by G. M. Ford
I heard a radio crackle. And then another. The two trucks were jawing back and forth. The nearest truck’s taillights flashed and then went out. In the half light, it took me a minute to see that one of them was moving. Trouble was, it was hard to tell which truck was moving. It was like having the car next to you in traffic start to creep forward, and you stomp on your brakes because you think you’re rolling backward. Took a couple of seconds of staring to be sure. The nearest truck was rolling down the street toward their friends at the far end of town. The two guys standing in the bed had turned around and were looking out over the cab.
“Now,” I said as I pushed myself to my feet. Gabe was breathing down my neck as we skulked across Main Street in the darkness, hoping like hell that driving without headlights in nearly complete darkness would keep the guys in the truck sufficiently occupied so’s they wouldn’t notice us creeping around behind them.
We made it. Plastering ourselves against the weathered side of the old warehouse, hotfooting it toward the darkness at the back of the building. Once we turned the corner, we kept slide stepping along the back wall, picking our way carefully through the maze of century-old farm equipment and agrowaste littering the uneven ground.
By the time we reached the far end, I’d added three divots to my shins. I ventured a quick look between buildings. Wavering brake lights told me the nearest truck was backing down Main Street to take up its former position.
We darted across the space and flattened ourselves across the back of the tavern. Forty feet in front of me were three concrete steps leading up to a doorway. The light fixture above the steps had been ripped from its moorings and now hung disconsolately by its wiring.
I stayed low as I duckwalked over to the steps. I was on the second step, working up the nerve to knock on the door, when two things happened at once. First, the door opened. Second and most worrisome, somebody stuck a double-barreled shotgun into my face so hard it sent me back on my haunches, which in turn sent me skidding the rest of the way down the stairs on my ass.
I was still at the mouth-breathing stage of things when a voice said, “Oh, it’s you.”
Actually . . . it was her. The old woman from behind the Conway Tavern. Except that, since we’d chatted earlier in the day, she’d either been in a serious car wreck, or somebody’d worked her over pretty good. Her lower lip was just about split in two. Her left eye was sporting one of the most colorful shiners in Christendom, and to top things off, she had what appeared to be about ten stitches’ worth of cut below her other eye.
She lowered the shotgun. “Where’s the boy?” she wanted to know.
Gabe and I exchanged glances, but neither of us said anything.
“Aw . . . don’t tell me . . . goddamn it.”
So we didn’t.
She pointed the shotgun at the ceiling and motioned us inside. Seldom has a flight of stairs seemed so steep. Felt like were chugging up one step at a time for about twenty minutes. The upstairs apartment had been trashed. Tables thrown over on their sides. Lamps in pieces on the floor. Pictures askew on the walls.
“They come up here a couple of hours ago,” the old woman said. “Started slapping me around, looking for you guys.”
I opened my mouth to apologize, but she waved me off.
“Don’t,” she said. “Wasn’t your doing. They’re just hateful people.”
We stood in silence for a moment.
“They’ll be back,” she said. “Bunch of ’em are outside in the street.”
I told her we knew about the guys outside in the trucks. “Your phone work?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Did till they ripped it outta the wall. Cell service is so damn spotty out here, most everybody got them a landline.”
I pulled Bickford’s phone from his pants pocket. No bars. “Shit” slipped out.
“We gotta get out of here,” Gabe said.
“Your car still in there?” she asked.
“’Fraid so,” I said. “Anybody but you live in town at night?” I asked.
“Nope,” she said right away. “Just me.”
“Where’s the nearest phone?”
She didn’t have to think about it. “Potter’s Junction. It’s about nine miles back toward Stanwood. Everything works back there. They got their own microwave tower.”
“We need to get there. Right now,” I said. “Those Aryan morons are planning terrorist attacks. We’ve gotta keep that from happening. Lotta people gonna die if we don’t.”
“I got an old truck,” she offered.
“You’re coming with us,” Gabe rumbled.
