The Forge of Darkness (Darkness After Series Book 3) (9 page)

She’d felt safe enough with Benny and Tommy around, especially since they’d started regular patrols around the property, but now Tommy had been shot. From the way Lisa and Stacy described it; it was bad, too. Lisa told her Benny said the bullet passed all the way through, and that it missed his heart, but it was impossible to know what it
did
hit and how much damage had been done. She just hoped they could hurry and get him back here and that Benny would get back too. She would feel a lot better when they were all inside the house, then they would see what they could do for Tommy. She had cleared off the big, sturdy wooden table in the dining room and moved the chairs out of the way. The first thing they needed to do was get him onto that where they could see what they were doing. She’d helped Mitch patch up Jason in that very room when he’d been nearly beaten to death, but he didn’t have a bullet wound through his chest. Surviving that would be iffy even with the attention of ER doctors in a fully equipped hospital. April tried not to think about what it would do to Benny if he didn’t make it. He’d already lost his wife and Tommy was all he had until the two of them found her and then Mitch took them in as part of the family.
 

She walked to the door and went out on the porch again to stare down the road. She knew the girls probably had not had time to even reach the spot were Tommy and David were, much less get back with him, but she couldn’t stop herself from watching for them anyway. When they suddenly appeared, running fast to the house with someone else with them, April thought she was seeing things. But they were real indeed when they drew closer, and she could see that David was the forth person running with them.
But where was the travois? And where was Tommy?

Thirteen
 

“W
HAT
DO
YOU
MEAN
, Tommy’s dead?” April asked as Lisa blurted it out even before the four of them reached the porch.

“David saw it. Those men killed him, and they’re coming here next, April!”

It took her a minute to get them all to slow down and stop talking at once. April was trying to keep Kimberly calm, as she was getting upset by all the commotion and had begun crying. Lisa and David were saying that a whole group of armed men were now out there by the road and that David had heard them talking of finding the house that they knew must be nearby.

“They said they were going to come here and stay. They were talking about all the cows and how there would be enough to feed everyone for weeks when they all got here.”

“How many of them do you think there are, David?”
 

“I don’t know. There were six of them that came down the road after the one that shot Tommy came out of the woods. But I heard them talking about some people coming with horses… and then they said something about a bunch of women and children too.”

“It’s like there’s a whole mob of them!” Lisa said. “What are we going to do, April?”

April’s mind was racing with this overload of bad news. Tommy was dead and now they were facing a group of killers intent on taking everything they had. Who were these people and where did they come from? Were there really as many of them as David thought? She hoped not, but in truth, she had no reason to doubt him. Since he’d been hit in the head he saw things in the simplest ways and it would not even occur to him to embellish his story for effect. He’d just witnessed his new best friend killed with a hatchet and he was both scared and angry, but he was also concerned about the rest of them, who he considered his friends too. They were the only people in his world now, and he liked them all. April had to take his warning seriously, and from what he said, they had very little time to prepare.

If Mitch and the rest of the guys were here, they would handle this differently. But with three of them off hunting, Tommy dead, and Benny unaccounted for, they were five men short for any kind of serious resistance. Mitch and Benny had often discussed ideas for fortifying the house for just such an event, but they had not had time to get very far with it; the daily patrols being the main thing implemented since April arrived there. After the encounter with the four men who’d abducted her and Kimberly, Mitch knew they were vulnerable to desperate survivors who might be on the move looking for resources. But he acknowledged that they couldn’t prepare for everything and the most important defense was to remain vigilant, until they could become more organized. Finding enough food took up a large portion of Mitch’s time, not to mention the efforts of teaching the others the essential skills they needed, such as marksmanship, archery, tracking and hunting.
 

Mitch would be sick to find out the thing he’d feared would happen had come to pass while he was away for the night. But that was something he would have to deal with tomorrow. April had to make a decision and she knew she had to make it quick. If there were as many men as David said and indeed more on the way, there was no way they could defend the house from an attack if it came before Mitch returned. And after all the shooting that had already happened, April was sure that these men wouldn’t wait. They knew there were people living nearby and that they probably had resources they wanted. They would come tonight, she was sure of it.
 

