by Jason Ross
Eventually, the bragging slowed, overtaken in three measures by snoring. Cameron considered hitting them right then. One man against three, him with only five bullets. He had no idea how they were armed, but based on their stories, he knew they had guns and plenty of experience using them.
He had a good idea where they were: three bends above the impoundment dam he and Isaiah built, nestled deep in a bend in the river. The marauders hadn’t lit a fire, but Cameron could smell them anyway. As he’d starved these last weeks, his sense of smell had transformed into a superhuman ability. At a primal level, the smell of any other mammal was the smell of meat. Their cloying body odor might as well have been a neon sign, pointing the way to their camp.
His brain worked slowly, and thoughts came like oatmeal being poured out of a tea kettle. He reached the conclusion that to attack these men alone would be suicide. In the dark, amidst the brush, he couldn’t see to shoot his rifle. Even if he had a thousand rounds of ammunition, hitting one of them would require more dumb luck than he’d experienced in months.
Cameron worked his way to a standing position using a tree as a handrail, and shuffled through the brush, away from the camp. He had no choice but to move very slowly—if he did anything more than stop-start-stop-start he got winded. Being three-quarters starved forced a man to be sneaky. He made no surplus movement, and no surplus noise. When Cameron waded back across the shallow, sandy river, dawn colored the eastern horizon.
He heard Isaiah’s wailing as soon as he emerged from the cottonwoods. The man sat on the homestead porch, his legs dangling over the side, kicking at the air. He reminded Cameron of a boy whose dog just got ran over. He was a weeping, snotting basket case. He didn’t judge the man, though. One of the first things they’d lost to starvation was control of their emotions. Cameron had undergone his share of crying jags.
“Wipe your face and pull yourself together,” Cameron wheezed as he caught his breath against the porch. “We’re going after her.”
“You...you know where she is?” Isaiah’s tearful eyes glinted with hope.
“Yes, but we need to go now. Just you and me. They’re over a mile away.”
In starvation terms, it was a long, long way.
Isaiah gathered his shotgun and poked his head inside to let the women know where they were going. Cameron didn’t bother to climb the stairs. He’d need every ounce of energy just to get back.
“Do they have food inside?” he asked.
“Yeah. Wheat kernels.”
Cameron nodded. “We need to eat before we go. We should eat the women’s portions too. This is a winner-take-all kind of deal.”
Isaiah ducked inside again and came out with four bowls of cold, wet mash. They didn’t bother with utensils. They poured the joyless slurry down their throats and abandoned the bowls on the porch.
“Let’s go,” Cameron said and waved Isaiah off the porch.
Cameron followed his nose the last two hundred yards into the snoring camp. The girl must’ve fallen asleep too because there was no simpering.
On the way, he’d worked up a plan, but not the kind of plan he would be sharing with Isaiah. It was the man’s daughter at issue, and it was only right that Isaiah should take the goat’s share of the risk. It wasn’t as though either of them had the energy to debate it anyway.
“You go around that way,” Cameron whispered. “Hit them from that side and I’ll come at them from this side.” He motioned Isaiah along the back trail. The night before, the raiders hadn’t so much set a sentry as made one guy sleep on their back trail—a human tripwire of sorts. Cameron sent Isaiah on a collision course with the sentry while Cam prepared to shoot the other two in the back.
Isaiah’s shotgun was barely big enough to kill a rabbit. The twenty gauge shotgun was a lot smaller than the twelve gauge shotguns police carried. The big, stumbling, half-crazed polygamist wasn’t going to do much in a fight, but he could draw attention while Cameron went to work winning this thing. To Cameron, that felt as square as a preacher’s soul. Isaiah should be grateful Cam was willing to risk his life at all. The marauders were hardened, practiced killers. So was Cameron, but it was three-against-one—or three-against-two if he counted Isaiah, which he really didn’t.
He’d told Isaiah to “hit them from that side,” but those instructions would mean next-to-nothing to the man. It sounded more promising than “go over there, stumble around like an ox, trip over their trail guard and wake them up.”
