Walking in the Rain (Book 1): Surviving the Fall Read online

  “I see one from the roadblock,” I yelled, and Stan agreed. He would try for the driver at two hundred yards, he added. Not a clap shot, but easily doable with his Savage hunting rifle and scope. I would follow his lead, aiming for the three men I could see crowded into the back cargo bed of the truck.

  The CETME Sporter was the civilian version of the Spanish made, select fire military rifle that evolved into the G3 and the HK91. Chambered in 7.62x51, or .308 Winchester, the big rifle featured a twenty round magazine and not-so-great iron sights, but I’d shot my father’s HK91 plenty of times over the last few years so the oddly placed charging handle and the gritty feeling trigger fazed me not in the least. The rifle seemed to have been well cared for when I “inherited” it, but until I pulled the trigger I would not be able to say how far off those sights might be.

  As soon as I heard the boom of Stan’s rifle, I began taking my own shots. The CETME was a beast for recoil like I remembered, but I rode the hard thump into my shoulder and stroked the trigger once more. I could tell the sights were off since my first shot slammed into the roof of the truck rather than my target, but the second shot seemed to cause one of the thugs to stumble back and somersault off the back of the truck. Luck rather than skill but I’d still take it. Then the truck started swerving from side to side, which made me think Stan’s shots had the desired effect.

  In the movies, the truck would have veered out of control, and then rolled over ten times on the pavement. Or else, continued driving straight ahead at breakneck speed until slamming into a conveniently placed bridge abutment.

  In reality, the truck coasted to a stop about seventy five yards from our position and men started trying to scramble behind the bulk of the truck body for cover. Well, the two men still alive in the truck bed, anyway. Given the blood spray across the inside of the bullet starred windshield, nobody in the cab was getting out under their own power.

  I managed to hit one of the men on the outside of the thigh, almost at the hip, and he spun with a jerk and accidentally tumbled out of the truck on the side exposed to our fire. He went down hard and a spray of fully automatic fire exploded from the black rifle his hands. The rounds snapped by high and to the left of me, but still caused me to flinch. That looked like a real M4 carbine, which might open up a whole other avenue of trouble.

  Fortunately, the magazine in the carbine was exhausted and the weapon dropped to the pavement. The wounded man lay still, either unconscious or possibly even dead from the fall. I wasn’t hitting where I was aiming, but at least now I had an idea of how to compensate for the sights.

  The last of the bandits dove off the truck bed and seemed to stagger in mid-air. I heard the boom of the Savage and figured Stan was a pretty good deer hunter after all. Hitting targets on the move is never easy.

  “Reloading,” Stan called.

  “Covering,” I replied, remembering that response from a war movie I’d seen once. And I was, too, carefully scrutinizing the area around the truck for any movement. I saw nothing stirring, except the ragged breathing of the sprawled form on the pavement beside the truck. Still alive after all.

  “I’m good now, Luke,” Stan said more softly now, and I nodded to myself and took a second to swap for a full magazine for my rifle. I’d only burned through five or six rounds from the CETME but better to make the exchange now than run out later. I safed the rifle, slung my pack, and edged closer to the road, CETME still at the ready.

  “Stan, coming over,” I said loudly, wanting make sure he heard me.

  “Come on. I’ll cover the road.”

  So I ran across the two lanes and zeroed in on where Stan what kneeling, rifle shouldered and peering through his scope. I saw Stan glance my way but quickly he returned his attention to the road.

  “How many were in the cab?” I asked.

  “Two of them. Driver was a guy I didn’t see today at the roadblock, but he was there when we came in the other day. I got both of them with headshots I think.”

  “Three guys in the back. One still alive, but not sure about the one you shot that fell on the other side.”

  “Can’t we just go? Nobody is going to come looking for us for this, I don’t think.” Stan asked, his voice steady but his eyes pleading. He was not a violent man by nature and now that the immediate threat was handled, Stan wanted to get back on the road. Sensible and I wanted to agree, but what if they were herding us to their own ambush? When I asked that very question, Stan looked sick.

  “What can we do?”

  “Well, I can go ask that survivor some questions before he bleeds to death. Then we can plan accordingly. Wave the girls back down here, and we can let Ruth and Amy provide overwatch while we go ask our questions and load up whatever we find laying around.”

  “You really think he is going to bleed to death?”

  I nodded.

  “Oh, I can guarantee he will after we get done with him. Hard to heal up from a cut throat.”

  Stan looked like he wanted to be sick and said,” Jesus, Luke, they have a merit badge for that? What kind of Boy Scout does that?”

  “Stan, these bandits would have killed you and you don’t want to think about what they might have done to your family. I’m the kind of Boy Scout that wants to live to see his family, and you better be too.”

  That seemed to get through to the man and he said nothing else as we made our way down to the scene of carnage, under Amy’s watchful eye. Ruth stood watch to the front and we let Sophia sleep as long as she wanted. I tried not to think that this might have been us spread out in a gruesome tableau if the day’s events had turned out differently.

