by Joe Russell
Dave was truly at a loss. He had a few half-baked ideas as to how to escape his current predicament, but his Ruger on Billy’s hip and the thirty-thirty leaning against the tree behind Doug made him too cautious to want to try anything so far. He knew he needed to make his move, but he also knew that if he was killed trying to escape, the girls would be, too. Or worse.
He was considering all this, staring blankly into the darkening forest through the space between the two men when movement caught his eye. Something light was back there, maybe twenty or thirty yards. Something peeking around the tree. It was a face. It was Mike! A wave of relief and adrenaline washed through Dave like a tidal wave. He had been wondering where Mike had gone and when he hadn’t made an apparent return earlier that afternoon, Dave had assumed that Mike decided to hike east out of the mountains in search of help, like he had wanted to do earlier. Dave didn’t know what Mike had been doing all day, but he’d never been happier to see him than he was now.
Dave wanted to make some kind of signal to Mike, but knew he couldn’t alert Mike’s presence to Billy and Doug. Dave looked back and forth cautiously, trying to make silent contact with Mike and at the same time, gauge the state of awareness of his drunk captors.
Dave jumped in his seat a little more than he would have liked to when Billy shouted at him again.
“Hey, Boy! I asked you a question.”
Dave turned his glance back to Billy, who was leaning forward in his seat. He looked irritated, but Dave didn’t think he had any clue of what was going on behind him.
Dave took a deep breath, realizing this was probably his chance. “All right. I haven’t seen them all day, but I know where they are...” He feigned a sigh of defeat. “I just… can I have another drink? This is tough.”
Billy eyed him a moment, then smiled a little in unconcealed victory and he told Doug to pass Dave the mason jar again. Doug did so, and Dave accepted it with both of his bound hands. This too, was a quart jar and roughly three-quarters of the way full. Dave snuck a glance between the men again to Mike who was still watching, then gave him a discreet but intentionally detectable nod. Billy, who was of course watching Dave's every move for a variety of possible reasons, picked up on the nod, just as Dave had intended. Billy turned his head quickly to see what was behind him and when he did so, Dave made his move. As quickly as he could with his limited mobility, Dave stood up, raised the mason jar above his head and threw it downwards with all his might. As quickly as he could, he turned his body and did his best to jump backward away from the fire, landing ungracefully on the hard ground behind him. While he was in mid-air, the jar struck one of the rocks lining the fire pit on Billy and Doug’s side and shattered, spraying the strong drink everywhere - toward both his captors and the fire. The moonshine instantly ignited when vapor from the spray contacted the roaring fire and erupted in a blinding fireball. Fortunately for Dave, he’d been facing the other direction when he dove for cover.
Dave, of course, didn’t get to see it happen, but he knew his plan had worked when he felt the heat and heard the unmistakable sound of the flare. Then, as if for extra confirmation, he heard Doug screaming in pain. He looked up from where he lay, about eight feet behind where his chair, now on its back, was sitting. He quickly got himself up, stood up straight, then as quickly as he could, let his body drop straight down so his butt collided with his heels. He had read a book a few years back by a NAVY SEAL who’d had one hundred different tips about avoiding and escaping capture, and this technique for defeating duct-taped ankles was one of them. To his delight, the outward force of his lower legs diverging under the weight of his body tore the tape just like it was supposed to, and his feet were free. He stood again and bounded back toward the fire. Mike was also charging from the opposite direction, Junglas in hand.
All of this took place in a matter of seconds, but it seemed to go in slow motion for Dave. Doug’s shirt was on fire and he was panicking, but still on his feet, slapping crazily at his chest. He turned to see Mike approaching quickly and despite his fiery predicament and drunken state, made a surprisingly fluid grab for the lever-action rifle leaning up against the tree, close to where he now stood. He leveled the rifle at Mike when Mike was only a few feet from him, but didn’t get his finger on the trigger quite in time. Before Doug could fire on Mike at now point-blank range, Mike made a wild but effective swing of his left hand that parried the muzzle of the rifle away from him. Then using the momentum of his charge, swung the large blade at a forty-five-degree angle down at Doug’s face. The sweet spot of the heavy blade made contact with the left side of Doug’s skinny neck, slicing more than halfway through, severing his jugular and leaving his life’s blood spraying like a garden sprinkler.