“Me? Oh no. I couldn’t.” She looked around the room, like she was seeing it for the first time. “This place is my life. My Charlie . . . he would never . . . no . . . I couldn’t . . .”
“You can walk, or I can carry you, but either way, you’re coming with us,” Gabe said in a low voice. Something about when Gabe uses that voice seems to get people’s attention. Like life or death may be involved somehow.
The old woman’s shoulders slumped. After a few seconds of staring at the floor, she gave us a barely discernible nod, walked over to the biggest kitchen drawer, and took out a thick ring of keys. She underhanded them my way. I pocketed them, then picked up her shotgun and handed it to Gabe.
“You got more shells someplace?” Gabe asked.
She opened a closet to the right of the stairs and produced a full box of shotgun slugs. Punkin balls, as we used to call them when I was a kid. Put holes in things the size of a pocket watch. Didn’t have that much range, but if one of ’em hit you, whatever it hit was blown to mist and gone forever.
“You know . . . ,” the old woman began. “There’s a storage shed around back of the post office. All the state agencies used it for emergency equipment . . . you know, since we’re so damn far out of the way. And since I’m the only one out here twenty-four seven, they give me a key, in case of disaster or something like that.”
Gabe was beyond impatient. “So?”
“So . . . last time I looked in the shed there was a couple sets of those things the troopers throw out in the road to bust up your tires if’n you won’t stop when they tell ya to pull over. Just hangin’ there on the wall big as life.”
“Spike strips?” Gabe and I said in unison.
“Unless the staties moved ’em in the last coupla months.”
“How old’s your truck?” Gabe asked.
She stuck out her chin. “Eighty-nine,” she said. “My Charlie wouldn’t drive nothin’ but Fords. Said Chevys were pieces of crap.”
Gabe looked over at me. “We ain’t gonna outrun those big old Dodge Rams in an eighty-nine Ford.”
We had to wait about forty minutes before the nearest truck rolled to the other end of the street to chat with their brethren again, at which point Gabe and I got both spike strips spread across Main Street as far apart as we could get ’em, so if the second truck saw something wrong with their buddies, they’d be inclined to swerve around and would run into the second strip in the darkness at the edge of town. That was the plan anyway.
I was driving. The old woman, whose name turned out to be Betty, was strapped into the passenger seat. Gabe, the assault rifle, and the extra clips were in the back of the truck, prepared for a rearguard action. The Ford had tall wooden gates on both sides and a nice thick tailgate to shield Gabe as much as possible.
“You ready, Betty?”
She pulled the old-fashioned lap belt tighter. “Ready as I’m gonna be,” she said.
Been a while since I’d driven a stick shift, but it was kinda like riding a bicycle—once you learn, you never forget.
I popped the clutch, wound up first gear until we bounced out onto the road, then jammed the transmission into second and began roaring up Main Street in a cloud of smoke and gravel.
Behind us, both of the trucks were suddenly ablaze with lights and staging frantic K-turns in the middle of Main Street. Muzzle flashes lit the night. Smoking tires bega
n to scream. I slammed the transmission into third and tried to push the pedal through the floor. We fishtailed wildly as we swung out onto the main road and went roaring off into the darkness.
In the rearview mirror, I caught sight of the first truck hitting the spike strip. The front tires exploded, and huge chunks of steel-belted radial went flying off in all directions, like a murder of frightened crows rising together from the ground.
The second truck swerved around the first. The boys in the back began firing out over the cab. Gabe ducked behind the tailgate. Slugs thumped into us from behind. Betty unbelted herself and hit the floor. Sometimes you get lucky. About five seconds after Betty hit the floor mats, a slug came ripping through the back window and buried itself in the dash, right about where she’d been sitting. Would have taken her head clean off if she’d still been sitting there.
I checked the mirror. They were gaining on us . . . fast. Must have missed the spikes somehow. More thuds rained on the truck. Gabe let loose a burst from the truck bed. I checked the road ahead and then the rearview. They’d dropped back out of range. Only one guy was still standing in the back of the truck.