  Tableau? Was that the right word? That was one of the words I learned prepping for the SAT test to build my vocabulary. I sometimes grope around for the right word at the darnest of times. I knew I was trying to ignore the elephant in the room, but torturing this man was not going to be fun. Killing him in the heat of battle, not a problem. Even cutting his throat now, as a prisoner, not so bad.

  But torture? Could I do it?

  Then I looked back over my shoulder and saw Amy and Ruth. Both were standing watch, weapons in hand, trying to look intimidating. Amy, since she was facing me, offered up a wry little smile of encouragement.

  “Stan, you tie his hands and feet. Ask him the questions. I’ll handle the rest” I said, drawing the old butcher knife I still carried from the makeshift cardboard scabbard on my hip. The knife wasn’t all that sharp, even with me working the blade over with a stone a few times, but the edge was enough for what we would need to do.

  Hell, I’d skin him if necessary, if that would get us the information we needed. These people, some I’d only known for a day, meant enough to me that I would listen to the screams and endure the stares later if only my actions would be enough to keep them safe.

  My daddy always said that whatever we were doing on the farm, whether it was cleaning out the pig pen or mucking out the horse stalls, beat walking in the rain. I never understood as a child, but not long before I headed off on this cursed trip, I finally got him to explain what he meant by that expression.

  “Luke, my old platoon sergeant used to say that. It was just a throw-away line, but he would always come out with that when we bitched about some particularly nasty job. Whatever terrible chore he needed done, from burning the honey barrels to bagging blown up chunks of your buddies after a mortar attack, he always said doing this job was better than walking in the rain. Just a way of tricking your mind, I guess. Whatever hard thing you have to do, just imagine that the alternative might be worse. That’s all it means.”

  Well, now I really understood, standing there on that deserted stretch of highway, doing whatever I needed to get the job done. Better than walking in the rain.

  CHAPTER NINE

  We rode for a long time in silence, each of us occupied with our own thoughts while at the same time maintaining a high level of readiness. I watched the green world flash by outside my window and mulled over what I had le
arned.

  Torture, as it turned out, had not been necessary to get the wounded man to talk. Heck, once he started the hard part was getting him to shut up. Mainly about the gruesome wound in his thigh, where my rifle round had apparently broken his femur as well as blowing a huge chunk of muscle and tissue out of the middle of his leg. The bandit cried and moaned a lot as I tried to staunch the flow of blood but one look told me this guy did not have long.

  Stan asked the questions and I stood there with my knife in hand, ready to start carving if the well ran dry. Before the dying man lapsed into unconsciousness, we had what we needed and I set about scavenging the dead. The last of the bandits expired before I finished with my chores.

  Stan watched me work for a moment before walking back to relieve his wife from her watch duties. He seemed a little green, like all the blood and death might be getting to him, but every time I checked he was still maintaining a good lookout.

  Stripping the dead took about fifteen minutes and in the end we added three AR-15s, a pair of twelve gauge shotguns, and what appeared to be a select fire Colt M4. The Oklahoma National Guard emblem made me wonder briefly how the weapon had ended up here, but I set that thought aside and grabbed all of the magazines and ammunition I could find. The magazines and ammo for the M4 and the AR-15s were interchangeable, so that was a plus.

  “What about their truck?” Amy asked. She had kept watch on our back trail while Stan focused on the road ahead. So far, neither had reported any sign of traffic, pedestrian or motorized.

  “We can’t take it with us,” I replied sadly, “we don’t have enough of us to properly protect the one we have. Splitting up is not a good idea.”

  “What about taking it with us a ways and hiding it?” Stan suggested. “There’s plenty of old dirt roads and logging trails along the way. Just go until we find a likely place, pull off and conceal it for later. Maybe we can come back for it with some men from the farm. Just having a running vehicle these days is a valuable asset.”

  Since the dying bandit had assured us they were not herding us into an ambush, Stan’s idea made some sense. We decided to at least try to stash the truck for later recovery and I drug the bodies into a convenient ditch and let gravity dictate their final resting places. With the plan being to run us off the road, rape the women and kill us men folks, I wasn’t feeling like wasting any time digging graves. For his part, Stan offered to help but I wanted him off his bad ankle and back in our truck.

  “I think I might know a place,” Ruth finally volunteered. “There’s a turnoff about four miles up the road. Leads to an old private cemetery that nobody has used in years. The locals know about it but since there’s only a tumble down old shed nearby nobody would think to salvage from there.”

  Stan gave his wife a funny look and Ruth laughed despite the tension of the last hour.

  “No, honey, it’s not an old make out place from when I was in high school. One of my great, great uncles is buried out there and I went to see if I could find the tombstone. You know, helping mom with her genealogy research.”

  We all agreed this sounded like a decent plan so I volunteered to drive the captured one ton farm truck while Ruth followed with Stan, Amy and little Sophia riding with her. I repeatedly warned Ruth not to slow down near the rest stop and for everyone to be ready to fight. Despite some funny looks, nobody said anything at the time.

  Before we started out, I laid a feed sack down in the driver’s seat and tried to squeegee the inside of the windshield with a piece of shirt salvaged from one of the dead to clear the glass enough to drive. Both the driver and passenger had been struck in the head by Stan’s shots and the truck cab resembled the inside of a blender when I pulled out the two corpses. A blender set on high and used to puree brains, I thought to myself.

