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Western adventure Western romance
Amazon
Lulu
Category:
Western
Type: Fiction
Pages: 263
Price: $2.94 (eBook)
The story of a young boy who finds himself in the company of a woman who is hell bent on getting justice for him against the men who raped and murdered his mother.
After witnessing the shooting of his father and the brutal rape and killing of his mother, Ben is left alone and bewildered after the killers ride away.
However, he is soon befriended by a magnificent, tall and beautiful woman whose sense of justice leads her to drag the boy across the western lands in search of the men who committed the atrocity against his mother with the intention of getting revenge for the boy.
It isn't long however, before Ben comes to realise that the woman, Ruth, is more than a little crazy and despite her beauty and enigmatic charm, she is a violent killer who thinks nothing of slitting the throat of anybody she considers to be a threat to her or the boy. But by then, he has fallen under her spell and blindly follows her into one danger after another until the final and brutal showdown where both he and the woman find themselves facing a bloody and violent death.
Excerpt
I felt the tears stinging my eyes and rolling down my cheeks as three or four of the men piled in and joined the first man. They scrambled together like a pack of wolves on top of my mother. They were grunting and gibbering like monkeys as they tore off her clothes and pawed at her almost lifeless body and all I could do was cry like a cowardly army deserter, unable, or unwilling to involve myself in what was happening to the woman who had given birth and raised me for the past fourteen years. The only thing left to me was to pray to whatever entity there was, that it would be over soon and that those vicious desperados would ride away and leave us in peace. Only then, coward that I was, would I be willing to climb down from the roof and tend my mother.
The abuse went on for what to me, seemed a lifetime. I buried my face in my hands to try and block out what was happening. But the picture of those animals piling in like vultures to get at the best bits of meat, had imprinted on my mind and all I could do was wait and listen to the grunting and groaning and animalistic sounds they made from all the effort they were putting in during the depraved and ferocious rape of my mother.
Eventually, quietness descended apart from a few voices talking and the occasional laugh. I lifted my tear stained face from where it had been buried in the crook of my arm and fearfully, surveyed the scene below.
There were seven of them sitting in a ragged circle on the ground. They were talking softly and grinning as they passed round a bottle of whiskey seemingly oblivious to the naked, still form of my mother’s bruised and broken body as she lay face down in the dirt
I felt anger rising inside me and I wanted to tear each grinning and smug face from their heads and stamp them into the dirt. There was murder in my heart for what they had done to my Ma and Pa and the cold and contemptuous way in which they had carried out their vile deeds. However, I did not know if it was self-preservation and cowardice, or wisdom in the knowledge that I would surely be killed should I challenge them that persuaded me to stay hidden. I convinced myself that I would be of no use to anyone and unable to help my mother if she was still alive, if I gave myself away.
I stayed put and after a few moments, the leader of the bunch spoke.
‘Ok we have been here long enough. Let’s take whatever is worth taking and get the hell out, we have got a long way to travel.’
They dispersed and began to search around for stuff that would be useful to them. We had nothing of any real value on the farm apart from the livestock and an old wagon that we used to transport Alfalfa to Salina but, it appeared that what we had was what they wanted.
They butchered one of the two cows we owned, cutting prime chunks of meat from the carcass which they wrapped in curtains and loaded onto the wagon. Then they set about catching chickens and putting them, still alive into burlap sacks and throwing them into the wagon along with the two hogs we owned which they had hogtied so that they couldn’t escape. After they had collected all the livestock and tossed them into the wagon, they tied the other cow to a ring at the back and harnessed our mule to the shafts. Finally, they ransacked the house and loaded sacks full of our belongings into the wagon along with everything my Ma and Pa had built up from that unforgiving land.
After around three hours during which they killed, cooked and ate three of the chickens along with some flatbread and cookies my Ma had baked earlier as well as drinking our coffee, they were ready to leave.
My Ma hadn’t moved all the time they were ransacking the farm and loading the wagon and I figured she must be dead. None of the men going about their business of dismantling in a few hours everything that my parents had taken a lifetime to build, paid her any mind at all, not one of them had the humanity to cover her nakedness and show at least a little respect for her dignity.
I watched them leave and stayed put for long after they had disappeared from view fearing they might, for some reason, return and catch me.
At long last and when I was absolutely certain they wouldn’t be returning, I ventured to the ladder and urged my stiff limbs to carry me down one rung at a time before hurrying round the building to go to my Ma.
I had never seen a naked woman in my entire life before let alone my own mother. So it was, with a certain amount of trepidation and a great deal of embarrassment, that I approached her. But approach her I must. I needed to find out if she was still alive and if so, try to help if at all possible. However, my knowledge was very limited where injuries were concerned and practically none existent with life threatening afflictions.
I knelt beside my poor broken Momma and saw that her entire body was covered in bruises and abrasions where she had been man handled, punched, pinched, bitten and abused in every way. I looked at her bruised face and swollen, bloodied lips and I began to blubber like an infant which in many ways, I was. My tears came large and fast and rolled down my cheeks and onto my lips, finally dripping from my chin onto my Momma’s once lovely, face. I sobbed uncontrollably as I gazed down at her swollen lips, lips that had felt soft and warm when she had so often kissed my cheek when I was younger as she tucked me up in my small sleeping pallet for the night.
‘Hey,’ said a voice behind me.
I squealed like girl and tried to scramble to my feet, but only succeeded in falling backwards onto my butt. I scrambled backwards to escape whoever had spoken fearing that somehow the ruffians had doubled back to kill me. As I skittered backwards on my hands and feet I looked up to see where the threat was coming from and who had spoken. When I saw the speaker, I stopped my backwards rush and froze, rooted to the spot as I gazed mesmerised into the beautiful, smiling face of a goddess.
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