“You can’t cross here,” a man shouted from the roadblock. “This is our territory and we’re going to keep it pure.”
“What the hell does he mean by that?” Jim asked.
“What do you think we are?” Cole yelled. “Impure?”
“We’ve purged the devil’s followers!” the man shouted. “We don’t know what you are. And we can’t take the risk. ”
“I wonder how many innocent people were killed along with the guilty?” Hank questioned aloud.
“Can I walk up and talk to you?” Cole yelled.
There was a brief pause, then, “All right. But leave your weapons at your truck.”
“No way,” Cole shouted. “I don’t know who you are any more than you know who I am. But the wind is blowing from the east and I can’t smell you, so that’s a plus for your side.”
Jim was studying the men at the roadblock through binoculars. “They all smiled at that, Cole. I think they’re for real.”
“All right!” the man shouted. “You people can come on up and let us take a whiff of you. But if you smell like a cesspool, you’ll be dead in ten seconds. Come on.”
“My name’s Henry North,” the spokesman said, after eyeballing and smelling Cole for a few seconds. He nodded his head and his people relaxed. “It’s been pure hell around here, mister. Right now, I’m not sure which side is worse. If you know what I mean.”
“Oh, I know,” Cole said. “We met a Brother Ely last night. I thought we were going to have to shoot our way through his group.”
“I’ve heard the name on shortwave. We’re not that bad,” North replied. “But don’t plan on going through Maryville. It’s a damn war zone. Nationwide, I don’t know who’s winning.”
“I think it’s a draw, so far,” Cole told him. “But none of us have anything to go back to. We’re heading for the mountains to sit it out.”
“That’s not a bad idea. We got a handle on things early on here. Most of us have homes and businesses still intact. That’s why we remained. Y’all can go on through. But watch yourselves. From Maryville on east, it’s a free fire zone.”
“Thanks. Good luck to you.”
“Same to you, mister.”
Cole took the point and moved the group on.
As the small convoy put the lake miles behind them, taking the back roads and bypassing any towns, Cole could see what Henry North was talking about. The battles here had been fierce, with many homes destroyed by fire and a few still burning unchecked. Here and there, a body lay bloating under the merciless blast of the late summer sun ... food for the gathering carrion birds. And the battle had been no respecter of gender or age, men and women and children lay in grotesque shapes along the way.
Cole led the small convoy over to the Foothills Parkway, and there they ran smack into trouble.
A bullet slammed into the windshield of the Bronco and tore the rearview mirror off, the glass of the mirror shattering and the frame hitting Cole in the forehead. Cole thought for a moment that the bullet had hit him in the head, but reflexes took over and he cut the wheel to the right, leaving the road and braking on a gravel road that meandered off into the timber.
Cole grabbed up the mic. “I’m hit!” he radioed. “Pull off the road and take cover.” He put a big hand to his forehead just as his eyes saw the bloody end of the mirror frame on the seat. He grunted, knowing then what had hit him. His fingers came away bloody, but he knew he wasn’t going to die from a small cut on the forehead, even though it was bleeding copiously, as head wounds will do. “I’m okay,” he radioed. “Just a cut on the forehead.”
“What have we got, Cole?” Jim’s voice came out of the speaker.
Cole keyed the mic. “I don’t know yet. So far only one shot has been fired, and that one damn near punched my ticket.” Cole was holding a handkerchief to his forehead, slowly ebbing the flow of blood.
Cole heard the heavy reports of high-powered rifles behind him. Jim’s voice popped out of the speaker. “They’re hitting us now, Cole, coming from the north side of the parkway. Watch your ass.”
Cole found his first-aid kit and pressed a large adhesive bandage tightly over the cut on his forehead. Then he got mad.
He reached behind the front seat, on the floorboards, and pulled out a gun case, holding a Remington model 7400, .308 caliber, scope-mounted. He had sighted the rifle for long-distance shooting back at Ruth’s estate. Cole stuffed a pocket full of cartridges and slipped away from the Bronco, moving into the brush and timber.
