Barren Fields (10 page)

I say to the man,
turn around
after I pull my left hand out of my pants pocket, holding a zip tie.

The woman lowers her gun’s aim from my head but doesn’t put it away.

She begins, “How do I know—”

“You don’t,” I say cutting her off while zipping Toby’s hands together behind his back. “You don’t know who we are or what we are like, but we could have shot you, this guy, and that other woman while you were trying to sneak up on us. We didn’t and that is all the comfort I can give you right now. Your safety with my group depends on what you have done since the world became this mess. Your baby will be safe with us no matter what you have done. Now holster your gun so we can find out what is going on with everyone else.”

“I’d rather her drop the gun than hold on to it,” Jeremiah says with his rifle now aimed at the woman.

“And I would rather have one extra gun available if more runners come at us,” I say back to him. “If we die during another attack, do you want her and that baby out here without a gun? Just keep her in front of us, and we should be fine.”

We cautiously walk to the inside edge of the woods and peer down the road to make sure no other runners are visible. Then we look up the road to the trailer and see our people and several others standing by bodies lying in the front yard of the house.

I take the rear, walking backward, to make sure we don’t get surprised by any more infected. Jeremiah is behind the woman and man. I finally turn around to see the new chaos as we arrive to the group by the road. There are two dead people, neither of which look like infected based on them having guns and backpacks; one woman and one man. The zip-tied man we captured in the woods walks over to the dead woman’s body and drops down to his knees by her. There are also four other people I don’t know; three women and a man.

“What happened?” I ask looking at Isaac and Samantha.

“They shot each other,” Isaac says. “Right after you guys shot in the woods, these two turned their guns on each other. The man got a shot off first, but his rifle is a bolt-action and she has an M4. She got three shots in before he shot her again.”

“I thought I heard at least ten shots.”

“That was us,” Samantha and Luke say together. Samantha points to two of the women I don’t know while continuing, “They were coming up behind the houses. When the shots came from the street these two dropped to the ground taking cover, and two infected ran up behind them, so we both shot.”

“I thought you were shooting at us until that body fell on my legs,” one of the women says and is clearly shaken both by the shooting and the body hitting her.

“You’re lucky we didn’t shoot you since you were following us. Why is your group shooting at each other? One of you tell us what your story is,” Jeremiah demands with his rifle waving around at all the newcomers.

He is still on an adrenaline high from the encounter in the woods and looks a bit spooked. Probably because there are so many armed strangers.

“Don’t talk yet,” I say to one of the women as she takes a breath to begin speaking. “Isaac, Samantha and I will get their stories one at a time inside the trailer. Jeremiah, you Luke and Matthew watch the guy we tied up, keep a look out for more runners, and make sure these people don’t speak to each other until we’ve heard what they have to say.”

*

“So, tell us who you people are,” I say to the first woman.

“Are you a cop? I mean, were you a cop before everything happened?”

“No.”

“Sorry, I just thought since you wanted us separated and you seem a bit...bossy.”

Samantha smiles at me being called bossy, and Isaac gets a concerned look on his face. I have been called much worse than that and by people whose opinions I actually care about, so it doesn’t bother me at all.

“I wasn’t a police officer. Yes, I
am
bossy at times, but I’m not a bully unless someone gives me a reason not to like them. I try to be fair to everyone I meet, at least under normal circumstances. This isn’t a normal situation though, and you should know that I have a certain skill when it comes to interrogating people.”

It is Samantha’s turn to show concern, which the woman notices. Samantha physically shifts away from me, almost recoils, and her face blanches white when I mention interrogation. She is obviously recalling how I tortured those men at the ranch. My wife was right when she explained why she wanted me to continue with the torture. Samantha’s reaction to me, Isaac’s look of concern, and the unfortunate smile that appears on my face probably make me seem like the worst possible person to be with, in a confined space like this. At least that is what I’m reading from the sudden look of fear that is on this woman’s face.

“I want to get back home to my family,” I tell her and ease my expression a bit, which doesn’t seem to calm her down at all. “Tell us your story. Who you are, who the people you are with are, and why your group members are attacking each other. If what you tell us doesn’t match what the others say, I’ll know someone is lying and things will get painful until I find out the truth.”

She is staring at me as if she’s afraid to talk, so I just turn my palms up and give her an
I’m waiting
look.

She nods and mouths
okay
, and then begins, “You probably won’t get a straight story out of Toby, the
prick
you tied up. The woman that Roger killed was Toby’s wife, Paula. Roger, the man that shot her, has only been with us for two days. We met him in Rogue River. I’m sorry he’s dead. I thought he was a good guy, and if he shot at Paula first, then it was to help us get away from Toby and her.”

The tension on her face starts easing up a bit only to show an expression of embarrassed sadness as she sits stiffly and nervously talks fast.

“Rachel is the girl I was with. Donny and Amanda are the couple who was out there. Heather is the mom, and her baby girl is Victoria. There were four more of us when we arrived in Rogue River five days ago, they were killed by those damn runners.”

“And you are?” I ask when she pauses.

“I’m sorry... I’m Abigail.”

She doesn’t seem like an Abigail to me, even though she is used to calling herself that. There was the slightest hint of something when she said her name, but I don’t question it right now.

“Our group was heading out of Medford, hoping to make it to the coast...”