I forced my vision forward and started doing my Parnelli Jones impression.
I pushed harder with my foot, but not much happened. Eighty-five miles an hour was all the old truck had in her. I leaned out over the steering wheel, as if shifting my weight would help us go faster. The windshield disappeared into a thousand pebbles of safety glass, some of which landed in my lap and some of which got blown out onto the hood of the truck.
I scrunched down in the seat and kept driving. Felt like a cannon was trained on the back of my neck. Gabe let go with another blast. Our pursuers dropped back out of range again, firing blindly out the truck window as they swerved back and forth, trying to make it harder for Gabe to keep them in the sights.
We covered another six or seven miles. Gabe kept up a successful rearguard action. Betty crawled up from the floor and looked out the former back window of her truck. I heard her laugh and checked the mirror to see what could possibly be funny about a moment such as this.
That’s when I first saw the sparks. The spike strip had indeed gotten one of the Ram’s front tires; they were running on the rim, and the rim didn’t like it one bit. We were half a mile in front of them, driving at eighty-five, with most of the windows blown out, and I could still hear the scream of steel on asphalt and see the fountain of bright-orange sparks rocketing high into the night air, causing the truck to veer back and forth erratically as the driver fought to maintain control.
“They’re pullin’ over,” Betty announced.
I was in the process of breaking out a smile when she added, “There’s somebody else . . . way back there,” she announced. She read my mind. “Gotta be more of them Aryan idiots. Don’t nobody drive out here this time of night.”
She was right. Dead-straight road. Dead-flat country, and way the hell back there, five miles anyway, a pair of halogen headlights was racing in our direction.
She leaned my way and checked the gauges. “She’s gettin’ hot,” she announced.
Yup. Engine temperature was three-quarters of the way up. Through the former windshield I could smell hot engine oil. Real hot. Burning.
“How much farther?” I asked her.
“Three, four miles,” she said through tight lips.
It was like going to the dentist. You just sit there and bear it. They were gaining on us, no doubt about it. Next time I caught sight of the temperature gauge, it was one little notch from being pegged.
Then, with a shudder, the old Ford started to slow. I could feel it in my feet. Something in the engine had given way. Something like the head gasket maybe. What had been a roar now sounded a bit like a fart.
Betty pointed forward. “There it is,” she said. “Potter’s Junction. See the glow?”
I pumped hard on the gas pedal. Nothing. Then three exhaust explosions shattered the night. I took the Ford out of gear, turned off the engine, and let her coast. I checked the speedometer. Seventy and going down. Sixty-five and then sixty.
I threw my eyes back onto the road. I could make out a big, yellow Shell gasoline sign up ahead of us. Steam was pouring from the truck’s engine compartment. Unconsciously, I started scrunching forward in the driver’s seat again. Fifty . . . forty-five.
I pulled my eyes up. We were almost there. I could see the two bays of gas pumps now. And the garage. I jerked the wheel hard to the right. Hit the gravel driveway at a stunning thirty miles an hour and slid to a stop.
“Where’s the phone?” I yelled as I groped for the door handle.
“Percy keeps it under the counter in the office,” Betty said as she slid out of the seat. I was hot on her heels as she headed for the office door. Gabe was already out of the truck bed, standing behind the engine block with the assault weapon at the ready.
“How far back are they?” I shouted at Gabe as I followed Betty.
“Three, four miles,” Gabe threw back my way.
Betty was rattling the door for all she was worth, but the lock was holding its own. Stayed that way until I put a size 13 through the glass.
I used my elbow to break out most of the jagged glass in the door frame and then ducked inside. The phone was where she’d said it would be.
Old-fashioned rotary phone, but the sucker worked. I dialed one of the few numbers I knew by heart. Three rings. “Yeah.”
“Tim, it’s Leo.”
“Fuck, Leo . . . you know what time it is?”
