Lines in Shadow: Walking in the Rain Read online

  “Just tired, gentlemen, so please excuse my awkward attempt at humor.”

  “Don’t sweat it, Scott,” Devayne said in an offhanded manner. He could see the older man was almost punchy with exhaustion. He’d been there plenty of times himself over the years. And in the last few months, for that matter. “Thank you for coming. You men have a seat. Lieutenant, can you give me a rundown on what happened in Gentry?”

  Conners proceeded to do just that, and he accomplished it without notes or a PowerPoint. Scott listened as Conners hit the high points and the lows, laying out the action without trying to sugarcoat the things he reported. If anything, Scott thought he was a little hard on himself about the two men he’d lost, and he could see from the captain’s expression, he must have felt the same.

  When Conners finished his after-action report, Scott shifted his long legs and winced a bit at the sudden bite of pain. Devayne caught the move and regarded the old Marine for a second, as if waiting on an explanation.

  “Just tweaked the hamstrings, Captain. Nothing serious. Not as young as I used to be. Please, you were about to explain why you wanted me here?”

  The ploy was ham-handed, and captain actually laughed. It was a dark sound, though Scott sensed it was real enough. When he answered though, it was in all seriousness.

  “Mr. Keller, you are a man of many parts. I’ve come to value your insights, and I wanted to see what you think about this new group of men attacking in our area. So far, all we’ve received have been fragmentary reports as this horde has pushed through all the communities to our north.”

  Pushing through was a polite way of putting it. The smoke from the fires in Bentonville was still visible in the daytime sky.

  “Well, sir, they are animals. Worse than animals. ‘Zombies’, my scouts called them. They look like the walking dead, anyway. Covered in blood and clothes rotting off their bodies. The one we caught, well, all he did is mumble, but I think he is on drugs of some sort. We’ll get him detoxed and then get some questions answered.”

  Scott’s words were deliberate, and he sounded completely sure when he spoke.

  “Do you have a handle on the numbers yet, sir?” Conners asked.

  “Nothing more than speculation, lieutenant. Which is why when I heard you managed to take not one, but two prisoners, I wanted to speak with you both. Because the speculation I’m hearing places the numbers in the thousands, gentlemen.”

  “Well, shit,” Scott uttered under his breath before continuing. “If they are all like what we saw at the campgrounds and in Gentry, then I think we can take them out. Except they have friends, Captain. Well-armed, and well-trained supporters.”

  “Homeland advisors?” Devayne said, and it wasn’t really a question. Conners had already reported the kinds of weapons the ambushers brought to their attack. Nothing else made sense to him, or the other men. But Captain Devayne hadn’t survived this long by assuming facts not in evidence, and he said as much.

  “We need to find out the nature of this relationship. You said your boys starting calling this cannibal you captured a ‘zombie’? Well, let’s see if you can get the zombie to talk. And the other one, the one dressed like a DHS field agent, I want to know everything he knows.” Captain Devayne turned away for a moment, as if debating his next words.

  “I don’t care what you have to do to him, Scott. After what we’ve gotten back from Camp Gruber and the other sites, the Colonel has passed around new orders. They get no consideration, no Geneva Convention crap, for mass murderers. Drain this guy, get everything he knows, and plant him somewhere in a deep hole.”

  “Shit,” Scott said softly. “How bad is it? Whatever it is you don’t want to tell us, that is.”

  Devayne nodded, conceding the point.

  “About as bad as you can imagine. We just received word via courier. Seems this Recovery Committee we’ve been hearing rumors about on the radios is real. And trying to work through existing pawns to prop up their agenda. Are you men familiar with Congressman McCorkle out of Texas?”

  Both men nodded with equally puzzled expressions, so Captain Devayne continued.

  “It seems the late Congressman McCorkle made a deal with Jeffrey Chambers, and this blasted Recovery Committee. Strip the supplies from all the farming communities around Nacogdoches, subjugate the area at gunpoint, and he would be rewarded with the eastern part of his home state as payment.”

