“His house is still full of food. You might be able to make use of it.”
“We know. We been over there. Seen the food and left it be. Wouldn’t be right. It would be like stealin’ from a good friend. We get hungry sometimes. But we ain’t that desperate, nor likely to ever be. Old Hank had enough stealin’ done to him. First his life and then his deer. That was done by cowardly strangers, and that was bad enough.
“It just wouldn’t be right nor proper for his friends to steal from him too.”
David looked closely at the two grandsons standing beside the old man. Both were in their late teens, both painfully thin with gaunt faces. They were excellent examples of the human body when severely malnourished.
He wanted to say, “Look at these boys. They’re on the verge of starving to death. And you’re passing up free food on principle?”
But he held his tongue. He knew there was no arguing with the old man, but there was a good chance of riling him up.
And if they riled him up, there was no way of telling what might have happened.
Instead, David asked another question.
“This road… do you know how much farther it goes? Do you know how many more farms and ranches we’ll find if we keep heading north?”
“It dead-ends after another quarter mile or so. Only one more farm up there. The old Huckabee place. Good people, the Huckabees. She used to bring me pies sometimes. They’re gone now, don’t know what happened to them. Somebody else is living there now. Don’t know much about ‘em. They stay to themselves and so do we.”
“Thank you, sir. Sorry to have bothered you.”
“Wasn’t no bother, son. It’s nice seein’ a face every once in a while that ain’t got anger or meanness on it. Good luck on your hunt. I hope you find the woman you’re looking for.”
Chapter 46
Brad and David left their truck parked and walked the quarter mile to the farm the old man called the Huckabee Place.
“Let’s hit this place and then head back to the compound,” David said. “The radio’s dead and I think the battery is shot.”
With nine teams of men searching all over the county, there weren’t enough radios for everyone. So each team had only one radio to use to call for help or report their progress.
With a dead radio, the men would be helpless if they came under attack from angry homeowners, or if their truck broke down and they needed a ride back.
It was a lack of communication which made an already difficult process even more so.
So Brad didn’t argue.
“It’s about lunchtime anyway. Maybe we can get one of the girls to make us a couple of sandwiches and we can eat them on the way back.”
As they walked up the winding caliche driveway between the dirt road and the Huckabee’s farmhouse, the pair made small talk about the search and where they’d go next.
“I think we only have a couple more roads to work until we hit Highway 51. Mike and Frank have already worked the other side of 51. If we can finish up this side today, we can look at the grid map and see which areas still haven’t been worked. We can shift to a new area in the morning.”
“Good. Hopefully we can find an area a bit more friendly. I don’t know about you, but I’m getting darn tired of talking to people who insist on pointing loaded weapons at me.”
“You can’t blame them, Brad. They’ve all been through more hell than we had to endure. And it’s likely they’ve been robbed a time or two. And maybe even have lost some of their loved ones to the marauders. You’d be guarded and suspicious too. I know I damn sure would be.”
“I know. It’s just that… well, I don’t know how much experience these people have had with weapons. I notice that most of them keep the safeties off and their fingers on the triggers, even after they see we’re unarmed. I just don’t want to get shot because somebody has a nervous twitch at the end of their finger. That’s all.”
“Well, I don’t see any way we can avoid getting drawed upon. At least they’re a bit friendlier when they see we’re unarmed, even if they keep their…”
David stopped talking and instantly went to one knee.
Brad followed suit without so much as a split second’s hesitation.
“What? What did you see?”
Instead of answering, David held a finger to his lips. Then he pointed two fingers toward his eyes, and one finger toward the northwest.
Without another word, Brad slowly raised up until he could just barely see over the top of the waist-high shrubs that lined both sides of the driveway.
A hundred yards away he could make out a woman, on hands and knees, pulling weeds and stray grass from a vegetable garden.
He couldn’t make out her face, but her naked breasts caught his attention. It wasn’t every day he saw a topless woman tending to a garden.
In fact, it was a sight he’d never seen before.
He knelt back down and whispered to David.
“I see her. Isn’t it odd that she’s outside without a top?”
“I’d say so. I can’t make out her face from here. Can you?”
“No. She’s too far away.”
As one, the men raised up again for a better view.
And it was at that precise moment Sarah stood up to stretch.
“Holy cow. She’s naked all over. I wonder why.”
“Don’t know. But she appears to be about the size and weight as Sarah, you think?”
“Yes. But then there aren’t any overweight women anymore. Half the women in Texas are about Sarah’s size and weight.”
“Good point. You can’t make out her face?”
“No. But her hair color looks about right.”
“Should we go further?”
“No. There’s not enough ground cover to get any closer without being spotted. And a naked woman isn’t likely to stand there while two strange men walk up on her. She’ll likely bolt and run into the house. I reckon she’d be too embarrassed to come back out and talk to us.”
“So what should we do then?”