In the strengthening morning light, Cameron could already see one of the sleeping men through the underbrush. He’d shoot that guy first, the instant Isaiah made himself known. He held his rifle against a tree and peered at the sleeping man through the ancient riflescope atop the Mosin-Nagant. The other two bastards and the girl weren’t visible. The three were spread out in the dimples of sand beneath the canopy of the cottonwoods. There were no tents, or tarpaulins. They’d settled to ground, bundled up and fell asleep like animals. It made them exceedingly hard to find.
The sleeping man shucked off his sleeping bag in the mounting warmth of the morning sun. The movement startled Cameron and he pressed the trigger by reflex. Luckily, the safety was set and nothing happened. He exhaled and quietly clicked the safety lug to fire. The sleeping man settled in and shifted his rifle to the other side of his sleeping hole. Cameron caught full view of the black AR-15 rifle, as well as the handgun strapped to the man’s belt. They slept armed, and it made sense they’d have the most-lethal firearms available. They’d been raiding and upgrading for months.
“We have you surrounded,” Isaiah bellowed. “Come out with your hands up.” The copse of trees erupted.
The man Cameron had in his scope sprung from his bed and flashed through the understory of brush like a cat pursued by a vacuum cleaner. He didn’t get time to shoot. Cameron side-stepped through the brush, trying to find a window to shoot the running man in the back.
“Who the hell was that?” an unfamiliar voice rasped.
“Shut up,” another whispered.
His gun leveled, Cameron hunted for a flash of cloth or wisp of hair. He sought a target—any target, now that the element of surprise had been blown.
The once-sleeping man wore camouflage like a soldier, and it forced Cameron to pick apart every shape in the undergrowth. New windows flashed open with every shift of his weight. Sticks, logs, sprigs of grass—the men would probably be lying down or crouching. They’d be buried in the thickest cover.
“Squeech!” a shrill voice squealed under Cameron’s feet. He stumbled back. The little girl, Leah, scrambled away from him, gagged and awash in terror. He’d stepped on her. His head jerked up in alarm. The raiders had certainly heard the squeal and they’d be looking his way.
“If you don’t surrender now, we’re coming in shooting,” Isaiah yelled again. “We’re from the Rockville militia and we’re going to shoot you without a trial unless you drop your guns and come into the clearing.”
It was a clever gambit, Cameron admitted, but it’d have the raiders looking in all directions. He wasn’t nearly as safe as he’d planned, and he hadn’t seen so much as a clump of hair dance in the breeze since his target flushed. The three marauders lay low in the duff, and low meant invisible.
The little girl scurried away on hands and knees. Cameron couldn’t afford to watch her go. Taking his eyes off the raiders’ whispered voices could prove fatal. Then the three went silent. Cameron strained for the slightest shush of grass or crackling of a twig. If they remained still, and if he moved through the brush, he wouldn’t see them until he was right on top of them. He was ten yards from the trampled-down bed, which meant they were likely very close. His best play was to wait for Isaiah to do whatever Isaiah would do, no matter how long that took. Cameron stopped, waited and feared.
The adrenaline had already hit him in the back of the head like a cricket bat when Isaiah yelled and the sleeper bolted. Now, the juice turned sour in his bloodstream. His legs wobbled and his breath came
in strangled swallows. At best, the riflescope was milky and blurred around the edges. With a horse’s dose of stress galloping around in his head, all he saw in the scope was green blobs and watery patches. The optic became an utter liability—a pencil hole punched in wet newsprint. Without iron sights, he’d have to see the threat with the naked eye, find it in the shitty optic, then shoot. It’d take a long, long time.
The raiders whispered again. He placed them a little better. Twenty-five yards out, under the trunk of the thickest cottonwood.
“Gwaaah!” Isaiah bellowed and crashed through the branches. Motion flickered in the weeds. A man’s head—red, turbulent hair stuck out from under a black beanie cap. The horrible scope forced Cameron to lean against a tree trunk to steady himself. The red hair came into focus in the wet hole of the optic.
Boom! Cameron’s rifle barked.
