Pekot’s Bushrats approached the Victor farm on the road, with Peep and Pinch’s squads spread out in front of the main column as skirmishers. The farm compound consisted of the larger farm house with three smaller buildings behind a stone wall at the roadside. To the west of the farm was a windbreak of trees that had a larger cowshed in it. Behind it to the south was an empty cow paddock enclosed in a wooden fence. The farmhouse was securely shuttered up. Approaching the farm from the east, they had a good view of the paddock. It was obvious there was something very wrong there. Choke stopped the column about one hundred meters from the farm.
Two men had been tied to the fence on the paddock’s east side, facing the road. Just a few meters apart from each other, they were each tied to a fence post with their arms pulled tight and bound to the top rail in a crucifix pose. At that distance, it was difficult to make out much more, but the man on the left was not moving and appeared a bloody mess. The man to the right was groaning audibly.
A woman began shouting from the farmhouse. Her voice had a hysterical pitch and her words were incomprehensible. This prompted the man on the fence to begin screaming and shouting incoherently.
“Sergeant Theodas: shieldwall facing the farm! Quickly, now!” Choke barked.
Knuckle got the men in position in short order. With Peep and Pinch’s skirmish line spread out in front, they held their position for the better part of a minute. Nothing happened. Finally, the man yelled something intelligible:
“Fuck sakes! Hurry up! Help! Help!”
Choke thought for just a second before nodding to himself. He whistled at the skirmishers and gestured for them to head around the farm to the west. Peep and Pinch already had their orders to clear the windbreak tree stand behind the farm and set up a defensive position at the cow shed there. Still well spread out, the skirmishers moved onto the road and around the farm, heading towards the windbreak.
Choke, Knuckle, and Shane all dismounted and stood at the ready with their bows. The man on the fence continued to curse and yell as they waited. It was about five minutes until Pinch’s horn rang out the all-clear.
“Alright, let’s move out. To that man at the fence there. Keep an eye on the farmhouse,” Choke ordered.
He, Knuckle, and Shane mounted up. They and the spearmen moved through the field and around the edge of the farm’s stone wall, heading for the cow paddock. The farm house’s shutters had arrow slits in them, which was anxiety inducing, but there was no attack.
“Come on! Fuck! Hurry up! Please! Please! Help me! Please!” the man on the fence begged as they approached.
The man turned out to be Victor, the farmer whose cheek Peep had sliced open after stabbing him for attacking her in the farm house after she backhanded his wife, Neva. His face bore that wound, with the stitched-up slash from the corner of his mouth to the base of his jaw still swollen and ugly.
While Victor had no signs of any new wounds, the way he had been bound to the fence was clearly torturous. His neck was tightly bound to the top of the fence post and its rails, holding his head tightly in place. His arms were stretched out tight, tied to each rail to the side. This position meant his buttocks were about fifty centimeters off the ground. In order to keep himself from choking, he had to stay in a deep squat and pull up with his arms to alleviate the pressure on his neck. To further increase the discomfort, wet rawhide had been used to bind him. It was now just damp, and was shrinking as it dried in the afternoon sun.
As terrible as Victor’s position was, no one paid him any mind as the platoon reached the paddock. Everyone’s attention was fully drawn to the spectacle of the man on the fence to his right. The large burly man was tied to the fence in exactly the same manner as Victor. Clearly dead, he had no face or scalp. From the jawline up, and above the ears, the man had been skinned, leaving just red muscles and tendons over the white bone beneath. The man’s front was awash in blood, but the coup de grace was clean and obvious: a brand-new, white-fletched longbow arrow shot straight into the heart.
While the victim had no features to be recognized, there was little doubt as to who it was. Bob’s burly frame was unmistakable. Further, he still had his weaponbelt on, with its distinctive buckle. The shortsword scabbard was empty, but the heavy leather ox-clout had been left in its place.
The spectacle of Bob caused great unsettlement with the men. With the smell of teamster vomit in the air already, several of them threw up. Others yelled and cursed and otherwise flapped about like startled ducks.
Victor began to weep loudly.
“Please! Fuckin please! Pleeeeeeeeeease help me!” he bawled.
Shane was the first to get his wits about him. He sprang forward and quickly cut Victor free of the fence. The burly farmer collapsed and curled up to weep more quietly. Shane gently worked on removing the tight rawhide chords still biting into his flesh.
Realizing with a cold start that this would be a perfect time for them to be attacked, Choke blinked and shook his head sharply to break his focus away from Bob.
“Men!” he shouted. “Defensive perimeter! Now! Form up! Sergeant! Get them in position! Facing outward! Now!”
Knuckle had been slowly stepping closer and closer to Bob, leaning in to stare at his corpse intently. He, too, shook his head sharply to harness himself and began bellowing at the men.
