by A. American
“What chicken thing? Which one is best? Hands down, Bojangles.”
Thad and I both looked at him in horrified shock. “You need to stop talking now. Your Yankee is showing,” I replied as Thad laughed.
“I’m not a Yankee!” Aric grunted.
“Were you born north of Tallahassee?” I asked. He didn’t answer right away and I added, “Then you’re a Yankee.”
That didn’t sit well with Aric and he mumbled, “North of Tallahassee, my ass.” It got Thad to laughing. And I was glad to see it. This silly-ass little conversation pulled us, even if just momentarily, out of the darkness that was closing in around us.
The Stryker was sitting in front of Sarge’s house, and as we walked around it, we saw the garage door was open. It revealed what had become an all too common sight. Micha was hanging from the ceiling, naked. Beside him hung one of the Cubans. The other one was too injured for such treatment. But he was strapped to a chair where he could see everything that was happening.
Sarge was sitting in a chair facing the men. He was leaned back with his feet outstretched and his hands stuffed into his pockets. Doc, Ted, Mike and Dalton were all there as well. Doc, being a man of medicine, was off to the side. He generally didn’t take part in interrogations. Mike and Ted stood on each side of the two men and Dalton was behind them, a length of hose in his hand that I recognized. It got Thad to laughing. And I was glad to see it.
Micha didn’t look well. He hung limply from the ropes, his full weight on them. His body glistened with sweat and his breathing was heavy. I could see red welts on his sides that I was sure extended across his back as well. The Cuban was in a similar condition. Both men looked as though it had been a long afternoon.
Walking into the garage, we looked the scene over. “Does that one speak English?” I asked, pointing at the Cuban.
Dalton nodded and Sarge replied, “Just like a cue ball. The harder you hit him, the more English you get out of him.”
Micha looked up weakly. I stepped up in front of him and looked into his eyes. “You know, I never did like your ass.” I turned and walked away from him. Sliding another chair over beside Sarge, I sat down. “So, what has he had to say?”
“Oh, you know, the usual shit. He doesn’t know what we’re talking about. Has no idea who these hombres are. Never seen ‘em before.”
“Really?”
“That’s how it started out,” Dalton said. Then he ran the piece of hose down Micha’s flank, who recoiled at its now familiar cold touch.
“He’s starting to come around. He’s been a busy boy. He was working with the DHS before we pushed them out. He’s the one that was spraying the farm with herbicide. He was responsible for a number of things,” Sarge said.
“I knew it,” Thad said.
I shook my head. “Why the hell did they spray the farm?”
“They didn’t want us to succeed,” Sarge replied. “They wanted suffering. Thinking the people would beg for the Fed’s help. But that ain’t all. He was also involved in the bombing at the park.” Sarge looked at me and said, “His partner was a tough bastard for not telling me that.”
Micha looked up and I caught his eye. “Don’t worry,” I said. “You’ll join him soon.”
“What about that one?” Aric asked, pointing at the Cuban.
“He’s more willing to talk. Just a soldier. They were told they’d be able to walk across the country. Apparently, the Russians and the Cubans got together to carve up the east coast. The Ruskies also had a deal with China, giving them the west.”
“Was he spotting for them?” I asked.
Sarge snickered, “Yeah, he was. Still won’t admit that.” He nodded to the beleaguered Cuban and added, “But he did. They were working together.”
“What about the guy working on the net?”
“Oh, the Chinaman.” Sarge looked at Aric, “You were right about him. He was who you thought he was.”
“I knew it was him. I saw his body. If he was still around here, then others probably are as well,” Aric replied.
“Well, he ain’t around anymore,” I said. “Shane and Shawn put his ass in the dirt.” Micha looked up briefly before dropping his head again. “That’s right, asshole. We bagged him too.”
“What do you want to do with them?” Sarge asked.
