Midnight Skills

by William Allen

After that, Luke thought he overheard a hissed conversation between the two people behind the cart.

  “I think it may be a pair of girls,” Amy said, her voice firm and without any sign of emotional distress over the radio. That she could witness five men cut down this way without blinking, reminded Luke of how much she had endured. “Can I try talking to them?”

  Luke looked back, catching David’s eye for a second and then giving a short nod. He didn’t want to be the controlling boyfriend, but he knew the older man would listen if Luke thought there might be any more danger.

  “Open your door a crack,” David directed, “but don’t get out yet, please. They can hear you just fine.”

  “Ladies, my name is Amy,” she began, “and I don’t know how you came to be stuck here, in the middle of the road with all your kitchen things and linens dumped out, but we really would like to help. In exchange, maybe one of you can tell us what’s going on around here. We’re coming from Center, and we haven’t seen anybody on this road since we started.”

  Luke couldn’t hear all of the conversation, but he could tell Amy was getting an earful from what he figured were two girls. As long as they kept their rifle barrels pointed away, Luke was willing to wait while Amy received what he thought of as her intelligence briefing.

  “Okay,” Amy finally announced, “if you are sure, we won’t hold you up. But before you go, let me give you this.”

  Reaching back into the center console, Amy withdrew a well-used paper sack that Luke knew contained her lunch. Just a pair of sandwiches, ground venison patties with some late lettuce and homemade mayonnaise, and a plastic bag full of fried potato slices and a plastic cup full of sauerkraut made from Angeline Stanton’s prize-winning recipe.

  A small hand shot out from around the end of the wagon and claimed the bag with a murmured, “Thank you,” was all Luke made out. He spared a glance at Amy and saw his girl was fighting back tears. Having learned his lesson, he would wait until Amy was ready to talk. For the moment, he signaled Hank to restart the SUV and he radioed David, they were back on the move. He saw Angel sprint from the weed-choked ditch and reclaim his spot in the five-ton, and then they were rolling again. Once past the scene of the shooting, Luke knew David would drop back again.

  Luke, feeling like a sitting duck, slid his body back through the roof hatch and closed the slider, careful to avoid braining anybody with the SAW while he moved back into the front passenger seat.

  “So, what did they say?” Luke asked carefully.

  When Amy stayed silent, Luke pursed his lips but refrained from speaking.

  He would wait on what made Amy upset, but he needed to know if the two they’d rescued knew anything about the conditions ahead. They were still on Highway 84 headed west, and the next town would be Mt. Enterprise when they turned north on Highway 259. With only a pre-blackout population of slightly over four hundred, the small scouting party wasn’t expecting trouble, but remained on guard just the same.

  As they continued to roll west, and Luke waited for Amy to respond, he briefly dredged his memory for any tidbits about the small town. It was a farming community, with a couple of feed and seed stores located on the ‘main drag’, as his father would call it. Other than that, he was drawing a blank.

  “The woman said she and her daughter were moving over to her uncle’s house, just a few miles up the road from their place. She didn’t know much, except there was another gang hitting small farms in the area. She thought they would be safer with family. His house was back off the road, but I got the impression the driveway was just past where we stopped.”

  “Not the same ones Luke just ventilated?” Hank asked, not unkindly. Apparently, he could also tell something was bothering the girl.

  “No, this group is larger. Ten or more, and they were traveling on horseback. Still not very good at it, she said. They rode through yesterday, headed west, which was the only reason why they chanced using the road.” Amy’s report was short and to the point, and Luke decided he needed to brief David on a possible threat ahead. Once that was done, he resumed his scrutiny of the countryside rolling by his window. Not sightseeing but scanning for signs of danger.

  Still, he noticed the empty houses near the road, front doors forced open and litter from the interiors scattered haphazardly in the overgrown yards. Here and there, he saw a few thin ropes of wood smoke in the distance, and he wondered if these survivors were the ones who’d overrun their neighbors. Or were these still living, just the ones who’d resisted the hardest when outsiders came to steal and loot. No way Luke could tell, and he wasn’t going to stop and ask questions.

