Apocalypsis: Book 3 (Exodus) (32 page)

“You can army-crawl through the weeds until you get close and then wait for your moment.”

“Army-crawl.  Fun,” I said sarcastically.

“I do love me some army-crawling through the wet, smelly, snake-infested weeds,” said Winky, smiling.

“Snake-infested?” I said, feeling a little light-headed at the idea.

“Just kidding.  Not really,” she said.

“Not really, what?  Kidding?  Or about the snakes?”

“Yeah.  One of those,” she said, leaning back quickly so I couldn’t hit her.

“I
will
slap you silly, Winky.”

“You’d have to catch me first.  And I’m fast.”

“But you’ve got to sleep sometime.”

“Okay, ladies,” said Ronald, holding up his hands, “time to behave.  We have plans to make here.”

“Yes, sir, Ronald, sir,” I said, saluting him.  Then I couldn’t help but smile.  “Just messing with you.  I like bossy men.  Tell me what I should do.”

“Me, too.  Boss away,” said Winky, looking at him expectantly.

“I’m not bossy,” said Ronald.

“Uh-
hem
,” said his brother, clearing his throat.  “Yeah,
right.”

“Traitor,” Ronald said, scowling at his brother.

“I just call it like I see it.  And
you
?
 
Are
bossy.
  But you know I like you anyway, brother, so keep on keepin’ on.”

“With my bad self?” he finished.

“Yeah.  Wit’ yo bad self.”

They did a complicated hand slapping thing that had me jealous.  Winky and I giggled as we tried to mimic it.

Ronald put his hands over ours, covering them and halting our progress.  “Girls.  Please.  You’re embarrassing yourselves.”

Jamal snickered behind him.

We stuck our tongues out at them.

“They’re just jealous,” whispered Winky loudly.

“Yeah,” I agreed.  “We’ve got skills.”  We did a messy high-five followed by two hip bumps that sent Winky flying into the dirt.  “Oops, sorry about that,” I said.

We both started giggling, unable to stop.

The guys all rolled their eyes.

Bodo spoke up from his position on the ground.  “You haff to watch out for Bryn’s butt.”

I hid my smile behind a fake scowl.

“Girls,” said Peter, shaking his head and sighing, as he went back to his job of repacking the trailer.  He’d taken everything out and was starting from scratch.

“I’m going to take a cat nap until the rain comes,” said Winky, lying down on her back, using her backpack as a pillow.

“Me too,” I said, doing the same, facing Winky and resting my back against Bodo’s after giving him a kiss on his thankfully cool cheek.

I fell asleep looking at my friend’s beautiful profile, envying her coffee-colored skin and shiny black hair, hoping that no matter what went down later today, that she’d never lose the spunk that made her so much fun to be around.

***

The rain came and brought with it plenty of thunder and lightning.  The drops were so big it reminded me of the shower in Kayahatle.  We were soaked in less than a minute.

Winky and I armed up, each putting two knives and a gun in our clothes.

Bodo was awake and seemed much better.  He protested when he was told he couldn’t participate, but he seemed okay with me going.

“Chust come back to me.  Dat’s all I ask,” he said before giving me a bone-crushing hug.

“You all have to be ready to haul ass when we’ve gotten those kids,” I said, pulling out of his arms.  “If by some miracle we’re able to get them out in secret, we can’t be hanging around here waiting for those slave drivers to come after us.”

“Yeah, this’ll be the first place they look,” said Ronald.

Winky was staring out into the rain, in the direction of the slavedriver camp.

I nudged her in the arm.  “What’s the matter?  Having second thoughts?”

She shook her head without looking at me.  “Nope.  Just getting into the right frame of mind.”

“She’s getting her game face on,” said Peter, standing by the now nearly-empty trailer, all ready for its three passengers.

“Come on,” I said.  “No sense in waiting.  We don’t want the rain to stop while we’re in the middle of it.”

“Do you think the rain woke them up?  Maybe they’re not sleeping anymore,” said Jamal, looking worried for us.

“They could be but probably not.  We’ll have to use the cover of the rain to get as close as we can and then we’ll just have to wing it.  You okay with winging it, Winky?”

She nodded, glancing at me quickly before looking back to the highway.  She was dead serious, totally in the zone.

