The Forge of Darkness (Darkness After Series Book 3) (17 page)

Twenty-four
 

B
ENNY
WAS
SO
TIRED
he was having difficulty holding his head up. Moving to a more comfortable position was impossible, as he was sitting in one of the straight-backed wooden dining chairs from the kitchen, his hands tied behind the chair back and his ankles lashed to the wooden legs. Another length of rope was wound around his body as an additional restraint. But Benny had been surprised that they’d bothered to tie him up at all. He’d expected to be shot as soon as they were done questioning him, as he was of no real conceivable use to them. But the one called Drake, who’d asked most of the questions and who seemed to be in charge, had acquiesced when another suggested that they wait for Jimmy. Benny gathered real quickly that Jimmy was the little brother of the teenaged boy he’d shot—the one that had pulled the knife on David. And both of them were Kenneth’s sons—the man who’d shot Tommy and who had died during the night of the wounds he received from Lisa’s .22.
 

He heard them say that Jimmy ought to have his chance to get an eye for eye. “Let him do the honors,” the man arguing for waiting said. “It won’t make any difference to us, but it’ll give little Jimmy a bit of satisfaction, getting his revenge, since he didn’t get to participate in the fun here, seeing how he had to ride back and tell the others what we found. Besides that, waiting for him to get here will give the old man more time to contemplate the fact that he’s gonna die for what he’s done.”

“Suit yourself, but just get him out of my sight and make damned sure he’s tied up where he can’t get loose! He’s already caused me enough trouble!”

Benny had put up a fight when they grabbed him to drag him into the house. He knew it was useless, but he couldn’t go out without trying. It ended when one of them kicked him so hard in the stomach that he couldn’t breathe. He took a couple of hard punches to the face too, including one that had his right eye swollen shut. Now he had been tied to that chair for what he figured was nearly 12 hours. They’d put him in one of the back bedrooms, the one that had been Doug Henley’s office, with the chair facing the wall. When daylight came, Benny could see with his good eye the framed pictures of the real game warden that had given away the lie he’d concocted to discourage his captors from further searching. It hadn’t worked, and now Benny found himself helpless, with nothing to pass those long hours but his tortured thoughts of Tommy’s death. The only thing left to look forward to now was seeing Tommy and Betsy in the next life, where Benny was certain he was headed soon.
 

There was nothing else he could do for his friends either, but hope they were safe. Maybe the girls had realized they needed to get far away, and maybe, just maybe, Mitch and those other two boys wouldn’t come walking up into the yard before they figured out something was wrong. Benny didn’t have any illusions that Mitch would be able to do anything in time to help him. With this many armed men here and his sister and his girlfriend off in the woods somewhere, taking back the house wasn’t going to be his top priority, even if he knew Benny was in there. But Benny was sure he wouldn’t, because nobody did other than the men who were holding him. From what he’d heard them say, there were even more of them on the road behind than there were here, including the young boy they intended to hand him over to.
 

They had left him alone after moving him into the office during the night, and all he could hear outside was muffled conversation and the sounds of the horses in the front yard. There was a lot of activity out there after daylight, and Benny figured they were going through everything in the house and barn, looking for anything they could use. He heard some of the men ride off on horseback, and later in the morning, he heard distant rifle shots off in the direction of the creek. The shooting had to involve his friends; he couldn’t think of another explanation. The men had either found the girls where they were hiding, or they’d ambushed the boys coming back from the hunt. When he heard the door open behind him a half hour later, Benny suspected he was about to find out, and he was right. The one called Drake entered the room and jerked Benny around to face him, chair and all.

“I want to know how many of you were living here, old man! I just ran into two young men on their way back here with a deer carcass. They were both carrying bows and arrows. I guess you’re going to tell me they were your ‘cowhands’ too, aren’t you? Like anybody with a tiny herd the size of the one here would even need a hired hand…”
 

Benny said nothing, but he now knew the shots he’d heard had involved Mitch and the guys, rather than the girls. That didn’t make it good news though, and what he heard next was even worse.

