Outnumbered (Book 6) Page 6

  While supper was being prepared far upwind, we gathered briefly to say good-byes to our departed friends and relatives. Without speaking out, I wished my disillusioned friends could have appreciated the precarious situation they had placed themselves in by refusing to acknowledge the horrible and deadly dangers surrounding us.

  The burial detail finally finished. A large pot of stew simmered over a low fire while the men stood guard along the rivers edge. The women disrobed and then waded into the cold, clear water to scrub off the stench of death. Before they emerged from the river, their clothing got a dousing. They put on clean clothes and hung the wet ones on the clothes lines that were still intact. Then it was the men's turn to wash before supper while a small group of women stood armed guard.

  For our third day of travel, we rose at dawn. Before breakfast was cooked and eaten, it was apparent the sky would stay overcast. We lingered longer than we should have and were late getting started. Most likely, we would never visit that desecrated spot again. Previous good memories had been overshadowed by the recent horrible acts inflicted there.

  A strong breeze blew from the south and the air smelled cleaner, as if it had been filtered through a rain storm. The temperature hadn't risen much since dawn, and we all felt rain was imminent. The wagon crews took the threat of rain seriously and searched for our rain gear from the piles of supplies while we rode.

  We'd been on the road about two hours when, as expected, a fine drizzle began. Within the hour sporadic summer showers pummeled us and most of us were soon drenched to some extent.

  At lunchtime, we pulled in under the leaky roof of an abandoned gas station at a small, wide spot in the road to eat our cold meal in a relatively dry space. Smoked meat, cornmeal tortillas and watermelons made for a quick meal while we vigilantes joked and bantered back and forth. No one joked about the intent of our mission. That was too personal to speak about lightly.

  Traveling had become easier for the horses when the road gradually left the hills behind us and flattened to a rolling prairie. We moved on from under the awning thirty minutes later and continued in the rain for two more hours until we entered West Plains. The deserted city had claimed a population of twelve thousand inhabitants prior to the Zombie Apocalypse. Now it was just another ramshackle remnant of what had been. As we left the east edge of town, sunrays shone through the dissipating cloud cover, and the temperature rose noticeably. Water quickly drained away, and steam rose from the warm pavement. I was relieved to get rid of the sweltering raingear.

  Before supper that evening, my ratty, well-used twenty-two year old edition of a road atlas lay spread across a soiled counter in a ravaged Shell gas station. The distance left to Poplar Bluff was close to ninety-miles. I figured three days of riding would put us near the city. Then we'd be faced with the difficult task of finding the murderous scum we had come to deal with. We spoke about the possibility of being detected first and walking into an ambush. Everyone was charged with scouring the areas around us and being vigilant.

  Three days passed uneventfully as we rode toward Poplar Bluff. The weather was still hot in early September but cooled nicely after dusk. By the position of the sun, I guessed it was about three in the afternoon when our destination became visible across the eastern horizon. We made camp on a knoll west of the outskirts of the city where large trees provided shade. An adjacent open area provided tall grass where the horses grazed on long tether ropes. The horses had enough water from the recent rains pooled in a clogged roadside drainage ditch.

  I held a group meeting to discuss our plan for locating the murderers we sought. We would form three, three man crews on horseback to conduct a cursory search of the city proper. The group we sought wasn't expected to be in town, but we needed to assure ourselves of that before we searched the rural area. Richard, Morgan and I would lead the crews. Vernon and Adam would ride with me, Mitch and Paige would go with Morgan, and Larry and Bryon would be with Richard. Adam, Paige and Bryon had volunteered to ride three of the draft horses bare-back. The draft horses weren't nearly as fast as the riding horses, so if a crew encountered the renegades they would likely have to dismount, take cover and fight. Hopefully, the rest of us might hear the gunfire. After two days of crisscrossing the city without seeing any signs of human activity, we changed our search focus to the areas outside the city limits.

