Thirty-five
Rex walked unarmed up the highway to talk to the
leaders of the caravan. Caitlin followed in the trees and snuck in as
close as she dared to overhear their conversation. Guards spotted her,
but they shouldered their rifles after a moment's discussion and
thereafter kept little more than a casual watch on her movements.
With her keen hearing, she didn't have to be too
close to overhear what was being said. Rex and Derek, a tall man with
stringy black hair, shook hands. Derek wore a black leather jacket and
earrings. Caitlin imagined him to be a gang leader, a modern day pirate
on the prowl. She believed Ted's story about their reasons for going to
Texas, but they were still thieves and pirates looting the small
Appalachian towns they encountered along the way.
Derek apologized for making a pest of himself. "The
fact is, we're out of gas and out of food. If we're stuck here, we'll
have to sink roots for the winter, unless you'd be kind enough to donate
enough supplies to see us on our way. We'll settle for fifty gallons of
gasoline and three hundred pounds of canned food. After that, we're the
next guy's problem."
Rex never flinched. "What do you have to trade?"
Derek laughed and gave Rex a friendly slap on the
shoulder. "How about ammo? How much and what kind of ammo do you need?"
Which would be a dead giveaway of Brighton Hollow's
capacity to defend itself, in Caitlin's opinion, if Rex was foolish enough
to answer the question. "We're not short of ammo," Rex said without
missing a beat. "We use bows and arrows to hunt and save the armory for
self-defense."
Derek's eyes narrowed with suspicion. "We've got the
military and NATO stuff to spare."
Rex shrugged, refusing to be intimidated. "We could
use some of that. How much are you offering?"
Derek took a moment to think. His smile had faded
away. "You want to see what else we've got to offer?"
Before Rex could answer, Derek snapped his fingers.
Three men came rushing up from behind, each grasping the arms of two
teenage girls. Their wrists had been bound behind their back. The men
stopped alongside Derek and forced the girls to their knees.
"We've got too many to feed," Derek said. "We use
them for bait when we stop for the night. When the zombies and the
caterpillars close in for the kill, we collect a caterpillar hide. You
can have these six for whatever they’re worth to you and a few hundred
rounds of whatever ammunition we've got laying around."
It was a sucker deal. Derek thought that maybe Rex
would be game to save the lives of the innocent girls regardless of cost.
"Sounds fair enough," Rex said evenly. He reached
down to help one of the bound girls to her feet. The man holding her arm
jerked her out of reach.
"We meet halfway in a couple hours and exchange on
the open road," Derek said. "We'll be ready to move out as soon as we've
finished with our business."
"Sounds fine," Rex said. He turned and started
walking back to town at a measured pace.
There was going to be trouble. Rex would never
sacrifice their meager food supply so casually. Suspecting that to be the case, Derek looked very angry.
He would have to wait to see what Rex offered before risking a
confrontation, because taking by force would cost lives. Orange City
hadn't gone down without a fight. His intention had been to
intimidate, and Rex had clearly not been intimidated. Whatever
happened, it would obviously be something other than the trade the men had
agreed upon.
Caitlin slipped back out of sight, hoping Rex
understood that she was of no use to him in broad daylight, not in the
open pitted against men with guns. She watched two hours later as the
exchange was consummated. Rex and his friends pulled out a small trailer
loaded with gasoline tanks salvaged from abandoned cars and canned food
stacked in cardboard boxes. Derek inspected a few of the cans, opened
one, sniffed the gas, and then had his men hurry the trailer away.
Derek's men threw the girls to the ground in the middle of the highway and
tossed two small boxes of shotgun shells to Rex. The people in the
caravan roared with laughter.
But when Caitlin heard the excited shouts and cries
of anger from within Derek's camp a short time later, it only confirmed
her initial suspicion that Rex hadn't bartered in good faith, no more than
had Derek. Rex had only wanted only to save the lives of the girls after
all. Somehow, he had cheated Derek, and Caitlin wasn't so sure it was a
smart thing to do.
Caitlin pieced together what had happened from
snippets of conversation drifting up from the camp. The gas tanks had
been filled with water with only a film of gasoline floating on top to
fool a cursory inspection. Most of the canned goods had been opened from
the bottom, emptied into other containers, and then filled with mud.
Derek had one truck in the convoy with steel plates
welded to the front bumper. It drove to the barricade that afternoon and
Derek's men started firing into Brighton Hollow. But the barricade of
cars and trucks Brighton Hollow had put up had been placed far enough from
town to put most of the houses out of range. With nobody out and about,
the gunfire was a waste of valuable ammunition and it soon quit. The plow
on the truck could push the barricade of vehicles aside, except that Derek
had no idea of Brighton Hollow's defensive capabilities and wasn’t about
to risk lives in broad daylight to find out.
