Chapter 23Home Front VII - Sunday, August 5th to Monday, August 6th
Lori sat in the kitchen, a lantern on the table next to her sending a soft glow across her face. She looked worn out and tired. Streaks of dried tears were visible on her cheeks and her hair was disheveled. Another day had passed since her daughter was taken and her son wounded. Darkness looked into the windows from outside.
She rose from the chair and moved over to the gas stove that had a small pot of water warming over the flame. She turned off the flame and poured the water into a basin. She grabbed a few clean rags and took the basin into the living room.
Another lamp, burning low, revealed Shane asleep on the couch. He had a pained look on his face as if his pain chased him in his uneasy dreams.
Lori placed the basin on the table next to the couch and dipped the rags into the water. She removed the bandages from her son’s wound in his side and used the rags to clean the area. In the dim light, she could see the wound wasn’t doing very well. A smell that did not bode well wafted up from the wound. Infection had set in.
Lori was torn. Her daughter was missing, but her son was here, and he was hurt. Most likely seriously hurt. No one had come by to check on her, so she had no way to go find Doc Miller, who lived about three miles away. She didn’t want to leave her son for that amount of time, but knew she was going to have to do something soon.
An infection in that deep wound could possibly kill her boy and she wasn’t going to let that happen. But without some help and meds, her cleaning and re-bandaging was only going to do so much good. She was also almost out of bandages and was planning on cutting up some sheets soon.
Lori heard a noise at the window and her gaze first went to the shotgun in the corner, gauging its distance if she needed to get it quickly, then at the window.
A cardinal was on the windowsill looking into the room. She thought it strange that this songbird was out and about in the dark. She couldn’t remember ever seeing one at night before, but she actually thought she saw one last night too, just a few hours after Shane had come home.
The bird flitted around at the windowsill for a few more seconds, then flew off.
Feeling her son’s forehead, her hand felt as if it was burned. He was running a high fever. Yep, infection was here.
She went back to the kitchen and poured some cool water onto one of the rags and went back. Placing the rag on his forehead to help cool him some.
She was going to have to go for the doctor. She would go as soon as the sun was starting to lighten the sky.
She lay down on the floor next to the couch. She had set up a sleeping pad and had a light blanket for the slight chill of the early morning hours. She slept uneasily but did manage to get a few hours of restless sleep and was up before the crack of dawn, packing a small pack with a few items that she may need for this hopefully short trip to the doctor.
She checked on Shane one more time. He too was sleeping restlessly, and he was now mumbling a bit from time to time, but otherwise his condition was stable, but not good. She placed the note she had written, explaining to Shane where she had gone, and what she was doing.
She took one last look at her boy, grabbed the shotgun, and headed to the back door. She left the house and started walking down the driveway. When she came to the road, she turned left and started walking as fast as she could up the road towards Doc Miller’s house.
The road that led to the doctors was fairly straight but rolled up and down on this fertile farmland near the Shenandoah River. She pushed up the up hills and started to jog on the downhills, but the day was heating up quickly and the humidity was oppressive.
The road took a slight turn and as she moved around the corner, she could see the doctor’s house. Something wasn’t right. She stood staring at the front of the house. There was an army Humvee parked in front of the house. Suddenly, she realized that she was standing out in the open. Even though she had been an army wife for decades now, the sight of army usually meant bad things in this uncertain time. She moved off of the road quickly and rushed into the bushes. She skirted the low bushes and moved off into some thicker trees, then started moving towards the house, un-slinging her shotgun.
As she got close to the house, she moved towards the building to get a better look into the front yard and maybe into the house.
She got to the edge of the small, wooded copse and sat, looking. Her heart was beating rapidly in her chest as she saw movement in the house. Three men came out of the house. The one on the right was an army private, at least he had an army uniform on. He wore the black arm band that she had come to know meant that he was a rogue soldier, serving that fascist asshole, Richard Flaherty, who was holed up in Mount Weather. At least they had deduced that he is most likely up there in Weather, pulling his strings and ordering people about. Not caring about who lives or who dies. Killing indiscriminately and taking what they wanted.
The second guy was Jim Henry, the leader of the Blue Mountain Patrol. Something was definitely not right here. The BMP had been trying to stay away from the army. They were talking as if they knew each other and were actually working together.
Between them was Doctor Miller. He didn’t look happy. Each of the other two men had hold of one of his arms as if they were moving him along against his wishes.
“Where are we going?” asked the doctor, fear making his voice high and squeaky.
“You’ll find out when we get there,” replied the soldier. “We require your services on a little side job. Our fun went a little too far and we need you to fix someone up for us.”
Doc Miller somehow caught sight of Lori looking at them from the bushes. He did a little shake of his head, warning her off. She stood tight.
Jim let go of the doctor and opened the back of the Humvee. “Get in doc,” he ordered. “You got everything in your bag, right?”
With one arm free, the doctor shook free of the soldier, dropped his bag and started running toward the side of the house. He was hoping to get to the back where a trail led into the forest. If he could just get out of sight for a bit, he could try to lose them on the maze of trails that he knew intimately from years of hiking them. There were many different ways to go in the dense woods and he had actually made quite a few of the trails himself.
The soldier brought his weapon to the ready and sighted down on the running doctor. He pulled the trigger sending a three-shot burst towards the running man, just as Jim Henry screamed for him not to shoot.
The doctor fell to the ground in a pink spray of blood as all three of the bullets found a target in his back.
“What the fuck!” yelled Jim Henry. “We needed him, you stupid asshole. He is the only doctor in the area.”
The man looked over at Jim, shrugged his shoulders and said, “He ran.”
