The woman began to sob quietly.
“Why don’t you and La Roux go get our gear. I’ll stay here with….”
Anderson looked at the woman and asked a question with his eyes.
“Me names Tilly … Tilly Maxwell.”
On hearing the name, Tilly, Callum felt suddenly filled with old memories. Tilly had been his sister’s name, and hearing the word spoken aloud opened old wounds.
“Are you alright?” La Roux asked as he took Callum’s arm.
“I’m fine. It’ll be dark soon, so we best go get our gear.”
La Roux led the way back up the path, and Callum’s gaze drifted back to Tilly as he went.
Night was already falling by the time Callum and La Roux returned with the gear, and they noticed Anderson had not been idle in their absence. A fire now burned in the clearing, and three rabbits roasted in its flames. He had also found time to throw the four dead bodies of the men they killed earlier into the river, thus washing them downstream and clear of the camp.
“Where did you catch the rabbits?” La Roux asked as he sniffed the air. “They smell right good.”
“I didn’t catch ‘em,” Anderson replied as he prodded one of the cooking animals. “The fellas we killed caught ‘em. I saw no reason to let them go to waste, so thanks to those disgusting pigs, tonight we eat well.”
All thoughts of his sore leg left Callum’s mind as his mouth began to water at the smell of the cooking meat. His empty belly let out a loud growl, and as if to pacify an unsettled and hungry child, his hand unconsciously patted it.
He heard the baby let out a slight whimper and his attention moved briefly to the woman, Tilly. She looked a lot better than when he had seen her last. She had taken the time to wash away a little of the filth that had covered her. In addition, she now wore an old and extremely tattered dress, but in spite of the dress’s battered state, it offered the poor woman at least a little more dignity than being half-naked. He also noticed how young she was. Earlier, covered in dirt and with the lack of hope etched in her face, she had looked old and almost at the end of her endurance. Now, with the dirt washed away and the protection of a group of Rangers, she seemed to be a different person. He knew he was reading a lot into his glimpse of her, but he was used to absorbing a lot in a short time. He could read more from a single glimpse, than most could ascertain in an hour.
Callum moved to a log a small distance from both the fire, and the rest of the group. He sat down and finally attended to the bullet graze on his calf.
With babe in arms, Tilly leaned toward Anderson, who only sat a foot or so from her side. “Is he alright?” she asked as she flicked her head in Callum’s direction.
Anderson looked toward Callum and nodded. “He’s just a quiet type of a man. He don’t say much, but when he does it pays to listen. Don’t mind him none.”
She got to her feet and approached the silent Ranger tending to his wounds on the log. Callum looked up at her briefly, and then returned his attention to his wound.
“Mind if I sit down?”
Callum looked up again. “Why would I mind?”
“Well, yonder Mr. Anderson says yer the silent type. Silent types generally like being on their own.”
Callum straightened. “If that’s what you think, then why are you bothering me?”
She smiled and said, “Because I wish to thank ya.”
Callum’s brow furrowed. “For what?”
Tilly’s face filled with confusion. “Why, for saving me of course.”
Callum returned to tending his wound. “No need to thank me. I was just doing my job.”
“That’s as may be, but the man you dragged into the river was my brother, Jacob Junior, and….”
Callum’s head snapped up. “He was your brother? But he was going to rape and kill you.”
She nodded sadly. “That he was. Me and my sister, Alice she be … or should I say, she were. Well, this here boy be my brother’s child….”
Callum stood. “Hold on, you mean your brother fathered a child with his sister?”
She nodded again. “And with me, but they already killed my baby girl.” She started to weep. “That’s why me and Alice ran. We didn’t want ‘em killing her child. We knowed it were a sin having a child to our brother, but he forced himself on us. The sin be my brother’s, and ‘twere not the baby’s doing. Yet, ‘twere they who paid for the sin. We just wanted her baby to live.”
