power that would be needed to do it by hand. There were a hundred acres of cabbage to water, pick, and cultivate. Without a tractor and only two sons, a daughter and a wife to help with the labor, the farm would soon fall apart.
And besides, his second son, Justin, never wanted to be a farmer anyway. At sixteen, he was more interested in girls and cars. In fact, his real dream had been to go to automotive mechanic school to learn how to rebuild cars. Not just to fix cars but to rebuild the classics.
His twin sister, Jennifer, wasn’t really sure what she wanted to do. She was quiet and kept to herself, which Charles kind of liked because Jennifer was pretty and he had always been afraid that she would end up pregnant and married before her time. Just like him and his wife, Susan. She had been a great wife, but he always worried that Susan hadn’t been happy with her life or where she had ended up.
Once Charles got back to the barn, he and Charlie Junior used a piece of tow rope and strung the unconscious stranger up from a rafter in the barn. Charles looked over the equipment that the stranger was carrying. It looked like top-of-the-line stuff. The camos that the stranger was wearing looked expensive. His rifle was military grade, and the pistol looked as much like a work of art as it did a weapon. Charles guessed that the stranger had stolen his gear from somebody else. An escaped prisoner from the local prison couldn’t have gotten this type of gear without taking it from somebody else.
After the blackout, the prisoners at the State Correctional Facility Charlesville had been able to escape from custody and were wreaking havoc on the locals. Some prisoners had taken off and tried to get back home, or at least that’s what people suspected, however a large group of prisoners stayed, and were working their way from house to house taking whatever they wanted. Some citizens fought back, and many of them died for it. When the power went out, the prisoners were able to overrun the prison, killing a lot of the guards and confiscating their weapons. Now the escaped convicts were better armed than most of the citizens in the area.
The town police department had collapsed soon after the blackout. The officers that were on duty stayed for a while but soon realized nothing was coming back on and had taken off to go be with their own families. Who could blame them? Family came first. The only officer that stayed to try to keep any kind of order was Bill Collins. Charles and Bill were friends and often hunted together. Bill lived in town and had no immediate family, so he did what he could. But when the convicts moved in, there wasn’t much that one man could do against a large group of armed convicts, so he had retreated to the safety of Charles’s farm and was living in a spare room in the house.
“Charlie, go get Bill. We need to deal with this piece of shit.” He watched as Charlie ran through the double barn doors toward the house. He turned back to the stranger, who was still unconscious. There was something that didn’t feel right. He didn’t know what it was, but something was off.
Jennifer had run back to the house screaming that somebody tried to rape her, but when Charles tried to get any information from her, all she could do was point toward the power line. So he had gone down to check things out and caught this guy coming up the path. Charlie had inadvertently distracted the stranger, giving Charles the opportunity to knock him out with a shotgun butt to the head.
A couple of minutes later, Bill and Charlie walked into the barn. Charles would always laugh when he saw them together. Charlie took after his dad. He was tall and big. Bill was quite a bit smaller. At five foot nine and 170 pounds, he was considered normal, but beside Charlie, he looked like a hobbit. From what Charles had seen, his feet were almost as hairy.
“How’s Jennifer? She calmed down enough to answer any questions?” Charles asked, looking back at the stranger.
“No,” Bill said. “She’s still pretty worked up. Did you happen to see anybody else with this guy?” He pointed to the stranger hanging from the rafters.
Bill went over to the table where Charlie had laid the stranger’s gear. He picked up the AR and looked it over. It was a nice piece of hardware. He then picked up the 1911. He didn’t know a lot about 1911 pistols but saw on the slide that it was engraved with “Hunt Custom 1911 A-1.” He did know enough to know that if this pistol was a full custom, it was an expensive pistol, easily four grand.
“No,” Charles answered.
“Why?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. She kept mumbling stuff about guys. ‘Big guys, smelly guys, ugly guys,’ but she was hyperventilatin’, and I couldn’t get anything more out of ’er. Susan and Justin are with ’er now. Once she calms down, I’ll try again to get somethin’ from ’er.” He looked at the 1911 again. “This stuff’s a little too nice to be a convict’s gear, don’t ya think?” he asked, more to himself than anybody else. When he got no answer from himself or anybody else, he signaled toward the stranger and asked, “What are you gonna do with this guy?”
Charles looked at the stranger for a couple of minutes. What am I gonna do? “Well, let’s wake this piece of shit up and see if maybe we can’t get some answers from him.”
7
I kept my eyes closed and feigned unconsciousness. I woke up when the shorter guy was looking over my gear. The other two were watching him and didn’t see me wake up. They were huge. Both guys were over six feet and big. If I had to fight my way out of this, I was screwed. I kept my eyes closed but kept them open enough that I could see silhouettes.
One of the big guys walked over to a hose and filled up a bucket with water. He walked toward me and, from about three feet away, threw the water, hitting me directly in the face. I didn’t need to fake surprise, it was cold, but I jerked “awake,” coughing and spitting. It wasn’t a bad case of acting if I do say so myself.
The short guy walked up to me and slapped me across my face. “Wake up, motherfucker. We gotta talk.”
I opened my eyes and looked around. I was strung up on a rafter in a barn. There was hay and straw on the floor, an International Harvester tractor parked in the corner, and a few empty stables along the wall across from me. The barn looked old, like it had been standing for a while, but it still looked sturdy. There were just the three guys I originally saw. Big guys one and two looked like father and son. The shorter guy didn’t look like the other two, so I guessed that he was a friend, a neighbor or something. He was just too different from the other two to be related.
Big Guy number one walked over and stood beside the short guy. He just stared at me. I looked back, never taking my eyes from him. If I showed any type of weakness, I was toast. Without warning, big guy one punched me square in the stomach, just below my solar plexus. He hit me with his right hand, a righty. I might need that info for later, if I had to go hand-to-hand at some point. I’m glad I hadn’t eaten anything in a while because I would have puked all over big guy one.
“You get kicks outa’ rapin’ li’l girls?” Big Guy yelled as he wound up for another swing.
Little Guy grabbed his wrist. Like Little Guy could have stopped him if he wanted to hit me again.
“Charles! Hittin’ him isn’t gonna get you anywhere. Let me talk to ’im.” I almost laughed. Were they intentionally doing “good cop, bad cop,” or was it an accident? I said I almost laughed, but I must have smiled for real.
Bucket Guy came running up to me and punched me across the left side of my jaw.
“You think something’s funny? You try to rape a little girl and you think it’s funny. Is that what you were in jail for in the first place?”
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