The Storm: War's End, #1

by Christine D. Shuck

  He moved on to his room. It too looked just as he had left it and was far more of a mess than Jess’s room could ever be. Dirty laundry, unmade bed, and his belongings were scattered about, a maze of clutter on the floor. He was surprised by it somehow.

  “I was such a complete slob,” Chris muttered to himself. He closed the door and headed for his parents’ room. It was empty. The bed was made and his mother’s pajamas were neatly folded near the pillow on her side of the bed.

  “Perhaps everyone is outside,” he thought and headed back through the kitchen to go into the backyard. The bread was baking in the oven and he could tell it was nearly time to pull it out. Over the years they had all developed a nose for it. Flour was short, so they ate every bit that came out of that oven. If they didn’t want burned bread it was in everyone’s interest to keep an eye (or nose) out.

  He opened the sliding glass door and the sun blinded his eyes. He had little time to wonder how morning had turned to late afternoon and a pulsing ball of fire that hung in the west. Dreams held by no standards, they knew no scientific laws or rules of physics. His gaze was drawn to his parents standing there, arms raised in the air. His father looked sad, his mother was scared and crying. Michael Aaronson spoke softly, “Please Chris, don’t shoot your mother. Shoot me.” Chris looked down and realized the rifle in his hands pointed directly at Julie Aaronson’s chest.

  “It’ll be okay, son. I know they told you to do it, just shoot me and let your mother go.” But the rifle barked out one shot and he watched his mother fall to the ground, blood staining the front of her shirt. His father turned away from Chris, his face set in sorrow, and knelt by Julie Aaronson’s body, hands to her chest. Her eyes were wide and staring, and there was a single teardrop on her left cheek. Chris’s father didn’t seem to notice the blood bubbling over his hands and soaking his clothes. He kissed his wife, then turned back to look at his son, “Oh son, what have you done?”

  It was his scream that gave him away and brought the two soldiers to his hideaway. The dream faded and Chris opened his eyes to the sight of a rifle barrel and booted foot. He followed the boot up to a leg, up further to the chest and the scraggly beard and gap-toothed grin of Tim Easter. The bastard looked delighted to find him, “Hey there shithead, where’d you think you were headin’?” He twirled his rifle around and smashed the butt end hard into Chris’s forehead. His head bounced once on the ground and before he blacked out he heard Easter and another soldier laughing.

  Pain. A slow drip making its way from his forehead, down the left side of his head and falling slowly, one drop at a time, from his cheek. It was dark out. But he could smell beans and feel a smidgeon of warmth from the campfire. Chris tried to move and couldn’t. No surprise there, his arms and wrists were bound behind him. He could feel the bark of the tree rough against his back. Easter was practically growling at the other soldier, one Chris didn’t recognize, “You best give me that jar, asshole,” he snarled at the other man, “I found it and I’ll be damned you gonna eat it all.” From the looks of it, the two soldiers were about to come to blows over the jar of pickled eggs they had found in Chris’s pack.

  Tim Easter was a small man, no more than five foot six, if that. He was skinny, although recently he’d put on a little weight after his stash of meth had dried up. He was still stringy though, and he smelled bad.

  Not just body odor, but that teeth rotting in your head kind of thing. He fingered the holster that held his knife, trying to decide if it was worth cutting the other soldier to get his share of the food back. Chris tried to get a better look at the other man, but when he moved his head pain lanced through him and he let out a small groan. This earned him the attention of both men. Through the haze of pain he could see they were both grinning with sadistic delight. He didn’t recognize the second soldier at all.

  “All right! Our little runaway’s waking up!” Easter crowed, looking ready to do more damage. He stood up, the pickled eggs forgotten and unsheathed his knife. “Y’know, Lieutenant Cooper said to bring you back, but he sure didn’t say I had to do it all in one piece.”

  Chris sneered back at the little man, “Lieutenant Cooper is a psychopath, and you’re just his sad little suck-up, Easter.” It was stupid to trade insults when he was at such a clear disadvantage. The fist that smashed into his face loosened a tooth and broke his nose.

