by Boyd Craven
“Marshall?” I asked.
“Hot damn, that about scared the ever-loving shit out of me,” Grandpa said, wiping his hands on his overalls.
“Language,” Jessica chided.
Grandpa stuck his tongue out at her, and her laugh was almost musical, “Just kidding. I’ve said and heard worse. A lot worse. You can’t offend me.”
“What do you want to do about this guy?” Grandpa asked, hitching a thumb in Marshall’s direction.
“The other side wants him bad. He smells like shit and looks like he’s been through the wringer. Let’s take him inside and clean him up some, get him some food. I bet he’ll be more than willing to talk.”
A very hogtied and gagged Marshall nodded his head enthusiastically.
“I don’t know, maybe we should get what we want outta him, then feed him to the hogs; they’ve been a hungry lately.”
He shook his head at Grandpa’s words comically, but I could tell he didn’t know that he was being put on.
“He’s going to be good, he has to; otherwise Raider’s going to sic him in the balls,” I said stone-faced, remembering the movie Stand By Me.
“Ouch,” Jessica said theatrically, cupping imaginary plumbing.
Marshall made some sort of sound, so I pulled the gag off and the rag out of his mouth. He sputtered and spit a few times.
“You’re the last family I would try something with,” he said seriously.
I could tell he meant it. He hadn’t wet himself, but his eyes were full of unshed tears. He was terrified and running on empty.
“Good, let me get you untied, but if you try anything, Raider will run you down. I know in your condition, you can’t outrun him, let alone a bullet.”
“Yes, sir, I’m sorry I’m here,” he said quickly and then went silent as I started on his legs.
Grandma was almost lathering Marshall with attention. Raider looked a bit jealous and ashamed at the same time. His story had started coming out in spurts as soon as Grandma had offered him the rest of the sandwiches and fresh coffee. He’d devoured it entirely, and before he could finish his stories, she sent him to the shower to cleanup. I’d been in some rough fights, but he looked like he’d been at the wrong end of several somebodies.
“Boy that dirty, I wouldn’t normally let him sit at the table,” she said to me, “but he looks half-starved and beat. Those bruises on his arms and neck weren’t from you guys today.”
I hadn’t noticed the bruises on his arms because of the caked-on sweat and dust.
“Go get him a change of your clothing…” I raised my hands up in protest, but she waved a hand at me. “Now don’t you sass me. I’ll get his cleaned. If half of what he said was true, he might have come to the only place around here that can help.”
“I… yes, Grandma,” I said and gave up.
“Do you have any more of that egg salad?” Jessica whispered as I was leaving the table.
“I’ll show you how to make some later on,” Grandma teased, “but I can make you a sandwich out of some sourdough and cheese?”
I had almost eaten my fill, but that made my stomach rumble. We’d traded a while back for some cheese with another vender when Grandma had last been at the farmer’s market, and we hadn’t gotten into it much. We had a few smaller rolls of it that had been dipped or coated in wax to keep it good for storage in the root cellar. Raider ran ahead of me and jumped on my bed, sniffing the sheets then burying his head.
“That’s where Jessica was sleeping,” I told him, turning to my dresser.
He gave out a low woof and then jumped off, running for the front of the house. I shrugged and pulled out a pair of jeans and an old plain white t-shirt. I had plenty of those, and I gave him one of the less stained ones. I wasn’t going to ask for the clothes back.
“Wes?” I heard from the doorway. He was still sort of dripping water, a towel draped around him. “Somebody took my clothes?”
“Probably Grandma,” I said, and laid the jeans and shirt on the edge of the dresser. “Dry off and put these on. Sorry, not giving up my underwear. Those get precious in the apocalypse.” I was half serious, but half joking, and I got a smile and a nod in response.
I pulled the door closed behind me and went back to the table. One of the cheese wheels had been taken out of the restocked pantry, and several thick slices were on a plate next to the sourdough. A pint jar of leftover mayo and a knife were next to it. I quickly made up a few sandwiches with both Grandma and Jess watching me. I was suddenly ravenous again.