“If you want to wait here, I’ll hightail it back to the truck and get the binoculars out of the glove box. We probably should start carrying them with us anyway. If we can make out her face and can rule her out, we can be on our way. Or we can yell out to her and tell her we mean her no harm, and tell her we won’t approach her until she has a chance to cover herself. That should show her that we’re the good guys.”
“Okay. I’ll keep her in sight until you get back. If she goes into the house while you’re gone, we can just go up to the house. She can get dressed and then come out and talk to us, and we’ll just pretend we never saw her naked.”
“Okay. Sounds like a plan. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
While David was gone, Brad watched the naked woman tend to her chores. Under other circumstances, watching her might have awakened a desire in Brad, for he was a young and virile man.
But these were not normal circumstances. Although the woman a hundred yards before him was attractive and pleasant to look at, he had to focus on the mission at hand.
And finding Sarah was much more important than gawking at a nude woman, whether she was attractive or not.
True to his word, David was back at his side in just over ten minutes. He duck-walked the last fifty yards or so to keep from being spotted.
He rose up just over the top of the shrubs and focused the binoculars on the woman’s face.
And he studied it for what seemed to Brad to be an exceedingly long time.
“Well? Is it her or not?”
David couldn’t make up his mind.
“I don’t know. It could be. I mean, her hair is tied back, and Sarah never did that as far as I can remember. And her face… It’s darker on one side than it is on the other. And it’s puffier than I remember Sarah’s face being. At first glance I would say no. But I can’t say for sure.”
He went back to one knee and handed Brad the binoculars.
“Ta
ke a look and tell me what you think.”
Brad very slowly straightened up his lanky body and placed the field glasses against his eyes.
“Well, whoever she is, her old man is a very lucky guy. She’s got a body that could stop a freight train dead in its tracks.”
“Yeah. I noticed that too. But what about her face?”
“Oh, yeah.”
Brad studied the woman’s face for a full thirty seconds before announcing, “I can’t be sure either. I see what you mean about her face being two different colors. Maybe a birthmark, or a bruise? A bruise would explain why that side of the face is puffier. Or it could be a birth defect of some type.”
“But you agree, it could be Sarah?”
“Yeah. I doubt it, but it could be.”
“So where do we go from here?”
“Why don’t we go back to the compound, like we’d planned? We can’t call Bryan to meet us here with a dead radio, but once at the compound we can call him from the base station and find out where he’s at. We’ll bring him back with us. He can tell for sure, even from this distance. And if she’s finished her work before he gets here, no harm done. He can go up to the house with us to talk to her in person.”
As the pair made their way back down the caliche drive to the rutted dirt road, Sarah turned her attention in their direction.
The wind had changed, and she thought she’d heard voices coming from the area behind the shrubs.
But as she watched, she saw no sign of movement, heard no additional sounds.
So she went back to her task at hand and wrote it off as her imagination playing tricks on her.
Chapter 47
Bryan sat on a rock, taking a break while Bryan Too relieved himself against a tree forty yards away.
The two had conversed little all morning. Bryan had the sense that his search partner and new friend had something he wanted to say, but couldn’t find the right words.
So he didn’t press the issue. They were getting to know one another fairly well now, and it wasn’t the first time he’d seen Bryan Too in a pissy mood. Whatever was eating at him, he’d soon be over it.
The truth was, Bryan Too did indeed have something to say. And he was indeed having trouble finding the right words to use. He needed to be forceful but not unkind. He needed to be sensitive to the agony Bryan was going through, but at the same time make it clear to Bryan that he no longer supported his wild endeavor.
Bryan still steadfastly believed that Sarah was in these woods somewhere. Where, exactly, he did not know. But he was convinced that she was there somewhere, and desperately needed his help.
The others may have abandoned her, believing the dog man’s assertion that she’d been taken elsewhere.
But Bryan himself was grasping at straws.
She had to be there, she just had to be.
And if she was, then he and Bryan Too were her last hope for survival. He wouldn’t abandon her as everyone else had.
Bryan Too, on the other hand, supported his friend’s belief at the beginning. He said he’d stay with him and help search as long as Bryan wanted to stay out there.
But Bryan’s resolve, unfortunately, was stronger than his judgement. After all the time the two had spent out here, they’d uncovered not a single clue to hint that Sarah was still in the forest.
Not an additional drop of blood past the roadway. No overturned rocks, no crushed pinecones, no flattened grass where she might have lay down to rest.
Nothing.
Bryan Too certainly didn’t want to hurt his friend’s feelings. And he certainly didn’t want to discourage him, for he was suffering enough.
But someone had to tell Bryan he was on a fool’s errand. Someone had to tell him he was wasting his time when his efforts could be best used elsewhere.
That someone would have to be Bryan Too. For there was simply no one else around.
And as soon as Bryan Too found the right combination of words, he’d tell him.
Or maybe not.
For Bryan Too was about to get a reprieve in his unpleasant task.
As he walked over to his friend, their radio sprang to life on Bryan’s hip.
“Bryan, this is David. Come in.”
