Jernigan's War (8 page)

He was coming into the park from a gravel road coming down off the mountain. He came to a gate on the outskirts of the
park. There was no one in sight so he stopped and using his bolt cutters, cut through the lock on the gate and proceeded on into the park. He didn’t know if there would be any park rangers still around or if they had gone renegade like the police in the mountains behind his home. He didn’t run wide open, the gravel road was uneven enough to warrant caution. He also didn’t want to run into any surprises such as road blocks. He kept mental notes of side roads and trails in case he needed to double back.

About 10 miles down the road he came upon a little girl standing by the road crying. She appeared to about five or six so he stopped to check on her. She sobbed and pointed, “Bad men hit my sister.” Porter looked in the direction she pointed, “How many bad men are there?”

“Three, they drug her into the woods; but, she told me to run.” Porter told her, “Stay here and don’t leave this motorcycle no matter what you hear.” He picked up the AK47, flipped off the safety and headed up the trail at a fast walk. He came to a camp where three men were standing over a young woman. They were having a heated argument over who would get to go first. They were stripping off their clothes, while the young lady was naked on the ground trying to cover herself with her hands. Porter raised the rifle and made seven shots before they all went down. He walked to them and shot each one through the head before turning his attention to the girl. As he replaced the magazine in his rifle with a full one, he asked her if she was ok. She was about his age with blond hair and was sobbing and couldn’t speak. She crawled around and found her jeans and shirt. Porter looked around, “Are there any more?”

She shook her head, “These are the only ones I’ve seen; there could be others. I’ve got to find my little sister.”

“She’s ok. She is just up by the road with my bike.”

After she got dressed he led her back to the Rokon and her sister. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of sight.” He put the little girl
behind him on the rack behind the seat. He let the girl sit on the trailer. He turned back and went back a couple of miles to where he remembered a trail. He motored down the trail until he was a half a mile or so off the gravel road. Stopping, he opened up the 5 gallon jug of water and let them use a small amount to clean up. He handed the older girl the 9mm, showed her the safety and told her, “If you need to shoot something, flip off the safety and pull the trigger. Flip it back on when you’re finished, I’ll be back in a bit.” Porter turned to leave. Scared, she jerked around, “Where you going?”

“I’m heading back to their camp to scavenge what I can.” He hastily unloaded the trailer and the rack on the back of the Rokon. He replaced the partially empty magazine in his magazine pouch with a full one from his back pack. In his mind, it was important to maintain his magazine pouch and rifle with fully loaded magazines, in case he ran into trouble.

Porter ran flat out down to the camp where he had killed the three men about 15 minutes earlier. He tried not to look at the dead bodies as he quickly gathered up their food, guns and packs. They had an old pickup with several cans of gas in the back. He went through their pockets and didn’t find anything of real value. He ended up with a trailer full of canned goods and three duffel bags of belongings. He also had three long guns, pistols and several boxes of bullets. His final find was two five gallon jugs of water.

He was fully loaded when he got back to the girls. The sun was going down and he put the Rokon sideways on the trail so he could use it for cover if they had company. He looked at them and introduced himself, “I’m Porter Jones from Los Angeles. What are your names?” The little one held out her hand, “I’m Ally, this is my sister Sandy and we’re from Palm Springs.” Sandy added, “Our last name is Bailey. Our parents were killed last week when we ran off the road at a road block. The men who
caused it gave us a jug of water and a box of crackers and told us to beat it. We’ve been walking for days. We started eating lizards and have been finding water faucets in the park. Most of them were working.”

Porter built a small fire after building a wall of rocks to hide the flame from sight. “I cleaned out their campsite, I only left the clothes they were wearing, they were too bloody to use anyway.” He unloaded everything from the trailer. He pulled out the skillet, scrubbed it out with sand and pebbles, then wiped it clean with his dampened shirt tail. He set it over the fire, dumped in the remaining goat and on top of that two cans of pork and beans. He cleaned off some forks in the sand and ran them through the flames of the fire. He let the girls eat from the skillet first. After they were full he finished off the rest and they washed it all down with water. He cleaned the big skillet again and poured in some water to heat. He opened his stash from Big John and found a wash cloth, towel and a bar of soap and told the girls to get washed up for bed. He gave them tee shirts to sleep in and rolled out his sleeping bag for them between the Rokon and the fire.

