Cory
“We’ve got trouble,” he says to his brother who is working in the equipment shed on the tractor. Winter time is when they do repairs and maintain the farm equipment and vehicles and as much as they can on buildings. There is no such thing as downtime on a farm, he’s learned.
His brother’s head jerks up from the open hood of the tractor, “What’s going on?”
A second later, John walks casually over from whatever he was working on at the other end of the building. He is wiping his greasy hands on a rag. “The prisoner?”
“No, sir,” Cory tells him. “The Professor just called in. He and Sam heard gunshots up on the ridge somewhere.”
His brother’s eyes dart to John, and they immediately jump into action. John literally runs out of the barn as Kelly tosses the wrench back into the toolbox beside him. Then he jogs beside Cory toward the horse barn.
“I’ll take the ATV,” he says and splits off in another direction.
Cory’s stallion is in the riding arena separating him from the mares. He easily catches him and leads the beast to the horse barn where he has him under tack in three minutes flat. The horse knows something is going on because his eyes are wild and he prances as if doing dressage. Cory swings into the saddle without the stirrup and spins him in a tight circle so that he can face the house.
“I’m going!” he shouts and gets a wave from Derek, who is standing near the back porch talking to John. Damn Dog is right on the horse’s feet and barks twice to let him know she’s down for the fight.
His horse’s hooves thunder on the ground. It’s been relatively dry this week other than the snow the other day. But it has already melted, and the temperature has dropped, so the ground is hard. He hopes he doesn’t take a spill from Jett because falling off on hard, frozen ground is way worse than soft.
On his hip, the radio chatter is almost constant now. John says, “I’m taking the car. I’ll circle out on the road and head northwest.”
His brother relays, “I’m halfway to the ridge. Professor, what’s your position?”
“We’re about a hundred yards northwest of the top pasture,” he answers.
“Gotcha’,” Kelly says.
“Give me a few, and I’ll be there, too,” Cory tells them.
“Roger,” his brother answers.
His concern for his wife and daughter bubbles to the surface, so Cory presses the button on his radio again, “Derek, get Paige.”
“Already doing it, brother,” his friend answers.
He breathes a sigh of relief and pushes the stallion even harder up a steep hill. The animal doesn’t even pant. He’s ready for this. He’s always ready. Cory keeps him in top shape, runs and exercises him a lot. He could’ve been a twelfth-century war horse. He knows something is afoot. Cory can feel a tenseness in his broad back and an extra tightening of his shoulder muscles. He’s quite sure the horse can feel the same thing from him.
When they break through the forest and into the top meadow, Cory slows him and murmurs, “Easy, boy. Easy.”
He tightens his hold on the reins and follows the path Simon and Sam just took, which is easy to see because they’d cut a straight line across the pasture, smashing down the dead grasses and weeds as they went. He gives the horse his head again, and they fly across the open meadow in lightning speed. He leads him over a fallen log in the path as they enter the forest again, and Jett easily jumps it. The ground in front of him shows him evidence of Simon and Sam coming through here by the fresh prints from their horses.
“We’re near the big boulder, Cor,” Simon’s voice comes over the radio.
“Roger,” he answers, knowing exactly where he means. There’s a huge rock, rounded and smooth from a hundred years of weathering marking a natural overhang of earth and slate rock. He’d gone out there many times to get away and think. It’s about a mile from the farm. He and Huntley had even carved their names into the old rock.
Within a few minutes, Cory has found them. They are waiting with their horses and are dismounted.
“What’s going on?” he asks and looks around him with edgy nerves. The horse knows it and prances once. “Easy.”
Sam immediately tells him, “We were…well, we stopped to fetch my hat when it fell off, and we heard gunshots.”
“You sure?” he asks Simon, knowing he has a lot more experience with long-range shooting than any of them.
“Oh, yes. It was gunshots. First, it was just the one. Then we heard three more. Then nothing. Probably a pistol, .38.”
Kelly pulls up on the ATV from a newly formed path they’ve been working on clearing for the past year. It was a lot of work but helps in times like this. Now they have a point of entry and exit from all four directions on their property. If anyone is within the farm’s boundaries, then they’ve climbed over fences or barriers to get there. Unless they came in up here. The sheer length of the perimeter makes it challenging to fence this part in completely. They build more every summer, but this past season was spent hunting assholes.
