Castroville: Countdown to Armageddon: Book 7 (11 page)

     As she wrapped the man, she wondered if Tom was still alive. She certainly hoped so. He didn’t have to come along to help her find and retrieve her mother. He did so out of love for Sara. It would be a damn shame if he paid for loving her with his life.

     And she wasn’t sure whether she’d be able to live with herself if he did.

     As she wrapped the man’s head she noticed his scalp was soaked with his sticky blood. Randy’s strike on the top of his skull had opened a gash perhaps half an inch long.

     Sara knew that head wounds bled profusely, but always trickled to a stop, or a slow ooze, after several minutes. It was another little tidbit Tom had taught her.

     Knowing that, it wasn’t an effort at saving his life that drove her to wrap an extra course of tape beneath his chin, and then across the top of his head. Rather, it was the work of a God-fearing woman who thought it merciful to try to ebb the flow of blood, so the man wouldn’t be weak or nauseous when he finally came to.

     Randy rolled him onto his stomach and hog-tied him. His wrists were tied together, and so were his ankles. Then the four limbs were tied together. If he came to before he was found and freed, he’d be miserable. But no permanent damage would be done.

     Hopefully he wouldn’t regain consciousness until Randy and Sara were long gone, with Tom and Stacey in tow.

     Along with any other hapless prisoners they could find.

     Sara could be forgiven if she thought things were going swimmingly up to this point. She had never been on a guerilla mission of this sort before, and thought things were going exactly according to plan.

     But Randy had been serious when he told her the day before never to get comfortable. That plans changed constantly, as the situation changed.

     Randy hadn’t mentioned it before, for fear he’d alarm her or cause her to lose much-needed sleep.

     But he could have finished the statement and told her that something always goes wrong.

     Always, without exception.

     While they were hog-tying the sentry, a lone man exited the ranch house and climbed upon an Appaloosa pony tied to a rail near the front porch.

     Randy never heard the man. He’d closed the front door quietly so as not to wake anyone in the house. He walked lightly across the wooden porch for the same reason. And when he climbed upon his pony, he didn’t ride off at a fast gallop. He sauntered off at a leisurely pace.

     He was in absolutely no hurry. He’d done this chore a hundred times before and knew there was absolutely no reason to rush.

-21-

     Inside the barn, totally unaware that his partner had been hit in the head, knocked unconscious and tied up, the second sentry lay upon two bales of hay laid end to end.

     He was wide awake, but it wasn’t because he was more dedicated than the man outside. He’d eaten some chili for supper a few hours before and his stomach was still churning.

     He’d emptied his bowels in the corner of one of the horse stalls a couple of hours before, but that didn’t do much except to stink up the place. Now the horses were restless, unaccustomed to the smell of a human doing the same thing they themselves did on the barn floor several times a day.

     The man’s name was Shiloh, and he was a relatively friendly sort. Friendly in that he didn’t go out of his way to assault Tom as some of the others did. He didn’t kick his prisoner in the ribs to announce his food plate was there. He didn’t place Tom’s water bottle just out of reach and laugh at Tom’s feeble attempts to reach out for it.

     Shiloh wasn’t a man who believed in tormenting another. And thus far he’d been the only one who’d made an effort to communicate with the old man who lay sleeping fitfully, chained to the barn floor. Tom was rolled up in the fetal position and not even aware he was doing it.

     It was a move of self-preservation his subconscious mind had adopted after being kicked so frequently in the two previous days.

     Since Tom was sleeping, Shiloh had no one to talk to.

     Since he couldn’t sleep, he was restless.

     And since his stomach was crying out in pain from the indignity of being served too-spicy chili, he couldn’t get comfortable.

     Normally he and Stan, the man on guard at the barn door, had a regular routine.

     One man would guard the barn door for half of their eight hour shift.

     The other would nap on the hay bales, ten feet from their shackled prisoner.

     At oh-four-hundred hours, four a.m., they would switch places.

     It was a system that worked well over the previous months. For Tom wasn’t the only prisoner who’d been shackled in chains and chained to the floor. There had been several others who’d gotten on the wrong side of Jack Payton and had to pay for their indiscretions. Or who’d been taken hostage or held for ransom for various reasons and things.

     Knowing that probably wouldn’t have surprised Tom much.

     But knowing that very few of those prisoners ever left the big barn alive might have distressed him a bit.

     By splitting their shift in half and switching places halfway through it, both Shiloh and Stan typically got in some good sleep without the boss finding out about it. Their routine called for the doorman to call in whenever someone was approaching.

     The doorman would stick his head into the barn and yell out, in a loud voice, “Hey, bring me a cigarette, would you?”