  The second blow knocked him out for the second time that day.

  As he slowly regained consciousness he noted that the jar of pickled eggs was empty. So were the beans. His stomach roiled and his head throbbed. Now he was bleeding from a cut below his right eye, copiously from his broken nose and the earlier cut on his forehead. Chris looked as bad as his head felt.

  He spit a small glob of blood out of his mouth and focused his eyes on his two captors. Easter turned back at him, eager to hit him again.

  He didn’t like fair fights ‘cause he never won them. This advantage was more his style, “Wake up and ready for more, you little fuckwad?” he sneered. When Chris didn’t respond he just smiled more, “Your little sis, now she was always ready for more.”

  Chris tried to still his response, but his pulse quickened and he stiffened, it wasn’t just his blood that was making him see red. Easter grinned over to the other soldier, “Burton, you ever have any of that sweet ass? The bitch was in the second room on the left, she was good at fucking.”

  Burton spoke up, “Oh, yeah, nice sweet ass. You could tell she liked every minute of it. Shame Coop killed her.” Chris’s fury at the two had been building to frenzy until the last remark. He stiffened against the bindings, unsure he had heard right. Easter was watching closely and he nodded.

  “Yep, he strangled those stupid whores, both of ‘em. Caught up to ‘em the same night as the storm and made both of ‘em pay for all the trouble they’d caused. Shame too, ‘bout your sister, shit; she was good for at least a few more weeks of screwin’.”

  Chris lunged against his bindings and felt one of the bindings give just a little bit. He could hear a hoarse scream of pain, and then recognized that it had come from his throat. Not Jess, oh God, not Jess. He shouldn’t have listened to Allen, he should have gone in there, died fighting, anything but let them try to escape on their own.

  He howled in grief, “You’re lying!” If Jess was dead then he was all alone, no family, no one to go home to.

  Much to Easter’s and Burton’s disappointment, the news that his baby sister was dead, quickly turned Chris’s initial anger and denial into shock and unresponsiveness. All of their taunts were met with silence.

  He did not move when they kicked him or hit him and he said nothing at all.

  Easter and Burton left him tied to the tree all that night, and didn’t bother offering food or water.

  They had also taken a great deal of pleasure recounting Allen Banks’ fate to Chris. He had no idea that Allen was the only truth they told that night. All that Chris knew was that no one who had escaped that night had gotten very far. He was the only one left. Eventually they stopped talking trash and grew bored. As the fire settled into deep orange coals, the two soldiers wrapped themselves up in their blankets and fell asleep. They were undisciplined, good only for simple missions like fetch and retrieve or securing food and weapons; they didn’t think to take turns staying awake to keep an eye on their prisoner.

  As the two soldiers slept Chris worked on a section of the rope, sliding it up and down, up and down over the rough bark of the tree. It was close to dawn when the rope finally broke. He didn’t run. He retrieved a knife discarded from dinner on the ground near the campfire. Then he quietly arranged the bindings so that they appeared intact.

  Easter and Burton had been tasked with bringing him back to the camp. They would be heading back today. If he ran, they would chase him, and likely bring even more men with them. He couldn’t risk it.

  Some dark part of him wanted them dead anyway. That dark part relished the idea of spilling their blood and ridding the world of t
heir filthy, stinking presence. So he waited, eyes closed to slits, until Burton roused first. The man stretched and yawned and staggered off to the woods to piss, kicking at Easter when he passed him.

  Easter cursed and sat up, looked over at Chris and decided to have himself even more fun. He threw his blanket off, stood up and swaggered over to the tree where Chris hunched and feigned sleep. He unzipped his pants and aimed the stream of urine straight at Chris’s head. What happened next was so quick, so brutally final, that Easter didn’t even have time to scream. As he fell to the ground, blood gushing from his genitals and then, a second later from his neck, he just looked confused. He died that way, on the ground, his simple little mind unable to understand how a man could move so fast when he was tied up.

