Winds of Fate Read online

  The sun was going down and it began to grow cold. Jodie thought of building a fire but quickly decided against it. She scraped together a shelter of sticks and branches, and pulled the thin plastic sheet from her backpack to cover it. It was a cramped space but it would keep her warm.

  She slept the rest of that day and all of the next. Finally, the need to empty her bladder and eat something became an urgent matter. She dragged herself from a fitful slumber to full wakefulness, and then sat there for several minutes. She felt around over her body trying to locate the places that hurt most. After deciding they all hurt about the same, she leaned forward, rested her head on arms that rested on her knees, and thought about peeing and eating.

  Girl you are going to have to do better than this if you plan on getting out of here.

  “Why don’t you give me a break?” She asked without lifting her head.

  You know them boys are coming, and they are pissed as hell. You blew up their fort.

  “I know it would be easier to think if you’d just shut the hell up!”

  That isn’t my job, not what I was programmed for.

  “Then reprogram yourself.”

  I don’t know how

  Look it up in psychology 101; you might even find it under “Road to longevity.”

  Now you could use a few lessons in that subject. You’re dragging your feet and it’s going to get us both taken out.

  She knew the voice was right, and after a long moment, she said under her breath, “I’m doing the best I can.”

  It ain’t good enough baby cakes!

  When she tried to move, every muscle in her body protested the action. Cramps set in and pain shot through her legs, shoulders and back. Ten minutes passed before it subsided, enabling her to move without screaming.

  Jodie found a secluded spot and after peeing for what seemed like an hour, she looked around to see if anyone was nearby, and then walked from under the salt cedar into the open. When she made it to the river, she saw that the water level had dropped considerably. She washed her face in the cold, clear water; and then cupped her hands and drank heartily, the water catching in her dry throat.

  Damn girl! Slow down!

  “I’m thirsty!”

  You are going to be sick if you drink cold water that fast. Take your time.

  Jodie took stock of her situation and didn’t like it. She went back to the shelter of the cedar tree and opened the backpack. She took out one of the MREs, peeled the foil back and took out the contents. She ate slowly, chewing the flat-tasting stuff into mush before swallowing it. Some sixth sense told her not to eat too fast, even though she was starving.

  Hungry is a good thing girl, it means you are getting better.

  “I don’t feel better!”

  You ain’t dead!

  “What do I do when the food runs out?”

  There are all kinds of varmints out here. Snakes, rabbits, lizards, and bugs.

  “Hey! I’m eating, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  Worry about that later, for now you got to get moving. Them boys may not be here yet, but you can bet they’re coming.

  Jodie had to keep moving, but all she wanted to do was curl up and rest for a while.

  “Anyway, why would they come looking for me? For all they know I’m dead. Any evidence that I was there was wiped out when the mountain blew up”

  Because, you dumb assed nit, they are going to want to know what happened. They will look around and eventually they are going to think about you, then they will ask themselves, “Did she survive?” If they conclude there is a possibility, then they will also know that you had reason enough to blow up the camp.

  “Still they would have to find something to lead them to believe I wasn’t dead. And, after that explosion I don’t think there is anything left of the place.”

  When they don’t find your body, they might begin to wonder what happened to it. The other bodies are there... so where is yours? When no answers are coming their way, they might just begin to wonder if you somehow survived. And since somebody will have to answer to someone for what happened at that camp, they are going to look until they find the responsible party. Once they find your tracks, they’ll put two and two together. They aren’t in jail, so they know you did not go to the cops. So, either you made it out of here and are in hiding, or you are still somewhere in the desert. They’ll start shaking down the girls in town looking for you, and when they don’t find you there, they are going to come out here searching for you.

  “So, what you’re saying is that sooner or later they’re going to figure out it was me?”

  In most ways, those boys are stupid as rocks. But you can bet your skinny ass that when their necks are on the line they can and will use those melons on their shoulders. They like living. They will notice little things like your shoes and clothes being removed from the creek bed, and all the tracks you left behind that didn’t get blown up with the buildings...

  “How long? How long before they finally figure it out?”

  As soon as they see their little army camp has been blown into toothpicks … anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of weeks.

  Once every two or three months, Jake would send someone up to the camp to make sure that things were as they had left them. This time it was Joey McPherson, AKA Boomer. When Boomer saw the smoke, his first instinct was to call Jake, but thought he best check it out first and find out where the smoke was coming from.

  Boomer knew if he called Jake without knowing the details, all he would get for his effort was an earful from Jake. A minute before rounding the bend that hid the camp from view of the maintenance road, the floor of the burning building fell through. Boomer had just pushed the phone back in his pocket when the explosion rocked the earth.

