by Joe Nobody
It was almost 4:00 a.m., and the GPS indicated they were approaching another intersection with a county road. Terri started to slow down, and Bishop said, “Blow through it. Don’t stop.” She gave the truck a little gas, and they went right through. Bishop turned and watched the road behind them, immediately dreading his decision. Nothing happened.
“You are so reckless!” Terri teased him.
“Hey, sometimes you have to live on the edge and take risks.”
“Well, I for one am glad to see you come out of that conservative shell of yours. Let your hair down, and party a little.”
“We do live such a boring, mundane life, don’t we, hun?”
They drove another 20 miles when Bishop started getting that serious look on his face and asked Terri to slow down. In a short time, he saw a farm lane leading off of the road and asked her to stop. He got out and scouted the lane before waving her in.
There was no gate, but he didn’t mind as he was not planning on staying long. The next big obstacle on their route was only a few miles ahead of them, and he wanted to regroup and make sure they were ready. Stretching, eating, and visiting the “facilities” were all taken care of.
Interstate I-10 was a coast-to-coast freeway. It ran from Florida to California along southern portions of the US. In this part of Texas, it was a major traffic artery and the fastest way to head west from Houston.
Because of the sheer volume of traffic, almost every exit had sprouted truck stops, fast food joints, and hotels. Bishop wanted to cross under I-10 using one of the few roads that was not an exit, but that was impossible, given their route and direction. What concerned him most were the gas stations. During the evacuation of Houston for Hurricane Rita, I-10 had become a 120-mile long parking lot – primarily because gasoline had run out, and fuel trucks could not get to the stations to deliver more.
During those crazy three days, people had basically lived at gas station parking lots or on the freeway itself. Police had to be called in to manage the lines at the restrooms, even after the fuel was long gone. Bishop remembered seeing pictures of convenience stores with their shelves completely bare.
It was only natural that as Houston fell apart, evacuees would head west via I-10 and now would have been stuck at the exits, perhaps for weeks. One of the things that surprised Bishop the most about the Rita situation was the lack of planning by so many evacuees. They had always been able to put a debit card in a gas pump and fill up, and there was always fuel and food at the next exit. After Rita was over, many of them appeared on local news stations telling their horror stories: “We left Houston and were heading to my cousin’s house using I-10. We had half a tank and a couple of cold sodas in the car, so we thought we would be able to make it out of town and fill the car up once we were away from the crowd.”
Bishop believed there would be hundreds of thousands of such people on I-10. By now, they were going to be very hungry and very desperate. It would not surprise him at all if societies had formed, complete with rules and leadership. The real victims would be the small towns within a few miles of the interstate.
During Rita, when the roads had completely closed, the small towns near I-10 had become saturated with thousands of hurricane refugees looking for food, water, and shelter. One small town resident said it best. “The locusts of Houston descended upon us in biblical proportions and consumed everything.”
Bishop knew that the Rita locusts were still in a mental state that retained some measure of hope for a return to a normal life. They were running from a storm and at worse, would return to a flooded or damaged home and have to deal with FEMA. Now, people would have little hope left in them, and that would make them even more of a threat.
The biggest problem facing Bishop right now was how close to approach the freeway before scouting on foot. Were the people like those they had seen at the Brazos River Bridge and packed together tightly? Had they spread out? How far?
Another dilemma was how much gear to take with him. A rifle might attract attention he didn’t want. It could also be common. One thing was for sure, a moving vehicle meant gasoline, and he would bet dollars to doughnuts that gasoline was more valuable than gold. If he let Terri get the truck too close, all hell could break loose.
He looked at his watch – it was 4:30 a.m. He had two and a half hours before daylight. He could quickly walk with a light load about six miles per hour, so he decided they would travel to within five miles of I-10. He looked at the atlas and could not find any roads close to the five-mile mark, so he decided they would proceed slowly and chance it.