  Hearing whispering in the backseat, Luke risked a split-second glance over his shoulder to see the older woman, Alisha, saying something to Amy, who was shaking her head firmly at whatever the medic was suggesting.

  Luke didn’t know the woman very well, since she was one of the outsiders picked up, or rescued, by David on his way to the ranch. Alisha was an LVN, or licensed vocational nurse, who had been run through one of the ranch’s training classes, and then certified by Miss Beth as a medic. Luke judged her to be in her late twenties with short hair, cut off in an unflattering bowl shape, and a lean physical shape that she tried to hide under multiple layers of sweatshirts.

  “Lucky for that girl and her momma we came along,” Hank said, more to fill the silence in the cab than anything else.

  “Lucky for us, too,” Luke replied. “If those bandits hadn’t sprung their trap on those two, they might have gotten a free shot at us. I guess it worked out okay in the end.”

  “You think they had families?” Alisha asked, her voice curious. “The bandits, I mean.”

  “Probably,” Luke said after a long pause.

  “They might have just been trying to feed their families is all,” Alisha continued, her voice subdued. “I can’t help but feel sorry for them.”

  “We’ve seen plenty of people just trying to feed their families,” Amy commented darkly, and Luke could hear the frustration in her voice. “Best thing you can do is help the ones that ask for it, if you can, and leave the ones who only want to take like them, dead in the road. And don’t, for a moment, think you can turn your back on any of their women, either.”

  “That’s cold,” Alisha replied, and to Luke, she sounded a bit shocked by Amy’s hard line. Luke wanted to reinforce the message and spoke up.

  “Miss Alisha, read your Kipling. My father bought me a book of his poems when I was ten or eleven years old,” Luke said. “Kipling wrote of the he-bear and the she-bear of the Himalayas, and eloquently posited that the female is the more deadly of the species. Many remember that quote, but I remember another:

  'Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale.’

  Can’t get more plain than that.”

  “So, you think women are more dangerous than men?” Alisha asked, skepticism in her voice.

  “No, ma’am, but I know some who can be. I saw Amy and another young lady not much older, in a fight to the death against a gang of convicted murderers and Homeland thugs. Neither Amy or Lori backed down, and by the time they were done, the ground was carpeted by the dead. I was scared to death of losing her, but I couldn’t move from my spot or we would’ve been overrun from the other direction.”

  “Rudyard Kipling?” Amy asked. “The same guy who wrote The Jungle Book?”

  “Yeah,” Luke agreed. “I’ve still got the book at home. You can read it sometime, but Mom will probably have it on her reading list anyway.”

  “How did we even get off on this subject?” Hank asked with a nervous chuckle. “I’m not what you’d call a big reader. What is the moral of the story, or the poem, anyway?”

  “Women are the real badasses, because they can carry a baby to birth. If men were put to that challenge, the race would die out in a single generation,” Luke pronounced, and even Amy laughed at that bare-faced statement. More seriously, Luke continued, “To be that fierce, you just need to fi
nd the she-bear in your soul. Be willing to fight and scratch and kill for your cubs.”

  “Well, can’t argue with that,” Hank said as they made the turn in Mount Enterprise, “because even though I love my wife dearly, she can purely scare the hell out of me sometimes. Back before, if I had a little too much to drink or stayed out too late with the boys, I knew she would cut me some slack. God forbid, though, if I came home smelling of some other woman’s perfume, or she got word back through the grapevine that I’d been down at the racetrack again? She-bear, indeed.”

  Hank’s pronouncement, despite the serious tone, elicited a round of much-needed laughter in the SUV after the sudden and furious gunfire of just a few minutes ago.

  CHAPTER 7

  “So, the tanks are just sitting there? Untouched?” Mike asked, his voice tight as he struggled to maintain his excitement. Clearly, the thought of being one step closer to making their own diesel was a boost to his spirits.