There was something in David’s voice, despite his efforts to hide it. It was something akin to… excitement.
Bryan was on the radio immediately.
“Go ahead David. What’s up? Did somebody find her?”
“I don’t know, Bryan. Maybe. But she was too far away to get a positive ID. We want to come and pick you up and take you back there with us.”
“We’re less than a mile north of Highway 83. We can be there in twenty minutes. Pick us up about five miles east of the compound.”
“Twenty minutes. Got it.”
David looked at Hannah, who was sitting at the security console. She had a very concerned look on her face.
“I sure hope you’re right,” she said.
“If you’re wrong and it’s not her, you’ll crush whatever life is left in him.”
“I know. If you’ve a mind to, get everyone together after we’re gone and say a prayer.”
With that, David picked up the fresh radio battery and snapped it onto his radio. He took a second fresh battery and headed for the door.
Brad was already waiting at the exit door, a backpack full of freshly made sandwiches and bottles of water not only for himself and David, but for the Bryans as well.
Chapter 48
“Now, I don’t want to get your hopes up,” David said as the two Bryans climbed into their truck. “The woman we saw was a hundred yards away. That was as close as we could get to her without spooking her. We both agreed that she looked like Sarah, but from that distance she could probably appear to look like a lot of other women too. We figured you could tell for sure one way or the other.”
There was a piece of the story Bryan was missing, and he was confused.
“Why didn’t you just walk the hundred yards and see her up close?”
“Well, as I said, we were afraid we’d spook her and she’d run. Or we’d freak her out and she’d start screaming. You see, she was completely naked.”
“Naked? Why on earth would she be naked?”
“That, we don’t know. But we were afraid to proceed any further under the circumstances.”
The conversation ceased for several minutes, each man lost in his own thoughts. Brad handed Bryan Too a couple of sandwiches, but Bryan waved his off. He was too excited to be hungry. And despite David’s admonishment, his hopes were indeed rising. It was the first solid lead they’d had since the dog lost Sarah’s scent. He had to pin his hopes on it. He simply had no choice.
By the time they turned off the pavement and onto the rutted dirt road the men were talking again, and discussing out loud why the woman at the farm might be tending to her garden in the nude.
“Maybe she just likes it that way. Or maybe you guys stumbled across a… what do they call those places where naked people all live together?”
“A nudist colony. And that’s a possibility, I guess. Maybe it was there before the freeze, and we just didn’t know about it. Maybe the woman you saw was one of the colony’s survivors.”
“No, I don’t think so. The old man who lived next door didn’t say anything about a nudist colony. He said it was a farm, but that the people who lived there before the freeze were gone now. He said somebody else lives there now, and they stick to themselves.”
“Well, I would venture a guess that most nudists stick to themselves.”
“I think we have to consider another possibility. Maybe she’s being held against her will. Maybe the way they’re keeping her there is by taking away all her clothes so she can’t leave.”
“No way. My Sarah would fight tooth and nail before she’d let anybody take her hostage. And the moment she was able to, she’d get away, naked or not. I mean, she could always cover herself with shrubbery or something well enough to get to the highway
and ask for help.”
As the truck finally ground to a halt a hundred yards from the caliche drive David said, “Well, since we don’t know what we’re dealing with, let’s be extra careful.”
“Should we take weapons?”
“No. Not yet. If we carry weapons in before we find out what’s going on, we’ll be viewed as hostile. If a gun battle starts, the woman will be in the middle of it, and whether she’s Sarah or somebody else, that would be a bad place to be. Let’s go forward and assess the situation. If it looks like we’ll need the guns, we can come back for them before we go in. Agreed?”
The other men just looked at each other. They didn’t particularly like David’s logic, but at least part of what he said made sense.
When they reached to end of the drive, Brad said, “Okay, we need to go in low from here. She’s in a field about a hundred yards from the drive. You’ll be able to see her over the top of the bushes about fifty yards from here.”
Bryan held up his hand.
“Let me go get a look at her first. If it’s Sarah, I’m not comfortable with her being on display in front of you guys while we find out what’s going on. I’ll call out to her by name. She’ll recognize my voice and know it’s safe to run to me.
“If it’s not Sarah, I’ll come back and let you know and then we’ll decide where to go from there. Whether we want to just leave her in peace or try to contact her to ask if she’s seen Sarah.”
He looked from man to man.
“Okay?”
“Okay. Just don’t go in and leave us back here if there’s any chance of shooting.”
Bryan took the binoculars and stole up the driveway to a point about fifty or so yards away.
The others said nothing, but watched as Bryan slowly rose, then put the binoculars to his eyes and scanned the horizon before him.
For a couple of minutes, the other three men sat restless, wondering what was going on.
Then Bryan returned to them, and said in a low voice, “I had a clear view of the garden. But she’s not there.”
Chapter 49
John was always the planner, the strategist, in difficult situations. It was John who’d planned out the guerilla missions against the marauders who took over the compound by force three years before.
The Search Page 16
