by A. American
Tossing the fish into the cooler we’d brought the burgers in, I said, “Looks like we’ve got about all we can carry home.”
Thad lifted his bass out of the water. It was at least three pounds; and as he removed the treble hook on the Rapala plug, he said, “Yeah, this one won’t even fit in. I can’t close the top!”
“Looks like we’ll have a hell of a fish fry.”
“Fresh fish will be nice.”
Thad lifted the cooler with a grunt. “Damn, this is heavy!”
I slapped him on the back, “It’s been a good day, buddy.” I looked up into the sky. The sun was starting to drop, and the heat was finally letting up. Down by the water, it was cool and the scenery pleasant to the eye. “A damn fine day.”
Thad nudged me with an elbow, nearly knocking me over. “It sure was. We need to do this more often.” His mood shifted slightly, and he added, “There’s more to life than just surviving. You got to take time to live too or there’s no sense in surviving.”
“You couldn’t be more right, my friend.” I looked at him and smiled, “We need to remember that. Let’s do this sort of thing more often. Next time, let’s go to the wayside on Juniper Run.”
“Where’s that?”
“Straight up nineteen, north of forty. It’s a nice wide place in the river. Most of it is knee deep but there are deeper pockets. It used to be a fun place to go till the Forestry Service shut it down because the rednecks would leave too much trash, beer bottles and shit like that.”
“I think we should do something like this once a week. Give everyone something to look forward to.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said as I set the cooler on the picnic table beside the grill.
“What’s a plan?” Sarge asked.
“We need to do something like this once a week. No reason not to,” I replied.
Sarge thought about it for a minute. He looked out at the spring where Perez was standing in the water with his pants legs rolled up. He was leaned over splashing the cool water on his arms and wiping the back of his neck. He nodded his head and said, “I think that’s a fine idea. Everyone’s had a great time today. It’s good to get out and have a change of scenery.”
“Oh, my Lord!” Miss Kay said. “Look at all these fish!”
Thad smiled. “Yes ma’am. Me and Morgan loaded the box.”
“We’ll have a wonderful fish fry tomorrow night. Nothing beats fresh fish,” Kay said. “I’ve got everything we need. I’ll even make cornbread.”
“I’ll fix us up a pot of green beans, like Momma used to make,” Thad added.
“That’d be wonderful, Thad. You are a good cook.”
Thad blushed, as was his custom when paid a compliment. “I learned from Momma and my grandmother.”
Kay patted his shoulder, “They taught you well.”
As the light began to fade, we pulled out of the springs on our way home. There was no hurry this time as we again rode with the windows open. After spending all day in the water, we were much cooler and the air blowing by us felt pleasant. When we turned onto Highway 19, it was nearly sunset, and the stars were beginning to come out. The sky was clear, so I was surprised when I heard the distant sound of thunder.
Looking at Mel, I asked, “Do you hear that?”
“Sounds like thunder,” she replied as she looked up. “But I don’t see any clouds.”
Before I could answer, the radio crackled to life.
During World War II the Soviets developed a new weapon, the Katyusha multiple rocket launcher. The weapon terrified the Germans that came under its fire. They called it Stalin’s organ because of its resemblance to a pipe organ. The rockets made a terrible screaming sound when launched and instilled fear in the hearts of anyone that heard it.
The weapon has been steadily upgraded over the years. The current system is called the Grad. In Russian it means hail and is a good description of what the weapon does. The current version carries forty rockets that are a little longer than nine feet. They can carry a variety of warheads with a range of between twelve and nineteen miles. The warheads ranged from high explosive to incendiary.
The thunder we were hearing was from three of these units sitting on the eastern shore of Lake Beauclair just south of Eustis. Each machine fired its forty-rocket load, one-hundred-twenty rockets. They carried a mixed load, two with high explosive warheads and the last with the incendiary type.
Sarge called for a halt and we stopped in the middle of the road. Everyone got out of the vehicles and stood in the road looking south. We couldn’t see Eustis from where we were, but we could clearly hear it.
“What is that awful noise?” Kay asked.
The old man stood looking south and replied, “It’s artillery hitting Eustis from the sound of it. I think that helicopter we saw earlier was getting solid coordinates.”
Cecil gave out a low whistle, “It sounds like hell.”
Sarge nodded. “It is.” He looked around and called Doc. “Get in the MRAP; we’re going to town.”
Chris Yates had drawn a straw to come on this trip as well and he moved quickly to collect his gear and follow Doc.
I ran to the Suburban and grabbed my gear. I was in shorts and flip flops, but I was going too. Mel didn’t question me when I kissed her, saying, “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
She nodded and looked down the road, in the direction of the sound. “I’ll get the girls home and wait for you.”
I climbed into the back of the MRAP with Perez, Ian, Doc, Aric and Cecil. Jamie was driving as usual. As we drove towards the sounds of the still-rumbling explosions, Doc started going through his bag. He asked who had tourniquets on them. I started to pull mine out, but he stopped me. “Keep it. You’ll probably find someone to use it on.”
The sound of thunder stopped as we passed through Umatilla. But Eustis was now just ahead, and I heard Jamie take a sharp breath. “Oh my God.”