“Let’s do this,” I said, walking out of the trees.

“Bryn, wait!” said Bodo, immediately getting shushed by everyone around him.  He waved them off and came over to me, grabbing me into another big hug.  Water was streaming down both of us.  I looked up at him and tried not to focus too much on how amazing he looked with his wet face and the flows of water coming off him in small rivers.  Even bald, he was gorgeous.

“Be careful.  I don’t want to have to come in dare and rescue your big butt.”

I smacked him on the arm.  “Watch who you’re calling big butt,
big head.
”

“I brushed my teeth so I could kiss you.  Iss dat okay?”

I nodded.

He leaned down and kissed me hard on the mouth, gripping the back of my head and forcing the kiss deeper.  His minty tongue tangled in mine, immediately heating me up from my core outwards, the rain only barely keeping us cooled off.

“Gettin’ steamy in heeeere,” said Peter.

Bodo finished the kiss and gave me one more quick peck, before pulling back a little and staring into my eyes, his hands on my neck and cheeks now.  “I’m not kidding.  Be safe.  I luff you.”

I didn’t hesitate.  “I luff you, too.”

He grinned big.  “Dat’s good.  Even if you haff a little Cherman accent.  I like it anyway.”  He kissed me once more and let me go.

Winky grabbed my arm and pulled me away.  “Come on, lover girl.  Time to go whoop some ass.”

I turned away from our friends and followed silently, pushing Bodo’s face and kiss from my mind.  In what felt like less than a minute, we arrived at the edge of the highway.  It was dark and the rain obscured a lot of what we could see.  We had to drop down as soon as we got near the edge of the road to avoid being noticed.

The highway had been built up on a slight hill, with the shoulders on either side going down into ditches and then the fields beyond.  On the other side, there was just a short piece of bare land before the tree and then the nearby town’s outer limits.  The two smashed up cars were in front of us, the closest one a little off to the right.  We used the body of the one farther away to shield us from the view of our targets.

“Now what?” Winky whispered, lying down next to me on the upper slope of the drainage ditch.

“Now we army-crawl up to that car and see what we can see underneath it.”

I tried to ignore the stinging scrapes I was suffering as a result of our choice to go on our bellies onto the highway.  We might have been able to go to the car standing up, but the frame was smashed up, and it hadn’t been a very tall car to begin with.  All of the glass had been broken out, too, making the solid part of the car only a few feet high, or less in some places.  Luckily, there was no glass on this side of the car, but the tiny rocks we crawled across felt like I imagined the glass would have felt, anyway, so it wasn’t much of a consolation.

We reached the middle of the highway before we were able to see anything.  We had an imperfect view of the trees the slave drivers were sitting under from the space below the car.  The weeds on the side of the road had grown so high, we were only able to make out a couple of the people there.  Both of them were leaning against one of the trees, and I couldn’t tell if they were sleeping or awake.

“Can you see anything?” I asked.

“No.  Stupid grass is in the way,” Winky whispered back.

I was straining my eyes to get a better look when the sound of sliding gravel distracted me.  I turned in time to see the black muzzle of a gun pointed at my face.  I followed it up to the hand holding it and then to the arm leading to the face.

It was a guy, one of the slave drivers if I wasn’t mistaken, about fifteen years old with sparse patches of hair playing at being a beard on his face.

I took Winky’s hand and squeezed it hard twice before doing a pushup and standing with my back to the car.

“You too,” he said, gesturing with his gun at Winky.

She stood, glancing at me nervously.

“Don’t do anything stupid.  I’ll shoot you both if either one of you does anything I don’t like.”

I was too busy praying that none of our friends would come after us right now to think of anything to say.  Winky also wisely kept quiet.

“Come with me,” he said, backing up a few steps and waving the gun to our right, telling us to move around the car and join the slave drivers at the tree.

“Well, that went well,” mumbled Winky under her breath.  We were walking in front of the guy with the gun, taking the smallest steps possible, trying to prolong our journey and work out a plan.

“What are we gonna do?” I whispered.

“Kick ass,” Winky said quietly.

“Stop talking!” said the guy behind us.  “Just walk!”