“Which direction?” Kelly asks.
Simon points to their north. “We think from there. I was just waiting for you.”
“Good call,” Kelly praises. “I’m gonna circle back. See if I missed anything. Cor, you and Simon head north. I’ll flank and meet you up there.”
“What about me?” Sam asks with her tiny voice. It makes Cory a little antsy having her out here with them, but it’s too late to take her back.
“Stay close, little sister,” he warns and swings his mount back onto the path they normally take. “Be vigilant. Watch for tracks, blood, anything that looks disturbed.”
“Got it,” Sam answers.
There are probably a thousand or more acres of woods ahead of them until they would meet up with John on the road. At Jett’s hooves is Damn Dog, and she is more than ready. She even whines once before they move forward.
“Go, girl,” he says with urgency, which sends her into a quick, tight spin before she takes off at a sprint ahead of them.
Cory starts at a slow trot, although his horse would like to run. He keeps his reins short, Jett’s head bent down toward his chest in order to control him. They’ve been in this situation many times together, and the animal knows what to expect.
Without talking or making too much noise, they move together in a row until it opens up enough to ride side by side here and there.
His radio crackles on his hip. A second later, John says, “I’ve got fresh truck tracks up here.”
“Nothing yet on our end,” Simon answers him.
“Roger,” John states. “I’ll wait for you.”
Cory can only imagine that John is frustrated. He is a man of action, not waiting around. He picks up the pace, gives the horse his head just a bit. Suddenly, Damn Dog somewhere ahead of them begins barking, so Cory bumps his right heel into Jett’s side, and the horse begins cantering. Simon and Sam follow right behind until they come to the source of the dog’s barking. He spots her quickly enough at the base of a hill. Cory swings a leg over the stallion’s head and tosses the reins to Samantha.
“Wait here, Sam,” he orders and jogs down a short ravine toward the dog, who is pawing at the ground and barking loudly.
Simon is right behind him and calls out, “What is it?”
“Not sure yet.”
Cory is able to get his dog to calm down, and she resorts to whining and pawing at the ground.
“Easy, girl,” he states and steps carefully around the thick underbrush and bushes near a full maple tree.
Simon has turned his back to him and is guarding the surrounding area as he stalks closer. His dog stays right with him until she finds it necessary to rush ahead of him to their left. And that’s when Cory sees it. The human corpse covered in branches as if the murderer attempted to hide the body. The legs are still showing, though. Whoever did this, did whatever this is, didn’t do a very good job of hiding the evidence. If it just happened, they took off in a rush.
“Simon!” he yells to his friend, who joins him a few seconds later.
“What… oh,” he says when his eyes lock onto the body. “Whoa.”
Cory squats and removes the two bigger branches concealing the body and rolls the person onto their back. She has been shot multiple times and is clearly dead. Simon takes her pulse, even though Cory could tell him not to bother. He doesn’t. Simon is a doctor and probably feels obligated to make sure.
“Shit,” he says as he looks at the woman lying there, her sightless eyes staring up at the cloud cover above the treetops.
“Oh my God!” Simon blurts and covers his mouth. “Damn.”
“What?”
Simon pauses a moment as if he can’t find words. “I know her. That’s…that’s a girl from Robert’s compound. She brought us stuff. She ran errands for the general and the doctors. What the hell was her name? Sara…Sally…I can’t remember. She’s the sister of another girl there named Sofia! What’s her name? Isabella! That’s it. That was her name. I remember. She came in when her sister wasn’t working and brought stuff. She was nice.”
“She’s from Knox?”
“Yes, she worked there. She worked with us in the medical center, too. She and her sister look a lot alike. I actually thought it was Sofia when I first saw her lying there. Sofia’s taller, though. And has blonde hair, not brown.”
“What the fuck is she doing down here?”
“I don’t know. Visiting people? Dr. Avery said Sofia’s sister, this girl, was in a sex slave camp in Nashville, but I don’t know much else about her. Just that their family was killed and the sister ended up there.”
Cory thinks about this for a second before asking, “The one we broke up?”
Simon gives a one-shouldered shrug, “Not sure. I can only assume. That was my first thought, too.”
“Wonder where the sister is? Is she at the fort now? Does she even know her sister left it? What the fuck, man? Why is she here so close to the farm?”