     Shiloh knew what the words would really mean, if he happened to hear them on this night. They wouldn’t mean that Stan wanted a smoke. For Stan didn’t smoke anymore. He gave them up a year after the blackout, when they became so stale he lost the taste for them.

     No, those words on this night would mean, “Get your ass up, Shiloh. Someone’s coming, and it may be the boss.”

     The plan had worked perfectly in recent months and had saved them from getting fired or having their asses chewed. And knowing that made it easy for Shiloh to lay upon the hay bales and relax.

     He couldn’t sleep. The upset stomach took care of that. But lying there with his eyes closed sure beat standing on his feet and watching out into the darkness.

     A song popped into his head, as they are sometimes wont to do. A little ditty from his favorite movie, which he’d watched in the den of the ranch house a couple of evenings before.

     It was called
My Rifle, My Pony, and Me
. It was sung by Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson in the John Wayne classic
Rio Bravo
. And since Shiloh couldn’t get it out of his head and couldn’t sleep, he did the next best thing.

     He covered his face with his Stetson, closed his eyes, and whistled the tune to amuse himself and pass the time.

-22-

     Tom and Sarah heard the whistling, coming from within the barn. At first Sarah thought it might be Tom, since Tom was a whistler too. She didn’t know it would be a long time before Tom would be able to whistle again, through his busted lips and shattered front teeth.

     “Listen,” she whispered. “Do you think that might be Tom, trying to send us a message?”

     Randy shrugged.

     “Does the song have any significance to you?”

     “No. I’ve never heard it before.”

     “Then probably not. But if it is him, what could he possibly be warning us about? And how could he possibly know we were out here?”

     Now Sarah shrugged.

     She felt foolish.

     “Sorry. Just thinking out loud is all…”

     Then she changed the subject.

     “Now what? Are we going to sneak into the front door? What if the man inside is watching it?”

     “He wouldn’t be much of a sentry if he wasn’t. That’s why we’re going in another way.”

     He took her hand and led her around to the side of the barn, beneath the high door of the hayloft.

     He went to one knee, and she followed suit. She drew close enough to smell his breath, and it smelled of peppermint. She thought that very odd.

     Randy began to whisper in a conspiratorial tone.

     “We’re going to get you up in that loft. I want you to take off your boots and leave them down here. They’ll make much too much noise as you walk over their heads. Hopefully the loft is covered with hay and that’ll help cover your footsteps.”

     “What do you want me to do?”

     “Just look around. Stay in the shadows and creep to the edge of the loft. You won’t be able to see all of the barn below you, but you should be able to see a good portion of it. Hopefully you can see how many men are in there and where Tom is.”

     “Do you want me to shoot the men if I get a clear shot?”

     “Heck no, girl. That would bring reinforcements running, and not the good kind. We’ve got to finish this operation without letting anyone know we’re here.”

     “So what do I do after I case the joint?”

     “Case the joint? You watch too many old gangster movies.”

     “I thought that’s how cops talked.”

     “Hardly. After you get as much information as you can, come back and let me know what you found. We’ll decide our next move.”

     “Roger, ten-four, over and out.”

     He liked the way she was so relaxed now she could joke. But it also worried him a bit. She needed to have her game face on, and be ready for anything.

     “Can I take my rifle? Just in case I need it?”

     “Of course. But don’t use it unless you absolutely have to.”

     “One more question. How do I get up there?”

     “You can’t fly, Supergirl?”

     She smiled.

     “Sorry. It’s the one thing I can’t do.”

     “Then maybe that ladder over there on the ground will help.”

     Randy couldn’t see the ladder, laying on the ground twenty feet away. But he knew it was there. He’d seen it as they scouted out the barn the previous day.

     He went to retrieve it as Sara took off her boots.

     When he got back, he very quietly positioned the ladder as she watched.

     “What are you going to do while I’m up there?’

     “I’ll be just outside the barn door, gun drawn, ready to come rushing in if I hear trouble.”

     “Well, let’s hope you don’t hear any.”

     “Atta girl. That’ll be totally up to you and how careful you are.

     “Walk very slowly and listen to the floorboards as you go. If you get the sense one of them is going to creak, take your foot back off and step onto another one instead. We only have a little over an hour before the sky starts to lighten. Take a few deep breaths and go.”

     As Sara slowly made her way up the ladder, her socked feet making no sound at all, a lone rider on an Appaloosa pony was approaching the main gate.

     Things would soon turn ugly.

-23-

     This seems as good day as any for dying. Might as well get it over with.

     Robbie wasn’t sure where he’d heard it, exactly. From a movie somewhere, probably. Maybe an old western. He watched a lot of them when he was a boy, mostly to escape the realities of a miserable life. He’d longed to be like Roy Rogers, and ride into town and play the hero.