by Ian Daniels
“Everybody just back off!” I ordered.
“What?”
“Holy shi…”
The kids were exclaiming. Their surprise was cut short as the skinny kid had finished reloading and was bringing the crossbow back up to fire at me. I was already moving, sliding around to his side. I was about to launch a full tackle to put him down when a second shot from Blake sent the majority of the blood and brain matter in his head spraying across the remaining windows of the car.
Now I was the surprised one.
Between cries of fear, yells of anger, and screams of horror from the two girls, the big kid charged the few steps between us. He gallantly raised his sword to swing it down on me, but the wide, desperate stroke never fell. Regretfully, my Garand put two powerful 168 grain bullets through his chest. If Blake’s shot hadn’t have killed the first kid, mine would have as they traveled all the way through the fat kid and impacted the skinny one's body as it lifelessly crumpled to the ground.
“You two back off, now!” I yelled at the girls, who to their credit were not completely shocked beyond all functioning.
“Get down here,” I yelled to Blake and the girls took a couple tentative steps backwards. I then moved to kick the sword and crossbow out of everyone's reach and as soon as my attention was momentarily diverted to securing the weapons, they snapped into action.
It seems as though I had miscalculated their part in all this. The girls were not the timid pawns in this scheme, they were the masterminds. Active role players and as women can so often be, these two were understatedly perilous.
They both rushed at me from two directions, not running away as I would have expected. I didn’t hear any words exchanged and never even caught so much as a look between them; they just came right for my jugular, literally. The draw of the knife from the hip of the stacked girl drew most of my attention. I was on my heels now, taken by surprise by the unexpected move from the two, and I was within their reach much too quickly.
I needed precious distance from the knife and had only one card to play as I drove the length of my long rifle upward, aiming at the blur of a female face as it got within range. The gun whispered by, missing her chin. The quick reaction from me at least slowed her down and got her off balance as she leaned away to avoid the strike. One on one I had a chance, against the two of them together, armed, they could very well kill me.
Taking a step into the one already off balance, the Garand’s barrel buried itself in a perfect bayonet-less thrust that doubled her over onto the ground. Her less busty partner was also momentarily caught off guard, finally slowing, and maybe second guessing their actions after witnessing the violence of my hit. She quickly took the worst of the two blows when I butt stroked her square in the face.
Small rocks and dust preceded Blake down the hill above the road as he rushed to join me. From the corner of my eye I caught the movement from the first girl who while hurt, had recovered enough to flip the small knife in her hand to get what I recognized as a throwing grip.
Oh shit.
Mind on auto pilot, my arms raced against hers as she raised herself up on one hand and drew the other back to launch the knife into the air, but I managed to beat her to the finish line, so to speak. The big M1 snapped to my shoulder and my finger touched the trigger once, twice then a third and final time.
Her body jerked from the hammer blows of the big 30-06 rounds as they impacted, and dark holes appeared in contrast to her otherwise pale skin.
“Cassie!” the other girl screamed through bloody teeth as she lunged toward me only to be intercepted by a lineman-esque body tackle from Blake. The element of surprise and his pure strength and body weight played a huge advantage in the takedown, but it was the years of grappling in the Army that was evident to me as he moved.
His hit knocked her over but even as she fell, she caught sight and began reaching for the little crossbow still loaded and ready. Blake was again faster as he landed on top of her, his body balanced and efficient with practiced motions as he spun around on top of his opponent, defending off an arm that lashed out, and finally whip lashing the back of her head firmly into the asphalt with his left arm straight across her lower neck.
Still pinned down, the girl thrashed and bucked, managing to place a knee into Blake’s back. She began to turn and twist, feeling maybe some advantage, and that’s when his Beretta materialized in his hand. He drove the butt of the pistol grip into his own hip and unleashed four rapid rounds into her body. A silence over even our own ragged breathing and thumping heartbeats took hold as we paused in place for what seemed like minutes.
“Did that really just happen?” Blake finally asked rhetorically, swinging his leg over the dead girl’s form and standing upright. It was an impressive and deadly display of his shooting, and now that it was all over, we each were slightly stunned by our own automatic reactions that led to all this. The thinking part of my brain started to recover, and my mind began racing, trying to decide if everything that just happened had been necessary on our end.
“You all right?” I asked him the more important question. We both checked ourselves, our surroundings, and finally the four dead people… kids… just to be sure of what we already knew. They were each dead by our hands.
“You think she actually knew how to throw a knife?” Blake wondered out loud as he fingered the edge of the little dagger he had picked up off the cold asphalt.
“Honestly I doubt it. This whole thing was just a desperate attempt at something they probably saw in a movie or something. As soon as I figured out what she was doing…” I trailed off. I didn’t try to hide that I was upset. Not just at myself for escalating the situation out of control, but at the situation itself. None of these kids, or us either for that matter, should have even been out here on this cold day to begin with.
