Chapter 10

We took time for another round of coffee and then I decided that we might as well take a look for possible routes to Jill's camper. As we left the kitchen and went outside we noticed Carl and the others coming back with four fresh kills. I went over to give him the lowdown.

"You got the tank to make gasoline too," he said, as soon as I got to that part.

"Well, it said it would."

"Who said it would?" he asked.

I remembered I hadn't let him know about my info department, so I had to explain that and then told him we were going to take a look at the suburban and camper to look for a route.

"Have at it then, Casey and I will ride herd on the crew while you're gone. Maybe we'll just feed them so much they'll be too lazy to give us any trouble. They're already getting more to eat than they were in Graveyard and some of them like it," he said.

"That's a damned good plan," I said, then left him to it.

I already had a web belt, holster, and Glock for Karen and Katy and it didn't take over an hour and a half to squeeze one for Wanda and Jill out of the Igloo. When we were all loaded for bear, or at least for asshole patrol, I took them outside, cobbled up a practice target in full view of all prisoners and had them go through about a hundred rounds each to get familiar with which way they should point the business end. I went ahead and burned about fifty rounds through the Marlin I'd copied for myself.

I planned on heading directly toward Graveyard on the same path we'd used before, but Wanda and Jill both thought there was a better way if we'd start about two hundred yards north of where we were headed, and they were right. For some reason the trees were fewer and smaller on the path they showed us. Damn, it even seemed that it was shorter this way.

Graveyard was still deserted when we went through it and now that I was paying attention I saw that it was on one side of an even bigger clearing than the one we were using. We didn't stop though; we just let Jill lead us to her stuff by the way she knew. After a couple of minutes it was apparent we'd have to find a better trail than this. The trees were too damned thick to fuck with on her way.

When we got to her Suburban and camper I was surprised. The suburban was a four-wheel drive model and it had oversized ground grip type tires on it. That wasn't the biggest surprise though. The camper was. Hers looked a lot like Carl's and I was pretty sure it was the same size. It had a few features his didn't though. It had one of those slide out sections that you could use almost like a bay window, and from the way things looked it was unmolested. Jill looked things over and declared it unharmed.

"How did you get it here Jill?" I asked.

"I drove it dummy, how'd you think I got it here?"

"I mean where's the road you used?" I asked.

"Oh, there was a nice nearly road with only a few saplings in it. I got off that when I figured my gas was about gone," she said.

"Do you think you can find it again?"

"Sure, it's only about a mile to it from here," she said and struck out for it while we followed.

When we reached it I was amazed. She was right, it was a lot more nearly a road than the one I'd had to clear. I wondered how I'd missed it when I was looking for a way out, especially since I knew she'd have had to be able to just drive out.

"This can't be more than five or six miles from the safe area. You must have been damned low on gas when they grabbed you," I said.

"That's bullshit. The safe area is nearly fifty miles that way by my odometer, unless driving so slowly caused it to mess up," she said, and she'd pointed in the opposite direction from the way I knew my safe area was.

"You must have come down in a different area than I did, mine was off in that direction," I said, pointing.

"Oh, I didn't even know there was more than one."

"Doesn't really matter. Let's walk this path back toward mine and see what we find," I said, and so we did.

The picture became clearer after about a mile. As we approached the clearing for Graveyard I could tell that there were only a few trees in the way and that they were the end of this path. We could have them out of the way in less than two hours, and the path to Graveyard wouldn't take much longer to clear.

We didn't go back to Jill's stuff but went right back to our clearing. Carl had all the men stuffed by now but I had some bad news for them. They'd be working off their meals in minutes.

I told Carl what we'd found and when the girls went into his trailer he and I started getting the chain gang organized. We chained them all together, had them pick up a few shovels, mattocks, and axes then locked the end of the chain to the back of my trailer's pole. Carl and I got into the cab, I fired it up, put it in low, and started creeping to the near path we had to clean off to get to Graveyard.

To save any arguing, when I got out to release the men and get them started, I fired a couple of rounds from the Glock to get their attention and kept it in my hand while I gave them their marching orders. There were only five trees that had to come down and none of them were very big. I cut them off to post height with my chainsaw then got some of the men to work moving the tops out of the way and cutting them up while I set two each to digging up the stumps on their far sides. Carl, me, and the dogs just watched over them and gave a few instructions.

None of the trees were a bit of trouble to pull down by just backing the truck up with a chain tied high on the remaining tall stumps. We got them busy filling in the holes after that and two hours later we chained them in line again, hooked them to my trailer, and headed for Graveyard.

We only had three trees to deal with here and we'd be done. Two more hours later we were heading back home with a line of nouveau convicts trailing behind us on their chain gang.

