The Orphans (Book 5): Civil War (15 page)

Cade pulled the trigger blowing out the back of Owen’s head. The momentum from the bullet sent him in a heap to the ground falling head first. Cade looked down watching the rock beneath Owen’s head turn from an almost blinding white with the sun shining on it into a crimson red. The spot would be a reminder, he thought, to anyone stupid or cocky enough to try and take his power.

The rest of the men started to walk over. When Travis moved in the back of the truck Cade pulled his pistol aiming it dead center at Travis’ chest. He held up his hands lifting the handle for the truck’s bed. He said, “Sir, I just thought that we could get the tailgate down and get Bella somewhere more comfortable.”

“What in the fuck do you think we’re going to do to make her more comfortable? Would you look at her for god sakes!”

Travis was nodding his head slowly. He said, “I…I just want to say that I was going to go and dig her plot, unless that was something that you wanted to do. I don’t want to step on your feet, sir. You did want to bury her didn’t you?”

Cade stared at Bella lying crumpled in the back. He pulled her up gently cradling her in his arms. Travis gripped his shoulder as he helped him down off of the tailgate. He did not want to see him topple with Bella in his arms. Cade turned around after walking past the men and glared at Travis. “Go get the shovels so you and I can do this together. If it is one thing from the old days that we should be allowed to do it is to be able to bury the ones we love.”

Jep was standing nearby and looking at Owen. He said, “So, uh you want us to bury Owen too?”

Cade looked at him for less than a second. “I said loved ones. I don’t know about you, Jep, but if you want to break your back making him a hole then be my guest. Just make sure that you do it on your own time and when your watch is over.”

Jep looked at Owen thinking of the size of the hole that he was going to have to dig. “No worries, boss, we’ll just toss him over the fence. I got an idea that there will be something that comes across and makes a meal out of him.”

Cade shrugged, “Suit yourself then, just mind what I say.”

Jep didn’t want to ask anything else but couldn’t help himself. “Hey, Cade, did you want us to stay up here? Are we going to have any shit hitting the fan because of this?”

Cade turned around thinking about it for a second. “You boys stay up on that ledge. If the dead don’t get those people I think we might see them come our way with ill intentions. They had all kinds of shit there, way better than those rifles you boys got. Lemme know if you have any issues up here; we are going to need every single man we have when they decide to come around if they know who it was that hit them. If they didn’t then it is just going to be a matter of time before they find us.”

*****

Six hours later

Cade and Travis had been taking time going back and forth with the shovel. It was near six in the evening and even with the cool air both of them were shirtless and sweating heavily. When they had the hole to the length that Cade wanted they got a small stack of two by fours from homes which had not yet been finished. Within an hour they had the best casket that they were able to make. Cade laid her comforter in there and wrapped her delicately in the blanket. A few of the men came and lowered her in by rope slowly. The radio squawked and it was Jep. “I don’t want to interrupt you guys but you better get up here and bring everything you can get your hands on.”

Cade hit his radio, “Are they coming for the wall or is it the dead?”

“Hard to say, sir.”
“Well, it should be a pretty fucking easy answer you idiot! Do you see the dead or do you see the soldiers coming?”

“Uh, I see both. I don’t know what is going on!”

Cade did the sign of the cross over Bella’s grave and screamed to the men, “Get your asses moving, you heard him!”

Chapter 16

Base

Ellie saw Bryan didn’t have much hope left in surviving the day. She could hear Clary screaming from behind almost impossible to make sense of. When she went back he jumped when she gripped his shoulder. She said, “Hey, Clary, stop swinging damn it or I’ll leave you here. What is the problem with you?”

“Make sure that they’re all dead. Make sure that none of those men make it through the day. None of them deserve any compassion from us.”

“What do you expect me to do, just shoot them in the head?” Ellie asked. “What about mercy…isn’t that something that people still deserve to receive?”

“Not when those people were coming in with one intention, which is that of cold blooded murder. They didn’t have anything but death on their minds. There would be no survivors right now if we hadn’t done something to take them out.”

Ellie said, “That isn’t how I want to fight though. That isn’t the war that I believe in.”

“Well, Ellie, unfortunately for your ideals sometimes there isn’t a choice in the matter and we need to fight with any means possible. If you have a problem with that then you need to reassess the way that you view the world. Mercy isn’t for the weak and it is something we give those that deserve it. It’s going to be damned hard to grant that to someone who is trying to kill you while you are trying to give them help and sympathy. There’s little you can do for men like that. They want what we have and they aren’t going to stop trying to come after us until that point in time that all of us, or all of them, are dead. If you aren’t prepared to deal with that then you will have to be ready to deal with death. There isn't any middle ground. Now help me get up and get us out of here. Do you see any of theirs that is moving?”

Ellie looked around and saw one of their men trying to hobble away. She said, “Yeah, there’s one guy that’s walking towards the fence line.”