  “Yeah,” David agreed. “Looked like nobody messed with them. We located eight that were full, a pair of tankers, and another old Peterbilt that might be serviceable, once we replace the battery. Didn’t want to be too obvious, since I’m sure we had watchers, but yeah, we are set on that end.”

  “Ran into a spot of trouble too, didn’t you?” Sam asked, glancing between David and Luke. Luke nodded, giving his father a short rundown of the altercation.

  “More concerned about this mounted troop we heard about,” Luke said when he’d finished the recitation. “But we didn’t see much else. Very little moving around Kilgore still. But I agree with David, though. We had eyes on us for at least part of the trip.”

  “Well, we need to stay vigilant, but the rest of that all sounds promising,” Sam concluded, and nodded to prod Mike into motion.

  “Yes,” Mike began. “We can go ahead and pour slabs here at the site we selected, and then set up the storage tanks and get the piping started. All we will need then, are a couple of those mobile refining plants and we can start generating our own diesel and kerosene, at least.”

  “So, the Guard is really laying claim to all the fuel left in the station tanks?” Isaac Stanton asked, his expression guarded as he glanced back and forth between Sam and Mike. Ike was a longtime employee of the family ranch and he handled most of the horse training duties himself. He was also usually too deeply involved in the business of keeping the ranch running, to pay attention to things going on out beyond their little community, but Sam looked to Ike for his common-sense approach to finding solutions.

  “Major Warren said they need the fuel still in the tanks to keep their vehicles running, and with the fighting going on up in Missouri, I can imagine we aren’t going to be getting any outside resupply,” Sam said with finality. He then looked around the room at the gathered council members and lowered his voice. “He is also hearing some disquieting rumors out of Fort Hood. There’s trouble there, and Major Warren is working hard to reconstitute what he can of the scattered Texas Army National Guard units.”

  “You think this major might be cooking up some reallocation plans of his own?” Beth, Mike’s wife asked plainly. Beth Elkins was not one to beat around the bush. “Should we push up the alert status?”

  “Not yet,” Sam replied, catching the glint of fire in his old friend’s eye. He’d known Beth a long time, and she was married to his best friend, so Sam had a lot of experience reading the woman. She’d been as rattled as Mike by both the attack on the ranch that’d killed Billy, as well as Sam’s own kidnapping while in town. Beth, while never having been a Marine, was a firm believer in the old Marine axiom of getting in your retaliation first.

  “I think Major Warren is playing it straight, Miss Beth,” Luke finally said, allowing himself to be drawn back into the conversation. “He’s a decent man, trying to sweep back the tide with a broom.”

  “And if he’s not? If he’s got plans to set himself up as another McCorkle?”

  “Then I’ll go visit him one night and put two behind his ear,” Luke replied coldly, and even Amy jerked at his matter-of-fact response. Sensing the reaction, Luke looked around the room, his eyes searching the faces of the family and close-as-family people seated here.

  “What? You think I’m going to put up with that kind of bullshit again?” Luke asked, looking around the room at the gathered council members. “Pay attention, folks!” he continued, his voice rising. “This shit is only going to get worse. When the starving groups of refugees hit our lines, and they push the women and children out in front, are you going to be able to pull the trigger? Are you? Because if the Major, or anybody, comes to take food from us, you’re damned right I’m willing to kill them in their sleep.”

  “Luke, that’s enough,” his mother said, clearly disturbed by not only her son’s tone, but the foretelling he was willing to share. He might be nearly seventeen, and a proven fighter for his people, but he was still her little boy, too.

  “No,” Sam said in response, his voice deep and tinged with a knowing sadness. “Let him speak, because he’s right. We will need to harden our hearts for what’s coming, unless by some miracle, we can come up with more food this winter. We’ve harvested everything we can think of, and we can make sure the clan is fed, but it’s going to be monotonous. And the plain truth is, not everybody is going to make it this winter. I don’t like it, and anybody who does is a damned fool, but there’s nothing more we can do.”

  After Luke’s outburst, and Sam’s endorsement, the rest of the meeting passed with a subdued air that seemed to puzzle Luke. They have to know, don’t they, he thought. We’ve only talked about the winter shortages dozens of times. Luke, at nearly seventeen, still had a lot to learn about man’s ability to ignore or block out those inconvenient truths whenever possible.

