The Abandon Series | Book 2 | These Times of Retribution Read online

  With a nod but not another word, the lawman turned and left. For a second—and Colt had to stop to think about it—he thought he saw the flash of terrible sadness in the man’s eyes. But he shook it off because Lance Garrity was a solid man through and through, and a good Sheriff.

  Thinking nothing more about it, Colt lugged the box inside, sat it down, and said, “I’m going to need a knife to get this open.”

  Faith fetched him a blade. He took a deep breath, his thoughts now fully on his older brother. If anything, his curiosity about the contents of the box had piqued.

  He and Walker hadn’t spoken in years, which was why receiving something like this had his head buzzing with questions. It also had him lamenting the past, turning over old conversations, thinking he’d do just about anything at this point to talk to him, see him, give him a brotherly hug, and apologize for the way they left things.

  Faith stood over his side, just as beautiful as the day he met her. She watched him cut away the thick plastic wrap. When he was done, he handed her the knife and looked up. Her lovely face was lined with worry, the same as it had been for the last two years as the nation began its descent into chaos.

  “Is that Walker’s writing?” Faith asked.

  Looking at his brother’s cursive writing, Colt slowly nodded. She put her hand on his back, soothing him, reassuring him. He was sure she felt the sadness creeping into him, the regret he so often tried to put out of his mind. Instead of opening the box, he simply stared at it, suddenly terrified to see what was inside.

  “You should open it,” Faith prompted.

  “What do you think I’m doing?” he asked unconvincingly. She saw him pause and he knew that she understood his thoughts.

  Finally, he opened the long box. Inside he found his brother’s disassembled sniper rifle. The Barret M82. His most guarded possession when they were overseas.

  “He sent you a rifle?” she asked as she gazed upon the parts of the weapon.

  “I guess so,” Colt said, fear and worry plaguing him, his emotions spiraling nearly out of control.

  He saw the letter sitting in the box, had to blink a couple of times because that bad feeling was beginning to amplify within him, causing his heart to beat nearly out of control. Was he having a panic attack? It was starting to feel like it. He opened the letter and read it.

  The note was short, to the point.

  Colt,

  They’re coming for you. It’s only a matter of time. The gold is yours if you can protect it. It’s half the key to keeping the president alive and this country from completely falling to ruin. Don’t be you, not this version of you. Be worse. Be the old you. The nation doesn’t just need this from you, it will demand it soon enough.

  Your brother, Walker

  “Oh, no,” he said, his face going deathly pale. Fear mixed with loss and regret, not just for the easy life he and his brother never had together, but for the abundance of anxiety gathering inside of him.

  “What’s wrong?” Faith asked. “Other than all of this?”

  “There’s a storm coming,” Colt turned and said to her, his face ashen, never more serious. “It’s coming for all of us.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  Colt moved the different parts of the disassembled weapon aside, pulled out a brick-sized box, and opened it up. Inside, there was a large gold bar. It was so big, he actually felt the breath fall out of him.

  “Is that…gold?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Still inside was another smaller box. He opened the smaller box, pulled out a stack of silver bars, and started to shake his head.

  “Whose gold and silver is that?” Faith asked, now concerned. “Is it Walker’s?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why would he send you a rifle and stolen gold?” she asked.

  He turned and looked at her, solemn in his tone, but shaky at heart. “I’m afraid he sent it to me because he’s left this life and no longer needs it.”

  She went very still, then—when her face began to show the same kind of fear he’d been holding inside—she said, “I need to check on the eggs.”

  He smelled the burning poultry, then stood and walked outside for air. Looking down at the road below, feeling himself swimming in this void of despair, he froze and his eyes began to water.

  Down the slight hill, just across the road, he saw his Russian neighbor, Vitaliy, drive his old pickup down onto his property. Colt wiped his eyes for a closer look. Vitaliy had plywood sheets on either side of the truck’s bed like he was hauling garbage. Was he finally cleaning up the property? Wiping his eyes again, he watched the man with interest. Vitaliy dropped out of his truck, saw Colt from the distance, gave a hesitant wave. Colt waved back, the same as he’d been doing for the last few years.