Clary said, “I have a change of heart Ellie, can you put one of those rounds in his leg please?”

“How is that a change of heart?”

“Because if I could see right now I’d personally and happily put a bullet in the fuckers skull. Do it before he gets away!”

Ellie did as ordered feeling a little guilt that she worried was still going to be there in the days to come. She squeezed the trigger once and a scream erupted from the man who fell to a knee. Clary said, “You take me over to him I need to have a talk with him, Ellie.”

“But you're blind right now, Clary.”

“Yes, Ellie, I noticed that, thank you. That is the sole reason that I need you to take me over there so that I can talk to him. I would like to know what he knows and if he tells me then we won’t nearly have the issue of dealing with me like he could.”

Ellie gripped his wrist and Clary pushed himself up from the ground. The two walked over to the man who was screaming holding his leg. Ellie took his rifle tossing it far out of reach. When he saw feet walking around him he tried to pull his pistol but Ellie kicked him in the gut quickly stripping the knife and a pistol from his belt rig. She said, “He had a knife and gun on him, Clary. What do you want me to do with them?”

“Just hand them to me, we can go from there.”

The man tried to let up off his gut but hurt worse when he let go. “You stupid bitch, you are going to regret doing that. You don’t know who you are messing with. You don’t know anything!”

“Uh, that’s actually funny because I know that I have guns and a big ass Navy Seal standing next to me. You are in a field, all alone, injured and everyone with you either abandoned you or they’re dead. What exactly do I need to worry about?”

He said, “Well, unlike you I’m not deaf. You have just as long as I do left to live because those things are coming. If you can’t hear them screaming at you then you are fucked because he’s blind and it's obvious that you are deaf.”

Clary listened deeply for a moment and his new found blindness did bring his hearing onto a new level previously not in his list of abilities. Clary knelt down touching the man’s foot. He kicked Clary off and Clary said, “Ellie, which one of this guy’s legs has been shot?”

“His right, why?”

Clary reached up the man’s leg feeling through the blood soaked pants. When the man punched Clary in the face, Clary gripped onto the man’s jacket pulling him up close and brought his forehead down into where he thought the man’s nose would be.

He hit just a little lower and broke his mouth open and the bottom portion of his nose. The man stopped laughing immediately and gripped the blood now coming down his nose. Clary said, “So, where are you from, asshole?”

The man said, “If I tell you then my boss is going to whoop my fucking ass. That is if he lets me back on the base after failing him and everyone else.”

Clary said, “At least you have a hope that he likes you. The only reason you are still alive is you have things that I need to know. If we only have a little time left before the Turned show up then I will use everything up to and including my dying breath to find out what I can from you.”

“Well, you might as well kill me then because I’m not saying shit.”

Clary went down the man’s leg until it started to feel wet. He said, “Let’s hope that you haven’t been with too many dirty women over the last year, or lifetime I guess.”

“Why don’t you go to -”

Clary dug his finger into the bullet wound hooking his knuckle inside of the man’s wound and lifting up. Tears instantly filled his eyes and he began screaming just as loud as he could. Clary said, “Tickles, doesn’t it, asshole?”

“I’ll talk, I’ll talk, just let me go, just stop please, fucking hell stop and I’ll talk!”

Clary lifted up on his finger tearing at the skin. “I think that I’d like to just hang on until I get what I need out of you. You want this over quicker then I suggest that you speed shit up. I’d hate to think what kind of damage I can do if I leave it in here for too much longer. Hey, I tell you what, ass, maybe I should just rip out your fucking knee cap. You could probably find someone around to try and fix your knee, I mean no one here or probably in this state for that matter, but I’m sure some asshole like you could figure something out. You guys are pretty handy if you are able to survive in this shit. At least you were pretty smart until you decided to bring your plague of these assholes to our gates. What you didn’t think we’d have something to retaliate with?”

Ellie was watching, and could see that the dead were on their way. She hit her radio whispering to the kids in the bunker below the medic facility. “You guys stay there, the immediate threat is done but the Turned are coming and we’re going to have another fight on our hands. You make sure that you don’t open that for anything. They’ll smell that blood from a mile away so don’t mess around. You guys stay there, Aslin and everyone will be back and we’ll take them out…again.”

The man tried to crawl away from Clary but he held tight to the wound. The man screamed clenching at Clary’s hand and finally caved. He said, “Fine, fine…we’re at a private townhome community.”

When the man stopped speaking Clary inserted his finger deeper, prodding at what he was confident was the bullet lodged in his leg and just below his knee cap. Clary as calmly as he could be said, “And specifically, like town and directions…where is it. There’s a lot of townhomes that I have seen around here when we’ve been out gathering.”

“It is only a few minutes away from here. If you wouldn’t have attacked our men and killed them, then you never would have seen us. We have enough and we know how to get more. We didn’t have any issues until our boys didn’t come back. What the hell did you expect us to think?”

