“His wife said he was a gifted surgeon.”
“Are they still willing to move to the ranch?”
“Yep, lock, stock and barrel, including all of his equipment and medical supplies. We’re going to have to build a clinic ASAP.”
That statement brought to mind the go-to I had with Jules, his father-in-law. I took a moment to relate the exchange and added my thoughts about population growth at the ranch and the question of exclusive ownership.
Jeffry said, “I can see your point, but I’ve known Jules for a long time. He’s not a man who easily lets go of authority. He enjoys being in charge.”
He stood, groaning and grimacing as he did. “”The damned leg stiffens when I’m not using it, but Doc Robbins says its healing okay. I know you’re anxious to see Annette. Come back and tell me about your trip.”
Opening the door to her room, I found Annette still flat on her back. “How long will it be before you can sit?”
“How long will it be before you learn to knock first and then greet someone with a ‘Hello’?”
“Knock, knock, hello. How long before you can sit up?”
“Christ, did you de-mature while you were gone? I can sit; do when I eat. Walk too… walked twice to the bathroom already.” She indicated a chair, “Drag it over and tell me about your adventures.”
“How do you know I had adventures? Maybe I was completely bored, just riding taking the sights.”
“Bullshit. Your name’s Tempest. Chaos finds you anytime you’re out of sight.” She rethought her statement, “No, for that matter, chaos finds you anytime, anywhere with any-who.”
“Well, I did rescue a boy from wild dogs and investigated a few places.”
She smiled. “Tell me everything.”
I did tell her everything, but first I told her, “I am glad to see you can breathe and talk normal. Do you know you’re beautiful when you smile?”
Her smile grew bigger. “Okay, for that you’re forgiven for barging into my room.”
When I finished telling her about the time spent away from the clinic, she said, “Jules and Jeffry; yeah, I can see them as authoritarian; Doctor Robbins—, he’s more the ‘uppity, uppity, better than thou’ type.”
“Yeah, well, it comes to the same thing.”
“Bullying,” Annette supplied. “It comes back to, you’re young, you’re a girl and you’re small for your size. Because you can’t change any of that you’re always going to be angry.”
“How come you’re immune? You’re a girl and young.”
“Maybe it’s because I’m not a dynamo of energy with an overwhelming personality attacking life with an obscene level of derring-do.”
“What is “derring-do”?”
“Derring-do is brave and heroic feats, and you’re loaded with it.”
I shrugged and said, “Maybe I need to shed the derring and the do.”
Annette said, “Naw—, keep it all. Here’s the question that concerns me… where in the hell are we going to stay once we return to the ranch. I am for sure not going to stay in the bunkhouse with a bunch of kids. The ranch house is out because I’m sure you in that close of proximity will lead to more skirmishes with one or the other adults there.”
“You can have my room in the bunkhouse. I plan to move to the barn until I devise a permanent abode.”
“You still determined to have a place of your own deep in the woods?”
“Naw, I’ve decided to share it with you as soon as you’re sure you won’t keel over and die.”
“Why the change if heart?”
I shrugged, “You’re not like me, boil over, you’re more apt to simmer and then explode. Tell me you don’t think being around all those people won’t wear on you.”
She chortled and said, “Sooner than you’d think. I’m more like you than I want to admit. What’s on your agenda for the rest of the day?”
“Have something to eat while I tell Jeffry and the others about the trip. I’ll probably go to the ranch to help with the unloading.”
Annette gazed at me for a moment and then said, “There’s something I want you to do, but if you don’t want to, that’s okay.”
“What?”
“Go over to the Ranger Station and check on the women and children. I’ve worried about them ever since we left em there. Tempest, I know your attitude; all of em were guilty, but realize this, most women go along with their men because their mothers and fathers taught em to be that way. They can unlearn that mindset.”
“They don’t matter to me, one way or the other, but if it’ll put your mind at rest, I’ll do it for you.”
