The Nightmare begins

Chapter Seven

All Ron Jenkins had said to her and to his wife, Carla, was, "I'm goin' on down into that town there. I won't need my horse—you keep it close by and saddled and ready. I figure they might have some water and some other things down there I reckon we could use just as soon as letting them down there to rot."

Carla Jenkins had thrown her arms around her husband and tried to stop him, but one thing Sarah Rourke had learned about Ron Jenkins was that once he made up his mind he wouldn't change it. She remembered her own husband being like that, but now, since the night of the war and her experiences that following morning, she felt that perhaps she should have changed hers. She had hated the guns he kept, practically called him a fool for building and stocking his survival retreat. Yet, guns had kept her alive so far, and now the survival retreat she had loathed the thought of seemed to her a sort of haven of normalcy as she sat there in the dark, huddled with the children, their heads on her lap.

There could be no fire, the brigands having left the town only a few hours earlier and still perhaps close enough to see a fire and come and investigate.

She couldn't sleep, though she was tired. Her body was beyond sleep, she thought. She watched Carla Jenkins. Carla—who talked too much usually—was silent as a grave, her daughter Millie's head cradled on her lap. Carla—less than a yard away from Sarah—just sat staring out into the darkness.

The sound came again, and the shiver up Sarah Rourke's spine came again as well.

It was a scream, from the town below them in the darkness of the valley. A scream, but an unnatural-sounding one. She knew the sound, having worked as a volunteer in a hospital where she'd first met John Rourke. It was a man screaming. She had heard the sound in the hospital emergency room too often. She had met John, thought little beyond the fact that his lean face and high forehead and dark eyes and hair looked attractive and that he had apparently noticed her too. Years later, when their lives had crossed again, they had dated, talked a lot and married eventually. It had taken both of them some time to recall the chance meeting years earlier. They had laughed about it.

But now, as the scream came for a third time, the memory of each moment shared with her husband was like a cocoon to which she could withdraw, even if just for an instant.

Finally, when the scream came a fourth time, she eased the children's heads from her lap, pushed the hair from Michael's eyes and moved nearer to Carla Jenkins.

"I think one of us should go and see, Carla."

Sarah whispered, afraid that even the slightest noise might attract the brigands.

"I can't," Carla answered, her voice barely audible.

"I can go," Sarah said, bolstering her courage and simultaneously cursing herself for having said it.

"No—you mustn't. Ron will be back soon."

"But someone is screaming down there, Carla. It might be that something has happened—"

"No—he is just fine. Now you let things be."

Sarah Rourke sat back on her haunches, staring at Carla Jenkins, seeing the face, watching the lips move even in the darkness between them—but hearing herself. She couldn't say to Carla Jenkins, "You're being a fool—your husband is in trouble down there. The brigands must have come back— they're killing him."

She couldn't say that without admitting to herself that perhaps the thought of John Rourke coming for her and Michael and Annie was just a fantasy.

"I'm going," she said finally.

"I don't want you to."

"Watch Michael and Annie, Carla—I have to—" but Sarah Rourke didn't finish the sentence. The scream came for a fifth time, only weaker but longer in duration now. She stood up, checked the .45 Colt Government Model in her waistband and went back to Michael and Ann. She nudged Michael. "Michael— I need you to wake up."

"No—I wasn't asleep. Just a—"

"Now Michael—you're like your father! The slightest noise in the middle of the night and you're wide awake. Try to wake you up in the morning and it's like World War—" She stopped, her mouth still open. My God, she thought! How we used to joke about it. She tried waking Michael again and this time he sat up.

"Now, are you awake?"

"Yes," he said, his voice not sounding that way to her.

"All right—I'm going down into the valley to see if Mr. Jenkins is all right. I don't want to wake up Annie, but if she does wake up keep her very still. If she makes noise those bad men who burned the town there could find us. Do you understand, Michael?"

"Yes, I understand. But why do you have to go, Mom?"

"Somebody has to go—Mr. Jenkins might be in trouble down there."

"Do you have your gun—so you can shoot them if you have to?"

She looked at her son, running her fingers in his hair. His hair, his face, even the dark eyes that because of the night she couldn't quite see were exactly like her husband's. She was coming to understand that so was his logic. "Yes, I'll take my gun. Just listen to Mrs. Jenkins and do what she says unless—" and Sarah Rourke looked over her shoulder, watched Carla Jenkins staring into the darkness, rock rigid. "Unless what she says doesn't sound right—do you understand what I mean?"