“Had you ever heard of chasing and catching alive?” Jim continued the anger in his voice was steely and hard. “Now we are going to have to splint her leg ourselves. Do you know how to splint a fucking leg?”
“Naw, but we can figure it out. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just good enough”
“Don’t you have any medic friends up in Weather?”
“Naw, they’re all assholes. Besides, this op is covert. No one in Weather knows we have her.”
“Fuck!” Jim yelled one more time, his frustration a clear sign on his face.
He picked up the bag, opened it and looked at the contents. His dumb stare revealed that he didn’t really know what he was looking at. He closed the bag and put it in the back of the Humvee.
Both men got into the Humvee and the soldier started the engine. None of the two men went to check on the doctor. They had already written him off.
The Humvee pulled out of the driveway and moved down the road that Lori had just walked up.
She waited until it turned the corner in the road, and then took off running towards the side of the house.
She went up to the doctor. He had fallen face down with his arms and legs spread out like he was trying to do a belly flop into water.
She turned him over and the wounded man sucked in a long shaky breath. The sound was like a gurgling brook. He was alive. Lori checked the man over, pulling his bloody shirt away revealing three leaking holes. All three of the bullets had gone through and through. Who knows what kind of damage they did as they passed through the man.
He coughed and blood sprayed out of his mouth in a fine mist. He opened his eyes and focused on Lori.
“I,I, didn’t want them to find you,” he said softly, as blood ran out of his mouth and down to his chin. “I think they have your daughter,” he slowly continued on. “I should have just gone with them. I think she is hurt.” He coughed again and closed his eyes, trying to breathe as blood filled his lungs. “I thought I could get to the woods.”
Lori tried to make the man comfortable as the life continued to drip out of him.
“Shane is hurt too,” she told the doctor. “I had come to get your help. It was probably those guys that had hurt him. Britney was with Shane when he went out. He came home bleeding with a wound in his side and said that someone had taken Britney. I need antibiotics and more bandages.” She didn’t know if he even heard her, his breathing had slowed a lot and his eyes were still closed.
His eyes fluttered a bit again and he said, “I have some supplies hidden in the house.” He coughed again. “Find the key with the red tape on it in the kitchen on the hooks and go to my bedroom. Look in the back of the walk-in closet. There is a large wooden chest.” His voice was growing fainter and quieter. Then it stopped.
Lori checked him again, tears flowing from her eyes as she tried to stop the bleeding of the wounded man.
As she was trying to tie a makeshift bandage using his torn shirt, she noticed he had stopped breathing. His eyes had opened again, but no life remained in them. He was gone.
She checked his pulse to confirm and moved away from him.
Lori went inside the house, found the key and then the chest in the back of the closet. She opened it and saw that everything she needed was there. This would be an important stash, but she couldn’t take it all with her.
She filled her small pack with as many of the supplies as she could, locking the chest and hiding it a little by throwing some clothes on top of it. She put the key in her pocket.
Lori went back down to the doctor and slowly pulled him into the house. They were close to the back door, and she pulled him up into the kitchen. She found a blanket on the back of the doctor’s couch in the living room and covered his body.
“Once I get Shane stable, I’ll come back and bury you doc,” she said with some more tears. “I promise.”
She went to the front door and carefully looked up and down the road to ensure the Humvee wasn’t coming back and then she headed south. She stayed off the road, moving parallel to the road in the woods. This slowed her down a little, but she couldn’t be discovered before she got back to her son.
“Hold on Britney, I’ll find you as soon as I get Shane stable,” she said to the wind as she made her way south, back towards the farm.
Lori walked for about a mile in the brush and trees next to the road. She turned another bend and saw several vehicles, all military, blocking the road. She looked at them for a few seconds, thinking, those weren’t there an hour ago. She hunkered down in the brush and observed the scene.
The three Humvees stood across the road and there were about six or seven soldiers milling about. Another Humvee was sitting perpendicular to the three blocking the road. It was the vehicle Jim and the soldier had been in.
The soldier was outside the vehicle, and he was talking to two of the other soldiers.
Lori couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the guy seemed pretty worked up and he kept gesturing back at his Humvee where Jim sat silently.
Eventually two men jumped into their vehicles and moved them backwards, letting the killer’s vehicle through. Once they were through, the vehicles were moved back in place and the men went back to milling about the road.
Lori thought for a while and then decided she needed to detour for a while towards the river and then work her way around the roadblock. She couldn’t figure out why they had set up a block seemingly in the middle of nowhere.
After she figured she had gone far enough, Lori headed back towards the road, continuing to parallel it in the brush and trees.
The sun had been continuously getting higher in the sky as she moved along and the heat had increased again, if that was even possible.
Lori was about 500 meters from her house, but it was on the opposite side of the road, she approached the road, looking both ways before venturing out into the open, turned left and started jogging towards the driveway.
As she approached the driveway, a group of people came over the rise that was south of their house. They were jogging too. It looked to be about seven people, a couple of them were young and short.
She slowed to a walk and looked at the runners. She could see that they all had weapons of one sort or another and all were wearing backpacks.
Suddenly, the man in front slowed as he saw her, he looked at her standing in the middle of the road, then he sped up again. He looked ragged and haggard. His beard was a good four or five inches and his clothes looked worn and tattered.
There was something familiar about his run. He kinda ran like her husband Clay.
As he got closer, there was a smile on his face. “Hey darling,” the man said. “I’m home.”
Her shotgun clattered to the ground as she realized that crusty old man was her husband. She ran into his arms, shouting his name, forgetting that urgent business needed to be taken care of, at least for a few seconds.