The Forge of Darkness (Darkness After Series Book 3) (20 page)

“That son of a bitch!” he muttered. “He did this just in the short time we’ve been gone?”

“I wonder where Jennings and Langley are? You think he might have gotten them too?”

“Come on. I’ve got to know. If I die trying to find out, then I die, but I’m going to check that house.”

“I’m right behind you. Let’s go!”

Drake hurriedly crossed the open lawn from the woods to the barn, and then, keeping his back to the siding, worked his way to the barn door, where he found Langley dead just inside the entrance and Jennings where he’d fallen beside the old tractor. Both died from arrows like all the rest. It was absolutely unbelievable! It was like they were up against a band of renegade Apaches from hell. Overnight, Drake and his gang had gone from being the hunters to the hunted, and now they were only two.

“We’re finished here, Chuck! You and I are the only ones left and we’ve lost 14 men since we found this cursed place. It’s time to cut our losses and go back in time to head off the women and everybody else before they get any closer.”

“I’m with you on that, Drake. It’s a good thing we’ve still got the two horses out there in the woods. It looks like whoever did this made off with the rest.”

“Yeah, it looks that way.” Drake was looking around the barn, lost in thought for a second. “There’s one thing I want to do before we leave, and it won’t take but a few minutes. I need your help though, Chuck.”

“Sure, what do you have in mind?”
 

Drake told him and together they began emptying the jerry cans of diesel and gasoline on the lumber and hay stacked in the back of the barn. But they saved two five gallon containers of gasoline for last, taking those to the front porch of the house and using them to douse the cypress lumber and siding, working quickly so they could do what they had in mind and be gone. Drake had hoped the old man was still tied up inside, but when he looked in through the window he saw that he was gone, the ropes that had held him in a pile beside the legs of the chair. Whoever had done the killing here had cut him loose, but there was nothing to be done about that now.
 

Drake had found a couple of empty soda bottles in the barn and filled them with gasoline before they poured it all out. Now he stuffed the oily rags he found in the back of the old truck into the bottles and handed one to Chuck. They lit their Molotov cocktails out in the open yard, and Chuck tossed his into the barn just as Drake’s shattered on the wooden porch. The result was an instant ignition of the gasoline-soaked structures, and Drake knew that despite the light rain that was still falling, there was so much bone-dry wood under the roofs of both the house and the barn that they would burn to the ground in no time. He hadn’t had much to smile about in the last few hours, but he was grinning now as the two of them ran for the woods and the horses that awaited them.

* * *

After they left the property through the gate on the east side, Mitch led the way as he and Benny rode two of the horses and led the other four that had all been tied up to the porch rail out front. Mitch had never had much interest in horses, but he had ridden a few times before the collapse with friends that kept them on their farms. The thick woods around these parts, not to mention all the fences in most rural areas of the state made horseback travel less than ideal. But once they were in the national forest beyond the fence, it was at least possible, especially since Mitch knew the area well and knew the best route to take to avoid the worst thickets and cutover.
 

Following the creek all the way would be out of the question, due to the vegetation, but he knew the pine ridges well enough to figure out a path to the upper reaches of the small branch where he’d asked Lisa to take the others in the canoes. He and Benny rode until they intercepted it, and then it was a simple matter of following it’s course downstream until they neared Black Creek.
 

Not wanting to get shot because they were approaching on horseback and might be mistaken for the cattle rustlers, Mitch left Benny with the horses and covered the last quarter mile on foot, finding Lisa and all the others right where he’d hoped he would. But his gaze was locked on April and Kimberly. When Stacy noticed him and pointed his way April turned to face him and once again, Mitch knew she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. She passed Kimberly over to David and leapt to her feet, practically taking him down when she ran and launched herself into his arms. Mitch felt her tears against his cheeks as he closed his eyes and squeezed her tight, neither of them speaking a word, as time seemed to stop and all that mattered for that moment was that they were together.

But when Mitch opened his eyes and looked over April’s shoulder, the first sight that greeted him was poor Samantha, who had obviously fallen apart again at the sight of April’s happy reunion. Lisa and Stacy were hugging her close from either side, but Mitch knew there was nothing that they, or he, or anyone else could say that would make things better for her, not now, and maybe not ever. And Benny, who had lost his beloved son, was still sitting alone back there on a horse in the woods, beaten and bruised and in need of rest and recuperation. Mitch went to get him, with April walking at his side, refusing to let him out of her sight.
 

* * *

Despite her protests later though, after everyone had told their stories and tried to piece together as much information as they could about the attackers, Mitch said he was going back to the house. He agreed to take one other person with him, and Lisa insisted she was the logical choice. Mitch was okay with that, as the only other he would consider was Jason. He wasn’t about to leave those who stayed behind shorthanded. The chances of anyone finding them here were slim to none, but Mitch was done with discounting possibilities after all that had happened. He wanted to go back there while there was still some daylight, and if there was no sign of more of the bandits then he intended to watch the house with Lisa from the cover of the woods and see if anyone returned there after dark. It was the only way to know if they were still around, and Mitch feared they were after hearing what Benny said about the leader. Benny also confirmed what David said he’d overheard. The men they’d encountered so far were part of a larger group, and judging by what the one called Drake said when he threatened Benny, they were already on their way to the farm and not so far behind. Mitch couldn’t let that happen, but he had to do more recon before he could come up with a plan.
 

He tore himself away from April with difficulty and he and Lisa left. Since they had the horses, Mitch figured they might as well use a couple of them, so the two of them rode quietly back along the route he’d taken with Benny earlier. They were almost to the property line when they smelled the smoke. It was heavy, and far more acrid and irritating than ordinary wood smoke from a cooking fire.

“I don’t like this, Lisa. Let’s leave the horses here and go the rest of the way on foot.”

