The Battle: Alone: Book 4 (16 page)

     He breathed slowly and deliberately, using the number of breaths to mark the time.

     It was a talent he’d learned in the Corps. His resting breathing rate was eleven breaths per minute.

     When he exhaled fifty five times, he knew that five minutes had passed.

     And no one had appeared outside the house to look at the shattered camera.

     Of course, the man working the security console might not be paying attention as he should.

     He counted fifty five more breaths.

     Still nothing.

     He took that as confirmation that the camera system wasn’t working. And while that was certainly good news, Dave was a bit disappointed.

     He was looking forward to taking out another of his enemies.

     Not because he liked to kill. But because the more of them he killed, the more likely the rest would decide the farm wasn’t worth dying for and would simply leave.

     Or, the sooner he’d kill the last one and rid the farm of the cancer that had infected it.

     And the sooner he’d taste Sarah’s sweet kisses again and feel the loving hugs of his two girls.

     He repositioned his sights on the window where he’d seen the shadow of a sentry, peeking through the blinds a few minutes before.

     The blind was still up. The sentry was still there.

     He did some quick calculations, and tried to estimate where the sentry’s chest would be, if the lifted blind was at eye level.

     He placed the crosshairs on that spot and once again placed the pad of his index finger on the trigger.

     Then he had second thoughts.

     He suddenly remembered a movie he’d watched in his tiny safe room in San Antonio a couple of months before, when he was still waiting for the long winter to end.

     Odd how he couldn’t remember the name of the movie.

     But he did remember the plot. A group of terrorists took a group of people hostage, and placed them in front of the doors and windows, tied to chairs or propped upright. Their thinking was that if there was a rescue attempt, the hostages would be the first ones killed.

     Perhaps the person behind the window blinds wasn’t a bad guy at all. Perhaps it was his wife or one of his daughters. Or someone else who didn’t deserve to die.

     He took his finger off the trigger and hit the safety switch with his thumb.

     If it was a hostage behind the blinds, he or she wouldn’t die at Dave’s hand.

     If it was a bad guy, he just got a temporary reprieve.

     But his days were still numbered.

Chapter 29

     Life inside the farm house had become a lot more tense since Dave started his personal war.

     The three casualties Swain had taken had left its mark.

     But Swain still had the numbers, and took great pains to convince his men of that.

     “Whoever is out there is a weak force. If they had more men than we did, they would have overrun the compound, not just taken out three of us. We probably scared them off when we went into the forest looking for them. They likely didn’t expect that. They expected to take out three of us and see the rest of us run off. They expected us to just abandon the farm that we all fought so hard to take. Well, I say bullshit to that.”

      It was a pretty speech, and Swain was able to convince most of his men that the crisis was over. That they’d likely never know why they were attacked or by who. But that the danger had passed, the threat gone.

     But still, Dave’s guerilla tactics took their toll. A few of Swain’s men were secretly starting to doubt Swain’s leadership abilities. They were all military men before they were incarcerated. Many of them were infantry and knew tactics as well or better than Swain did.

     They wondered whether it was unwise to just write off the attacks as a one-time thing. Swain’s only adjustment in response to the deaths of his men was to order the area inside the hayloft door sandbagged so the sentry had a place to hide behind.

     But the men on horseback, and the men who randomly roamed the grounds were more vulnerable.

     Horses didn’t carry sandbags.

     Still, no one dared question Swain’s judgement. They’d seen how brutal he could be, even with his own men. He was not a man who accepted disloyalty or disrespect, and either slight was punishable by death.

     After two days without any further incidents, things settled into an uneasy calm.

     Sarah had been in the living room reading a book, when she thought she heard something break on the other side of the wall. It sounded something like a small glass shattering. She looked around to the others in the room, though, and no one else seemed to have heard it. So she just wrote it off as one of those undefined creaking and settling sounds an old house makes. She went back to her reading.

     It was Lindsey’s turn as Swain’s “insurance policy” that morning, and Sarah had taken her a short stack of pancakes and bacon for breakfast.

     She hated seeing Lindsey chained up, sitting in the middle of that bed, an armed gunman within arm’s length. At least the man tasked with guarding her on this morning was Eddie Campos. He was one of the nicer of Swain’s men, and not one who insisted on pointing his rifle at Lindsey’s head constantly, as some of the others did.

     That was Swain’s idea. It was meant to intimidate his hostages by reminding them constantly that they were just an itchy finger away from dying.

     And reminding them also that it was he and he alone who decided their fate.

     Campos told Sarah and Lindsey that he once had a daughter about Lindsey’s age. He’d lost her to the plague which followed the blackout, but still held her in his heart, and that he saw a lot of his daughter in Lindsey’s eyes.

     Sarah hoped if Campos was the one standing guard over her Lindsey on the day Swain ordered her death that he would rebel against his leader and refuse to pull the trigger.