He climbed up to a rise so that he could see the camp as well as the gravel road. He saw no activity of any kind. The sky was clear and he could see more stars than he ever knew existed. He resisted the urge to go through the rest of the gear he had secured from the bad guys because he didn’t want to waste the batteries in his flashlights. He stayed on guard well into the evening pondering his dilemma. He was doing good to feed himself, now he had two more mouths to feed. Stopping to rescue the girls could have been a mistake. Just as he was about to head back into camp he saw headlights coming from way down the road in the direction of the bad men’s camp. The lights slowed and turned down the road where the dead men lay. A few minutes later the lights came out of the road followed by the lights from the truck where he found the gas. Both vehicles disappeared back down
the road. They didn’t even take time to bury their comrades. The cold finally drove him back to the fire which he topped off with some heavy brush he found on the trail. The girls were sleeping together in the sleeping bag. Other than an abundance of freckles, they were both pretty.

The next morning he awoke by the fire. He was stiff from having slept on the bare ground. He had been warm on the fire side and frozen on the back side. He would have to figure a better sleeping arrangement for the next night. They ate Vienna sausage for breakfast and he finally took the opportunity to look in the duffels and cardboard boxes of supplies he swiped from the bad guys. He dumped them out on the tarp and started going through the pile. There was no way he could carry everything so he had to decide what was worth carrying and what they would have to abandon. The first thing he sorted out was the guns and ammo. Two of the men had rifles, the third a shotgun. One of the rifles was a 30-30 deer rifle with a cheap scope and a box of ammo. Another of the rifles was a Chinese SKS with a can of ammo on stripper clips. The stripper clips made reloading the SKS rifle quick and easy. This was good news because it used the same ammo as his AK47. It was also a good size for Sandy because it had a short butt stock which would make it easier for her to shoot. The shotgun owned by the third man was a 12 gauge Remington pump. It had a bandoleer with buckshot, birdshot and a couple of deer slugs. There were two pistols, a Beretta 9mm with a shoulder holster and four 15 round magazines. The other was an old Smith and Wesson revolver. It looked like an old pistol a policeman or security guard would have carried. There were also 100 rounds of 9mm ammo in two boxes.

He reloaded the empty clip for the Chinese pistol and adjusted the shoulder holster to fit Sandy. Her hands were small but the Chinese pistol was a good fit. The Beretta was a little big for his grip but he figured he would quickly grow accustomed to it.
After climbing up to his observation point from the night before he could see no activity in any direction. There was no sound, no smoke and no dust on the gravel road. He took the chance and taught Sandy gun safety and to shoot their weapons cache including the weapons he chose to carry. Ally wanted a weapon also, so Porter gave her a ball peen hammer that had a raw hide loop on the handle so it could be hung from a nail in its prior life. Now it fit Ally’s wrist. Porter told her, “You can break a noggin, a toe, or a shin bone.” Ally grinned at the prospect. He also had a large hunting knife to go on Sandy’s belt.

He took inventory of their food next. They now had at least two weeks worth of beans, Chef Boyardee and other assorted canned goods. He stuffed all the food into one of the empty duffel bags. He found a surprise in the third bag. In 20 opaque plastic containers with tight fitting green lids he found one ounce coins. There were 20 gold coins in ten of them and 20 silver coins in the remaining containers. This represented a small fortune. He put these into the bottom of the ammo can.

They went through the clothes and discarded the dirty ones. They shortened the legs of a couple of pants for Sandy and shortened two belts for Sandy and Ally. They found warm shirts and jackets and rolled up the sleeves. Ally had to make do with Sandy’s blue jeans with the legs cut short. They saved their own dirty clothes for later use.

The rest of the cardboard box contents held some metal camping plates, knives, forks, spoons, can opener, and some large cooking utensils. All of these were put in the skillet and lashed together with some cord. There were also some bars of soap, paper towels, two fifths of tequila, and a dish brush. He discarded a large axe and shovel. He elected to keep a machete.