  “That’s crazy!” Conners exclaimed. “McCorkle was one of the leaders of the state’s rights movement in Congress. He hates Chambers and the overreaching federal government. Hell, he introduced a bill trying to disband the Department of Homeland Security.”

  “Well,” Devayne replied, letting the word draw out for a long second, “seems he decided to change that position, once the lights went out. The report I received didn’t have all the details, but he seemed happy enough sending out his own personal death squads to do his bidding. Then, his goons ran into something they weren’t expecting, in the form of a Special Forces A-Team out of Fort Polk.”

  Scott felt a dark bark of laughter escape his lips before he could bite back the response.

  “Bet that surely ruined his day,” he finally managed to say.

  “And then some, hence my use of the term ‘late’. Anyway, the opposition is getting more creative in their efforts to break up our forces, going so far as inventing a Texas provisional government that doesn’t exist. Or didn’t. Reading between the lines, that issue is being addressed, but is not the subject of this briefing. On a side note, however, I did receive word that our mutual friend, young Luke, made it back to the family ranch.”

  Conners let out a low whistle, which he quickly shut off. In some ways, he still wasn’t accustomed to the whole ‘officer and a gentleman’ thing, but he imagined it wasn’t considered polite to whistle in a meeting with his superior officer. Deportment wasn’t one of the things his instructors wasted time with in his abbreviated, week-long OCS classes. No, they’d focused on more concrete details.

  “We were just talking about that little psycho the other day,” Scott commented, but not without a little affection in his voice. “What about his girlfriend? Amy? Do you know if she made it, too?”

  Scott asked, because his daughter would ask. Isabella was eight going on twenty-five when it came to some things. She’d latched onto the fourteen-year-old girl like a leech, especially when her Aunt Ruth was there to fawn over the skinny little refugee.

  “I’m assuming so, but the note didn’t mention her, I’m sorry to say. The only reason Luke’s name came up was because he somehow got mixed up in that situation with McCorkle. His father was taken hostage, along with the local sheriff, and Luke had some hand in getting them both released.”

  “Oh, shit,” Scott muttered. “That must have gone over great with the kid. I can’t even imagine what he did when they took his father.” Scott shuddered and seeing Captain Devayne’s curious look, Scott filled him in on the what he had personally witnessed.

  “I saw him let loose,” Scott explained, “at what the folks back home are now calling the First Battle of Saw Creek. Not really that big of a scrape, now, but back then it was a big deal. That’s where we recovered Sarah and her family, Nathan,” Scott added as an aside to the lieutenant.

  “Well, give,” Devayne demanded, curious in spite of himself.

  “We were badly outnumbered, Captain. I think there were seventeen, maybe eighteen raiders, and back then it was just Nick, Mark, me, and Luke. Now, you know I’m pretty good at getting around in the woods, better than Luke, really, but he volunteered to sneak in and get the hostages out. Because, get this, he had more experience silently killing guards with a knife.”

  “Shit,” Conners whispered in spite of himself, then continued in a more conversational tone. “I’ve heard he was there, but I didn’t know about that. Except, he did seem pretty handy with a knife at the school.”

  “Yeah,” Scott continued, “and he carried out that part of the mission perf
ectly. Got the hostages out, then killed four of them with a knife to thin the herd. Then, when we started the attack, a half dozen of the raiders managed to find cover and were trying to make a stand. So what does Luke do?”

  Scott pauses for dramatic effect before moving forward with his tale. “He’s wearing a jacket he got off a dead raider, so he slips up on their position and pretends to be one of them! Jumps right in the middle of their position, yelling for them to cover him.”

  The other two men were sitting forward in their seats by this time, and Scott reveled in the unfamiliar position of being the storyteller rather than the listener for once.

  “And…” Devayne prompts impatiently.

  “And then he pulls a Tarantino and commences to killing every single one of them. Pistol in one hand, big old knife in the other. And screaming bloody murder at them while he’s doing it. I have to say, I was sitting there with my chin in the dirt, rifle in my hands, watching this unbelievable shit happening and not believing it. Craziest thing I’ve seen since…”

  When Scott paused, the other two men wait for him to finish the thought, but the older man suddenly seemed far away. After a long moment, Scott finished his story.