So Derek pulled back, and Caitlin guessed that he was
going to wait for the cover of darkness to attack. Clearly, Brighton
Hollow didn't have a population large enough to guard every inch of the
town’s perimeter. It would be easy enough to slip through when the light
of day faded away.
Caitlin slipped close to Brighton Hollow at dusk and
let her caterpillar take one of the men from the convoy trying to sneak
into town. The caterpillar fed. When she rushed up behind another, the
caterpillar lashed out in self-defense, killing instantly, but without
bothering to take nourishment.
She could hear and see better than anyone out in the
cold and cloudy night, and she single-handedly put a stop to Derek's
attack. The few who got through weren't enough to overpower Rex Hogan and
his men lying in ambush. Most of Derek’s men died in silence with an
arrow in their back.
Caitlin followed the survivors back to their camp.
She wanted to taunt them, to let them know they had been defeated by a
mere girl, that Brighton Hollow would be eternally grateful for her
intervention, and that nobody would dare condemn Rex Logan for spending
time with her and being her friend.
She had no choice but to sit high on the hill
overlooking the campfires and keep her silence, anxious for the new day to
arrive and for Derek and this camp to leave. It was enough that Rex would
be waiting for her after they were gone. Brighton Hollow would find the
bodies lying around the perimeter and know that she had saved many lives.
A cry sounded just before dawn of the second day.
Caitlin moved along the ridge in search of the cause. She could see
nothing through the intervening trees and risked a closer approach.
There were no guards. Caitlin scanned the edge of
camp, certain she could detect men in hiding among the trees if they were
there. Maybe Derek had accepted his defeat and saw no need for them.
Regardless, there was nothing keeping Caitlin from drawing near the
tormented cries.
Caitlin took a seat on a log to study what she
found. A girl had been hung from her crossed and bound wrists from the
low branch of a tree. A cage had been placed before her. In the cage, a
caterpillar crawled to and fro, a hungry caterpillar in search of escape.
A caterpillar without a host.
The bound girl was trying to remain both quiet and
very still. It wasn't working. Every time the caterpillar sniffed the
air, the girl cried out and tried to pull back from harm's way. The
caterpillar was within striking range. As soon as it grew hungry enough
to feed, it would lash out at her.
"Bastards," Caitlin murmured.
It wasn't clear to her why the girl was being
tormented. She was on the inside of a wire fence that had been unrolled
and now extended about the perimeter of the camp. A generator throbbed
somewhere within the compound. A few electric lights glowed from within
large canvas tents. Otherwise, the camp was quiet.
Caitlin was certain she could scale the low fence,
kill the caterpillar before it struck, and untie the girl. If anyone
interfered, they couldn't possibly aim and fire in the darkness any faster
than her caterpillar could strike at them.
She felt no deep compassion for the girl's plight,
but she knew that Rex would appreciate the gesture. If she saved the life
of this girl, her humanity in the eyes of Brighton Hollow would be
heightened. She could show them that she wasn't the monster they
thought. She could show them that she deserved Rex Logan's love and
admiration.
She stood and approached the low fence. When the
bound girl spotted her, she went rigid with tension. Caitlin thought that
she might scream and foolishly attract the attention of the guards.
"I want to help you," Caitlin said in a whisper just
loud enough to carry to the girl. The girl bobbed her head in response
and grew as still with anticipation as a statue.
The caterpillar in the cage sniffed the air again,
sensing Caitlin's presence and maybe the presence of another of its own
kind.
Caitlin set her caterpillar on the side of a tree and
scaled the fence. Or, at least that was her intention. She grabbed the
upper strand of wire and unwittingly completed an electrical circuit
between the voltage coursing through the wire and the damp ground at her
feet. The electrical shock was an explosion that wracked her body. It
knotted her muscles and froze her in place. An alarm went off inside the
compound. Men came running.
The invisible power locking her muscles ended. Men
grabbed her arms and pulled her around to an opening gate. "Turn the
power back on! Watch yourselves!"
They dropped her to the ground
inside the fence. The toe of a boot rolled her onto
her stomach. Her burned hands were wrenched behind her back. Cuffs
snapped shut on her wrists. She thought she heard Leon murmuring to her,
but it was Derek, the leader of the group. "We're going to have an
interesting time together, you and me," he was saying.
"The bug!" a shrill voice screamed. "The bug is
coming over the fence!"
She heard a snapping noise. She smelled an acrid
odor and saw flames burst from orange and brown fur.
"Three hundred bucks up in smoke!" Derek roared in
anger. "I told you I wanted it intact!"
Her smoldering caterpillar dropped at Caitlin's
side. She heard herself screaming louder than any victim she had ever
taken. Their deaths had been quick and merciful, not at all like the very
special and terrible way that she was going to die.