He settled down behind a tree, pulled a round into the slot, assumed the sitting position, and began sweeping the area across the road through his scope. “Well, now,” he muttered, adjusting the scope as the figure of a man, visible from the waist up, came into view. The man, wild-eyed and unshaven, held a scope-mounted rifle. “There you are, you stinking son of a bitch.” Cole got him in the cross hairs and gently began his trigger pull, letting the rifle fire itself. The slug tore a hole in the man’s chest and knocked him backward. “One down,” Cole said.
Off to his left, Cole could hear the familiar crash of Hank’s 7 mm mag, and the yammering of M-16s.
Cole once more began using his scope to scan the terrain across the road. A man stepped out from behind a tree at precisely the wrong time for him and the right time for Cole. Cole put a .308 slug in the man’s chest. His numbed and soon to be lifeless fingers dropped the rifle and the man rolled slowly down the slight incline.
Cole saw a man burst out of the brush and run hard for a heavier stand of timber. A second later, he heard the hard boom of Hank’s 7 mm mag. The bullet took the man in the center of his back, blew out the front, and dropped him to the ground.
The ambushers quit the fight; they’d had enough of the accurate shooting from what they had thought would be easy game. Cole made his way back to the Bronco and crouched down just as Katti came roaring up and jumped out, running to him.
She took a look at the bandage on Cole’s forehead and smiled. “I think you’ll live.”
“But I’ll need lots of tender, loving care.”
“I’m sure I can manage that.”
Jim drove up and stepped out. “How many did you get, Cole?”
“Two, for sure.”
“We got five. I think this bunch had a sudden change of heart about prolonging the fight with us. But for sure there will be more.”
Cole looked at the mountains, looming to the south and east. “You know these mountains, Jim?”
“Better than most,” the ex-Tennessee State Trooper said. “We’ll want to turn off just a few miles further. It’s a paved road that makes a big loop. We won’t complete the loop. I know an old fire road that angles off from it. That’s the one we want.”
Cole nodded his head and grimaced. He had a raging headache from the mirror frame colliding with his noggin. “Take the point. You know the way.”
About eight miles further on, the Great Smoky Mountains swallowed them.
Cole led them on the paved road for several miles, then signaled for a turn. The fire road was passable, but Cole would have hated to try it in anything other than a four-wheel drive that sat well off the ground. And the road got worse the further they drove. The old road, which looked as though it had not been used in years, finally stopped.
“We’ve got room to turn the vehicles around,” Jim said, “and park them heading back out or at least facing the road.”
After the vehicles had been turned around and parked, Cole began walking in a large circle, studying the immediate area. They had been steadily climbing as they drove the old road and about a hundred yards from road’s end, he could look down and see the looping paved road they had exited. They would need a guard here at all times.
The old fire road had ended at a stone bluff that reared up about seventy-five feet high. No one would be coming at them from that direction. About a quarter of a mile away, a creek bubbled its way along. The trees that surrounded the campsite were tall and old and the brush h
ad not been cut back in years. With a little work, they could make the camp site reasonably secure in three directions.
Cole walked back to the group. He pointed back toward the bluff that overlooked the paved loop. “One person down there at all times as lookout. We have no way of charging batteries for the walkie-talkies, so we’ll string a rope with a tin can with pebbles in it as a warning signal. . .”
“Shades of Nam,” Jim said with a smile.
“Yeah,” Cole agreed. “Only this time we don’t have to worry about tunnels.”
“Or the enemy within,” Jim added.
Cole looked over at young Bob King, sitting on the ground with a perpetual sullen scowl on his face. “I wouldn’t be too sure of that, buddy.”
Book Two
The more I see of the representatives of the people, the
more I admire my dogs.