“Are you talking about those dumb asses in the pickup a few months back?”

“Well, that dumbass was second in command and you guys shot the shit out of that truck and left them for dead.”

“Yeah, because he tried to take one of our kids that we have here and the weapons that he had on him.”

“The two men that came to us that you kicked out said you attacked them and that you were out for blood, all kinds of crazy shit. If that isn’t true good luck trying to get Cade to believe it. It won’t matter anyway because he’s going to be out for blood now after his daughter got killed in this. I don’t have anything else that I can tell you so get your fucking fingers out of my leg!”

Clary pulled out his fingers as quickly as he’d put them in, and wiped them on the man’s shirt. “You know what? You are right. There’s nothing else that you can tell me.”

Ellie said, “Hey, Clary, you find out what you needed to know?”

He nodded slowly feeling up the man’s chest and when he could feel his shoulder grabbed it pulling him in close. He grunted as he began to squeeze. He said, “Ellie, you might not want to watch what’s next.”

Ellie began to say something but the man yelled cutting her off. “What do you mean, next? What is next? I told you what you wanted to know, I told you everything you son of-”

Clary gripped hard with his left arm and pulled his right hand as quick as he could and snapped his neck. The man went silent and limp in his arms. Clary, breathing heavily, said, “Ellie, how far until they’re here, how long do we have?”

Ellie used the scope on the rifle looking into the distance and said, “They’re just now making it to the gates entrance. We probably have minutes if we are lucky. So probably less, honestly.”

She pulled him to his feet and ran with his hand in hers towards the entrance to the bunkhouse. When they got close to Lou she gripped him by the arm and said, “We need to get inside, the dead are on their way. Is Bryan going to make it, Lou?”

He felt the kids pulse one more time. It was always the hardest giving up on the young. “There isn’t a chance, sorry.”

There were plenty of screams still coming from inside of the building. Ellie said, “Lou, Lou, snap out of it we need your help, please. The dead are going to be here and we need to be inside when it happens.”

He got to his feet and the three of them ran for the door. When Kya saw them coming she swung it open and slammed it tight behind them. The echo rang through the bunkhouse when she did. Ellie gave her a hug, “Kya, I’m so happy that you are alive.”

Kya hugged her back. “What do you mean you are happy I’m alive? Who didn’t make it? We’ve lost so many in here I can’t imagine losing anyone else.”

She thought of how she would feel if someone had to break bad news about Shaun. Ellie knew that for the greater good of the others that she couldn’t tell her until they got back and had someone else to help her. A cry like she had never heard broke out behind her and diverted Kya’s attention away from what Ellie had brought up. When Ellie turned to see what was wrong, she saw Lou on the ground kneeling before his daughters on his knees with his hands on his face and his forehead on the ground. He was shaking uncontrollably and the words that came out were impossible to understand.

Clary stood there in his own personal darkness thinking that the only time he had heard a man sound like that was from the loss of a loved one. He said, “Ellie, Ellie where are you?”

She gripped his elbow and he leaned in saying, “Was it both of his daughters?”

She nodded forgetting he was currently blind and then said, “Yeah, yeah they are.”

Clary let out a breath that sounded like someone had sucker punched him in the gut. “Oh fuck, I’m sorry, Lou. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

Lou heard this and snapped. “What are you talking about loss? They didn’t have cancer, they didn’t have leukemia, they were ripped from my life on your base. Did you forget that it was your base that we came to because we were going to be safe here? My daughters were going to have a place to survive, to thrive and learn how to make it in this world. Excuse me for being a bit fucking bitter about this but Jesus Christ, what do you expect? What the fuck happened, Clary? Who were those men? What did you do to deserve this and bring pain upon us all because of it?”

Clary started to speak realizing that the screams of pain coming from the inside when they had been on the outside were no longer. With Lou losing his mind and cool he knew that it wasn’t because they had been saved but that they didn’t make it. Clary said, “I don’t know what happened for sure, but I have a feeling that Bella was a spy.”

“She’s sixteen years old at best. What the hell are you talking about?”

“It wouldn’t take long for someone that is new here to figure out the routines and who does what, and where things are kept, would it? I saw a man come through a hole in the gates they had cut, and carry her off. From what I could tell it looked a lot like she was family, probably his daughter or as close of a relation as one could get.”

“How the fuck did she get in and why isn’t there a vetting process?”

Clary was trying to stay calm and keep his shit together. He didn’t want Lou to do anything stupid and he knew that there probably wasn’t going to be a lot that he could do if that was what it came down to in his current condition. “You realize that most of the time when we were picking people up that there were impending circumstances like fighting off the dead, right? If we had to go through a fifty question process before we brought anyone here we would never have brought you either. I’m sorry about your daughters, Lou, but there isn’t anything that can be done now. We do the best that we can here but we have limited resources, and there is absolutely no way that we could have known that she was up to no good.”