  “Anyway, it was amazing. He was screaming and I swear, foaming at the mouth, while he was doing it. Pure mad dog, Captain. But I don’t think he wasted a bullet or missed a shot, even going ape-shit like he was. Unreal.”

  Devayne seemed to take a moment to digest this story before he got back to the point.

  “Well, we might wish he was still here if what I fear is the case. This Liberation Army is an invasion force, possibly with the manpower to swarm our defenses and overwhelm our positions here. And with the Homeland boys helping, they may be something else as well. A distraction.”

  Scott Keller and Nathan Conners nodded in unison even before Devayne had said that last bit.

  “So, I need your prisoners to talk, gentlemen. In order to meet this threat, we need numbers, locations, equipment, and enemy dispositions. Not just for the Liberation Army, but for their DHS handlers as well. Get this intel for us, and get it fast. We’ll take the one you shot, Scott, since he needs the medical care, but you get the other one. If you need help, send word and I’ll do whatever I can. Now, is there anything else, or any questions?”

  Conners gave a polite ‘no, sir’ but Scott seemed to be thinking hard about something, so Captain Devayne gave him the courtesy of time to formulate his thoughts into words. He knew Scott, despite his normally calculating nature, was anything but slow.

  “I was just thinking, sir. The timing just strikes me as awfully suspect for this move. Harvest time is upon us, you know, and if the rumors are true, the siege at Fort Chaffee seems poised to break. Maybe the tide is turning our way. A little. Seems sort of interesting timing for this Liberation Army to turn up. Yeah, they may be acting as puppets for the other side, but getting them turned this way must have taken more than a bit of time.”

  The two officers nodded and Devayne seemed to be thinking about something else before he spoke again.

  “Scott, you’re probably on to something there. More reason why we need that intel. Find out what their objective is, and their timeline. We’ll work it from this end on the other one. I will make him talk, even if I have to electrify his nuts to do it.”

  All three men, including Devayne, winced at that threat, but Scott had no doubt the man would carry through if necessary.

  “You are correct about harvest, too. Folks been pulling out of their gardens for a couple of months now, but the corn is starting to turn to ready and so is everything else. We absolutely cannot let them get to the fields, or the winter stores already set aside. That is our lives, and the lives of our communities.”

  With that weighing on their minds, Scott and Lieutenant Conners made their hasty exit and headed back to the farm. Work was waiting, and time was not on their side.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The card table was surrounded by hard faces hunched over their pasteboards and glaring around at the other players in a tense concentration. Scott sat, peering over his hand, waiting for the first move. As dealer for the initial hand, he would have to go last, so he waited and observed the others. Finally, the cardsharp seated to his immediate left called out in a surprisingly high, piping voice.

  “Does anybody have any fours?” she asked, and Scott watched as several other little girls around the table flinched. Isabella, Scott’s eight-year-old daughter, rewarded the other players with a satisfied grin as she collected up the cards tossed into the middle of the table. Double deck “Go Fish” could get pretty cutthroat with the preteen crowd on the farm.

  Also seated at the table were Sarah Trimble, her two daughters, Shay and Delilah, and Cass’s little girl, Maya. These four girls, ranging in age from eight to twelve, all got along amazingly well for the most part, and blended almost seamlessly into the older mass of twelve to fourteen-year-old girls rescued a few months earlier from the school in South Bentonville. Scott’s daughter, Isabella, might be the youngest in the cohort, but was by no means a shrinking violet.

  They’d just finished the cleanup from breakfast and Scott and Sarah were waiting for some quick construction work to be completed at the back of the complex when Maya proposed a quick hand of cards. With very limited electronics and no internet, the kids quickly discovered the existence of lower tech games such as Monopoly, Sorry, Risk, and of course, all kinds of card games.

  Sarah acquiesced, provided the girls finished their morning chores first. So, chickens got frisked for eggs, hogs got slop tossed in their general direction, and Scott found himself dealing cards. He noticed in passing that everybody at the table, his daughter Bella included, wore at least a pistol on their belts, and both Delilah and Shay also sat so their small 22LR carbines were slung across the backs of their chairs, close at hand.

