Fifty Falling Stars

by Wesley Higginbotham

  “Best for the community?” The mayor asked. “Did you see the murder he committed this morning? Your husband is insane and danger to himself and us!”

  “No, I saw him execute one of his soldiers for raping a young woman. I feel he was right in that. I feel safer knowing that everyone saw what happens to someone who does something like that.” Sherry said.

  Her statement chilled the conversation. Sherry turned to Will. “Do you know anything about why he ordered these people attacked?”

  Will shrugged his shoulders and addressed the sheriff. “What was that he said to your earlier? It was something about armbands? Wasn’t it?”

  “What armbands?” Sherry asked.

  “The report from Jimmy said that the men had strips of cloth tied around their arms.” The sheriff said.

  Sherry visibly paled. “Oh my God! They can’t be here.”

  “That right there!” The mayor said, pointing a bonny finger at her. “What is that? You know something don’t you? Tell us why your husband has gone all crazy on us!”

  “He asked us not to tell the town about it. He didn’t want to panic everyone.” Sherry began. She saw the sheriff flinch. “But he told you, didn’t he.”

  “Told you what, Sheriff?” Brother Bob asked. The two clergymen had been so quiet that everyone had almost forgotten that they were there.

  “About Owensboro.” Sherry said. “About three weeks before we made it Celina, we tried to cross the Ohio River at Owensboro. Kirk had us wait while he and Clay and Jimmy went to scout out the town and the bridge. They saw thousands of people storm the city. Kirk sent Clay and Jimmy back to the camp while went closer to the city. What he told us when he got back was something out of a nightmare. He said he saw the attackers collecting bodies. They butchered the dead, cutting them up and cooking them. He said there were women tied down, being raped by whoever came by. I’m glad he kept us away from there. Can you imagine what it would be like if thousands of people like that turned up at our town?” The Methodist preacher looked like he might be sick for the second time that day. The Baptist preacher muttered a prayer.

  The mayor turned to Terrance. “You knew about this? Why didn’t you tell us?”

  The sheriff sighed. “Because all I had, all we have now, is Kirk’s word. I didn’t want to stir up any trouble over what could or could not be a real threat. I didn’t know him and didn’t particularly trust him.”

  “But you trusted him enough to let him set up the scouts and have us work on his defense upgrades?” Garry asked.

  “Why not?” Sheriff White said. “Most of them were pretty good ideas. They weren’t that big of a drain on resources.”

  “Ok.” The mayor said. “So Kirk may or may not have seen some horrible things while he snuck into that town. What does all of this have to do with us? Is he just paranoid?”

  Sherry was shaking a little bit. “He said the men that attacked Owensboro wore bits of cloth tied around their arms. He said he didn’t know why but thought it might be some sort of uniform or identifier.” The light switched on in the mayor’s mind. His eyes widened as the realization of what Kirk was doing hit him. The first screams from inside the room reached them.

  The door opened twenty minutes later. Jenny ran out crying. She saw Will and flung herself into his arms. He tried to comfort her. He looked up to see what had upset her so badly, but his view was blocked as the doctor ran out. Will saw what was in the room. The man had been tied to a chair. A big red spot covered the man’s chest. Will saw the man’s hands. He only had six fingers left. The remains of the missing fingers littered the floor in front of him.

  Kirk stepped into the doorway, wiping the blood from his face with one of the towels the doctor and Jenny had brought in with them. When he finished with his face, he wiped his hands and a pair of bloody pliers. Kirk fixed that town council with a flat stare. “Is that part of all your special training?” the mayor asked, looking a little ill.

  “Don’t ask questions that you don’t want answers to.” Kirk said. “Well, I confirmed it. It’s the same group. They know about Celina and are headed this way.”

  “Wait a minute, son.” The sheriff said. “You did all that even without knowing he was part of the same group that attacked that town in Kentucky?”