     But even after getting to know Campos over the previous year, and having some long conversations with him about the rights and wrongs of their situation, she still couldn’t say for sure.

     Her sister Karen was feeling under the weather that morning and had one of her migraines.

     “Let’s go sit on the porch for a while,” Sarah suggested. “It’ll do you good.”

     “I tried getting up a little bit ago, but the knee just hurts too darn bad.”

     Karen had been shot when the farm was overrun, and her right knee was pretty much worthless now.

     “Want me to get you some ibuprofen?”

     “I took some already. Didn’t seem to help. I think the knee is trying to tell me there’s a storm coming.”

     “You know, I wish that knee put as much effort into helping you get around as it does into predicting the weather. Hold on, and I’ll get the chair.”

     Sarah went into the other room and returned with a collapsible wheelchair. It was just one of many things Karen and Tommy had included in their hoarding supplies, hoping they’d never have a real need for it.

     Tommy was gone now, executed by Swain and then thrown in a pile with the other dead men, doused with gasoline and set afire. Wasn’t even given a proper burial, and Karen still hated Swain for that.

     She hated Swain for a lot of reasons.

     Sarah parked the chair next to the bed and set its wheel brakes.

     “You need any help?”

     “Nope. I can handle it. Thank you for taking such good care of me.”

     “Hey, I can’t help it. You’re my favorite sister in the whole world.”

     “I’m the only sister you’ve ever had, silly.”

     “I know. But it still counts.”

     Karen moved from the bed to the chair and Sarah released the brakes and pushed her toward the bedroom door.

     Karen said, “Wait a minute, before we go out there.”

     “Okay. What’s up?”

     “What’s your asshole friend doing this morning?”

     “He’s still sleeping.”

     “Is he still taking that junk?”

     “Yes, but he’s slowing down. Instead of shooting up, he’s just smoking a gram a day. That’s his way of cutting back, he says. Says he has to be more alert now that someone is shooting his men. Then he crashes and is dead to the world. Go figure.”

     “I wish he was dead to the world.”

     “Yep. Me too.”

     “I fantasize sometimes about walking up on him while he’s sleeping and plunging a knife deeply into his hard cold heart. Does that make me evil?”

     “Honey, if that makes you evil then I’m the devil on earth. Because I’ve fantasized about killing him a thousand different ways myself.”

     “I guess him sleeping is the next best thing. I hope he sleeps for days.”

     “How come his men aren’t angry with him for keeping them out there even after three of them were shot?”

     “I think some of them are. They won’t voice it, because they’re terrified of him. But I can tell by the looks on some of their faces that they’re getting tired of his crap. They know the dope is starting to affect his judgement.”

     “Do you think any of them are upset enough to overthrow him?”

     “I don’t think so. Not yet. They’d need the support of some of the others to keep from being killed. And they’re afraid of talking bad about him between themselves, for fear of being branded a traitor and shot.”

     “If they ever get brave enough to do it, do you think it’ll be a good thing or bad?”

     “I don’t know, honey. It would depend on who they anointed their new ‘king.’ A couple of them, like Flores, are just as bad as he is. Some of the others, though, might treat us a little better. Do you really think it’ll ever happen? Them overthrow him, I mean?”

     “I don’t know. Maybe. It probably depends on whether the killing continues.”

     “Yeah, about that. Swain keeps saying that it was an isolated case of other men from Leavenworth, trying to scare them off the property so they could take it themselves. He says that they didn’t realize how many men were here, and when they went searching for the attackers they scattered. But…”

     “But you’ve been thinking the same thing I’ve been thinking, haven’t you?”

     Karen managed a weak smile.

     “What exactly have you been thinking?”

     “That maybe it’s Dave.”

Chapter 30

     Sarah and Karen had no idea things were going to escalate once again.

     As they debated their future, Dave was a mere four hundred yards away, waiting for a rider on horseback to come into view.

     Dave had been a Marine for only four short years, but he learned some lifelong habits. Some were elaborate changes in his character. He’d learned to be more empathetic with others in the world who didn’t have the same opportunities he had.

     He learned to go out of his way to help the weak and oppressed. And he learned to prepare for the worst case scenario in every situation.

     But he’d learned some small things too, like the myriad of sayings Marines use to motivate themselves and steer them in the right direction.

     One of those sayings in particular was so near and dear to Dave’s heart that he printed it out and hung it above his desk at home, before the power went out and his whole world came crashing down.

OTHERS STUMBLE FROM SITUATION TO SITUATION. UNITED STATES MARINES EVALUATE, ADAPT AND OVERCOME. WE KICK SITUATION’S ASS

.

     It was an old saying, made up by a Marine many generations before Dave. But it still applied, and it bounced around the back of Dave’s head, reminding him to constantly think out his plans looking for flaws or a better way to do things.

     That was why he took his crossbow and bolts back to the tunnel. He’d planned to sneak onto the property and to hide behind the ancient oak tree, then to use the crossbow to pick off mounted sentries as they rode by.