by D. J. Molles
LaRouche had a hard time figuring how he felt about it.
Knowing what he knew.
Being who he was.
None of it made any sense at all.
Clyde grabbed the dead man’s legs and lifted them off the ground, and he and Chalmers carried the body. Chalmers gave no indication of thanks for the assistance, and even seemed not to notice that Clyde had come to help. He just kept staring and LaRouche couldn’t really tell what he was looking at. The dead man’s feet, perhaps. Or perhaps something none of them could see.
LaRouche followed along, still holding the unfamiliar rifle and wondering if they would take it from him. Did he have a right to a weapon in their eyes? This was a peripheral thought as the impatience crawled around his legs like grasping briars, prickly with the importance of his message. Would Chalmers listen to him? Would Chalmers listen to anyone right now, or was he too incensed to see reason?
They dropped the body with the others. Clyde carefully laid the feet down, but Chalmers did so without ceremony. He didn’t stoop to lay the dead man’s demolished head down. Instead, he just released it and it dropped there onto the ground with a muffled thump and a queasy-sounding crack, like maybe the skull had struck a stone.
Now Chalmers looked at Clyde and LaRouche. He seemed not to know them for a second and LaRouche watched his hand drift to his revolver for a moment. Almost an involuntary twitch. Then the deacon appeared to remember himself. He blinked twice, then furrowed his brow.
Realization did not mean a change in mood. Chalmers was still sour. “What the fuck do you want?”
Clyde deflected to LaRouche with a look and a gesture.
LaRouche was not afraid of Chalmers, per se. Not in the way that Clyde and the others seemed to be. They approached with caution and did everything but cower. LaRouche understood the man as someone that was erratic in his temper, and often brutal with his decisions. Neither of these things made LaRouche uneasy, though. He had the same sensation standing before Chalmers that he’d had when he’d walked in front of Claire and wondered and almost hoped that she would stab him to death.
If you want to die so bad, there are many ways you could do it, he reasoned. You could just not say anything and let whoever that was that attacked us blow this whole fucking camp up. You could go up in flames. Or maybe take a few 20 mm rounds to the chest that would turn you into pink jelly. I doubt you’d feel a thing.
It was true. His life held little value to him. Yet he clung to it anyway.
“Did you have something to say?” Chalmers asked sharply. “If not, then help me gather the dead.”
“You should leave the dead,” LaRouche replied. “And we should leave this area. Immediately.”
Chalmers stared, his thoughts and expression a mystery.
“Who are those people?” LaRouche pressed. “The ones that attacked us?”
“United States Marine Corps,” Chalmers answered, flatly. “Out of Camp Lejeune, I believe.”
Like a tumbler lock, things suddenly fell into place for LaRouche. He’d known that they were US troops from the first barrage of gunshots that he’d awakened to. He’d known it from the controlled ferocity of their fighting, from the familiar sound of their guns, from the chatter of the automatic weapons and the explosion of well-placed grenades. But when “Marines” and “Camp Lejeune” were said, then other things far beyond tonight suddenly made sense.
“You’ve been fighting with them for a while, haven’t you?” LaRouche asked, his voice quiet and earnest. “They’re hunting you guys down—hence your aggressive expansion westward. You’re trying to get away from them.”
Chalmers’s jaw muscles bunched. He did not like what LaRouche was saying, but he wouldn’t deny it, either. He tilted his head back, looking down his nose at LaRouche. “We are not trying to get away from them. The Marines that fight us are a vestige of the old world, the old government that ruled this land. God has sent us to conquer this land, but first we must gather our strength. Even after the fever has broken, a sick body needs time to marshal itself.” He pointed at LaRouche with a trembling hand, the finger almost touching LaRouche’s chest. “The Lord’s Army does not flee from the Marines that so aptly call themselves devil dogs. We are gathering our strength and when we are complete we will return and wipe them out and claim the land that God has promised us.”
