Crashing Down - A Post-Apocalyptic Novel (The Ravaged Land Series Book 3) (8 page)

But he didn’t let go. In fact, he grabbed her tighter and started to move her away from us. He was stronger than she was but she fought back.

“Come on, girl,” he said through clenched teeth. It seemed as though he was trying to keep her calm. He wanted her voice quieter so she wouldn’t draw any attention or make a scene.

“No!” she said loudly and tried to jab her elbow into his gut. He had anticipated her move and dodged the weak attack.

The guy grabbed her wrist and started to drag her aggressively towards one of the side doors next to the one Dominick had gone inside. He jerked her repeatedly as she tried to plant her feet on the ground.

“Stop!” she yelled.

“Shut up,” he growled as he lifted her. Her feet came up off of the ground and he started to carry her away.

D
ean
and I both reacted at the same time to rescue her, but Penn beat us both to it. There was no way he had been asleep with how fast he got to her side. He had likely just been pretending to sleep, waiting to see if things escalated to the point where he would need to jump into action.

He spun the guy around and pushed him away from Sienna. I put my hands on her shoulders and pulled her away from them.

Penn pulled the guy’s arm up and twisted it around his back in one swift motion. It looked awful, as if the slightest movement would cause his arm to break in the most painful way.

“Oww-eeee!” the guy wailed as he tried to get away from Penn. But he stopped the instant he realized if he moved any more his arm would dislocate… or break. “Let me go! You’re going to break my arm!”

“That’s right, it won’t take much… maybe just a millimeter more and I’ll break your fucking arm. What does Dominick do with people who can’t pull their weight around here? Do you have a doctor at this camp to put your arm in a cast?” Penn asked practically spitting in the creep’s face.

“I’m sorry! It won’t happen again. I didn’t know she was spoken for… just let me go!” the guy pleaded, his eyes wide and glassy.

Penn’s eyes grew darker and he narrowed them at the man. “If you ever even look at her again, I’ll break both of your arms. And you better believe I will do it too.”

“I won’t look… I won’t! I get it!” the guy said the tears pooling in his eyes. But they weren’t tears of sadness, it was without a doubt from the pain. I didn’t even care about the pain he was in. Let him feel it. If he would have gotten Sienna away from us, who knows what he would have done with her? I knew it wouldn’t have been anything good. How many times had this same thing happened to other girls in this camp? Girls that didn’t have a Penn to protect them. Maybe it would have been better if he would have just broken his arm. Both of them.

“Get out of here,” Penn said as he released his arm and shoved him away from us. They guy glanced back for a second before he rushed off and disappeared back to wherever it was he had come from.

Penn looked at Sienna as if he was checking to make sure she was whole. After he stared into her eyes, he nodded as if they had a secret telepathic conversation that neither Dean nor I was privy to.

“Thank you,” she whispered, as she went on her tip-toes and wrapped her arms around his neck. It seemed as though he hadn’t been expecting her reaction. Penn stood there stiffly and shot a quick glance in Dean’s direction, but then he put an arm around her and hugged her back.

Moments later the guy was knocking on Dominick’s door. After a short wait, he was allowed to enter the room. I wished I could have heard what they were talking about, but I knew it would be frowned upon for me to go and put my ear against the door to listen. There was no way anyone out here would allow that to happen.

Penn barely moved as he stared at the door, watching and waiting. After ten minutes or so the door opened, and the guy walked out. Dominick stopped in the doorway and they both looked over at us. I knew that the guy had told Dominick what had happened. Whether or not he had told the whole story we’d probably never know.

Dominick didn’t come over by us to ask questions. He didn’t bother to hear what our side of the story was, instead he waved the guy away and went back inside his room.

After that we decided together that Sienna wouldn’t be taking a shift. In fact, they tried to talk me out of it too, but I had been able to convince them that my scream would wake the dead if anything like that happened to me.

