Ever Onward (44 page)

The Uzi followed his rise. “Very
good!”, Sloan grinned. “No wonder Hec was scared shitless of you.
Where is old Hec anyway? Dead?” Sloan shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.
I bagged the ‘Great White Hunter’, not that gutless
hayseed.”

Flame moaned and attempted to sit up.
Sloan’s hard eyes flicked to her, then back to Josh. “Time to cash
in your chips, friend. It’s been a blast.”

Sloan’s left hand gripped his right
wrist and the Uzi centered on Josh’s chest. Clutching the knife,
Josh readied himself to spring. One final gesture; futile but still
necessary.

As his muscles bunched for the leap,
an explosion rent the mountain stillness. In mid-air Josh felt
something sizzle by his ear. At the same time he saw Sloan spin
around, blood welling from a large hole in his right shoulder. The
machine-pistol, set on automatic, sprayed out its lethal contents
into the clear, crisp sky. Josh’s leap brought him up against
Sloan. While his left hand fended off the lowering gun, his right
hand drove the tapered blade deep into the man’s chest. For several
heartbeats they clung together; two lovers locked in Death’s
embrace. Then they sagged to the ground, Josh’s weight driving the
blade in up to the hilt.

Sloan’s eyes opened in surprised
wonder, then glazed over. The breath that escaped his dead body was
carried off by the wind.

Eddy, his legs still pinned by Tiny’s
bulk, let his heavy King Cobra fall to his side. It had been one
hell of a lucky shot, and now that it was over, he realized how
close he’d come to shooting Josh instead. Suddenly he began to
shake.

Flame crawled to Josh and hugged him.
Together they staggered to their feet. Like a tottering old couple
they made their way to Eddy, who had just freed himself from Tiny’s
massive corpse.

Eddy looked down at his shirt,
glistening with Tiny’s blood and organs. “Christ, what a
mess!”

Flame laughed, staggered and was
forced to sit. Fighting back shock and giddiness, her mind groped
at something important, though she couldn’t quite remember what.
Then it came to her.

“The others!”, she said, clutching
Josh’s arm. “There should be two more!”

Josh moved to the large slit, catching
up his 30/30 as he went. Through the wide crack he could see a lone
figure cautiously approaching some fifty yards away. Higher up and
to the left another figure sat slumped against a rock, a splash of
bright red on its head. Josh cocked the rifle and raised the it to
his shoulder. Behind him, Flame was about to speak, but then
stopped herself. Josh knew best.

The report from the 30/30 echoed off
the surrounding peaks. The closest form jerked, staggered and
dropped his gun --- his hands shooting skyward.

“Dun’t shut!”, Nuts Wilson screamed,
his words still slurred from having bitten his tongue hours ago.
“Fur Chrust sak, dun’t shut!”

Josh fired again, this time striking
the rocks on Nuts’ right side. “Turn around and head back up!”,
Josh yelled. “And take the other one with you! If I can still see
either of you in three minutes, the next one won’t
miss!”

Nuts was already moving back up the
steep slope, Josh’s words having lent his weary legs
wings.

“Nice move, Lover,” Flame beamed. She
nodded towards the woods where Hec was still bound and gagged.
“What do we do with that one?”

Josh touched her cheek. “That depends
on him. But first, let’s see to that cut on your head.”

Twenty minutes later the four of them,
Hec included, sat round their small stove drinking tea. They’d made
a quick meal of soup, salami and tortillas. Hec, his hands now
bound in front of him, had eaten a hearty meal despite his broken
teeth. Eddy sat to one side. Clutching his shotgun, he glared at
the bearded woodsman. At last Hec put down his empty
cup.

“Mighty fine grub,” he drawled.
“Always planned to get me one of those hiker stoves. Beats the hell
out of a fire.”

Eddy’s brow creased and his hands
whitened on the stubby shotgun. Josh frowned at him, then, lighting
his pipe, turned to Hec.

“You’re pretty cocky for a man about
to die.”

Hec wiped a trickle of blood off his
cut lips. “Oh, you aint gonna kill me. If you was, I’d be dead
now.”

