THE COLLAPSE: Seeking Refuge (14 page)

Fish’s explanation agitated the mob even more.

Another man hollered, “So, are you telling us that the only way to get any information around here is to put our lives on the line every day with the security teams, is that what you are saying?”

Bryan looked at the man and firmly stated, “Doesn’t that seem logical to you?”

The golfer then said, seemingly to all men present instead of just to Fish and Bryan, “I’ve got way too much other shit going on, with fishing all day and taking care of my family.  I don’t have time to volunteer on those teams.”

“Me neither!” the golfer’s sidekick shouted once again.

Fish looked at Bryan, he sensed that they were losing control of the vigilantes.  Bryan sensed it, too, because he shook his head at Fish.  The small mob was nothing more than a bunch of frustrated, strung-out men that simply wanted information.  Or were they?

Fish suddenly had other ideas, and became angry right back at them.  Even though he was brand new at The Park, he could very clearly see what was going on there.  He thought the golfer and his supporters were just lazy, cowardly individuals that were too afraid of the beach or the bridge to volunteer on the security teams.  But yet they felt as though they were entitled to “answers” and information.  “Answers” - how dare they?  Additionally, the golfer was jeopardizing the current mission, and Fish intended on putting an immediate end to the ridiculousness occurring in the middle of the road.  The prisoners were watching, and if they sensed weakness amongst those who were charged with the protection of The Park, they might attempt to escape.  Even worse, if they actually did escape, what if they took all this information and observations back to the rest of their own people, Bowmen or otherwise?

Fish decided to take action.  The golfer noticed that Fish put away his pistol and was removing the M-4 rifle from his back.  He nervously began to step backward away from Bryan as Fish stepped toward him.

“Hey, stop!  What are you doing!?!!!” the golfer screamed in terror as he ducked away, almost falling to the ground in his haste.  Fish had the ass end of his rifle in the air, as if he was about to butt-stroke the man in the head.  He didn’t, though, it was just a bluff.  He just wanted to scare the obnoxious golfer, nothing more.  A mere show of force to calm his ass down.  It must have worked, because the golfer and his supporter bolted a few yards up the road before turning around again.  The large German shepherd barking loudly in a protective posture next to Fish had frightened the men even more.

“Anyone else want ‘answers’?” Fish yelled to the rest of the posse over Pharaoh’s barking, “I gave all of you a chance to come with us and you fuckin’ blew it.  So…get the hell out of here.  Go back to your campsites.”

The remaining members of the posse scattered without further question.   

Bryan didn’t seem to approve of the way Fish handled the situation, but said nothing about it.  He reserved the right (to himself) to question Fish’s methods later on.  After the prisoners were delivered and secured, of course.

The young man that originally had recognized Fish as the Safeway Guy said sadly before he left the group, “I thought that you were supposed to be our hero.  But I was wrong, you’re just a damn bully.”

“Oh, boo hoo,” Fish made a crying sound to the disappointed young man as he slowly walked away, then continued with, “you just stood there while your idiot friends almost ruined our mission.  Grow some balls, stand up for yourself.”

“Whatever,” the young man said, his back still turned to Fish. 

Fish’s anger increased exponentially at the “whatever” comment.

“Whatever, yeah.  WHATEVER!” Fish shouted, his blood boiling.  “You know what?  It was guys like you that got us into this whole Collapse mess in the first place.  Bunch of mobs of people protesting and crying about racism and government and cops and taxes and rich people.  Millions of people just like you playing follow the leader to loudmouths like the jackass with the golf club tonight.  You, yes, YOU are the reason the whole country fell apart.  Standing right there in the middle of everything and participating in all the bullshit, too afraid to do anything other than the same stupid shit everyone else was doing.  How does that make you feel, coward?  WHATEVER!”

The saddened soul refused to turn around, but said, “No, sir, I disagree.  Actually…I think it was the oppressive people in charge like you, yes, YOU that destroyed our country.”

Fish had no response.  In a small way, he thought that the guy might have been right.  Maybe even in a big way, but his fury would never allow him to admit it, nor apologize.  He just flipped the M-4 strap over his shoulder and removed his 9mm pistol as he ordered the prisoners to march faster.  His former fan disappeared into the darkness in the opposite direction.