“We can’t stay here,” she told Lisa. “We’ve got to grab as many of the things we need as we can carry and get out of the house now!”

“But we can’t let them break into our house!” Lisa said. “This is all we have! How will we live without the house and all the stuff we need?”

“We’re not going to let them have it, Lisa. Mitch will be back tomorrow. You know that. But if we lock ourselves inside and try to defend it with just the five of us they may take it anyway, after they kill us all. You know that kind of thing has been happening ever since the lights went out. If we’re trapped in here and surrounded, we won’t have a chance if there are enough of them. I don’t think we should risk it, Lisa. We can hide close by in the edge of the woods and wait and see. Maybe they won’t come here tonight, but if they do, at least we’ll have options. The guys will be back in the morning and Benny is out there somewhere too. They will come up with a plan then, but if we don’t go now, it may be too late.”

“I know you’re probably right. It just feels like giving up or something. It’s sucks that we’ve got to leave our house and sit out in the woods in the rain all night.”

“Believe me, I hate to have to take Kimberly out in this weather too, but better that than risking her life in a gunfight. We don’t know what those men might do. These walls won’t stop rifle bullets.”

“I just hope they don’t find us out in the woods anyway after they find out we’re not in the house,” Samantha said. “It would be even harder to fight back out there.”

“They won’t find us.” David said. “I know all the good places to hide. Tommy showed me.”

“And, we can go all the way to the creek if we have too,” April said. “The canoes are hidden there if we need them. The important thing is that by getting out we will have options. But if everybody is in agreement, we need to hurry! We need to think fast and get everything we can carry that we might need.”

“All the guns!” Lisa said. “We’ve got to take the guns and ammo, or they’ll steal it all if they break in.

“Within reason,” April said. “What we can’t carry we can lock in the safe. We have to take food too… and blankets and tarps for shelter… we need matches, something to cook in… knives… extra clothes…” April’s mind was racing even faster than before. There was so much to consider, but of course it would be impossible to take everything they might need. Of course they couldn’t carry all the firearms, much less the ammo that was stashed away. She didn’t want to loose anything to theft, but she had to hope for the best, that these people would either change their minds and leave or Mitch and Benny would come up with a way to thwart their plans before they got far.

Kimberly was her first priority and she knew she could not personally carry much else besides her child and the essentials she needed to take care of her. She was nearly two now and could eat what the rest of them ate, which was crucial because there was little left of the well-stocked larder Mitch’s parents kept in the house as a matter of course before the pulse. Hunting and gathering had become essential for survival and back during the summer, before April arrived there, Mitch and his sister and friends had done what gardening they could with seeds his dad had left from the year before. But now they were into early December and though the winters were mild here, it was still more difficult living off the land than it was in the warmer months of the growing season.
 

Lisa was right. It
did
suck to have to leave the warm, dry house and hide out in the rain because of the threat of violence from a gang of ruthless trespassers. April had hoped there wouldn’t be more of this kind of life-or-death drama for a while, but here it was, visiting again so soon after her last ordeal of terror. There was no time to dwell on that though. The five of them quickly ransacked the pantry, gun safe and closets and moved their supplies out on the front porch to sort things out and figure out how they were going to carry it all.
 

“I wish we hadn’t left that travois behind now,” Lisa said.

“We weren’t thinking about having to do something like this,” Samantha said.

“No, I was just thinking about getting back to warn April.”

“It’s okay,” April said. “We don’t know that we’ll have to go far. Let’s just get everything we can carry across the yard to the edge of the woods. Then we can make another trip if we have time.”

