Bad Moon On The Rise (34 page)

“
I’m not joining your damn
army of fruitcakes,” Ramsey said. “I don’t rebel against the rigid
stupidities of one world by following the rigid stupidities of
another.”

There was that low, gravelly laugh
again. “I take it you’re not a joiner?” Grubb asked.

“
Damn straight,” Ramsey
said, spitting on the floor.

Without warning, a horrible scream cut
through the night air. It sounded like a wildcat was getting a hot
poker jammed up its ass. I about shit in my drawers at the sound
and Ramsey looked as scared as I had ever seen him look.

“
Don’t worry about that,”
Grubb assured us, even as the agonizing screams continued. “I’m
just looking into your story and some of the men are reluctant to
talk.”

I thought there was a slim chance one
of his men was standing just outside the cabin, screaming his fool
head off just to scare us… but I doubted it. Grubb seemed way too
pleased with himself, like he was welcoming this chance to show the
men who was boss. I was suddenly very glad I had blabbed
willingly.

Ramsey didn’t seem glad about anything
and Grubb noticed.

“
I see your capture
rankles you,” Grubb said soothingly to him. “Don’t be embarrassed.
The man who brought you in once taught covert operations for the
military. He, quite literally, wrote the book on the very
techniques you were attempting to use.”

Ramsey didn’t look mollified,
especially after another scream rent the air, only to stop
abruptly. Too abruptly.

“
Are you going to let us
go or not?”  I asked. “We have nothing against you. Or against
your men. This is your mountain. I acknowledge your right to deal
with the situation in the way you see fit. All I want is the boy,
so I can take him home to the people who love him. To his
people.”

“
His people?” For the
first time, Grubb seemed less than calm. “His people poison
themselves with drugs, kill each other over the most minor of
offenses, live in squalor and debase themselves daily by attacking
their own. We have done him a favor by taking him from ‘his
people,’ as you say.”

That made me hoppin’ mad. As someone
who had few people left, I wondered who the hell he thought he was
to be putting down someone’s family, especially when he didn’t even
know them. Corndog Sally worked her whole life, over eighty years,
from sun-up to sundown. Who was this man to judge her?

“
First of all,” I told him
angrily as Ramsey stared at me, horrified. He looked on the verge
of weeping at what he knew was to come. “You had no right to take
the boy away from people who have raised and loved him. No right at
all.”

“
The boy is better off
with us. We will raise him as white and give him a purpose in
life.”

“
A purpose? As in his
purpose is to destroy his own people by  flooding their lives
with drugs? What kind of purpose is that?”

“
You put a lot of stock
into the concept of ‘his people,’” Grubb said.

“
That’s because I have
none of my own, and it burns my ass when people who do have others
who love them don’t get the chance to return the favor. Trey
Blackburn has people who miss him, and you have no right to keep
him from them just because they have a different color skin from
you and your men.”

“
I have nothing against
blacks,” Grubb said smoothly. “We do not target them. As I said
before, people self select.”

“
Oh, self select this,” I
said angrily, shooting him the bird. I held it up high, in front of
the camera, as Ramsey groaned in frustration.

Grubb laughed at me. “You are quite
the hot head, aren’t you? What am I supposed to do with
you?”

“
Let us go,” I said
immediately. “Just let us go and let us have the boy. None of us
will say a thing. I don’t even know what you look like and we’ll
never be able to find our way back here again.”

 “
Maybe you could
not, but something tells me your friend here could.”

Ramsey looked a little worried at that
one. When he didn’t speak up, I felt like I had to say
something.

“
Look, my friend here is
no friend of the law, okay? He lives on the same side of it as you
and your men. The last thing he wants to have happen is to get
involved with an investigation and have the law crawling up his
ass.”

“
A wanted man, is that
it?” Grubb asked curiously.

“
I wouldn’t exactly say
wanted,” I said quickly when Ramsey turned to me with such a
searing look that I was afraid he might porpoise toward me, chair
and all, and start biting the crap out of me. “He’s more like a
person of interest. In a whole lot of unsolved cases. He’s one of
the ‘usual suspects’ you might say. He’s the last person who would
turn you in, and me? All I want is the boy.”

“
You ask a lot of me,”
Grubb said. “And I don’t even know your name.”

“
I don’t know yours,” I
pointed out. “All I know is ‘Grubb.’”

“
Call me Chuck,” he said
with a laugh.

“
Call me Debbie,” I
suggested. “Debbie Little.”

“
Is that your real
name?”

“
Is ‘Chuck Grubb’ yours?”
I countered.

He ignored the question. “Okay, Chuck
and Debbie it is.”

“
Will you give us the boy
and let us go?” I pleaded.

“
I need to talk to the
boy,” Grubb conceded. “And see what his wishes are. I can’t promise
you anything more than that.”

“
How long will that take?”
I asked.

 “
You are pushing
your luck, Miss Little. I suggest you say no more.”

“
I heartily echo that
sentiment,” Ramsey said firmly.

Even I can put a sock in it sometimes.
I heard the crackle of a walkie-talkie of some sort as Grubb issued
orders to his men.

The two silent guards reappeared
immediately, one to grab my arm, the other to cut Ramsey free of
his foot bindings and help him to his feet. But they were smart
enough to keep Ramsey’s hands tied behind his back.

“
Where are we going?” I
asked.

“
Don’t worry,” Grubb
assured me in his deep voice. “You’ll be safe where we’re taking
you.”

Or so he thought. Ramsey’s warning
about the men rang loud in my memory. I was not willing to let
myself relax with anyone but Grubb. Who knew how many of his men
had gone rogue? Who knew what they might do to me?

I was contemplating this possibility
as the guard dragged me out of the cabin and stepped me through the
dirt yard toward a path that led into the woods.  I didn’t
like it. We were heading toward the storage sheds.

