The Forge of Darkness (Darkness After Series Book 3) Read online

  The skills and knowledge Mitch learned from his father were keeping him alive today. Mitch knew he was fortunate to have been raised the way he was and where. Out here in the backwoods, far from big cities and even small towns, his family had been largely self-sufficient even before the blackout. Mitch had learned to do many things the old way, including hunting and preserving foods. With more than two decades of outwitting poachers and other outlaws, his game warden father had seen it all and Mitch absorbed plenty listening to his tales of their mostly illegal tricks and methods. All of this backwoods knowledge was crucial now, and certainly would be more so the longer things went in the direction they were headed.

  So while Mitch would have preferred to be back at the house, warm and dry and in the company of April rather than out here in the woods in the rain, the discomfort and inconvenience was nothing new to him. If they didn’t find Jason’s deer before dark, they would find a place to settle in for the evening and resume the search in the morning light. Next time Jason would be more careful with his aim. Mitch was sure of it.

  Three

  THE SUDDEN REPORT OF a high-powered rifle shattering the quiet of the piney woods stopped Benny Evans in his tracks. The shooter had to be close, probably within range of where he stood, but there had been no sound of a bullet impact and a quick check of the girls behind him reassured him they were both okay as well. The rain that had been falling for several minutes was enough to muffle smaller sounds, like people talking or moving through the woods, making the gunshot even more startling. Benny hadn’t expected to encounter anyone out here, but it wasn’t far to the dirt road that ran by the front of the Henley property. Tommy and David were out making their rounds of the perimeter, but they’d already passed this way and Benny and the girls had spoken with them as they worked their way to the back of the 600 acres. Tommy was carrying his .308, of course, and the shot Benny just heard could have come from a rifle like that, but it was in the wrong direction to be Tommy’s. Besides that, his boy wouldn’t be wasting ammo for no good reason. When two more shots followed the first, even as Benny contemplated this, he began to get concerned.

  He quietly put down the axe he’d been carrying in one hand and reached for the Remington 12-gauge slung over his back. At the same time he turned and motioned for the girls to keep quiet and be still. They had been following just a few feet behind and were just as confused and startled by the sudden gunshots as he. Benny crouched to watch and listen, waiting for any sign of movement or other sounds out there among the pines. Just seconds later the silence was disturbed again. Something big was crashing through the brush ahead of him, from the direction in which the shots had come. Benny raised his shotgun and tensed as he strained to see through the screen of trees. Whatever it was, it was coming his way and making a lot of noise. Seconds passed and then he knew—the cattle! The small herd of brown and white Herefords was running right at him, busting their way through the woods in a panicked stampede. Benny backed up to where the girls were crouching and hurried them close to the base of the biggest nearby tree. The terrified herd split around them at the last minute, rushing past Benny and the girls on both sides. But just as he thought they were all gone, Benny noticed one of the yearling steers bringing up the rear, its gait hobbled by a useless leg. As it made its way past him, trying desperately to keep up with the rest of the herd, Benny saw the glistening blood that coated its hindquarters.

  So that was it! Someone had shot at Doug Henley’s cattle! Until he saw the wounded animal, Benny hadn’t realized what had happened, so he hadn’t thought to try and get a count of the animals running by. But there had been three shots. Unless the other two missed, there could be cattle down in addition to this one that was obviously wounded. Mitch was going to be furious when he found out about this!

  “Lisa, you and Stacy need to get back to the house! Tell April and Samantha there’s a trespasser out here somewhere and that y’all need to stay inside and keep the doors locked.”

  “We can’t leave you out here alone, Uncle Benny,” Lisa said. “Just because it was one person doing the shooting doesn’t mean there aren’t more. April and the others would have heard it anyway, and Tommy knows we don’t have a rifle with us. I’ll bet he and David are headed back this way already. We can sneak up there with you and see who it is in the meantime, and help you make sure they don’t get away.”

  Benny considered what Lisa said and figured it made sense. Mitch Henley’s little sister was a brave one, and she and Stacy had both seen their share of violence since things fell apart. He didn’t want to put them at any unnecessary risk, but he knew they could both be quiet and it wouldn’t hurt to find out more before he sent them back to warn April. There was no use raising a major alarm if it was just one or two desperate wanderers passing through that took a shot at the cattle because the opportunity presented itself. They could slip up close enough to see who had done it and size them up without being seen. Benny was sure that was the way Mitch would handle this if he were here, and once he had an idea who he was dealing with he would take the appropriate action to make them wish they’d never seen those cows. It was hard enough looking after the livestock without worrying about some low-life rustler shooting it for meat.

  So far, the small herd of just over two dozen animals had survived and had stayed within the fence. Mitch and Jason had expanded it since the collapse, using all the barbed wire on hand and cutting their own posts, so that it now followed the boundaries of the entire property. The expansion allowed the cattle to range from the bottomlands near the creek to the more open woods and pastures, and would help stretch what little leftover hay and feed there was in the barn through another winter. Most of the time the herd stayed out of sight of the house and yard, now that they were foraging more. But Mitch wanted to keep them around and keep them alive as long as possible, because with as many people as they had staying on the farm now, he knew the time would come when finding enough deer and other game close enough to home would become difficult. Beef would have to be slaughtered, and he hoped to put it off a lot longer, but Benny agreed that it was inevitable.