Bryan continued to walk behind the prisoners in silent disapproval, hoping that Fish wouldn’t talk to him or ask him his opinion about anything that had just happened. 

Fish didn’t. 

For once, he knew better.

Chapter 8

Upon reaching the intersection that dispatched Forest Loop to the right, and Lower Loop to the left, Fish had excused Pharaoh from duty.  He pointed toward Lower Loop and told the dog to “go back to the truck”.  Pharaoh had whined in protest, but after Fish commanded him a second time, the dog reluctantly obeyed.  Fish wasn’t sure what to expect at the Probsts’ site, and felt as if Pharaoh might have been a liability during the interrogation process.

William met Fish and Bryan outside his RV with two lengths of plastic cord.  The cord reminded Fish of his mother’s clothesline when he was a child.  It was somewhat stretchy, but ultra-strong.  William asked the beachers to secure the prisoners’ hands with it, then told Fish to bring the men inside the RV.  Fish moved the two turds toward the RV’s door and pushed them inside.  He had tried to follow them in, but William put his hand up as if he wanted Fish to remain outside.  That was a shock!

“Let us talk to them alone first, please,” William said to Fish.  Fish thought that was rather odd, he felt as if somebody should be watching over the potentially dangerous prisoners while the bosses conducted their interrogation.  But, Fish was accustomed to following orders, so he obliged.

“Roger that,” Fish acknowledged, stepping back off the RV’s footboards, “we’ll be right outside the door in case you need us.”

“Thank you, Fish.  You did an excellent job tonight,” William stated.  Then he poked his head further out the door and said, “You, too, Bryan.  Good job, thank you.”

“No problem, sir,” Bryan respectfully replied.

Minutes passed as the bosses questioned the prisoners.  The Probst’s had a very, very nice RV, and it was constructed in a manner that prevented Fish or Bryan from discerning any of the conversation taking place inside.  Fish and Bryan wanted nothing more than to eavesdrop on the interrogation, but neither of them wanted to be caught with their ear pressed against the bosses’ window or door.

It had taken Bryan a few minutes to muster up the courage to ask Fish why he had acted so ruthlessly to the men that had intercepted them on the road earlier.

Fish admitted, “Sometimes I get too emotional about stuff.  It’s hard to describe.”

“Were you really going to hit that man in the head with your rifle?” Bryan asked.

Fish laughed, “Hell no!  I just wanted to scare the dude, that’s all.”

“Oh, okay.  That makes me feel a little bit better, I thought you were actually going to hit him,” Bryan said.

“Nope,” Fish said, “but…I probably shouldn’t have yelled at the kid that called me a bully, either.”

“No, probably not,” Bryan agreed.

Fish explained, “My buddy, Stevo, says that I sometimes get ‘overly passionate’ about stuff.  I’m not totally sure what that means, but I need to learn how to control it.”

Just then, Fish and Bryan turned around as they were interrupted by Clay emerging from the darkness up the road.  He was jogging.  Upon reaching the Probsts’ site, he gave the radio back to Fish, and then put his hands on his knees to catch his breath, for he had just ran the equivalent of around two miles, some of it over rough terrain.  He notified Fish that none of the beachers had been hurt during the gun battle with the third boat, and that he had already radioed Carrie with the information.  Fish was relieved to hear that, and thanked Clay for his efforts.  Clay nodded, but he was more interested in what was going on with the two men they had captured. 

“Well?” Clay asked loudly, still huffing away with his hands on his knees.

“Well, what?” Fish asked, almost laughing.

“What’s going on with the prisoners?  Who are they?” Clay asked.

Bryan answered, “We don’t know yet.  They told us to stay outside.”

Clay stood up straight and put his hands on his hips as he finished up catching his breath.  He chuckled as he said to Bryan, “Do you think they are doing the ‘good cop, bad cop’ thing in there?”

“Ha-ha, maybe,” Bryan laughed.