Do you really believe this crock of shit? LaRouche thought, but managed to hold his tongue. What he was picturing was not his own body being destroyed as gunships roared in and 20 mm Vulcan cannon belched flame and ripped earth and flesh alike. It was the girls and the women that had no choice but would still die along with the rest of them.
Thinking of them, he chose his words carefully. “We need to move on from this place, and we need to do it quickly. When they come back it won’t be to exchange gunshots with us. It’ll be to exterminate us. Wipe us out completely.”
Chalmers glared. “How do you know what they’re going to do?”
“Because I was military. I was infantry once. And that’s what we did. We patrolled forward and when we encountered resistance we held our ground or we fell back, but either way we didn’t just duke it out. We called in an air strike. Or we called in an artillery barrage.”
For the first time the look of rage seemed to cool in Chalmers’s eyes.
“Has this ever happened before?” LaRouche asked. “Them probing your lines?”
Chalmers shook his head. “Our base has never been attacked before. They’ve hit our supply lines and raiding parties many times, but never our bases. We usually don’t stay in one place long enough for them to find us.”
“Well, then this is their golden opportunity, isn’t it?” Movement caught LaRouche’s eye and he looked to his right and saw Claire, perhaps fifty yards from them, kneeling over a woman that was lying on the ground. LaRouche wasn’t sure if the woman on the ground was dead or not. She didn’t appear to be moving. Back to Chalmers. “They’re ranging us. This is what they do. This is what I would do. Poke at your lines, get an idea of numbers, and then call in a strike—probably air. And I give it twenty minutes tops before they’re all over this place and this little clearing is nothing but dead bodies and burning rubble.”
Chalmers looked out of it for a moment. He frowned, reached up, and touched the left side of his face with his fingertips and when they came away they were smeared with half-dried blood. He stared at them in the firelight and then rubbed his thumb across them, at first softly and then vigorously. Finally he looked at Clyde, ignoring LaRouche.
“Clyde, tell everyone to gather every weapon and piece of ammunition they can find, but be ready to roll in ten minutes. Send a runner to the other groups along the western front.” He looked intensely at Clyde, his words full of hidden meaning. “Have them tell the others that now is the time. Tell them to meet us in the place we spoke about. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
Clyde nodded.
“Pass it on,” Chalmers ordered. As Clyde disappeared at a run, Chalmers fixed his eyes on LaRouche. “I still don’t know about you, LaRouche. I’m concerned about where your heart is. But for the time being I want you with me.” He pointed to the rifle in LaRouche’s hands. “And find yourself a better weapon than that.”
EIGHTEEN
TALKS
LEE AND HIS SMALL group left Camp Ryder when it was still dark. They did so quietly and without fanfare. The camp around them was dead quiet. The fires smoldered and the predawn hour was the coldest of the night. Lee’s companions were an old man named Hughes, a brown and tan dog named Deuce, and two men that Lee had only just been acquainted with: Jared and Noah.
Jared was a short, pale man of perhaps thirty years with a bulbous bald head and scraggly bright red hair that attempted to grow along the bottom of his skull, like a wreath around his head. He seemed odd, but he was generally pleasant and quick to laugh. Noah was younger and seemed a wolf-man compared to Jared’s relative hairlessness. He had thick brown hair and an almost
black beard that seemed to consume his entire face. He was a serious man with suspicious eyes and love for no one but his fellow survivors from Dunn. He appeared to treat even Lee with some caution.
The only others that were awake that early morning were Angela, Tomlin, and his chosen two, Nate and Devon. Angela was there because she would not sleep after Lee had left—they both knew it. He had tried to rise as silently as possible. In his better days, he would have succeeded, more or less. But the injuries of his bodily abuse plagued him worse in the mornings, when the air was coldest and the joints were stiffest, and he found himself ever so slightly clumsy. Neither Sam nor Abby stirred when he gathered his things. But Angela lay there, wide awake, staring at his dark figure and feeling the heat of the blanket next to her slowly drain away. When he had grabbed his rifle, she had pulled the blankets off her and yanked boots on her feet and accompanied him outside.
