Chapter 17

There were both lying where we had left them. Obviously. They were dead as disco. The little guy that had been trying to rape Hanna had bled out a lot. I must have hit an artery when I whacked him with the Kukri, the ground was soaked beneath him. It took a foot on his shoulder and a lot of pulling and wiggling to loosen the big knife free. I'm only moderately ashamed to say I kicked him in the face when I was done. I used his shirt to clean off the knife and put it away.

His big revolver was lying near him. I grabbed it and opened up the cylinder. The ends of six used shells looked back at me. Unless he had more ammunition the thing was only good for what he had used it for on Hanna, a bludgeon.

I stripped the two of them, the little guys shirt would be good for a rag or maybe wicks for a lantern or oil lamp. The other clothes, as distasteful as it was, would be good spares for us or barter if we came across more people that were a little more civil. Though the big guy's pants could use some bleach, as expected, Rebecca had done a number on him, his cock and balls were just bloody mush which had soaked into the jeans.

They were both wearing good solid, if a little worn, construction boots. They would come in handy and the little guy's feet would be close enough to either Hanna or Rebecca. The little guy, Juan, had a pack of cigarettes, five or six left as well as a lighter in his pocket. The big guy had his wicked knife still in his hand, the probably 4.5 inch blade flat black like the rest of the knife, only the razor edge going up to the tanto tip gleaming in the sun. Other than the scabbard for the knife and a pair of leather work gloves in his back pocket he had nothing else really useful on him. The $80 bucks in his jeans pocket wasn't going to buy us anything here!

I went down back to the hut, letting Rebecca know it was me well in advance and told them that I would be back in a couple of hours, I was going to get rid of the bodies and see if they had a camp anywhere nearby. After quickly eating a couple spoonfuls of our leftover lunch I grabbed the .308, some rope, kissed the two of them and then headed out.

I tied the bodies' ankles to the rope, strung it around the horse and started off, their naked bodies dragging behind us. I finally stopped a couple of kilometers away at the centre of what had been a pretty major intersection, now just a large, flat, grassy plain. What had been one of the buildings on the corner had obviously had underground parking. Now it was a 60 foot deep hole. The sightlines to the spot were great. I was going to leave the bodies there as a warning and it would be hard to miss them. Anyone coming from any direction would see them well off. The bodies were a little beaten and scraped up from the ride, all the better for my use. I sat them up beside each other, facing in opposite directions, took out my Fairbairn knife and carved "attempted rape" and "assault" on each of their slumped over backs. Then I got back on the horse and road back the way I had come.

Understandably my mind kept coming back to the fact that we had been totally complacent. There were obviously desperate, needy and just plain bad people out there. We didn't even know how many other people actually were out there! For a city the size of what this had been, five people wasn't a lot, then again we hadn't seen any signs of those two prior to them coming to our camp, nor had I seen signs of anyone else other than Rebecca and Hanna. Still I was certain that there had to be more "others" that the two voices, seemingly so long ago now, had talked about. We needed to get back out there and try to find more people before they stumbled across us. I wanted to control the situation. Regardless, none of us would be walking around unarmed and unprepared again.