They got their answer, not more a few seconds later.  There was commotion and yelling from inside the Probsts’ RV, then the door burst open.

A panicked Claudine screamed through the open doorway, “They got William’s gun!  They ran out the back door!  Shoot them, shoot them now! Before they get away!”

The three beachers looked at each other for a split second, then scurried around the RV, readying their weapons along the way.

Fish spotted the prisoners dashing into the forest behind the Probsts’ site, dodging trees as they flew into the darkness.  If they got too far into the deep woods, they would be lost.  It would take the security teams too long to form up a search party and find them.  There was simply too much territory back there for them to cover before night’s end.

Clay bolted ahead of Fish, surprisingly, since he had just finished running such a long distance.  Fish watched as Clay raised his pistol and fired a volley of semi-automatic fire at the runners. 

One of them went down! 

The other runner turned to his fallen comrade and for a moment debated an attempt to pick him up and carry him along.  It was normal human instinct to help a friend in need.  Most people are inherently good Samaritans, sometimes to a fault.  In this case, there was nothing the runner could do for his buddy without sacrificing himself.

The fallen runner was the one with the gun, and after being hit in the back of the neck by one of Clay’s bullets it had flown from his hand, landing somewhere yards ahead of him in the brush and thick layer of pine needles.  The other runner decided that it would be pointless to look for it, especially in the dark, since the three men pursuing him would easily catch up within moments and gun him down.  He needed to disappear into the deep woods…and fast.  

Fish wasn’t a faster runner than Clay on normal terrain, but once inside the tree line he was much quicker.  The forest was his friend, even in the dark.  Clay and Bryan had been weekend outdoorsmen before The Collapse, but Fish was the undisputed trail king of the three.  He naturally bent and folded under low-hanging branches, twisted around short trees and leapt over deadfall as he pushed forward.  The escaping convict ahead of him didn’t stand a chance.  Once upon the man, Fish put a short burst of automatic fire directly into his back.

“Got him!” Fish hooted to his fellow beachers as the runner went down flat onto his stomach.  Bryan and Clay were still negotiating through the rough foliage behind him.

“Hell yeah!  That’s what I’m talkin’ about!” Clay cheered as he slowed to a walk.

Bryan shouted toward Fish, “Good lord, you’re fast!”

Fish laughed as he caught his breath.  But then, he noticed movement ahead of him.

“Shit, he’s still alive!” Fish announced.  He had figured with the amount of M-4 ammunition he had blasted into the guy’s back, at least one of them would have pierced his heart, but he was wrong.  The man had flipped himself onto his back and was rasping heavily from multiple sucking-chest wounds.

Bryan and Clay caught up with Fish, and they approached the runner cautiously.  It appeared as if the bullet-ridden man was attempting to speak.  Last words, maybe?

Bryan was the first to kneel down in the moist, earthy pine needles next to the agonized man.

Clay asked, “What’s he trying to say?”

Fish knelt on the other side of the man, and everyone was silent as they listened to the doomed man struggle for breath.  Fish figured that even your worst enemy deserved a chance at some last words.  I mean, why not, right?  What’s the worst that could happen? 

“They’re….not…” the runner started, gasping for breath.

Fish asked, “They’re not….what?”

“They’re…..not,” the runner said once more, then coughed, spraying Bryan in the face with a bit of blood spatter.  Bryan wiped his cheek with his jacket sleeve and looked up at his buddy, Clay.

Clay looked uneasy.  It was hard to watch a man die like that right in front of you, enemy or not.  It was heart-wrenching.  What was the man trying to say?

Fish tried to calm the guy down, saying, “It’s okay, buddy, you’re gonna be alright.”

Bryan scrunched up his face while he cocked his head at Fish, as if to say,
“Liar, liar, pants on fire.”

But Fish didn’t know what else to say to comfort the dying turd.  He really wanted to know what the hell the man was trying to say.

“They’re….not….” the man coughed out once again, then closed his eyes.  They were losing him.

“C’mon buddy, stay with us!” Fish gently slapped the man’s face repeatedly, then stopped as he felt something wet on his fingers.  It was either blood or saliva from the man’s mouth, or both.  Either way, it was gross.  He wiped his hand on the back of his pants, just as the man finally finished up the last sentence he would ever utter in this world.