US Interstate 10, Central Texas – September 12, 2015
Wires and Fires
They were almost to the five-mile mark when they saw the first fires on the horizon. For as far as Bishop could see east or west, there were flames twinkling in the distance. It immediately reminded him of the people trapped at the Brazos River bridge. They stopped the truck and just stared for almost a minute. If their situation had been different, the scene in front of them would have been beautiful. Terri commented that it looked like a field of fireflies. Bishop took out the big rifle and used its scope again. They were still so far away he couldn’t make out much, and he needed to get a closer look.
They drove another hundred meters or so, and Bishop could make out a fence line with trees lining both sides. The fence looked like it was separating two fields of some crop that had not yet sprouted. The field next to the fence line was smooth and flat. He jumped out of the truck and quickly climbed the fence to check the soil. It was firm and hard. He ran back to the truck, pulled out his wire cutters, and snipped the wire very carefully. He motioned Terri in, and after the truck had cleared, he quickly used duct tape to connect the wire ends back together. It would not hold long, but anyone driving by would never notice the cut wire.
He walked ahead of the truck as he had done before, travelling away from the road for several hundred meters. The field began to slope gradually downwards into a small drainage gully. The gully was cultivated, even at the bottom, so he had Terri drive the truck down into it.
In reality, they were parked in a ditch, but from the road, it would appear like an empty, flat farm field. Bishop stood on the bumper of the truck and put his head at the same height as the top of the cab. He looked back at the fence and could not see it. He had to climb almost on top of the camper shell before it came into view. Anyone driving down the road could look in their direction and see nothing but empty field.
Bishop dug around in the camper for a few minutes and pulled out a rifle Terri had not seen before. It was a space age-looking gun, mostly plastic with odd angles. She realized why he had chosen it when he folded the stock and slung it over his shoulder.
She was curious as she watched him pull out an old shirt, tear the sleeve, and then roll it around in the dirt. He put it on and then took a handful of soil and rubbed it all over his face and hands. He put on the torn shirt and then rolled his mask into what looked like a sailors cap and pulled it over his head. He took a black plastic trash bag, put some gear and a few magazines in it, and draped it over the same shoulder as the rifle. It looked like a makeshift backpack. She couldn’t see the folded rifle under the cover of his arm, shirt, and dark bag.
He tucked one pants leg into a boot and slumped over, walking around trying to imitate an older person.
“Would you believe me homeless?” he asked.
She giggled, “Will you work for food? I could use a pool boy with soft hands.”
“Seriously, do you see anything out of place?”
“No, you look like those poor people we see under the bridges at home. The only thing missing is a shopping cart full of plastic bags and three days’ worth of beard.”
He asked her to wait for him there until it became dark again. If he were not back, she should return to Ben and Maggie’s. They hugged, kissed each other, and then he was gone.
Bishop walked to the edge of the field and then the road. He looked back wi
th his NVD and still could not see the truck. He started walking down the edge of the road, glancing right and left with the night vision, wondering when he would run into the proud citizens of I-10.
He had walked about half a mile when he started seeing the distant fires again. The folding rifle, called an ACR, or adaptive combat rifle, did not have any magnification on it. He was stuck with the NVD and his own eyes. He kept moving and started up a small rise. He had a bad feeling in his gut. Something was just not right, like someone was watching him. Bullshit, he thought, that is just nonsense. You are getting paranoid.
He was looking right and left and almost missed the overturned school bus sitting in the middle of the road. He stopped and listened for a bit, but could hear nothing but crickets and other sounds of the night. He was 50 meters from the school bus when he stopped to listen again. His bootlace was untied, so he knelt to tighten it and saw a thin line running across the road a few inches in front of his leg. A TRIPWIRE!
Thoughts stormed through his head like lightning bolts. He wanted desperately to raise his rifle, run, or hit the deck, but he didn’t dare move. Bishop could make out the wire now that he was looking for it. He tried to trace the wire in both directions with his eyes, but couldn’t tell in the dark what it was connected to.
