Haven From Hell (Book 4): Alcazar Prison, page 18
part #4 of Haven From Hell Series
What was significantly less beautiful were all the people standing around the place. Not that they were ugly or anything, it’s just that I didn’t know who they were. There must have been five hundred of them. There were men, women, and children, which I took as a good sign. As I may have noted earlier, most bandits don’t seem to go in for family living (contrary to my most recent encounter in Riverwood).
All the men had beards, which wasn’t all that significant. What was interesting about them was that the beards didn’t look like something out of a barber’s nightmare. Most men after the Change had beards that looked like they’d be right at home on Sasquatch’s butt, but these guys sported a markedly superior facial coiffure.
The next most interesting thing, after all the beards, was the big bulldozer over by the pool. It had real big treads, as well as a bunch of metal grates all welded haphazardly together over the cab, and I was pretty sure it had made the big shattered opening in the estate wall. The way the tread tracks led right up to it was a dead giveaway. There was a guy (with a real nice beard) standing on it and making a speech.
“We shall rest here for a time, my brothers and sisters, keeping a constant vigil. No doubt Satan’s army has heard the sounds of our victorious struggle against his harlot minions. They will surely fall upon us in a few scant hours. By then, God willing, this instrument of Divine Providence,” by which he meant the bulldozer, “will be refueled and prepared for the engagement. Rest well and prepare for the battle ahead. Meanwhile, all you Brethren prepare the defenses.” That last was directed at a better armed segment of the population which was closest to the improvised tank. They all had a bunch of semi automatic rifles, mostly with scopes.
The third most interesting thing I saw was a short line of dead bodies all lined up by the pool. I noticed that four of the corpses were adorned all in green, blue, red, and white. Also, each had a nice big hole shot through its skull; it looked like they had been lined up and executed. A bit beyond them there was a pile of bodies, a kaleidoscope of color all intermingled with blood and brains. As I watched a few workers stepped up and began hauling the remains of the Color Cult onto the pile of the dead. Over to the side there were still more bodies, but they were covered with sheets and laid out with some respect. By the size of the remains they must have been the cult’s kids. Next to that I saw what I took to be four new graves, each marked by a crude cross, with all the earth around them overturned as if by a giant scoop (like the one mounted on the bulldozer).
A light drizzle commenced as the ‘brethren’ got to work. They hurried around the side of the mansion into the front yard, and began driving a bunch of motor homes toward the swimming pool. From there they circled the vehicles like something out of an Old Western movie, using short lengths of chain link fence to seal off any gaps. I saw that all the vehicles had reinforcing metal bars welded over all the windows. Meanwhile, a number of the men ‘resting’ were situated at the camp’s perimeter with various shotguns and rifles at the ready, no doubt alert and prepared to kill anything that came within their sights.
They looked like a reasonably friendly bunch, so I decided to call out and see how they would react. “Hello the camp! Hello the camp and all within!”
They all futzed about for a while, pointing their rifles every which way, until their apparent leader stepped up and called out, “Are you friend or foe?”
I mean seriously, how many ways are there to answer that question? What I said was, “That depends on whether or not you try and shoot me!”
The boss man yelled, “Come closer, boy, we mean you no harm. What was done here today was done with the Lord’s blessing. You have no need to fear us.”
Well, that was a relief. Tracer and I came out from behind our hiding spot and made our way over to our new friends. At a distance and at night I may have appeared unarmed since I’d left both Mary Ann and Ginger hidden back near the van. Once the guards saw that it was just Tracer and I they relaxed some, but still kept an eye out for other potential threats. Most notable to me, many of the other guards had allowed themselves to be distracted by my appearance, indicating a certain lack of experience at being at the receiving end of a serious distraction tactic.
Once we got closer to them, one of the younger men came forward, a real hothead dummy. He raised his rifle and demanded, “Are you for us or for our enemies?” by which he indicated the piled corpses of the Color Cult.