  * * *

  Benny hadn’t been thinking about the cattle at all though until he heard the shots and saw the stampeding herd. His quest today with Lisa and Stacy was far more important. It had brought the three of them out to the edge of the property near the road because there were a few Eastern red cedars mixed in among the pines growing there. But just before all the unexpected commotion, Benny had been about ready to call off their search for the day and go back home. Heavier rain was coming, and it was getting late. He’d told the girls they probably wouldn’t find the tree they were looking for until tomorrow, even though Stacy was sure they already had a half hour earlier:

  “This one is the perfect shape! Look at how even it is all the way around!”

  Benny had just laughed. “We couldn’t even get that one through the door without cutting it half in two! And that’s if we could even drag it back to the house. That thing’s nearly fifteen feet tall!”

  “But it’s so pretty!”

  “Yeah, but it is big, Stacy,” Lisa said. “I think Uncle Benny’s right. It probably won’t fit.”

  “I know it won’t fit,” Benny said. “The ceilings in that house ain’t but eight feet high. Besides that, the doorway’s only three feet wide and that thing’s got a spread of seven or eight feet at the base! We’ll find a smaller one just like it. We just gotta keep looking.”

  It was a pretty cedar all right, shaped just the way a Christmas tree was supposed to be, but it was simply too big to work. Looking for a Christmas tree was about the last thing Benny Evans ever expected to be doing again, especially after everything that happened in the last few months. Even before, when Betsy was still alive, the two of them had stopped making a fuss over holiday decorations. Betsy had a small artificial tree they still set up in front of the living room window every year, along with a plastic holly wreath they hung on the door, but that was
about it. He couldn’t recall how many years it had been since he’d last cut down a live cedar for a Christmas tree, but he figured it was when Tommy was a young boy, certainly no older than these two fourteen-year-old girls. Tommy was forty now, so that had been a little while. Regardless of that, Benny was just delighted that the girls wanted to spend time with him and that they both were already calling him “Uncle Benny” even though he’d only known them a few weeks.

  Benny still couldn’t believe the good fortune that had befallen him and his son since the day he’d found April Gibbs and her child tied up in that canoe under a steep bank on Black Creek. The man who’d left them that way had tried to kill his boy with an arrow, but his aim had been off enough that the broadhead cut through Tommy’s upper arm instead of the middle of his back. Benny had sent that bastard straight to hell with a blast of double-aught buck from his 12-gauge, but it had been a real close call. Now, thanks to April, he and Tommy practically had a new family along with a real place to call home. Benny was a woodsman at heart and had taught his boy all he knew, but living out of a canoe for seven months straight, always on the move and always in hiding in the deep woods had gotten pretty old. The truth was, Benny himself had gotten older than he wanted to admit. He was doing okay for nearly 70, but living outside like that was hard, even on a young man. Things were a lot easier here on the Henley farm, even if they were still harder than life before all this happened.

  Benny was mighty grateful that Mitch had agreed to take him and Tommy in, but Mitch had assured him he was just as thankful for what they’d done for April. Despite all that, Benny and Tommy both were determined to earn their keep around the place. And today, that meant finding whoever had fired those rifle shots and making sure they didn’t do anything else to threaten the security of everyone living there. He whispered a last warning to Lisa and Stacy before they got started:

  “I want you both to stay back several yards behind me while we’re sneaking up there. If you see me stop, you stop! Don’t move, don’t talk and don’t do nothin’ until I do.” Benny knew the girls would follow his orders. They knew how to be quiet, and the soft rain would help, making stalking the shooter even easier. He handed Stacy the axe he’d been carrying so that he would have both hands free for his shotgun. Lisa had her own weapon—the Ruger 10/22 that she’d already been a crack shot with even before the collapse. Benny gave them both a reassuring thumbs-up and then he started working his way through the pines.

  Four

  THE SHOOTER IGNORED THE soft rain, focusing all his attention on his target as he centered the crosshairs of his riflescope behind the shoulder of the nearest of the grazing steers. The butt stock of the 30.06 slammed into his shoulder with its familiar punch and he smiled as he saw the unsuspecting animal go down—hundreds of pounds of meat secured with a single bullet! He opened the bolt to eject the spent case and slid it home to chamber another round, scanning the rest of the small herd to pick his next target while he still had the chance. The remaining animals were startled and disoriented, unsure what to make of the sudden rifle blast and the sight of one of their number thrashing about on the ground, kicking out its death spasms. They would probably panic and bolt at the next shot, so he had to make it count. Picking another steer about the same size as the first, the shooter squeezed off his second round and saw his target fall, then he rapidly racked the bolt again as sure enough, the rest of the herd turned to run into the cover of the woods. He took quick aim and fired again, hitting one of the yearlings and seeing it stagger but keep going. The bullet missed its vitals, striking the hindquarters instead because it was already running away. Before he could get a forth round in the chamber, the cattle were out of sight, but it didn’t matter. Two were down and the rest wouldn’t go far, judging by the quality of the fence, at least what he could see of it. They could be rounded up tomorrow or the day after. Tonight there would be a feast and when the rest of the herd was corralled, there would be enough to feed everyone for a good long while.