Meanwhile, figuring that Mike was going to engage Doug, Dave set his sights on Billy. The stocky man had apparently done a better job at dodging the explosion than Doug had, but had paid for his evasion with a hard fall. And, not having the warning Dave had, and a little too much to drink, it was taking longer to pick himself up. He was still on his hands and knees when he saw Dave coming at him. Dave was now abreast of the fire pit, about ten feet from Billy and closing in fast. He reached down, hands still bound together and grabbed the non-burnt end of an oak branch that was incidentally, about the size and shape of a baseball bat. Raising it above his head, Dave made the final bound toward Billy. Billy rose to his knees, now fully aware of his current state of danger. He drew Dave’s Ruger that had been protruding from his hip pocket all evening and leveled it at Dave. Only a few feet from each other now, Dave suddenly sidestepped to his left just before Billy pulled the trigger, sending a 9mm hollow point slug dangerously close past Dave’s chest and back toward the cabin. If Dave hadn’t been so pumped up on adrenaline and with tunnel-vision on his objective, he would have literally felt the breeze of death brush by him. Passing the muzzle of the small pistol, Dave swung his smoking club like the baseball bat it resembled, making direct contact with Billy’s face, the end exploding into a shower of sparks. Billy’s face flew backward to the extent that his neck would allow, then he slowly toppled backward onto his back. Partially from the adrenaline of the fight, partially from the fact that Billy still clutched the pistol, and partially from the hatred Dave felt for the man who’d had the nerve to attempt what he had, Dave raised the branch again and let it fall like a wood-splitting ax on Billy’s head. Then, not caring in his rage that the man was clearly unconscious, Dave clubbed the man’s head again and again and again, until someone grabbed his shoulder. In his state of rage and defensive aggression, Dave almost turned on this new person, but stopped when he saw it was Mike. Dave paused, club still raised in the air for another devastating strike, and turned back to regard Billy’s body below him. His face was no longer recognizable, having literally been beaten in to the point that it more closely resembled a jack o' lantern that had been left out on the porch too long. But bloody. The contents of Billy’s head were oozing out all over itself and the ground around it. The sight was horrific, and would have been enough for most to either faint or lose their last meal, but Dave regarded it with cold, steely resentment. Knowing what Billy had planned on doing to his wife and forcing Dave’s hand in this situation… Dave felt no sympathy for this swine. Breathing heavily from the burst of exertion, Dave let the big stick, still smoking like a giant match blown out by the wind, drop one last time on the corpse with an unsettling wet slap.
Mike, still resting his hand on Dave’s shoulder, spoke softly, “It’s over, man.”
Dave turned to Mike and looked into his face deeply for a moment before responding. “No, it’s not,” he whispered hoarsely. “They’re not here.”
✽ ✽ ✽
For the next several minutes, no one really spoke as they moved around the grim scene. Mike warned Dave that Neil, who had been hiding back in the forest when the fight had broken out, was with them and gave him a thirty-second explanation of why, before calling out to the man that it was okay to approach.
Dave had retrieved his Ruger from the ground near Billy’s body and after a reluctant search, recovered the two spare magazines in one of the man’s pockets. He stood and stared for a while at the dark cabin behind them, a little ominous in the fading light of evening with no internal light of its own. He knew the girls weren’t in there, but figured it would be good to search the place anyway. There might be clues or anything else that could help them in their situation.
Dave pulled his little Maglite out from where he had placed it only a minute ago when he had found it as well in one of Billy’s pockets. He walked silently toward the back of the cabin, toward the door he had fatefully entered hours before, without bothering to tell Mike or Neil what he was intending to do. He dropped the half-depleted magazine from the Ruger and replaced it with a full one. There was still one in the chamber, so that made eighteen rounds. The heavy wooden back door of the cabin was already ajar behind a dirty screen door. Dave pulled it open with his left hand, his pistol still in his right. Holding the door open with his right foot, he clicked on the flashlight with his left hand and entered the cabin. No need for stealth now.