“Can you record this call?” I shouted into the mouthpiece.
“Sure.”
“Do it. Right now.”
One of the longest minutes of my life passed before he spoke again.
“Yeah, so I’m recording.”
I gave him the Reader’s Digest version and then pulled Bickford’s list from his pants pocket and began to read out loud. Name of group, members’ names, where they were from, where they were assigned to. All of it. Tim had enough presence of mind not to interrupt. The longer I talked, the less annoyed he became.
The flash of headlights outside stopped my recitation after about eight groups. I ducked down behind the counter and kept shouting into the phone. “This is the real shit, Tim,” I shouted. “These fuckers are crazy.”
I watched in astonishment as a food truck squealed to a stop. A food truck! TACOS SUPREMO was painted on the side. Fresh tortillas handmade daily.
“Gotta go,” I said as the food truck’s serving window began to roll upward. Except it wasn’t tacos they were peddling, it was bullet holes. They’d mounted a .60-caliber machine gun on the service counter.
I screamed at Betty, “Get in here.” She didn’t need to be invited twice.
I dropped the phone, grabbed Betty by the arm, and sprinted into the garage about five seconds before they let loose with the machine gun, and Potter’s Junction more or less ceased to exist.
I don’t expect there have been many occasions in human history when falling in a grease pit could be considered good news, but this was definitely one of them.
By the time Betty and I hit the slimy concrete floor, the building above us was beginning to come apart. The shelling stopped for a moment. I heard Gabe let loose with a volley and almost immediately heard someone groan. The next burst of machine gun fire was directed at the truck. From six feet down in the pit I could hear the enormous rounds peeling the sheet metal off the truck.
That’s when I realized I was still holding Betty’s shotgun in my hands.
“Stay here,” I told her as I crept up the concrete steps. Half the door frame had collapsed. The back wall of the garage was waving in the night air and appeared to be about ready to join the doorway on the floor. I crawled under what was left of the door frame, got down on one knee, and peeked out at the Taco Terrorists.
The guy behind the machine gun was reloading. Gabe was down. Not dead down, but crawling-around-in-pain down, holding a lower leg.
&n
bsp; I raised the shotgun to my shoulder, put the bead on the guy’s face, and pulled the trigger. The slug hit him flush in the lower jaw, reducing the bottom half of his face to red mist. The force of the huge lead slug propelled him all the way to the other side of the taqueria. I winced when I heard him hit the opposite wall.
I started to crawl back into the grease pit, but suddenly everything went dead quiet. I kept moving, thinking there hadda be another guy inside the taco truck, waiting for one of us to stick our head up.
But no. Only the silence persisted. Louder and louder until Gabe’s voice broke the tension.
“Leo,” Gabe yelled. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I shouted. “You?”
“Took a little shrapnel in the leg.”
“Cops are on the way.”
“We got these two,” Gabe said. “Don’t see nobody else comin’ down the road neither.”
I stood up. As far as my focus could focus, nothing was coming our way. No lights. No nothing.
I reloaded the shotgun and began to inch toward the taco truck. I couldn’t even bear to look at the guy I’d hit with the punkin ball. I’ve got a strong stomach, spent twenty some-odd years dating a woman who cut dead bodies apart for a living, but there’s a limit to everything, and the pile of pulp lying there on the floor was way past my limit. Gabe had stitched the other guy twice in the chest. The bug-eyed expression on his bloodless face said he couldn’t believe it had happened. I was guessing that Taco Tuesday was officially over for the week.
By the time I got over to Gabe, Betty was already there. Gabe had a piece of sheet metal about as big as a tongue depressor sticking out of the left calf.
“Part of the fender,” Gabe snarled.
The old Ford was quite literally shot to pieces. No glass left anywhere. Most of the hood gone. Three tires shot out. Had so many jagged holes in it, the old girl looked carbonated. The look on Betty’s face told me the truck meant more to her than simply a way to get from place to place. Some tender connection to her late husband, I guessed.