“Who are you?” John asked. Terry was still wrapping his head around the scene.
“We’re... We’re...” the defenseless young blonde tried to answer.
“Professionals?”
She nodded, bursting into tears. Her partner, a very young girl with brown hair, reacted to the tears and began sobbing as well.
“Be quiet. Who are these guys?”
“That’s... Gary...” She stumbled over the words.
“Jenkins?”
Her head bobbed up and down at high speed. She had her lower lip sucked into her mouth.
“The other guy?” John asked quietly.
“I don’t know. He’s from the other group,” the blonde said, recovering from the shock.
“Excellent. Listen, girls. Get dressed. You’ll want to come with us.”
“Wh... Why?”
“Because... In five minutes this place is going to explode,” John said. “Terry, keep an eye on those two while I tie these guys up.”
Terry didn’t think that would be a problem.
Three minutes later, Terry and John were staggering across the grass under the weight of their two prisoners. The two girls followed them. They wasn’t much choice. They barely knew where they were, and getting back to town would be a problem in their ridiculous high heels. When they were spotted by the other teams, Terry caught sight of one of Nick’s men rolling out wire from a big spool. Seth’s team pulled back to the trees and waited. As soon as Terry dumped his passenger in the bushes, he turned to watch. He quickly wished he hadn’t.
The bomb was on the near side of the bunkhouse. When it blew, the shockwave punched Terry in the gut. He watched the rest of the blast in surprising detail. He saw the brief curvature of the wall as it was pushed away from the bomb. The solid wall dissolved into shredded wood confetti. In milliseconds, the jagged shards were propelled through the mass of men inside the building. By the time the blast reached the far wall, nothing recognizable remained. Dark bits of matter flew into the distance, seen dimly by electric light from the house. Terry heard a rain of thumping and clattering debris hit the ground in the distance.
From his right, the sawing of a Gatling gun spun up to speed and filled the main house with hot tracer fire. Quickly enough, the tracers hit combustible material and started the fire. As the house was enveloped in flame, John watched the front door like a vulture watching a corpse, but no one came out.
Clearly, the bomb had done an effective job. Terry felt sick to his stomach. He had heard every word of Bill’s speech that morning, and had even agreed with the logic, but this... This felt bad. It was one thing to face a man and see who left the fight. It was another to be snuffed en masse without warning. The men watched for long minutes for any sign of escapees, and finally, at a signal from John, they burned everything else.
Chapter 8 – 6
Dad and Arturo returned on foot, two hours after Joe had left. The station wagon finally rebelled at the lousy gasoline and sputtered to a halt at the fork, back up on Blanton Chapel Road. It was a tough hike for Arturo. He flopped onto Sally’s front porch, dodging Bear’s enthusiastic tongue greetings. Dad stood nearby, catching his breath before he shared his news. In his head, he was struggling to find a way to explain to his wife that they would be forced to deal with the Eugene Curfman problem. Unfortunately, his most clever mental line was,
we have to deal with Eugene Curfman
.
Just then, the front door slammed open and a parade streamed out, led by the gigantic dog. Beth Carter was third in line. She began without preamble, “We have to deal with Eugene Curfman, David.”
“What? Are you reading my mind? Of course we do, but I expected to talk you into it,” Dad said, suddenly realizing all the potentially horrifying reasons she may have wanted to solve the problem. “What happened? Is everything ok?”
“Oh, yeah. We’re fine. We had a visitor today, Sally’s friend. He said that Eugene is threatening the neighbors just to track us down.” Mom explained.
“Sounds like good old Eugene,” Dad replied, making a wry face.
“Wait. Why were you going to talk me into it?” Mom asked with the same look of concern Dad had used moments before.
“Eugene left us a note. He wrote it on the barn door in charcoal. It was a threat, but I can’t repeat it in front of the kids.”
On cue Jimmy and Tommy groaned theatrically, and stomped their little feet with the grand indignity of it all. A brief burst of laughter followed the boys’ angry dance, which ended it on the spot. It’s hard to be angry when people think it’s funny.