“Well if they
were
your hands, you can count yourself one short as of this morning. The other one won’t be coming back, but if he does, we’ll be ready for him. The son of a bitch can’t shoot worth a damned, I’ll tell you that. He must have fired a half a dozen rounds at me with a semi-automatic rifle, but missed every time.”

Benny wasn’t going to volunteer anything, so he had no way of knowing which of the young hunters was dead, or why Drake only saw two instead of all three. But he did know that Jason was the only one carrying a rifle. So that meant that it was likely Mitch or Corey. It made him sick to think about it, but he still had hope April and the girls had escaped. The thing was though, even if they had, where would they go now and how would they survive? Other than he and Tommy, Mitch and Lisa were the only ones with any real woods experience before the collapse. So if Mitch was dead, their future didn’t look bright. But Benny was snapped out of his worries of the future by the back of Drake’s hand striking him across his already-bruised face.
 

“How many?”

“The two you saw are it!” Benny said. “They’re the hands I already told you about.”
 

“No, they’re not, because these two didn’t know we were here. They were carrying that deer out of the woods like they were out for a Sunday stroll; laughing and cutting up, completely at ease.”

“Well maybe they was going somewhere else with it then,” Benny said. “Sounds like more strangers if you ask me. Lately, the place has been crawling with good-for-nothing vagrants, looking to take up where they ain’t got no business!”
 

“Just keep being stubborn, old man. It doesn’t really matter whether you answer my questions or not. The only reason you’re alive now is so you can meet Little Jimmy. It’ll be good for him, figuring out just what he wants to do to you before you die. It’ll make him a stronger man someday. We’ll hunt all your friends down like dogs no matter how many there are; so don’t delude yourself into thinking you’re helping them by keeping your mouth shut. It won’t matter in the end.”
 

With that, Drake shoved Benny back against the wall and left the room, slamming the door behind him. Benny’s face stung from the blows, but the physical pain was nothing compared to the sadness and loss he suffered.
 

* * *

“Oh my God!” Stacy had whispered, when the first two rifle shots echoed through the forest, coming from exactly the direction in which Lisa had gone after warning them to hide the canoes. “They may have just shot Lisa!”
 

When several more shots rang out, none of which sounded like a .22. April had wished she could go and see if Lisa needed help. Maybe she’d been hit, but then again, maybe they shot so many times because they missed as she took off through the woods? It was horrible, not knowing, and also not knowing where Mitch and the guys were. She considered too that the shooting could have involved them instead, or maybe even Benny. There was no way to find out without going to investigate, but she was not leaving Kimberly to do it herself, and Stacy, Samantha, and David did not have the skills to risk stalking closer to such dangerous men in the daylight.

“As hard as it is not knowing,” April said, “we’ve got to sit tight. We can’t risk splitting up any further just yet.”
 

“But what are we going to do if Lisa doesn’t come back?” Stacy asked.

“If she’s okay, she’ll come back soon. If they were shooting at her, she may be hiding or running, but if they didn’t hit her she’ll be back. If she’s not back in another hour or so, then we’ll decide about looking for her.”

April had her hands full keeping Kimberly quiet while they waited. A light rain was falling again, but not enough to put up with the discomfort of sheltering under the canoes as they had done all night when it rained much harder. April wished they had a tarp, but the one she’d brought from the house was with the pile of stuff they had abandoned in their haste to get out of there after the shootout. So they sat there in the wet, cool forest, she keeping Kimberly wrapped up under her poncho in her arms, while they waited and listened, their field of vision limited to just a small stretch of the creek they could make out through the trees. When something finally
did
break the monotony, it was a sound that sent a chill all the way through her—the sound of a paddle lightly banging into the side of an aluminum canoe!

