The Buzzard Zone

by Kelly, Ronald

  There were only two in sight—a big, beefy boy about the size of Big T wearing a blue and white letterman jacket and a smaller, lankier one manning a charcoal grill. They were barbequing long strips of meat. Levi wondered where they had gotten it.

  When they left the truck and stood in a line along the street, the big boy picked up a twenty-gauge shotgun and walked down the slope of the yard until he was halfway between the house and the road. “What the hell do you want?” he asked, licking his lips nervously. He spotted the Thompson, AR-15, and AK-47, then looked down at the shotgun in his big fists, feeling more than a little inadequate.

  “We want to talk to Nathan,” Levi told him.

  The big boy—Taylor, if the name on his jacket was correct—turned and yelled at the house. “Hey, Nathan! Some folks are out here wanting to see you!”

  For a minute or two, nothing happened. Then the front door of the big house opened and six boys filed out, one after another. They were a mixed bag—some clean-cut jock types, while others were of the four-wheel-riding, red Solo cup-toting redneck breed. All were armed, some with revolvers or semi-auto pistols, and some with shotguns and rifles. They descended the steep porch steps, strutting and swaggering with the faux immortality of youth, acting like they were the Wild Bunch or something. The skinny kid at the grill flipped a couple of slabs of meat with a long fork, then closed the lid, picked up a Marlin repeater, and joined them.

  The last one to appear in the front door of the house was the one they had come to see. To say that he was unimpressive would have been an understatement. He was small—scarcely five-foot-four and maybe a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet. He had curly dark hair, horn-rimmed glasses of the expensive variety, and his face was covered with acne. He wore a holstered Smith & Wesson Model 29 on one hip. The big .44 Magnum seemed to weigh him down on one side, causing his right shoulder to slump slightly.

  “I’m Nathan,” he said arrogantly. “Who the shit are you?”

  Agnes stepped forward boldly. “I want my sister back.”

  Nathan peered through the thick lenses of his glasses and, seeing the family resemblance, smirked. “Well, maybe I will and maybe I won’t. Maybe I haven’t finished having my fun with the old bitch yet.”

  “Let us have her, Nathan,” James told him flatly.

  The boy glared. “Stay out of this, Stephen King. It isn’t your fight. This is between me and the lady with the granny glasses.”

  “We’re all together on this,” said Levi. “So you’re dealing with the six of us.”

  Nathan laughed. “But I’ve got nine to your six. You’re a little outnumbered.”

  Big T lifted the barrel of the Tommy gun an inch or so, pointing it at the nerd’s chest. “This here evens up the odds just fine.”

  Nathan’s face reddened until his blackheads and blemishes blended in and nearly vanished. His hand began to ease up the side of his leg a bit, aiming for the black neoprene grip of the Magnum revolver.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Kate warned him. She held both Glocks in her slender hands, her thumbs resting on the hammers.

  “Fine!” Nathan ducked back through the front door and disappeared for a long moment. The boys who stood in the front yard shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. Apparently, the amount of firepower—as well as the hardened faces of those who wielded it—scared the teenagers half to death. More than likely, most of them had never fired a weapon before things went south. The situation had them sweating, that was for sure.

  Maybe we can do this without anyone getting hurt, Levi thought hopefully. But the bundle of nerves in his stomach told him that things could go either way.

  Then Nathan was back. They watched in alarm and disgust as he pushed something through the door and onto the concrete platform of the high porch.

  It was Angela Tressler. She was naked and lashed tightly to her wheelchair with copper wire. Her pale, wrinkled body was bruised and beaten, and her white hair was a wiry tangle that nearly obscured her small face. Someone had taken a can of black spray paint and drawn eyes upon her sagging breasts and a pentagram had been carved into the flaccid skin of her belly with a dull knife. Her crotch was raw and inflamed. Dried blood coated the hollow columns of her inner thighs.

  “Oh my God,” whispered Agnes. She wavered on her feet a bit and then straightened herself. “Angie.”

  Nathan laughed, his teeth flashing with silver braces. “Here! You can have the ugly, old bitch. She’s outlasted her usefulness anyway. Dry as a bone. Gotta use half a tube of KY just to get it in!” And, with that, he gave the wheelchair a shove.