Tomlin, along with Nate and Devon, were awake because they were preparing to leave at first light. Where Lee and his three men and a dog would stick mostly to known roads that wormed through the Camp Ryder Hub, Tomlin, Nate, and Devon were slated for a journey south and slightly west, which took them on roads that they had yet to travel or even scout. They did not want to navigate them in the dark.
The farewells were short and quiet and perfunctory.
Lee’s hand lingered momentarily on Angela’s arm, but then he was climbing into the vehicle that they would take. It was the same old Ram truck that Lee had once borrowed from the late Keith Jenkins. The other option was Arnie’s little red Geo. Lee had offered Tomlin the truck, but Tomlin said he preferred the Geo because it was less noticeable. More incognito.
Old Man Hughes drove the truck, and Lee took the shotgun seat. Jared was behind Lee, and Noah was behind Hughes. Deuce was behind them all, in the bed of the truck, but tucked close to the cab to get out of the cold wind. Still, his snout protruded, always testing the air.
Now, on a long, winding back road that took them due east toward the town where they would meet Colonel Staley, Lee leaned forward and looked up at the sky through the windshield. Above them, stars shone starkly, but to the southwest, in the direction that Tomlin and Nate and Devon were heading, the sky was gray and dull as gunmetal, and the fire of dawn caught the edges of clouds and gave them away. A thick, ugly storm was coming in with dawn, and already the trees around them were beginning to sway as the wind picked up and the temperature started to rise. The bigger storms always brought warm winds with them. It would feel like the beginning of spring for a few days, and when the storm had passed, everything would freeze over, colder than before.
It was full light by the time they neared the meeting spot. It was not the actual town of Mount Olive that they were heading to, but rather an intersection just outside it, where Suttontown Road crossed Highway 55. That was the location that Colonel Staley had selected. Lee wasn’t sure about the significance of this particular intersection, if there was a significance at all. He suspected that it was more a random selection.
The roads in this area of the country were flatter and straighter than in the Piedmont. The terrain had less contours for the roads to work around. As they were about a mile out from the meeting point, Lee waved for Hughes to stop.
Hughes obliged, but gave him a look.
Lee cracked his door, then looked into the back. “Noah, come with me.”
Noah slid out of the pickup without question.
“Where you goin’?” Hughes asked, tapping the steering wheel steadily.
“Just sit tight here,” Lee said as he swung his legs out. From the truck bed, Deuce scrambled over the side and shook his coat out, ready to accompany Lee on whatever journey was planned. “I’m going to push up ahead over that rise to the north. Hopefully get a look at this meeting spot.”
“I thought we were going to trust them.”
Lee grunted. “We’re here, aren’t we?” He closed the pickup door behind him and crossed to the northern side of the road, Deuce finishing marking territory that he would never be able to hold and then following. Noah stood at the shoulder, scanning the flattish lands around them. As Lee reached him, he touched his shoulder and spoke as he moved past. “Stay low and quiet, and about fifty yards behind me. Okay?”
“Okay. Got it.”
The rise seemed the only terrain feature in sight. There were small lines of woods, but Lee figured the hill and the brush that lined the top would be better for their purposes of staying hidden and trying to get a good vantage point on the intersection where they were supposed to meet the Marines.
There was risk any way you cut it. Lee was cautious. Colonel Staley was cautious. In all likelihood, Staley had lookout posted on a wide perimeter around the meeting point, and even doing the careful thing of reconning the meeting point ran the risk of stumbling on one of those Marines. But Lee also wasn’t willing to step in blindly. His trust could only be stretched so far. It seemed the better risk was to run into a sentry.
Lee had read once that the best way to win at poker was to be the cautious player. But if you found yourself matched up against another cautious player, then neither would win. The game would just keep going. Stalemate.
Someone needed to take risks. Break inertia. Get the ball rolling.