I thought about it for a moment, considering the options. I thought back to the bombing in the park. About what happened there. The stinging smell of alcohol mixing with the acrid smell of smoke and metallic odor of blood and flesh. The crunch of glass under my boots as we walked around the scene. It was so much like the last scene at the park, the one that killed Bobbie.
It was almost like stepping back in time. Like revisiting a nightmare in troubled sleep. The image of Bobbie’s charred and smoking body as I slowly pulled the zipper up over her face. I remembered the image of Danny’s hand, the missing fingers and the rivulets of tears cutting through the black dirt and filth on his face. Then of my girls sitting on the couch and Little Bit looking over her shoulder and asking me if she were going to die too.
As I was considering all this, my radio crackled. It was Shane. “Morgan, we’ve got issues.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“People are gathering; they’re saying the attack was the Army’s doing. They’re nearly rioting.”
I looked at Sarge, “What the hell are they thinking? That we did this to ourselves?”
“Someone is stirring this up. I don’t think they came up with it on their own,” Sarge replied. Sarge scratched the stubble on his chin. “Ask him to get Cecil to calm them down. He’ll be able to handle this until we can get there tomorrow morning.”
I nodded and relayed the statement to Shane, telling him to get Cecil to try and calm them down. He agreed and said they could handle it until tomorrow. “It hasn’t gotten out of hand yet,” he replied.
I looked around the room. At the men hanging from the rafters, the others, Mike, Ted, Doc and Dalton watching them from the perimeter. Settling my eyes on Micha, I said, “We’ll take them to town tomorrow and hang them in the park.”
Sarge’s head bobbed as he processed this. “It’s good. It’s good and proper.”
Then Micha’s raspy voice broke the silence. “And what good will that serve?” I looked over to see his eyes cast up as he was too weak to lift his head. He shook his head from side to side. “We,” he started to say, then glanced at his Cuban compatriot before correcting himself, “I am worth more alive than dead.” A slight smile cracked his lips. “I know what’s going on. Where,” he jerked his head towards the Cuban, “the rest of them are.” His smile spread, “where the Russians are.” He was playing his ace, or so he thought.
Sarge’s cackling cut the weight of the moment. I was thinking about what Micha had said. But Sarge wasn’t impressed. Instead his head rocked back and forth. “Thank you!” He shouted. “Thank you for giving me that. I was wondering just where the limit was. Just what you did indeed know.” Sarge rose to his feet. “But now I know.” Sarge looked over at me and said, “Don’t worry. By dawn, we’ll know what he knows.”
Fear washed over Micha as he asked the question for the answer he already possessed. “What? Why? Why not keep me alive?” He seemed to find strength and started to fight against the bindings. “You can’t kill me! You need me!”
I stepped past Sarge and close to Micha’s face. I leaned over and looked into his eyes. I knew how he’d managed to this point. How he would so easily, quickly, cast his allegiance to the strongest.
“You know the problem with selling your morals?” I asked. “Eventually there are no more buyers. I always wondered why you bothered me.” I wagged my finger at him, “Something about you always ate at me. Watching you slink around, and now knowing you were making deal after deal to keep yoursel
f safe and comfortable.” I grabbed his chin and lifted his head. “But there are no more deals. You cannot take this and turn it into a better situation for yourself. You’ve burrowed your way in for the last time. Tomorrow, you will hang.”
Micha glared back at me. I could see he was trying to formulate his response. But he wouldn’t get the chance to issue it. Sarge stepped past me, clapping my back as he did. “Tomorrow is a long way off and we’ve got a lot to do,” he said as he gripped my shoulder and turned me away from Micha. “Go on and get some rest. Tomorrow, in town, he’s yours. But tonight,” Sarge said as he looked at Micha and added, “but tonight, his ass is ours.”
A fear washed over Micha’s face and his tongue flicked out of his lips as a lizard would. “I’ve already told you everything I know.”