“Don’t worry, Beth,” Dad said. “Arturo and I took a good look around, and we have a plan. We’re going to ask for some help.”
“Help? From who?” Mom asked.
“The cannibals, of course.” Dad said with a grin.
“David, you are not going to talk to cannibals. I will not have you eaten for lunch.” Mom was completely serious, hands-on-hips serious. The rest of us practically fell to the ground with laughter.
Mom finally saw the humor and joined the laughter. “Funniest thing in a month of Sundays,” Sally gasped between laughing spasms.
When the laughter settled, Dad put on his scheming face and said, “Who said anything about talking?”
***
First things first. Dad and Arturo spent a good part of the afternoon retrieving our car from the main road and getting it to run. They went out with George’s old tractor and a sturdy rope, and came back with the station wagon in tow. They had drained several fuel tanks into portable gas cans along the way. Dad poured all the gasoline into one of the translucent plastic barrels and left it to sit for half an hour. While they were waiting, Arturo took command of the tactical situation. He decided that Sally, Lucy, Tommy, and Jimmy would stay at Sally’s farm. The four men – yes, I included myself in that category – would go on the offensive along with Mom. Arturo told her that we needed as many guns as possible, but I think it was more about the fact that Mom insisted, threatened, and absolutely refused to be left behind.
Dad looked at the gas in the barrel, and could definitely see separate layers forming. He waited a few minutes longer, and used the siphon pump to pull off the top layer from the barrel, refilling the gas cans with what he hoped would be better fuel. Arturo had spent that time draining the remaining fuel from the station wagon’s tank. Without knowing anything, I could look at the frothy liquid and understand why the car stalled. Dad poured his “filtered” gas into the tank, and the car started after fifteen agonizing seconds of grinding the watery old fuel out of the system. Dad was even able to readjust the carburetor to a reasonable idle.
“We won’t be able to get away with this for long,” Dad said. “I’m just glad it worked.”
Arturo nodded and killed the ignition. “If it works for the rest of the day, that’s good enough.”
“You say that now. What if we run out of salsa?” Dad asked, smiling at the endless series of Mexican jokes.
“I don’t even remember salsa. But that’s fair because there’s no stores around here with white bread either,” Arturo shot back, playing the “pasty white dude” side of the game.
The five of us headed out twenty minutes later. We crunched down the newly melted gravel driveway in our dark green family station wagon with the fake wood trim and turned south towards the school. The flicker of sunlight through the naked trees distracted me enough to forget for seconds at a time that we were preparing to do something very dangerous. I think I was more worried about making a mistake than dying, but that changed quickly.
I almost said something when Arturo missed the turn onto Powers Bridge Road, but then I stopped, knowing that there was a good reason. We went out to the highway and turned towards Manchester. We passed through the heart of town a short time later. The long, sunny day had brought out the scattered surviving residents. As they walked the streets scrounging for food in the houses of the deceased, most watched us pass with blank expressions. They were too tired, hungry and confused to react. Some showed suspicion or even open hostility, but no one actually bothered us. One guy was pushing a shopping cart full of kittens down the middle of the main drag. I remember him because he was wearing bright red Converse high tops, and he waved cheerfully as we swerved to miss him. I remember thinking I wouldn’t want to be his cat that day.
We wound through some residential streets and passed a school. Unlike our familiar school at Hickerson Station, the building and the sign were still fully intact. Westwood Junior High. I liked the name. Westwood held the promise of a bright future of clean houses, lined up in orderly neighborhoods, where children play carefree in the streets and backyards. Then I remembered that I would never see the inside of a junior high school, or any other school for that matter. I guess my version of school was where we were heading right then.
Arturo followed the road out of town. He described it as a shortcut to our neck of the woods. He stopped in a shallow dip between two long slopes, and Dad led the rest of us out of the car and into the woods to the right. We hiked two hundred feet into the trees where the road could only be seen in dots and dashes, and turned left to approach the Duck River. We could hear the soft rumble of the station wagon retreating back over the last hill we had crested on the drive. From Arturo’s description, we knew that we were on the far side of the river from Eugene’s camp, and on the opposite side of the road from a large group that had apparently turned cannibal to survive the winter.