La Roux and Anderson now stood at her side. The big Cajun placed a caring hand on her shoulder. Callum could see how much sorrow and pity his companions felt for her, but all he felt was the need to give her justice. He loathed himself for not being able to feel empathy for her, but he knew that part of him was as dead as Tilly’s sister Alice.
“Alice were only sixteen,” she sobbed.
“God Damn it,” La Roux growled angrily. “What kinda animal….”
Anderson looked at La Roux and shook his head, cutting the Cajun short. “Listen,” Anderson said, “Why don’t we all sit down and have something to eat, then you can tell us what’s going on here.”
***
They ate the rabbits in relative silence. La Roux ate one of the three rabbits on his own, while Callum and Anderson shared the other two with Tilly. As they ate, the three Rangers rarely took their eyes off the poor woman now cradling her dead sister’s child. She could clearly tell their eyes were firmly fixed on her, as she never allowed her gaze to meet theirs. Instead, she kept her eyes firmly fixed on her food. Occasionally, she would let out a small sob of grief, but she would quickly choke it down.
It took them only half an hour to polish off the three rabbits, and as La Roux placed a coffee pot next to the fire to warm, Anderson moved closer to Tilly.
“You know we only want to help, don’t you?” he said as he placed a hand on the baby’s head. “We just want to prevent what happened to you and your sister from happening to anyone else. To do that, we need to know as much about the people who harmed you as we can. We need to know who, and where, they are. We need to know their numbers and we need to know how well-armed they are. I know it will be hard for you to tell us these things. You will need to tell us things that you would rather forget, but please believe me when I say every detail is important. The more you can tell us, the better the chances we have of stopping them.”
Tilly looked at Anderson, and then her eyes drifted to Callum and La Roux. Finally, her gaze turned to the baby in her arms.
“I’ll tell ya all I know, but I warn ya, it ain’t pretty.”
Now La Roux and Callum edged closer to her, and Tilly began her harrowing tale.
Tilly placed the sleeping baby on the blanket beside her, and then turned back to the Rangers, who had now gathered close to her.
“My family is right big, even by these here part’s standards. Pa—Jacob Maxwell he be—but everyone just calls him Pa Maxwell, well he has four brothers and three sisters. He’s the oldest of the eight of them. Each has between six to eight kids themselves. Ma gave birth to twelve, but three dun died. When the damned Lingering plague hit our family, we numbered close to seventy. We all lived real close to each other, so things went bad real fast. It were like we all lived in a village, only everyone in the village were kin. We were happy, but the Lingering changed all that.
“We’d dun heard tales of the Lingering, but for almost a year the curse seemed to just pass us by. But that all changed when my cousin, Billy, came back bit on the leg. He said he’d stumbled across the thing in the woods. It had no legs, so Billy didn’t see it hidden in the undergrowth. It were just lying there, and when he got too close, it grabbed him by the leg and then sunk its teeth into his ankle. He managed to brake free, and came running on home.
“Within a week of Billy’s bite, we’d lost nearly thirty people to the curse, but not a single one of then turned ornery. All of ‘em just sorter milled about, but that changed when my Ma gave birth to her thirteenth child. We guess they’d dun smelled the blood, and they changed in seconds. They burst into our house and started going crazy. Luckily, only Ma, and my aunty May were inside, but those things ate them both … and of course, the baby.” Tilly dabbed at her eyes with her sleeve, but her eyes were dry. Her action was more one of reflex than necessity. “I wonder if that there coffee is ready yet. I could do with something a might stronger, but coffee will do just fine.”
La Roux felt the pot and found it hot to the touch. He poured four cups and passed them to each of those gathered around the fire. He then reached into his inside coat pocket and pulled out a small bottle of whiskey. He held it aloft, and all nodded. He poured a nip of the alcohol into each of his companion’s cups, and then did the same to his coffee. He then looked at the bottle, but before he recorked it, he took a sizable swig of its contents.