Boom-boom-boom, boom, boom, boom-boom. Zzzzt. Boom.
Cameron’s legs folded like a rusted-out camp chair. He forced them, willed them, to do their job. He pushed up and rose against the gnarled bark of a cottonwood. His eyes flicked from knot to knot of shaded glen, mistaking sticks and logs for the gun barrel that would end his life.
A crouching man rose and aimed in the direction where Isaiah had rushed them. Cameron found him in the scope and pressed the trigger, but the trigger refused to budge. Had it rusted solid?
Cameron glanced down. The safety knob looked weird. He crouched to repair his rifle.
He ran the bolt and an empty, brass cartridge popped out, cartwheeled through the air and disappeared in the thick grass. He hadn’t reloaded after his shot at the redhead. He’d dropped to the ground instead. He had no idea if he’d hit him. He hadn’t even run his bolt. Something felt knocked askew in his brain, and he felt like a visitor in his own body.
His hands eased the bolt forward. He could feel the liquid resistance of another cartridge sliding into the breach then snicking home. He came up out of his crouch. The man with the black assault rifle crept toward Isaiah, more upright now. More confident.
Cameron centered the crosshairs on his chest and squeezed.
The rifle barked and the man vanished.
Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom.
The bitterbrush around Cameron scythed apart with incoming rounds. He flopped face-down in the sawgrass. Bits of bark and chaff thickened the dust motes like a fairy war. Bullets came in waves, scores of them chopping through the thicket like invisible machetes. His face pressed into the understory. He smelled dark soil and sage. Gunpowder and sweat.
Some gauzy part of his mind knew that the pauses in the maelstrom were his enemy changing thirty-round magazines, but his legs refused to do anything useful with the information. The bullets zipped and hacked through wood and stem, little-by-little reducing the thicket to mulch.
Da-boom! Another shot echoed from the forest to the desert and back. The rifle fire from the marauders ceased. A man screamed, long and ceaseless, like an old fashioned train whistle. Another man moaned. Cameron pressed his face deeper down into the black soil.
“Cameron...are you alive?” Isaiah called from beyond the world of dank leaf litter and raw terror.
Cameron’s muscles were locked down like a ship in the storm, every joint seized in a curl of self-protection. At first, Cameron couldn’t even make his jaw function. When he finally forced it to unlock, his voice refused to obey. If he made a sound, the maelstrom might resume.
But he wasn’t shot. He knew that much for certain. There was no dull pulsing of hashed flesh. He’d been shot before, and he remembered the pain. He was still whole at the moment. His body was hollowed out by starvation, but no blood leaked out of him.
The thought of food gripped him even tighter than his fear of having his head blown open. In the middle of a gunfight, sex, looming death, it didn’t matter. Food was his god. His holy creed. His salvation. The raiders would have some food, probably. They might be dead or wounded, and if so, he could eat their food.
Cameron crawled to his knees and looked around. More light poured through the canopy than before. It was mid-morning.
“Cameron?” Isaiah called for him, but his voice wheezed and tapered.
Nobody was shooting and there was a chance they’d won, but how was he supposed to know for sure? Isaiah was probably shot and the girl might be shot too. The marauders had fired hundreds of rounds in every direction. Cameron sure as hell wasn’t going to rush over and attend to Isaiah. The hero had been knocked out of him by the apocalypse months ago.
He’d needed to locate the three marauder assholes before he did anything else. Their food wouldn’t be far from them.
Cameron army-crawled on his hands and knees through the shattered green and toward where he’d heard them whispering. There were no whispers now, but that could mean a lot of things. He wasn’t going to jump to conclusions. He’d only barely survived. His consciousness wobbled and memory intruded on the tiny battlefield.
“Don’t stand around giving each other hand jobs until the game’s good-and-proper won,” his dad used to say, way-too-loud, when ten-year-old Cameron’s Pop Warner football team was winning a game at half-time. The other parents always treated his dad to sidelong glances, even thought Cameron was typically one of the best players. His old man was one of “those parents” at games, and if he were totally honest, Cameron might a similar parent now, with his own boys.
