Finally, Jared tilted the glass to his lips and let the liquid pour into his mouth. To his surprise, the fluid was not nearly as harsh as the whiskey Bart had given him. He swished the drink around the inside of his mouth before swallowing it. As if the rest of the group were waiting for his cue, they too sampled Dwight’s evening beverage selection.
John downed his drink in a single gulp, placed the glass back on the tabletop, and stared straight at Dwight. “Man, that’s gotta be a two-hundred-dollar bottle of booze. That stuff is smooth.”
“Five thousand.” Dwight snorted indignantly.
It was John’s turn to snort. “Five large? You got to be kidding me.” John hooted as he fished a loaded magazine out of a pouch and waved it in front of Dwight. “This here is worth more now than that bottle of liquor.”
“You couldn’t be more right,” Dwight said with a grim look.
The men finished their first glass before Dwight poured everyone a second. Jared felt the tension in his body loosen its grip halfway through the second glass. The dead bodies of the intruders were outside and only a few yards from where the men sat drinking an unspeakably expensive bottle of whiskey, yet here they were taking a load off after a successful mission. Prior to the event, if a deer died on someone’s front lawn, there would be calls to the police, who would in turn call animal control and so on and so forth.
“You guys killed a lot of people out there,” Dwight said, breaking a lull in the conversation.
Jared could tell John was about to lay into Dwight, so he spoke up to prevent any fighting within the group. “I understand what’s going through your mind right now. From your standpoint, we killed men who were probably your neighbors and were probably just trying to feed their families. Of course, that is one way of thinking about it, but it was never our intent to do something so vicious to people with good intentions. We are living in a new world now, but that world doesn’t change the fundamental elements of right and wrong. Those men weren’t trying to trade what they had for food to feed their families; they were on your property with guns, heavy poles, two snipers, and what they felt was a well-thought-out plan to kill you and take what you spent years accumulating to survive. Was their life more valuable than yours? For that matter, was their life more valuable than your wife’s? It wasn’t. Those men were desperate, and what I’ve learned is that people who act out of desperation can be the most dangerous and reckless beings of them all. They don’t consider what is right; they don’t live by the Golden Rule; they do what they want when they want with no regard for others. What we did, however unfortunate, was get rid of people who lacked a moral compass. I don’t know, Dwight. Maybe this new world needs to start fresh and rid itself of self-serving individuals. But I also don’t know how that can be done without corruption, because the one thing history has shown us time and time again is that you can’t have extreme power without corruption.”
Jared stopped talking. It dawned on him that, while he hated the corruption and power struggle in the world, perhaps the natural repercussion of a successful society lends itself to power struggles and corruption in those who become leaders. While he thought more about this cause and effect scenario, the other men fell silent too, and Jared hoped someone would break the ice.
“We can’t bury them all, but tomorrow before we leave, we can at least lay them all out and cover them with a tarp or something,” John added.
Oh, thank goodness for John, thought Jared. He’s always thinking practically about the next step.
Jared shook his head. “No, we leave ’em as they fell. Their families and friends should see what happened here tonight, and hopefully, it will impact them in a way that leads them to do better than those men out there. Their families need to see the battering ram and know their spouses were out in the middle of the night engaging in savagery towards another man. They need to know this sort of conduct won’t be tolerated by everyone.”
The men dropped the subject after Jared’s proclamation and continued drinking whiskey until the bottle was empty. They talked about solar panels and batteries, then they talked about guns and tactics, but when there was no more whiskey and Dwight made no attempt to produce a second bottle, John stood up and stretched.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a couple of extra beds, would you?” he asked.
Dwight showed each man to his own bedroom, and for the first time since Jared had left the ranch house, he slept in a soft bed with plenty of pillows and a warm comforter. No one bothered with a security watch. John felt that anyone trying to break in would wake them in plenty of time to repel any sort of late-night nonsense. Jared, on the other hand, felt anyone sneaking around the house would see the mess out front and want nothing to do with the home’s occupants.
The following morning, Jared woke up with a wicked headache. He grabbed his gear, slung the rifle, and staggered out to the living area, where he found Barry and Dwight sitting at the kitchen island, sipping coffee. He could smell it now and see the tendrils of steam curling from the men’s cups, causing his mouth to water like a faucet and his brain to develop an urgent need.
“Is that coffee?”
Both men turned in their seats and smiled.
“It is. Would you like
