Rejecting the clogged interstate and the numerous challenges that would bring, we drove down the old state highway with the wind in our faces blowing through the missing windshield. Tarah propped herself up in the back seat to pick off rev stragglers just for fun, with her seemingly endless ammunition. Otherwise, there wasn’t a soul on the road, transitioning our anxiety to a lower threat level that was both liberating and worrying, as looking away from the abyss is just as dangerous as gazing into it too deeply…at least long enough to see that the abyss is a mirror.
Few would normally expect much activity in the area, as countless acres of farmland with far-off tree lines marking distant boundaries splayed out around us like an empty shelf. Gravel roads crisscrossed the area in a mile-wide grid, filled in by corn fields taller than a man; some weren’t roads at all but long driveways leading to a lone manufactured house on a hill, or a mobile home rusty with seasons of rotting leaves under the only tree around.
Sam pointed ahead with his hand still on the wheel. “Looks like there’s military up ahead. I told you this would be handled by the fine fighting men and women of the United States Armed Forces!”
We peered at a few structures dotting the highway median ahead…and not just vehicles. We were soon coming upon a roadblock complete with barricades, crates, tarps, and a couple of Humvees. But no people…no movement.
Sam stopped the truck at a safe distance and shifted into Park. “Where the hell is everyone?”
“Maybe they moved on,” I said. “You’re asking me like I know how evacuations work.”
“No sign of a fight,” Tarah said.
“I’m getting a closer look.” Sam shifted the truck back into gear and we rolled closer at low speed before stopping, still a good walk to the first barricade and leaving plenty of time to blast anything coming toward us. But we were met with nothing but the tall grass leaning in the breeze, flattened by phantom feet around the tents and vehicles.
“There’s only so much we can learn from here,” Sam continued, grabbing his shotgun and opening the driver’s side door.
“I’ll go with him,” I said to Tarah.
She looked at my shotgun leaning on the front seat. “You taking that?”
I swept an arm across the scene like a game show presenter. “As you can see, there’s nobody around and we’re in the middle of nowhere. But if you’re so concerned for my well-being, Annie Oakley, you can cover me from here.”
She gave a side look. “How about I just shoot you right now for calling me that?”
I caught up with Sam and we investigated the two Humvees first, both parked strategically at angles and both empty, including the seats, shifter, and pedals.
“I’m getting weird vibes,” I said to Sam, quietly. “Look at the rust on the doors. Military shit is spotless, isn’t it? These are cleaned out-”
“-Like empty shells,” said Sam, brow furrowed. “What’s going on here?”
I looked around the far sides of the vehicles, finding a grassy area with green canvas tarps and weighed down with sandbags, serving as makeshift tents. But under them, no furniture, tables, chairs, papers, supplies, boxes of supplies, or even empty boxes…nothing a reasonable person would believe would be found in a military admin zone. Just a few empty crates and the Humvee bodies.
“This is fake,” I said, looking around suspiciously. “It’s a setup…for something.”
Sam looked about. “But what? Who for?”
I heard rustling coming from Chuck’s truck behind us and a yell from Tarah and I turned towards the noise. A man appeared from a hiding spot on the far side of the highway and stuck a pistol through the window at Tarah’s head while she sat watching our surprise.
Sam brought his shotgun up before a gruff female voice yelled out from another hiding spot behind us, near the empty crates. “Lower that fucking weapon!” she screeched. “You’ll spray ‘em both from that distance, including your pretty little thing there!”
I turned back around and saw the woman standing behind a waist-high pile of sandbags, camouflaged in a dark green disguise with face paint and bunches of tall grass poking the air around her head like antennae. She pointed a pistol at us. They were both dirty and sweaty, as though they’d been working hard without a break.
Sam kept his shotgun high, ignoring her command.
“Well, it looks like we got ourselves a little standoff,” said the woman, her gravelly voice carrying the faux-Southern twang of a Midwestern yokel. She whistled to her partner, who shifted his position so he could see her and still maintain his aim towards Tarah’s head. “Merle! These sumbitches want a Messican standoff!” The elation in her tone was not a good sign in the promotion of peace.