  A few minutes later, Burton’s body joined Easter’s. Chris stood there for a moment, looking down at the two lifeless bodies at his feet and feeling nothing but a red haze of pain inside and out. Monsters like these had killed Jess. Monsters like these had killed his parents, his friends, and everyone he loved. He dragged their bodies into the thicker forest, as far from the road as he could stand to drag them. He pulled brush, dead tree limbs and leaves over the bodies, returned to the campsite and tamped out the last of the smoldering coals. With luck, no one would find the bodies or the campsite for a long time, perhaps never.

  He rinsed his hands and face as best he could in a small stream nearby. He had collected the revolver from Burton, and another knife from Easter. He gathered up all of the food that was left, which wasn’t much, and stuffed it into a rucksack with a blanket. Burton’s blanket had smelled slightly less rank than Easter’s, but they were both wretched, stinking things. He picked the lesser of the two evils, hitched the rucksack onto his shoulder, stuck the revolver in his jacket pocket and headed for the small pickup truck they had been driving.

  He’d drive it out of gas and then ditch it, it was limited to roads and he wanted to disappear, that meant going on foot and probably cross-country. But for now, he wanted some distance between the bodies and him. If they caught up to him again, they wouldn’t bother trying to take him back. After what he’d done to the other two, they’d shoot him on sight and apologize to Cooper later.

  The tank showed as half full. That was good luck, the first in days. Chris figured he could get a hundred, maybe even 150 miles from the truck before it ran out of fuel. As he steered the truck onto the road, Chris took a long look up the road he had come from before he turned and headed south. Home wasn’t home anymore. Not without Mom or Dad or Jess. Home was gone and so was the life he had known. He didn’t know where he would end up, but he couldn’t go back, not ever.

  The faded green pickup headed south, all alone on the road, as the rain started up again.

  The Cabin in the Woods

  “The cabin we found. It came at a moment when I think we were both just ready to sit down and call it quits. We were hungry, exhausted, and so tired of running. I can still see the sagging, moss-covered roof in my mind’s eye. In that moment, and in the days that followed, it was nothing less than paradise. It was a place of quiet and of refuge. Our bodies slowly began to heal; our nightmares and fears quieted some. And in some ways, our hearts began to heal there too.” – Jess’s journal

  Jess began her day by stretching and, as Erin kicked out in her sleep, falling with a solid, painful thump onto the hard wood floor. “Ow!” She inhaled dust and sneezed violently.

  Erin shot up out of bed at the noise and cracked her head against a small shelf on the wall above. Dust and books rained down on her, “Ow! Aw, crap!”

  Both girls glared at each other, Jess clutching her sore hip, and Erin her injured head, before they began to laugh. It was funny, in a ‘Three Stooges’ kind of way. They laughed, swore as their body parts hurt even more, and took a good look around. The daylight from the two small windows was weak; outside the rain had continued through the night. It was now morning and it showed no signs of stopping. It made a quiet thrum against the roof of the cabin. The trees, which were still barren of leaves, shook back and forth with the strong gusts of wind that rattled the windows. Jess could feel drafts each time it did. It was obvious that the cabin was meant only for summer use.

  Without a fireplace or insulation, it was barely livable in the nippy spring nights. It certainly wouldn’t be warm enough during a harsh winter. But for the moment, it was shelter and that was exactly what both girls needed.

  There was one sizable leak above the kitchen sink and another directly above the toilet. The one above the toilet had managed to soak the floor all around and a small rivulet of water angled across the uneven floor and pooled in the center of the cabin near the oil lamp and the remains of their dinner from the night before.

  Erin eyed the wet toilet, grimaced, “Damn it, I really need to go!”

  She grabbed a bowl from the cabinet near the sink and pulled the curtain closed after her and cursed even more as she realized there was no toilet paper and that the toilet was bone-dry. Her bright idea of catching the drips with the bowl didn’t work very well. The water simply splashed out of the bowl and showered her with small droplets which sprayed in every direction like a fine mist. She set it aside and let the roof drip onto her head, cussing and laughing simultaneously.

