The Battle: Alone: Book 4 (14 page)

     Eventually the body wins out and shuts down. Not permanently, but it will grind to a halt until the addict has no choice but to get some much needed sleep.

     That was the state Sarah found Swain in that particular morning.

     His eyes drooping as though weighted down by boat anchors, he slurred his words. But he wasn’t drunk, and it had been hours since his last bump. He was merely exhausted beyond exhaustion. He was losing his ability to function.

     So much for being invincible.

     Sarah stated the obvious.

     “You need some sleep.”

     “I know. But before I do I want you to make love to me.”

     “You know that’s not going to happen.”

     He laughed.

     “I know. I know because… what were we talking about? Why are your clothes still on? Why am I naked again?”

     “You’re always naked when you order me up to your room.”

     “Oh, Sarah, honey, I never
order
you up to my room. I merely ask you to come. The decision is totally up to you. Of course, if you don’t I will drag you by your lovely hair, because I am a caveman and you are my trophy… I’m sorry, honey. Were you saying something?”

    She hated this man with a passion. But she was a human being and a mother. Her compassion was stronger than her capacity to hate, and she actually felt sorry for him.

     “Why don’t you crawl into bed? I’ll cover you and I’ll sit and talk to you until you go to sleep.”

     He suddenly went into a rage.

     “I don’t want to sleep! I want you to make love to me, damn it! Hey, that’s what we were talking about, wasn’t it?”

     He chuckled, tickled with himself for remembering, even in the sorry state he was in.

     “Sarah, baby, I want you to do all the things you used to do to that worthless husband. The one who’s dead now. The one who probably blew his brains out because he wasn’t enough of a man to come and get you.”

     She stood patiently, watching him as he stammered and stuttered and struggled to maintain control of his mind long enough to form coherent sentences. She wanted to throw something at him. Instead she bit her tongue and let him rant.

     “Your husband thought it was too hard to come for you. He didn’t love you like I do. Can’t you see that?”

     For a man who was severely dehydrated he had an impressive amount of drool rolling down one side of his face. He didn’t realize it, and wouldn’t have cared if he had.

     “Dave loves me more than any man has ever loved me. That’s why I love him so.”

     “Oh, bullshit, Sarah. Take your clothes off.”

     “And if I refuse?”

     “
And if I refuse? And if I refuse?
What are you, Sarah? A broken fucking record? I swore I’d never force you to do anything, or hurt you in any way. But Lindsey… now there’s a different story. Did you know I could say the word and have her shot, before your very eyes? Did you know that, bitch?”

     “Yes, sir. I know.”

     “Oh, there you go with that ‘sir’ crap again. Would it kill you to call me ‘sweetheart,’ just even once?”

     She said nothing.

     “Hell, I’d even settle for ‘John.’ I get so tired of you calling me sir all the time.”

     “That’s what you instructed everyone to call you.”

     “Yes, yes. I know. But Sarah, honey, you’re special. You know that. Now take off your clothes. Please. There! I said please. When’s the last time you heard me say please to anyone else in this house?”

     His tone went from conciliatory to threatening in a flash.

     “Now do it!”

     She removed her blouse and her bra.

     “All of it!”

     She complied.

     “There, that’s better. Don’t you feel better that you’re not all confined by your clothes? Don’t you… wait a minute. What was I saying? I forgot what I was flippin’ saying. Oh, yes, I remember. I want you to fuck me like you used to fuck your worthless husband. Why won’t you do that for me, Sarah?”

     “Because I don’t love you.”

     “But I love
you
. Can’t you see that?”

     “If you say so.”

     “What if I forced you?”

     “You told me you’d never do that.”

     “Well, hell. I’ve said a lot of things in my life I didn’t mean. What if I forced you to do all the things you used to do to… what was his name again? Dave! That’s it. Dave! What the hell does he have that I don’t have?”

     “My heart.”

Chapter 25

     There were times when Sarah had sway over her captor, and was able to use reason to calm him.

     This wasn’t one of those times.

     “Answer my question, bitch. What would you do if I forced you?”

     “Then I’d have no choice but to comply. But neither of us would enjoy it, and you’d show me you are a man who cannot be trusted to keep your word.”

     “Maybe I’d rather get laid than have you respect me.”

     He paused for a moment, then laughed uproariously. Apparently he found his words incredibly amusing.

     “Sarah, come here and lay beside me.”

     “I’d rather not.”

     “And I don’t give a damn what you’d rather or rather not do… Let me put it to you another way, S… Sarah. My God, I almost forgot your name. I
am
tired…”

     He lost his train of thought. Sarah knew it wouldn’t be long now before he crashed. Once he was out he’d sleep for at least a day, maybe two. She was looking forward to the respite.