  It rolled down the steep steps, bouncing and bucking, until it got halfway. Then one of its wheels caught on a chipped edge of concrete and it flipped. There was a sickening crunch as the top of Angie’s head struck one of the steps. Then the chair and its occupant tumbled until it landed on its side on the sidewalk below. The elderly woman moaned hoarsely and passed out.

  Levi looked over at Agnes. She had bitten her lower lip so deeply that blood welled up and dribbled down her chin. Her eyes, brimming with tears, shifted from her fallen sister to the boy at the top of the steps. Levi watched her hand tightened on the center grip of the compound bow. Calmly, she reached over her shoulder and plucked an arrow from the quiver across her back. She hooked the notched end of the feathered shaft in the bow’s nylon cord.

  Don’t do it, Agnes, he thought, but couldn’t bring himself to say it out loud.

  Nathan began to laugh uproariously. “What are you gonna do, lady? Shoot me with an arrow? You want me to set an apple on my head? Go on! Give it your best shot, you dried-up old cu—”

  Agnes cut Nathan’s final word in half, releasing the arrow and sending it upward in a well-calculated arch. The four-bladed head split his tongue in half, then sank forcefully through the cartilage of his palate and skewered the rear portion of his brain.

  The boy jerked spasmodically, got his hand around the grip of the Smith & Wesson, and managed to yank it from its holster. His twitching fingers pulled the trigger and the gun went off, taking off half of his right foot. Then he pitched forward and tumbled, head over heels, down the steps.

  Before Levi could stop her, Agnes discarded her bow, drew her Ruger, and began to run up the sidewalk toward her sister.

  “Wait!” he shouted, but she refused to listen. Then, he too, was moving up the sloped yard. The others were right behind him.

  Agnes was nearly to her sibling when the football player fired his twenty-gauge. A rifled slug hit the old woman in the abdomen, directly beneath her ribcage. It tore through her stomach, shattered her spinal column, and exited like a bloody tennis ball from the small of her back. She dropped the .22 pistol and folded over as though she were hinged in the middle. She took a couple of faltering steps, then fell protectively across her sister.

  The boys in the yard began to fire, but their aim was erratic. Bullets and buckshot either went over their heads or kicked up clods of dirt and grass at their feet. Two of them lost their nerve, tossed down their weapons, and escaped around the side of the house.

  Levi and the others returned fire with better accuracy than their opponents. One by one, Nathan’s army fell, brought down by single shots or bursts of automatic fire. A .45 slug ripped through the meat of Big T’s thigh, but it failed to show him down. With an angry yell, he powered up the grassy slope, firing his Tommy gun in a sweeping arch. By the time they reached the house, six of the nine were dead.

  The big jock in the blue and white jacket looked around at his fallen comrades, his eyes wide with fear. “Keep away!” he shouted, waving his shotgun. “Keep the hell away!”

  Although the boy had gut-shot Agnes, Levi couldn’t bring himself to shoot him. “Just calm down, son. Let’s talk about…”

  Whether by accident or on purpose, the twenty-gauge went off in the jock’s hand. A slug hit Levi in the side, spinning him around and causing him to fall into a blanket of autumn leaves. A burning pain lanc
ed through him from front to back. Stunned, he placed his hand against his side. The palm came away coated with blood.

  “Papa!” screamed Kate. She raised her Glocks and fired. Three holes stitched across the jock’s forehead, causing him to look dazed and stagger backward. A burst from Avery’s AR-15 lifted the teenager off his feet, from groin to throat. He fell on his back, sputtered and lurched for a long moment, then grew motionless.

  When his son and daughter approached him, Levi waved them off. “I’m okay. It went right through. See to Agnes and her sister.”

  James and Big T were already there. “They’re both in bad shape,” James told them. “Miss Angie has a skull fracture or worse and Miss Agnes… well, the guy nearly cut her in half. Glenda’s a nurse. We need to get back and let her take a look at them.”

  “Then let’s get them in the truck and head out.” Levi looked at the bodies of the boys strewn on the grass around them. “Damn! This shouldn’t have happened.”

  “They were a bunch of shitheads and assholes,” James said. “Anybody who would use someone like they did Miss Angie deserves what they got.”