In the center of the perimeter the men were setting up, Choke mounted Nike and stood up in the stirrups to have a better look around. The farmhouse was quiet. The fields around were empty. The surrounding woods menaced with implicit threat. Across another strip of pasture from the paddock was the cow shed in the windbreak, about fifty meters from Choke’s position. Peep was on top of the cow shed’s roof with her Scythan bow in hand. Seeing Choke notice her, she waved and raised her arms quizzically.
“Is that Bob?” she yelled.
“Yes!” Choke yelled back.
“They took his face?”
“Yes!”
“Fuck! He alive?”
“No!”
“Okay! Don’t cut him down! I wanna see that shit!” Peep waved again and jumped down off the roof to disappear into the brush behind the shed.
Choke took another minute to look around and consider the situation. Shane was still helping Victor, giving him some water from a skin. The men in their tight perimeter were on edge, but maintaining their positions, hunkered down behind their shields with their spears pointed out. Knuckle was standing by his horse with his longbow in hand.
Choke sat back in the saddle and moved Nike between Knuckle and Shane to address them both:
“Peep was right. This spectacle was the whole point of this. Once Victor is composed enough, we will have to talk to him about what happened. And we’ll need to clean Bob up. So we’ll be here for a little while. That means we need to better secure that windbreak. You fought in there, Knuckle. You should take over in there.”
Knuckle nodded.
Shane did as well before adding: “Sounds good, LT. Not a bad position, here, if the farmhouse is secure. We should clear that. Then, we’re in the open here, so we could use the ranged men. Miss Otilla’s bow, for sure.”
“Yes. Good. Thank you, Shane,” Choke said. He looked to Knuckle: “Sergeant. Take Corporal Oscar and whatever men you want and relieve Peep and Pinch at the cowshed. Keep the two shortbows and send the slingers and the others back with Peep and Pinch. Then, push a bit further south into the windbreak towards the hill to a defensive position. Signal us when you’re in position. Then, hold there. Keep watch out to the west, as well. Questions?”
“No, sir.”
“Good. Get on it.”
Knuckle and Osgar took six of their best spearmen through the paddock and to the cowshed. Peep and Pinch came back with the three slingers and seven of the ten spearmen that had gone with them to skirmish. Choke signaled for Pinch to get their men into defensive perimeter. Pinch did so gratefully, having just glanced quickly at Bob before turning away with a deep shudder.
Peep, however, immediately went straight up to the grotesque corpse. She leaned in close to the skinned face, peering at it intently. Then she ran her fingers through the flights of the longbow arrow in Bob’s chest.
“Yes. So much for whimsy,” Choke said to her.
“They worked him over pretty good before they took his face,” Peep said, gesturing to his hands. “Both thumbs cut off. Stumps burned. And his fingers here are all fucked up. Smashed and twisted. So they had a good conversation with him. And not here, I reckon. No thumbs,” Peep said, looking around on the ground. “Unless they kept them, along with his face,” she shrugged.
Choke nodded and sighed deeply. “That’s enough. Let’s get him off the fence, now. Shane, can you help me get him down?” Choke asked as he dismounted.
Shane and Choke cut Bob off the fence and laid him down on his back. Choke then covered him up with his cloak. The arrow in his chest made a tent of it.
Peep had stepped to stand over Victor. With her bow still in hand, she was glowering up at the break in the trees up on the overlooking hill that marked the observation spot on the trail.
With Bob settled, Choke and Shane moved back over to Victor as well. Choke looked to Shane and gestured at Victor: “Is he going to be able to speak to us?”
Shane shrugged and stood up. “If he wants, I reckon. He was hollering up a storm before,” Shane said.
“Oh, he wants to, alright,” Peep said with a sharp edge of menace as she turned to look down on Victor. “Ye hear me, fuckface? Yar talking to us now. Don’t fuck around. I’m in no mood.”
“Oh, no shit?” Victor said, sitting up to glare at Peep. He managed to hold her eye for a long second before looking away. Shifting over to lean back against his fence post, Victor drew his knees up into his chest and began massaging his wrists. “I’ll do as he said and tell ye what he told me to. So let’s get the fuck on with it, huh?”
“Who now? What who told ye?” Peep asked sharply.
“Who the fuck d’ye think? Sneed! Ye were asking us about him before, right? And we didn’t know him. Well, I’ve fuckin met him now!”
“Yeah, looks like. So, before we get to that: anything going on in that shitheap that we need to be worried about?” Peep asked, gesturing at the fine farmhouse with her bow.
“No! You leave them be!” Victor yelled, looking like he might try to stand up.
Peep rolled her eyes and made a calming gesture towards him.
Shane cleared his throat and leaned in: “We should get them to open up. We need to clear that house. A middling archer could have any one of us from in there.”
“Yeah, and then the rest of us hit the dirt and burn the fuckin place down with them in it. Sneed aint in there. He aint that dumb. Besides which, I don’t wanna hear none of their bullshit. They got a shrieking cretin in there. And a bitch that can’t seem to help but run her mouth. No sense giving her another chance to piss me off. Let’s just not flip that rock over, huh?”