“Neither,” I replied, “but as commander of the army of the LORD I have now come.”
The boss man got a big kick out of that, he couldn’t laugh hard enough. With tears coming out of his eyes he finally managed to get his wind back and said, “You’re a hoot son. I haven’t laughed that hard in ages. And after our recent losses I could use some uplifting,” he motioned to the marked graves. He introduced himself as Patriarch Fisher. I told him my name as well. He seemed real friendly, the kind of person I knew I could trust.
As I was led into the camp I asked Fisher, “So what happened here?”
He replied, “It was a bad business. We saw the smoke of a fire and the Spirit moved me to investigate. What we came upon was a house all aflame, with a bunch of women striving to put out the blaze. It seemed imprudent for us to rush forward to help, since I reasoned the ladies did not know us, and would likely react with understandable hostility.
“We waited for the fire to burn out before I sent a pair of representatives in to ask if the ladies might need any help. We heard a gunshot and feared for the worst. Jermy, over there,” Fisher pointed the man out, “was one of the men I sent. He came back with the report that the women had shot Jeremiah dead after he had introduced himself. That night I sent several of my men to go over the wall in order to extract justice from the murderesses. The first two to touch the top of the wall were electrocuted to death and the rest wisely retreated.
“With my righteous wrath fully kindled, I had the men use our black powder to blast holes in the wall in numerous places, then drove the bulldozer through as a distraction. We closed in on them from all sides, detonated more charges all around the house, and showed no mercy.
“The saddest part was that they had slit the throats of their own daughters rather than let them fall into our hands. The horror within the house, however, defies imagination. These women,” he motioned to their bodies, “had stuffed the bodies of man and babe alike! Stuffed them like deer trophies and set them in a perversity of a game room.” He looked at me like I should be astonished, or maybe disbelieving.
I had to ask, “So, what’s it like to be ‘moved by the Spirit’? How can you tell it’s the Spirit, and not just some random curiosity?” Basically, that’s the only thing that got me putting one foot in front of the other.
He found my disregarding of all those bizarre examples of the taxidermic art somewhat perplexing, Then someone yelled out to me, “You! You demon! How dare you! When I get free I’m going to rip you apart! I’m going to tear your *$%^&* off and shove it down your throat! I going to...”
A soldier, one of the Brethren, was dragging my good buddy Goth along. He had her bound hand and foot and was taking her toward what I took to be the place of execution. After cuffing Goth into silence he turned to Fisher and said, “We found this one unconscious in the ruin. You want me to execute her, Patriarch?”
I decided to put my two cents worth in, “Absolutely. Have fun!”
“Hold on a moment, Bartholomew, she seems to know the lad. Take her aside and question her.” Then, looking at me, he asked, “Is there anything you want to tell me, son?”
“About what?” Sometimes normal people can be so vague.
He seemed to be suffering from a mild fit of consternation, “Are you mocking me, boy?” Now I was really lost.
I told him, “Okay, what we have here is a miscommunication. I don’t get what you want to know. Please be specific so that I can understand you.”
He took in my statement and knew it to be the simple truth. His features softened and he tried again, speaking more slowly, “How does that woman know you?”
“Oh that! Well, it’s kind of embarrassing actually. How to put this? She found me at an abandoned farmhouse, and we had an altercation, and then she knocked me out, and then I woke up chained to a chair in the basement. Not my finest hour.” Yeah, I thought that about summed it up.
“If you had been chained to a chair, how did you get free? And why come back?”
“I escaped by picking a couple of real hard locks, and I came back so I could kill the Color Cult. You guys beat me to the punch on that one, so kudos.”
Fisher took a second to digest that before asking, “You came back here to kill them all by yourself? Why?”
“What do you mean, why? Why didn’t you just tuck your tail between your legs and hightail it out of here? Why fight back when you could have run? I count four grave markers over there. That means that after your emissary got murdered you lost three more people than you had to. What’s up with that?” I may have sounded a little exasperated.
