Punching Tickets: Book Five in The Mad Mick Series

by Franklin Horton

  He knew he had to be quiet. He had his rifle with him, but he was going to leave it out there in the woods. A gunshot would most certainly draw people from the firehouse and perhaps even from that church camp up the road. There were six men in the house and he intended to take out all six. Once he had, he'd grab the ammo and the weapons, stashing them in the army surplus duffel bag slung across his back.

  To some extent, the men were going to make this easy for him. He'd observed that they spent each evening playing cards by candlelight in the living room of the old house. Having them all in one room would make things easier. Six men were a lot to take on but he loved to fight. It had been one of his favorite things about the pipeliner lifestyle. There was no passive-aggressive backstabbing in his workplace. If you didn't like somebody you threw your hardhat off and went at it. Even if there was nothing substantial to fight about, he found some reason to get into a good scrap on a regular basis, even if it was just wrestling.

  The night was cold, the air smelling of wood smoke. He stood up from the weeds and crept across the yard, the ax handle gripped tightly in his right hand. It was worn smooth from carry, fitting him like a glove now. He heard the laughter of the men as he climbed the steps. It reminded him of the camaraderie of the evenings in the campground, playing video games and drinking beer with his buddies.

  At the top of the steps, he took a deep breath and steeled himself. When he felt ready, he grinned in anticipation. God, he lived for this.

  He gripped the doorknob in his hand, knowing the men didn't lock it while they were awake, using the front porch as the urinal. He twisted the knob and shoved the door fully open. The men looked up at him expectantly, thinking that perhaps someone from the firehouse was dropping by to play cards or visit with them. They couldn't have been more wrong.

  The nearest man, little more than a teenager with a patchy beard and a friendly smile, died first, the ax handle caving in his forehead. The attacker was able to subdue another nearby man on the backswing, the ax impacting his eye socket and sending him flailing backward, screaming and clutching at the pulp of his ruined eye.

  The attacker drew back to swing at a man in brown coveralls. The man raised his hand to fend off the blow, but the attacker brushed the block aside with his free hand and cracked the man's skull with the ax handle. The remaining men were scrambling to their feet in a blind panic. They had no weapons in the room, which worked to the attacker's advantage. He was between them and their weapons. He swung furiously, like a man with a machete caught in a jungle thicket.

  The attacker kicked, he punched with his free hand, and the ax handle continued to rise, fall, and slash. Men screamed as skulls cracked, teeth flew, and arms broke. As the pain of injury finally disabled the residents of the house, the attacker finished them off. They screamed for mercy. They begged and prayed but got nothing beyond a final blow of the hickory to their cranium. Each of the fallen died with the same visage—the blood-spattered hulk of a man, bearded and grinning as he ended their lives with his stained bludgeon.

  When everyone in the house was quiet, but for the seizing and twitching of their injured brains, the attacker took a moment to wipe his brow with the back of his bloodstained sleeve.

  "You boys keep it too hot in here," he whispered. "A man will soak through his clothes fighting in this heat."

  He confirmed there were six bodies dead or dying, which matched up to what he'd expected to find. To be on the safe side, he made a quick pass through the house to confirm there was no one he'd missed. When certain he'd cracked every skull that needed cracked, he worked quickly to locate the men's weapons. They only had four between them so he tucked them all into the duffel bag and dumped all the ammo he could find in with it. He didn't know where they'd gotten their supplies, but they had considerably more ammunition than he did.

  When he was done he heaved the bag onto his shoulder and tested it. "Not bad. I can work with that."

  He tucked the ax handle into his belt like it was a sword and headed out to retrieve his own rifle from the woods. He threw a quick glance back at the house, wishing all of the places he'd hit in the last few months were as lucrative as this one. Then he slipped off into the night. He had a long walk ahead of him.