“You’ll do it today?”
“Sure, the station’s not that far from the ranch.”
“Thank you. Go eat, I’m out of energy.”
“Can I get you anything?”
“Naw just shut the lamp when you leave. The fumes are getting to me.”
********
An hour and a half later, I was hiding in the woods across the road from the Ranger Station. I let the lens of my cheap telescope play over the two men on the front porch sitting in plastic lawn chairs. A third man had just left to go inside.
I didn’t see any children out playing, but I did hear women’s voices. It sounded as if they were behind the building. Because of the lay of the building, the safest approach to the back of the house was to return to the main road and circle through the forest.
That took thirty minutes, but I snuck right up to where I could hear them; by my count, fifteen women, talking as they weeded a large garden.
In a low voice, one woman spoke to the close-clustered group kneeling in the rows of vegetables. “I know they’ll rape Becky soon. I heard Ben talking to George about her nubbing tits. We need to move up our run.”
Another woman said, “I still say we should douse em with gasoline and burn em up. Those three will track us down in a heartbeat. George keeps bragging about his special forces training. Our children will slow us down.”
“That’s too chancy. If we bungle it and alert the one on guard, there’s no telling what they’ll do to us. Demi, hold up your hand to show what they do to runaways.”
A young, blonde haired woman held up a hand missing a thumb. She said, “A hand without a thumb is just about useless. Damn son of a bitches.”
I’d heard enough. Another half hour put me back across the road from the front of the station. I’d already figured out what to do. I removed my pullover sweatshirt from under my light jacket and cut it into strips. With a finger on the trigger my pistol, while wrapping multiple strips around hand and pistol, I found myself chanting, ‘Audacity, audacity, what would I do without you?”
That done, leaving my rifle and backpack behind, I breached concealment and crossed the road.
I approached the station. I’d left my jacket partially unzipped to provide a view down the center of my bare chest for added distraction. Cradling my cloth-swathed hand, lurching as I went, forty feet from the building, very loudly I began calling, “I need help. A snake bit me. Please, I need help.”
All three men were on the porch and all three of them left it to come to the aid of the little hurt girl. Only one of them carried a rifle, but all had pistols holstered at their sides.
My mind said, “God damn, this is too easy. It was too easy. Disarmed by my helpless appearance, they came with zero caution. Fifteen feet from me, I raised my swathed hand from its nest and began shooting.
I shouted, “Snakebite,” with every pull of the trigger. I put two rounds in the chest of the man carrying the rifle. “Snakebite, snakebite,” and the second man staggered and fell in unison with the first. Snakebites stabbed the third man. Five seconds was all it took to put em down, but none of the three was dead.
Three more strikes from the snake, all to their heads deleted their tenuous hold on life. Right then, standing over the dead bodies of the garbage, watching residual gun smoke escape from the hole in the cloth at the business end of my clothed h
and, I wished Jeffry, or Jules, or Doctor Robbins was there to ask me what I felt about killing them. Absolutely nothing would be my answer.
I felt heat on my gun hand. The end of the binding burst into flame. It was a race, but I got unwrapped before I suffered any burns.
Of course, the noise of gunshots brought the women running from around back. The one in the lead stopped short and screamed, “Oh god, help us, she’s back.”
Just to mess with em, I shouted, “Calm down. God sent me to save you yet again. How in the hell do you women keep getting yourselves into messes like this?”
The woman, I recognized her as the one with the cut off thumb, came closer. “Why are you back?”
“Annette, the girl that left you all the last time I was here asked me to check on you.”
A woman from the crowd behind her shouted, “So you came and left us man-less again.”
Pissed, I shouted back, “Damned right I did. Can I get a thank you?”
I saw a woman give the loudmouth a shove and tell her to shut up. To the group I spoke.