  So our little convoy of two vehicles rumbled on down the road, and I felt that familiar touch of ice on my spine as we drove past the roadside rest area ahead. Splitting my attention away from the asphalt strip was bad practice, but I’d insisted I could make it on my own and I was determined to do just that. Most of the rest area was hidden by a row of bushes and I could just make out the shape of metal canopies through the twisted limbs.

  Nothing moved, but I kept my hand tight on the pistol grip of the M4 resting on the seat next to me. I’d reloaded the carbine and kept three spare magazines handy next to the weapon. At the first sign of trouble, I intended to point this bullet hose in that direction and open the spray.

  Only after we were a good half mile past the turnoff did I relax enough to turn my attention fully back to the road in front of me. I resolved not to make that mistake again and listen when Amy insisted she could ride shotgun for me.

  The cemetery was just as Ruth described it, an overgrown wide spot next to a dusty dirt road that looked undisturbed since well before the lights went out. I pulled the rig up next to the only structure around, a dilapidated shed squatting in a second clearing behind and adjacent to the tombstone dotted piece of property.

  Ruth said the shed was left over from when the tiny cemetery association still maintained the property and the last members had probably died off back before any of us were born. Now, usually such a building would have been appropriated by one of the many wandering meth cooking gangs that roamed the rural landscape but Stan expressed doubts any would have bothered the cemetery. Meth heads were, by definition, idiots or they wouldn’t be poisoning themselves in the first place, but they were also highly paranoid and setting up shop next to a bunch of dead bodies might make them even twitchier than usual.

  Stan and I cleared the shed and found it to be completely empty except for signs of raccoon scat on the dirt floor and what might have been the scattered skeleton of a rat in one corner. I drove the heavy duty work truck, carefully, into the narrow space and killed the engine.

  A quick check of the glove compartment and under the seat revealed no useful items, just random receipts and other useless pieces of paper, so I slid out the driver’s side door and carefully maneuvered myself out of the tight confines of the shed. Fortunately, the truck’s heavy pipe bumper just cleared the rusted sheet metal tin of the shed’s door.

  “We all good?” Stan asked, limping back over to our truck. Sweat covered his tanned face and I knew the ankle had to be killing him but he kept going without a murmur of complaint. The more time I spent with the man the more I realized he was just that solid. Stan Schecter was the right guy to be watching your back on a trip like this, and I was glad he was watching mine.

  “Yessir. Just took a last look but I think we got everything worth taking. Let’s fuel up and be on our way.”

  “Disabled the truck already?” Amy asked as I approached.

  “Nah, just took the key. Heck, I could barely squeeze out on the driver’s side. Let me get the fuel can and top this baby off.”

  Taking care of that little chore quickly, I restrapped the fuel containers in the back of the truck and slid into the front seat once again. I estimated we had about twelve gallons of diesel left in reserve split between three cans in addition to the full tanks on the truck. That should get us to Siloam Springs even if we had to take every dirt road and goat path between here and there. I decided to use some of that extra fuel and I asked Ruth to head further up the dirt road for a little ways.

  “Does anybody live back here?” I asked her.

  “Don’t know. I just came out the one time but the road looks pretty overgrown.”

  When we came to a spot in the road where the trees overlapped the road to form a canopy overhead I asked Ruth to stop and she braked without hesitation. I hopped out and glanced around, clocking my surroundings like a gopher popping out of his hole. I saw thick stands of waist high and better saplings growing all along the side of the road and went to my backpack to retrieve my hatchet.

  “You going to try covering our tracks?” Stan asked, observing from the back seat as I hacked down a dozen leafy saplings. He was watching around us, his eyes moving constantly
like I had done earlier. Ruth had backed up and turned the truck around, facing the direction we needed to go, and I was almost finished weaving the drag into place.

  “If it works, yeah,” I replied. “If not, I want to make it look like we drove out on this road but not in, especially around the cemetery. Mess up the tracks, anyway.”

  Using a few scraps of rope, I secured the saplings into a rough spread and tied off to the truck’s trailer hitch. Ruth smiled at me when I said, “Punch it. But softly.” She knew what I meant. After a few miles of sweeping the dirt road, we pulled up to the hardtop road as a blistering twenty miles per hour.

  Once I cut loose the drag and dismantled the sad looking collection of tree limbs, I tossed the rolled up rope in the back and hopped into the cab. Ruth took off again, and this time brought the speed up to a more respectable forty miles per hour.

  I had the CETME rifle wedged against the door frame of the truck but now the M4 sat in my lap, barrel barely protruding out the window. I really wished we could have brought the other truck as well as backup transportation if nothing else, but our numbers dictated the decision. Maybe Stan or some of Ruth’s family could come back for it if the world ever settled down a little.

  “That thing fully automatic?” Stan asked.

  “Yeah. One of the guys back there must have stole it from a National Guard unit.”

  “You ever fired one of those before?” Amy asked from her seat behind me.

  “Yeah. Something like this, anyway.”

  “That must have been some kind of Boy Scout troop,” Stan said with a laugh in his voice.