  As they helped their father to his feet, Kate’s eyes widened with horror and concern. “Papa, you’re bleeding badly!”

  “It just went through a love handle, darling,” he assured her. “Your mama just won’t be able to hang on when we do the bedroom boogie for a while.”

  His daughter looked even more horrified. “Ewwww! That’s gross, Papa!”

  As they helped him to the cab of the pickup truck, Big T tenderly carried Agnes and placed her in the bed of the vehicle. The old woman moaned, her eyes bright with agony. She reached up and touched his face. “Tell Abe… that I love him.”

  “You can be doing that yourself, Miss Agnes,” he told her, his voice cracking. “I gotta get your sister and we’ll be going.”

  When Big T got back, James was trying to release the elderly woman from her wheelchair. “This wire is so tight, it’s cut into her wrists, right down to the bone. I have a pair of cutters, but they’re at home.”

  With little effort at all, Big T picked up Agnes Tressler, wheelchair and all. As they started for the truck, James was shocked to see that the big man’s pants leg was drenched in blood. “Brother! You’ve got a hole in your leg!”

  “It ain’t nothing,” he told him. “We gotta get these folks some help.”

  “And a little for yourself, too.” James looked overhead and found a cloud of buzzards circling eagerly overhead. “Looks like the clean-up crew is here.”

  They climbed into the bed of the truck with the two injured women, then James knocked on the back window of the cab. “Let’s go!”

  With Avery at the wheel, they swiftly left the house of Nathan Childress and headed back to North Edenburg Street.

  A few minutes later, Jamie was opening the big gate at the back of the Newman property. Avery floored the gas and brought the truck in. He stopped, then slammed it in reverse and backed up to the rear door of the house.

  “What happened?’ asked Jake. “It sounded like a war over there.”

  “It was,” his father told him as he hopped out of the back. “A short one.”

  “Are they…?”

  “Yes, son. They won’t be bothering us anymore.” James looked toward the door and saw Glenda standing there. “We’ve got some hurt people, baby.”

  “I’ve already set up triage in the kitchen,” she told him. “In case, it turned bad.”

  “It did,” he told her, as he dropped the tailgate. “We’ve got a couple who probably won’t make it.”

  Glenda turned to her oldest son. “Jamie, take Jake and Jessie to your room and keep them there for a while. I don’t want them to see this.”

  Jamie nodded solemnly. “Okay, Mom.”

  Billy and Jem came out and helped them bring the wounded inside. After James found the wire cutters, they liberated Angela from the wheelchair she was secured to. When they laid Agnes and her sister across the kitchen table, Abe watched from the far side of the room. His face was pale and his eyes brimmed with tears. “Oh God… what happened?”

  Levi grimaced with pain as he sat stiffly in a kitchen chair. Nell crouched beside him, holding a dish towel to the hole in his side. “She found her sister,” he told him. “That kid, Nathan, dumped Angie down the steps and all hell broke loose. Agnes brought him down with an arrow and then some stupid jock put a shotgun slug through her belly.”

  Abe walked across the room as though he was in a daze. He stood beside his wife and gently stroked her forehead. It was cool to the touch. “Stubborn old woman,” he said and began to cry.

  She reached out and felt around until she located her sister’s hand, limp and unresponsive. “I did what I came to do, Abe.”

  “Yes, you always do. But this time you’ve gotten yourself killed.”

  She shrugged her slumped shoulders. Even that small movement seemed to be an agonizing one. “I got her back. That’s all that matters.”

  Abe looked up at James. “Will she survive?”

  James looked at his wife. Glenda’s eyes were grim as she shook her head. Then she moved across the kitchen to examine Levi and Big T.

  Both men’s injuries would have been potentially life-threatening if the projectiles hadn’t gone completely through muscle and tissue and out the back. “No internal organ’s hit,” she told Levi after examining the hole in his side. “Pretty much just skewered your love handle and nothing else.”

  Levi winked at his daughter. “See, I told you.”

  “I’ll clean and stitch it up with a needle and thread, and put you on some antibiotics and you ought to be fine.” She then moved to Big T. He had already taken his hunting knife and sliced his britches leg open from ankle to crotch. Glenda examined the wound and whistled. “You’re lucky. An inch to the right or left and it would’ve either hit your femoral artery or shattered your femur. We’ll fix you up, but it’s going to hurt like hell. We have a pair of crutches out in the garage that you can use. James hobbled around on them after he got hit by that…”

  “Freaking tree limb!” the writer exclaimed, throwing up his hands. “I can’t get rid of the thing. It follows me around like a love-sick puppy!”