He couldn’t stand there all night, so he took a deep breath and slowly, ever so cautiously, took two full steps backwards and went to one knee. His head pivoted right and left, up and down for over a minute. He raised the NVD and did a very detailed search of the area, seeing nothing but the wrecked school bus, and the tripwire. What the hell?
He stepped back up to the tripwire and started following it to the right. This was a time-consuming process as he checked for other wires in front of him. He would very slowly move his hand from the ground up to the height of his head feeling for a wire and then take another step. He finally reached the side of the road and followed the wire to the fence. There was a small pine tree, and the wire wrapped around it and extended up to an orange plastic pistol – a flare gun. Bishop had seen these before on boats. The Coast Guard had regulations that required most boats to have emergency signaling devices, often flare guns, on board at all times. Someone, he thought, was pulling their boat and decided later that they needed an early warning device. Why here?
He looked at his watch and was not happy. It had taken him over an hour to move less than one mile from the truck. He was still trying to piece all of this together when he noticed a second wire running off the flare gun. He traced it with his eyes as it went up the tree until it ended at a shotgun shell pointing right at his face. Nice, he thought.
Whoever had rigged the flare gun had decided they needed a safety, or a booby trap on the booby trap. This safety was designed to hurt or kill anyone messing with the flare gun. He also noticed the flare gun had a condom over the barrel, and what looked like grease around the breach. Wow, thought Bishop, someone knew what they were doing. The flare gun had been waterproofed.
He was still four miles away from the interstate and already had run into the most sophisticated, well-thought out device he had seen in years. It was going to be light soon, so he made up his mind to go back to the truck and regroup.
Terri had settled on sleeping in the truck’s backseat. She had toyed with the idea of making a sunshade of some sort and resting outside, but was just too tired. She took her pistol and laid it on the floor beside her. Then she draped a shirt and towel over the windows. She was thinking about how long it would be before it got hot enough to turn the inside of the cab into an oven when she fell asleep.
The light of the false dawn was arriving as Bishop made it back to the field. He crossed over an uncut portion of the fence and walked back to the truck, staying close to the tree line and stepping carefully on clumps of weeds as he went. He could clearly see his tracks from when he had left earlier, and wanted anyone in the area to see only the sign of a person leaving the field, not coming back.
He was getting ready to cut over to the truck and stopped to look around one last time. As he stood looking back the way he came, a large clump of bushes growing in the fencerow suddenly stood up, and Bishop was looking right into the muzzle of a rifle.
The man pointing the weapon at Bishop was wearing a ghillie suit, and a damn good one, Bishop had to admit. He had walked right past the man and never seen him. The ghillie was a shirt and pants made of mesh. Local vegetation was woven through the mesh to allow the person wearing it to blend into the surroundings. The camouflage was very effective, having been used by both military snipers and hunters for hundreds of years.
“I guess I have just met the man who set that tripwire up by the bus,” Bishop said.
“You got really lucky there, bud. I thought for sure you were going to walk right into that, and I was going to have to reset it.”
The man looked Bishop up and down, “A PVS14 night vision, a Springfield TRP .45 and a Bushmaster ACR, enhanced. Nice setup. That’s some pretty good kit. You Army?”
“No sir, private security.”
“Blackwater?”
“No sir, HBR.”
“You don’t have to call me sir. Master Sergeant will do. How did you get out here Mr. Private Security?”
“We drove.”
The man actually laughed at Bishop’s smartass remark and then continued the interrogation. “Now you wouldn’t be thinking of trying to get the drop on me with that .45, would ya?”
“The thought had crossed my mind, Master Sergeant, but no, I know a pro when I see one.”
The man looked over Bishop’s shoulder and nodded. Bishop heard a rustling, and a second man rose out of the fence line bushes wearing a ghillie. The master sergeant said, “This is my son, Kevin. He makes way to much fucking noise when he walks, but he is a crack shot, and during the last month, he has proven he will pull the trigger.”