  Bella and nine-year-old Maya wore full flap holsters containing long barreled .22 caliber revolvers, where the slightly older Delilah and her sister Shay bore larger frame (for them) semi-automatic pistols in 9mm. Everybody at the farm learned firearm safety, but Bella was the youngest to go armed as an everyday practice. In the event of an attack, Bella and Maya would fall back to the big house as their battle stations, more specifically to the basement, but the Trimbles, all three of them, would take adjoining fighting positions on the perimeter.

  Scott scarcely paid attention to the game’s progression, thinking about what he needed to do next, but he noticed Sarah acted like she couldn’t think of anything more fun to do at the moment. She heckled the little girls gently, teasing her two the hardest but still with no malice. More often making fun of herself, rather than her daughters or the other two youngsters. She pretended like winning the game was an end in itself, rather than a way to pass time before their real jobs started.

  “That Doc Holiday,” Shay crowed at one point, “he was a for-real flake, but he sure seemed fast on the draw,” she opined, referring to the DVD played the night before for movie night. Sid Stevenson’s electrical skills made cobbling together a working player the job of an afternoon, and Tombstone, despite the pervasive violence, was a repeat top voter getter for the feature presentation.

  “I’ll be your huckleberry,” Maya and Isabella mock-drawled in almost perfect time, which got all four girls to cry out “Jinx” in a ragged cry. Scott just shook his head, mystified, but he caught a shadow of a smile on Sarah’s tanned face.

  This Sarah Trimble, suntanned and lean, with a healed scar on the left side of her chin and fierce eyes that would have been at home in the face of a Lakota warrior, was a far cry from when Scott first saw her that day. When she was a freshly liberated captive of slavers and murderers, near unto death from torture and dehydration. And what had happened to her daughters, well, after that day Scott simply stopped trying to take prisoners, except as a means of gathering information.

  And that thought made him glance over his shoulder, so he saw the ATV round the path paralleling the big ho
use and leading over to the seated card players. His nephew, Mark, was in the driver’s seat. The younger man’s face was set in a stern cast, and his eyes wouldn’t meet Scott’s as he drew to a halt.

  “It’s all set up,” he said, and Scott simply nodded. They’d had words before over this type of thing, and Mark didn’t like it one bit. He operated by a set of rules in his life, and what Scott and Sarah were willing to do didn’t sit right with him. Sarah, for her part, didn’t seem to give a damn, but Scott felt a bit of his anger stir at his nephew’s attitude. Mark wouldn’t turn the blade, but he would benefit from the work done by those with the stomachs to do the hard things.

  Something must have shone in Scott face, for Sarah rested her hand, palm down, over his forearm for a moment. It was a calming gesture, and a sign of her trust. Sarah, after her ordeal, was a bit shy on personal contact. Scott didn’t, couldn’t, understand what the woman had endured, but he could admire her courage and determination in the face of such horror.

  “Let’s go. Sooner started, sooner finished,” she said, and pointedly ignored Mark’s silent shudder. Sarah took the driver’s seat and Scott didn’t protest. In the past, he might have joked about women drivers. Not anymore.

  The site was erected about two miles from the nearest home place, which Scott estimated was Nick and Leslie’s recently reclaimed small farm. Deep in a copse of old growth oaks, somehow overlooked by the timber company’s clearcut crews, the small clearing was sheltered from view except for the narrow trail leading in, and that was perfect for what they had planned. Scott thought so, anyway, and he’d scouted out the spot himself.

  Mark and his crew had everything set up as requested. The zombie, now cleaned up and deloused, lay shackled on an improved work bench made from the dented tailgate off a trashed Ford F-150 and laid across a pair of old sawhorses, their wooden beams splintery with age. Once the pair exited the ATV, Sarah took a circuit of the tree line while Scott surveyed the scene, nodding in approval. The long skinny tailgate could be cleaned with alcohol or bleach when he was done, where a wooden table would need to be burned, after. Just too hard to get blood out of the wood.