  The city's municipal building had been ransacked years earlier. The nine of us converged on the building in the morning hours of our fourth day there. After we'd searched through cabinets and desk for over half an hour, Paige discovered a cache of local county maps in the office of the mayor's secretary. With detailed maps of the area in hand, we returned to camp and planned our search. We split the area into nine sections. Each crew would canvass the roads in an assigned sector and ride approximately thirty miles from the city. As I feared, the first two days were unrewarding.

  At mid-morning on the third day, my crew was north of the city and back in another section of the Mark Twain Forest. We rounded a sharp bend on an oil and chip country lane. A lone rider stood dismounted while his horse drank from a nearby pool of water.

  Vernon immediately drew his assault rifle from the scabbard and sighted on the man thirty feet away. He yelled, "Don't move you son-of-a-bitch or I'll cut you in half."

  It was clear from the tone of his voice that we'd hit pay dirt. As Vernon spoke the young man's hand quivered and edged toward a holster on his right leg. I'd drawn my Glock and then fired two rounds into the ground between his feet. "If you touch that gun, I can just as easily put a bullet between your eyes. It's your choice; do you want to live or die?"

  He raised both hands over his head and glared at me uncertainly.

  Adam was on the ground and held his Glock inches from the young man's head. "You killed my dad and a bunch of my friends. Make a move, and I'll gladly blow your frigging head off."

  I dismounted and then cut a length of rope four-feet long. Our prisoner was in his early twenties, pleasant looking with long blond hair and a short scruffy beard. His horse was an Appaloosa, I thought

  When our prisoner's hands were tied behind his back, Vernon lowered his rifle and shoved it back in the scabbard. He dismounted and strode to our prisoner and spit in his face.

  Before I could act, Vernon's right arm cocked back, and he delivered a vicious punch to the man's stomach and followed it with a left to his face as he doubled over and fell. "That's only partial punishment for killing my parents and grandmother and raping my sister and cousin."

  Vernon had set the pace for what needed to be done. The dirty but necessary interrogation fell to me. I drew my hunting knife with my left hand as I squatted and placed my right knee across the man's throat. The heavy, eight-inch-long stainless steel blade flashed in the sun as it raised and then plunged down into the outside flesh of my victim's left leg. He screamed loud and long and quivered as the blade tore through flesh. The blade was twisted and he screamed louder. As his breath ran out, the scream subsided. I hesitated for effect before the blade rose cleanly; blood spurted from the incision.

  I asked, "What's your name?"

  He summoned enough bravado to say, "Fuck you."

  My demeanor was harsh as the blade plunged into the inside flesh of the same leg. The young man screamed even before the blade entered and was again twisted for maximum pain.

  "Your real name Mr. You?"

  His face paled, and he was more talkative. "Everett."

  "Last name?"

  "Morrison."

  I stared into the young man's eyes and saw indecision mingled with fear. I spoke softly with an edge of coldness, "I'll ask you a question. If I think you're lying, I'll slaughter you like a hog at butchering time.... Where's your group's camp?" The knife withdrew and was poised high above the right leg.

  Loathing and pain were clearly evident on the man's face; his body quivered and sweat formed on his brow. He summoned enough courage to not speak. The knife fell and the first two inches of sharp, pointed
steel punctured his leg. He screamed and his face contorted. "Now, Dammit talk to me or I'll keep punching holes in you until you do!"

  His vision swiveled between me, Vernon and Adam, as tears flowed. "I didn't want to do it, my dad and the others made me."

  I leaned on the knife and forced it down another inch. His eyes widened and I placed my right hand over his mouth as he screamed. "Focus, Everett. I asked you a question, and I want an answer. If you keep screwing around, you're going to bleed out before I can patch you up."

  He sweated profusely. "Up this road about three miles to the Plesantdale Church sign."

  The blade dug deeper and twisted again. "And then?"

  He grimaced and whimpered. "Take a left and turn right at the second road."

  "And?"

  "The fifth dirt lane on the left."

  "And?"

  Tears flowed freely down Everett's cheeks. "The cabins are a quarter mile back in the woods."

