Dawn of Destruction

by Ronald Williams

  “That must have been the shot we’d heard,” Jenny said. “Then I think I got somebody else coming in from the back. He’s still out there. Hasn’t moved, hasn’t made a sound.”

  “Why don’t you come here and watch the side of the house,” Sally said. “I’ll cover the back for a bit.”

  As mother and daughter passed each other in the darkness, Jenny very quietly whispered, “Thanks.”

  When she got to the window, Sally was able to make out a dark shape prone on the grass. It was likely the person that Jenny had shot. While they sat in the darkness, listening for anything else that might be coming at them, Sally reviewed the situation to herself. The man she’d shot wasn’t military or police as near as she could tell from her brief check of the body. Him and whoever it was in the back left her with two bodies she and the kids would need to dispose of. They mentioned hearing a truck up the road a ways, one that she’d heard herself.

  One part of her wanted to get at the truck. A running motor vehicle could be a great asset under the current conditions. On the other hand, it made noise. And there’d been gunfire. That was going to bring attention to the area, and the last thing she wanted was anybody else sniffing around the cabin.

  “Look, kids. We’re going to need to be bold. I think we need to assume that it was just the two guys. We need their bodies off our property real fast…”

  Chapter 18

  Bill had no idea how long he’d been out, but he woke to a lit candle, a canteen of water, and another MRE. He was aware that he was parched and starving, but the smell left over from his first meal down in the turbine room turned his stomach. The thought of drinking any more water, with whatever Benton had spiked it with, was too much for him to overcome.

  Instead, he stretched out his tight muscles, wincing at the pain from the bruises and cuts, and did what calisthenics he had the energy for. When he couldn’t muster up the strength to keep going, he opened the MRE and dug in. Since it was sealed, he assumed it would be safe to eat. It was hard going, with his mouth so dry, but he eventually got it all down. Everything except the coffee. The caffeine was a diuretic, and he knew he’d need to be as tight on fluids as he possibly could under the circumstances.

  When the food had been in him for a good long while with no sign of stomach upset or nausea, he finally gave in to his thirst. As he used his feet to pull the canteen closer, he hoped that the food had been in him long enough to get some nutrition out of it.

  He tried to detect the taste of anything unusual in the water as he took a few cautious sips, but with the stale taste of vomit in his mouth underneath the heavy flavors of the MRE, coupled with dehydration, he couldn’t have picked out much of anything. As much as a part of him wanted to chug the whole thing, he knew better. He took just enough water to clean out his mouth and take the edge off his intense thirst, then set the canteen aside.

  Between his physical condition, the beating, the drugged food and water, the noise in the turbine room, Bill’s head was pounding. He was exhausted, but also knew that the discomfort would keep him from trying to sleep if he decided to just curl up and shut his eyes. He’d get more sleep when his body shut down enough that he just lost consciousness.

  Besides that, he knew that it wasn’t just going to laxatives and emetics in the water, and a lot of loud noise. Those kinds of stresses would take a while to break a person down. If Benton really wanted to get at his family, he’d have to step it up or be prepared for a long wait. Pondering what else was in store was a thought train Bill didn’t want to get on, but as his head continued to pound and the roar of the water turbines continued to assail his ears, it was hard to get his mind off of it.

  He didn’t realize until he was almost through it, that he’d been absentmindedly sipping at the canteen while he tried to figure out what was going to come next. Several minutes with food and water in him, and his stomach was staying still. “OK,” he said in to the noisy darkness. “Make it so I can’t tell if the water is good or not. Got it.”

  He was pretty sure that talking to himself wasn’t the most mentally healthy thing he could be doing under the circumstances, but he didn’t have anybody else to talk to.

  Chapter 19

  “You sure we don’t want to keep this?” Jenny asked, as she got into the old pickup truck with Cole and Sally.

  “Yes. We want this truck and the two clowns in it far away from the cabin.”