  “Y’know. We might as well leave the lid open.” She called out to Jess, “It’s dripping right over the toilet, at least that way there’ll be water in the bowl!” They ended up doing just that.

  The small stove generated a little heat, but both girls were worried about making it last, so they turned it off as soon as the water had boiled and split a large can of stew between them. With breakfast out of the way, and the rain still coming down at a good clip, they had little they could do except explore the inside of the cabin. Erin didn’t have any shoes to go mucking about in the rain with and Jess had no desire to explore outside by herself.

  They went through all of the food – canned, dried and powdered, and estimated how much they had. They were lucky, whoever owned this cabin had stocked it very well. With both of them eating three meals apiece, they had about three weeks supply of food on hand, all the water they needed thanks to the creek, a rifle and ammunition, the ability to fish, and relatively dry shelter. For the moment, they were safer than they had been in a long time. Jess took note of the dates on the labels. All of the food had expired within the past eighteen months but none of the cans were bulging or damaged. It was probably safe to eat and the previous evening’s meal had been edible enough. She wondered what had happened to the owners of this little cabin and why they had never returned to it.

  “Erie, you know how to shoot, right?” Jess asked her friend after they finished planning out their meals for the rest of the day.

  “Yeah, sort of.” Erin replied, “I took this handgun shooting course when I was thirteen. My dad and Toby usually went hunting while I stayed home with Mom or came and saw you, so I don’t know much about rifles.” She pulled the rifle out of its box and began inspecting it.

  “It can’t be too much different. Let’s see...” Erin began to mutter to herself. She found a tattered manual in the box and began to reference back and forth with it. Soon she was busy assembling components and digging into one of the boxes of ammunition.

  While Erin lost herself in the task at hand, Jess kept busy by putting all of the food back away and then started up the stove. She boiled more water to make hot cocoa. The yearning for some hot, creamy chocolate running over her tongue was almost painful. The water was running clear and cold from the sink spigot. It was slow and had very little pressure. The fact that it was running at all meant that she didn’t have to go out into the rain for it and that sounded more than okay to her.

  The rain subsided and the bright rays of the sun were peeking through the clouds. When the water came to a boil, Jess carefully dissolved the contents of the packets into two freshly rinsed mugs. Erin had disassembled, reassembled, loaded and was now peering through the sights of the rifle as
she aimed it towards a wall. “I’ve got it all figured out,” she announced, and then sighed in pleasure as Jess handed her a steaming mug. “So it’s pretty straightforward,” she paused and took a cautious sip of the hot chocolate, “Oh, damn, this is good.” Her eyes rolled and she grinned at Jess over the rim of her cup and then noticed the sun for the first time. “Hey, the rain has stopped! Right on, we can go out and take a look around – maybe even do some target practice!”

  “We aren’t shooting that thing off until we are sure there isn’t anyone around for miles.” Jess interrupted firmly. “Sound like that carries, y’know.” Erin looked deflated. “But you can show me what you were doing and hell, maybe we can try hunting something if the coast is clear.”

  The girls savored every last drop of their hot chocolate and then Erin pointed out and named each part of the rifle, referencing the manual every so often as she disassembled and reassembled it again for Jess’s benefit. She took care to show her the safety and explained how to load the rifle and how to aim and then let Jess dry-fire it. Jess paid sharp attention. If anyone came near them she figured she would fill them full of holes and then ask questions. At one point she swiveled the gun around, crossing in front of Erin. Her friend ducked, grabbed the rifle, and barked, “Don’t ever point a firearm at anyone unless you mean to kill them.”

  Jess rolled her eyes at her friend, “Erie, ease up, it isn’t even loaded!”

  Erin just stared back and said, “Jess, always assume a gun is loaded. Always treat it like it is. Otherwise you’ll end up shooting yourself or someone else. My dad knew someone who had owned guns for years.