“Where’s Grandpa and Raider?” I asked suddenly.
“Your Grandpa got a couple cheese sandwiches and headed back to the barn. He said he was almost done. Said you and Jess could handle Marshall if he had mischief in mind.”
“Shenanigans,” Jess said, smiling between a mouthful of food.
I put a sandwich on her plate and then offered one to Grandma. She smiled and took it.
“Wes, I really can’t thank you enough,” Marshall said, coming back into the room, stopping when he saw the plate of food.
“Dig in, you look starved,” I told him.
Jess pulled out a chair and I sat down next to her, across from him. My pistol dug into my side, reminding me it was there. In a way it was comforting, though not from Marshall, but rather the knowledge of what had happened at the crater of diamonds.
“Spider and his guys showed up almost as soon as we got settled. They brought a lot of people and trucks and campers with them. He was somebody Lance knew from the big city. I think they used to… uh… be in business together.”
Marshall’s words were easily recalled.
“I think it was meth. I think Lance was cooking it and giving it to Spider to sell. That’s how he got enough money to buy the Barred Rooster. Why he didn’t ask our family for a loan is beyond me. I don’t think he wanted my dad to find out. Anyway, when Spider showed up with ten guys, we thought cool. Nobody else is going to attack us at the camp there and shoot people.”
Was he really thinking of our rescue operation of the Gutheries as an attack? They shot themselves, not us.
“Then more guys showed up, and after the third group of his showed up, most of the later ones on Harleys, they came for me. I was trussed up and thrown into the bed of a truck and driven out into the country somewhere. They held me in an old shed. I saw Spider once after that; he told me that they were holding onto me while they negotiated with Lance. I only saw his guys after that. They told me if I tried to escape, they would track me down and kill me.
“I heard their plans though. They camped outside the shed and waited for word from the big guy himself. They’re going to kill Lance after they take total control of the area, and they were using me as leverage to keep him from going to war against them.”
There had been a ton more, lots of little details that had Jessica needled him with, but she had held off on a lot, because today was the day they were going to hit the farm and she wanted her mother and a few of the crew from their bunch to ‘interrogate’ him.
“We need to warn my cousin,” Marshall said with a mouthful of food.
Grandma took her sandwich and poured herself a glass of water from the carafe and walked out. Raider followed her, but didn’t leave; instead, he returned and sat next to me. I turned to Jess who was turning red, but not from embarrassment.
“Your camp wasn’t attacked by anybody we know. We rescued the bakers from your cousin and set off a distraction,” Jess said.
“Rescued? Lance said that they had come to him, but they got into a fight?”
“Where the hell were you then?” I asked him.
“Most of the time?” he said around a mouthful, “I was trying to find enough food. The first people that were shipped out of Murfreesboro didn’t get everything taken from them like the guard did soon after. I was finding places with food for the guys with the trucks to unload. Sometimes I’d find entire stretches of houses—”
“To steal from?” I asked him. �
�What if people were counting on that food when they came back from wherever they were taken?”
He quit chewing and put his head down. I could see his ears turning red, probably from shame. Jess looked at me, her eyebrows raised. I shrugged.
“There’s no food. We even checked the trains that stalled along the tracks. There were a few we couldn’t get the locks off of, but the ones we could were full of useless stuff. Dead electronics, car parts, sometimes cars. Nothing we could really use except for the gasoline. We found plenty of that.”
Jess sat bolt upright and shot me a look. I shrugged as Marshall looked up.
“I don’t know what to do. A lot of us would have starved if I hadn’t gone looking for food. I’m not proud of what I was doing, breaking into people’s places, but when you’re hungry…”
“You do things you’d never imagine yourself doing,” I said, remembering Emily and her own admission about how their husbands had died trying to become… raiders? Murderers? Marauders?
“I know me, and Jesus will settle up someday,” Marshall said, “but I did what I had to do. I pray for forgiveness every night.”