  It would be another day, before Jake began to worry why Boomer had not returned, or called to let him know everything was okay up at the camp. Jake waited another twenty-four hours, and this time he sent Carlos Morton, AKA Rat Man.

  Carlos had earned the name in Vietnam as a tunnel rat. Rat Man’s excited and somewhat awed voice gave Jake the news over the phone.

  A day later Jake stood at the edge of the crater caused by the blast while others from his group scouted around the area sifting through the rubble. Jake was mean, cruel, and a cold-blooded killer, but he was not stupid. Standing there with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops he understood two things. One, he was a dead man because there were people he had to answer to, and they would not accept this total wipeout with any sort of grace. Two, the woman he stabbed was still alive. He didn’t know how he knew, but having lived a lifetime with an intuition for such things, he recognized all the symptoms. He should have put a bullet through her head before dumping her body into the river. At the time he didn’t think she was worth wasting a bullet on, now his screw-up had come back to bite him in the ass.

  He yelled down at the men below “Rat Man, Cherry, Mel! Start at the center and work your way outwards, see what you can find.”

  Rat man looked up at him and shaded his eyes. “What are we looking for?”

  “How the hell should I know? Anything that looks out of place or just doesn’t fit, I want to know about it.”

  He went back to his truck and fished around in the cooler for a beer. The ice had practically melted and the cooler was half-full of murky slush that looked like something from a sewer. Jake knew the filth had come from his crew’s hands as they fished around for a beer; possibly the only time any of their hands ever met with water except for the times they pissed on them. He looked at the beer that was still dripping, and then tossed it back into the cooler.

  He opened a six-pack of warm Avian water, pulled a bottle from the pack, twisted off the cap and emptied the bottle in one long pull. As much as he would love to get shit-faced, now was not the time for it. He needed his head clear and sharp, and the way things were going it looked as though he would be sober for a while.

  There was no doubt; the people he
worked for would not let him live one minute past finding out that he had let their supply of arms and explosives be destroyed. No matter the reason, he had been responsible for its safekeeping, and he would be the one they staked out in a red ant den after stripping the hide off his body. They would not be sympathetic to reasons or excuses. His death would be as a lesson to anyone who might think about getting careless with the “big guy’s” property in the future, and most likely one of his own men would betray him.

  He needed to figure out what to do next. Any thought of going to the bigwigs and letting them know what had happened was out of the question. They didn’t give a rat’s ass how this happened, the fact that it had was sufficient reason to take him out.

  He needed to get the hell out if he wanted to keep on living. He had to travel as fast and as far as he could, by the quickest means possible. First, he needed money. The organization had a little over four-hundred-thousand dollars in a secret bank account. By total accident, Jake had discovered it, and with a little effort on his part had learned the account number.

  It would be easy enough to get his hands on the money, still he had the problem of witnesses. They would catch, torture, and slaughter every man here to find out what happened to the arms and their money. He was going to have to arrange it so there was no one to talk to. Before he did that, he needed to find that ugly cunt of a whore and eliminate her, and for that chore, he needed his men. Once she was dead, he could simply kill the rest of them and disappear with the money.

  Two hours later, Mel came trotting up and said. “We’ve found some tracks three hundred yards down the other side of the riverbank. I almost missed them because the dust had all but covered them up. Then we found another one about a half a mile on. Whoever it was is moving slow and carrying a lot of weight.” Mel took Jake to the place the tracks were found and they began following them along the upper ridge of the river. They eventually reached a point to where the tracks were clear and clean. Jake looked at Mel and asked. “What do you make of them?”

  Mel worked in silence. Jake could tell that Mel was digesting the pattern, gauging the stride, depth, and the size of the track. With that information, Mel could tell practically everything about a person, their height, weight, and whether it was a man or a woman. How he did it Jake didn’t know, nor did he much care, just as long as he found the bitch. Mel finally spoke. “From the stride, I would say it was someone about five-foot-four, or five. The depth and the pattern of the tracks indicate that whoever it was is carrying something heavy, probably a backpack. The weight is on the balls of the feet rather than the heel, suggesting the person is leaning forward. I would say that whoever is carrying the pack weighs about a hundred and five to a hundred and fifteen pounds; the pack is forty to fifty pounds.

  There is more weight on the right foot, suggesting the person is favoring the left side. It’s a female. I found where she stopped to take a leak. The way she moves is slow and staggering. I doubt if she made it more than a mile, no more than three at the most. If we start now we can probably catch up with her in a couple of hours.”

  Jake looked down at the tracks and thought. It has to be her. He looked at Mel and said. “Take Rat with you and find her. When you do, don’t do anything, just keep her there and call me.” Mel looked into Jake’s face and didn’t like what he saw there. Suddenly the hot desert wind seemed to have picked up a chill, and ran a cold finger down his spine.