  The shooter knew that a herd of cattle like this in one place inside a fence that was in good repair meant someone was still around to take care of them. There would be a house somewhere nearby, he was sure of that. Someone would lay claim the cattle, whether they were the original owners still hanging on here or simply wanderers who had taken up residence since the collapse, but it wouldn’t matter. Whoever they were, there would not be enough of them to resist. No one they’d encountered so far had been able to. That’s why he had no fear of his shots being heard and had acted to secure meat immediately while the opportunity was there. There were a lot of mouths to feed and they had been on the move for too long. What happened next would be dealt with as necessary. He turned to the boy who was lying on the ground beside him.

  “Run back there and tell Mr. Drake and the rest of them what we got! Tell him to bring the horses and get on down here before it gets dark. Tell him to send somebody back to tell everybody else too, because we’ve found us a new place to call home for a while!”

  The boy took off immediately, knowing better than to hesitate or question a direct order from his father. It wouldn’t take him long to get to where Drake and the others were waiting. They were on the road not far behind, just holding back a bit for the scouts to reconnoiter on foot. The rest were a couple of days back, traveling much slower because of the women and little kids and all of their stuff. It was always like this when they moved somewhere—the hunters and scouts going far ahead, checking things out and making sure the way was clear—and the rest of the community following, but not too closely.

  The shooter watched the boy go until he was out of sight. Then he turned and with a wave of his hand signaled his eldest boy, Kenny, to move in and secure the kills. The tall, lanky teenager rose from where he’d been hiding on the hillside behind his father, and made his way down to the gravel road, stepping across only after making sure it was still empty. The shooter stayed put, remaining in the prone position from which he’d made his shots, the rifle still covering the lifeless animals he’d put down. He figured Drake and the other men would get there with the horses before whoever lived around here showed up, but he wasn’t taking any chances until they did.

  * * *

  April Gibbs stood at the sound of the second two rifle shots. She had been sitting in the rocking chair in the living room of the Henley house with Kimberly asleep in her arms. The first shot that seemed to come from out front, in the direction of the road, caused her to stop rocking and ponder who fired it. But when two more followed, she began to really wonder. It had to have been Tommy if it was anyone from among her friends. Benny and the girls were out there somewhere, but they didn’t have a high-powered rifle. Benny’s weapon of choice was the 12-gauge shotgun he’d been carrying the day she’d met him, and Lisa had her trusty .22 carbine, as always. But they wouldn’t be shooting while out looking for a Christmas tree anyway, and neither would Tommy or David, who were on patrol—unless there was a really good reason.

  April carried her daughter into the bedroom and placed her gently in the baby bed Mitch had pulled down from the attic where his parents had stashed it when Lisa had outgrown it. She waited a moment, watching Kimberly to make sure she didn’t wake before leaving her, then grabbed her carbine and opened the door to the front porch. A light rain was falling, and the sky had gotten darker than it should be at that hour, indicating the weather wasn’t going to get any better. She was sure Tommy had probably fired those shots, but at what? Maybe he had seen a deer while he and David were making their rounds? She was sure it was something like that, but after all she’d been through, she couldn’t help but be nervous.

  The few short weeks since she and Kimberly and David had arrived here at the farm were really the only time since the lights went out that she’d not felt like she was living with the constant threat of another attack. Most of the time it felt safe here, especially when Mitch was at home, but she knew the others added to their security too. Like Mitch, Benny and Tommy wer
e competent woodsmen before the collapse, and Jason was learning fast, as was his cousin, Cory, who had arrived long before April with his girlfriend, Samantha. Lisa and Stacy, Mitch and Jason’s little sisters, could do their share too, even if they were only fourteen. If there was anyone in their group they couldn’t really count on for much, it was David Greene, April’s former fiancé and father of her child.

  April had been done with him as a partner even before their journey down Black Creek to seek out Mitch, but she couldn’t abandon him entirely, for Kimberly’s sake. The attack on the sandbar where he was left for dead had in some ways made her life easier, because David no longer knew who he was, let alone April. The sad part of that though was that he didn’t remember his child either. Little Kimberly still called him “daddy,” and he went along with it, believing that she had lost her real daddy and mistakenly thought he was her father. When he’d questioned April about this, she’d agreed, saying that must be it, because he looked a lot like her father. It was a lie, but it satisfied him and solved the problem of further confusing their child. April didn’t know if David would eventually regain his memory and recognize the two of them or not, but she would deal with that when the time came, if it ever did. But at least he was alive, and lucky to be so, thanks to Mitch. She had to admit he was making himself more useful now that he didn’t know who he was. It was good to see he seemed to have forgotten his former obnoxious, self-entitled attitude that had made it so difficult for him to adapt in those first months after the blackout. Now, with his new personality, living entirely in the present moment, he was showing some interest in learning how to survive in this harsh new reality, and was cooperating and at least trying to do his share. Maybe there was hope for him after all…