He shrugs again, “I don’t know. I never got to talk to her. Just the few times she brought us papers or samples. She was really shy. The sister, too. Sofia has a scar on her neck that made me think something bad happened to her.”
“You don’t know where any of her family is? If they’re around here? Maybe in our town?”
“I don’t know. Dr. Avery acted like the sister and her were all that was left in their family. It was weird, though.”
“What was?”
Simon frowns and says, “I don’t know how to explain it. Sofia just acted like she knew me, the way that she looked at me.”
“Like you knew her?”
He shrugs again. “Kind of. Like she was familiar with me.”
“And you’d never met her before?”
Simon shakes his head. “No, she didn’t look familiar. I kind of wrote it off to maybe I treated her at the clinic in our town once or something.”
“Maybe it was the sister you treated,” Cory states, trying to sort this all out. “I mean, we did take in a lot of those women from that camp and so did other communities. Chances are if we absorbed both sisters into our town, you’ve treated one or both of them.”
“Hm, yes, you could be right,” he says with a scowl.
“What is it?”
He shakes his head.
“Si? What’s going through your big brain, little brother?”
“Let me work this out for a minute,” he says and walks away. “We need to tell John and Kelly what’s going on, and I don’t want Sam sitting up there without us for very long. Someone just did this, just killed her. Her body is still warm.”
Damn Dog follows obediently after them as they climb the hill back to the horses.
“Let’s pick up the pace,” Cory suggests and receives nods of accord from them. Then he digs his left heel into the stallion’s side, and they fly over the ground. Twenty minutes later, and after following a fresh trail from an ATV that is not from Kelly, Cory is lead to the road where they quickly find John waiting for them next to the truck. “We found tracks. ATV.”
Kelly comes flying around the corner on his own ATV, one with different tires than the set they found in the forest on the trail leading to the road just now. He cuts the engine and joins them where Cory and Sam fill him in on what’s happening. Simon is quietly pacing, looking off into the distance, and occasionally brings his rifle to his shoulder to spy through it.
“I don’t understand why someone from Fort Knox would be down here on our property in the first place,” John questions.
“Me, neither,” Sam agrees. “That’s weird. Usually if Parker or one of Robert’s men is going to bring people here, they call it in to Grandpa on the radio first.”
“You wouldn’t call it in if you were going to kill the person you’re traveling with,” Cory says.
“Yeah, but usually they don’t travel with one person at a time,” Kelly reminds them. “When Robert sends a group, it’s usually at least six men. And only a few times has he sent a group that had a woman in it. That’s only because Marissa has experience in the military, too.”
“Yeah, she was cool,” John states, remembering her.
“But I’ve never seen that girl or her sister come with them. And why is she dead?” Cory speculates.
Simon walks over to them in a rush, “Maybe she came to warn us. Maybe she overheard me talking to Dr. Avery about figuring out who Angelica is and she knew. Maybe she didn’t feel comfortable coming forward with the information to me when I was there for some reason.”
A silence falls over them while they consider Simon’s theory.
“Sam, I…,” Simon starts but stops and frowns.
“What?” she asks.
Simon runs a hand over the lower half of his face in a universal sign of stress before saying, “I think I might have something figured out. I have a request.”
“What is it?” she asks more hesitantly this time.
Simon swallows hard, and his left eye twitches. “Would you be willing to draw her? The dead woman? Isabella?”
“What?” Sam says on a gasp. “Simon, gross. No.”
“I know,” he says and holds up a hand. “I know. And it is gross. I’m sorry even to have to ask. It’s just that…I can’t explain it. I think we need to have a drawing of her. She looks a lot like her sister.”
“So?” John asks.
Kelly even puts in, “Yeah, dude, that’s asking a lot. Sam doesn’t want to do that. And I sure as hell don’t blame her.”
“Why?” Sam asks, stepping closer to Simon and staring at him with a queer, speculative expression. It’s as if she is picking up on something in Simon that the rest of them can’t see. Cory sure doesn’t. He agrees with his brother. Drawing a dead woman is a pretty nasty thing to have to do.
“I just have a hunch. And half of a theory,” he explains. Then he shakes his head and makes to say something else when Sam stops him.
“Yeah, I’ll do it, Simon,” she tells them with a nod. “I trust you. I know you wouldn’t have me do something like that if it weren’t necessary.”
He nods solemnly and places a hand on the outside of her shoulder just briefly. “Thanks.”