“Don’t stand around giving yourself a hand job,” Cameron whispered to himself as he stalked the blown-apart grove. “The game’s not good-and-proper won yet.”
Ahead, through the grass, he saw a boot against the base of a tree. It was attached to a leg, both motionless. The camouflage pant cuff had slid up to expose a white tube sock and a hairy leg. Cameron pushed his rifle out in front like a spear, finger on the trigger. He felt fairly certain he’d racked the bolt this time. He believed he had three bullets left.
A man stared back at him from the ground. His expression was difficult to read, but it seemed to ask some mundane question like, “Did you remember to pack the salt shaker when we left camp?”
Cameron noted the red hair. The black beanie was gone. The back of the man’s head had been raggedly removed. Another dose of adrenaline climbed up his spine. Cameron shivered. It was the emotional shockwave of victory. He’d slain this man. Definitively.
He struggled to re-engage his brain. He needed to think about what to do next. Isaiah called out for him every minute or two, but Cameron filed it away under “not my fucking problem.”
A better weapon. Of course. He needed a better weapon.
Cameron slid up behind the red-haired corpse and used it like a protective sandbag. There was an AR-15 next to the body in the dirt. He didn’t think the guy had shot it before Cameron clipped him in the dome, but he slid the magazine out of the receiver and checked. A stack of brass stared back at him from the depths of the curved magazine. He couldn’t tell how many rounds, but it was more than a few. Enough, probably. And the rifle’s scope was modern, open and clear. A little, red light gleamed in the middle of the optic. Cameron dumped his Mosin-Nagant in the dirt.
He took his time searching the man’s body. It was a damned treasure trove of equipment. These bastards had probably improved their gear with every home invasion. Redhead had tricked himself out like a special forces operator.
He forced himself to stuff the foil-wrapped energy bar that’d come from the man’s pocket, still warm, into his own pocket. For now, Cameron must attend to the threat of death. He needed to find the vipers in the lawn before he turned his eyes to the chicken coop. He folded himself back to the ground, unwilling to even crawl along on his knees for fear of having his head blown off.
With the AR-15 cradled in his arms, he crabbed along the contours of the earth like a centipede. After fifteen minutes of slow, fruitless slithering, he came upon a helmet on the ground and a bedroll beside it. He ignored the supplies, strewn about, and followed the tamped grass away from the sl
eeping place. He kept his belly tight to the nap of the ground with his dick dragging behind it. The adrenaline came in waves and he forced his mind to slow its mad churning.
A shape materialized in a shaft of light, five yards ahead. The bottom of a boot. It shifted, tilted, then returned to upright.
Alive!
The adrenaline hit hard again, like a miserable drug trip that refused to end. He could see no other boot, which made no sense to his addled brain. A man—probably wounded—lay on the ground, the sole of his boot pointed toward Cameron. But he could see nothing else.
If he came up to his knees, the third guy might shoot him. If he shot at the boot, the other guy might rush him. Cameron should’ve taken the redhead’s big knife, but even if he had, how would he kill a man from under his foot?
Screw it, Cameron surrendered to the adrenaline.
Blam, blam, blam, blam!
He riddled the bottom of the boot with bullets, probably sending lead up through the guy’s ballsack. The echoes died and the copse of trees returned to silence. The boot stilled. A bullet had punched a hole in the middle of the tread.
“Cameron?” Isaiah moaned.
He ignored the plea. Cameron’s every sense tuned to the minuscule sounds of the thicket. The fall of a stick. The chirrup of a bird. The susurration of the cottonwood leaves. Nobody came to kill him.
“Cameron?”
He had no idea what ground he’d covered and what ground he hadn’t. From face-in-the-dirt, he had the opposite of a bird’s-eye-view. He’d been slinking around for thirty minutes. He had no better plan, so he slid toward Isaiah’s voice—fifty yards away.
“Cameron, is that you?”
It dawned on him that his biggest threat, at this moment, was probably Isaiah. His compatriot was undoubtedly pointing a gun in his direction.
Two down. One to go. If he found one more guy, he’d be good.