     “Come here, my love. I don’t care if you don’t want to. I want you to and this is my kingdom, not yours. It could be, you know. You could be my queen, if you would just relent and tell me you love me. We could run my kingdom together. Wouldn’t be that nice… wouldn’t
be
that nice… Oh hell, you know what I mean.”

     She still didn’t go to him. She was hoping he’d just close his eyes and nod off to sleep.

     But Swain wasn’t a man who gave up easily, either when he was in an amorous mood or when he was fighting sleep.

     “Sarah, need I remind you that I have the power to bring your world crashing down upon you? You’ve already lost your worthless husband… whatever the hell his name was. And you’ve lost your youngest daughter. Beth, was it? Or Beulah. I always hated the name Beulah. That was my mother’s name too, but she was nothing like your daughter. She was a bloody whore! Anyway, where was I?

     “Oh, yes. Don’t help me. I remember now. You’ve already lost your husband and your baby girl. How would you like to lose Lindsey, or your sister? I could snap my fingers and they would be dead within minutes. Hell, we could even play a game. I could be nice and agree to spare one of them. Only I could make you choose which one to spare.

     “Wouldn’t that be special, honey bunches? Honey bunches of oats? Where in hell did
that
come from?

     “Anyway, as I was saying, you ungrateful little bitch, you could choose which one gets to live. Of course… of course… of course by the same time, you’d be choosing which one has to die.”

     He laughed, amused by the whole idea of his little “game.”

     “How about it, sweet Sarah? Which one?”

     She stood, watching him, wishing she could shove a dagger into his cold black heart. But she said nothing.

     “Last chance, my love. Come over here and lay with me. I promise I won’t do anything. I promised you long ago I wouldn’t. And unlike Dave, or Daniel, or whatever the bloody hell his name is,
I
keep my promises.
I
would have come after you.
I
wouldn’t have stayed home and given up on you and found some other whore to shack up with.
I
respect you much more than that.”

     As she crawled into bed and lay next to him, it occurred to her that he had a very skewed interpretation of the word “respect” and what it meant.

     She lay there, naked, her back to him, wishing she were somewhere else. Anywhere else.

     She didn’t get this close this often. She’d forgotten how rank he smelled. Meth addicts cast away personal hygiene as quickly as they do the need to sleep, eat or drink. He hadn’t showered in at least three or four days. And while he insisted that Sarah be perfectly groomed and clean at all times, he saw no need to do the same.

     She opened her mouth and breathed through it. It made the stench just a little bit more bearable.

     He pressed his naked body against hers and she cringed in disgust. He’d tried the same tactic before, perhaps an ill thought out attempt to awaken her sexual desire. This time was different, though. She knew his body was spent. He wouldn’t have been able to do anything even if she’d decided she was willing.

     And there was no chance of that happening. Not in this lifetime or the next.

     He draped an arm over her and cupped her breast in his hand.

     “This is okay, isn’t it, honey… I just… I just… love the way it feels in my hand. You’d love it too… if only… if just… you weren’t such a snotty fucking bitch all the time…

     His words were coming slower and slower now. She knew he was on the verge of falling asleep. And when he did, she would very slowly extricate herself from his grasp and from his bed. Then she’d go take a long hot shower and do what she could to wash his stench from her body. She’d scrub the places he touched until they were almost raw, tears flowing freely and rolling down the drain with the soap suds.

     And all the time she’d be praying to God to help her be strong. For Lindsey’s sake, and for Karen’s, and for Dave as well. Because despite Swain’s protestations, she knew Dave was coming for them. She just knew it.

     Swain yawned, and the hand on her breast relaxed just a bit. She knew it wouldn’t be long.

     Thankfully, he’d shut up too. She’d learned that talking was one of the last things he stopped doing before the blackness overtook his body.

     Then he was startled awake by loud noises and shouting in the front yard.

     “What?.... Who said that?... What in hell is going on?”

     There was a loud knock on the door.

     From the hallway, a man’s voice: “Captain Swain. Captain Swain!”

     Swain managed a “Come in!”

     Sarah tried her best to cover herself as a burly man named Hernandez burst into the room.

     “Sir, Johansson’s been shot. And some of the other men are missing!”

Chapter 26

     Dave scurried back to the fiberglass “electrical” box. He stashed his sniper rifle inside it, grabbed his backpack containing water and provisions, and secured the door again from the outside.

     For the next couple of days he’d be playing a game of hide and seek, hiding in the woods and daring his enemy to come looking for him. He’d take out any targets of opportunity he could, and gain some more intelligence regarding their troop strength and tactics.

     And he’d watch the fiberglass box from afar. If they discovered what it really was, they’d pay a very heavy price for that little bit of information. Better for the bad guys to be sitting ducks than Dave.

     If they passed it by without giving it a second glance, Dave would know that only he knew the secrets contained in its ugly green walls. And he could return to it as a base of operations.