He screwed up his face, looked away a moment, then said, "I think I do—if she tells me to do something dumb, I shouldn't do it?"

"Right—but think—just think and otherwise do what she says."

He leaned up and put his arms around her neck and she kissed him, barely touching her left hand to her daughter's head in fear of waking her. "Take care of Annie—remember you're the man," she said.

Sarah Rourke reached down and took the AR-15, checked the safety and pulled the bandanna down a little over her ears. She blew Michael a kiss and started away from the campsite. She half thought of taking her horse as a quick means of escape, but the noise the animal would make might give her away, she reasoned.

The legs of her jeans—bell bottoms— caught continuously on the brush as she moved as silently as she could into the woods on the slope and down into the valley. She stopped after a few hundred yards and rolled up the cuffs of her pants. She heard another scream; by now she had lost count. She remembered reading a western novel her husband had bought once. In it, the Indians had taken the scout captive and were torturing him throughout the night and into the early morning, just to unnerve the settlers hiding in the circled wagon train.

They had tied the man to a wagon wheel and roasted him over a fire. The thought of it still caused her to shudder.

She stopped in her tracks, then dropped to the ground, hugging the AR-15 to her chest. She was less than a hundred yards from the main street of the town now and could see the center of the street clearly. She could see a half-dozen or so of the brigands—and at their center she could see Ron Jenkins. At least she supposed it was Ron Jenkins. She heard the scream again and almost screamed herself.

One of the men—a tall black man with no sleeves on his coat—had a jumper cable in his gloved right hand, the cable leading to a storage battery on the ground a few inches from Ron Jenkins' feet. When he touched the end of the cable to Jenkins' body, Jenkins twisted against the ropes binding him to the front bumper of the pickup truck, shuddered, then screamed again.

Sarah Rourke looked carefully on each side of the center of the street and saw no one—just the four men and two women torturing Ron Jenkins. One of the men was black, as was one of the women. There was another pickup truck parked a few yards away from the one to which Ron Jenkins was lashed, but it appeared empty to her. She moved the selector of the AR-15 to the unmarked full-auto position—the gun had been illegally altered by the man she'd taken it from.

She got up to her knees, then rose to her feet, the rifle snugged to her shoulder.

"Don't move—any of you. I've got you covered with an automatic rifle," she announced at the top of her lungs, "Now step away from him!"

"Well, well," the black man shouted back, turning to face her. "We cut your sign earlier—figured if we grabbed your man here you'd soon come along to get him.

You can have him too, all we want is your horses—and maybe somethin' else. He don't look like much for a girl like you—tits like I bet you got under that T-shirt I guess could set a fella like me just on fire, sweet thing." The black man laughed, then started walking toward her. "Now, gimme that ol' gun before I whip your white ass with it for being bad to me, hear?"

Sarah Rourke touched her finger to the trigger of the modified AR-15 and shot the black man in the face, then brought the muzzle around and started firing at the remaining three men and two women. They started to run, only one of them starting to shoot back at her. She fired at him and he threw both his hands up to his face.

She shot one of the women in the back as the woman tried making it into the pickup truck, shot another of the men in the head as he jumped into the back of the furthest truck, which was already in motion. The black woman was in the cab.

The last man was running to catch it and Sarah fired, a three-shot burst which she felt—oddly—proud of herself for being able to control. She'd drawn a three-point bullet hole line across the man's back and he'd fallen forward on his face as the truck had sped away.

She almost automatically changed magazines for the rifle, set the selector back to safe and took the pistol out, her thumb over the raised safety catch, the hammer cocked. She ran to Ron Jenkins, glancing over the dead as she did to make sure they were dead.

She dropped to her knees beside him, setting the AR-15 onto the ground and raising his head with her left hand. "Ron—it's all right. I'll get you out of this," she said.

Eyes opened and staring past her, she could hear him whisper, "I'm not gonna—gonna make it, Mrs. Rourke. Take care of Carla and Millie—get 'em to Mount Eagle. God bless you—'cause them killers is gonna be back here sure as I'm—" and his eyes kept staring but there was a rattling sound in his throat and his breath suddenly smelled bad to her. She took her hand from his face, got to her feet and stepped a pace back. She stared at him a moment. "You're dead—Mr.

Jenkins," she said hoarsely. "You're dead."