by Hetzer, Paul
Too bad, Steven thought to himself. The fucker can sure handle pain though. I’d probably be blubbering like a baby.
“Okay, asshole, put your hands behind your back,” Steven ordered.
The man laughed, yet did as he was told. Steven reached down and undid a lace from one of the man’s grimy boots and wrapped it around his thick wrists. He had to set his handgun down next to him to finish binding the wrists together. He didn’t see the tent flap twenty feet behind him part and the barrel of a gun push out in his direction. The sound of the blast hit him at the same time as the sledge hammer-like blow struck him in the center of his back. He felt warm wetness spreading down his spine and he collapsed forward over the injured man and fought to take a breath, pushing back the pain and darkness that threatened to overtake him.
Kera was beginning to cut the ropes that held one of the prone woman’s wrists to a stake when the sound of the gunshot blast caused her to dive flat onto her belly. Her hand closed around the barrel of her shotgun and she pulled it in close to her body while rolling over and up into a sitting position. She wasn’t sure where the shot had come from. She nearly screamed out in anguish when she spotted Steven lying motionless across the bearded man, however, before she could react she heard the sound of a shotgun being racked. The sound came from one of the tents across the camp on the other side of Steven and she immediately spotted a barrel sliding back out the tent flap. She swiftly and deftly fired her shotgun from her hip in the direction of the tent and was grateful to see the front of the tent shred from the load of large pellets and the satisfactory sound of a grunt and a body hitting the ground. She hastily stood and darted off to the side, approaching the tent laterally, keeping her shotgun aimed at it as she closed the distance. She picked up a long stick once she drew near to pull aside the flap of the first tent, scanning the interior with the gun. It was empty except for piles of raggedy clothes and a couple of well-used sleeping bags. She let the tent flap fall and silently approached its companion from which the shot had come. She gingerly used the stick to pull aside the shredded flap while she kept her finger tight on the gun’s trigger and let its barrel poke inside.
The kid lay on his back with his shotgun lying beside him. He must have been fourteen or fifteen years old and had a scraggly, sparse attempt at a beard on his pimply face. He stared up at the tent’s ceiling with round, bright, scared eyes and Kera watched in amazement as a large bubble of blood built up around his lips and then burst with a low pop to drain down his dirty, hollow cheeks. Pink blood frothed and bubbled from a mess of tangled flesh and glaringly-white bone around his sternum where the tightly packed balls of lead had decimated his bare chest. She entered the tent keeping the shotgun pointed at him. The light quietly faded out of his eyes and his chest expanded with its last attempt at a breath. A rattling gurgle sounded in his throat and then he was quiet.
Kera backed out of the tent and into someone, letting out a short scream when hands grabbed her around the shoulders.
“Shhh! It’s alright, it’s me,” Steven said from behind her. Stifling a sob, she spun around and wrapped her free arm around his neck, burying her face into his chest.
“I thought you were dead!” she cried quietly. “Are you hurt badly?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, hugging her back. “Are you okay?”
“It was just a kid!” she cried. “He was just a kid and I had to shoot him.” Her thoughts were in turmoil. She could easily reconcile with herself the killing of the men, but a kid! What kind of kid would be living with these monsters?
Steven pushed her back to arm’s length. “Look at me,” he demanded when she wouldn’t meet his eyes.
She raised her tear-filled eyes to his.
“He was with them,” Steven said, nodding toward the bound man. “He may look like a boy, however, he is just as much of an animal as they are for what has been done to these women. You did what you had to do. Don’t think for a second he would have hesitated doing the same thing to you.”
She nodded in understanding and wiped the tears away with the back of her hands. “I’m alright. I’ll be okay. It just surprised me is all.”
“Please...” one of the women at the tree pleaded hoarsely.
Kera stared over at her. “It’s alright. You’re safe. We’ll get you down in a minute.” She turned back to Steven. “First let’s check you out.” She spun him around to look at his back. The outside of his pack was a mess of small holes in a near circular pattern around six inches in diameter. She could see the shredded remains of clothes and other items sticking out like fluff from a busted pillow. She helped him lift off his pack and saw that the back of his khaki shirt was soaked.