  A low moan drew their attention and Glenda hurried back to the kitchen table. Angie Tressler was coming around. She stared blindly through her cataracts. “Hello?” she gasped. “Who’s there?”

  Agnes slowly squeezed her hand.

  The elderly woman smiled slightly. “Agnes?”

  “I’m here, sis,” she replied. Her voice was low, scarcely a whisper.

  “You came looking for me?”

  Agnes nodded. “I did. And I found you.”

  A violent spasm of coughing shook Angie’s frail body. “I’m going, sister. I’m sorry we didn’t have more time to visit.”

  “Oh, we will.” Agnes smiled, “Because I’m going with you.”

  Angie squeezed her sister’s hand so tightly it made her bones creak. Then a rattling breath escaped her lips and she was gone.

  Agnes stared up at her husband with weak eyes. “Abe?”

  “I’m here, dear,” he said. Tears coursed down his face and settled in the whiskers of his beard like dew.

  She reached up with her free hand and drew his head toward her. “Give me a kiss, will you?”

  “You’re… not… going… anywhere!” he cried, sounding like a petulant child. His tears changed their trajectory and dripped across her pale face.

  “I hope to hell it’s raining,” she said, “because if you’re crying, I’ll get up off this table and thrash your wrinkled ass.” She drew his head down until their lips met for a long moment. When he pulled away, she patted his cheek. “I hindered you back in Oak Ridge. You were so worried about protecting me, that you couldn’t get any work done. Now you can go back to doing what you do best… finding solutions. Make me proud. Save the world.”

  “That’s a tall order, woman,” he told her quietly. />
  “You’ve been filling them for me for forty-eight years.” She coughed raggedly. A frothy gorge of blood and torn tissue passed her lips. It slid down her cheeks, pooling on the tabletop around her head. Glenda mopped it away with a wad of paper towels. “At least try. It’ll give you something to do until you see me again.”

  Then Agnes’ fingers loosened and her eyes grew glassy and unseeing.

  Abe’s head dropped until his forehead rested on the edge of the table top and he expelled grief in great, heaving sobs. Kate embraced him from behind and laid her head on his shoulder, crying along with him.

  “Honey, could you get my sewing box out of the bedroom?” Glenda asked her husband. “I have work to do.”

  With a nod, James left to get the “sewing box” that Glenda had liberated from her job at the hospital the last day she had punched the clock. The multi-compartment EM case was filled with surgical instruments, nylon sutures, curved needles, antiseptic solutions, painkillers, and every type of antibiotic imaginable.

  The others grew silent and sullenly looked away. Tears were shed and hearts broke.

  Death had claimed family that evening.

  Chapter 19

  A cool breeze swept across the expanse of Oakdale Cemetery, sending autumn leaves skittering across the grass and plastering them against the granite and marble stones that stood, like solemn sentinels, across its tranquil acreage. On the far side of the graveyard, Henderson Elementary and Henderson Middle School stood, while, strangely enough, Highway 64 cut directly through the middle of the burial ground. Needless to say, what was once a busy stretch of road occupied by cars and school buses was now utterly deserted.

  Avery, Jem, James, and Billy took turns digging two holes, side by side, in a plot of earth beneath a shady oak tree—Agnes and Angela’s final resting place. The twin sisters would have wanted it no other way—together in death, as well as in birth.

  Levi and Big T sat nearby, aching to get hold of a shovel and pitch in, but the severity of their wounds prevented them from taking part in the ritual. Nell, Kate, and Glenda stood several yards away, quietly and respectfully watching. Standing with them was Abe Mendlebaum. The elderly man looked small and ancient in a black suit they had found in one of the abandoned houses along North Edenburg Street. He held a bouquet of plastic flowers they had taken from a Dollar General store before their ten-minute trip to the graveyard. Enolia sat cross-legged on the ground with her daughter beside her, chanting a “song of passage”—as Billy described it—in their native tongue of the Cherokee language.