  4

  Six Months Ago

  J.D. Wombley was known as "Wombat" to his fellow pipeliners. He'd never seen a wombat before so he didn't know if it was an insult or a compliment, a jab at his burly stature or a testament to his tenacity. Wombat was twenty-eight years old and, like many young men of his generation, had been unable to find work in his community. For the last few generations, coal jobs had kept his ancestors afloat. As automation increased, those mines required fewer men to run an operation. Continuous miners chewed up the coal seams formerly dug by stooped men with short-handled picks. Battery-powered scoops loaded the coal once dumped into carts by the hands of wiry, dust-blackened men.

  Then came increased government regulation, with many mining companies unable to obtain permits for opening new ground. Once they'd mined-out their existing seams, they were left with no option but to close the doors and send the last of their workers home. In some areas of the country it might not have been such a big blow, but when it was the only industry it devastated the community. As the mines closed, so followed the businesses that sold mining clothes and boots, that sold fuel, parts, steel, and welding gases. Gone were the businesses that fed miners or operated shower houses where they washed off before going home. Gone were the new car dealerships since no one had the money now to buy them.

  The increase in natural gas jobs around the country came as a salvation to many. The Marcellus shale that ran beneath much of the Appalachian Mountain chain was rich in natural gas. The proximity of this gas to the large eastern cities increased demand. There was a steady need for wells and pipelines. Many men from Appalachia now lived away from home and their families, clearing rights-of-way for pipelines, running pipe, welding, and drilling wells. Many only saw their families on the weekends, but Appalachia had never been an easy place to live. The Scots and Irish who first settled there were already used to hardship and were of a temperament that tolerated it with good humor.

  In a region where people tended toward marrying young, Wombat had never married. He'd graduated from high school in Richlands, Virginia, where, although he'd had a serious relationship with a girl, it hadn't lasted beyond school. She wanted to get married and he wasn't sure he was ready for that yet. He wanted to get out of his hometown and earn some money. Later, working as a pipeliner and living in a camper in Ohio, he dated a few girls but it never worked out. His afternoons were about beer and video games with his buddies. Weekends were for drinking overpriced drinks at the strip club. He wasn't ready to give that up for a house and kids. Maybe one day, but not yet.

  When the initial terror attacks came, the ones that knocked the country for a loop, Wombat and many of the people he worked with had headed back home. He worked with a lot of folks who either lived in the same county he was from or one that neighbored it. They'd acted quickly, wanting to get home to their families and back to the safety of the hills. They'd also been spared from one of the problems that kept so many from reaching home—the lack of fuel.

  As pipeliners, they all worked on construction sites with heavy equipment. Many of their trucks had fuel tanks on the back that they used to refuel heavy equipment. Once they had a plan for getting home, they worked together to top off those auxiliary tanks and assemble a convoy of diesel pickups with enough fuel to get them home. With most of them staying in campers or sharing apartments, they went by each man's place to collect his guns and gear, most of them assuming they might not return to their Ohio homes for some time. Everyone pitched in what food and drinks they had, aware it would be best if they didn't stop for anything except bathroom breaks.

  Their fast thinking and strategy paid off. The further south they traveled, the more chaos they saw. Fuel stations with tall signs that had once displayed fuel prices now
said "No Fuel." While the pipeliners hadn't imagined the stations would sell out so quickly, they didn't stop to ask questions. They had no idea that the government was already locking down the fuel supply for first responders by this point. The noose around America was tightening.

  When they hit the West Virginia turnpike the men began to see cars stranded along the road. In some spots, they were forced to weave between stalled vehicles. The people gathered around those cars tried to flag them down, but the pipeliners had vowed they'd stop for nothing and they meant it. When the stranded travelers became pushy, the pipeliners turned guns on them and ordered them to get the hell out of the way.

  They hadn’t had to kill anyone but it had been close several times. Once, someone had opened fire on them as they passed. When some of the pipeliners wanted to turn and fight, to shoot back, cooler heads in the group prevailed. Older and wiser men warned that getting their trucks shot up in a fight could keep them from getting home at all.

