Jeff Brackett - Half Past Midnight

The last man succeeded in getting his barrel up, but I was practically on top of him. I slid right, parried the rifle barrel, and slipped up alongside him. A head butt and a hard uppercut broke his nose and cracked ribs, loosening his grip on the rifle. I yanked it out of his grasp and slammed the butt into his diaphragm as hard as I could. He went to his knees with a wheezing exhalation, gagging until I silenced him with the rifle stock on the base of his skull.

I whirled to see how Ken was doing just in time to see the last of his two drop to the ground, bleeding profusely from the neck. Looking back toward the oak tree, I saw Megan jumping down from the lowest branch.

It was over.

Less than ten seconds had passed since Megan’s first shot. Megan’s two were unequivocally dead, as were both of Ken’s. Of my group, two were dead, and one was dying with a knife in his back. The last one was unconscious with a bloody nose, broken ribs, and a nasty bump on the back of his skull.

With no minor trepidation, I yanked the knife from the spine of the dying freebooter, knowing as I did so that it would likely kill him. It did, leaving us with a lone survivor and an ethical question that none of us wanted to deal with.

Should we kill him, finishing what we had started, or rather, what they had started? Or should we let him live? To be, or not to be? This perverted version of Hamlet’s dilemma now faced us squarely in the guise of this helpless young man.

“Kill him,” Ken said bluntly. He looked at me with the pained expression of a person caught between two equally distasteful choices. “You’re the one who said we would have to kill them all.”

He pointed to the unconscious form on the ground. “Kill him, and it’s over.”

He was right but, still, I hesitated, my emotions clashing with my logic. “How will you feel about it when we do kill him?”

I intentionally used the plural pronoun so that he couldn’t distance himself from the event. “He’s beaten and helpless. Hell, Ken, he may die anyway! But do you really want to live with the idea that we killed him in cold blood?”

“Don’t try that judge, jury, and executioner philosophical crap on me! This guy is a murderer and a rapist! He and his buddies killed John and Pat. How many others have they killed? For that matter, how many more would they have killed if we hadn’t gotten them today?”

“I don’t know.” I shook my head wearily. I was exhausted, tired of the whole situation, both mentally and physically. Still shaking my head, I handed Ken the crimson coated knife that I had just pulled from the other man. “If you’re that determined, if you are that sure you’re right, then go ahead. Because I honestly don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong at this point. All I know is, I don’t want anything to do with it.” I took the coward’s way out and headed for the house.

Megan followed behind me, and we left Ken staring at the bloody knife in his hand.

A couple of minutes after Megan and I walked into the house, I heard the back door slam behind us. Turning, I saw Ken standing in the kitchen with the would-be bandit slung over his shoulders. “We need to get him to the hospital.”

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.