  Faith pushed open the screen door and said, “I’m going to need some more eggs.” He turned around to where she stood with a dishtowel. “I burned them, if you can’t smell them already.”

  “Yeah, I can,” he said, catching another whiff of them.

  She handed him the keys to the truck and said, “Be careful.”

  He chuckled as he took the keys. “Do you need anything else while I’m there?”

  “Grab some bananas and a bag of flour,” she said.

  “Alright,” he replied, promising to be back soon. “Put that gold and silver in the safe, please. And stash the rifle back in the back room, next to the other guns.”

  She smiled, then leaned forward and kissed him like he wasn’t coming back.

  “Walker will be okay,” she said before he left. “No matter what’s happened to him, in this world and the next, he’ll be okay. He always lands on his feet.”

  With sad eyes and a heavy heart, he said, “I hope so.”

  Chapter Five

  Colt McDaniel

  Colt climbed into his truck, turned the big engine over, then rolled down the window and pressed the ON button to the CD player. Alan Jackson came to life with the song Country Boy. He turned the volume knob up, gave himself over to the music, then eased down the driveway and tried to put Walker out of his mind.

  He and Faith lived on a thirty-acre spread just off Watts Mill Road in a thirty-five-hundred-square-foot house that Faith reminded him was far too expensive for the neighborhood by about four-hundred grand. She said this not out of arrogance, but out of concern.

  His father liked the property because it was off the beaten path and had great soil, good sun, and just the right irrigation. But the neighbors could be a little sketchy depending on who decided to buy and sell in the neighborhood, which often depended on how badly the seller needed cash.

  The old Russian crank across Watts Mill Rd., Vitaliy Sidirov, was his nearest neighbor, the only one he could see without having to use binoculars. But he had let his trees and brush go, along with normal repairs to his house. His place was an eyesore for sure, but Colt never worried about the Russian creating problems for him and Faith. Vitaliy quietly bred dogs, and though Colt and Faith were sure he’d hosted a few dog fights from time to time, he’d always been cordial.

  Up the road from him, closer to the Taylor farm, some nameless idiot from Junction City thought it would be easy to set up a meth lab. The explosion happened last year. This makeshift lab burned the idiot and his business partner alive, but on the upside, it spared the county and the taxpayers from the costs of court fees, a jail cell, and three square meals a day. No one complained, but it was Mrs. Taylor who said what everyone was thinking: “Good riddance.”

  Despite a handful of uncultured transplants, the occasional tussle between bad neighbors, or the random suicide, no one really bothered them. Then again, most days, they tended to answer the door with a shotgun, so maybe word got out about that, too.

  Colt turned left on Watts Mill Rd. and made the short drive to Sugar Creek Pike—a heavily wooded, two-lane road that was narrow enough and closed-in with enough old trees to make you claustrophobic. Rowan often
said it looked like something out of Deliverance, and even though Colt agreed inside, he continued to tell his son it wasn’t that bad.

  A mile and a half ahead, when Sugar Creek ran into Danville Road, or US-27, he took a right and merged with US-27, a rather uninteresting four-lane stretch of highway. He switched out Alan Jackson for Hank Williams, Jr., and, keeping with the theme, he played A Country Boy Can Survive.

  Up ahead, he took S. Main Street, an unmarked turn he’d taken a hundred times when he and Faith went shopping. He slowed for a couple of linemen working on the utility poles, wondered if it would be harder working the lines than it was working the land. If you grabbed the wrong beet or pulled the wrong carrot, you weren’t getting fried to death fifteen or twenty feet off the ground, so maybe it was better being a farmer than a lineman.

  On the left, he passed Edgewood Body Shop, Hensley’s Carpet & Vinyl, and Eldridge Excavating—a trio of red and white painted buildings that looked haphazardly plopped down on the side of the road. Just before turning into Kroger’s rather large parking lot, he passed a strip mall with a Smoker’s Outlet, Andrew’s Food Market (Gyros), and a Valero gas station.