  “Yes. It was a hunch, but it turned out to be right.” Kirk said. The Methodist preacher looked nauseated. Kirk addressed him. “That’s right, father, I would have tortured an innocent man on a hunch. I know there’s a special VIP room saved for me in hell, so save your sermon.” Kirk looked back to the mayor and the sheriff. “Looks like we get to have that emergency meeting after all. We haven’t got much time. They’re closer than we think.” The group looked at Kirk like he had two heads. “Don‘t you guys get it yet? Did I do something horrible? Yes. But this isn’t a fucking game. When these animals show up, we’re not going to have a small skirmish. These fuckers are bringing a full-fledged war to our doorstep. There is no surrender with these guys. No reasoning. The last time I saw them, they were eating the people of Owensboro! There’s no telling how many other towns they’ve hit. They had thousands of men at Owensboro. How do you propose their leader, Commander Vicio, manages to feed these sick fucks? Who do you think is next on the menu?” Kirk let that sink in for a second. “Sheriff’s office in fifteen, and someone bring Mr. Pae and Doctor Williams.” He turned to Sherry, who was crying. He embraced her. Even though she knew it was Kirk, loved him, and knew he did what he did to protect the town; she cringed a little. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the evil times they lived in might be rubbing off on him. Kirk and his wife walked out of the courthouse.

  When they left, the mayor turned to the sheriff. “That guy is evil. I can’t believe he tortured that man to death, even if he did get critical information out of him. I just don’t know that’s it worth it. It’s just not who we are.”

  “I know what you mean.” Terrance said. “We may have to deal with Kirk permanently after this is attack is over.”

  Brother Bob spoke up. “I think you gentlemen may have Kirk all wrong.”

  “What do you mean, Bob?” Brother Clarke asked.

  “I don’t know that he’s evil. Sometimes it’s not ‘what’ we do, it’s ‘why’ we do it.”

  “I don’t follow you, Brother.” Sheriff White said.

  “What do you think of when you think of angels, Sheriff?” Brother Bob asked.

  “Kind beings with wings that bring good news, perform miracles, and help people.” The sheriff answered.

  “True. They bring good news like the birth of Christ and perform miracles.” Brother Bob agreed. “But they are also the ones who do God’s dirty work. Who did he send to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah? Who killed the first born children of Egypt for Moses? We might look at those acts as evil and wrong because they killed little babies and everyone in those ancient towns, innocent included. But that was God’s will; and they did it, no matter how ugly it was.” He paused. “Perhaps Kirk’s our angel, doing the dirty work so we won’t have to…”

  Kirk was waiting for the town council when they made it back to sheriff’s office. Once they were all inside the conference room, Kirk used thumb tacks to pin up the map of Celina that he had taken from the sheriff’s office and began laying out his plan. “All right everyone, this is how we’re going to do this since we don’t have much time.”

  “What do you mean we don’t have much time?” The sheriff asked.

  Will cleared his throat and Kirk shot the Sheriff a flat stare.

  “As I was saying, we don’t have much time. The asshole I questioned earlier said the gang was at Beaumont, Kentucky when they left on their mission. That puts them fifty miles out if they come south and attack the west gate. A little further if they go east, then south to attack the east gate. That gives us four days max to prepare. So, we don’t have much time.

  “I’m going to lay out my suggestions for how we defend the town. Please hold your questions and comments until I finish.
We can address any issues that you think I may have missed or areas where we might make improvements after I lay out the initial plan. Everyone got it?”

  Reluctant heads nodded across the room. “All right, let’s get started. First of all, let’s start with what we’re facing. From my own observations and what I was able to get out of their scout, they have somewhere around three thousand armed men. Their group is not like ours in that every one of them is part of their fighting force. They don’t have much in the way of support functions. That gives them the advantage as far as numbers they can field against us. However, it also creates a disadvantage for them because they don’t have much of a supply system or medical. They have soldiers but little or no way to supply them and no way to treat their wounded. If we stop their initial charge, any time that we keep them occupied will only serve to weaken them at a faster rate than it will us.