“But who the hell killed her?” John asks. “We still don’t have an answer to that.”
“What if someone was chasing her or following her and realized she was coming here to tell us pertinent details about the President or the highwaymen or Angelica?” Simon puts forth.
Cory inhales and holds it while thinking it through. “Man, that’s a lot of effort to go to in order to stop someone from talking to us. And it’s murder.”
“What’s murder when you’ve already been responsible for so many others?” his friend asks.
“Good point,” Cory concurs with a single nod.
“Let’s see if we can find where this picks up,” Kelly says of the trail near their feet.
“I’m going high,” John states and walks around to get something out of the truck. He pockets the keys after locking it. “See you in an hour? Back here?”
“You know it,” Kelly says and bumps his fist to his best friend’s.
“Cor, you run south and east and meet Kelly near the old entrance to the farm,” John orders. “I know it’s a long ride, brother, but we need to see if we can’t pick up on something.”
“Oh, hey,” Sam says quickly. “Simon also found a patch of fabric. Show them, Simon.”
His friend pulls a two-inch by four-inch square of plaid fabric from his jacket pocket and shows them.
“Anyone recognize this from our own clothing?” Simon asks.
“Not mine, brother,” Kelly says, shaking his head.
John steps closer and looks at it, “Me, neither. I’ve got a blue flannel shirt, but it’s darker than that.”
“Not mine,” Cory also adds. “Where did you find that?”
“Closer to the farm,” Simon says with gravity. “Too close.”
“Shit,” Kelly states. “How’d they not hit any of our trip wires?”
They are silent a moment thinking about this when Simon states with clarity, “They know where they are. They’ve been here before.”
“Son of a bitch,” Kelly growls.
“Let’s move,” John orders and slings his rifle over his shoulder. His friend looks ready to murder. He’s seen this many times and figures his own face mirrors John’s.
“I’m taking Sam back,” Simon tells them, to which he nods.
Kelly steps in to say, “Good idea. Get her out of here in case whoever did that to that girl is still close.”
“Take Damn Dog with you,” Cory says, wanting his dog to offer them a better set of ears so that they don’t get ambushed.
Simon boosts Samantha into her saddle and instructs her to go ahead of him. Then he sends a nod over his shoulder to Cory, which he returns.
“Come on, girl,” Simon calls to the dog, who whines once and looks at Cory.
“Go on, go,” Cory says to her.
She immediately follows after Simon and then shoots ahead of them. Cory spurs his horse again and sends him into a canter along the muddy and gravel former backcountry road, the same fateful road he ran alongside his brother and Em and John when he first came to the McClane farm. His mind is racing even faster than the horse’s hooves beneath him. None of this makes sense. They are missing something here. And that one thing they aren’t linking is what could get them all killed like that girl back there, left to rot in the woods as if her life didn’t mean a thing to anyone. She meant something to her sister, and someone is going to have to get word to her of what happened to her only living relative. They will also need to bury her to prevent predators from coming around.
Cory catches sight of the ATV tracks again and knows that they aren’t from his brother. Kelly had come in from the opposite direction. They take a sharp left turn and veer up over a short mound of frozen mud and back into the woods. They sometimes run this route when they are returning from Clarksville or Coopertown and are trying to avoid the main roads. The path is wide enough for a truck, but most of the time ATV’s are the vehicle of choice in this area. Cory proceeds with caution and encourages the horse onto the path.
“I’m taking the CC path,” he radios in so as to avoid friendly fire. This is the nickname they’ve given this trail. It doesn’t lead directly back to the farm, but it does lead to a main road and then down to the freeway.
“Roger,” John’s response comes first. Then Kelly also answers.
One set of ATV tracks wider than the ones on their farm keeps on going right on their trail as if the person driving it knew of the trail’s existence and was familiar with the route. They can’t be that far ahead of him if they just killed the girl by the gunshots that Simon and Sam heard. Maybe ten minutes or so? He’d rushed the trail to get to Simon as soon as he could. Another ten minutes of finding the girl and talking with his brother and John. Maybe the perpetrator is twenty minutes ahead of him.
His horse spooks as the sound of far-off gunfire hits their ears at the same time. Cory pulls him to a stop and waits a moment.
“Did anyone else hear that?” he says into his radio.
