“Do you know, Barb?” JoAnn asked.
“Possibly slavers of some sort,” Barb replied. “They don’t seem to want to hurt us. We must be more valuable to them undamaged. That makes me think we’re the cargo.”
“They killed my dad,” JoAnn moaned, starting to cry again.
“That’s why you need to stay strong,” Barb said. “Dwelling on what you’ve lost won’t help anyone. It doesn’t help you, your father, or anyone here. Everyone needs to be strong, both for themselves and for everyone else. That’s the only way we have a fighting chance.”
“What good is that going to do?” asked a woman. Barb couldn’t get a good look at her in this light but remembered her from when their hoods were removed. She looked to be in her mid-forties with bad teeth. She wore a tank top that revealed old tattoos with crude lines and misspelled words. Her skin had looked like leather in need of some saddle soap.
“We can better support each other if we stay strong,” Barb explained. “We’ll be in a better position to take advantage of any opportunities that might present themselves.”
The woman gave a dismissive laugh that turned into a smoker’s cough. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. I was out of food and only had one thing left to trade. My body. If that’s what these guys want they’re welcome to it as long as they keep me fed.”
Barb stared in the direction of the woman. “I’m not so easily won over. Anything they want from me, they’ll have to fight to take.”
“They’ll get what they want in the end. There’s more of them than there is of you,” the woman said. “Might as well give it up and take what enjoyment you can. Ain’t no use getting beat up over it.”
While the woman was outnumbered in her opinion, there were others who agreed with her. Barb didn’t approve of the woman’s attitude but she bit her tongue. It was easy to be judgmental when you had a bunker full of food. Barb was not in the same situation as most of these other women. If she were, perhaps her view would be different. Especially if she had kids to feed.
It was on the tip of her tongue to express her defiance, to tell these women that she would not be taken so easily, but she quickly realized she needed to keep any plans she made secret. It was possible one of these women might offer to trade information about her for special treatment. Maybe they would whisper her plans into a guard’s ear while she was sleeping. Another prisoner could give her up for as little as a solitary cigarette or a swig from a bottle of liquor.
Barb needed a moment to herself. She walked to a distant corner and slid down the wall, her legs stretched out in front of her. The movement hurt and she realized she’d need to be more careful until she healed up. JoAnn came and sat beside her.
“What are we going to do?” JoAnn whispered. “How are we going to get out of here?”
Barb shook her head but that movement hurt too. She was getting a headache from dehydration. She needed to remind herself to drink as much as she could when water was available to them. “I don’t know. I don’t want to say too much in front of the other women until we know who we can trust. Some of them I’m not so sure about.”
“Me neither,” JoAnn agreed.
“My dad will come for us,” Barb whispered. “As long as he can find us, he’ll take us home.”
“I hope you’re right, but he better be bringing more than just himself. There are a lot of men out there.”
Barb smiled in the darkness. “You don’t know my dad. Twice this many would not stop him. Three times this many. He’s a very determined man. And a very dangerous one.”
10
In the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, fall often brought cool nights but the daytime temperatures could be quite warm. Shirtless, Ragus felt the sun burning his skin, the padded straps of his pack gnawing into his shoulders, but he did not want to stop moving. His jeans were sodden and rivulets of sweat were running down his legs. He’d been forced to cinch his belt tighter, trying to keep the wet jeans in place. Like the pack, they rubbed and abraded his skin yet the pain only urged him forward.
His water was gone, the empty bottle clipped to his belt beating a cadence against his thigh as he chugged steadily onward. He thought he recalled a stream running close to the road a short distance ahead of him. He would stop there and use the mini Sawyer filter Conor had given him to refill his bottle. He’d once fished the river for horny heads and smallmouth bass with his uncle Orbie just a week before Orbie was crushed to death in the mines.
Before reaching the stream, he was forced to slow to a walk when he was stricken with a cramp in his hamstring that refused to go away. When he could not walk it out, he stopped and desperately massaged the muscle, so taut and painful it felt as if a rod were being threaded through the meat of him, like a hunk of chicken being shoved onto a skewer. From being on the wrestling team he understood what was happening. He had sweated the salt from his body and needed to replenish it.
If this was wrestling practice he would simply go to the cooler and filled a paper cup with a sports drink, but he didn't have any, nor did he have any salt pills. He walked in agony for twenty minutes before the cramp began to ease. By that time he was passing the Gas & Guzzle, a local convenience store. He eyed the shell of the store, the windows broken out and discarded packaging littering the parking lot.
His leg ached from the cramp and he didn’t know what lay ahead of him. He could be running for hours or days so he decided to make a quick pass through the store to see if he could find anything of use. The store smelled of mildew, sour milk, and rotted food. Broken glass ground beneath his shoes, gouging the narrow oak planks on the floor, dark as ebony from decades of traffic. Ragus started with the drink coolers and found them looted of nearly everything. There was not a single can, bottle, or quart of beer anywhere. In fact, everything alcoholic in the entire store was gone. Ragus wondered if the alcohol had been purchased in the days after the collapse or stolen after the store was abandoned.