As I stepped away, Sarge snorted, “Well now, we know that’s not the case,” Sarge looked past Micha to Dalton and added, “don’t we?”
Dalton nodded grimly, “Indeed.”
“And I believe you are well acquainted with my man Dalton,” Sarge said to Micha as he spun him around to face the big man. “And all we’ve done to this point was with the aim of keeping you alive.” Sarge laughed and patted Micha’s shoulder. “But that’s no longer an issue. Now is it?” The last words Sarge spoke directly into Micha’s ear.
Panic gripped the naked man as his new reality swept over him. “But I can help you! I know where they all are! I can tell you!” Micha pleaded.
Sarge stepped behind Micha and tussled his hair. “Oh, you will. See, now, we know you have more to tell us. And we know you want to.” Sarge stepped back in front of him and asked, “you do want to, don’t you?”
Micha nodded, “Yes, I’ll tell you everything.”
Sarge stepped back over to his chair and took a seat. He chewed on his thumbnail as he made a show of thinking. “That’s good. It’ll make all this easier. But,” he paused and looked at the nail, “we have to be sure you’re telling us the truth. We have to believe you.”
“I’ll tell you the truth!” Micha shouted, believing he’d found his salvation.
Sarge looked past Micha to Dalton and asked, “Do you believe he’ll tell us the truth?”
“I’m not sold,” Dalton replied.
Micha was reinvigorated and now stood on his tip toes. He tried to spin around to see Dalton, but Dalton prevented him from doing so. “I will! I have no reason to lie now!”
Sarge leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Good. That’s what I wanted to hear.”
I listened to the exchange with little interest. Whatever the information we could extract from the little slug paled, at least in my mind, to the value he would serve swinging from a rope on the gallows in the park. His death will serve a couple of public purposes, and a private one as well. The people of northern Lake County have not yet forgotten the evils of the DHS and what they did to people here. While we thought we vanquished that particular evil, this will demonstrate that the threat still exists. It will also demonstrate the fact that we are still very much fighting it, and will not shrink from the threat.
On a personal level, it will be vengeance for Bobbie. For the pain her death has caused my friend, my wife and my daughters. She was someone who never caused harm to another person. Innocent in the evils of the world around her. But just another tick mark in the column for those that, still it would seem, seek to oppress or rule over us.
It was this last thought I had the hardest time with. It’s only natural that there will always be those that seek to subjugate others. To lust for power and control. But control over what? Our society has so little now, of anything. What good is it to rule over a wasteland, other than to serve one’s own ego perhaps? Because, with the power, even if sought vindictively, comes responsibility. And it was the latter I sought to avoid, not covet.
I willingly accept my responsibility for myself and family. But I damn sure didn’t want it for everyone around me. It was as foreign an idea to me as space travel at the moment. Our once soft lives were now hard, and the thought of willingly, wantonly, trying to complicate it further through conquest was unfathomable to me. But the fact remained there were those that didn’t think this way and it was because of them, we, I, had to stand where I did.
“You want to live then?” I asked Micha. He nodded eagerly, his eyes wide with the thought of saving his skin. “Then you need to give a full accounting of your actions, since the beginning. You will read them aloud tomorrow in the park, before the community, so all will know your scheming.”
Micha nodded enthusiastically. “I’ll do it!”
Sarge looked up at me and didn’t say anything. I could see he was thinking. “Good. Then you can make your confession tonight. Dalton will be here to make sure your memory doesn’t fade.” I replied. I looked around at the guys. “Tomorrow morning we’re going to have a service for Bobbie, before we go to town.” Solemn nods were the only reply. “I’ll leave you to it then. I’ve got other things to attend to,” I said as I headed towards the open garage door.
Sarge got up and followed me outside, waiting until we were out of earshot of the others. “Then what?” He asked.
“Then what, what?” I asked.
He stuffed his hands into his pockets and looked at the ground. “Tomorrow, after he reads his confession, as you call it. Then what?”