“Annette says you all are just a bunch of dumb-ass women who don’t know how to live without a man telling you how. She says you all can change. You have a chance to prove it. I’m going to give you directions to a place less than ten miles from here. Pack your shit and show up there tomorrow evening around five.”
One thumb, asked, “What’s there, where you want us to go?”
“It’s a place where you can live decent, productive lives.”
She went to one of the corpses, gave it a kick and said, “You are a master of deception.”
“Yes I am.” I was tired of being there. “You all should make ‘One Thumb’ your boss. Come or stay or kill yourselves, it’s all the same to me.”
I arrived back at the ranch in time to help unload. Rather than ‘Clinch with the devil, I told Maggie to inform Jules that another large group comprised of women and children would show up the next evening. Her laugh and words showed she saw through my plan. “Thanks for giving it to me to carry him such joyous news to cap his day.”
“Better you than me.”
With all the new arrivals with so many children, the noise level at the ranch was high and tiring. That night found me inside the barn spreading blankets in the loft. Before lying down, I had an MRE as I sat in the hay window and watched a group of nearly a dozen adults prepare supper on barbecue grills placed in the side yard while dozens of children— ‘played… Nope, ran amok, yelling and screaming.
Yep, I needed space.”
**********
Run amok— that would define my next few days. Days that would find me with Annette for brief periods intermixed with helping, sometimes guiding projects; moving buildings to the ranch, hauling supplies from the Walmart and Lowes to store inside those buildings. I spent an entire day locating large-capacity portable fuel tanks that required a dedicated caravan of dump trucks and trailers to transport.
Jules did manage to get the fuel tanker at the fuel depot to run. He and Vikas assumed the job of multiple trips hauling gasoline and diesel to fill the tanks at the ranch.
Jeffry, everyday becoming more mobile as his leg healed, rummaged through the manufacturing warehouse at the metal-building lot and found plans for the construction of a huge metal building.
It took him an entire day to inventory the materials, both on hand inside the building, and in the covered sheds of the lot, but, declaring the inventory complete, wanted everything loaded and transported to await a ‘sometime erection’.
In the early days of all the spastic activity, we brought Annette from the clinic and installed her in my old room in the bunkhouse—, my ‘old room’ because I took up permanent residency in the barn loft.
Three weeks passed and came the day Jules requested a meeting of all adults. That evening, ‘all adults met under a newly erected metal-roofed, twenty-by-forty cooking pavilion behind the ranch house.
With the multiple gas grills pushed to one side, we sat at round patio-tables on plastic chairs. On the tables were buckets of ice and jugs of iced-tea. If preferred, cans of soft drinks were in Styrofoam coolers near the grills.
Annette, out of bed and back to normal except for some muscle loss was at a table with Vikas, Preeja and me. The women from the Ranger Station had blended with us, but none sat near our table. From ‘hate looks’ I sometimes caught, some of them must have loved the murderers I killed.
The night was warm, the sky clear and full of stars. A mood of earned satisfaction for work well done permeated the space. Jules, standing at one end of the open sided pavilion, called for attention.
“Everyone, please, let’s call this meeting to order.”
It took only a moment to gain his audience. He raised his glass of tea and said, “Let’s toast ourselves and thank the almighty Lord for giving us the strength and means to achieve the mighty deeds we have done. On this beautiful night, everyone has a bed under a roof. Everyone will go to bed with full stomachs. I ask the Lord’s grace that it will always be thus. Raise your glasses and drink.”
I wasn’t much into toasting a sermon, but responding to a glare from Annette, I raised my glass with the rest. My thought was the credit for our achievements went to the bountiful amount of labor we performed.
Jules continued speaking. “Several of you have voiced the opinion that we need to slack off on bringing in new supplies until we can provide for adequate long-term storage. Clothing and other dry goods need housing in a low humidity environment. Our canned goods need not only a dry environment, but also a cool one to ensure longevity.