Every soft drink, every sports drink, and every bottle of water was also missing. Only the spoiled containers of milk were left behind, many of them intentionally busted against the wall in what passed for lowbrow entertainment. The food shelves had been ransacked and nothing remained there except for plastic bags hiding bread and hamburger buns beneath dense wigs of powdery green mold.
Checking for nuts and beef jerky, foods easily eaten on the run, Ragus was disappointed to find the racks empty. He tilted the displays carefully and looked beneath them. He managed to find a half-dozen beef sticks and a pack of peanuts that had been lost in the looting. The find brought a smile to Ragus’ face. He picked the bounty up and shoved it in his pocket.
Walking toward the counter he saw that every tobacco product, whether intended for smoking, dipping, or chewing, was absent from the shelves. Near the counter he found a half-pot of desiccated coffee sitting on the burner of a Bunn coffee maker. Beside it, mold filled the transparent vat of a slushy machine, ready upon the restoration of power to dispense an especially vile concoction.
Ragus studied the condiment center, looking at napkins, straws, and seasoning packets that had been passed over by looters. Then he was struck with an idea. Rifling through the packets, he found plenty of sugar and salt. They had apparently been of little use to anyone but they would be to him. They should allow him to make a passable sports drink from his next water refill. It would be without the artificial flavoring and coloring he was used to but should prove sufficient to make his muscles stop locking up on him.
He took as many of the packets as he could find, putting them in his pack. His clothes were already so saturated with sweat they wouldn’t survive in a pocket. Deciding he’d wasted enough time there, he gave in to the pull of the road, the pull of his responsibility. He stepped back on the road and forced his tired muscles to resume plodding along the pavement. Every few minutes he would veer off the shoulder of the road and find a prominent branch clearly visible from the road. He snapped the tip of it but left it
dangling in place, a marker he hoped would show Conor he was headed in the right direction.
As for his own certainty that he was headed in the right direction, Ragus was relying on the scuff marks of homemade horse shoes on the paved road and the trail of horse manure littering the highway. Certainly there had been other people on horses who’d come this way but Ragus was certain he was on the correct path. The horse manure was so abundant it was like following a small town parade.
Sore and nearly exhausted, Ragus sought to distract himself from his misery. He began looking at the paved road as the course of a videogame and the piles of manure as reward tokens. He tried to avoid thinking about how far he had to go. That would only depress him. He simply forced himself from one pile of shit to the next, making a ding sound between panting breaths as he ran past each. The game worked for a while but he eventually reached a point where he was too tired, too sore, and too depleted to continue running. He slowed to a walk.
He was feeling demoralized when he spotted a solitary apple tree in a field beside the road. Even this late in the season there were a few apples stuck to the branches. He could only imagine how wonderful they would taste. Making sure there was no one around to bother him, Ragus climbed up the shoulder of the road and ducked through a barbed wire fence.
With a little climbing and branch shaking, Ragus brought down several apples. They were not perfect and he had to trim away a few wormy sections but they tasted delicious. The sugar spread through his body like a magic potion, revitalizing him. He ate two and put the rest in his pack. With his craving temporarily abated, he wanted nothing more than to lie down at the base of the tree and close his eyes, knowing he would drop right off to sleep.
He held his hand up and saw the sun was four fingers off the horizon. He had about an hour of daylight and should keep moving. If he could keep walking he could cover a few more miles before dark. Though a nap was tempting, there was nothing he wanted more than to find Barb and keep her safe until Conor caught up with them. If the opportunity presented itself, he would rescue her himself, but he would not put her in danger by acting stupidly. He would never be able to face Conor if his actions led to Barb getting hurt.
Ragus got back on the road and returned to playing mind games to distract himself from the pain. He told himself that he was not trying to walk five miles but instead only trying to walk to that funny shaped tree a hundred feet away. Then from the funny shaped tree he was only walking to the crooked fence post that jutted erratically from the otherwise orderly row. From the crooked fence post he was only walking as far as the narrow bridge.
Distracted by such games, he walked for another hour and then on the wafting evening breeze he caught a smell that made his stomach knot like a clenched fist. It was the spicy aroma of roasting meat. He prayed his drooling did not deplete what few fluids remained in his dehydrated body.
Booger Hole Creek wound like a blacksnake through the khaki-colored pastures of western Tazewell County. Near where it crossed under Highway 460 there stood a roadside barbecue restaurant that had been in business for around forty years. The building had once been a barn. Bright paint and flamboyant graffiti covered the fences and exterior walls. With the smell spreading through the air, Ragus was almost convinced they had remained opened despite the collapse, but the herd of horses gathered in the parking lot told him another story. This had to be the people he was following. He had caught up to the kidnappers.
Relief came with the awareness that he’d successfully tracked them this far. There had been multiple instances over the course of the day where Ragus wondered if he was on the right trail or not. He experienced moments of doubt where he thought he would never find Barb or his body would give out before he did. Even at those moments, he could not go back and face Conor as a failure. He could not go back empty-handed. It was not even a possibility.