“Can you just give me the quick version first,” I say interrupting her.

“Um, well. Toby and Paula were trading us for supplies and people with skills.”

“Us?”

“The women. We were the incentive to keep guys with certain skills in the group.”

“You mean
sex
, right?” I ask wanting to be sure.

“Yes.”

“And you went along with it or were forced?”

“I went along with it, but I didn’t have a choice, if that makes any sense.”

“All right, now give me the details.”

“They didn’t threaten us personally, but trading sex for supplies were the rules if we wanted to stay in the group. If a man had skills or something that the group needed, we traded ourselves to him to get it, whether it was ammo, bolt cutters, or in Donny’s case, welding skills. I’m not a G.I. Jane and never even looked at a gun before things fell apart. I have no survival skills and don’t have anybody to take care of me, so I don’t have any other option if I want to live more than a few days. It’s the same for all of us girls—except for Amanda. Donny agreed to stay with the group and be the welder or builder when needed, but he made them agree no one could mess with Amanda.”

“He wanted her for himself?” Samantha asks in a disgusted tone.

“No, I think he just wanted to protect her at first, but they spent so much time together they got close. He never tried anything with me or the others, before or after, he and Amanda got closer. He even mentioned a few times he would like to get us away from Toby and his wife, but it is too dangerous to split into smaller groups.”

“And what did Toby and his wife have to offer?”

“Protection. They are both really good with guns. I mean, at least he still is. He’s quick and deadly accurate. I’ve never seen him miss until we were being attacked by the runners, and I swear he was missing on purpose.”

“What do you mean?”

“He didn’t use his rifle. We left Medford because of the runners—there were just too many starting to show up. They would keep their distance and try to sneak up on us, and it was wearing us down always having to be on alert. Anyway, Toby could shoot them with his rifle no matter how fast or which direction they were running, and yesterday when we were attacked, he left his rifle on his back and just used his handgun. He can’t hit anything with that thing. I think he wanted to get rid of the other men from our group before we found you people. ‘
Men are a liability when interacting with new groups, you women are the commodity
,’ he used to say.”

“You only lost men in yesterday’s attack?”

“Just men,” she says, nodding. “I’m not sad they are gone, though. They were exactly the type of men that enjoyed the arrangement Toby and Paula set up. None of them were very strong or could shoot well. They needed Toby and Paula almost as much as me and the other girls do. They just happened to have some skills that could come in handy: electrician, cook, and two computer geeks that were friends and happened to survive with others until they were on their own. They were good with electronics and radios.”

“So you think Toby let the infected kill those four so he would have better leverage in dealing with our group?”

“Yes, and that’s what Roger thought too. He told me this morning he thought Toby might let the zombies get him before we reach your group. The only reason Donny and Roger survived yesterday was because they stayed back by us ladies to make sure we were safe. Toby told all of the men to form a perimeter around the building we were in to make sure none of the runners could sneak up on us. They were set up too far away and too spread out, according to Roger.”

“Besides Toby, is there anyone else in your group that is, for lack of a better term, a bad guy?”

“No.”

“And is there anyone else from your group that might be straggling behind or waiting for you to return?”

“There isn’t anybody waiting for us, and we have no place to return to but our bike trailers filled with supplies. The trailers are back in Rogue River. We were all hoping to make it to the coast and try to survive the next winter there. There aren’t as many places we can scavenge from out there, but we can go fishing and there shouldn’t be as many sick people as there are in the cities.”

“I hope the others back up your story. You seem nice even though you lied to me about your name.”

Her eyes go wide letting me know I was right on my feeling about her name before she sputters, “They only know me as Abigail.”

“That’s fine,” I say and get up to bring in the next person. “Your real name isn’t as important as the other details you gave, and if you didn’t have a reason to tell your group who you were before you met them, I don’t expect you to tell us right away either. Please sit in the trailer’s bathroom and close the door. I’m going to bring Donny in next.”

*

After Abigail, I ran through quick interviews with Donny and the other three women. I don’t think I spent more than five minutes with any of them. My first concern was,
are there any more of this group out there somewhere?
They all told me
no
. Of course, I asked them,
when is the rest of your group that is waiting in Rogue River going to get here?
They all denied there was anyone else and didn’t know why Abigail would tell me that.

My second concern was,
did Toby and his wife force the women to trade sex for protection?
To find that out I told them,
Toby seems like a decent fellow and his wife was probably the same. Why would Roger want to murder Paula?
I got some pretty direct comments about how I’m blind or an idiot if I thought Toby and his wife were decent people, and they then backed up what Abigail had said about the sex trading arrangement.

My final concern was,
did Toby set up the other men in his group to die?
For that I asked them,
If those other four men were your main security force and defenders, how did they all die while none of you were injured?
Roger only told Abigail that he was concerned that Toby was going to kill him and only Donny shared in that concern. Until I posed the question the way I did, the other women, Rachel, Amanda, and Heather didn’t think anything was strange about the attack that killed the four men yesterday. After they each chuckled in their own way at the four men being capable protectors, they expressed surprise that the men were set up so far away as they were and that Toby always arranges the defense set-up of the group since he was the best at it.

Stepping out of the trailer to give my final interview to Toby, I see Jeremiah next to him and they are both kneeling by Paula’s body.

“We need to speak with Toby now. What are you two doing?”