  Just before sunset, Mel and Rat found where she had rested for the night. He took off his baseball cap and wiped his face with a handkerchief that he had fished out of his back pocket. He studied the ground for a long time then grunted a note of dismay. Rat looked at him and asked, “What’s wrong?” Mel put his hands in his pockets and said, “Nothing. Everything. Call Jake and have him come here, I’ll explain it then.”

  Forty-five minutes later, Jake came crashing through the Greasewood shrubs and Salt Cedar. “This had better be damn good. I am getting tired of stomping around out here like a fucking jackass.”

  Mel pointed to the ground and said. “This is where she spent the night. We found a place about three miles back where she stopped to rest. She was pretty much done in by then, but something spooked her and she walked another three miles.” Mel said this with a bit of admiration in his voice, and then continued. “She crawled under that Salt Cedar and collapsed. From the way the ground is trampled down I would say she was here for about twelve to twenty hours before she packed up and moved on.” Jake looked down but couldn’t make heads or tails out of the disrupted earth and smeared footprints, and then he looked at Mel and asked. “How soon you think before we catch up with her?”

  “An hour ago I would have told you that she wasn’t going any further than here. But this rabbit is changing.” Jake looked at him and asked, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “She should be dead, but she isn’t. She has a purpose that wasn’t there before. It is as if every step she takes makes her stronger instead of weaker. The limp is almost gone, and her stride has improved. When she got up this morning she was stiff, which is understandable for a woman that’s not used to walking with a heavy load, and especially one in her weakened condition. You would expect to see a steady decline as her strength wore away. Instead, she’s walked it off in short order.”

  He paused then said; “I think she knows that someone’s following her. She dug a hole, buried her trash and scat, and then took care to cover her tracks leading away from here. Did a damn good job of it too. I had to double back twice before I found her trail again.”

  Jake shook his head, “Are you trying to tell me that that skinny bitch is starting to grow a back bone? Because if you are, you are sadly mistaken, I know the kind of girl she is, seen hundreds of them. They don’t suddenly grow a set of balls when things get bad. If anything, you find them sitting in their own piss and begging you to help them.”

  Looking thoughtful, Mel shook his head, “Well, this one is different. She might be a skinny strung out addict, but I have to wonder what she was before that. It’s like she is coming to life. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s like tracking in reverse. Instead of getting weaker, moving slower and making mistakes, she’s getting stronger, moving faster and making fewer mistakes.” Then he looked at Jake and said. “She isn’t just a skinny bitch, she’s a skinny bitch with a set of brass balls the size of a bull elephant. More to the point, she’s smart and dangerous.” To prove his point he picked up a large rock the size of a football and threw it to a spot about three feet in front of them. The ground collapsed as soon as the rock hit it, exposing a hole about three feet wide, three feet deep, and full of sharp wooden spikes.

  Mel pointed at the spikes. “See the tips? They are slightly darker than the rest of the wood. Probably poison, or covered with shit or snake venom. Not enough to kill you, but enough to make you wish you were dead.” Rat looked into the hole and said, “Man this brings back memories.”

  Hey, baby cakes, are you with me?

  “Shut up! I don’t need your voice of doom right now.”

  Maybe not, but you do need to quit leaving a trail a slug could follow.

  “I’m doing the best I can! If I could toss out half of the stuff in this pack I could make better time, but I need all of it.”

  I’ll have someone inscribe that on hour headstone.

  “Thanks, you’re a real pal!” She stopped, then looked around to get her bearing then said, “Fuck you! I need to rest. And as far as I’m concerned you can carve that on my headstone ... along with a P.S. eat me!”

  Now I know you’re getting better. Your charming personality has returned.

  “No, I’m sick of running around in this damn desert, digging holes and acting like a freaking Commando. I’m tired of pointing this gun at everything you tell me to point it at, and never shooting it. I’m tired of you hounding me and I’m sick of eating those freakin’ cork-and-cardboard meals.”

  They ain’t all that bad.

 
“Really? I think they taste like embalmed flesh that escaped a mausoleum.”

  Good Lord, girl! You must have been chowing down in some weird feeding places to come up with that analogy. Whatever, this crap will keep the hollow places filled, and it’s supposed to have all the right stuff to keep your brain alive. You can worry about eating a big fat juicy burger when you are out of this place and shed of them boys who are coming up behind you.

  “How far?”

  They are a might shy of that hole in the ground you booby trapped back there. But you do have them wonderin’ what you are. But that big one, he got it bad for you, and he ain’t gonna let go til’ you’re dead.

  She was quiet for a moment, and then she asked, “Those others … the dead women in the river bed ... do you think there are more of them?”