“Seems like they grow up faster than ever these days.”
The sergeant nodded toward the truck and said, “That your wife?”
Bishop tensed, and his weight moved forward to the balls of his feet. What have they done to Terri?
“Relax. She is sleeping in the backseat. She is fine as far as I know. We haven’t turned into complete animals just yet, so chill.”
Bishop relaxed a bit and said, “Yes, Master Sergeant, she is my wife.”
The sergeant reached to his belt and pulled out a small radio. He raised it and said, “Clear.” A second later, he tilted his head, listening through the ear bud connected to the radio. He looked at Kevin and said, “Grandpa is clear.” He looked around one more time and said, “There is no one around, so why don’t you ask your wife to join us. She has a 9mm sitting on the floor beside her, and I really don’t want her firing off any rounds this morning.”
Bishop started to turn toward the truck, but the move made Kevin nervous, and he had an AR15 pointed right at Bishop’s head. Bishop decided he was very comfortable right where he was, so he called out, “Terri. Terri, you awake? Terri, wake up please.”
Bishop saw the truck move ever so slightly, and then the back door opened, and her head appeared. She said, “Bishop?”
“Honey, we have company. Could you please come over here without your pistol?”
“Bishop? Okay, let me put some pants on.”
Terri started walking from the truck, and Kevin shifted his aim from Bishop to Terri. She had a puzzled look on her face because Bishop still had his rifle on his shoulder yet the two man-bushes clearly had the upper hand.
The sergeant looked at Terri and shook his head. He said, “I know you have that pistol tucked in your pants, young lady. Please don’t reach for it.”
Terri looked surprised and then sheepishly asked, “How did you know?”
“Because you were sleeping with your pants on, and I would have done the same thing in your shoes. Now, Mr. Bishop, I want to hear your story, and I need it quick. The Rovers will be out soon, and all of us standing around here having a tea party is risky, t
o say the least.”
It took Bishop about three minutes to give the sergeant the condensed version. When he had finished, the sergeant thought for a bit and then said, “You have two choices. You can come with us, or stay here. If you stay here, you have a 50-50 chance the Rovers will find the truck. If you come with us, I can guarantee better odds, and I have three beers I have been saving for a special occasion. Your call.”
Bishop thought about that for a second, “What if we just go back the way we came?”
“Well now,” replied the sergeant, “that isn’t going to get you to the other side of I-10, is it?”
Bishop looked at Terri who just shrugged her shoulders. Bishop nodded. “We’ll join you.”
The sergeant looked at Kevin and ordered, “Point,” and the boy left immediately. He then keyed his radio. “Break out the good china, we have guests.”
He told Bishop and Terri to follow him in the truck and started walking toward the road.
As they hurried to the truck, Terri said, “Do you trust him? I mean, they could be cannibals for all we know.”
“They already had the chance to disarm us, shoot us, kidnap you, and do all sorts of evil, crazy shit if they wanted to. I don’t see any other option right now. Besides, I could use a beer.”
Bishop and Terri followed the sergeant down the road in the direction of the school bus. Right before they got to the tripwire, Bishop watched as Kevin opened a gate that had been well hidden by its own ghillie suit. Bishop had walked right past it just an hour ago. The opened gate revealed a driveway heading back into a wooded area.
As they turned in the lane, Bishop could see a single story ranch-style home. The front yard was littered with clothing, overturned chairs, and dresser drawers. The home had also been on fire, as Bishop could see smoke stains above two of the broken windows, and some of the siding was warped away from the wall. An older man wearing a radio and ear bud walked around the corner carrying a shotgun, but did not raise the weapon. He motioned for them to pull the truck around to the back yard. Bishop had just noticed something very odd about the back yard, when the man reached up and pulled back a big tarp so they could pass. The tarp had been painted with a picture of a yard, but when it was pulled back, Bishop could see a large pickup truck and a boat on a trailer was behind it. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, he thought.