“I think that’s it for the bladder in your CamelBak,” she said thankfully, relieved that it was only water.
She pulled up his shirt and saw the faint outline of a bruise forming in the center of his spine. “You’re okay,” she stated, the tears flowing freely again, and hugged him from behind. “You’re okay.” she whispered.
“Let’s take care of these girls.” Steven turned around and kissed Kera on the lips. “You were stupid to charge in here, though you did good. We got lucky.”
Kera attempted to smile. “I know. I’m sorry, but I had to.”
“I know.” Steven sighed and walked over to the bound man to retrieve his carbine.
“That was my boy that bitch killed,” the man snarled at Steven in a raspy voice.
“Yeah? Sorry for your loss, asshole.”
The man sneered at him and nodded with some inner thought while he gritted his teeth against the agonizing pain of his wounds.
Steve picked up his gun and walked over to the two women tied to the tree. He delicately unwrapped the wire that bound their necks and then carefully cut the rope that joined them together, and with his arms around their waists, eased them to the ground.
“Thank you,” a black girl with close-cropped hair growing out into an afro whispered, throwing her arms around his neck and hugging him tight. She was easily as tall as his six foot frame. The other girl, blonde haired and slight of build, sat crying quietly with her knees drawn up to her breast-challenged chest. Both were dirty and bruised, with cuts on their necks where the barbed-wire had dug into it. Their wrists were purple and swollen from the strands of tightly bound rope.
“Don’t thank me,” Steven said quietly to the two girls as he unwrapped the black girl’s arms from around his neck. “That’s your heroine over there,” he said, indicating Kera, who was freeing the third woman. “I didn’t think it was worth the risk trying to free you, however, she got it in her head she was going to do it with or without me.”
“Were we worth the risk?” the blonde girl asked between sobs without looking up.
Steven smiled kindly at her and knelt next to her, brushing dirty, matted hair away from her face. “I’ll let you know.”
“Well, thank you anyway,” said the black girl in a subdued voice. She had southern drawl mixed in with an inner-city inflection. “They had us up on that tree like ripe fruit, ready to be plucked for whatever sick sport them motherfuckers could dream up. You and your woman were God sent.”
Kera had freed the hands and ankles of the other woman, who had rolled up into a ball and retched violently for a moment. With a whimper she had stiffly scurried away from Kera with a mad, suspicious look in her eyes.
Kera cautiously approached her. “Wait,” she said and reached out to touch her gently on her battered back. The woman cried out and swatted her hand away, crawling further away while making a sad mewling sound.
“I won’t hurt you,” Kera cooed at her. “We’re here to help.”
The woman was curled up in a ball again sobbing uncontrollably. Kera heard her moan ‘Diana’ and ‘my baby’ in between her sobs.
Steven and the two women watched the scene unfolding before them.
“She was here before us,” the black girl offered. “They have done some god-awful things to her and made
it clear to us that we was next.”
“She had a daughter,” the blonde girl said when she got control of her own sobs. She still had her knees drawn up tight as if ashamed of her nudity, in stark comparison to the black girl’s boldness.
Steven walked over to the tents and went inside. He found a couple of old flannel shirts that obviously belonged to the men and a couple of bottles of water and brought them back to the women, whom he judged to be in their early 20’s. They were both rubbing their hands and wrists as the numbness faded and pain coursed through them with the return of the blood flow.
“Thank you,” they both said as he helped them into the stiff, smelly shirts. They opened the bottles and thirstily quaffed the water in long, noisy gulps.
“There are more clothes inside the tent. Help yourselves to what you need.” He got up and walked over to Kera, who was still trying to console the other woman. He knelt down beside her a few feet from the curled up sobbing female.
“How is she?” he asked in a low voice.
“She’s been hurt bad,” Kera replied in a whisper, the words nearly catching in her throat. “One of those bastards burned her nipples off.”
“Goddamn monsters!” Steven spat, looking back over his shoulder at the bearded man who gazed malevolently back at the both of them.