“They’re not…..good people.”

Fish, Bryan and Clay took turns looking at each other as the runner expired.  Fish was the first to break the silence.

“Well, duh.  We already knew that!” he exclaimed, almost laughing in the process.

Bryan stood up and challenged the comment by asking, “But who was he talking about?”

“His people, of course, the Bowmen,” Fish said.  “He was trying to use his last words to warn us.  But we already knew they were all pieces of shit, anyway.”

Bryan didn’t look convinced that the runner’s last words were directed at the Bowmen.  He quickly checked the distance between where they were in the forest and the Probsts’ campsite.  They were far enough into the woods that they wouldn’t be heard.  Regardless of that, he spoke quietly.

“Look, this guy’s hands aren’t bound.  Neither was the other one’s.  How did they get loose that quick?”

Fish was thrown a curveball, but rationalized the situation with, “That plastic cord was kind of stretchy, ya know?  Maybe they wiggled out of it.”

Bryan shook his head, “Nah, no way.  We tied that shit way too tight, stretchy or not.”

Clay suggested, “What if they were playing ‘bad cop, good cop’ like I said…and one of them untied their hands as a good faith gesture?  That would make sense then, wouldn’t it?”

“Maybe,” Bryan said, “but what if they let these guys go, purposely, knowing damn well that we would blow them apart?”

“But why?” Fish asked.  He wasn’t convinced of the sinister suggestions that Bryan was making.  He felt as if they were betraying their bosses with the current discussion.  There was no way that Claudine and William would have done anything like that.  What purpose would that have served, anyway?  Having two men killed for no reason?  Didn’t make sense.

“I don’t know,” Bryan answered, shaking his head in deep thought.  

The beachers’ discussion ended abruptly as they heard a person crunching through the woods toward them.  It had to be either William or Claudine.  Bryan put his finger to his mouth in a soundless “Shhhh” warning.  Both Fish and Clay silently concurred by nodding back to him.

“You guys got him, eh?” William inquired as he approached, almost jovially.  “I saw the other one back there, dead as a doornail!  Way to go fellas!”

“Thank you, sir!” Fish said, accepting the praise with fake enthusiasm.  Bryan and Clay said nothing.

William looked at the body on the forest floor and said with a hint of disgust, “Did he go down right away?  I mean, he didn’t give you any problems, did he?”

Bryan silently thought to himself,
“Don’t you mean: ‘did he say anything to you before he died?’ – but that’s a clever way to change it up.  You’re a real pro, ain’t ya?”

Fish proudly said to William, “He went down pretty quick.  The dumbass said some shit that we already knew, though.”

Bryan grimaced, he wanted to tell Fish to shut the fuck up, or at least gesture to him not to say anything else, but William would notice him doing it, and would figure that something was awry.  The boss was too smart.  So, Bryan was forced to play along.

William’s eyebrows went up as he asked, “Really?  What did he say?”

Fish shrugged his shoulders and quoted the dying man, “They’re not good people.”

Bryan blurted before William could think about it, “But we already knew that!  Of course the Bowmen aren’t good people!  The poor bastard was just trying to warn us before he died.”  Bryan tossed out a quick fake laugh and added, “Maybe he thought it would save his soul or something!” 

Clay laughed, “Yeah, fat chance of that, though!  This mug is goin’ straight to hell!”

Fish caught on to what his beachers were doing, and began laughing too, hoping it didn’t sound forced.

William laughed right along with everyone else.  He appeared very relieved.  He ended his laugh with a deep sigh, asking, “Would you guys mind giving me a hand to find my gun?”

Fish replied, “No problem at all, sir.” 

*****

Claudine had lit a fire in the steel ring behind the Probsts’ RV while the beachers helped William find his gun.  Clay had found the weapon and wiped the wet soil and pine needles off of it before handing it to William, who thankfully accepted the weapon and stated that it had been a wedding gift from his brother-in-law when he was first married to Claudine many years ago.