April hoped they
would
have more time than they needed. Maybe because of the weather, the trespassers would camp out there by the road where they’d shot the cattle and sit tight until morning. If they did, that would give her and the others more options and would mean less time to wait on Mitch to return. She was holding out on this hope after they stashed the blankets and some of the guns in the woods and were heading back to the house for a second trip. They were halfway across the yard when they heard a strange sound coming from out in the direction of the road. It was a horn of some kind; a primitive sound like something from a medieval battlefield in a movie. It came as one long, eerie wail and ended abruptly, the echo drowned by the falling rain.

“What was
that?
” Stacy wondered.

“I’ll bet is a signal. They are using it to let the rest of their friends know to come on!” Lisa said.

“Yes, I think you’re probably right,” April said. “That means we don’t have much time. We’ve got to hurry and grab the other stuff and get out of here!”
 

“You should stay back and wait with Kimberly, April. There’s no point in taking her back to the house because you can’t carry much with her anyway. We’ll get the rest of the stuff.”

“Okay, but just hurry! They may be coming this way right now!”

April stood there watching, trying to soothe Kimberly as she waited at the edge of the yard for the four of them to gather up the remaining gear and supplies on the porch. They made it back to where she waited and after moving everything into the edge of the woods; they stood listening for that strange horn again as the rain continued to fall softly around them.
 

“Hey…do you hear that?” David asked.

They all stopped whispering and listened closely. It wasn’t the horn, but something more subtle. At first, April didn’t recognize the sound as she had really only heard it when watching television or movies in her prior life in the city. But Lisa recognized immediately what it was and when she named it, April knew she was absolutely right and David had heard the men mention them too:
horses! It was the sound of hooves clattering on the gravel, and it sounded like there were a lot of them.

“I hear voices too!” Stacy whispered.

“Yes, it sounds like they’re out by the end of the lane,” Lisa said. “The gate is locked, so that may slow them down, but they’ll probably break it down or cut the fence to go around it.”

“I think you’re right,” April said. “They’re getting ready to come to the house and nothing is going to stop them. We’d better get this stuff farther into the woods and make sure they don’t see us when they do.”

Fourteen
 

M
UCH
TO
HIS
DISMAY
, Benny found himself virtually trapped between the six men he’d been following and this other band of eight who’d arrived on horseback. The problem was that the riders decided to stop in the middle of the road almost adjacent to where he was hiding when he first spotted them. They had inexplicably picked this spot to sit tight, apparently to wait for a signal from the others. Benny cursed under his breath as he watched them dismount. Two of them walked to his side of the road and relieved themselves at the edge of the bushes less than 20 feet from where he stood. Once again, Benny was almost afraid to breathe as he watched and waited. He could not extricate himself from this situation to get back to Tommy for fear of being discovered by these riders, who were clearly following the other six who had gone ahead on foot.

As he stood there watching, Benny studied the men and their equipment, trying to figure out where they might have come from. He and Tommy had been living deep in the woods along Black Creek for most of the time since the blackout, so Benny had not had much contact with the outside world and what was going on there. Mitch and the others had told him what they’d seen of it, and April especially, had seen more than her share during the time she was sheltered in the church in Hattiesburg. From what they said, Benny gathered that many places were virtual war zones now, with large gangs fighting for control of territory and the goods necessary for survival. The grid had been down for nearly nine months, so Benny figured there had been enough time for this violence to evolve from random looting and crimes of opportunity to something much more sinister. What he saw before him certainly looked like the latter. These men seemed organized, well prepared and experienced in what they were doing. They were far from a random gang of thugs from what he could see, and Benny figured they’d probably been raiding and pillaging all the way from wherever they’d come from, whether nearby in the region or from much farther away. Whoever they were, they appeared to have adapted well to the harsh conditions of life as it was now. They were well at ease with their horses so Benny figured most of them already had plenty of time in the saddle before the blackout. But how did so many come together and agree to a mutual plan? Surely they had a leader they believed in to cooperate that way. Benny didn’t know the answers, but he knew their arrival was bad news for the Henley farm. Life as they’d known it up until today was about to change forever once again.