  “No gyros, no gas, no smokes,” Colt said aloud.

  Whenever he and Leighton went shopping at the Kroger together, this is what his daughter would say. It always made him laugh. Now that she was away in college, he missed her terribly.

  He slowed the truck and signaled left, waited for traffic to clear, then hung a left and cruised into the deep parking lot belonging to the grocery store.

  Kroger was low slung, long, and not terribly attractive. The adobe-colored façade sported a freshly-painted look, but the white and green roof looked like an outdoorsman’s attempt to blend the building with the dirt and trees around it.

  In front of the store, like a huddle of teenage miscreants, was a gathering of motorcycles, old cars, and trucks. They weren’t 1980’s old, these vehicles were more like 1960’s old, or early 1970’s old. And not nice. Not in the slightest. In fact, looking closer, he didn’t see a clean or well-built ride among them. It was as if this chatty gang of oddities in skinny jeans, black hoodies, and pulled-down balaclavas had trolled a junkyard, slapped some wheels and tires on what vehicles they could reanimate, then decided that Kroger was the hip place to be. It wasn’t, but whatever.

  The all-but-conked-out look of the vehicles concerned him, but he was more worried about the people who had driven them. They were bone-rail thin, mostly white, and they had that rowdy look about them, like causing problems was their reason for living. One of the guys grabbed a girl who was smoking, then tried to drag her into his arms, but she turned and put her cigarette out on his face to cheers and jeers. He stood back, then laughed, which Colt did not expect.

  For a second, he considered turning around and heading back home, but what was he going to tell Faith? That he ran into a scary group of kids, tucked tail, and ran? No. He wasn’t like that. Still, logistically, there was no way to avoid the group because they were hanging out right in front of the building.

  Maybe they aren’t that bad, he thought. But what if they are?

  These kids were one sporting event, a tapped keg, and a Weber barbecue away from turning this parking lot into a Kroger tailgate party.

  Shrugging it off, he parked in the middle of the lot where it was empty, locked his truck, then walked toward the entrance like a guy minding his own business.

  When he passed the gaggle of miscreants, he looked over and caught one kid’s eye. He was a human ashtray. The red blister on his face from where the defiant girl had put her cigarette out on his face was a red welt with a white circle in the middle of it. He simply stared at Colt, no expression, nothing to indicate he was anything other than a ghoul.

  The chatter died down, the ruckus falling to silence. Quickly glancing around, he saw most of them looking at him, that same stone-faced glare, like a hive mind, had directed them to turn and stare. He narrowed his eyes, but he kept his mouth shut and his feet moving.

  “That’s right, keep on walking,” he heard one of the women say. A few of the guys snickered, but Colt refused to take the bait.

  “Nice butt, cowboy,” someone else said. This time it was not a girl speaking; rather it was one of the guys, which had him shaking his head.

  He breezed into the grocery store, grabbed a plastic Kroger basket, then headed to the produce aisle and picked up half a dozen bananas. In the dairy department, he put an eighteen-pack of eggs in the basket, and then he headed to the baking aisle for flour.

  Unfortunately, a really ugly guy with a semi-attractive girl was in the aisle blocking the flour section. The progressive-looking girl had two skinny arms sleeved with tattoos, as well as a skull tattoo on the side of her neck. The guy she was with had the girl’s back pressed into the shelving where Colt’s brand of flour sat. At first, he wondered if they were trying to have sex in the store, but the way this guy was aggressively in her space, how he was growling at her like she’d done something to scrape his last nerve, told him otherwise.

  She glanced up at Colt looking a little scared. The guy turned, red-faced, eyes narrowed, his jaw flicking like he was about to go nuclear. “What?” he barked.

  “I need some flour,” Colt said.

  “Come back later,” he grumbled, turning back to the girl. The girl kept looking back and forth between Colt and this guy, her boyfriend—whatever he was.

  “Flour is the last thing on my list,” Colt said, his heart racing. “So if you’ll just let me grab it, I’ll be on my way.”

