Without law 11, p.25
Without Law 11, page 25
They snuggled against my shoulders, and I leaned down to breath them in. They smelled sweet and sweaty, and I took a few deep breaths to steady myself.
I loved these women, and in just a few seconds, I felt grounded again.
“Tav,” Anna said, and she pulled back and pointed to my mouth.
“What is it?” I asked, and I wiped my lips on the back of my hand. There was blood when I pulled it away, and I figured it was from the scuffle. I didn’t remember much about it, everything had happened so fast, but I was sure Brody had got a few hits in at some point.
“Are you alright?” Paige asked, and she grabbed my face to examine me.
“I’m fine,” I told her. “Let’s find some shovels. We’ll figure out what to do about Brody afterward.”
“Okay,” she agreed.
“Fuck this,” Tara said, and she reached for her pistol and aimed it at Brody before Anna caught her from behind and pulled her arm down.
“Tara!” Bailey exclaimed.
“We have to figure out what to do as a team,” I said, and I slowly took the pistol from her hand.
“Fine,” the platinum blonde spat, but it looked like she was about to cry.
Anna released her, but Paige immediately pulled Tara into a hug.
I hated to see them like this, all of them. This was one of the worst situations we’d ever dealt with, but we couldn’t make a decision that went against the group. Everyone deserved to plead their case, and even though I wanted to shoot Brody, part of me felt sorry for him, too. I’d seen soldiers have PTSD before, and it never turned out well. Half the time their wives would end up with bruises or black eyes because they tried to wake them up, or snuck up behind them accidentally. It wasn’t on purpose those times, but knowing that made me understand Brody’s viewpoint more.
I didn’t support it, but I also wasn’t sure that it was right to kill someone with a condition like that. The whole situation was FUBAR.
We searched around the resort for a bit and found some shovels in a storage shed out back. All the time, I never let Brody out of my sight. He just sat and stared at the road. Part of me expected him to try to run, but I thought maybe he felt like I believed him. Maybe his delusion allowed him to think that I’d never kill him because he was right.
Once we found some shovels we started to dig near the tree line. The dirt was still somewhat hard from winter, but it was soft enough to dig with some effort. It was quiet while we worked, but every now and then I looked over and saw tears running down Bailey’s face. The other girls kept it together a little bit better, but Bailey was the most sensitive, and I knew she took this hard, even though she was the one who advocated to keep Brody alive.
It was late afternoon by the time the graves were finished. Anna and I carefully carried the bodies over to them and laid them down gently.
“Should we say something?” Tara asked before we covered them back with dirt.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Is there something you’d like to say?”
“They didn’t deserve this,” Paige whispered.
“Yeah,” Bailey agreed, and her lip trembled. “And, I’m sorry for what they went through.”
I pulled the blonde to me and let her sob for a moment before I handed her over to Anna.
“Go sit down,” I said. “Let me handle this.”
Anna led the other girls toward the jeep, and I looked down into the graves and studied the faces of the women there for a moment. They were pale, with large circles under their eyes, and they were much too skinny for their frames. The clothes they wore were filthy and tattered, and I could see bruises both new and old on various parts of their bodies.
A couple of the women were in pieces, which had been terrible to see, but I had found some linens in the lodge and wrapped them up. I had also been the one to carry them to the graves, I didn’t want Anna to have to deal with that.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, then I tossed in the first shovel full of dirt.
“Do you need some help?” Brody asked from behind me as I finished up with the first woman.
“Why would you do that?” I asked, and I regarded him coolly to gauge his reaction.
“I only killed them because I had to,” he said. “I want to help. I’m not happy about what I had to do.”
I didn’t bother trying to explain to him that he didn’t have to kill them, he had only convinced himself that he did. But his face was already the last thing these women saw before they died, and I didn’t want his presence to desecrate the good we tried to do by putting them to rest.
“I don’t need any help,” I told him quietly.
“Oh, come on,” he chuckled as he reached for a shovel. “It’ll take you an hour to get this done by yourself.”
“Don’t touch them,” I snapped.
“Fine,” he said, and he held his hands up in surrender. “Do it yourself, then.”
As I worked I thought about how strange the day had been. Everything had moved so quickly, from the time we saw the caravan headed to the refinery, through the battle, and now to this. It almost didn’t feel real.
I tried to piece together what had happened when we went to look for Brody. He had to have had this planned the entire time. That was why he hadn’t shown us where he was hidden, and that was why he hadn’t answered when we called out for him. We had thought he could have been injured, but really the whole time he had planned to kill those women in cold blood.
I wiped my mouth again and a fresh streak of blood showed on my hand. I stared down at the red liquid, but I still wasn’t sure what to do, so I just kept shoveling dirt.
After the bodies were buried I went and found the girls.
“We have to make a decision,” I said. “And it needs to be unanimous.”
“I don’t think we can do that,” Tara said.
“I don’t want anyone to regret what we do here today,” I said.
“If we were going to kill him we should have already done it,” Anna said.