Dean reluctantly agreed to it because deep down he knew that he and Penn would need more sleep than what they’d get if they shared the job between the two of them. Plus, he knew I wasn’t going to back down easily.

The night passed by without any problems. The only thing that caused me to tighten all of my muscles was when Dominick’s door opened in the middle of the night and he exited the building. He must have gone outside to use the porta-potties. At least that’s what I guessed.

When he came back inside the building I pretended I was sleeping, but he definitely, without a doubt, stopped to look at our group for a moment before going back inside his room. It was unsettling. I was pretty sure I had stopped breathing for those few minutes.

* * *

T
he next day
, everyone started to rise and go off to do whatever tasks they were assigned on a normal day. Dominick dramatically exited his private suite and made his way over to our corner. He looked us all up and down as if we somehow looked different to him and he wasn’t quite sure who we were.

“You all slept well?” he said settling his eyes on mine. The way he looked at me made me feel as though he had known I hadn’t been sleeping when he walked out in the middle of the night.

“Yes, did you?” I answered too quickly. It must have seemed weird because Dean, Penn and Sienna all shot me a questioning look at the same time. Dominick hadn’t noticed, so I decided to ignore them.

I still couldn’t put my finger on what it was about Dominick that made my skin crawl. My disdain for him was so extreme I wanted to challenge every word that came out of his mouth. And it wasn’t just because he murdered those people in the middle of his camp, I’d felt it even before that happened.

“Sure did. Always do,” he said with a squinty-eyed smirk. “So I was thinking, Ros is it?”

He waited for me to respond even though I knew he knew my name. He was trying to make sure I knew my place. That I had to respond when he asked a question.

“Right,” I said with a small nod.

“I think that maybe you should come with me on a food run,” he said, his grin fading. His look was to show that he wasn’t asking, he was telling me what was going to happen.

I looked at Dean and Penn briefly before exhaling and turning back to face Dominick. The first words that popped into my head spilled out. “A food run?”

“Yeah, it’s when we take the pickup truck and go out to—”

“I know what a food run is,” I said cutting him off. What I had wanted to know was why he was asking me of all people. The last thing I wanted to do was go off alone with Dominick. He could have asked anyone. Why me?

“So you’ll come?” he said making it sound as if I almost had a choice in the matter. But I knew I didn’t really have a choice. I knew by his tone that it was more of a demand, an order… not something I could say no to.

“Well I….”

“If she’s going, then I’m going too,” Dean said wrapping his arm around my waist.

Dominick looked annoyed for a split second before he raised one corner of his top lip and tried to force some kind of smile.

“Sure, OK. We’ll get you guys your guns back,” he nodded and gestured to one of his men. Somehow they had known what they were supposed to do with just a simple gesture. He disappeared for a few seconds and then brought over our guns.

Penn checked them over before handing one to Dean, one to me, and then tucked his into his waistband. Dominick started to walk away, he curled his finger to indicate that Dean and I should follow. He stopped abruptly and I almost walked right into him. Dominick turned and looked at Penn, “Someone will come along with something for you two to help out with soon.”

Dean took my hand as we followed Dominick out of the main building. He led us to the same pickup truck we’d ridden in when we first arrived at the camp.

Two of Dominick’s men jumped into the back while he had us ride up in the front with him. One of the guys in the back tapped on the roof of the cab and Dominick started the truck. Someone pulled open the gate door to let us out of the camp and with that we were driving down the road away from the resistance and away from Penn and Sienna.

Dominick seemed to know where he was going. He probably had done this run a thousand times. I was surprised how relaxed he looked as if this was all his territory and if something was amiss he’d already know it. If the area would have been something new to him, hopefully he would have been more cautious. Even still I wished he would have been more leery, it didn’t seem wise to ever be calm and relaxed. No matter how well a person knew a given area.

“So what do you think of my camp so far?” Dominick asked with his eyes focused on the road.

