The sky (of Plancus’ city) forebodes to us
Through clear signs and fixed stars,
That the time of its sudden change is approaching,
Neither for its good, nor for its evils.
The next few hours were difficult for all of us. At first the police, led by the intrepid Chief James Kelland, confiscated our weapons and threw Ken and me in jail. Of course, the weapons we had when we walked into the hospital were not the same weapons we had used against the freebooters. We had dropped them and Megan off at the house with instructions for the women to hide them, as well as all of our other firearms. Then Ken and I told Kelland a story wherein we had disarmed a few of the bandits and turned their own weapons against them.
He wasn’t having any of it. It was a stupid idea on our part anyway. We hadn’t taken into consideration a major flaw in our reasoning. It was soon brought to our attention when the kid we had lugged into the hospital recovered enough to talk almost immediately. He told a story about a group of men who had attacked him and his innocent friends as they partied. He claimed several men and a young girl had attacked his friends for no apparent reason. He stated that the young girl had killed two men with a rifle, two with a crossbow, and one with her bare hands.
The questioning began in earnest, and I began to have second thoughts on the wisdom of having spared the kid’s life.
In light of his story, I figured it was time for us to tell the truth, starting with the gunshots we’d heard earlier that afternoon. The only thing we held back was the existence of our supply stash. I was still unwilling to give that up, and I guessed by Ken’s silence on the subject that he agreed.
Our only problem was that since we had already lied once, Kelland was trying very hard to try to rip our story to shreds. And he loved every minute of it. The first thing he did was separate us so they could question us individually and hopefully get conflicting stories. We each went into interrogation rooms just like in the movies, only they always appeared larger in the movies. I didn’t think this was terribly smart of him. After all, he’d already allowed us to stay together earlier while I told him what had happened.
After we were separated, Kelland sent an officer to question Ken. He evidently wanted the pleasure of making me squirm all to himself. Most of the questioning was pretty predictable.
“Y’all heard gunshots?”
“Yeah, we already told you that.”
“How far away were they?”
“We couldn’t tell.”
“So you decided to find out?”
“Yes.”
“Y’all dressed up like GI Joe, went trompin’ off through the woods huntin’ for a few gunshots?”
“It wasn’t just a few gunshots; it sounded more like a war.”
“And y’all went lookin’ for a war? Sounds pretty stupid to me.”
“We had to find out what was going on. With the phones out, we couldn’t very well call the police.”
“You gettin’ smart with me? I don’t like it when folks smart off to me.”
“I’m not smarting off. Just stating facts. We couldn’t call the police. Amber had the van, so we couldn’t send someone to get the police. The only option we had left was to investigate for ourselves.”
“So you ran through the forest, found your war, jumped into the middle of it, and whooped up on twenty to twenty-five men? That’s seven to one odds, boy! You expect us to believe that you, your nigger friend, and a scrawny little girl could each take on six grown men?”
I held my anger in check. “We took them by surprise, in small groups. That way we only had to take a few at a time.”
“So you admit you jumped them without provocation!”
“They killed John Robinson!”
“You saw ‘em do it?”
“No. But we saw them raping Pat Robinson!”
“Was she protestin’?”
“She was tied to a table!”
“Maybe she liked it that way.”
“With her husband’s dead body lying in the yard a few yards away?”
“How did you know he was dead? Could be havin’ her husband play dead while she got it on with a bunch of men was just some kinky sex thing with them.”
It went on like that for nearly an hour. It seemed his main goal was to try to implicate me, or rather us, in the murder of several innocent individuals. I knew he didn’t like me, but I hadn’t thought it was anywhere near that bad.
Or maybe he just wanted to see me squirm.
At any rate, he had questioned me for nearly an hour when another officer stuck his head in and called him outside. Kelland returned a few minutes later with a manila folder and a rather strange expression when he looked up at me.
He kept doing that, glancing up at me with that look, then reading some more. What the hell was he reading, anyway? It was as if he didn’t quite know what to make of me. He stood inside the door reading through the folder for a minute more before he spoke again.
“When I heard that kid’s story in the hospital, I guessed the ’young girl’ he talked about must either be your wife or your daughter. Especially since, according to your ’killer hijackers’ report,” he waved a sheet of paper from the folder at me, “both of them have already killed people.”
A chill ran up my spine at the way he said that. As if I wasn’t already worried enough, now he was after my wife and daughter.
“So I sent a couple of officers over to pick them up.”
“By the way, they’re here now, along with Mrs. Simms and your boy.”
He smiled a little at the anguish in my expression before he went on. “I also sent some men over to the Kindley’s and the Robinson’s.”
“They confirmed that there were a lot of bodies layin’ around. That don’t mean nothin’ ’cept somebody killed a bunch of people out there.” And again, that look.
But I thought that I possibly understood it now. Kelland was the kind of man who respected strength, or what he understood of strength anyway. He still didn’t like me, but to his way of thinking, anyone who could take on odds like the ones he had mentioned earlier must be a strong individual. It didn’t matter that we had at no time faced anywhere near that many opponents at once. The way he saw it was simply that we had faced impossible odds and won.
He respected that; ergo, he respected me, maybe even feared me a little.
He moved to the table and sat down across from me again. Scooting his chair back, he propped his feet on the table and began a new tactic. “You know, when Chief Davis died, and I took over, one of the first things I did was to read the statement you filed on your run-in with those hijackers.” He waved the report at me again. “Then I sent two men out to the site.”
I wondered where this was heading.
“They pretty much confirmed what you said about the ambushed convoy. All the wreckage and the bodies matched your report. And they found the hidden little road where you said it was and the cabin in the clearing.” He peered intently into my eyes. “And they found three bodies in that clearing.”
“Three?” We had killed two, Edgar and Michael. Who was the third?
“One was a man whose throat had been punctured,”