  Later, after they’d had a chance to clean up and get ready for bed, Luke lay on his back and watched with rapt fascination as Amy spent twenty minutes brushing her hair. Her blonde locks seemed to glow with the soft light of the single LED fixture, and her golden mane, now reaching the middle of her back, was longer than Luke had ever seen it.

  Glancing in the mirror, Amy became aware of the scrutiny, and in a moment of self-consciousness, stopped what she was doing to look over at Luke.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “The most beautiful girl in the world,” Luke replied with sincerity. He lay with his head propped up on his elbow, and Amy thought the unguarded pose was nearly as captivating, and she studied the strong lines of her man’s face. Relaxed like this, with his longish hair hanging down in his eyes, he for once, looked his age.

  Amy, still unaccustomed to such unvarnished praise, blushed prettily before setting the brush aside and stepping over closer to the queen-sized bed. She was dressed in her typical sleepwear of a long t-shirt and white cotton boy shorts, and this time, her t-shirt bore the logo for a casino in Las Vegas. Luke had a lot of t-shirts, mostly souvenirs his father had picked up for him over the years, and he was happy to share with her. They look much better on her, he thought.

  As Amy bent down, she delivered a fierce kiss to an unsuspecting Luke, who quickly responded in kind and he reached up to gently cup the back of her head. After the heat of the kiss began to fade, Luke pulled back a few inches and delivered a soft kiss on the end of Amy’s nose. She looked at Luke and he laughed when her eyes started to cross.

  “You are so silly,” she said, and Luke shook his head in the negative.

  “I’m just in love,” he proclaimed as he swung his body up into a seated position and guided Amy to sit next to him. Reaching out, he claimed her hands in his, and she laced their fingers together.

  “I love you too, Luke. And I can tell you have something you want to ask me,” Amy observed.

  “You really can read me like a book,” he replied. “Am I that easy?”

  “No, not easy,” Amy retorted with a touch of humor. “You sometimes let your chivalry get all mixed up in the plain old needs of the day. You are my knight, but
sometimes you get turned around.”

  “So, you want to tell me what happened with Alisha today?” Luke asked. He felt he could broach this topic with Amy, since it was obvious the two had engaged in a heated conversation just after the shooting ended. Luke didn’t think this was what was bothering Amy, but he was giving her an opening if she wanted to talk about it.

  “Silly, really,” Amy replied, slowly circling around the side of the bed to pull back the covers and climb in next to Luke. “She was worried about me, and wanted to let me know I could talk to her if I needed to,” she continued as she curled under the light blanket and snuggled close to Luke, who still lay atop the covers.

  “Did I miss something?” Luke asked, feeling somewhat lost.

  “Oh, Luke, she thought I was being bullied by you, when you ordered me to stay in the truck,” Amy replied, then gave a wave of dismissal. “Apparently, this was her first time out on a combat patrol, and she didn’t understand the idea of following orders. Or if she did, she couldn’t see doing it when she owns shoes older than the person ordering her around.”

  “Ouch,” Luke said with half a laugh in his voice. “I hope you were able to make her understand. And I’m sorry, too. I could have worded things more nicely. It’s just…”

  “Jeez, Luke, I know what would get you riled up. The idea of seeing me pull a stunt like that again, bailing out of an up-armored SUV just to get hit. That would be pushing all your buttons.”

  Luke shivered at Amy’s words, remembering the time in McAlester when he’d thought she was dead after doing just that. What he’d shared with David, that adrenaline and hate-fueled rampage, was the result.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “I hate the idea. So, Alisha thought I was an abusive, asshole boyfriend because of that?”

  “I’m gonna plead the Fifth, considering she was just trying to be helpful. I think I set her straight, though.”

  “Uh-huh,” Luke agreed, then summoned up his courage. He knew something else was wrong then, and much as he didn’t want to intrude in her privacy, he felt like he owed it to Amy to at least ask.