He made his way cautiously but swiftly through the small cabin, clearing each room on the main floor one at a time and then the basement. It was actually laid out pretty much exactly as he had seen it in the strange dream he’d had earlier, only without all the creepy lighthouse pictures, of course. There was really nothing to speak of that he found, save his Ka-bar knife on the old, simple coffee table in the living room. It was still on the leather belt he had been wearing and until seeing it, hadn’t realized he wasn’t still wearing it. He put it back on, positioning the sheath of the knife on his left hip in his normal cross-draw fashion. Satisfied that there was nothing more to see inside the wretched cabin that was getting creepier by the minute as the last light of dusk outside was fading, he made his way to the back door and outside.
Chapter 20
Spruce Knob, West Virginia. Present Day.
The three men stood in a circle in the growing darkness, each studying their feet and the ground in front of them diligently. The circumstance they were in was so extraordinary that each of them was having a difficult time processing it, much less being able to determine what to do about it. Having to decide what to do as a group made it even more difficult to come up with a plan, and the darkness falling gave them a greater sense of urgency.
“You just killed two people,” Neil said, sounding a little panicked. “We have to get to the police! We can’t just leave them like this!”
“Fuck them,” Dave retorted, irritated. “My wife is still out there and I’m going to find her.”
Mike was caught in the middle. He agreed with Dave that rescuing the girls was the top priority, but also agreed that they couldn’t just kill a couple of guys and not report it, even if it was in self-defense. He didn’t know what to do, but sided with Dave, partially because deep down, he believed Dave had the better plan and partially because he was less afraid of the older, scrawny Neil.
“I think Dave is right,” Mike interjected, trying to keep the conversation civil and calm. “I know we can’t just leave these guys, but the girls have to come first. I don’t know where they are or why they were taken, but every minute counts and I don’t want to let them down by showing up too late or missing them altogether because we wasted time dealing with these assholes.” He nodded to the firepit and the carnage that lay beyond.
Neil hung his head a little, his defiance and fear of the law giving way to guilt and fear for his daughter. “I know, I just…” he trailed off.
Dave spoke up, a little calmer than before. “Mike’s right. If we don’t find them soon, I don’t know if we ever will. At least, in time,” he said solemnly.
“I wish we knew where they were. I mean, I agree we need to be looking, but we just lost the only lead we had. Hell, we don’t even know for sure if they’re together.”
Dave replied thoughtfully, “No, I think they are. I just don’t think it’s coincidence that both Rachel, Jen and Sandi would all get taken on the same day, so close together. I mean, there’s no shortage of creeps in this world, but it’s got to be related.” When no one spoke for several seconds, he continued, trying to shift the conversation in a more productive direction. “So, you guys didn’t see anything out of the ordinary? No other people?”
“Just a few guys in a cabin, maybe two or three miles from here.”
“Oh, yeah?” Dave perked up a bit, interested in any possible information that could give them a lead. “Did you talk to them?”
“Yeah,” Neil chimed in. “I saw them yesterday when Rachel and I were hiking.” Neil began to choke up, so Mike continued.
“We went and talked to them. Neil said there were three yesterday, but we only talked to one. Maybe young, twenties or so. Not too friendly. They had a new Jeep, but said it wasn’t running when we asked them for a ride into town.”
Dave’s level of interest rose even more at this. “Huh? What kind of Jeep?”
Mike shrugged. “Newer black Wrangler. Why?”
Dave glared at nothing in particular, then replied, “That Jeep was at the diner yesterday when we left. I think it was those three douchebags that came in when we were eating. Maryland tags?”
Mike shrugged again, presumably not seeing the point in all these questions. “I don’t know, didn’t notice.”
“Well, what did you notice?” Dave was trying to be patient and was slowly losing it.
Mike was appearing agitated too. “I don’t know. It was black, like I said. Big tires. A little dusty. Looks like some kid drew a lighthouse or something with their finger on the back of it.” He added this last part with a hint of sarcasm in his voice, clearly not considering it an important part of the description.
Dave stared silently at Mike for an awkwardly long time and Mike was afraid that he’d gone too far again, and that Dave was going to lose it. However, Dave merely replied just above a whisper, “What did you say?”
Mike looked at Dave with uncertainty. “Uh,” he hesitated.