With his relief came equal concern from the sheer number of men before him. The group had grown since he’d last seen them. There must've been other scouting parties, perhaps doing the same thing, and they had rejoined each other for the trip home. He didn't know how many of the horses were stolen on this raid or how many they brought with them to haul back women and gear, but he thought he could be looking at sixty or seventy horses. How many men went with these horses? Certainly more than he could deal with by himself.
He was having difficulty processing the information his eyes were feeding him. In fact, he had difficulty thinking at all. Thoughts came and went, trailing off without resolution. Any attempt at deciding a course of action got derailed by things as simple as the sensation of sweat running down his spine. It dawned on him that his inability to think coherently was likely a side effect of the dehydration. He needed to get water before he did anything else.
He skirted to the left and found an isolated section of stream not far from the encampment with a good flow of water. Conor told him that it was always better to draw from moving water if you had a choice. He added one of the salt packets and three of the sugar packets to his water bottle then filled it using the Sawyer mini filter. It tasted exactly like what it was, an unflavored sports drink. It was sweet and a little salty. Not entirely appetizing, but he could feel it working its magic inside his body from the first drink, restoring his chemistry and bringing him back to life.
Looking around to reassure himself that he was alone, he slipped off his shoes and socks. He took a seat on a rock jutting from the bank and eased his feet into the cold water. Resting them on the smooth stones of the creek bottom he was overcome by how good it felt. His poor feet had been tortured by the run. He pulled one out and examined it, finding a few hot spots that would probably be blisters by morning. As good as it felt, he wished he had the time to sink his entire body into the creek and let the water pour over him. He had no doubt he’d emerge a new man, ready to take on the world, but he did not have that kind of time.
Perhaps now that he had found Barb's kidnappers, he would not have to push himself so hard. If they were just walking their horses now that they were out of town, he could walk fast enough to keep up with them. It would be so much easier on his body than running the entire time. He fished around in his pack and found a bandana. He soaked it in the water, raised it over the top of his head, and squeezed it, allowing the cool water to run over him. He could imagine the cloud of steam rising from his overheated skull.
He soaked the bandana again, wiping down his face, his neck, and his chest. It both cooled and soothed him, restoring some of his confidence. Whether it was the drink or the effect of the cool water on his body, his mind was beginning to function better. As it did, he began to turn over scenarios. He glanced at his Henry rifle propped against a tree and knew there was no way he could march into this group of men, wipe them out, and rescue Barb.
He wished he had the ability to do that. He wished he was capable both in terms of skill and firepower to do such a thing. He fantasized about it, storming in like a wraith, like an avenging angel, and killing all of them. He was just a kid though. Any such action would only get him killed and leave Barb still in the hands of her kidnappers with no one to leave a trail for Conor.
Ragus was distracted by the movement of a fish near his foot. He had a hand line, hooks, and sinkers in a tin of survival gear in his pocket. He could find enough insects here to catch fish with little difficulty but he was afraid to build a fire for cooking them. If he played the wind right it would carry the scent of his fire away from the group at the restaurant. It was also unlikely those people would smell anything over top of their own cooking fires but he was scared to take the chance. While it was hard to pass up food, he had to be disciplined. He had to be tough. Hunger was just pain and he could handle pain.
The sun dropped over the horizon while Ragus sat there cooling his feet. The play of light in the changing leaves was beautiful around him, a peaceful oasis in the chaos of his world and his life. He was almost too tired to drink anymore but he forced himself to finish that bottle, then he
made another and drank it also. When he finished both bottles, he made another to take with him, and refilled the empty hydration bladder. The full three-liter bladder added a lot of weight to his pack when he was running today but it would be more tolerable if tomorrow’s pace was slower.
Ragus reluctantly pulled his feet from the soothing water and wiped them down with the bandana. They were sore to the touch and would be worse tomorrow. He used his mostly dry t-shirt to finish drying them off. His water bottle had several wraps of duct tape around it and he tore off some small squares to adhere over the blisters forming on his feet. As much as he hated to, he pulled his clammy, sweat-soaked socks back onto his feet and shoved them into his reeking boots.
When he stood, he felt significantly better than when he had arrived at the creek. He put his t-shirt on and walked back to the road. He needed to find a good vantage point from which to surveil the camp. The light would fade quickly now and he needed to learn all he could about the men who had taken Barb. He ate the peanuts and two of the beef sticks as he walked. If he was going expend this level of energy, he couldn't ration food. His body would not have the endurance to push all day long and he would bonk and collapse. He decided that when he found a spot to hide he would open a can of tuna and eat that too. He had never really liked tuna but he liked hunger even less.
11
Conor followed the trail by the same prominent features Ragus did, focusing on the distinctive marks made by the homemade rebar horseshoes. That was not his only assurance he was on the right path. He couldn't miss the branches bent at intervals along the edge of the road. Someone was snapping the end of tree branches as they went, a clear means of trail marking, and Conor was certain it was Ragus because he’d taught him the technique. Not only did those bent branches reassure him he was going the correct way, it told him the boy was safe.
The Mad Mick: Book One of The Mad Mick Series Page 7