They skirted the rise where gray-brown weeds stood at chest height. Deuce nosed through them, threading his way through thicker stands on a serpentine course, but always staying close to Lee. At the top, Lee knelt, looking out through the weeds where he could see blacktop crossing over blacktop.
Lee saw why Colonel Staley had selected this particular intersection. There was nothing there, save for a single house at the northwestern corner. The house was barely there anymore, just the brick façade standing, while the rest had crumbled and burned away. A few massive oak trees stood on the property and it seemed that one of them had fallen and taken out the back of the house.
Parked in the front yard of that house were two MATVs, the all-terrain vehicle that had begun to replace the Humvee on the battlefield. To Lee it had the look of a technical rather than a military vehicle. But he’d never rode in one and had heard they could take much more of a beating than the Humvee. These two were desert tan in color and seemed even from a distance to be well used. One bore an M240 machine gun on top, and the other a Mk-19 grenade launcher. Both the turrets were manned. Aside from the Marines in the turrets, Lee could not see the others, though he was sure they were there. The scene gave him an eerie, out-of-his-depth feeling.
What am I to these guys? I have no guns, I have no supplies. I’m just some random yokel who claims he’s in the military as I pull up in a beat-up pickup truck along with a few civilians. His lips were set in a grim, frowning line. I wouldn’t even believe me.
Lee knelt there in the tall weeds, the wind rattling through them and swaying the bearded tops. He watched the meeting spot for several long minutes. Keeping his eyes unfocused, looking for movement and not finding it. If they had snipers and sentries on the perimeter, they were well hidden.
But he expected that they would be.
Noah had sidled up next to him. “Looks like a trap to me,” he whispered.
Lee frowned down at the intersection, probably about a third of a mile distant from them. “I dunno. If I was in Staley’s position, I’d being doing the same thing. Certainly wouldn’t be showing up without weapons, waving a white flag of truce. If it were me, and I had his resources, I’d have a whole lot more than you see, parked just around the corner. Snipers in the woods. QRF ready.”
“So…?”
Lee chewed the inside of his lip, considering. “We go back and do what we planned to do. We show up at the meeting and hope for the best.”
They slunk back from the ridge, staying low until they were out of view, and then they stood and followed their own path of crushed dried weeds back to the road. They made quicker time going back than they had coming in.
“They’re just out of sight of us,” Lee said when he clim
bed back into the pickup truck.
Hughes eyes him. “So what’s it look like?”
“Looks like a trap,” Noah asserted again.
“Looks like they’re being cautious. Which is smart.” Lee pointed down the road. “Go ahead and roll us in. But go slow. And be ready to book it if shooting starts.”
Hughes took in a big breath and let it slowly out of his nose. Then he picked his foot up off the brake and the truck started forward.
Lee didn’t take his eyes off the road ahead of him. “Let’s open our windows and hang a hand out. No pointing guns.”
Behind him, the two back windows whirred down and Jared and Noah put their hands out the windows. They stayed quiet, as they had been for the vast majority of the trip. Hughes rolled his own window down and shoved his own hand out the window, although he seemed begrudging.
The intervening mile slid past, a thinning safety tether, and then they made a bend in the road and caught sight of the intersection ahead of them, and the two big MATVs that sat in the lawn of the defunct house. And then the safety tether was gone. They were there. They were committed.
Being on a level with the two MATVs, the one with the M240 and the other with the “ma deuce,” sent a little sliver of fear through Lee. He swallowed it down, jagged and scraping, but he just forced it down. Settled it. Kept on going.
Hughes had unconsciously taken his foot off the gas and the truck was slowing to an idle. Lee looked at him and the older man seemed to realize it. He lowered his head and accelerated again, but very slowly. It would not do to appear like they were charging in.
As they rolled forward, the M240 turret tracked them. All that Lee could see of the Marine that was manning it was a helmeted head staring at them from between two pieces of armor plating that framed the machine gun.