Dave grabbed both his shoulders and half-shouted, causing Neil to flinch and take a step back from the two. “A lighthouse!?”
Mike looked at Dave as though he was unstable. He answered slowly, “Yeah…”
Dave let go, to Mike’s delight, and took a step back. He looked as if he were going to fall and the other two had a hard time reading him. Was this good news? Or was Dave having a breakdown from the stress of everything that had happened today? Mike began to worry, knowing that they needed Dave to keep this effort going.
“A lighthouse!” Dave exclaimed, hands in the air and a smile on his face. “That’s where the girls are!”
Neil and Mike looked back at him with blank stares of confusion. Maybe he was losing it.
“A few years ago, Sandra and I were talking about code words. You know, like if we had to talk in code or something? ‘Lighthouse’ was our code word to tell the other we were in trouble or something was wrong. She must have made that mark on the Jeep when no one was looking. She was trying to send us a signal!”
Neil and Mike final
ly understood, and a wave of new energy washed over the group. No more guessing. Bizarre as this recent turn of events seemed to be, they knew with certainty, according to Dave, where the girls were or at least had been. It was time to go get them.
Chapter 21
Spruce Knob, West Virginia. Present Day.
Despite the less than consensual feelings on how they each wanted to approach their situation thus far, the three men were now on the same page. Dave, of course, had stated boldly that it was time to go get the girls at any cost, and in such a way that left no question as to whether the agenda was open to discussion. Either because of this, or because Mike and Neil simply agreed on their own, the three men were now marching through the darkening forest of one accord, both in body and spirit.
Despite the wrath he felt at times toward certain people, most recently Billy, Dave did not believe in vengeance. It wasn’t that he never felt like it, but knew that it wasn’t his place. He knew despite his relative youth, he had more vengeance to reap, if he wanted to go down that path, than most people accumulate in a lifetime. Some days it was all he could do to not allow himself to go there. As much as he hated Larry, among others, for what they had done to him in the past, he knew it was not his place to make them pay beyond what he’d already done. Not that he never wanted to, of course.
However, what was done on the battlefield, so to speak, was a different story. Dave knew that the Bible, the gold standard for morality in his mind, said to not commit murder. It said nothing about killing in other more practical or beneficial regards, such as war or in self-defense. The two were very different. Killing in cold blood was a horrible sin, both in modern-day America and in Old Testament Israel. Killing on the battlefield, however… Of all the people in the Bible, Dave could, ironically, relate to King David the most. King David was both one of the most righteous and the most violent of all time. Maybe violent wasn’t the right word. In today’s culture, the word suggests malicious intent, not just damaging physical action against another, regardless of justification. Either way, David was a warrior and lover of the Lord. When Dave read the King’s psalms, he felt as if he could have written them himself, at least as far as the feelings were involved. King David was far from perfect, but him being known as the man after God’s own heart was not a trivial thing. Most people who weren’t too familiar with the Old Testament would probably know David best by his slaying of the giant, Goliath, and this was Dave’s favorite story. The thing was, that David fighting and killing Goliath was a righteous thing to do; it was on the battlefield. Dave assumed that David struggled for the rest of his life with having essentially murdered Uriah, the first husband of his wife, Bathsheba. However, he doubted that the King had ever struggled with killing Goliath, or the hundreds of others he’d met on the battlefield from that time on. A good man should not like looking for blood, he should not enjoy killing another man. But he should not feel bad about doing it for justice on the battlefield, if it was necessary. King David probably never did, and neither did he. He didn't ask for that fight at his grandparents, nor did he ask for round two at his home a few months later. But given that those men had made the choice to harm him and his people, to attack his grandparents, that they had brought the fight to him and had forced his hand… well, he literally had never lost sleep over it. Their blood was on their own hands. Through the trials he had been through, he had learned two things about himself. One was that given the choice, he would not ever want to be involved in a violent confrontation again in his life. The other, however, was that if he was forced to, and the safety of himself, his loved ones, or even innocent strangers around him were at stake, he would fight back and spill as much blood of the wicked as he had to, and he wouldn’t feel any more guilt than David did when he’d decapitated Goliath with the giant’s own massive sword.