  “Could be useful, though…”

  “If these guys had friends, and they see it, they’ll be all over us,” Sally said. “Besides, it’s only as good as its gas tank is full, and that’s…” she turned the key far enough to power up the truck’s electronics. “Less than half full. And I’m sure this thing isn’t really a gas sipper.”

  “I don’t see any good way to turn this thing around up here. Maybe at the switchback down there,” Cole said. The truck had been parked at the side of the road facing uphill. It was less than half a mile as the crow flies from the cabin, but a lot farther by road.

  “We’ll just take it slow,” Sally said. “Jenny, think you can back it to that switchback, if you take it real slow?”

  Jenny looked behind her. “Yeah.”

  “Alright. Cole and I will give it a push off this flat spot here, and then it’s all yours.”

  “Wait one,” Cole said, going to the back of the truck. He took off his shirt and used it to muffle the sound as he busted the brake and backing lights. “OK. Let’s get this done.”

  With him and Sally putting their backs into it, they got the truck off its level patch and rolling backwards down the hill. Jenny did a decent job of keeping it on the road in the darkness by riding the brakes to keep the speed down. At the first switchback, she let the truck roll right to the edge of the road, doing her best to aim it for a forward roll down from there. One more push from her brother and mom, and she was coasting down the road towards the cabin, with the crunch of gravel under the truck’s tires the only sound it made. When she hit the driveway, she stopped and sat in the cab, looking resolutely forward while the bodies of the two men who’d come at the property were loaded into the bed.

  “OK, JJ. Let’s go,” Cole said, sliding into the middle seat while Sally hopped in after him. They let the truck roll on down almost to the T intersection where their road met the one that ran along the lake shore. There, Cole and Sally moved the two bodies into the cab of the truck. Cole siphoned out some fuel from the truck’s gas tank, splashed it over the bodies, and lit them up. The diesel took a bit to take, but once the flames got going, they were steady. Cole put the truck into neutral, disengaged the parking brake, and let it roll.

  He, his mother, and sister started making tracks up the hill as fast as they could while behind them, the truck rolled down the road.

  ###

  They spent the next day making a circuit of the property, resetting the noisemaker trap that had been sprung the night before, and trying to figure out what improvements they could make to give them better warning of trespassers and make the place more defensible. They didn’t have a lot to really work with but did what they could. Visibility more than a few feet into the tree line from the house was still their biggest hurdle.

  Jenny took some time to talk. She’d been silent ever since they’d put the looters’ bodies into the truck cab. Even though Sally had offered to send her on ahead, so she didn’t have to get up close with them, she decided she had to see the one she’d shot up close, just once, to understand what she’d done and what was at stake. Since that moment, what Cole and Sally didn’t know, was that she kept telling herself over and over again that if it wasn’t him, it would have been her and Cole that were dead. She knew she had done what she had to do, but it was thin solace.

  When she finally did speak again, standing on one of the game trails through the woods, she said, “Maybe we need more than just advance warning. Maybe we need to make sure that anybody sneaking up on us loses some skin.”

  “What do you mean, JJ?”
Cole asked.

  “Snares that will really take out a leg, punji stakes, things that say there’s nothing here that anybody wants any part of.”

  “Could piss someone off and make them more determined as like as it’ll deter someone,” Sally said. “A lone looter or a pair will likely go looking for easy pickings. If they’ve got friends, they’ll come back in greater numbers and with their eyes open for more.”

  “If it’s an organized group, we don’t stand much chance anyway, do we?” Jenny asked.

  “Not just the three of us,” Cole said.

  “So let’s prepare what we can prepare for. Besides, even if the next ones coming on our land are a bigger, better prepared group, they’ll at least pay for what they take from us.”

  Sally looked at her daughter, trying to figure out what was going on inside her head. It didn’t look like Jenny had gone off the deep end. There was a certain resolve in her voice. Whether it was vindictiveness or a commitment to not being a passive victim, Sally couldn’t say for sure.