—Alphonse de Lamartine
One
Only the absolute essentials were off-loaded from the trucks that first day. The tents were set up and sleeping bags unrolled and aired out. Several fire circles were dug out and carefully rimmed with rocks. Water containers were filled and purification tablets dropped in. Cooking utensils were unpacked, and cans of food set out to be opened for the evening meal. Latrines were dug.
Someone was standing guard on the promontory at all times, and a rope was rigged up stretching from the camp to the lookout post.
Finally, with supper heating over small fires, Hank brought out his shortwave radio and the group settled down to be brought up to date on what was happening in the world around them.
The news was anything but reassuring.
It was anarchy from border to border, coast to coast. For all intents and purposes, the government had collapsed. The president and family were in hiding. The military had been reduced to about a fourth of its original size, and those men and women remaining were being used to guard valuable equipment and to see that heavy weapons did not fall into the wrong hands.
“Whose hands are the wrong ones?” Ruth asked. “The Satanists or men like Brother Ely?”
“Good question,” Cole said.
After the initial blowup, the nation’s cities were now faring better than smaller towns, for the police had rallied to stand and the mayors had issued a dusk to dawn curfew and for once were enforcing it. Anybody found wandering the streets after dark stood a real good chance of getting shot . . . with damn few questions asked. If any were asked at all.
But the cities had suffered damages estimated in the billions of dollars. No one was even hazarding a guess as to the body count, or whether the thin blue line could hold.
Cole rigged another antenna and Hank tried to pick up some AM or FM radio stations. He could bring in only two AM stations, and both of them had wild preaching filling the airwaves. And the preachers were certainly not calling for calm: they were rabble-rousing. When the announcer came on for a five-minute news break, he was worse than the preacher before him.
Libraries were being raided, and offensive books taken from the shelves and burned.
“Offensive to whom?” Jim asked.
Hank just shook his head and sighed heavily. “It’s going to get worse, people.”
The radio preachers were frantically urging all Believers, as the faithful were now being called, to wear white armbands, denoting their purity and love of God. People refusing to wear the armbands for whatever reason were being shot, hanged, and in some parts of the country, stoned to death.
“Oh, dear God!” Hank said. “Next thing we know they’ll be covering the victims.”
“Doing what?” Sue asked.
“Taking a large object, such as a heavy door, and placing it over the victim, then slowly piling large stones on the door, until the weight crushes the life from the person.”
“The world’s gone crazy,” Sue muttered.
Cole was sitting on a camp stool, a curious expression on his face.
“What are you thinking?” Jim asked.
“I just remembered that Scott is a ham radio buff. But I’ve forgotten what meter band he monitors. I wrote his call sign down. But what the hell did I do with it?”
“It’s in the address book,” Katti said. “And yes, I packed it. I’ll get it.”
“Gary,” Hank said, “will you get that collapsible antenna out of the truck for me, please? We need to rig it just as high as we can. I’ve got several hundred feet of lead-in. ”
“How about on top of that bluff behind us?” Bev suggested.
“Wonderful,” Hank said. “But how do we get it up there?”
Bev smiled. “You’re forgetting, honey: I’m an expert climber and rapeller.”
“But that face is sheer!” Hank protested.
“It just looks that way,” she replied. “Watch.”
“It’ll be dark soon, Bev,” Jim cautioned. “Why don’t we wait until morning?”
Bev smiled, grabbed a rope, and disappeared for a few moments.
“Where did she go?” James asked.
“I’m up here,” Bev called.
All heads looked up. Bev was standing about eighty feet above the campsite, grinning down at them.
“How the hell did you get up there?” Jim called.
“I found a path right over there,” she pointed, then laughed at the expression on their faces. She lowered one end of the rope. “Tie the wire, antenna, and support post on. I’ll haul it up and attach the lead-in. Then we’ll really be in business.”
Hank tried several times to raise Scott on shortwave. No luck. After supper, just as the last light was fading, he touched base with the FBI man.