  Five minutes later, I had a head count of the number of people in their gang, how many were currently onsite and the number of buildings in the compound. Everett claimed two men and five women were watching the captive women and tending to the children.

  We cut the prisoner's shirt and pants off and used the cloth to slow the blood flowing from three punctures. He was none too clean. He'd live until we got him back to our camp where Carmen could stitch him up. He was only alive because I didn't trust him to tell the truth. Woe be to him if he'd lied to me.

  Before we left later that night, I'd explained to Everett in graphic detail what would happen to his testicles if he'd lied to me about the location of their compound. The hammer and nails in my hands gave my threats impetus. He swore he'd told the truth. I read the fright in his wide eyed stare and believed him. Well after dark, Richard and I rode back to where we'd found and abused Everett. We rode ahead under a clear sky and a full moon until we saw an old, weatherworn sign pointing left toward the Pleasantdale Baptist Church. It was difficult to read in the feeble moonlight because of the large number of bullet holes in it. So far our directions were spot on.

  At the second road, we stopped and listened for ten minutes before turning right. All we heard was the chirping of night insects and the hoot of a hunting owl. Our pace was slow and cautious up to the fourth lane on our left. We turned into it and followed the rutted trail through brush and saplings for what we judged to be approaching a quarter mile. The saplings beside us grew close together and many were over fifteen-feet tall.

  Ahead in a clearing, a two-story frame house stood silhouetted under moonlight. Outbuildings lay scattered around it, and a large ramshackle barn overlooked all of it. Looking closely, we saw the barn's roof was swaybacked and partially collapsed on the near end. We dismounted and tethered the horses to the post of an old, rusty barbed wire fence. Cautiously, we approached the house with rifles in the ready position. Up close it was apparent the farm site was uninhabitable. I pointed in the direction of the fifth lane and set off with Richard covering our rear. We stepped over the decrepit wire fence strands and moved stealthily through the dense stand of weeds and saplings.

  In twenty minutes, we passed through a fifty-foot stand of mature trees to another clearing; it matched the description Everett gave us. We moved back ten feet and took positions behind a dense, fully leaved deciduous bush. The luminous dial on my old wind-up wrist watch showed the time was twelve minutes past two a.m. I whispered to Richard to try to nap and I'd wake him at four. I counted six cabins beside the barn. All six had roofs at a steep enough angle to accommodate lofts inside. Usually that would be where children would sleep. From where I sat, it appeared they'd been built haphazardly with no logical pattern to their placement.

  At six, Richard gently placed a firm hand on my shoulder and pulled me from a shallow, uneasy doze. He pointed through an early morning mist at a single male figure as it stumbled through dawn's half-light to an outhouse.

  Close to my ear, he whispered as he pointed, "I saw dim light in that building on the far end a little after you went to sleep. Then seven women went to the outhouse. Two of them had guns, guarding the other five. I'm sure I recognized our women, so this is the right place. After they finished, lights were lit in that building in the middle. I imagine they're up early to cook breakfast because of the smell of wood smoke."

  I threw him a thumbs up in the shadowy, subdued light, blinked and rubbed the sleep from my eyes. My butt squirmed on the rough ground, and I settled in to wait and watch.

  Shortly after five, another male made the trip to the outhouse. Ten minutes later, three more women and a gang of kids from toddlers to teens made the walk to the stinky two-holer shack.

  Near six, a woman left the kitchen and stopped at a brass bell the size of a large watermelon mounted on a vertical post in the yard. She clanged it four times. Over the next ten minutes, two men, a women and the gang of children of all ages hurried to the kitchen for breakfast. The sun poked above the horizon to our right. We reassessed our position and agreed to stay where we were.