  Chapter 20

  If pressed, Bill would say that he was on day three of his imprisonment in the turbine room, assuming he was being given one MRE and canteen of water per day. It seemed a round estimation and matched his sense of passing time his hunger. After the first canteen of tainted water, the next two had been clean, but the third was doctored again.

  Benton had stopped by twice between each feeding, each time with another man. The other would hold Bill down while Benton went to work. Once it was a car battery. “No use for these right now, you know what I mean, Wild Bill? Just think, though, of how much fun this will be when I get a chance to tap into all that electricity being generated right here in this very room!” Benton had said, in between applications of the metal clamps.

  After the car battery had been something that Bill guessed was tear gas concentrated into a small garbage bag that would be put over his head and held until he’d just about passed over, repeated over and over until there wasn’t any gas left. Then it was just a few more rounds of the plastic bag.

  “I’d waterboard your ass, but I’d need to uncuff you for that,” Benton told him. “Don’t trust that you wouldn’t try something that would necessitate me defending myself with lethal force.?

  Every time Benton left Bill alone after a session, he’d shimmy up the pipe he was shackled to. The T joint at the top of it was close to the top of some piece of equipment or another. Since he hadn’t been drinking the coffee, he’d started storing the packets up there, with the wads of toilet paper and one book of matches. So far, Benton and his associate hadn’t found his little supply. Bill had no idea what exactly he was going to do with them. A plan was coming together, but the noise and cold and sleep deprivation were making it hard for him to hold a train of thought for all that long. Fire, coffee, eyes. There had to be some way for him to get those things to work and facilitate an escape.

  A few minutes after he’d vomited up and shat out his most recent MRE, Bill heard the familiar paired footsteps. Like good military men, Benton and his helper walked in step, bold and confident as always, while Bill writhed on the ground from the pain of his stomach cramps.

  “Got tired of waiting, Billy Boy,” Benton said.

  “William Henry Chandler, Captain, 520-65-5524, June 17th, 1974.” It was the only thing Bill ever said in Benton’s presence. As his captor stood over him, a piece of paper in his hand visible by the weak light of the candle, Bill kept repeating it over and over again.

  “Sally, Cole, and Jenny. That’s your family?”

  “William Henry Chandler, Captain, 520-65-5524, June 17th, 1974.”

  Benton bent over, showing Bill one of the photographs he’d had in his wallet. “You. Sally. This ugly one here looks just like you., that’s Cole, right? And this hot little thing must be Jenny. Got their names, got your address up here.”

  “William Henry Chandler,

  Captain, 520-65-5524, June 17th, 1974.”

  “Right, right, right,” Benton said. “I know when you were born. Let’s talk about when you’re going to die. See, I got the information that I needed. I don’t need you anymore.” Bill saw him draw his pistol from a leg holster. He pulled back the slide to chamber a round. “The only question is do I want to have my fun with or without watching. What do you think, Wild Bill? Should I keep you around and make you watch, like I did with all those families over in Afghanistan, or should I just be done with you?”

  “William Henry Chandler, Captain, 520-65-5524, June 17th, 1974.”

  Benton kicked Bill in the stomach. “I already know all that. I get it.” He kicked Bill again. “What I need you to do now is help me decide. Kill you now or kill you later. Now or later. That’s the only thing I want to hear out of you. One of those two words. Now. Later. Now. Later.”

  “William Henry Chandler, Captain, 520-65-5524, June 17th, 1974.”

  Benton reached down and hauled Bill up to standing by his shirt and pressed him against the pipe. Bill felt the cold barrel of the pistol at the back of his neck. “Now. Later. Now. Later. You want to see your wife and kids one last time or not, Billy Boy. Now. Later.”

  “Willia-“ Benton’s pistol fired, the blast of it right at the back of Bill’s head deafening, even with the all-consuming noise of the room all around him, coupled with an intense pain.