Even so, we had been stupid getting caught by a careless mistake. The two young guys had been stupid in their actions, and the girls, well I plain hadn’t given enough credence to the wicked side that seemed to be in a lot of people these days. You would think I would have learned that about seemingly easy women by now.
“Do we even need to go over everything that just went wrong here?” I asked Blake, pressing a fresh clip of eight rounds into the top of my Garand.
“What do you mean?” he stopped rummaging through their stuff and looked at me.
“Everything that we just did... Everything that tactically just went wrong," I amended, "do we need to actually say it, or can we just know it and not ever let it happen again?”
“Oh, yeah … yeah,” he waved me off, hopefully realizing what I was getting at.
We put ourselves in a bad situation in which the only things we did well was the killing part, which did not need to happen. This was not a mark in the win column in my book.
“When I asked how long you were going to let them go on, I thought you would deescalate, not ramp up,” Blake said awkwardly trying to defend himself after a weird moment of silence.
“Maybe at one point, but honestly I was starting to get a feeling that things were only going to go in one direction.”
“Us or them, and you chose us,” he pontificated proudly. "We're here, they're not. It was a good call."
I couldn’t tell if he was trying to make me or himself feel better about the situation. I actually thought he was justifying my actions and that somehow made me feel worse than if he had been trying to defend his own role in all this, which to me, seemed to have been at all the critical turns.
He had fired that first killing shot into the skinny kid when I probably could have gotten to him… probably. I had chosen us to be the ones to come out alive once it got down to that point, but why did I have to even make that type of a choice? I was flying by the seat of my pants by pissing them off, but I had no intention of actually killing them!
“A good call? Jesus Blake, we just blew away a bunch of kids!”
“Hmm, Jesus Blake,” he produced an unsettling grin and st
eepled his fingers, “I like the sounds of that!”
“What?” I repelled.
“Huh? Oh, kidding man, just kidding,” his features snapped back to normal. “So should we move them or cover them up or something?” Blake changed the uncomfortable subject.
Not that I was feeling all that sentimental about any of them, the guys I could almost leave where they fell, but the girls, although possibly the more murderous duo, they seemed to deserve better. Looking down at the one I had shot, her cleavage still spilling out from the low cut shirt and her body now rapidly cooling in the air, I reached down and zipped her jacket closed to her neck line, shaking my head slightly in contempt at the whole thing.
The road was relatively dry and clear, although the ground had frosted enough that digging a hole to bury them in would not be easy. Besides, we didn’t exactly have shovels and picks in our day packs, so we elected to leave them more or less as they were.
"Probably should get them out of the road... first time with a dead guy?" I noticed Blake's hesitation at touching the bodies.
"Saw a couple along a road in Iraq... never up close," he admitted.
I was almost glad to hear it. After getting the weird vibes from him that I had been getting, and still being conflicted on whether these kids had needed to die at all, I figured I could use the opportunity to my advantage and drive a point home with him.
"Well go on then," I prodded.
"What?"
"Get that kid out of the way so we can check out the car. See what they have in those bags, oh and try and find the keys, maybe see how much gas is left in the tank," I clarified.
I hoped that dragging the weight of a lifeless body killed by his own hands, feeling a stiff arm and the unnaturally cool skin... I hoped it all would put a little perspective into his head.
"Barely enough gas to move the needle," he called out to me after a few minutes had past.
"Yeah we don’t have anything to carry it in anyway," I reminded him.
"Well why the hell'd you want me to check then?" he scowled at me.
"To see if you'd do it," I huffed an evil little laugh. Actually I figured that if there was any gas in the tank we could have just driven the car away, but again, I was pushing Blake just enough to find out where his head was at.
Looking over the small pile of their belongings there really wasn’t anything we were terribly interested in. In a final sign of ironic respect, I placed the cheap sword on top of the fat kid’s lifeless body and folded his hands across it. Then taking a black permanent marker he found in the trunk, Blake wrote “thieves & murders” across the hood of the car.
Chapter 10
The walk back to the truck, changing the tire, and driving it home was nothing short of exhausting. The distance wasn’t far but the temperature was steadily dropping and after the adrenaline dump, we were zombies ourselves by the time my house was in sight. When we finally got inside and shut the night and the rest of the world out, Clint’s head tilted up and to one side and his eyes narrowed. He was obviously aware that something had gone on and that I wasn’t really in a hurry to share this last little experience just yet.
“Is that blood?” Danielle’s quick eyes and quicker brain caught the out of place detail. While Clint was content in giving me time, she was seemingly not.
Looking down, I noticed the mostly dried stain on the butt stock of my Garand. The term caught red-handed didn’t quite seem appropriate, as to me this was more like being caught baboon assed.
“Sure looks that way,” I muttered the first words I had spoken in over the better part of an hour.
“I told you there would be trouble!” she exclaimed at Clint who just gave her a conceding shrug.
In his own quiet and deductive way, seeing as both Blake and I were here now, he concluded that the situation must have been worked out and he wasn’t going to spend too much time on it until we were ready to fill them in.
“What happened?” Danielle asked while looking over Blake to make sure he wasn’t hiding any injuries.
