir.
Turning to Lillian, Ash answered confidently, “He’ll be back. I know he will.”
“Was he your husband?”
Caught off guard by the question, Ash quickly answered, “No. No, he wasn’t,” as she felt for the watch on her wrist, which to her horror, she realized was gone. “Damn it!” she shouted.
Feeling that she had touched a nerve, Lillian said, “I’m sorry. I guess that’s none of my business.”
“No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be short. My watch—it was special to me—I must have lost it last night. I just... I’m just worried about him, is all. But no, he isn’t my husband. I was traveling with my husband and some others when the men at the bridge, the same ones that held you, attacked us. They killed the others, but I got away. My husband fought to the death to give me a chance to escape. It was his watch. It was all I had left of him,” she said as she wiped a tear from her eye.
Regaining her composure, Ash said, “After that, I found myself living in the basement under one of the houses in Dolores. I had almost lost track of time, thinking of nothing but how I could take my revenge against those killers, even if I had to die doing it. I didn’t want to live anymore, I mean, I had nothing to live for, anyway. And then along came Jessie,” she said with a smile.
“How did the two of you meet?” Lillian asked.
“His family was killed in a similar manner. They lived on a homestead way up in the mountains where they thought they would be sheltered from the world. Which they were, for a while. Eventually, evil will find you, and when it does, you’ve got to be ready to face it head on, with no reservations. I know that now, and so does Jessie. We both look back on things and wish we had handled them differently along the way. We both have that in common, I guess.”
“Anyway,” Ash continued. “He was on his way to find his sister when the very same group of men took him. They held him prisoner in an attempt to find out if others were following. He somehow managed to get away from them, which is when we met. I nearly killed him,” she said with a chuckle. “I thought he was one of them at first.”
Ash then turned to Lillian, and said, “You don’t have to answer. I know it can be hard to talk about things, but... what happened? How did you end up with them?”
Taking a moment to gather her thoughts and compress her emotions, Lillian explained, “My father disappeared
early on, when things started to get bad. One day, he went out looking for food and water for us, and just never came home. He and my mother weren’t getting along very well, even when times were good, so I don’t know if he saw it as an opportunity and just left, or if something happened. I try to convince myself that he left us because of my mother. That way I can keep a glimmer of hope that he is still out there somewhere and that someday, maybe I can find him again.”
“My mother—well—she was a piece of work, to put it nicely,” Lillian said with a rather sharp tone, “She would shack up with any man who seemed to be able to feed us for a little while or protect us. Then one day, one of them had eyes for me, and she didn’t do anything to stop him,” Lillian said, pausing to deal with her thoughts.
“So, anyway,” she continued, “after that, I packed a few of my things and left. She didn’t even try to stop me. I guess she figured it would be easier to feed herself than to have to worry about us both. It wasn’t long after that that I met up with a really nice family that took me in. They were a mother, father, and son who were traveling from California to some family ranch of theirs here in Colorado. I don’t know exactly where it was; they just kept telling me that we were almost there. Then one day we were jumped by a group of men in a roadside attack. They killed Frank, the father, and their son, Bradley. They raped Helen over and over again. It was horrible. I could hear her scream for hours on end until her cries were finally stopped by the sound of a single gunshot. I was afraid the same thing would happen to me next, but they told me they had to save me for the rest of their group, which is how I ended up here. They gave me to the rest of the group as a gift,” she said in disgust as tears began to roll down her face.
Sitting down next to Lillian, Ash put her arm around her and said, “You’ve been through a lot. I’m so sorry. I don’t know how the world ever got to this point. We just seemed to be spinning out of control for so long. Everywhere you looked in the world it seemed like some new bad thing was happening every day. It was truly like watching a bad reality show being filmed before your eyes. Some people seemed to have blinders on, just assuming it would all eventually get better, while others seemed motivated to help the decline continue. Others, if they were skeptical of what was going on, were labeled with whatever politically correct derogatory moniker for non-conformists was popular that day. Then all of a sudden when we were at our weakest, the attacks came and the house of cards that our world had become came crashing down. The violence, the killing, the sickness, the terror, it was awful. And then the hunger and suffering that followed,” Ash said, pausing to look away for a moment.
“There have been many days that I wished I would have died early on like so many others,” Ash continued. “I often told myself they were the lucky ones. But now, every time I meet someone like you or Jessie, I’m reminded that I’m actually fortunate to have made it. The fact that you and I both are still here, after all we’ve seen and suffered through, shows me that there is still hope for this world yet.”
For the next few hours, Lillian and Ash sat silently, reflecting on the events of the recent past, while watching the birds on the bank of the reservoir in search of their next meal. Remembering what Jessie had said about moving on if he wasn’t there before sunrise, Ash said, “Wait right here. I’m gonna walk up to the top of the hill to see if I can get a better look. He really should be here at any time,” she said, forcing a positive outlook into her words.
Replying with only a reassuring smile, Lillian tossed a pebble into the water to watch the birds chase it as if it was something for them to eat.
Walking through the trees to the top of the hill with her rifle slung over her back, Ash took a hidden position behind a cluster of wild shrubbery and scanned the area for any signs of Jessie. “Come on, Jessie. Where are you?” she whispered to herself.
After about ten minutes and no luck, Ash resigned herself to the fact that the odds were she would have to do as Jessie had insisted and take Lillian, leaving the area, never to come back.