  That scene on the West Virginia Turnpike stood in sharp contrast to what the men found when they got off the interstate at Princeton, West Virginia, where some of their convoy began peeling off to deliver men to their homes and families. The roads were mostly empty here, with fewer stranded vehicles. People were holed up in their homes. They still had power at that point so most were glued to the televisions, trying to get more information about what was going on.

  There were three trucks in their group that drove all the way to Tazewell County before splitting off for the final miles of the journey. The Ford F-450 Wombat was riding in went to Richlands, Virginia. His crew dropped him off at a place called Doran Bottom before continuing on toward Buchanan County. While he was pulling his gear off the truck, his grandmother stood in the door of her trailer, watching him with the tube that provided life-giving oxygen draped over her ears. She only took it off to smoke her Salems.

  When the truck pulled off and left him, Wombat stood in the driveway waving, his gear piled around him. He'd wonder later why he and his buddies hadn't made some kind of pact to join up if things got hard, or at least exchanged addresses. No one had thought it necessary though. They all had cell phones or landlines and assumed they could just call each other. Soon that would not be the case.

  "You gonna stand there or come in the damn house?" his granny barked. "It's hotter than the devil's ass-crack out here."

  With a sheepish smile, Wombat answered, "Reckon I'm coming in." He dipped down to grab his gear and sling it over his back.

  "They's beans on the stove," his granny muttered, walking back into the mobile home, her recliner calling her name.

  Wombat smiled. His granny was rough as a corncob but he loved her. She'd raised him after his parents had moved off to Florida to start a new life without him. He'd been four at the time and he remembered it like it was yesterday. They told him they were leaving him with his granny so they could go to the store but they never came back.

  On those rare occasions they'd come to visit, they pretended like there wasn't a thing in the world wrong with what they'd done. When he'd refused to have anything to do with them, they'd told him he needed to grow up and get over it. He still hoped there'd be a chance to give them a little payback one day. Maybe burn their house to the ground or something.

  His grandfather had been a coal miner, but he'd already lost his leg to a rock-fall by the time Wombat came to live with them. He had insurance and benefits because the union was strong at that time, but his grandfather had always been insulted that he'd gotten a check from the coal company based on the assessed value of his leg. How do you assign a value to something like that? To the loss of income, the loss of dignity, and the lifetime of inconvenience? They did, though. Each hand, arm, leg, foot, or eye had a price.

  That injury and the consequential insult to his grandfather's pride made his grandparents bitter. They'd raised him to work hard and not trust most folks, especially big companies or the government. Everyone was out to screw you in this world. Everyone would use you if they got the opportunity. A person had to take what they could get, even if it required cutting a few corners to do it.

  While Wombat wasn't scared of hard work, he didn't like the government stealing a big chunk of his check each month. Best he could tell, they'd never done anything for him. The only people he owed anything to in this entire world were his grandfather, who'd already passed away, and his granny who was probably not long for this world.

  "They shut your job down?" his granny asked as he piled through the door with his gear. She was slouched in her plush blue recliner, looking awkward and uncomfortable with her scoliosis and COPD.

  Wombat dropped his bags and propped the rifle against the wall. "I reckon. They didn't run any shifts on the day of the attacks. We all got a bit skittish just sitting around watching the news so we headed out early this morning. The men wanted to get home to their families so we took the trucks to the jobsite and topped off the fuel tanks. Then we collected our stuff and headed home. No one ever said the job was shut down, but I never heard anyone ask either. We just decided it was time to get the hell out of there."

  "Well," Granny said, nodding as she processed his words with a stoic acceptance.

  "Figured I better get home and look after you." Wombat grinned. He leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek before heading into the kitchen to fill a bowl with pinto beans. He grabbed a wedge of fresh cornbread and crumbled it over the top, then added a dollop of butter. "Ain't had nothing fit to eat since I left."

  Her voice was weak but his granny couldn't let the comment pass. "Of course you haven't. Got no woman up there to feed you. It's a wonder you can keep yourself alive."

  Wombat erupted in a hearty laugh. "Ain't no woman that'll have me, Granny. Besides, I've only got room for one woman in my life and that's you."