I leaned forward and saw what shocked her. It looked like the road disappeared into a wall of flames. Thick columns of smoke rose high into the sky and the dark horizon was illuminated with the light of the fires consuming Eustis. I’d seen videos like this. Videos of neighborhoods decimated by combat in far flung places around the world. But it was the kind of thing I saw on TV, not in my community.
We found the guards at the barricade on the north side of town in a ditch on the side of the road, near where the old man had fished a gator out of the canal. The stunned men and two women climbed up out of the ditch when we stopped. They were obviously in shock and stared down the road towards town.
As evening was already approaching, the heavy smoke blocked out even more of the fading light, casting a sense of doom over everything. As Americans, we weren’t used to seeing this sort of thing on our own land. Of course, we knew it happened and that our own military conducted just this sort of operation around the world; but it was always over there. Never was it here. Never had any American town been exposed to destruction on this level, not since the Civil War.
The troops at the barricade were awestruck. None of the rockets made their way this far. They were concentrated on the Eustis area. Notoriously inaccurate, it was just a roll of the dice that none of them found their way this far north. We stopped and talked with the wide-eyed soldiers.
“Anyone been into town yet?” Sarge asked.
The Guardsmen shook their heads. “No. We’ve been taking cover in the culvert. I’ve never seen anything like it. No one can be alive in there,” he said, looking into town.
Sarge looked down the road. A thick column of dense black smoke was climbing high into the sky from the burning diesel fuel of the bladder located beside the armory. “It ain’t going to be pretty, but we need to go in there.”
He told the Guardsmen to stay at the barricade and we made our way into the inferno that was Eustis. The Grad rockets were not what you’d call a precision munition. I don’t know what the failure rate is, but we had to maneuver around an unexploded rocke
t, its fins protruding out of the asphalt in the middle of Bay Street.
When the armory came into view, my heart sank. The building was utterly destroyed and a flaming pyre. Several bodies lay in the street in front of what was left of the building. And upon closer inspection, there were more bodies and, more disturbingly, pieces of bodies everywhere. Some were charred corpses. Reminiscent of the figures left after the eruption of Pompei. But these were still smoking. Their lips, if they had any, were curled back in a sneer, revealing their teeth. It was impossible to discern man from woman. They were simply ghastly, charred apparitions of people, like three dimensional shadows.
The fires were so intense it was difficult to get close to several places. The police department was no longer there. A vague outline of the building was still on the ground, but nothing more than two feet tall protruded above the surface. The county administration building, our courthouse, was also ablaze. I worried for Mitch and Michelle.
Every structure in town was either damaged or destroyed. The roads were blasted and cratered. It wasn’t the Eustis I knew. We drove over to the clinic. The military grade tents that housed our only medical service were no longer there. Tattered pieces of canvas and shattered medical equipment littered the ground. The first recognizable body I found was a man in medical scrubs. He was lying in the road, not far from the clinic. He was very clearly dead, but I saw no obvious injuries.
But there were survivors. They appeared out of the flaming and charred ruins of the town. Always in shock, sometimes injured, sometimes not. Some were naked, their clothes either blasted or burned off. We began collecting the wounded in the park. It was a large open area where nothing was burning, though rockets had also fallen there. There were craters blasted into the lawn. The bandshell had taken a hit too, blasting away more than half of the dome. But, it was the best we could do at the time.
I was knelt down beside a woman. She’d caught a blast on her left side and been horribly injured. Though her left side was blackened from the explosion and there were terrible wounds covering her entire left side, she was still conscious. Her left leg was missing just above the knee and I fumbled with my tourniquet to get it out. She tried to speak, but a large hole in her cheek prevented her from forming anything intelligible. She was hard to look at.
I couldn’t say anything to her. What could I say? You’re going to be alright? I knew better than that. There was no way we could save her. Feeling a hand on my shoulder, I looked back to see Doc standing over me; and he shook his head. I looked back to the woman and said, “We can’t just leave her like this.”
“There’s nothing we can do for her. We don’t have the resources to help her.”
“But, we can’t just let her suffer.”
“We’re going to have to make some very hard decisions.” It was Sarge. He’d walked up as Doc and I talked.
“Like what?” I asked.
The old man looked around the burning town, then said, “We don’t have the resources to save most of these people. So, we either let them suffer until they die, or put ‘em out of their misery.”
“You mean shoot them?” I asked. And I looked at Doc, expecting him to argue the point.
But he didn’t. “It’s the humane thing to do. As much as I hate the thought of it. We can’t help them and they’re suffering terribly. It would be best to stop the suffering as quick as we can.”
I looked at the woman. It didn’t appear she was registering what we were talking about. It also didn’t appear she was completely conscious. I looked closely at her now. With the missing leg, she was also missing most of the fingers on her left hand. The left side of her face was horribly disfigured with most of her cheek blasted away, so I could see into her mouth where several teeth were also missing. Even if we could save her, what sort of life would she possibly have? Reconstructive surgery was out of the question. There was no way to get her a prosthetic leg. It was a simple fact that modern medicine as we’d all come to know it, no longer existed.