He turned back to Kera. “One of the other girls said she had a daughter.”
“Diana, my baby!” the woman moaned, overhearing Steven.
“Where is she?” Kera asked the woman.
“No, no, no, no, no, no!” the woman muttered over and over again, staying curled up on the ground.
The other two women came over now, dressed in ragged clothes they had liberated from the tents. One set a bottle of water by the woman who grabbed it up and instantly drained it, losing half of it down her chin as she rushed to quench her awful thirst.
“She ain’t all there anymore,” the black girl said, looking down kindly on the older woman. She laid a moth-eaten wool blanket that she had brought from the tent over the naked woman’s shivering body.
Kera thought the woman appeared to be in her early to mid-thirties. She had greasy, dark-brown hair, still wet with the dead man’s piss, and what was probably a pretty face, although presently deformed and mottled with black and blue bruising.
“I’m Dontela, by the way. As in ‘don’t tell-a your momma that you’re pregnant.’” The black girl grinned revealing straight, white teeth. “At least that is how my momma said I got that name.” She hitched her thumb at the blonde girl standing beside her. “This here is Katherine. She’s a sorority girl. We’re both from the University of Virginia. At least we were before all this shit went down and those three inbred redneck honky assholes found us.” She grinned sheepishly. “No offense.”
Steven smiled back, wondering which epithet she was apologizing for. “None taken. I’m Steven and your heroine for today is Kera.” Kera smiled wanly at them while caressing the shoulder of the crying woman on the ground.
“Any idea what her name is?” he asked.
Both shook their heads.
“As I said, she was here before us,” Dontela said. “Those motherfuckers brought us here a couple a days ago. Been here long enough to see too much, though. They had some fun with us, but hadn’t roughed us up too much yet.”
“What are we going to do with him?” Kera asked, nodding toward the man on the ground behind them.
They all stared back at the bearded man who was stoically enduring the pain of his gunshot wounds. He blew them a kiss.
“Leave him for the Loonies,” Steven said. “Speaking of which, I don’t think we should stick around here long. I don’t know if all that racket we’ve made will draw them in like flies to shit.”
“Loonies?” repeated Dontela. “That’s funny. I like that. You’re a comedian, aren’t you? We call ‘em M-80s. You know, ‘cause them people are M-A-D, stark raving mad, and can go off like an M-80 firecracker when they see you.”
Steven smiled to himself. He liked this girl. “Whatever we want to call them, we don’t want to be here if they come swarming up this valley from the highway,” he warned, the smile fading with the thought of having to run from another large group of the murderous creatures.
“Someone help me with her,” Kera said as she tried to lift up the battered woman. Dontela bent down and took her other arm and helped get her to her feet. The woman moaned out the name Diana again and softly cried ‘No’.
Steven gasped when the blanket slid from her. Her nipples had been burnt to blackened bits of charcoal and shallow, blood-encrusted knife slices traced patterns like a jigsaw puzzle across her breasts and stomach. Her nose was smashed flat to her face and one eye was swollen shut. Blood and fluids leaked anew from her ravaged vagina and anus. The woman couldn’t stand on her own feet.
“She’s not going to be going anywhere like this.” Kera stated as they carried the woman over next to a tent while Steven dragged out an old sleeping bag for her to curl up on.
“The sounds echo weirdly in these hills. Maybe they won’t come.” Katherine had crept up behind Steven. “Maybe we’ll be safe here for now,” she stated hopefully.
“Unless we make a litter and drag her behind us I guess we don’t have much of a choice except to stay here for the time being.” He sighed and stared at the dense woods around them. “Kera and I are going to have to scout around and see if there are any Loonies in the valley while the two of you stand watch.”
“Stand watch? What, we in the Army now?” Dontela laughed.
“You have to always be on your guard,” Steven responded with a serious tone. “We can’t become complacent. Complacency kills.”
They dragged the bearded man roughly over to the tree that the girls had been bound to. He screamed several times while he was brusquely pulled across several protruding roots causing his wounds to bleed even more profusely. They bound him to the tree with the wire and rope he had used on the girls.