“How did Spider’s men grab you?” Jessica asked.
“I was in town, the neighborhood near the grocery store,” he said, wiping his mouth, “I was looking for food when a truck full of guys pulls up. I recognized them all and figured they were there to load up supplies to take back to camp. Spider was with them. I should have figured something was up from that.” He went back to eating.
“I have to call this in to my mom—”
“A woman and child just broke cover from the edge of the woods…” a voice crackled from the radio.
“Do you know who?” another voice asked.
“Looks like one of the mothers from yesterday. The small lady,” the voice crackled at the end, but I could make out her description, “and a kid, maybe five or six?”
“Emily and Mary,” I said quietly.
Jess put her hand across mine. We listened as they gave the report. The two had broken cover in the field furthest from the barn. The kid—Mary? —had been on a dead run, being chased by the older and more lithe Emily. The reports were cold and dry as the events were being described. The girl got into the barn half a step ahead of her mother and both were lost out of sight.
“Can faintly hear her calling for Mary,” the voice said over the radio.
“Stupid, why are they back?” I fumed.
“I can hear motors firing up,” the voice over the speaker said and in the background noise and crackling of the radio, I could too.
They sounded like chainsaw motors, but I knew what they were. Smaller two stroke motors or quads. Similar to what I’d heard when the three men had been chasing Les.
“They need to hide,” Jess said.
“A dozen dirt bikes and quads just broke cover. They were under some sort of ground cloth that blended in. They are converging on the barn. Wait one. The woman and child are running for the trees.”
“Shoot them,” I snarled at the voice on the radio.
“There’s only two men watching the farm right now,” Jess said, “They can’t take on a dozen or more men.”
“They can do something—slow them down, let the girls get away,” I said, snatching for the radio.
“Shots fired, not from us,” the voice on the radio said. “Two men to a quad or dirt bike and two sets of people just went over. Another shot. Coming from the woods?”
“That crazy bastard,” I said, suddenly feeling a glimmer of hope.
“The grandpa?” Jess asked, and I nodded to her. “Have them open fire.”
“Trucks entering the property. Took us by surprise. Couldn’t hear them from the commotion and shooting.”
Dammit. Raider whined, probably sensing my sudden tension, and I dropped hand to my side as he licked it, comforting me.
“Must be forty men here now. Woman and child were tackled just now. Shots keep coming out of the trees, but the men are returning fire. No more men down, some that went over are getting up.”
We listened in horror as the report came in, and an explosion over the radio surprised us all, making Marshall twitch and jump in his seat.
“Firing from the tree line has stopped.”
“Was that a grenade?” Jess asked into the handset.
“Pretty sure that was two or three grenades,” the reply came, and for once the voice sounded upset.
We listened as the voice told about the woman and child being trussed up and thrown unceremoniously into the back of the pickup truck. The group went through the barn and the house, a few into the tree line. Within an hour, they were gone, leaving the buildings intact. Marshall had gone from pale to bone white during everything. He’d stopped eating and his hands had a shake to them as if he had some sort of palsy. Jess turned off the radio when it was apparent there was nothing more to report.
I’d eaten more than usual today. The mantra sleep is food and food is sleep had been drilled into me by Grandpa as a kid growing up. Both of them fed the body, but right now I was feeling a lump in my gut and it was making me nauseous.
“Marshall, this is only part of what your cousin Lance has been allowing to go on lately,” I told him, trying not to snarl.
Enough of it got out that Raider looked at me in surprise, then back to Marshall, his muzzle pulling tight, showing teeth. He started growling low in his chest, and the rumble of his anger could be felt through the seat of the table. Jess put down her hand and he didn’t look up at her as she stroked his head.
“I didn’t know, I swear,” he said.
“Yesterday, they dragged a woman into a trailer and raped her, for the entire camp to hear.”
“I swear, they had me locked away for a week, week and a half?” He was almost pleading, but the tears from earlier were back and they were falling freely now.