I slowly rose to my feet and looked at Doc, “You sure there’s nothing we can do?”
He looked at her and shook his head. “Not for her. There are others we can save, but anyone wounded this severely, no. There’s no saving her.”
As Doc spoke a pistol shot rang out down the street. I looked in the direction of the shot. “Looks like the others have already figured this out.”
“I’ve already talked to them all. No one likes it, Morgan,” Sarge said. “But it’s the reality of it. It’s what we’re going to have to do.”
I nodded and looked down at the woman lying on the street. “I’m sorry,” I said as I drew my pistol and lowered it. Her life ended with the report of the Springfield. I felt ill and relieved at the same time. Sick at the thought of having to shoot her lying in the street, relieved at knowing she wasn’t suffering any longer. She was the first, but sadly there would be many after her. It was a very, very long night.
When the sun started to break the horizon, I was standing in the front yard of a house on East Ward Street changing magazines in my pistol. I dropped the empty mag into the dump pouch where it clanged against the other two already there. We’d cleared the area of the business district earlier in the night and had moved into the surrounding residential areas.
The ranks of rescuers swelled overnight as people pulled themselves out of their shocked state and came out to help. So, I wasn’t surprised when a man walked towards me from the street. It took me a minute to recognize him.
“Hi, Morgan,” Alex the Canadian traveler I’d found at the Publix, said.
“Oh, hey, Alex.”
He looked at the pistol I was holding and said, “Hell of a night, huh?”
I nodded, “Yeah. And it ain’t over yet.”
“I see that. Are you still moving the wounded to the park?”
As I holstered the pistol, I replied, “The ones we think we can help.”
He nodded, understanding just what I meant. “Where you headed now?”
I was tired and thirsty. “I’m going to head back towards the armory. We couldn’t go through it last night because it was still burning. And I need a drink of water.”
“Care if I walk with you?”
“You’re welcome to join me,” I replied as I stepped out onto the road. We walked in silence for a bit, then I asked, “Where were you last night?”
“I found a house on the side of the lake no one was living in. It’s a really nice place, right on the water, and I’ve been trying to fix it up to make life a little easier under the current conditions.”
I smiled, genuinely happy. “That’s great. Glad you found a place.”
He stretched out a leg and pulled up on the jeans he wore. “There were even some clothes there that fit me.”
“Sounds like things are looking up for you.”
He gave a nervous laugh. “They kind of were.”
The rest of our group was at the armory when we got there. They were already picking through the still-smoking remains of the buildings. A line of charred corpses was laid out in the street, many of which didn’t even look like people. Just black stumps. Then there was the smell. Seeing Perez, I went over to him.
“Give me a couple of your smokes,” I said, holding my hand out.
He was leaned over raking through a smoldering pile with an E-tool. “You picked a bad time to start,” he replied as he stood up. Shaking two out of the pack, he handed them to me.
I broke the filters off and handed the rest back to him. “I’m not,” I said as I stuck the filters into my nostrils. “Just need something to help with the fucking smell.”
Perez nodded and looked around. “Yeah. You’ll get used to it.”
“I hope not. Thanks for these,” I said as I walked off.
Perez lit up one of the filter-less fags and replied, “Not a problem.” And he went back to work picking through the debris.
I found Cecil and the old man standing over several bodies laid out near the rea
r of what was left of the building. Walking up, I looked down and asked, “Is this Sheffield?” I knew there was no chance in hell he was still alive.
Doc nodded as he wiped a singed dog tag off with a rag and handed it to me along with another. They were Livingston and Sheffield’s tags. I looked down at the two blackened and shrunken forms lying on the ground. It was hard to imagine it was the two men I had known so well. They certainly didn’t look like themselves now. Moments like this hit really hard.
“We don’t have an accurate count of how many were here,” Sarge said. “But so far, we’ve found eighteen bodies. There are some at the barricade and a couple out on pickets who were lucky to avoid this massacre. I don’t know how many more we’ll find alive.”
“Plus, the guys we have back at the ranch,” I said.
“At least we saved them,” Sarge replied.
“Cecil, did your house make it?” I asked.
“Just some broken windows. Nothing serious.”
I nodded, “Good.”
“Anyone have a count on the dead?” Cecil asked.
“It has to be over a hundred,” Sarge replied.
“Way over,” I added.
“We got a week’s buryin’ ahead of us,” Cecil replied.
“We’re going to have to do mass graves. I hate to say it, but it’s the only way,” Doc replied. “And we’re going to have to do it soon. Like, we should start today.”
As we were talking, Mitch and Michelle walked up. “Wow, am I ever glad to see you two are alright,” I said.
“We were at home and we hid in the bunker,” Michelle replied.
“This is unbelievable,” Mitch said. “We saw so many bodies on our way here.”
Sarge nodded. “There’s a bunch. We’re going to have to get started burying them soon. We were just talking about it.”
“Where are the wounded?” Michelle asked.
“They’re at the park. I was about to head that way,” Doc replied.
“Come on,” Sarge said, “We’ll all walk over there.”