Mitch already had a bad feeling before they crossed the fence and entered a thick, slate gray haze of the heavy, choking smoke. It was dense enough to greatly limit their visibility, but he could find his way to the house from here by feel if he had too, and he knew Lisa could too. They finally came within sight of the house and Mitch’s fears were confirmed.
The bastards had set it afire, along with the barn!

Mitch looked for any sign of those who’d done this in his limited field of vision through the smoke, but there was no movement and nothing he could hear over the popping and hissing of the two big fires. Dark spirals of almost black smoke were spewing through several openings in the roof of the house, and under all the smoke were the raging flames that were consuming the structure and everything inside. The barn was nearly gone already, the dry hay stacked in the loft having provided more than enough fuel to create an inferno.
 

“Oh my God, Mitch! What are we going to do?”

“There’s nothing we
can
do, Lisa. It’s too late! Even if there were such things anymore, a fire truck and its crew couldn’t save the house now.”

The fire was so hot they could barely approach the edge of the yard. Mitch and Lisa just stood there side-by-side watching, their arms around each other’s shoulders, as their childhood home and place of refuge in this time of great strife was swallowed up in flames. There were so many things they needed still inside, and so many memories lost. As he stood there watching, Mitch realized that the only photo he had left of his mom and dad was the small, water-damaged and bent print he carried in a pouch in his hunting pack, having long since abandoned his wallet. It had been so long now he had mostly given up on his hopes of them returning. The two of them were likely dead and now the family home, his strongest connection to them other than his sister, was about to be no more. Everything had changed once again, and life was about to get even harder for him and those he had left.
 

Mitch and Lisa stayed there until nearly dark, and on the way back Lisa found the few items they had taken out the night before and later abandoned in their rush to escape. With heavy hearts the two of them mounted the horses and rode back to tell the others the bad news.

Twenty-nine
 

“I
DON
’
T
THINK
THEY
’
LL
be back,” Mitch said, as they sat around the campfire that night, huddled on a narrow sandbar beside the clear-running waters of the branch. “They wouldn’t have burned everything like that if they were planning to stay.”

“It sounds to me like that Drake guy, if he’s the one who did it, was really upset about losing all his men,” Jason said. “Maybe he just set the fires in reaction to that, without thinking?”

“He was upset all right,” Benny said, “but still, I think Mitch has a point. They didn’t even get a chance to get much, if anything out of the house and barn. I figure that Drake decided to cut his losses and he won’t be back. He probably went back to head off the rest of the bunch that was on their way. I wonder if he was the only one left?”

“I intend to spend some time studying tracks tomorrow,” Mitch said. “I should be able to piece more of the story together. Regardless of what we think, we’ll need to keep a sharp lookout. But we’ve got to go back there tomorrow sometime.”
 

Mitch didn’t have to say why. Everyone knew they had two graves to dig. Then, they would sort through rubble that was left and see if there was anything that could be salvaged. It was not a day he looked forward to, but if those men were truly gone and not coming back, that was almost as good as knowing he had killed every single one of them.
 

* * *

They buried Tommy and Corey in the side yard under the winter-bare branches of a big white oak that provided nice shade in the hot, Mississippi summers. David and Jason fashioned crosses for their grave markers from some cypress planks from the garden that had escaped the flames. Benny did his best to quote a few appropriate verses of scripture and then he said a prayer before they filled in the graves. Mitch was worried whether Samantha was going to survive this at all, but April assured him she would. She and Lisa and Stacy would give her all the attention they could and do everything in their power to help her get through. Benny was taking it hard too, but Mitch knew he wanted to live, if nothing else for those two girls who called him their “Uncle Benny.” David had lost his best friend and didn’t seem to know what to do with himself, but had gone to Benny and apologized for leaving Tommy when he did. Benny had admitted to Mitch that he’d been extremely bitter about that when he first figured out it happened, but when he realized David’s actions probably saved the lives of all the girls; he understood it was for the best. Tommy’s chances of surviving that bullet wound were slim to none anyway. He’d known that even as he sent Lisa and Stacy back to get the travois.
 

Sadly, that same travois had come in handy today to move Tommy’s body to his final resting place, followed by Corey. When they were through with the informal funeral, Mitch and Jason used it again for the unpleasant task of moving the slain bandits off the property. There were far too many of them to bury so they took them west a good piece along the road, in the direction from which they’d come, and spent the rest of the day and that evening searching for enough dry firewood and fat lighter knot with which to burn them. The grisly sight was close enough to the road that anyone coming from that direction couldn’t fail to see it. Mitch hoped such a grim warning wouldn’t be needed, but he’d sent everyone else back to the place they camped the night before as a precaution. They would stay well clear of the house for the most part, until they figured out what they were going to do next.
 

Mitch couldn’t sleep that night even long after he and Jason had returned to the campsite to rejoin the others. He was sitting by the waters edge away from the rest, staring at the current in the dark when April came and sat down beside him, asking in a low whisper if he wanted to talk.
 

“I was too careless, April. Way too overconfident. I thought I was some kind of expert at this survival stuff and that I had everything figured out; everything under control.”

“You
are
an expert at it Mitch. Without you, none of us would even be here now.
Nobody
has everything figured out, much less under control. You can’t blame yourself for this Mitch. You know this has been going on everywhere ever since the lights went out. Those men were predators, taking advantage of the weak. They made their last mistake coming here though. You stopped them, Mitch. You drove them away.”

“But at what cost? Look at us now, April. That farm with the house and the barn was the center of our universe. It was our refuge
and
our means of survival. And now we’ve lost it.”

“You always said it was the
land
that provided what we needed, Mitch. You said it was the forest, and the creek and all the life inhabiting them. The house was shelter, but we can build shelter again. We can even build another house. What else have we got to do?”