     In the late afternoon, the first group of men came through searching for Dave. There were three of them, on horseback.

     They passed within forty yards of Dave, who was watching them from fifty feet up in a tall fir tree.

     He wished he had a silence on his AR-15. They were easily within range, but he’d give away his position on his first shot.

     He had the drop on them, and could probably take out the second man as well.

     But the third man would likely bolt and take cover, then pick Dave off like a fish in a barrel as he tried to get back down out of his tree.

     No. As tempting as it was, he’d let the men pass. If there was only two of them he’d have gone for it. But with three men the odds were in their favor.

     And Dave was no use to his wife and daughters if he was lying dead on the forest floor.

     When the sun went down, Dave stayed in the woods, walking just inside the tree line, keeping his eyes peeled for any kind of movement.

     The enemy had resumed their patrols, but they weren’t right up against the fence as they had been before. They rode parallel to the fence, but fifty yards inland. Theoretically out of crossbow range.

     But they didn’t learn from their mistakes. Their new path took them past a huge oak tree, with a trunk twice the width of Dave’s body. That was good for at least one more kill shot.

     But not yet.

     First he wanted to get into their heads.

     An essential part of guerilla warfare is the element of surprise. He could defeat his enemy not only by shooting them with bullets or bolts. But also by making them paranoid. Causing them to look over their shoulders constantly and lose sleep at night. If he knew when and where he was coming after them and they didn’t, it gave him a psychological as well as a practical advantage.

     Their sentries on horseback wore no night vision or infrared goggles. It was possible, of course, that perhaps they didn’t have enough of the goggles to go around, and that only key personnel were using them.

     It was possible that someone else, perhaps up in the hay barn behind a newly erected barricade, was watching the tree line even now, as Dave watched the riders go past. It was possible that at that very moment, someone with a long range rifle and infrared sight was zeroing in on Dave’s forehead, and that the next breath would be Dave’s last.

     But that wouldn’t make any sense.

     If resources like night vision equipment and ammunition were in short supply, it would make much more sense for the first line of defense to be the best equipped.

     In Dave’s Army, the perimeter sentries would have had the bulletproof vests, night vision goggles, radios and the best weapons available.

     And all that stuff was available. Dave knew because he and Tommy had talked on several occasions about the best place to hide such things.

     It was Tommy who had the brilliant plan to cut holes in some of the interior walls in his house, then stash things inside the walls and cover the holes with paintings and framed posters.

     Dave had used the same technique in his own house to hide provisions, weapons and ammunition.

     In all likelihood, the several pairs of night vision goggles Tommy was sure to have stockpiled were still inside the farm house, inside a wall or perhaps buried in a waterproof box in the back yard somewhere. Undiscovered by the convicts and therefore of no use to them.

     He wondered for a moment why he hadn’t seen anything of Tommy. Of course, his absence didn’t necessarily mean he was dead. Perhaps the men were considered greater threats than the women and were more tightly controlled.

     He wondered how it would feel to be held tied up or locked up for months at a time. Dave had never been arrested, or even worn handcuffs.

     Well, except for the pair he and Sarah had in their bedroom in San Antonio. But those didn’t really count.

     As hard as he imagined it would be for Tommy and the other good guys to be held in some type of cell or restraints for all that time, he hoped that was the case.

     The alternative was something he didn’t want to imagine.

     For a brief moment, his mind wandered to a place he didn’t want it to go. And he panicked.

     He realized that he hadn’t seen his daughters Lindsey and Beth either.

     As quickly as that realization crept into his mind, he dismissed it.

     He knew his wife had survived. He’d seen her just a few days before.

     His daughters had to be alive and well too.

     They just had to be.

     By morning, Dave had scouted the compound from four different locations.

     He still didn’t know how many bad guys were still alive. He’d seen no one defect, and only slight modifications to their security procedures. That could have meant several things. Either they were confident they had the numbers on whoever had attacked them and assumed they could prevail in the end. Or perhaps they were a fairly disciplined group of former soldiers who believed they held the high ground and were safer where they were.

     Perhaps their leader was brutal and held tight control over his soldiers. Maybe as tightly as he did his captives. Maybe if anyone hinted of desertion or mutiny they were quickly struck down in a very visible way.

     Or maybe, just maybe, they weren’t defecting because they knew there was nowhere else to go. The entire area was watching out for them and would likely shoot them on sight. Maybe the farm house, although not perfect, was the best they could hope to do under the circumstances. And unless they were willing to give up and go back to prison, they had no real choice but to defend it to the last man.

     Dave was hoping after he took out his first three targets that some of the rest would scatter to the winds. It would have made his job a lot easier.

     But if there was any evidence of that happening. Dave certainly couldn’t see it.

     He’d just have to find ways to offer them more incentive to go.

     When morning broke he revisited the surveillance positions he’d held the night before.