Fisher explained, “I couldn’t bear to know that I’d left a den of murderous killers safe to prey on the innocent. Then too, there are always the demands of Justice. But what made you think you could defeat them all by yourself? Your only one boy.”
“I would have killed them all the night I escaped, but I was in a terrible rush. You see, it’s a long story, but I had some means of killing in the van which I’d been driving, and I needed to get it back to my friends. We had a whole separate bunch of unholy murderers to get rid of. But once I’d got done killing all of them I came right back here to finish the job.”
That Bartholomew fellow came back and told Patriarch Fisher, “The woman says that the kid escaped from the basement and lit a fire in the house. That must have been the smoke which led us here.”
I said, “Yeah, that was fun. Too bad I didn’t have time to do the job right. I’m sorry about your men.” Maybe if I’d spent a little more time wrecking stuff the fence would have been off when Fisher’s soldiers had tried to climb it.
Bartholomew added, “She says that he’s some sort of demon, with magical powers. He took the bullets from her guns without ever touching them. Also, the place they had him locked in was padlocked and bolted from the outside.”
Fisher looked at me questioningly, obviously expecting a response, so I said, “Yeah, there was also an ordinary deadbolt lock. That whole thing about me getting the bullets from her guns was just me playing around. Like I said, it’s a long story. At first I didn’t know she planned on using me to make a baby and then stuffing my corpse. If I’d known that then I probably would have...well done it anyway, to be truthful. But only because swiping the bullets out of her gun was super funny. You should have seen the look on her face when she tried to shoot me and I showed her her own ammunition! Priceless.”
Bartholomew began to ask a question before Fisher cut him off, “How did you get the bullets out of her gun without touching it?”
“What are you talking about? Of course I touched her stuff. Wait a minute, that doesn’t sound right. What I meant to say was that I...”
It took a while but eventually the whole story came out. By then the camp’s defenses were established and we had acquired a small crowd of listeners, mostly of the better armed variety.
I asked the patriarch, “So what were you going to do with all the little girls that were in the Color Cult? You know, if they hadn’t murdered them all.” I had a professional curiosity.
Fisher answered, “We would have taken them as our own, of course. It would be the only Christian thing to do. These weren’t the first bandits we’ve come across, and we’ve had to do that sort of thing before. Why do you ask? What did you think we would do?”
“I would have guessed that you’d move on and leave them all to die. But your way is way nicer, way better than what I would have done. I would have just killed all the murderers and left.” I’ve always been truthful to a fault.
Patriarch Fisher said, “Don’t be too hard on yourself, son. You’re only one man, you can’t be expected to raise a dozen children, and those cultists had to be stopped.”
He asked me, “So, son, how are things between you and the Lord?” probably because he was a religious leader type.
Normally I have a lot of fun with those kinds of questions because the people who ask them are so sensitive. Getting stopped and questioned by someone who has a genuine concern for my eternal well being is a great way to spend an afternoon. What’s even better is if the person doing the asking is part of some loser cult, and looking for stupid people to prey off of. Then I can really let loose and make a day of it. My problem was that Tracer was getting antsy so I knew the enemy were on the way.
What I said was, “Yeah, He’s great. There’s a bunch of zombies coming our way. If you’ve got any last minute preparations, now’s the time.” I altered my gaze to peer out into the orchard.
The patriarch wanted to know, “Zombies? Is that what you call them? What makes you think they’re coming right now, son?”
“Tracer told me,” I motioned to my friend.
Patriarch Fisher took me at my word and ordered everyone to prepare. As a result, when the enemy finally did appear, they found us as ready as we could be. From my previous travels through the area I knew that the lot we were facing must have come from Christopherton or its environs, because they were all a bit quick on the hoof. Furthermore, I had thought that I’d already killed all the ogres and ghouls from that place, but apparently not. A bunch of ghouls were spreading out in the horde and circling the encampment, meanwhile some ogres had split up and were rushing the defensive perimeter.