It was barely four in the afternoon when we got back. We let Casey and Scotty take care of getting the work crew chained to their respective trees. Jill was excited to be going to fetch her trailer and car so quickly, and Karen, Katy, and Wanda were determined to go along with Jill, Carl, and I.

"We want to make sure Jill doesn't give you too much pussy as a reward for getting her things back for her. She's really excited," Wanda said.

"I'm glad Jill's happy but she doesn't owe me anything for doing it, and especially not pussy. She's Casey's woman now and I won't sneak around behind his back. I wouldn't even do her if he asked me too, as long as she's with him he can take care of her. I don't fool around with another man's woman whether they're married or not, cause I'd beat hell out of any man that tried to bother y'all. I'll also spank your naked asses if I catch or even hear about you leading anyone on," I said.

"That's not the way the Mayor did it. He fucked every woman in sight anytime he wanted to," Jill said.

"Last time I checked the Mayor was still dead over it too," I said right back.

I could tell that it put a little damper on my girl's mood so I decided that maybe I could cheer them up a little.

"That don't mean I'd deny one of the unattached women if they felt needy and thought a little of my dick would help them out," I said, and then got to laugh at them for once.

That little speech wasn't just for my girls and Jill though. I wanted to make sure Carl understood that I wouldn't be sniffing around Jane, Gloria, or any woman he might have either. I didn't think he'd even consider going behind my back and I wanted to let him know I wouldn't do anything like that either.

Jill's Suburban's battery was down when we tried to crank it but you can't hardly find a log truck without a hellacious set of jumper cables onboard. I can't even count the number of times I've had to jump start a loader, skidder, sawhead, or dozer and you can't do it with the kind of chickenshit jumper cables you find in Wal-Mart. Mine were forty feet long and made from arc-welder cable with welder's ground clamps for the connection. When we hooked that Suburban's battery to my pair of hundred and fifty pound twelve-volt batteries hooked up in parallel and she hit the starter the Suburban was afraid not to crank.

"This is the best damned road service I've ever had. Are you sure I can't at least give you a blow job as a tip?" Jill asked.

"Give one to Casey and we'll call it even," I said, and we all laughed.

Jill's rig had stayed in pretty good shape, even though she said it had been sitting in that spot for nearly two years. She didn't even have a low tire. She let the engine warm up a little at my suggestion, but when she put it in gear it pulled right off and we followed her back to camp. She pulled up and parked it beside Carl's.

When she went to get Casey and Tina to show off their new digs it was nearly comical. I could almost read Casey's mind when he first saw the trailer. He'd been barely eeking out enough food and sleeping on the ground every night with his two buddies and now he had two women and a nice place to live. He was in hog heaven and he knew it.

I was happy for Casey and his new digs and new women, but it didn't do me much good. Sleeping in the truck beat hell out of sleeping on the ground, but it was getting a little crowded in the bunk, or at least it would be tonight. I guess I could manage though. I went to my truck and took a chair in the driver's seat to think a little about the problem.

It was really a shame. If the spacemen had been picking up around thirty people a month there were bound to be some other trailers scattered about. The problem was if the people were still alive I wasn't about to take their homes from them and if they were dead we'd never even know where to look. Jill had been the proof of that. Her car and camper were near Graveyard for two years or so and no one else ever found them. Damn, I wish I had a map of where they all were.

Suddenly my info storage that I'd nearly forgotten about made its little attention signal inside my head and popped up a map again. Fuck, I'd forgotten all about the map. I hadn't mentioned it to Carl when it came up the first time. I almost did but he got me sidetracked and I'd just forgotten about it. The map it was showing me now had dozens of red dots scattered around but they weren't the little towns that popped up, the towns were marked in gray and named.

I wished I knew what the dots meant and damned if the answer wasn't provided. They were abandoned vehicles. I asked for a closer look and up it came on the dot nearest us, which was only about a mile away. It wasn't really useful though. Well I guess it would be, but not for housing, it was a Honda one-sixty scrambler motorcycle. It must have been nearly thirty years old and from the way the brush was grown up around it the poor thing had probably been sitting in that spot for most of those years.

Shit, what was I thinking? If we fetched the thing back I could take it apart and put it in the Igloo piece by piece and make it into a brand new one. Hell, I could copy the pieces and have several if I wanted to. That wasn't a place to sleep though so I moved on.

Stupidly I just looked at the dots from the closest to the furthest. I guess I could have come up on what I wanted by asking more specific questions but I didn't, I just focused on a red spot and wished for a close-up and here it came. I didn't find what I was looking for until the eleventh try. I saw a lot of things I wanted to go see personally during my searching around, but the eleventh one was a winner.