“I drank but one cup last night,” Kent muttered under his breath. The alcohol sloshed in his stomach. He knew that probably wasn’t true.
The four were struggling up a sharp incline, and Mike had ordered Kent to carry the new backpack—the one they’d just taken from the man that Val had recently killed.
The four travelers had stumbled upon the man sobbing in the woods. He was wearing what might have once been a business suit, and he didn’t hear the approaching party until it was too late. In fright, he’d spun around, and as he did so, he lifted a hunting knife, and before he could even rightly wield it or threaten anyone with the instrument, Val had kicked it clean out of the man’s hand.
What had happened next was the reason that Kent was sick.
The man had immediately dropped to the ground and had begun pleading for his life. His story spilled from him like water over a dam. The story went by so fast that it was hard to make out, but Kent had gotten the gist of it.
The man and two of his friends had been traveling on behalf of the Governor of Pennsylvania when all the cars had simultaneously stopped on the highway (the EMP, Kent noted.) The three men tried to escape the horrors of the highway by making their way through the woods, but, in the last few days, both of his friends had been killed.
While the man whimpered and sobbed through his story, Val was busy rifling through the man’s backpack and noticed that it was full of survival gear, ammunition, and food and even an ammo can with a radio and other electrical devices.
“Where’d you get all the swell survival gear, huh?” Val asked with an accusation in his voice. “I’m pretty sure that Governor’s aids don’t carry this kind of gear on business trips.”
“Uhh… ahhh… well, we just came upon it,” the man answered. Guilt and shame were evident on the man’s face, and this, more than anything, enraged the brutish Val.
Val stopped his rummaging and walked over to the man and kicked him straight in the face as hard as he possibly could. Kent noted to himself that it was remarkable what a boot can do to a human face. Remarkable and grotesque. The man, bloody face buried in the snow, began sobbing again, and now he’d locked down completely. Emotionally and mentally the man was just spent. He didn’t respond to any of Val’s questions, and this struck Val as a lack of the proper respect he thought he was due. Mike, Steve, and Kent had all tried to stop him, but Val began to stomp the man, and in short order, he’d succeeded in leaving behind a bloody corpse.
This is why Kent was sick to his stomach.
Elsie’s mind was churning, and her eyes flicked from left to right as she tried to calculate and understand everything that was happening.
She shouted it. “Peter!”
“He’s up on the ridge!” Lang said over the thwacks and zings of bullets coming through the building.
“I’ve got to get to him,” Elsie whispered.
“You can’t go out there, Elsie,” Natasha said. “They’ll cut you down.”
“I can go out the back. The firing is starting to slow down, and it has all come from the front. I’ll run out and keep low and get into the trees and then work my way up to the ridge.” She looked at them. “I have to.” She had the beginnings of a tear in her eye. “He’s up there all alone.”
“Peter can take care of himself,” Lang said, a little too sharply.
“He’s not up there taking care of himself, young man.” Elsie shot back. “He’s up there taking care ofus.”
“If you go,” Natasha said, as debris from the walls rained down around them, “take Lang’s backpack… in case you get lost, or we don’t make it.”
“You’ll make it, Natasha. Both of you will. I just know it!”
Natasha smiled amid the horrors. Nothing like a Pollyanna to give you hope when the world is collapsing on your head.
Elsie saw Natasha’s smile and returned it. Then she broke for the back door, picking up Lang’s pack and throwing it over her shoulder on her way out.
Lang grabbed the .22 and Natasha lifted the pistol. Both weapons were woefully inappropriate for such a gunfight. Still, both of them began to tug at the carpets that covered the windows so that they could lay down some covering fire for Elsie. They did this because both Natasha and Lang were thinking about Elsie and Peter and not about themselves.
Kent had finally made it up to the top of the grade when he felt his gorge rise, and in a second he was doubled over, vomiting onto the snow and rocks.
“Great,” Val sneered. “What a winner you turned out to be. Just look at you. I’m sick of your weakness!”
Kent wiped his mouth with his sleeve and dropped the pack. He took a step towards Val, “Then why don’t you try to stomp me to death, you sadistic bastard!”
Val seemed willing to do just that, but Steve and Mike jumped between the two before any more violence could commence. After the two men had been pulled apart, Mike stepped into Val’s space and put his face only inches from the brutish man’s nose. He’d done this once before, back in a prison cell in Warwick. Val was a full foot taller, but Mike’s presence had a weight and gravity all of its own.
“One more argument,” Mike said. He cleared his throat. “One more threat. One more unauthorized stomping. One more unauthorized anything from you Vladimir, and I’ll kill you myself. Do you understand me, Comrade?”
The man who now called himself Val dropped his eyes and took a step back. “I understand, Comrade Mikail Mikailivitch.”
Mike looked over to Kent and pointed to the fallen backpack.
“Pick it up.”
Kent did.
The four men fell back into line, and as they hiked in a southwesterly direction, they saw the valley open up below them, and Kent was glad that at least for a little while they’d be walking downhill.
He took up the rear, right behind Val, and as the group marched forward through the snow, Kent whispered so that just Val could hear him.
“I called you a sadistic bastard because you are literally a sadist and the fatherless son of a whore. So there’s that, Vladimir. And, also this. Before this is over, I am going to kill you.”
Death and violence have a tendency to multiply when the shackles of civility are thrown off. Men who are violent and rapacious killers can be identified more readily, and men who might otherwise be peaceful and passive are sometimes not able to resist the desire to rid the world of soulless predators. There are such men even among the poets.
Elsie sprinted towards the trees and bullets zipped around her. Snow popped up into the air where the shots plowed into the ground. She could hear that gunfire was being returned from the cabin, and she could see the impacts popping at her feet. Then the shots that were loosely aimed in her direction stopped, but she did not.
Rounding the edge of the hill, she was surprised to meet up with Peter who was on his way down toward the rear of the cabin. He had the AK-47 at the ready, and he grabbed Elsie by the arm and pulled her over to a stand of trees, and they crawled into the brush near the base of the stand.
“How’d you get out of there?” Peter asked.
“Natasha and Lang covered me,” Elsie answered, breathlessly.
“Why didn’t they escape with you?”
“Lang is better, but he is in no condition to travel. Natasha would never leave him. I would have stayed too, but I thought… I ought to find out what happened to you. We—” she indicated to the cabin with her hand. She tried to brush a wisp of hair away. She tried to do it with the gentleness of her fingertips, but they were clammy with dried blood, so instead she raised the sweaty backside of her arm to her forehead and wiped away the strand. “We… we thought you might be dead,” Elsie said, her eyes dropped to look at her knees in the snow.