“Yeah, it’s east of me, your direction, Cor,” Kelly returns. “I’m coming your way.”
“It’s northeast of my position. I think it might’ve been from the road,” John says next. “Everyone, meet there.”
Cory knows that is a distance off still and digs his heel into the horse’s side to make him jump into motion. They tear up the ground as they go and crash through brush and ground cover as they move out. He is less heedless of being shot at than he is of missing the action of whatever is taking place. The fact that someone was just killed near the McClane farm is enough to make him take a jump over a fallen tree at a pace that is probably too fast and not as safe as he should be.
He makes it to the top of the ridge and waits before going out onto the road. The gunfire has stopped, but he isn’t about to lose his cover by traipsing out into the open like an idiot and getting himself shot. From his current position, he can guess that the shots came from the east of him. His horse snorts once, and Cory has to place a gentling hand on his thick neck.
“I’m at the road,” he says into his radio.
“Proceed with caution,” Kelly warns. “You’re ahead of us.”
He backs Jett up a few feet and turns tight into the woods again. He’s going to have to push the horse through underbrush and around branches and fallen trees. He isn’t going out into the open. He’ll run parallel with the road until he can see what he’s up against. It isn’t their first time doing something like this. The horse is used to this sort of hardship. It’s just that when Cory used to have to push him into a dense, uncleared portion of forest, he would cover the front of him with a wool saddle blanket so that he didn’t get scratched up. This time, he didn’t get enough advance warning of what they’d be doing, so he takes his time and tries to pick carefully around pricker bushes and watches out for protrusions sticking out of broken trees so that the horse doesn’t get stabbed. He also doesn’t want him to cry out in pain and give them up.
“McClane base, come in,” Wayne Reynolds comes over his radio.
“Gotcha’ loud and clear, Wayne,” Cory answers immediately.
“Just took on some heavy fire up here on the road,” he returns. “Anyone else having trouble today?”
“What’s your position?” Cory asks.
There is a pause before he says, “At the end of our road. Someone went around the barrier, and I think I startled him.”
“Shit,” Cory says under his breath.
“Chased him off,” Wayne tells him. “Whoever it was, they’re gone now.”
“We’re coming to you,” John interjects.
Cory feels it is safe enough to ride on the road since the Reynolds farm and the Johnson farm is past them on the road. That makes sense. The fallen tree abatisse is the last thing on their shared, gravel road. They hardly use the road at all. They’ve created new roads, rehabbed old oil well access roads to use so that they could covertly move on and off of their farms without leaving a traceable trail to outsiders. It also narrowed down their points of ingress and egress to their farms. It has worked almost perfectly until now.
Within minutes they are gathered, the four of them on the road closer to the Johnson farm.
“What the hell’s going on?” Wayne asks as if they will know.
Kelly shakes his head, “Another dead body. Close to our farm in the woods. We’re not sure.”
“Did you get a good look at the person who took a shot at you?” John asks, cutting in.
“No, I don’t know who it was,” he answers. “He also had on a mask and some sort of hat or toboggan. It was hard to see. It happened so fast.”
“What happened exactly?” Cory asks.
He shakes his head and runs a hand through his hair before answering, “I don’t know, man. I was just up here running a morning patrol. Dogs seemed sort of antsy or something. I figured it was a predator. A fox or a coyote, you know.”
“But it wasn’t,” Kelly states.
“No, it sure as hell wasn’t. Just as I was walking back, some asshole comes flying out of the woods on a four-wheeler. Almost hit me. Son of a bitch,” he mutters. “I fell down and twisted my ankle. When I got up, the fucker was shootin’ at me. I shot back, but he got away.”
“What did the ATV look like?” John asks.
“Didn’t get a good look, really,” he replies. “Camo? Olive green? Not sure I can say.”
“And it was just the one and just the one driver?”
He nods. “Yeah, unless others already went through and he got separated and left behind.”
This makes Cory even more nervous. Could there have been a group of people on the farm other than the person who killed the poor woman in the woods? He saw two sets of tracks.
They speak with Wayne a while longer and decide to split up, gather more people, and do a more comprehensive search. By the time they depart, every family on their road is sending people out. It’s going to be a long day of tracking and hunting, but Cory is up for the task. Someone got close to the farm, and it’s not the first time. It’s also not the first time that people have turned up dead near their farm. Somehow it is all connected. Now they just have to figure out how.