  “They do have running vehicles, supplied with gas from a fuel truck they bring with them wherever they go. The scout didn’t know where the fuel came from. I’m assuming they’ve been taking it from abandoned cars and underground gas station tanks in the towns they’ve raided. We have to assume that we’ll be facing some sections of them that will be highly mobile. When I saw them at Owensboro, they used a big bus to ram the barriers set up there and breach the town.

  “The army is led by an ex-con they call Commander Vicio. The scout didn’t know much about the guy, not being part of his inner circle. From the rumor’s he had heard about the guy, he’s a complete psychopath. The scout told me a story about how this Commander Vicio found a group of religious zealots wandering the countryside looking for some messiah to lead them to victory against the forces of evil. This Vicio character proclaimed himself their messiah and somehow managed to get them to accept it. In short, we’re dealing with a psychotic, megalomaniac who is hell-bent on capturing towns to secure enough resources to keep his army going. Reading between the lines of what the scout said, this guy is not especially intelligent and rules mostly out of fear and ruthlessness. His M.O. is typically straight-on, frontal assaults, taking the towns by brute force rather than any sophisticated tactics. He apparently either doesn’t have the means or the ability to establish himself at any one spot and build an infrastructure to support his army. I think that’s why he goes from town to town. He’s trying to find and take enough resources to sustain his army. The scout said that whenever they took a place, they scavenged everything of any value. This includes killing the town’s residents and using them for food. That’s what we’re up against.” Kirk paused letting this sink in. More than one of the faces in the room had turned pale.

  “We know that they have radios and are using them to coordinate their movements.” Kirk turned to Mr. Pae. “Have you been able to gather any info on their signals?”

  Mr. Pae cleared his throat. “We’ve kept a constant monitor on the frequency we found on the captured radio but haven’t heard anything so far. I’ve got my two assistants scanning the other channels trying to pick up anything. So far we haven’t found anything. Scott did find one channel where he picked up some squeaks like someone was pressing the transmit button on a radio and not saying anything. We’ve been monitoring that but haven’t been able to make any sense out of it. It’s definitely intentional, but we haven’t seen a pattern yet. It’s not Morris code, but it could be some prearranged code. There’s just no way to tell.” Kirk tried to think of any way that was helpful but couldn’t. He thanked Mr. Pae and carried on with his brief.

  “We have just over twenty-eight hundred people in town. We have guns for approximately seventy-five percent of these folks if we spread them out over everyone.” Kirk looked around for confirmation. Sheriff White and Garry nodded. “All right, I think we have to work under the assumption that all of the enemy will have weapons. I don’t think that they do, but I think it’s better to assume that. We have a little over six hundred rifles in town. From what I got from their scout, they use the roads exclusively to move from town to town. Given their current location, I think it’s safe to assume that they’ll attack from the northern routes into town. That means they’ll come in through the east or west roads. We need to beef those up.”

  “I want us to move some unused vehicles to the gates to create an extension of the gates by a hundred feet on either side. I want some of the tractors to dig trenches behind the row of cars that we set up. I want our riflemen split into two groups, each group stationed behind the wall extensions. This’ll give them cover and allow them to spread out, increasing the amount of fire that we can focus on the bridges. I want as many of the assholes dead or wounded as possible before they cross the bridges. That’s our greatest bottleneck and our strongest defense. I want our shotguns and pistols set up in the inner defenses, with the exception of thirty for each gate to stand behind the gates and take care of anyone making it across the bridges. I think the shotguns will be most effective against closer range targets as they get slowed down in our foot-trap fields and the wooden barriers.

  “One of the weaknesses that I think we have is the hospital.” Kirk looked over to Doctor Williams, the head of the hospital. “I’m assuming that there’s no way to move the hospital equipment and set it up inside the inner defenses?”

  “That’s correct.” The doctor said. “We have no space to set up everything inside the interior. The buildings that we might need to move into just don’t have the room or the infrastructure to support all of our equipment. The best place to treat our wounded will be the hospital.”