Kera took care of the woman as best she could. After giving her some more water and applying some anti-bacterial salve to her wounds she laid her on a sleeping bag and covered her with the ratty blanket. In minutes the woman had fallen into a fitful sleep.
Steven gave the men’s two rifles to the girls. One was a Savage bolt-action 30-06 while the other was a Marlin 30-30. He made sure they understood how to use them and told them to be relaxed but vigilant while he and Kera took a look around the area for any Loony activity. Katherine held the rifle away from her as if it would blow up in her hands. The girls soon located the camp’s food supply and ravenously tore into their first meal in several days.
“Keep that asshole in your sight at all times. You don’t want any surprises while your backs are turned,” Steve warned them and he and the bearded man exchanged sneers. “We shouldn’t be gone for more than a couple hours.”
“You’re not going to leave us here and not come back, are you?” Katherine asked in a frightened voice.
“We’re leaving our packs containing most of our supplies here,” Kera said. “We’re all together as a group now. Like a family. No one is abandoning anyone.”
The girl nodded graciously and returned to scooping pears, dripping sugary syrup from a can into her mouth with her dirty fingers.
“We got shit covered here,” Dontela proclaimed, patting the sling of the Savage she had across her back.
Steven nodded at the tall, proud-looking girl. “I think you do.”
Steven and Kera took off up the valley in the direction of the river. They planned to hike up the far mountain to the ridge and reconnoiter the highway and train tracks for any sign of the Loonies. If all was well they would circle down the slope and come in the back way in the direction from which they left. It took the full hour to get to the head of the valley, ford a broad, rocky stream, and hike up the slope to the crest of the mountain. With relief, they saw that the road was quiet in both directions; only the corpses of cars and trucks littered the highway. Behin
d them the railroad tracks were void of any movement. They could see where the trestle spanned the river a mile or so away. Thankfully the Loony horde had disappeared. Further to the west the valley that the highway ran through widened on both sides of the road with the sprawling suburbs of Charlottesville. After their run-in with the horde this morning, they both agreed that that would need to be avoided when they resumed their trek to the west.
“We’ve gotten lucky again.” Steven sighed. “I know I’ve had enough excitement for one day.”
“Yeah, me too, lover.” Kera put her arm around his waist and leaned into him. They were both exhausted and hungry, their legs rubbery from hiking up the steep mountain slope, and the daylight was burning away rapidly.
“We’ll walk the ridge for a while and then cut back down to the camp.”
“I would rather just lie down here in the grass and take a nap in the sun next to you,” Kera said wearily.
“That would be heaven,” he admitted. “Unfortunately, your charges are waiting for you.”
“I know.” She nodded. “I can wish though.”
They followed the ridgeline for about a half mile before turning down off of the mountaintop along a small gulley that grew in size and turned into a deep, cascading creek where springs of clean, cold water fed into it. They finally reached the damp forested floor of the valley where the small creek dumped noisily into a steeply banked swiftly flowing stream that bubbled and churned over a rocky bed. After carefully crossing over the fast-flowing stream by hopping from one exposed slippery rock to the next, they headed downstream, navigating along its bank in the general direction of the squatter camp.
Steven came across them first. The putrid smell of death alerted him to the carcasses before his eyes found them. He blinked his eyes savagely, his breath catching in his throat with a gasp. Kera stepped around him and stifled a scream with her hand when she saw the bodies. What appeared to be two women and a child of around 12 lay rotting next to the stream where they had rolled down the bank. The two women were barely recognizable, as the flesh had mostly rotted from the bodies or been removed by animals. The girl’s body was fresher, bloated with gases and grotesque with stiffly outstretched arms and legs. She was horribly mutilated. Both of her breasts had been brutally hacked off and she had been beaten about the head so badly that the skull had an alien appearance to it where the bones were shattered. Her body was laced with cuts and welts from what must have been a nightmare of torture. Her female parts were a bloody mess. They had both seen plenty of death before, although not like this.