Walking back down the hill to where she had left Lillian, Ash pushed a tree branch out of the way and said, “We’ll give him a little more time. He should be here any minute—ˮ
Interrupted by a man’s deep and raspy voice, she looked up to see Wolf, standing there with a knife to Lillian’s throat. “I don’t think he’s gonna make it, darlin’,” he said with a devilish smile.
Ash’s heart sank in her chest as she realized that if Wolf had found them, then Jessie must have been killed, and now she and Lillian could face the same fate—or worse. Bringing her AKM into position, Ash aimed the rifle at Wolf and said, “Drop the knife or I’ll drop you where you stand!”
Stepping behind Lillian for cover, Wolf laughed a demented laugh and said, “Go ahead... shoot me. But ask yourself if you can live with yourself if you hit this pretty little thing by accident. Besides, if you shoot me, this blade is tight against her throat. If I fall, she’ll hit the ground with me. You can be rest assured of that. Just imagine the pain she’ll feel. The burning sensation as this old blade slices through her pretty, little neck. You’ll watch her die a slow and miserable death, and it will be by your own hand,” he said, smiling to expose his rotting teeth. “Now, you nasty little bitch, put the gun down and maybe, just maybe, I’ll let you both live after I’m done with you.”
Fearing for the worst, Ash slowly began to lay the rifle down when Lillian shouted, “No! Shoot him! I don’t care if I die. I don’t want to live anymore, anyway. Just kill him and kill me, too. Save yourself!”
Seeing the madness and rage in Wolf’s face as his arm tightened, preparing to pull the knife across Lillian’s throat, Ash quickly took aim and pressed the trigger as the world around her seemed to move in slow motion. First there was the flash of light, followed by the thump of the rifle’s recoil against her shoulder as she screamed inside at the fear of what might be happening before her eyes. Wolf’s head then whipped back violently as his brains and bits of hair and skull splattered into the trees behind him.
Lillian simultaneously shoved Wolf’s arm away as he fell, the knife only slightly grazing her delicate skin.
Rushing into Ash’s open arms, Lillian wrapped her arms around her as they both began to cry amidst their strong embrace. Despite becoming strengthened and hardened by the events they had endured, both Ash and Lillian lost all control of their emotions, purging themselves of their pent-up agony and sorrow.
Regaining her composure, Ash knew what she must do. She could wait for Jessie no longer. Her heartbreaking revelation that Jessie must have died in the fight the night before was now a reality for her. The prudent thing for her to do now is to focus on Lillian’s safety and to get her out of the area as Jessie had wished.
~~~~
Falling down onto his back with his knife out of reach, the only remaining wolf approached Jessie, hidden in the shadows of the night. With the glowing of its eyes shining through the darkness of the forest and the sound of its heavy breath, the old gray wolf stepped out into the moonlight, revealing itself.
Jessie could see the fierceness in its eyes, the blood of its fresh kill still dripping from its fangs. With a fierce, low-pitched growl, the wolf inched closer and closer. As Jessie attempted to grasp his knife that lay just out of reach, the wolf let out a ferocious snarl as it leaped into the air directly at Jessie.
Out of nowhere, a second wolf came flying out of the darkness, latching onto the old gray wolf’s throat, taking him to the ground. A fierce fight erupted between the two wolves with a ferocity and level of primal violence that Jessie could have never imagined.
Finally succumbing to the battle, the old gray wolf lay dead on the forest floor. The second wolf—a she-wolf—stood over the now dead alpha-male of the pack that had terrorized Jessie’s flock for so long. The she-wolf turned to Jessie, looked him directly in the eyes, and then slipped away into the darkness, disappearing as quickly as she came.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Ly
ing flat on his back with the sun in his eyes, Jessie swatted a fly from his face and turned his head, looking across the street at the smoldering remains of the home, now just a pile of ashes. Jessie realized he must have managed to crawl away from the flames before it completely burned to the ground. His memory of the previous night a blur, his head pounding with pain, he tried to sit up, but his surroundings began to spin. Laying his head back on the ground and simply focusing on getting his bearings back, Jessie looked at his watch, surprised to see that it was nearly two in the afternoon.
Turning his head to look down the street, Jessie saw a stray housecat, just sitting there, staring at him.
“No free meal today, cat!” Jessie shouted. “I’m not dead. At least not yet, anyway. Besides, you don’t want this to be your meal. I’m sure I’m tough and full of gristle. Probably a bit gamey, too.” Struggling once again to sit up, Jessie looked at the cat, tossing a pebble in its direction, saying, “Now get out of here before I realize I’m hungry and the tables turn on you.”
Watching as the cat scurried behind one of the neighboring homes, Jessie looked around and thought, I just hope the reason Ash isn’t here is because she fled to safety with the girl, like I asked.
Struggling to his feet, Jessie dusted himself off and winced in pain. Pulling his collar away from his body so that he could get a good look at his wound, he realized the dried blood had formed a scab into the fabric of his shirt. Recognizing his urgent need for first aid, Jessie hobbled painfully through town, making his way to the basement hideaway that had kept Ash alive all that time.
Slowly working his way to the home, stopping to rest and to ensure that he wasn’t being followed, Jessie made it to the basement. Waiting outside behind the neighboring overgrown shrubs, Jessie carefully watched and waited. He wanted to make sure he wasn’t merely allowed to live so that he might lead the men to the other survivors. Once he was satisfied that he was not followed, Jessie slipped into the basement, closing the overhead door behind him as he descended down the short flight of concrete steps, bolting the door closed behind him.