     The sentries were more attentive than the day before. And they carried their rifles as they rode, instead of keeping them sheathed.

     Other than that, it appeared they hadn’t earned a damn thing.

     There were no more search parties looking through the forest for him.

     Had they really though he’d left?

     By noon he was exhausted and needed to rest.

     He carefully entered the green box and secured it from the inside, the lay upon his air mattress in the cool tunnel and drifted off to sleep.

     By the time he awoke it would be the following day. They would have begun to relax a little, and hopefully would still be sloppy.

     And Dave would implement phase two of his plan.

Chapter 27

     Dave’s worries about whether the men of the compound had survived the onslaught weren’t unfounded. He’d hoped that the reason he hadn’t seen Tommy or any of the other men was because they were locked up in a room inside the farm house. If Dave was able to find them and free them, they’d make instant reinforcements and could help him clean the scourge from the compound. 

     Swain, when his head wasn’t clouded by the drugs he was taking, was a fairly good strategist. The battle to take the farmhouse had resulted in Tommy’s death, as well as his daughter’s and another man who worked for Tommy at the time of the blackout.

     But the good guys hadn’t suffered the only casualties. Eight of Swain’s men had died during the vicious battle as well.

     After the farm was overrun, all the residents were taken hostage and held at gunpoint while Swain decided what he wanted to do with them.

     He’d determined that the men were liabilities that he didn’t need to undertake.

     There had been three of them left. Tommy’s brother Mike happened to be visiting from Orlando when the lights went out. Two of Tommy and Karen’s neighbors had been part of Tommy’s plan from the beginning. They were invited to join Tommy and Karen’s family whenever the stuff hit the fan. Both were married and childless, and the addition of four additional adults meant enhanced security and more people to help with hunting and gathering and crop production.

     Of course, nobody foresaw the prison break. If they had, Tommy would have invited several other friends to join him in his compound, and would have focused more on the security aspect of prepping. He hadn’t expected to face a small army of hardened criminals. Tommy’s worst case scenario involved nightly invasions by looters one or two at a time.

     Swain wanted to send two messages. One was to the hostages. He wanted to give them a very real sense that they should fear for their very lives, each and every day.

     The other was to his own men. There had been a couple of them who’d deserted in the heat of battle and lit out for parts unknown. Swain wanted the rest to know that he was absolutely ruthless.

     To drive home both points, Swain gathered everyone in the large den on the farm house’s first floor.

     The men were tied to dining room chairs in the center of the room, with guns pointed at their heads.

     The women and children were seated on the couches, their hands tied behind their backs, two men standing over them with rifles.

     Swain drew his handgun and calmly walked over to the three men and shot each of them in the head as the women and children screamed in terror.

     Two of the three slumped down in their chairs, their deaths instantaneous.

     The third and last of them fell over, still tied to his chair, his blood pooling onto the hardwood floor and his legs kicking wildly in nervous response to the assault.

     Swain kicked the other two chairs over as well. To him, a bigger pool of blood would make for a more dramatic show.

     But he wasn’t finished yet.

     He walked over to one of his own men, a convicted rapist named Bennett, and shot him in the back of the head as well.

     His men, some of whom had been mocking the women and children for crying and screaming, immediately gave Swain their undivided attention.

     “Oh, relax,” Swain told his men. “This man betrayed me. As long as the rest of you remain loyal, you’ll never have to worry about meeting the same fate.”

     He addressed the survivors.

     “Okay, here’s the way it’s going to work. Your men were expendable, so I got rid of them. You, I have a need for. So you all will remain alive as long as you follow my rules and don’t try to escape.

     At the end of this meeting we will untie all of you except for one. One of you will be designated my “Ace in the Hole.” An insurance policy, if you will, to ensure that none of the rest of you try to escape.

     He walked over to little Beth.

     “And what’s your name, little one?”

     “Elizabeth Renee Speer. And you are a mean man and you’re going to hell.”

     Swain chuckled at the tiny girl’s audacity. He couldn’t help himself.

     “Well, I’m sure you’re right about that, you little snot. But it won’t be anytime soon.”

     He turned to one of his men.

     “Take her into the downstairs bedroom. Tie her to the bed. Close the blinds on the window and sit next to her with your gun aimed directly at her head.”

     Sarah rose and screamed out in horror.

     “No! For God’s sake, please! She’s just a little girl! She’s no threat to you! Take me instead!”

     One of the men forced her back onto the couch. 

     “Sit down and shut up. She won’t be harmed, as long as the rest of you follow my instructions.

     “The little snot will be held at gunpoint, and the rest of you will be released to service me and my men. By service I mean cook and clean and do our laundry. The women among you will also service my men in other ways. But relax.”

     He smiled wickedly.

     “You won’t be asked to do anything you haven’t done before, I’m pretty sure.”

     He turned back to Sarah, and addressed her directly.