April placed Kimberly under the canoe behind her and grabbed her carbine. She was almost certain the sound meant that the men Lisa had watched discuss the other canoes had returned to get them and were now hunting for them downstream. She whispered to her friends to be ready to fire as soon as the canoes came into view, but when they did, what she saw was not at all what she’d expected.
 

Lisa was paddling the first canoe! Behind her, Jason was paddling the second one, with a third trailing behind him on a towline. That was all of them—their entire fleet! April stepped out of the concealment of the woods to greet her and find out why they were in the canoes. And more importantly, why Jason was with her, but not Mitch and Corey? When Lisa stepped ashore and told them, Samantha let out a scream that April was sure could be heard all the way to the house. April and Stacy caught her as her knees collapsed beneath her and eased her gently to the sand as the sobs racked her body in great waves. April could not begin to imagine how she felt, and what she herself would feel if it had been Mitch instead. But from what Lisa and Jason told her of his plans, she knew she might easily find herself in the same place as Samantha later that very day.

Twenty-five
 

M
ITCH
MADE
A
DECISION
as he watched the men at work on the carcasses and determined that they were the only four out here. Attacking them from the hillside across the road could work, but would leave any he missed with an easy escape route back to the house and reinforcements. Now that he had assessed the situation, Mitch decided his best plan would be to backtrack a bit and cross the road to the same side they were on, then circle around and get between them and the house. It would be the direction from which they least expected an attack, and if any of them managed to get away, it would not be easy for them to retreat to the house. Mitch knew every possible route and he could intercept any attempt they might make to do so. He had no mercy to spare for any of these men after seeing what they did to Corey and learning of Tommy’s ruthless murder. He would take out these four and whatever it took, get rid of the others that were in the house too. If more came as David had heard them mention, he would deal with them as the situation required, but that was for later. His full attention was on these four for now.
 

Once he’d crossed the road and worked his way back around among the pines, Mitch came upon the rolling travois that Benny made from his old bicycle wheel. Lisa had told him they’d planned to move Tommy on it, but that plan changed when she learned from David that he was dead. Mitch stalked on past it and continued to close the gap on his prey. When he was close enough to hear the men talking, the conversation he overheard was music to his ears. His job was about to get a whole lot easier:
 

“I’m gonna go look over there in that stand of pines between here and the house and see if I can find it. I almost tripped over it last night, so I know it’s there.”

“If you think it’s worth the trouble…”
 

“I know it is! That’s what it’s made for. They used to sell a contraption like that to haul your deer out of the woods. But I don’t know who would have bought one back then, when everybody had four-wheelers for that. It’ll sure make moving this beef a lot easier though. We can finish cutting it up when we get it back to the house.”

Mitch knew this was an extremely lucky break. One of the men was coming his way alone to look for the travois. He would be the first to die and then there would be three—much easier to deal with all in a group than four. He carefully checked the arrow he’d selected as he waited. It was one of his best. The spares he carried from Jason’s and Corey’s quivers would be used last, after all his favorites were exhausted.
 

From where he watched, Mitch was nearly a hundred feet from the other three men. If he waited until the lone man was almost upon him, the chances of the others hearing anything were very slim. Mitch had done this before, far more times than he cared to recall in the months since the lights went out, but such was the world he now inhabited. The man walking towards him looked to be about 30, his full black beard showing no gray and the rest of his face lean and tan. He carried an AK slung casually over one shoulder, clearly feeling safe on this little walk between his buddies by the road and the others that occupied the house. Mitch was low to the ground behind a dense clump of small evergreen cedars, sitting with his butt on his heels and his bow canted almost to the horizontal with the arrow resting on the upper side. He drew the arrow slowly, the motion so familiar that it was burned into his neuromuscular memory, the touching of his right thumb to the corner of his mouth telling him without conscious thought he was at full draw and ready to release the string. Mitch’s target was the center of the man’s Adam’s apple. The razor sharp, three-bladed broadhead would cut through his throat and silence any outcry; its path out the back of his neck severing the spine if his aim was true. He let the arrow fly and saw that it was.