“We hang him,” I replied easily.
Sarge nodded. “I figured that’s where you were going with it. Having him list his dirty deeds in front of everyone is a good idea. They’ll never believe us if we just say, it wasn’t us.”
I nodded. “That’s what I was thinking too. We need the folks in town to know we’re trying to help them at best and not trying to kill them at the least. This will serve to do that.”
“And him swinging from a rope will also send a message that we aren’t going to tolerate this sort of bullshit.”
I let out a breath and looked up as a mosquito buzzed in my ear. “We’ll let Mitch look at his confession in the morning. Have Micha sign it in front of him to keep up the appearance. But in the end, we will stretch his neck. I, we, can’t tolerate people that don’t want to work for the benefit of everyone. And we certainly can’t tolerate those that will actively conspire against it.”
Sarge laughed. “Careful, your commie is starting to show.”
I grunted, “Whatever. We’re not forcing anyone to do anything for the benefit of others. If you want to benefit, you have to provide, labor, something. We’re not making anyone work so others don’t have to. It’s not the same thing.”
“I know,” he replied. “But when words like, the greater good, start getting tossed around, it’s a short trip to Marxism.”
I stopped and turned to face him. “What we are doing is so far from that twisted logic as to not even be on the same plane. We’re simply trying to save this community, lives. What we did yesterday was for the greater good. We handed out food. We try to provide some semblance of order. But we’re not forcing it on anybody. Everyone is free to stay or go. Participate or not. I don’t give a shit either way.”
“And I’m with you on that. But those other systems, they exist because those men believed it was easier to achieve their idea of community through force. And in a way, it is. It removes responsibility from the individual; and in times like this, people will willingly accept it. I just want to make sure you know how easy that is. How fast people will beg for it.”
“You don’t have to tell me. Just look at what the country was like before this happened. Decadence is the last stage of a crumbling empire,” I laughed, “and we are a hell of a long way from decadence at the moment.”
Sarge pinched his nose and blew a snot rocket into the dirt. “Damn straight. We’ll get a full accounting out of him tonight,” he looked back over his shoulder into the garage. “I don’t think we n
eed anything from the Cubans. They’ll just say they were soldiers following orders.”
“And they are. But they’re invading soldiers on a sovereign nation’s land. They can swing with him. But, that’s up to you. Micha is a civilian and Mitch and I will deal with him. They are soldiers and therefore your problem, so you can sort out what’s right for them.”
“It’s the same in the end,” the old man replied as he arched his back, stretching it. “The rope.”
I left them to their work and headed back towards the house. As I walked, I plucked the mic from my plate carrier and called, “Hey, Shane.”
In a moment, he responded. “What is it, Morgan?”
“You still have that Jap’s body?”
“Yeah, we’re getting ready to bury him now.”
“Don’t. Bring him to the park tomorrow.”
He didn’t hesitate in his reply, probably relieved he didn’t have to dig the grave in the heat. “No problem. I’ll have him there.”
“How’s it going? People still grumbling?”
“There’s still a lot of talk that the Army did it on purpose. But Cecil got a lot of them calmed down. Something more needs to be done though or it’s going to get out of hand.”
“We’re going to do something tomorrow that should take care of it.”
“Okay, good. We’ll see you tomorrow.”
As I continued towards the house, I thought of what needed to be accomplished. Of course, the service in the morning was weighing heavy on my mind. I’d never considered the possibility of having to bury one of the women in my life. It may be Bobbie this time, and that’s horrible, but it could have just as easily been Mel. And that thought was one I couldn’t bear. But there was one small project I could work on that would keep my mind off things.
As I passed the shop, I saw the roll-up door open and could hear someone inside, so I wandered over to see who was in there. I found Thad working on a piece of wood sitting on two sawhorses. He had a chisel in hand and was carving into its face. I stepped up and looked over his shoulder. He didn’t pause his work, simply asked, “What do you think?”