Worse, to my left, under the lights
illuminating the clearing, I could see Trey walking slowly toward
the interrogation cabin, his face wary but determinedly
brave.

I felt a wave of panic, wondering what
the kid might tell Grubb about us if they turned up the heat. Who
knew where Trey’s loyalties lay after a couple weeks of
brainwashing? And he was just a kid. He wouldn’t hold up for long.
This wasn’t good.

My escort shoved me out of the
clearing and onto a darkened path. I inched away from my guard,
closer to the forest’s edge.

I was thinking about trying to make a
run for it, guards and rifles be damned. But before I could do
anything about the impulse, all hell broke loose in the compound
and, in a heartbeat, everything in my world changed.

An explosion rocked the compound. The
ground trembled beneath my feet as a massive boom rolled over the
clearing, enveloping me in sound and fury. Seconds later, a
fireball shot up into the sky from the other side of the property,
near where I’d seen the storage sheds.

The men reacted instantly. They poured
from the dining hall and recreation building; they ran shouting
from their bunkhouses and appeared from the shadows, all converging
on the cabin where I’d seen the weapons being stored. Forgotten, I
stared as they formed a brigade line in under a minute and started
distributing rifles and shotguns as fast as they could,
hand-to-hand, each of them taking two or more before disappearing
into the shadows. There were dozens of men, all fit and
well-trained, all eager to seize the moment their leader had warned
them would come. They were under attack and they were fighting
back. This was what they had been groomed for.

It had to be Shep. He had gotten my
message and notified the feds. Shots rang out from the other side
of the compound, enough for an entire war.

“
Casey!” Ramsey yelled at
me. “Get a knife!”

I dashed back to the interrogation
cabin and grabbed one of the knives from the wall. Ramsey was
waiting right outside the door and I sawed through the nylon rope
binding his hands.

“
Leave me some fingers,”
Ramsey reminded me.

“
Got it,” I said as the
rope fell away. Ramsey grabbed my elbow and pulled me into the
darkness next to the cabin.

“
Stay here,” he said.
“Don’t move or I’ll shoot you myself.”

He darted into the clearing where Trey
still stood, paralyzed by what had happened, looking every bit his
fifteen years old and nowhere near ready to cope with the crisis
unfolding around him.

We were not the only ones to have
noticed his fear. I saw a tall man on the far side of the clearing
dressed in black jeans and a dark green hoodie. It was the compound
leader, Grubb. He spotted Trey at the same time I did. He pushed
the hood off of his face and I could see him clearly in the
moonlight—older, weathered, rugged, handsome. Clint Eastwood in
High Plains Drifter. A man who lived inside himself, a man who had
seen it all. Grubb saw Ramsey coming and gauged the distance
between him and the boy. My heart started to pound. Grubb had a gun
in his hand and plenty of time plus the skills to shoot. I thought
I saw him raise the gun, or maybe I just imagined it, but just then
another explosion racked the compound. Grubb looked around instead,
as if searching for someone he knew. I realized with a start he was
looking for me.

I stepped out of my hiding spot and
raised my hand, knowing somehow that it was what I should do. Grubb
spotted me, raised his own hand in farewell, and sprinted toward
his men.

I dashed forward and reached Trey just
in time to hear Ramsey tell him, “If you don’t want to spend the
next twenty years of your life in the system, follow me.” He
grabbed the boy’s arm and we pulled him into the darkness of the
woods, Ramsey in the lead.

“
Keep your head down and
don’t stop moving,” Ramsey yelled at us. “There’s a lot of
firepower down there. We need to get around the roadblock, they’ll
have one up along the road, and then I’ll make the call about
whether it’s safe to take the road out. If I say so, we’ll take the
chance. We’ve got to get to the truck before they find it. For now,
just put your head down and run.”

We ran. We ran up the mountainside and
clawed our way to the rocky ridge, then clung to tree after tree as
we moved as quickly as we could along the ridge line, spurred on by
shouts and smoke and gunfire below. I had no idea what had
happened. I didn’t know if a storage shed had blown, if the FBI had
lobbed in tear gas bombs or what. Hell, Canada could be invading
for all I knew. The only thing I knew for certain was that I had to
get my ass to Ramsey’s truck and that the next twenty minutes would
likely determine the rest of my life.

We had Trey between us and once he got
going, he did not hesitate. He followed Ramsey like a gazelle,
leaping from one clear spot to the next, slinging himself around
trees I had to cling to and crawl past. He did not ask questions.
He just put his head down and followed. The kid was a
survivor.

Below us, blocking the private road,
we could see a dozen or more vehicles pulled up in formation. The
cars were empty and mostly official government sedans. I also saw a
few sheriff’s cars parked among them. It was Shep, indeed, and he
had reinforcements. My bet was that his friends were not just
Alcohol, Firearms & Tobacco but probably Homeland Security as
well.

We cleared the staging spot safely,
saw a couple of armed men with “ATF” emblazoned on their vests
checking the woods on either side of the cars and kept to the
forest above them. Somewhere along the way I fell and skinned the
flesh off my palms. It didn’t slow me down. Adrenaline kept me
going. I heard a rustling in the brush to my left and I wondered if
our fear was contagious, if other creatures in the forest had
sensed our flight. I imagined them running along beside us, deep in
the shadows, showing solidarity for our cause. It helped keep me
running.

I did my damnedest to keep up with
Ramsey but it was impossible. Soon I was alone, with only the edge
of the ridge to guide me. Just as I became fearful that I had
somehow lost them, I crashed into Ramsey in the darkness. He was
waiting beside an immense Douglas fir, patting Trey on his back,
urging the boy to catch his breath.

“
How much farther?” I
asked between gasps for air.