“Another voiced concern is that we are neglecting the main functions of the ranch, namely the procurement of livestock and crops. Folks, we need to collect cattle, horses, goats, chickens and rabbits. We need to get seed in the ground.
“Jeffry informed me this morning that he would like to begin construction on the large warehouse. To do this he will need to lay a foundation. As all are aware, the days for calling in concrete trucks is over, but he has a solution. Jeffry, Let me turn this over to you to explain. Come on up.”
Jeffry took Jules’s place. He waved to us and began. “The building will require a forty-by-eighty floor. As Jules pointed out we can’t order concrete, but we do have an option—, mudcrete.
“Mudcrete is a process where we utilize the existing clay we have under the grass that covers our piece of Tennessee. Though laborious, the process is simple. Till the earth, rake out the vegetative plant matter, and then spread concrete and sand in the correct proportions.
“The tiller comes back into play to mix the cement and sand with the clay. When that job is complete, the mix is compacted and leveled. The last bit of the process is to wet the surface and float it smooth.
“People, a forty-by-eighty-foot building is a huge project, but with all of us working on it in shifts, I calculate we can have the floor in five days.”
Jules, standing some feet away from Jeffry said, “That is a project that will need coordination with other pressing projects.”
Jeffry responded, “That shouldn’t be a problem.”
Jules walked to where Jeffry stood and thanked him. As Jeffry returned to his seat, Jules said, “I need to add that to do the floor will require dump truck loads of sand and a great number of bags of concrete. I propose we dedicate tomorrow to procuring those supplies.
Jules waved to our table, “Vikas has volunteered himself, Tempest and David to be our cowboys and girl. I see no reason that would preclude them from rounding up cattle starting tomorrow.
He continued speaking, “I would like to bring up a point and get opinions on it. This ranch has three-hundred-fifty acres, large, but because we’ll need to dedicate so much land to farming, not large enough. The land next to ours has over a hundred acres of fenced grazing. Across the road from us is another property. It’s unfenced, last planted in soybean, over four-hundred acres broken into three plots with stretches of woodland.
“The o
wners of these properties succumbed to the plague that has ravaged our country. I propose we annex them. Does anyone see an ethical problem with that? If so, please voice it. If no one sees a problem, let’s consider it done.”
He waited a long moment for someone to speak. No one spoke, so he said, “We’ll plan on expanding our border.”
Remaining seated, Abby spoke up. “Miss Mellon and I have a concern. We are neglecting the education of over two dozen children. We need a schoolhouse and all the materials associated with giving our youth a quality education. Miss Mellon has more to add.”
Miss Mellon stood to speak. “I have completed a survey of the adults here and I am pleased to say that there is sufficient talent, highly educated people to staff a full curriculum. It is a blessing to have with us Doctor Robbins and his wife, herself a trained nurse. Future generations will need doctors and nurses.
“As Abby pointed out, we need a dedicated schoolhouse. We do realize that survival comes first, but please ASAP it on your list of things to accomplish.”
Jules pointed to his wife. She looked up from the notebook on the table in front of her. “My wife Maggie won’t miss a word of your request. I’m sure a schoolhouse will be included in her growing book of lists.”
Jules turned his attention to me. “Not long ago I had a set to with Tempest. The ‘set to’ concerned population growth, and whether this would be a ranch or a town. Looking out from where I stand, I see so many faces that I can only conclude that we have the beginning of a town. Most of you can give thanks to her for your presence here.”
I didn’t see whom, but a woman shouted, “She killed our men and orphaned some of our children and orphaned all of em from the Walmart.”
I started to stand, but Annette held my arm.
Jeffry did stand. “All of the men she’s killed were murderers. If they were here tonight, we’d kill them all again. Tempest eliminated animals, not men. Our world is better without them. If any of you hold animosity toward her, see either Jules or me tomorrow. We’ll outfit you with a survival ration and see you to the road.”
Tempest of Tennessee (Episode 3): Tempest of Tennessee Page 11