They backed into the shadows before they stood up. I stayed right where I was and they passed within five feet of me. I could have taken them right there. Hit them hard from one side and let Baskerville close the trap from the other side. And maybe I should have. The nature of gathering intelligence is that you have to understand the larger picture and I didn’t want to fall into the assumption trap. Sure, they were hardcases and their necklaces were not the post-apocalyptic version of Boy Scout merit badges. That said, it didn’t mean they were actually evil. Maybe the trophies came from zombies they’d killed. I couldn’t tell without a closer examination. For all I knew, they could be rough-edged good guys working to protect a group of travelers. Hell, from any distance I looked like rough trade myself.

Add to that math the bodies in the clearing. I couldn’t easily concoct a scenario where these guys were responsible for that. Some of those people had been there for a long time, and if these men were just now assessing the sentry patterns, then it seemed likely they were newcomers. Which meant that the people on the other side of that wall could be bad guys.

Maybe, maybe not. They could have put those poor bastards in the clearing as a warning. Each of those zombies could have been a scavenger or some other kind of bad guy, and the clearing could be a place of public execution. Harsh, sure, but these were End Times. Harsh seemed kind of ordinary.

In either case, I didn’t know enough to warrant action. I won’t take a life based on an assumption. So, I let them pass.

When they were gone I walked over to where they’d been and stood for a while in the cool shadows. Baskerville came over and sat nearby, watching the path the men had taken. He didn’t like them worth a damn, that was obvious.

One thing occurred to me. Something that the librarian, Abigail, said. I couldn’t recall the exact words, but she’d mentioned gangs of rovers. That clicked with a bit of information from way back before the End, when I was a cop in Baltimore. There was a biker gang known as the Rovers. They were a real bad bunch, too. Well known for violence and brutality on a scale that made other gangs steer clear. There was even a case once where seven members of the Warriors, another biker gang, had been murdered in a drug deal gone bad. The right hand of each of the murdered bikers was missing and never found. The detectives working that case concluded the hands were taken as trophies.

Trophies. Like ears, noses, and scalps?