Merle spat brown tobacco juice on the concrete next to the truck, squinting in the sunlight shining down onto his sweaty, camo-painted face. “You boys want me to pop this bitch? Put down your weapon!”
Sam’s grip on the shotgun tightened for a split second before he lowered it, grimacing. He was at a disadvantage and barely contained his consternation.
The woman came up from behind and tore the shotgun from his grip.
“You did the right thing, Sam,” I said. “No reason to get killed by these hicks.”
“Shut up!” the woman crowed. “You two move to the truck and no one gets hurt.”
I hesitated. She gestured with the business end of her pistol. “Come on, squinty! Move!”
Sam and I turned and walked toward the truck, tension hanging in the air like humidity, every eye analyzing every movement, every second a perilous crawl to the next. The uncertain glances I caught passing between these two-bit bandits didn’t help, either…the telltale signs of not knowing what to do with us now they had us. And when people are uncertain and fearful, they tend to do dangerous things. Maybe the plan looked good on paper, but here they were, dealing with the reality of fish caught in their own net.
“Look,” said Sam, “You folks seem like fine Americans,” said Sam. “Just let us go about our business. We’re just passing through. No one needs to get hurt.”
“Shut it,” Merle ordered. “This your truck?”
Tarah remained defiant, as angry as Sam that she’d been caught flat-footed by these bumpkins. “As far as you’re concerned, it is.”
Merle volleyed her disdain, waving his gun back and forth. “My concern just stepped to the front and center of your pathetic little life, sweetheart.”
Tarah bristled. “I get it. You’ve got the gun, so you think you’re a badass.”
He paused, adjusting his ratty camouflage baseball cap. “As far as you’re concerned, I am.” Then, in one swift movement, he smacked Tarah across the face with the butt of his rifle, sending her flying back to the driver’s side of the cab. Sam stepped forward before the bandits’ weapons swung towards him simultaneously and then he stopped, holding his hands up in protest.
“Look, we don’t want trouble,” said Sam. “We’re just trying to get south. We have some supplies…I’m sure we could make a deal.”
“Yeah, I bet. Get in the truck,” Merle told him. Then he pointed his rifle at me. “You…get in the back seat with Big Mouth there.”
I stepped between Merle and the truck and climbed in, Tarah holding her bleeding nose with one cupped hand and a broken tooth in the other. After I settled into the seat beside her, she discreetly poked me in the side with a bony elbow and displayed a glimpse of pistol tucked under her left leg. She was shaking with anger as though she was barely restraining herself from using it and painting the road with Merle’s brains.
Merle held the back door open. “Honey, climb in the back and watch ‘em.”
Tarah and I slid over while the bandit took my place on the seat, before pointing her pistol at us, her arm trembling from holding the weapon aloft for so long, like a stein at Oktoberfest.
Tarah wiped the blood from her face. “You let him call you Honey?” She sounded like she had a cold, with her nose plugged up.
The woman returned a stern look. “That’s my name, bitch. Keep quiet or Merle’ll come an’ hit ya again.” The psychotic glint in her eyes returned and she spoke low and steady. “Me? I’d just assume shoot ya.”
Merle swapped hands with his rifle, guiding Sam into the driver’s seat with the closest hand to grip Sam’s arm. “You’re driving, Slick.”
“You can’t make me drive.”
“Don’t worry…we’re just going over that hill. If you try anything, you won’t be alive to see the other side of it.”
With guns and dirt and broken teeth, we looked like a feuding family embarking on a hellish road trip. Once we were moving, Merle was a rambling conversationalist, watching his captives while mumbling paranoid statements such as “Gotta get this truck off the road…can’t make it look like a graveyard. Feds keep trail cams in the trees.” His sweaty movements made me nervous; I’d seen plenty of loose-cannon junkies with the same symptoms…right before they hurt somebody.