  Kirk nodded. “You’ve trained all your people on basic triage techniques?” The doctor shook his head. Kirk ran his hand through his hair in annoyance. “Get on that immediately and make any other preparations you need to make to handle mass casualties. Get with Garry and set up a system to transport our wounded back to the hospital. I’m thinking we can use a couple of the pickup trucks to load up wounded from the gates and transport them back. If we have any ambulances, get them gassed up and running. I also want a doctor and a couple of medically trained people at the gates to triage on the spot and help stabilize the people we are bringing back.”

  “Ok, getting back to defending the hospital. I don’t think it would be a wise use of resources to post people to guard the hospital. It’s just too far away from where the fighting will be. I suggest that we hide a group of a hundred or so men in the buildings to the south of town, but not so far that they won’t quickly be able to support the gates if needed.” Kirk pointed to a block of buildings on the map, just north of the Methodist Church. “In the event that whichever gate is attacked gets breached, this group can cut off the invaders from getting to the hospital. If the enemy goes straight for the inner defenses, this group can launch a surprise attack and flank them as they get caught up in the barriers and the fire coming from the center of town.”

  “I’m going to position one of our scout teams on the mountain just across the river to the north and another on the hills overlooking the hospital. From those positions, they should be able to see everything that happens. They should give us a huge tactical advantage by giving us real-time, bird’s eye reports about what’s going on. That’ll allow us to maneuver smartly and shore up any weak spots that develop.”

  Kirk ran a hand through his beard. “That’s it. Anyone got any questions?”

  No one spoke for a while. They sat there trying to absorb the plan and come to terms with the fact that this was actually happening. Finally Sheriff White broke the silence. “It’s a good plan, son. Who do you propose to lead it?”

  Kirk shocked the room. “You, Sheriff.” Will’s jaw dropped open. “You have the majority of the guards and men under your control. They know me, but I haven’t had the face time with them like you have. I think a complete change in leadership at this point might cause more harm than good. I think you should set up a base at the courthouse and control the action from there. I’ll be in the southern group guarding the hospital and providing backup in case things get ugly.”
The sheriff was just as shocked as anyone else, but he agreed with Kirk’s assessment.

  “You mentioned that they rammed the other town’s barricades with buses.” Garry stated. “I think we should move some obstacles onto the bridges to discourage the buses from just driving up and ramming the gates.”

  “That’s a good idea.” Kirk agreed. “Just don’t use any old cars or anything that big. We need small obstacles that will deter the buses. One thing I do not want is to give their foot soldiers cover to hide behind on the bridge. So, whatever you use, try to minimize the cover it might provide. I think our chances are better to face one attempt at ramming the gate than allowing thousands of soldiers to run from cover to cover and eventually overtake us in sheer numbers. Even if we killed one of theirs for each bullet we fire, it’s still going to drain most of our ammo. I know the sheriff has a lot of reloading supplies, but I doubt we’ll have time to make ammunition while the fighting is going on.”

  “We dug up some fairly large rocks when we broke ground planting the fields. Would those work?” Garry asked.

  “Sounds perfect.” Kirk agreed.

  Will stood, leaning against the side wall through the entire meeting. He now stood straight and raised a hand. Kirk looked over and acknowledged him. “I don’t like what you said about the ammo. If this thing gets drug out, it may come down to hand-to-hand fighting. I think we need to gather anything and everything that can be used as a weapon and distribute them out. I’m talking knives, axes, baseball bats, everything. The scouts can train them for a little while before the attack.”

  “Good idea, Will. You might also see if we can find some shields for them to use.” Kirk said. Will nodded. No one had any more immediate questions.

  Kirk addressed the clergymen in the room. “Reverends, I have an equally important job for you three. I know a lot of people in this town are religious. Once word gets out about what we’re facing, there are going to be a lot of scared people in town. I need you guys holding as many worship services as you can and prepared to counsel as many people as you can. In a lot of ways, you guys may end up being busier than the rest us before this all happens. And, if I may, I’d suggest guiding your sermons toward some of the Old Testament stuff where the Israelites went to war and God protected them; but it’s really up to you. I just want our guys heading into this with as clear a conscience and sense of divine protection as you can manage.”