“Maybe we just want to stretch it
out,” Flame said, casually checking the loads in her Smith &
Wesson.

Hec leaned sideways and spit. “Maybe.
But I don’t think so. Besides, I got something to
trade.”

“Ya?”, Flame said. “What?”

Hec’s eyes creased down to narrow
slits. “What I got to say is between me an’ the boss-man. Whores
aint for ‘talking’ to.”

Flame and Eddy moved at the same time,
yet Josh beat them both. The Tanka knife, retrieved from Sloan’s
chest, now pressed against Hec’s throat. Josh’s voice, though
deceptively soft, didn’t fool anyone --- especially Hec.

“And just what is it that you have to
say?” The tapered point moved slightly. Crimson tears followed in
its wake. Hec’s ruined mouth opened to speak, but Josh shook his
head. His voice became even softer. “Let me guess. You wanted to
tell me that you’ve got men waiting for us at The Garden. Maybe
even at John’s Brook Lodge. But we shouldn’t worry, because you
know another way out. A secret way that only you can find. Perhaps
over the Gothics and along the Great Range? Is THAT what you wanted
to say?”

Hec’s eyes were now wide with fear.
How did this bastard know?! He’d planned to trade the information
for his life, even lead them out over the Great Range if he had to!
But he already knew!

“How... how...?”

Josh stood up, resheathing the knife.
“...Did I know? I didn’t. Not for sure. You just told
me.”

Hec turned away, all the cocky swagger
drained away. “What are you gonna do with me?”, he asked, his voice
small and frightened.

Josh poured himself another cup of tea
before answering. “Send you back the way you came. But without your
gun, your pack or your boots.”

“My boots?”, Hec repeated. “Christ! I
can’t walk out of here without boots! I’ll be wolf-bait by
dark!”

The look Josh gave him made Hec’s
blood run cold. “Oh, a smart man like you’ll find a way. Maybe you
can catch up with your two friends. Who knows, their boots might
fit.”

Hec squinted up at Josh. “You’re a
cold hearted bastard, you know that?”

“So I’ve been told,” Josh said,
drawing his knife and cutting Hec’s legs free. “Now, get
moving!”

“What about my hands?”, Hec asked,
holding out his still bound wrists.

Eddy, grinning from ear to ear, hauled
him roughly to his feet. “Don’t push it, asswipe! If I had my way,
you’d end up like your boss over there!”

Taking the hint, Hec began to pick his
way back up the rocky trail. Josh began packing up the cookware
while Eddy went to gather Tiny’s and Sloan’s weapons. Eddy
especially wanted the big Asian’s long rifle. Flame watched as
Hec’s form diminished in size, then turned to Josh.

“I learned something about you
today.”

“Oh,” he said. “And what’s
that?”

Smiling, she bent down and kissed him
warmly. “That you can be one cold hearted bastard when you want to
be.”

Josh shouldered his pack. “We all
can.”

Two days later they came down out of
the Great Range, followed a private footpath up to a large log
house, took the car keys from a dried up corpse slumped over the
kitchen table and headed home. The ride, like most of the last two
day walk, was mostly done in silence. Each one seemed lost in their
own thoughts.

Just before suppertime, they came to
the stone guardhouse leading into The Shire. They were
home.

Chapter 34
: ‘AN EYE FOR AN
EYE’

Mount Hawthorn

New York August
17

James Phinious Tibbs, better known One
Arm, was a happy man. For weeks now he’d been in a red rage ever
since the fiasco on Lake Champlain, but today he was grinning from
ear to ear. In fact, he was ecstatic; for today he was going to get
his revenge.

Behind him came three cars and a jeep,
a convoy of newly recruited brothers of chaos, each and every
mother’s son of them a full blown psycho, more than willing to join
in this little adventure of rape and pillage.

After fleeing the ‘attack’ at Crown
Point, One Arm and what remained of his crew, headed north. The
next day the not so good ship Sadistic limped into Plattsburg,
where One Arm and a bleeding, half blind Rambo quickly set up shop
in a waterfront bar. The three surviving women soon brought in a
brisk business and within a week they had found a new crew to take
the place of the ones killed by the old farmer. One Arm and Rambo
spent their nights drinking and planning their revenge.