“It’s good to hear your voice,” Scott said. “Is everybody all right?”
“The whole group is fine, Scott,” Hank replied. “How’s your family and how is George?”
“Family is fine and so is George. We’ve set up shop and quarters out at the airport; brought a bunch of mobile homes in. We’ve got military personnel ringing the airport. Things are settling down some here. But the death count is going to be unbelievably high.”
“We experienced some trouble getting here. The extremists seem to be coming out of the woodwork.”
“Tell me. We’re looking at a holy war, friend.”
“Scott, we’re on battery only, so we’ll monitor each evening from seven to seven-thirty.”
“That’s ten-four, Hank. Y’all take it easy, now.”
Hank switched the radio off and everybody settled back with a cup of coffee, watching the fire burn itself down to red embers.
Anne’s young ears picked it up first. She looked all around her. “I hear music,” she said.
“Oh, crap!” Cole muttered.
The strains of the 1950 hit, “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy,” drifted out of the dusk.
“You will forgive me,” the now-familiar voice sprang out of the gathering dusk. “Chattanooga was as close as I could come in song.”
James and Alice Mercer, Pete and Jane King, Al and Denise Winfield, and the three young people were sitting as if frozen into stone, their mouths open. Even Bob King had lost his sullen expression.
When the boy stopped popping his shoeshine rag and the music faded, Cole asked, “Don’t you have anything by Dolly Parton?”
The voice ignored that. “Did you people really think you could lose me? How silly of you. I was with you all the way.”
“How’s the war going?” Hank asked.
“Splendidly. It’s going just as I planned it.”
“Are you . . . ?” Denise said, looking all around her. “I mean, are you really the?—” She could not bring herself to speak the word.
“I am many things, you silly bitch.”
“But lately, just a big pain in the ass,” Hank said.
“When your time comes, priest,” the voice was now thick and dangerous-sounding, “I am going to enjoy watching you die.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Hank verbally brushed that off.
There was n
o reply. The breeze picked up briefly, then died away.
Denise looked at Cole. “That really was . . . ?”
“The devil,” Cole told her.
Alice Mercer fainted.
* * *
Cole insisted upon being permanently assigned the dog watch, the last watch before sunrise. He knew that attacks very often came just before dawn, and he did not want a noncombatant standing guard at that time.
The shock of Lucifer paying the camp a personal visit had gradually worn off, and a routine had settled in. Alice Mercer still jumped at the slightest noise coming from the timber, but so far the camp had gone unnoticed . . . as far as Cole could tell. Cole, Jim, and Gary had laid out warning traps at the outer edges of the perimeter, but so far none had been tripped.
The only excitement had been when Jane King was returning from a bath in the creek. She had rounded a curve in the path always used and came face to snout with a small black bear. Jane let out a shriek that caused the leaves on the trees to tremble and scared the bear so badly it climbed a tree and wouldn’t come down until hours later. The last time anyone saw the bear it was loping away just as fast as it could go.
Several times a day, lookouts would report vehicles traveling on the circle road far below the bluff, but the cars and trucks never stopped and no one ever came down the old fire road.
The group had been in the mountains for two weeks. After that first evening, the being behind the voice had not revisited the camp.
Jim had relieved Cole at dawn, and Cole had added sticks to the fire and put on the big coffeepot. He turned on the radio, volume down low, to try and catch some news from one of the few AM stations in the area they could pull in. For once, no preacher was on the air, haranguing his followers into violence. But the news hit Cole like a bomb.
“The President and his family are dead,” the announcer said. “The helicopter transporting the President and First Family from one secret location to another was struck by a surface-to-air missile and exploded in midair. There were no survivors. Since the Vice-president was killed during the initial outbreak of violence nearly a month ago, the Speaker of the House of Representatives was immediately sworn in as President of the United States . . .”
Rockabilly Limbo Page 11