We tried to walk quietly, but Kirk was the only one who was anything approaching quiet. The rest of us stomped through the woods like tourists at Disneyworld. This annoyed Kirk to no end. We finally reached the sheer edge of the tight river valley. Looking down, we could see rocky pieces of riverbank that still held glittering shelves of ice in the shadows. The heavy ferroconcrete bridge was visible far below and to our left. It was the only convenient way to cross the river, particularly considering how cold the water must have been.
The view of Eugene’s camp was fairly clear. From our vantage point, I could see that the camp was actually the remains of someone’s backyard. The jagged stubble of burned framework and brick showed where the house had stood this time the year before. The backyard was surrounded by a classic picket fence, predictably covered in random lines of spray paint. Some olive canvas tents and picnic tables were scattered haphazardly around the yard and a hand-built shed in the shape of a barn was located in the back corner, snuggled against the northern drop to the river. Men wandered among the tents and tables.
We sat in the dead underbrush, observing for a few minutes. A man walked to the shed. We couldn’t see the side with the door, but we heard the high pitched cries of feminine protest. My dad’s eyebrows shot up. Eugene had prisoners. He looked at my mom, but he already knew what he would see. His plan of sniping Eugene from a distance just flew out the window.
Dad clenched his jaw and said, “Ok, Beth. Up the tree.” He handed her our best long range weapon, a .30-06 with a massive scope. Mom slung it over her shoulder and suffered the indignity up being boosted to the bottom branches with my dad’s hands squarely on her butt. He made a lot of extra noise just to milk the situation for his own amusement. We thought it was hilarious too. “Hug the tree, Honey. Don’t get spotted.”
Mom’s response was a growl. She knew she was being taken out of the main fight, but she allowed it when Arturo had earnestly explained that sniper cover was the key to success. Whatever.
When Mom was in position high in the tree, we pulled back from the edge of the slope and turned left to cross the road. We emerged from the woods at the crest of the hill. On our left we could look down the road and see where Arturo had dropped us off. To our right, the road descended steeply and curved around an outcropping of the hill on our side of the river, emerging a little farther to reveal the bridge. Directly across the road, a gravel drive punched into the woods and turned quickly enough that whatever lay in the woods was hidden from our sight. We could definitely smell it, though. A foul mixture of decay and blood and shit wafted in on the breeze. I was about two-thirds of the way to a gag reflex the entire time we were there.
Dad motioned Kirk and me down into the ditch. He pulled a rolled piece of paper from his jacket and trotted across the road. He picked a big tree and used a chrome staple gun to attach his sign. He looked back across the road at us, and then raised his assault rifle, aiming just a bit high to do any real damage, and started firing blindly into the trees.
As soon as the gunshots sounded, we heard the station wagon roar. Within several seconds, Arturo came over the hill to our left and kept accelerating until he judged he could just barely stop to pick us up. Dad had emptied his second clip when the wagon barked to a stop. The three of us leaped into the car and yanked the doors shut as Arturo was already pulling away. We were doing over fifty across the bridge. Arturo kept his foot planted. The car was squealing in protest as we curved up the hill on the far side of the river. Those of us without a steering wheel to hold were piled heavily against the right-hand doors. The road straightened, still going steeply uphill, and then we were over the crest. The heavy station wagon wallowed and surged on the pavement as Arturo fought for speed and stability.
I could see the men from Eugene’s camp running in our direction. They clearly connected us with the gunfire across the river, and they may have known that we were the ones who had killed their friends at the barn. It didn’t matter. Either Arturo’s plan worked and they would soon have other problems, or it didn’t, in which case we would definitely have problems.
Arturo braked for all he was worth, turning right on Blanton Chapel Road. This was a bit of misdirection. We were hoping to lead any pursuit in the wrong direction, away from our new home, and away from the drop point at our old one. He repeated his high performance turn to the left on Highway 41, blasting away. Looking back, I didn’t see anyone following. I hoped that meant there was an angry swarm of cannibals crossing the river, but Eugene’s men may have just been slow to mobilize.