Now at last they were
ready.

Counting Pete the Prick and the kid,
Straw Hair, twelve men now followed them. More than enough to find
that old farmer and stamp ‘paid in full’ on his little shit-burg of
a town.

Since dawn the convoy, led by a heavy
garbage truck, had been weaving its merry way down I-85. The
truck’s massive front forks easily shoving wrecks aside whenever
necessary.

Bruce ‘Rambo’ Chillis sat beside him,
absently sharpening his large survival knife. His once handsome
face was covered with purple and black blotches, scars from the
shotgun blast he had taken three weeks earlier. The patch over his
right eye gave him a piratical look, almost rakish, yet there was
nothing swashbuckling about this cold-blooded killer. He, like One
Arm, lived for just one thing --- revenge.

Just two hours after Josh, Flame,
Trina and Eddy had entered the High Peaks Region of upstate New
York; One Arm, Rambo and their various assortment of psychopaths,
turned off the interstate and headed south-east to Crown
Point.

By noon they had found the place where
Willard and the little Turk, Sadat, had fired on their yacht.
Behind the large boulder Rambo discovered several empty rifle
shells. The one-eyed soldier-of-fortune grinned coldly as he picked
up one of the spent casings.

Straw Hair, half his left ear missing
due to Sadat’s lucky shot, came over and looked at the large shell.
“What the fuck was he using? An elephant gun?!”

Rambo held the cartridge up to the
sun. “A .444 double load. Either a Seinum or a Marlin.”

“Big?”, Straw asked.

Rambo didn’t bother to
reply.

A half hour later they found the town
of Crown Point to be deserted. One Arm took over a liquor store and
sent six men out to scout around. Half a bottle of Rye later Pete
and a sour looking Latino called Raoul came back with news that
somebody was living in a farm near a little one-horse berg called
Mount Hawthorn. It could be the hayseed. Rambo led the
reconnaissance himself. By late afternoon they had found the
farm.

As the sun began to set, Rambo and
three other heavily armed men burst into Willard’s place, each one
grimly determined to do murder and mayhem. Alas, save for a cat,
the place was empty. Rambo shot the cat.

Standing by the parked vehicles, One
Arm watched the scarred cat-killer come back down the long drive.
“Well?”, he asked.

Rambo brushed past him and climbed
into the cab of the garbage truck. “They must be up at that fucking
commune I told you about. The one by the lake.”

One Arm grinned.

Less than five minutes later the
convoy stopped beside the little stone gatehouse. Jim Shell and
Marcy, the woman who called herself Jim’s wife, were playing cards
inside the little cottage. It was their shift for guard duty,
something every adult in the Shire took a turn at. Jim and Marcy
had been looking forward to their time alone. Their ‘marriage’ had
taken place a week after they’d met. Two lonely survivors of a
small town on the Canadian-U.S. border, they had instinctively
clung together to stave off the madness all around them. They’d
been inseparable ever since. They secretly referred to the little
gatehouse as ‘the honeymoon suite’.

At the sound of the approaching
motors, Jim looked up, more irritated than alarmed. Moving towards
the door, he ignored both the CB and the shotgun that Cobb had
insisted be carried by all gatekeepers at the slightest sign of
trouble. Stepping outside into the growing dark, he faced a bank of
vehicles, all with their high beams trained on the cottage. Blinded
by the lights, he died instantly as several bullets ripped through
him.

Marcy screamed as Jim’s
body was punched back into the tiny room. She was still screaming
when Rambo’s tall form darkened her doorway. She didn’t scream for
long.

The wrought-iron gates crumpled like
paper under the truck’s massive weight. The alarm wire connected to
bells in the main house half a mile away lasted long enough however
to do their job. Mrs. Wang and several of the women glanced up as
the bell in the kitchen rang briefly. They had just finished dinner
and were doing the dishes, the men having gone out on the front
porch to smoke and plan the next days activities. Willard had been
trying to get Doc to see the advantages of planting corn in the
rolling field that led down to the lake. Mrs. Wang sent Betty
Sinclair to tell Doc about the bells.