  The thought of breakfast caused hunger to set in. I pulled two strips of jerky from a pocket; Richard did the same. As we chewed, several big mongrel dogs appeared at the kitchen to eat the first of the morning food scraps tossed by a young woman I didn't recognize. They barked, snarled and fought over the offered food. To my dismay, a big tan colored mongrel sniffed the air and wandered in our direction. It stood at the edge of the clearing and snarled and then barked lightly. I tossed the half piece of jerky I'd been eating toward the dog. It jumped to the side before lowering its head to sniff the object. In one gulp the meat disappeared. The dog was silent but continued to stare in our direction.

  The pack of dogs had dispersed. Molly stepped from the kitchen to dump more scraps onto a large round metal pan, and they quickly raced back to the feeding area and began their fight routine again. Our dog lost interest in us and trotted off to join the fray amid the promise of more food.

  I motioned to Richard that it was time to leave. No one had gone to the barn, so it didn't appear anyone would be leaving anytime soon.

  We tromped back to our horses and gave them water from canteens we'd left on the saddle horns before we quenched our thirst. Instead of going to the main road, we cut through a field overgrown with weeds and trees thirty-feet high to the next private lane. That home site was desolate, also. The house that had stood there was a charred ruins, and the barn and outbuildings leaned sharply; they were in the process of falling down. I guessed no one had lived there for the past forty years. We figured our wandering had put us three-fourths of a mile from the enemy.

  At our camp, we told the group what we'd seen. Morgan immediately pointed at Everett, "Then we don't need that sneaky little bastard any longer."

  Richard and I nodded in unison. No one in our group moved to stop him.

  Morgan frowned and was red faced as he turned and walked to where a rope secured the prisoner to a small tree. Everett's hands were tied behind him and he was still almost naked. He received a harsh kick in the ribs as Morgan un-sheathed his knife. He reached down to grasp the rope tied to Everett's neck and then cut it loose from the tree.

  "You murdered my family and good friends, you worthless piece of shit." With nary another word, he pulled Everett along behind him and disappeared deeper into the woods. The prisoner limped as he begged and stumbled along. He knew what was coming to him and stammered pleas to live. Wildlife noises quieted as Everett begged for his life and then screamed until it was cut short in mid-breath.

  We all suspected what Morgan had in store for Everett and accepted it. The Law of Retaliation we'd adopted demanded an eye for an eye, and a life for a life. We didn't need fancy lawyers to confuse the issue and tell us right from wrong and inject a ton of maybes and what ifs. No one spoke until Morgan returned to our clearing. When he sat, we resumed the conversations his actions interrupted.

  Richard and I slept most of the day amid the subdued noises made by fifteen other people,
dogs and horses. After dark we again rode toward the enemy camp. Our whole entourage followed behind. Everything we'd brought was tied down as tight as practical to prevent banging and clanging that might alert an enemy member who couldn't sleep and had moved outdoors. We turned off the main road onto the third lane with the intent of establishing our base in the clearing around the burned house. The horses were muzzled, and the dogs were on the wagons on short leashes. The dogs were used to running free and didn't like being tied down, but each was assigned a handler to keep them quiet.

  Everyone understood there would be no cooking fires built until our mission was achieved. The sight or smell of smoke close-by would alert our enemies of our presence. As I prepared to leave, I told the group, "We're going to reconnoiter, but if you hear gunshots, come running. We'll have been seen, and we'll be outnumbered."

  Two sentries were scheduled on two-hour shifts throughout the remaining hours of darkness. The rest of our people were snuggled in for the night when Richard and I again set off. The time was three-o-three a.m.

  We reached the edge of the enemy camp at three-forty. The previous morning's routine was repeated as the captured women were rousted early to cook breakfast. Later, the bell rang to announce food was ready.

  At eight, children played in the clearing. The kidnapped children from our dead friends’ camp held back in a separate, close group and appeared numb and dejected by what was happening around them. Once again only two men were seen. After breakfast, the captive women came and went, always under the scrutiny of their armed captors. As the sun climbed furtively over the tree tops, several captive young women were directed to an iron kettle twenty feet from the nearest building. Each carried an armful of clothing and bedding. Two other captives carried water in plastic buckets from a well to the smoke-blackened pot. A large rank of split firewood stood a short distance away.