  Chapter 21

  Jenny was digging a pit on one of her and Cole’s mountain biking trails that came up to the back of the house. Cole was behind her with a knife, sharpening an old dry branch. He had two other spikes laying on the ground next to him, ready to go. Sally stood over them, shotgun in her hands, keeping watch.

  Their work was interrupted by a series of three sharp sounds, as if somebody were banging a spoon against a metal pot.

  Cole and Jenny went immediately for their own weapons. They’d swapped out the hunting rifles for the weapons the two looters had been carrying.

  Jenny had taken the AR-15 with a home-brew modification to the lower receiver to allow it to fire full as well as semi-auto from the man she’d shot in the backyard. Cole had taken possession of the SKS that had been carried by the man his mother had surprised at the bottom of the driveway.

  There were three more bangs, a little bit closer. “It’s Steve Wilkerson and Danny.”

  Sally waved Jenny to go wide to her left, Cole to her right, and she started following the trail back towards the house. She held a finger up to her lips, to tell the kids to be quiet.

  “Just here to give you some news. Not looking for trouble,” Steve Wilkerson said.

  “What you got?” Sally asked.

  “We’re armed but they’re holstered, Sally. We got our hands up here.”

  Sally kept moving cautiously towards the edge of the trees. When she caught sight of her neighbors, they were openly carrying, but had their pistols holstered and hands up, as they’d said. “What’s’ the news?”

  Steve Wilkerson nodded to his son, who spoke up. “I just got outta one of the camps the Army’s setting up, down at the Libby Dam. A few of us snuck out last night.”

  “Yeah?” Sally asked.

  “Yeah. I caused some ruckus when they picked me up, so I got dropped in a room with a couple other guys that weren’t playing nice. Bill was there with me.”

  “He’s there? At the dam?” Sally asked.

  “I don’t know. They fed us, and must have done something to his food, because he passed right out a few minutes later. The guy in charge down there, sounds like he’s the military boss of this whole area, came in and looked at Bill, got this real weird look on his face. Had his guys haul Bill away. That was the last I’d seen of him, but something about the way that military dude was looking at him. I think he’s planning on keeping Bill around for a while, and not being too nice about it.”

  “Mom…” Jenny said. “We’ve got to go get him.”

  “Agreed,” Cole said.

  Chapter 22

  When he came to again, in pitch darkness in a dea
fening room, Bill was honestly quite surprised. The last thing he remembered was Major Benton putting the barrel of a pistol to the back of his head and pulling the trigger, a blast even louder than the constant roar of water through the dam’s turbines, and a very brief moment of intense pain.

  By all rights, Bill was sure he should have been dead. Nobody survives a bullet to the brain at that distance. Unless it hadn’t been a bullet. Bill contorted himself around, with his wrists still handcuffed to a solid metal pipe, to feel around as best he could at the back of his head. The skin there was raw and painful to the touch, feeling burnt. When he touched his close-cropped hair at the edges of the wound, he could smell a little bit of char.

  All at once, Bill went weak in the knees and dizzy. If he weren’t already down on the ground and shackled to a pipe, he probably would have gone down with the sudden wave of simultaneous terror and relief that had washed over him. He reached back and touched the wound again. It was an oblong slash across the back of his head. Bill guessed that Benton’s pistol had been chambered with a blank, and that at the last minute, he had twisted the gun so the blast wouldn’t go directly into the back of Bill’s skull. At that range, right into the head, even a blank could be lethal or cause very severe injury. So Benton still wanted Bill alive and reasonably functional.

  As Bill calmed himself and put his mind to systematically picking apart Benton’s behaviors, he remembered something. A puzzle he’d been trying to solve when he was interrupted and beaten unconscious. That was, by his best guess, four days ago. Four days of intermittent beatings, burnings, and other forms of torture, between which were deliveries of food that either was or was not doctored with some sort of violent purgative.