“This is partially your fault,” I raged. “You’re going to tell Jessica’s people everything, and I do mean everything.” I stood up.
“Where are you going?” Jess asked me suddenly.
“I’m going to blow off some steam,” I told her. “You can come or watch the kid or bring him with—”
“Calm down, you’re not thinking clearly,” Jess said.
Raider stopped growling and looked up at us.
“I think I am. I am not going to be helpless anymore,” I said softer.
“Let me get Marshall to our people or have them come here.”
“I’m just… I’m headed to the barn. I need to get my mind off this a bit.”
Jessica nodded and when I stalked to the door, Raider followed. Grandma waved from her seat on the front porch.
10
I filled ten jars the same way I’d filled the first. Instead of putting a hole through the cap, I put them on tightly. I heard movement behind me, figuring Jess or Grandpa had come to see what I was doing. Honestly, I’d thought Grandpa would still be out here working. I had almost wanted to be left alone, but he often could see things clearer than I could. Even when my heart knew what to do and my head was conflicted, my grandparents were always the ones I turned to for the tie-breaking votes when it came to moral decisions.
The barn was empty, but I saw that he’d moved stuff away from his workbench. The solder and torch were over there, along with assorted nuts and bolts and some lengths of tubing. I ended up using his other end of it for pouring the chemicals. I had the rough sketch of a plan working in my head. The more I thought, the more I was ashamed that I had not acted sooner when I strongly suspected what was going on over there. I blamed myself for a time about the man I killed. Maybe I had focused on that so much to cover my own shame and feelings of guilt because I KNEW what was happening at the Crater.
Jessica’s people were watching that group, so they had to have known as well. For how long? I almost dropped what I was doing when a gunshot rang out behind the house, but I carefully put the last jar on the bench and pulled my pistol and raced to the door. I saw Jes
sica coming out of the house, her carbine in her hands.
“Was that you?” she called as we both ran for the middle of the yard where the well was.
“No, it was behind the barn somewhere. My grandpa in there?”
Another shot rang out as we got near each other, and I heard no telltale sign of a bullet whizzing by, but that didn’t stop us from zig zagging as we used the scant cover we had between the barn and the back side of it. I was tempted to run through the barn, but the back roll away door wasn’t used or oiled like the front. It would make a lot of noise and until I knew what was going on—
Crack! Another shot rang out.
We flinched, that one was close, but we couldn’t tell what direction they were shooting. Jessica made a hand motion to me. I tried to puzzle out what she was saying as a furball went racing past me, barking happily.
“Raider!” I shouted and barreled forward, forgetting cover.
“Wes, wait,” Jess called, but both Raider and I came to a halt.
Grandpa was sitting behind the barn, a grin on his face. He bent over something and fiddled with it as Raider walked up. He ruffled his hair and then stood up.
“Go see your dad,” Grandpa said gruffly.
Raider looked at him hesitantly then to me.
“Grandpa, what are you doing?” I asked him, seeing three empty shell casings on the stump he was using as a bench, the brass gleaming.
“Your grandma told me what happened. She had the window open in the kitchen. She’s nosey like that. With those hooligans taking the ladies and kids and leaving, I figured it was time for me to test out my invention.”
“What if they’re coming this direction to cut through the woods like we do? Did?”
“Never have before. Come take a look!”
“Raider, sit. Stay,” I commanded.
He did, so Jessica and I walked up slowly. She saw what he’d done and let out a feminine giggle, somewhat out of character for her. Then I saw it. He’d taken an eyebolt and had put bends in the end with the eyelet. He’d brazed the straight shank to a piece of one-inch flat stock and drilled and bolted another eye loop at the other end. That one was ground down, probably painstakingly by one of Grandpa’s files. Through that was what looked like a roofing nail. It was long and had something wrapped around the diameter of it near the head between that and the eyelet. I bent closer and saw that it was a spring, and a triangular notch was filed into the nail as well.