He and Sandy spent the rest of the afternoon going over the map and by her best recollection they retraced her and Ally’s trek across the park. Porter determined that he had driven down from somewhere near Eureka Peak and were now on the edge of Covington Flat. Their goal was to reach Pinto Basin Road, travel southeast to Black Eagle Mine Road, and from there out of the park. Porter decided to make this run at night, the bad guys would probably be asleep or sitting around a fire and they could travel undisturbed.

Porter and the girls split a large can of ravioli, cleaned up their utensils and carefully packed all the gear. Ally would ride lying down in the trailer so she could sleep. Sandy would ride behind him sitting on the canvas bag of pine straw as a cushion. He hung the gas cans on ropes so they hung across the front and rear racks with one tied to the front rack. The water was put in the trailer along with the packs and duffels. They created a depression in the gear on the trailer so Ally would ride secure nestled down in the trailer. Sandy wore the SKS across her back and Porter had the AK47 and his magazine pouch over the Chinese coat. Ally was in the sleeping bag and Sandy had on one of the jackets with the sleeves rolled up. According to his dad’s watch it was about 10 pm and it was a bright moonlit night. Porter had grown accustomed to seeing at night since he started trying to save his flashlight batteries in the past week. The loaded Rokon and trailer looked like something you would see in a third world country.

Porter couldn’t run the bike wide open because of the load. He estimated his speed at about 15 miles an hour. He just barely had the bike in second gear. Although the going was slow, he didn’t have to use the headlight to see the road. The Rokon was fairly quiet at this speed and the going was smooth. Once they came upon a camp near the road. They could see the campfire with men sitting around it. They didn’t stop and the men didn’t seem to notice so they continued on into the night. They reached
the edge of the park just as the sun was coming up. Porter found a trail and headed up the road that ended at an old mining site. There were some old abandoned buildings and equipment. Porter hopped off the bike and went through and around all the buildings to make sure they were vacant. There was no indication of any recent activity or occupation. He pulled the Rokon and girls behind the largest building out of sight. They split a can of beans for breakfast. Not wanting to be trapped in a building, Porter strung a tarp from the eave over to the Rokon so they could rest in the shade until they could resume their trip again in the evening. Even though she slept in the trailer Ally was still tired. It was much warmer today so she and Sandy slept on top of the sleeping bag. Porter slept sitting up leaning against the wooden building. Other than some gnats and ants he slept undisturbed.

He was waken by a very nasty Hispanic man holding a machete to his throat. Porter bolted awake and almost cut his own throat when he jumped at the touch of the cold steel. It was at that moment that a ball peen hammer came down squarely on the big toe that was exposed in his dirty sandal by a little girl with blond curly hair. The man cursed, jumped, and turned as Sandy, who had walked behind another building for a bathroom break, shot him with the SKS. He went down and before Porter could shoot, she shot the man through the head while he was on the ground. Porter hopped up and quickly made a run around the location. He proclaimed, “You girls are awesome; I was a dead man for sure!” He followed the man’s tracks in the sand and found that they wormed their way off and back to a camp out of sight. Other than a few more cans of food, there wasn’t anything they could use. The man appeared to be infected with scabies and lice so Porter elected to abandon the camp site and move behind another building rather than drag him off. He cleaned off Ally’s hammer and again complimented and praised her on her quick thinking. Ally beamed! Sandy hugged his neck, “Thank you for saving us, you could have just given us some food and left us again.”

“If I had I would probably be dead right now.”

Sandy said thoughtfully, “From now on one of us needs to stand guard while the others sleep, we’re completely on our own and we’re going to have to take care of each other to make it. Do you think your grandfather will mind if we show up with you?”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t mind, if he does, we’ll just find a place to hide and live until things return to normal. We’ve got a lot of desert to cross in the next few weeks, I figure the best thing for us is to keep moving unless we can find a place to stay and rest.” Porter reminded her, “Don’t let Ally get near that dead man, whatever critters that are on him will be crawling off looking for a new home. We can’t afford to waste any water for washing until we get to a river or pond somewhere.”