  Her laugh turned into a hacking cough that made Wombat feel bad about teasing her.

  "Horseshit," she finally gasped when the attack passed. "You need to find someone to look after you. My ass will be in the ground any day now. Pushing up daisies and feeding the worms, if I ain't too sour."

  "You're too tough to die," he replied, his mouth full. "Besides, I can take care of myself."

  Despite the fact that she may have been joking, it was indeed only three days before her prediction came true. When the power failed his granny didn't make it twenty-four hours before she was gasping like a fish on the riverbank. When her oxygen generator died, Wombat helped her hook up to the green bottle she kept for emergencies but it wasn't full. It bought her two more hours, then she drifted away into death, mouth open and eyes wide, Wombat's hand clutched in hers.

  "Dammit, Granny!" Wombat sobbed. "Why'd you have to go and do that? Why'd you leave me?"

  His cries went unanswered and that evening he buried her in the backyard. He wrapped her in her comforter, her body impossibly light, a frail and brittle thing that seemed as if it could never have been alive. He found a framed picture on her dresser that had been taken in happier times. Wombat, his granny, and his grandfather in North Carolina at the Tweetsie Railroad, a local attraction. Wombat laid the framed picture on her chest and folded her hands across it.

  From across the chain-link fence separating their yards, the neighbor family watched from their back porch without so much as a word of sympathy or an offer to help. Wombat didn't notice them until he stood over the grave, tears pouring from his eyes and great barking sobs erupting from his chest. Their insensitivity fueled him and he angrily filled in the grave.

  When he finished his task, he threw the shovel to the ground and raised two middle fingers to his audience. "Fuck every damn one of you!"

  They paid him no mind and that was part of why he hated this neighborhood. There was a day when people here looked out for each other. During his childhood it had been a community. Now it was nothing but a wasteland of drugs, degenerates, and people pretending to be disabled to draw a check. They wouldn't lift a hand to help you, but they'd sure enough steal you b
lind if you stayed gone for a day or two. When she'd been alive, Wombat's granny had called them buzzards.

  Wombat sat on his granny's couch with his head in his hands, her blinds open for the first time in living memory to allow the light of day to illuminate the dark interior of the mobile home. He was struggling to figure out his next move. Logic told him that he should team up with one of his friends, but he had no idea how he was going to do that. At one point he thought his phone still worked, but the texts he'd sent to his buddies had gone unanswered. Sometimes the internet browser on his phone worked and other times it didn't. Wombat didn't know if the phone system was going down or if his buddies didn't have signal where they lived.

  One thing was for certain. He couldn't remain there in that neighborhood with those buzzards. A few more days with no power and no running water and things would get ugly. They'd start stealing off each other and fighting everyone around them. Those who needed liquor and pills to get by would start trying to find them at all costs. Besides all that, Wombat didn't want to stay in this place that held nothing but memories of his dead grandparents. He didn't want to step onto the back porch and see her grave.

  Wombat had a 1996 F-350 but it was broken down in Ohio. The terror attacks caught him mid-struggle, trying to make the decision whether to fix up the old truck or just buy a newer one. He hadn't been in any hurry to fix it because so many of the guys around him had company trucks. He always rode to work with one of them. He'd been leaning toward a new one. Even though he was a new guy, the pipelining money was good. He wasted some, saved some, and sent the rest home to his granny. It was the least he could do after the sacrifices she'd made for him.

  Her vehicle was a 1994 LTD with failing gold paint. The thing ran and she kept it full of gas, as long as the buzzards hadn't siphoned it out yet. They'd done it before though she'd never been able to prove it. She hadn't driven many places over the last few years. Just to the liquor store for the bottom-shelf Canadian whiskey that she mixed with store-brand cola each night, or to the convenience store for lottery tickets and the Salem 100s that had stained her curled fingers. She used to go to the fire hall for bingo but she'd cut out the bingo when they quit allowing smoking in the building.