“Are you serious?” Paige asked.
“I am,” Anna said. “We all can realize that he’s sick, but we don’t have to be around him. He doesn’t know where we live.”
“That’s true,” Bailey agreed. “We can just leave here and not see him ever again.”
“He should pay for what he’s done,” Tara seethed.
“He thinks it was the right thing,” Bailey said. “He needs help, if anything. Just because times have changed doesn’t mean we should ignore the fact that people are ill and just kill them.”
“He killed those women first,” Paige said.
“He did,” Anna agreed, “but we don’t have to worry about him doing it again. He doesn’t have anybody at the fort who could help him with an attack, and he couldn’t pull something like that off again without us.”
“Right,” Bailey said. “We just won’t see him ever again.”
“Fine,” Tara said. “But if we do see him again, then I’m going to fuck him up so fast.”
“Agreed,” Anna said. “Paige?”
“Alright,” the brunette sighed. “As much as I want to get rid of him, I also feel kind of sorry for him, too, but I’m with Tara: If I see that fucker again, I’m going to kill him.”
“It’s a complicated situation,” I told her. “It’s okay to have complicated emotions.”
“So, we leave and don’t see him again,” Anna said.
“Let’s gather the supplies and get out of here,” I said with a nod.
It wasn’t the exact decision that anybody wanted, but we had made it together, and we had been able to agree on it, so I was happy with the outcome.
A while later we finished loading up the last of the equipment, weapons, and various other things we had found at the ski lodge into the jeep. Only one of the trucks still worked, and Brody had decided to take it back to the fort, so we split some of the stuff with him, only because he started grabbing things and I knew if I spoke to him I’d end up hitting him again. We had decided not to kill him, but nobody had said anything about punches.
“That’s the last of it,” Anna said, and she closed the back of the jeep.
“Good,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Ladies,” Brody called, and I spun around to stare him down. I didn’t want him talking to any of my girls, not after what he’d done.
“Uh, yeah,” Anna said, but she eyed him warily.
“It was good working with you,” Brody said, and I took a step forward so I was in front of my girls, but he just held out his hand to me. “And good working with you again, brother.”
I looked down at his hand, turned away, and got into the jeep.
“Let’s go,” Anna said, and all my girls followed suit.
“Tav,” Brody said as he came up to the window. “Are you serious right now?”
“The most serious I’ve ever been,” I assured him.
I could see the anger well up in his face, he sneered and then turned away and headed back to his truck.
“Seems like you pissed him off,” Anna said as I started the jeep.
“Yeah, well, he pissed me off first,” I countered.
The drive back home wasn’t too long, but it was getting dark. I sped down the road and thought about everything Brody and I had been through. If I hadn’t saved his ass back in the day then maybe he wouldn’t have wound up like this, or maybe he would have wound up worse. I didn’t know, but part of me regretted that day. I had never given it a second thought before, but now I wondered if I had only helped him get to the point he was at then.
I knew none of it was my fault, these were Brody’s decisions. But still, it felt personal. I’d seen National Guard guys go crazy, and plenty of civilians, too, so I couldn’t put it past anybody in the military, but to see a fellow Ranger behave this way, it was sickening.
I had to bury those women because of him. My girls had shed tears because of him, and I couldn’t for the life of me understand why. There was no logical explanation, and that just made it worse. At least in the field I knew why people did the things they did, out of hatred or self preservation, or religious motives. Here, though, his motive was one that didn’t seem real. It didn’t make sense. He was sincere in thinking that those women were a threat, but I knew that they weren’t, and he went behind my back to kill them. That was an insult in itself.
We drove on down the road, and Paige directed me to take several turns that eventually looped us back around toward campus so that Brody would think we had gone up toward Burlington. The jeep was still somewhat loud from the hole in the muffler, and I worried about us running into another group of druggies, but I had yet to see anything so far. It was dark as hell then, and our headlights were the only light in front of us. Things always seemed darker at night now, since there were no streetlights. It was something you didn’t notice at first, especially if you’d grown up around roads that didn’t have any streetlights, but the more time you spent on the road the darker and eerier it seemed.
I took a deep breath as I followed our headlights as they reflected off the asphalt.
A dark night seemed fitting since it had been such a dark day, but I had to keep my spirits up. We had decided to never see Brody again, which was fine with me.
All I needed was my girls with me.
I looked over to Anna in the passenger seat. She sat with her foot on the dash as she stared out the window.
Tara, Bailey, and Paige were cuddled up in the back. Tara’s head rested on Paige’s shoulder, and Bailey leaned against the window, half asleep from the adrenaline crash.
I looked back to the road that would lead us home.
And I hoped that I never saw Brody again.
Because if I ever saw him again, I’d have to kill him.
End of book 11
End Notes
Thank you for reading Without Law 11. I’ll start working on book 12 as soon as this book has 100 reviews. So please leave a nice review here.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Eric Vall
Eric Vall, Without Law 11