Tilly took a sip of her drink and coughed. “My God,” she said in a horse whisper. “Where did you get that stuff?”
La Roux smiled. “Don’t rightly recall, but it warms the insides real good.”
Callum took a deep draft of his own drink, and then gestured for Tilly to continue.
Tilly placed her cup on the ground beside her and once more commenced her harrowing tale. “Pa and the other men of the family managed to kill all the undead, but the whole episode left him changed. He started saying strange things. He thought ‘twere our job to round up all the undead in the area and just keep ‘em corralled. Anyhow, we did as he said, and started rounding up the harmless ones, the rest we killed. Then that new law came in, the one saying the harmless Lingerers had to be shipped off. Would’ve been about six or seven year ago.”
“Eight,” Callum interjected. “It came into force eight years ago.”
Tilly nodded. “Could’ve been eight year ago, don’t rightly recall for sure. Pa said that the government weren’t going to take our Lingerers, and that we should hole up in the mountains. By this time others had joined us, not family, just people who had heard about what Pa and the other men folk were doing … you know, with the Lingerers. These new folks kinda worshiped my Pa, which seemed to make him go even stranger. He would sermonize about how the Lingerers were folks too, and the government had no right taking ‘em away. A few weeks later, he led us all up into these here mountains. There were fifty of us, and thirty Lingerers.”
“Yer saying he brought the undead as well?” Anderson asked in disbelief.
“Yep. We just herded ‘em along like sheep. We built a camp, penned up the Lingerers, and set about starting a new life. As the years went by, Pa only got worse. Soon, everyone started thinking he were the voice of God. I knew it weren’t so, but by then, it were too late. He said women were nothing more than baby machines, and that any man had the right to do with ‘em as they pleased. He said that the Maxwell blood line ran all the ways back to The Lord All Mighty, but the bloodline had become corrupted by the women’s sin.” Her voice cracked and she cleared her throat. “It were then that he said it were God’s will for Maxwells to breed with other Maxwells. He said ‘twas the job of all the Maxwell men to punish all women, but especially Maxwell women. After that, any woman folk with Maxwell for a last name really began to know what hell was. Fathers, brothers, and cousins all took their turns. Babies started being born with … defects … limbs missing, or with heads that were misshapen.”
“Jesus,” La Roux growled as he pulled the bottle of whiskey from his pocket and drained it in one long draft.
Anderson’s hand went to hers. “Do you need a break? Is this getting too much?”
Tilly shook her head and bravely plowed on. “I’m fine, just let me finish, then I’ll never speak of my Pa or the family again. My Pa blamed the baby’s defects on the women, and the Devil. He said the mother’s minds weren’t pure, so he ordered each man in the camp to flog the mother of the defective child twice over. This meant the mother would receive as many as sixty lashes. Trouble was, the village had all these ruined babies that no one wanted. He said that God must’ve sent the corrupt children so he could feed the Lingerers. It were then he started feeding the babies to the undead. The babies were still alive when he threw them to the Lingerers. The women tried to stop him, but the men folk just beat us all back. The first baby belonged to my oldest sister, Martha. She went out of her mind with grief and threw herself to the Lingerers too.”
Callum stood suddenly. A rage like he had never felt before filled him. Tilly looked up at him, and he saw how truly heartbroken she was. “Was your baby born with defects?” he asked as calmly as he could.
“My little girl had no eyes.” She began to weep uncontrollably. “She were my Pa’s baby too, but he just threw her to those things like she meant nothing to him. I hate that man; I hate him with every piece of my heart.”
For more than half an hour, all Tilly could do was cry. The three Rangers watched her, but none said a word. Anderson simply held her hand. Finally, her weeping subsided, and she struggled on.
“Now they don’t even wait to see if the babies are born ruined, they just feed ‘em to the Lingerers anyway. Pa says it’s the End of Days, and all new born babes must die to avoid going to hell. Truth is, he’s created hell, and he’s the devil in charge.”
“How many men does he have?” Callum asked softly.