Fisher was out there driving the bulldozer over any and all that came in his path. I found it disturbing how none of the ghouls even tried to tear the cab cage apart, how they all kept a straight on course for us. Also, I’d never seen an ogre fall back from a foe, but those ones did. It was as if they knew they couldn’t stand up to such a heavy machine and didn’t want to risk either the treads or whatever other armaments the man behind the controls might have to offer.
Without a rifle, all I could do was wait for the enemy to close, which they did. If it hadn’t been for the giant pool abutting the camp we would have been surrounded; as it was we were attacked on three sides. I apologized to Abby while drawing Polly and Bob. The way the ogres and ghouls hit our defenses at the same time it seemed that the enemy had their timing down to a science. Once the first ogre came within thirty yards, I blasted its brains out, then at fifteen yards I clipped the ghoul which had been leaping for the motor home which I was standing on. Due to the various angles of approach that was all I could shoot before the ogres hit our wall and our defense fell to pieces.
I put Polly in the driver’s seat and she chose Bach Cello Suite Number 1, which I found to be an interesting choice. With the full bodied tones of a master ringing in my ears, I dashed from foe to foe and began slicing my way through all the ghouls while letting Bob have his own brand of fun with the ogres.
Normally in a situation like that a lot of innocent people get ripped apart, but a strange thing happened. Once I began to display greater effect, the Changed altered their tactics and came for me. It was like the enemy really wanted me dead and chose to ignore closer potential victims. They began to close in on me from all sides, causing me to leap all over the place just to keep down the number of ogres within easy reach. It was a bit of a workout, let me tell you.
Tracer had begun barking and attacking the Changed, followed by a number of the Patriarch’s war dogs. Such a big heart in such a small body. I shouted for Tracer to run and hide but he was past listening to me. His blood was all the way up, and the only thing that could calm him would have been if there were nothing left for me to kill.
The enemy had made one critical blunder in choosing to focus on me: all the shooters around me were left with nothing but excellent opportunities to pick their targets. The ogres fell first and quickly, with the ghouls not far behind. Typically, someone armed with a shotgun would shoot out the legs of a ghoul and then another shooter would finish it off almost immediately. The ogres, being slower targets, mostly just got shot in the head.
After cropping the tops of all ghouls that came too close, and blasting the brains of any ogre I could hit, I went for the main body of the undead as they pressed through one of the holes made through the side of an RV. Meanwhile, Patriarch Fisher drove the bulldozer back to us and used its size to seal off another section that had been opened by the smashing hands of the enemy. The final breach was sealed from within by a clever woman driving a van.
With most of our defenses reestablished, the Brethren were able to get back on top of the wall (formed by all the motor homes parked end to end), and expend their ammunition thinning the horde as it attempted to close with me. I thought that was real neighborly of them. By then Bob was empty so I’d drawn Abby. Polly and she had changed music and had me hopping a lively courante before changing to an only slightly less feisty allemande.
Some defenders had driven another couple of smaller vehicles over to help seal off the hole that Fisher had plugged. I caught a glimpse of some woman attempting to uncoil a spare bolt of chain link fence to seal it off still further. While that was going on the patriarch drove out and began a more systematic slaughter. Without all the ogres and ghouls things were getting back under control. I heard a motor running behind me and turned to see yet another car being driven up to seal the very breach which I was defending.
Unfortunately, I had advanced forward through the breach, so I was cut off from the safety of the camp by my own action, and left outside to fend for myself.
A couple of men were shouting at me to climb up on top of the motor home they were standing on, to get away from the horde. One of them let down a knotted rope. I was more than happy to take advantage of their generosity, but first I had to reach down, pick Tracer up, and throw him to my new friends before climbing up. I thanked my helpers and then went to fetch Bob. I had dropped him around the battle zone somewhere.