“Couple chicks and two nerds tried a highway scam. A shank and rob, but my boy here saw it coming,” Blake explained. His summary sounded just a little too excited for my taste, and with a little restraint, I let it go.
“And where are they now?” Danielle continued trying to pump us for details.
“Not here,” I blurted out rudely. I was emotionally drained and didn’t want to think about it anymore. Plus I had more pressing concerns on my mind. “Weather is taking a turn. Temp is dropping and we might get some snow,” I told Clint.
“Radio is forecasting an inch or two, nothing major yet. A bigger system is coming our way by the end of the week,” he relayed to us. “Short wave is buzzing and there’s talk of the city organizing to get people out before the bad weather really comes in.”
“It's too cold to snow... and what do you mean ‘out’?” Blake asked, shedding his jacket and working on pulling off a boot to put next to the fireplace.
“Sounds like voluntary evacuations. They don’t think the utilities can keep up in the smaller areas. They’re concentrating on keeping the larger areas on life support. If we get hit with a big storm, anyone not prepared to be without power is going to have some real problems,” Clint expounded.
“Bigger news, the Mayor put in a call to the Governor for National Guard troops to help with the rioting and evacuations, but they’re tapped out and over deployed as it is so they can't funnel any help out here. Sounds like every official, officer and crossing guard are going to be preoccupied for a while; that could get ugly.”
“And what about us? How are we sitting?” Blake asked.
He had been unplugged from this line of thinking for a while now and hadn’t been home long enough to really look around and see for himself how well or not well stocked everything was. Even if he had had a chance to survey it, I wondered if he might have forgotten just how much fire wood alone it takes to keep a house running all winter.
"Supplies are fine. What's the violence like in town?" I answered Blake curtly and then asked Clint.
"Sounds like its starting to boil. It's wide spread in the city already and there are a few calls for demonstrations even out here by us," Clint eyed me, saying more with his look then with his words.
"How will we know if people start doing that?" Danielle asked him.
"Just look for the smoke," I answered her. "If everyone joins up and focuses in one spot, you are going to see blood in the streets. Hope the mayor has his shit together and gets out of town before the masses find him."
"Why, what'd he do that was so bad?" Blake perked up, probably hoping for a good story of corruption.
"Not a thing, but when did fact, logic, or reason ever matter to a mob?" Clint shook his head slightly, finally showing that this was wearing on even him.
That’s when I got up to go find somewhere else to be, but not before Clint spoke up one last time.
"There's something else too. I caught some weird stuff from out towards Wrangle I think."
"What'd you mean?" I rubbed at my growing headache.
"Not much to go off of, nothing to pinpoint a landmark or anything anyway... but from what I can gather, there's some people who are normally pretty active on the radios that haven’t been heard from in a while."
"Let me guess..."
"I crosschecked their handle and numbers in the notebook you had with the radio, it's your buddies."
"How long they been OOC?" I asked using the abbreviated radio slang for Out Of Contact.
"About two weeks."
A big unintentional sigh was my first answer.
"Well if you all are headed back to the house tomorrow then I guess I should take a side trip to see what's going on out in Wrangle.”
"These people that are missing, they're friends of yours?" Danielle sounded genuinely concerned.
“Yeah, aren't those your buddies that you used to go cut wood with every year? They're from that church that your ex
's parents' made you guys go to right?” Blake accurately summarized.
“Yes, thank you for not bringing them up. Anyway, the Parvish's are very… like-minded, so they're probably fine. Even so, I haven't seen them for a while and wouldn’t mind dropping by if I can. Also there could still be some good hunting out near there.”
“Sure,” Clint said after checking over the map again. "We might as well all go. We can park where Jefferson meets Long, and then go cross country easily enough. I also wouldn’t mind seeing what the highway traffic is looking like out that way too. The church and their place is what, about two miles past that?”
“Yeah, just about. I’ve hiked and hunted through there a couple of times before. Its half trees, half hills and fields. Lots of houses along the roads but we should be able to slip through them,” I answered.
"How far is it from here?" Blake asked, never being one to look at a map himself.
"By road, in a car? We'd probably never get there considering what we've just seen," I half laughed. "Overland and hunting it out at a slower pace, it's about a half a days walk."
"Well I guess that’s not so bad," Danielle surprised me with her support.
“You guys don’t need to go. You should get home and check on Karen.”
“We talked to her a little while ago, she’s still got her cough but is doing fine and the neighbors have been keeping tabs on her. A little trip to a church doesn't sound like a big deal right?” Danielle smiled.
“Okay, thanks, I appreciate it,” I smiled back.
Something in what she had just said was nagging at me though. I couldn't place it, but I seemed to have a foggy memory of just recently hearing, saying, or thinking something very similar, and I was pretty sure I didn’t remember it going well.
Our travel plans for tomorrow having been decided, Clint and Blake went out to haul in enough firewood to last us the night, which gave Danielle the chance to ask me an awkward question that seemed to have been on her mind.