I put my hands up in a surrender position while looking over my shoulder.  “What’s your name?”

“None of your business,” he said, trying to sound tough.

“Mine’s Bryn.  This is Winky.”

“Shut up, I don’t care.”

“Where are you guys from?” I asked.

The guy walked quickly to close the gap between us, jabbing me hard in the spine with his gun.  “Shut up, or I’m going to shoot you in the fucking head!”

I pressed my lips together, trying to control the panic that wanted to well up and take over my mind.  I needed to stay clear, keep it together.  My plan to humanize us to this guy so he’d have a harder time killing us wasn’t working.  We were nearly to the tree now, so I put my plan-making on hold.  I had to focus on being ready to make a move whenever the opportunity presented itself.  I snuck a glance at Winky and she nodded once, just enough for me to see it. 
She’s ready too.  Time to kick some slave driver butts.

As we approached, one of the other guys stood immediately.  The other two were sleeping, their backs to us.

“Look who I found creeping around up on the road.”

I looked at the kids who were all tied together.  Two of them were staring at us open-mouthed.  The other was sleeping and even the talking wasn’t waking her up.  They were all girls, which had been hard to see from a distance because their hair had been chopped off to what might have been shoulder-length if it hadn’t been so full of knots.  They were dirty, bone-thin, and their clothes were ragged to the point of being almost useless.  I compared them to the slave drivers who all looked well-fed and clothed in newish stuff, and it made me furious.

“Who the hell is this?” said the smaller guy, taking a few steps until he was just feet away from us.

“How the hell do I know?  They were hiding behind that car up there.”

“Were they alone?”

“They’re all I saw.”

The guy stepped closer to us, eyeing us carefully.  He looked at Winky and jerked his chin up at her.  “You one of them indian kids?”

“No.”

“You sure look indian to me,” he said.

“I’m not from India.”

If she had just come right out and said he was an ignorant ass, it couldn’t have been more clear what she thought of him.

“Ha, ha, that’s fuckin’ funny.  You know what I meant, bitch.”  He stepped over and slapped her hard in the face.  “Answer my question and don’t be a smartass about it.  Are you one-a-them indian kids or not?”

“Like I said, I’m not …”

He slapped her again before she could get the rest of the sentence out.  “I can do this all damn day if you want.”

“Don’t!” yelled one of the slave girls.

He whipped around and pointed at her.  “Shut. The fuck.
Up! 
I told you before!  No one wants to hear your shit!”  He turned back to us.  “So.  Are you?  Or are you not?  One of those indian bitches?”

“She is,” I said hurriedly.  “She an indian.  A Native American from north of here.  Near Orlando.  We’re both from there.”

“You ain’t no indian,” he said, scoffing at me.

“No, I’m not.” 
And neither is she, douchebag. 
I kept my thoughts to myself, my mind racing, trying to figure out how I could pull my gun out and shoot all of them dead before getting a bullet in my back.

“Did you frisk ‘em?” he asked the guy behind us, making me feel like he’d just read my mind.

“No.”

“Are you fuckin’ stupid?  You bring these bitches in here and don’t search ‘em first?  Jesus, J-Dog, you’ve got oatmeal for brains sometime, you know that?”

I turned in time to see J-Dog pressing his lips together, and I sensed some pent up rage in him, making me hope we could possibly use that to our advantage later.

The short guy moved up close and started feeling our bodies, spending extra time on our chests and in our crotches.

“I’m pretty sure you’re not going to find any weapons in my vagina,” I said.

That earned me a slap on the face and some more rough handling down there.  “Better shut up or I’ll think you like it,” he said, being even rougher.

My face flamed red, both from the humiliation of being violated and from the anger that was growing deeper by the second.  I was so looking forward to feeding this guy his nuts in reverse.  I tried not to smile at the vision of that move, lest he think he was turning me on with his cruel perversions.

He took the gun and knife from my waistband, but missed the one in my moccasin.  It was smaller, but just as deadly as the other.  I prayed over and over that he’d do the same with Winky.  She put up with the same humiliation as I did, and was relieved of her gun and knife in her pants too.  As soon as he turned away, she spit on the ground near his feet.

The slave girls who were awake, flinched, eyeing their captor with stark fear in their eyes.