Shane nodded his assent.
“Okay, ye hear that, fuckface? Tell us what we need to hear and we’ll get the fuck outta here. What happened?” Peep asked Victor.
“Whad’ye think happened? Sneed showed up with three guys.”
“And Bob, right?” Peep interjected.
“Yeah. And Bob. They dragged him here behind a horse on a rope.”
“His hands were fucked up already?”
“What? I don’t know! I guess. He was fucked up, but I weren’t looking at his fuckin hands. They didn’t do nothing to them here, anyways. He was pretty bloody already, though.”
“How’d they approach? Where’d they come from?” Peep asked.
“Outta the bush there. Same way you did, last time.” Victor gestured over to the tree line of the hill to the south at the point where the forested windbreak came out towards the house.
“And they left that way too?”
“I don’t fuckin know! I weren’t in a position to look around, now was I!”
“Fair enough. So, Sneed and his three guys ride up dragging Bob with them, and you and yar lot are here doing yar farming bullshit, I guess. So, then what?”
“Not like that, no. They crept up on us. The Sneed boss and two of the guys. Rounded us up. Then the fourth guy drug Bob outta the bush there. They sat us all in the dirt here and tied Bob to the fence. Then… then…” Victor closed his eyes and started breathing heavily. It took a long moment before he could continue: “Then Sneed says that we’re being punished for helping you before. That Bob talked to ye about Dixon and stuff. And that Rodolf did, too, and we didn’t stop him. So we gotta get punished, too.”
Victor broke down had had to take another minute to compose himself. Peep looked like she wanted to kick him, but held her irritation in check. Finally, Victor went on, weeping as he did:
“They put everyone but me back in the house. Then they tied me to the fence, too. Sneed says they’re gonna do to me same as Bob. Then, I can’t see what they’re doing, but Bob started screaming real bad. Screaming so bad. I can’t see what’s happening, but I figure it’s gotta be Kerl skinning his face, because he’s known for that shit. And then, just sudden like, Bob stops. He just stops, and it’s quiet. Just quiet,” Victor shuddered. He took another long moment.
Everyone was dead silent as they stared at Victor, transfixed. Finally, he spoke:
“Then Sneed comes right up to me on the fence. And he gets right up close, in my face. And he says to me that he’s Sneed. That he speaks for the Outfit. That we all know we done wrong by them. That he could, by rights, take my face, too. But he aint gonna. He tells me to tell everybody what they done to Bob, and why. And that I gotta stay on this fence until you come here. Bob, too. We gotta be on the fence until Lieutenant Pekot and the Bushrats come and cut us down. He said he’d be nearby watching. And that when ye get here, I gotta tell ye exactly what they done and what he said. And that if anybody cuts us down before ye get here, they’re gonna come back and take my face and kill everyone slow afterwards. And he also says to me to tell everybody in the whole town and around that they’ve been told now. Anybody that helps ye is fair game. And that goes for yar soldiers, too. Ye’ve all been told. Anybody that helps the Pekot Bunch is gonna wind up just like Bob, sooner or later. And then they left.”
It was quiet for a while. Finally, Peep hawked and spat.
“And what about Klim?” she asked.
“What the fuck about Klim? Whad’ye mean?” Victor returned.
“Well, he come here to find his man, Bob. What happened?”
“Whad’ye think fuckin happened? They make a fuckin racket and then go to cut Bob down. I holler at them what Sneed said about doing that before your lot gets here. And soon as I says his name, they fuck off right quick.”
“So that was that. They just left their man on the fence,” Peep said, mostly to herself.
“No, they cut him down and gave him a funeral and everything. What the fuck d’ye think?” Victor snapped at her.
“Hey. Don’t get cheeky now,” said Peep, pointing sharply at Victor.
Choke took a step forward and cleared his throat to interject:
“So, Victor. That’s everything? That’s all you were told to say?”
“Yeah. That’s everything, Lieutenant Pekot. Sir,” Victor said, his voice quivering with rage.
“Alright then. I know this is meaningless coming from me, but I am sorry. Thank you for telling us. We will leave you alone now. If there is anything we can do for you, or if you need anything, please ask. We will help you and your people however we can. Although I do understand that you probably would prefer to be left alone. So, again, I apologize for what happened to you and your family today. Is there anything we can do for you now?”
“No. No, sir.”
“Very well. I understand. You may go to your family. We will need to be here for just a little longer while we tend to Bob. Again: thank you. And, again: I am sorry.”
Victor said nothing. He rolled to his hands and knees with a groan and began to struggle to his feet. Shane stepped in to support him. Victor accepted the help. Then he turned his back on everyone and slowly, painfully, staggered to the farmhouse.
Muse Vassal 