  The guy took a deep breath, closed his eyes, then hissed out his irritation, exhaling extra slow and extra loud. The way this guy looked—with half his head shaved, three or four days of scruff, and dirty fingernails—Colt wanted nothing more than to walk away. But he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. There was no way he was going to be run off by some scumbag and his timid little prostitute.

  “Go buy something else,” the guy snapped, refusing to look at him. Instead of turning to Colt like a man, this dirtbag with crap-brown eyes and all black clothes burned the girl with his gaze.

  “I don’t need anything else,” Colt said. “Just the flour.”

  The man slapped the shelf, causing both the woman and two rows of flour to jump. Colt didn’t jump, though. Unless it was the sounds of gunfire or exploding mortars, he wasn’t bothered.

  Jaw flicking, brow pulled tight into a scowl, this creature turned his head slowly and tried to intimidate him with hard eyes and a grimace. The look of pure, seething hatred was intimidating for sure, but Colt refused to let it show.

  “In case you can’t see, I’m in the middle of something,” he said as if Colt was scraping his last nerve.

  With trembling cheeks and the bloodshot eyes of a hell hound, the twenty-something creep was barely human. He was more like a sewer crawler, a kind of nocturnal swine that lived in the shadows and ate sewer rats for a living.

  Colt blew out an exasperated breath, like this guy’s blustering was nothing more than a nuisance. “So take it two feet to the left, then I’ll be on my way.” Colt spoke with control, but a pit had formed in his stomach, causing a shot of adrenaline to spike his bloodstream.

  Instead of taking two big steps to the left, the guy tossed the girl to the side like she was a rag doll, then socked Colt in the gut so hard, he folded.

  Before Colt could recover from the gut-shot, a big fist cracked the side of his head, sending him crashing sideways into the metal shelving. He was hammered by another shot, right in the same place. The world pulsed in and out. His legs felt weak, his balance slightly off.

  The basket of eggs and bananas slipped out of his hand, the molded-cardboard lid on the carton of eggs popping open. Trying to stand, desperate to recover, he reached out for something to hang onto.

  The brute fired in a third shot, catching him in the exact same place. How he was still standing, Colt didn’t know.

  The man ripped Colt’s favorite trucker’s hat off his
head, grabbed a handful of his hair, then drove his face right in his opened eggs, and by proxy, the cement floor below.

  The impact splattered the eggs, coating his face with egg whites and yoke. He felt dizzy, dripping wet, too scared to be angry. But he was aware of the grip that had his hair. And then his face was smashed into the basket a second and third time, his nose smashing on the floor with only squashed bananas to soften the impact. On the fourth hit, everything went black—a complete and perfect void.

  When he regained consciousness, he saw the scumbag dragging his girl up the aisle by her arm. Colt’s face was smooshed into the ground, his body crumpled on the floor and against the flour display. He slowly rolled over onto his side, his face and forehead dripping with egg slime and blood.

  On the ground in front of him, he saw his opened wallet. He reached for it with a shaky hand, pulled it near him. His cash was gone, but his credit cards remained. He looked up as the guy who kicked his butt rounded the aisle, never even looking back.

  A foot away, he saw his driver’s license lying on the ground. A bolt of fear shot through him. Did he see where Colt lived? He reached out and picked it up, then touched his head and realized his favorite hat was gone.

  “Unbelievable,” he muttered, still feeling disconnected from his body.

  Painfully, still wobbly, he managed to push himself into a sitting position. He didn’t realize someone was standing over him until he looked up.

  “Colt?” a woman’s voice asked. All he saw were cheap shoes, swollen ankles, and pantyhose that should have been thrown away years ago.

  He couldn’t crane his head back that far. “Yeah?” he asked, trying to look up nevertheless.

  He recognized the woman’s voice, but her name escaped him for a moment. This heavyset homemaker in a housedress said, “I saw that all happen if you need a witness.”

  “It’s okay,” he said, trying to get up.

  She hooked a meaty hand under his arm to help him up. He glanced over, tried to focus on her meaty little sausage fingers, the torn-short fingernails, the flaky cuticles. Her name came back to him right away.