I looked at Dean before answering. “It’s OK, I guess,” I said as carefully as I could muster. I didn’t want to piss him off to the point where he’d just drop us off in the middle of nowhere.

Dominick chuckled. “We have some characters, that’s for damn sure, but I’ve been with those people for what I consider to be a long time. They are maybe a little boorish and a few who are quite eccentric, but mostly they are harmless. Most important is that they are dedicated to the cause.”

I bet Sienna didn’t think they seemed harmless. But I wasn’t about to bring it up. He would have just made excuses.

“The cause of taking out HOME at any cost?” I asked as Dean took my hand and squeeze it. I think he was trying to send me a message. A warning. To be careful, but I didn’t need his message… I already knew.

“Something like that,” he said wiping at his smile with the back of his hand as if he was trying to wipe it away. “We have to do what we can to save everyone. I really believe that. When HOME’s finished there might be nothing left… everyone dead, well except for HOME,” Dominick said meeting my eyes for a second as though he hoped I would agree with him.

“How did you organize all these people anyway?” Dean said joining in the conversation or maybe he was trying to steer it in a different direction. Dominick didn’t answer. At least not at first. I thought maybe he was choosing to ignore Dean because he hadn’t wanted him to come along in the first place.

Dominick sniffed, and turned a corner, “Well it’s not my group exactly. I took over the leadership role after the last guy in charge, umm, shall we say, moved on? No one else stepped up, and I knew I could do it better than anyone else at the camp. So here I am. With more followers and stronger than ever before.”

A small town came into view and Dominick pointed to a building in the distance. I could tell the decrepit building had once been a grocery store. But now it was just a barely standing pile of wood with a door. I wondered how much stuff could be left inside after they had been raiding it for who knows how long.

He pulled the truck up and parked by the curb. When Dean reached for the door handle Dominick put his hand on my knee to stop me from following. I looked at him as if I was trying to burn a hole into his flesh for putting his hand on me. He removed his hand slowly, and his expression seemed to lack confidence for a full second.

“You’ll stay out here and keep watch with me,” Dominick said before he looked at Dean and waved him off. Dominick turned his head to the side and shouted out of his window, “Take him with you. Show him what we do. We’ll keep watch.”

“You got it boss,” one of his flunkies said, while the other nodded. Dean looked back at me to check to make sure I was OK before he left with the two men. I slid over to where Dean had been sitting and locked the door out of habit. It wasn’t like I was going to sit in the middle while we waited for them to return. That would have been far too awkward.

Dean disappeared into the run-down building with Dominick’s men. I felt the tension in my body grow and expand from my shoulders down to my calves.

“Are you still finding food in places like this?” I said trying to break the silence that was beyond uncomfortable. It was actually easier to talk to him than it had been to sit in silence wondering what he was thinking about. Or what he was planning next.

“Some,” he said as he methodically scanned our surroundings. “We have a garden at the camp.”

“Oh?” I said genuinely excited to hear about it. They had been able to get food to grow. I wanted to reach into my pocket to make sure my seeds were still tucked inside. It was one of the things I held onto through all of this. To me they were like how a person would hold onto their keys or their wallet before all this had happened. They were that important to me. It could be the difference between life and death one day.

“Yes, but it’s not enough. We still need to find as much as we can. The garden is a work in progress.” Dominick put his hand on the shifter when he saw the guys walking towards the truck with two barely filled bags.

I slid over and Dean climbed back into his seat. Dean looked me up and down as if examining me to make sure I was in the same condition he had left me in. The men jumped into the back and tapped on the roof. That was how they signaled Dominick that they were ready. And with that we were off again.

We made a few more barely successful stops. It was almost not even worth it for the size of the camp. The guys came out to the truck with less and less each time. They seemed nervous and maybe a little worried too. Maybe Dominick would blame the small hauls on them not doing their job rather than the fact that supplies were just diminishing.