Merle met my gaze with disdain. “Keep staring me down like that and I’ll put you in the ground.” He then turned away and navigated us through a shallow ditch on the left of the highway, where a tangle of cut barbed wire fencing was pushed aside in loose rolls. Then he pointed us onto a two-track road that ran parallel to the highway until we reached what looked to be an empty lot on a hilly tract curving out in a lump out of the grass. We turned onto a gravel driveway leading around the hill and into a yard where chunks of rusty metal from cars, lawn tractors, and gas grills jutted from the dry, overgrown grass. A tin overhang stuck out from the side of the hill, buttressed with wooden boards above a wooden door frame and door.
“You live on the side of a hill?” Sam asked Merle. “Like Hobbits?”
“Shut up! Stop over by those mowers there.”
Sam did as commanded and turned off the engine. Multiple dogs barked from inside the hill, their snouts leaving wet streaks against the dirty panes of the embedded front windows.
Merle opened the passenger door. “Nobody moves until I say. We’re gonna form a nice line and walk slowly through that front door there. Anyone who strays from that direction will be shot and fed to the pigs. Got it?”
“Pigs’ll go right through ya in two minutes,” Honey said, as though proud to know such info. “We’ve found it to be a lot quicker than lime.”
“You’re a fucking psychopath,” said Tarah, and the truth, exposed to the cool evening air, kept Honey silent. How could one argue with the self-evident?
We looked at each other nervously. There was no way we were going to let these two mouth-breathers lead us into their Hill House of Death. Horrific images of a torture chamber with pointy metal contraptions appeared in my mind and I shuddered. Nothing good could come from doing their bidding, but what choice did we have at that moment?
In the time it took for Merle to close his door and open the one behind him, Sam caught my eye and flashed the handle of a pistol he’d also stashed, leaving me the only unarmed person in this pressure cooker. I may have been a blind fool, but at least I was in good company.
Honey climbed down from the truck and held us at gunpoint while Merle moved to the house and opened the door to corral a trio of barking, jumping dogs on the other side, ecstatic their people were home. By that point, it became clear these two hadn’t drilled this scenario much before putting their scheme into action. Merle was already looking for someplace to put his rifle, even with three people he’d just kidnapped standing in his front yard. Under opposite circumstances, they could have been easier marks than we were.
The spoiled dogs jumped and ascended Merle’s legs and then Merle disappeared into the hill with two of the dogs while the smallest—some kind of yapping terrier—plowed through the dirty screen door and zoomed around the yard in wild circles, tongue wagging like a flag until its energy ran dry and it returned to its furious owner, only to find master in no mood for play.
Merle looked at Honey in frustration, and she returned one right back. As though attuned to his thoughts, she quipped: “I ASKED you if you wanted a trial run and you said no! You said there was no time and we had to hit the highway A-SAP to catch stragglers comin’ through.”
A look of defeat flashed across his face before hardening up again. “I know what I said. And we got a couple right out the gate.” He nodded to us. “And now these three here. That’s not a terrible start, wouldn’t you say, Honey?”
“I’d say that first couple didn’t turn out too good.”
“We caught ‘em before we were ready.”
“Because we didn’t do a dry run! And you think we’re ready now because…?”
“Now Honey, we talked about this. We had to convert the venison grinder first. You even said so yourself.”
Honey softened her tone, and the surrounding energy returned to a base level of uncertain terror. “I guess we should count our blessings, then. At least the ambush idea seemed to work out fine.”
Merle turned to us, spit tobacco juice on the ground at our feet, and said, “All right, let’s get you three inside the house.”
We hesitated in the yard until Honey cocked her weapon and then we walked toward the entrance to their hillbilly home, taking our time, as though waiting for inspiration…such as any idea about how to get out of this weirdness. After all, nothing good comes out of a kidnapping.
But like the end of a silent prayer, any inner pleas for ideas were only met with more silence. As above, so below.
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