“Around thirty to fifty. It’s hard to say for sure because they come and go so much. There are only fifteen women now, and they’re raped and beaten daily. He keeps the women locked in the barn across from the Lingerers’ pens. He keeps ‘em there to remind them of where the babies will end up. Over half the women are pregnant.”
“Can you give us a detailed layout of the encampment?” La Roux asked.
“Yep.”
The Cajun nodded and asked another question. “Are they well-armed?”
“Mostly muskets and bows, but they do have some pistols and rifles too.”
La Roux nodded again. “I want you to describe the whole encampment to us, especially were the women are held. Tell us the quickest route there, and how long it’ll take us to get there on foot.”
For the next hour, Tilly drew plans of her old prison in the dirt. As they only had the light of the fire to illuminate her illustrations, the three Rangers huddled close. She left nothing out. She told them of the quickest, safest route to the camp, plus what to expect when they got there. She told them of the hundred or more Lingerers held in pens dotted around the camp. She warned that all the undead now had the taste of blood, and that her pa had told all the men under his command to release them if ever an attack was mounted on the camp. This added an extra level of risk to their mission, but not one they had not faced before. Finally, she described her father’s appearance in great detail. When found, he would bear the full wrath of the Rangers.
La Roux stood and stretched his back. “We leave at first light. Anderson, you’ll take Tilly and the baby down the mountain. Me and Callum will deal with the Maxwell clan.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Anderson protested. “You’ll be heavily outnumbered, so you’ll need all the fire power you can get.”
“True,” the Cajun said as he twisted side to side. “But do you want Tilly or the baby falling back into their hands? Whether there’s two or three of us really won’t make much difference, but I know I want that little woman and that child well out of harm’s way when the bullets start flying.”
Anderson looked at the tired woman sat beside him. She looked just about spent. “Yer right,” he said, “I’ll take them to Fort Miles and then I’ll head back up here with a couple of squads of men. I won’t be back for over a week … maybe as much as ten days. Will you and Callum be alright ‘til then?”
“We’ll have to be,” La Roux said as he undid his bedroll. “Callum, you take first watch. Anderson, you next. I’ll take last watch. Tomorrow’s going to be a big day for all of us, so let’s all get some sleep.”
Tilly had already laid down beside her dead sister’s baby. Snoring quietly, she finally seemed at peace. Anderson looked at her and said. “I wish I could be there to put a bullet in her pa’s head.”
“I ain’t going to waist a bullet on him,” Callum uttered as he settled on a nearby rock and began his watch.
Both Anderson and La Roux looked in his direction.
“Boy, you scare me at times,” La Roux said as he laid down. “In fact, you scare me more than any Lingerer.”
Callum’s cold eyes turned in the Cajun’s direction. “Why?”
The Cajun let out a yawn, then said, “The undead don’t know what they’re doing, but you do. You do things that make my blood run cold. Do you know why my blood runs cold, Callum?”
Callum considered La Roux’s question. “No, I have no idea.”
“There’s your answer, boy. You don’t realize how good a killing machine you are, or how brutal you can be. When you cut that fella’s throat earlier today, you did it with the same unfeeling coldness of a Lingerer. You could’ve just killed him, but that weren’t good enough for you. Now I’m not saying the sonofabitch didn’t deserve it, but that’s a whole different matter.”
Callum’s brow furrowed. “What are you trying to say?”
La Roux turned his head in Callum’s direction and raised himself up on one elbow. “Yer a human, Callum, not a Lingerer, so don’t act like one. If someone deserves to die, then just kill ‘em, don’t torture ‘em. If you keep doing things like you did earlier, then you’ve missed the point of being a Ranger. We’re trying to return humanity to the badlands. We can only do that by being better than those we punish. We shouldn’t go beyond that mandate; otherwise we’re no better than ‘em.”
Callum stared off into the night and allowed La Roux’s words to sink in. “Yer right, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, be better.”