“Well, they fought, and they lost. What do you think they’ll do next?”
“These two,” Cabot reasoned, “would be expected to check-in. I don’t see any radios on them, so they’d have had to physically show up somewhere on the regular.”
“So, you reckon their base of operations is here in Slayton Mill?” Cody asked.
“It’s a good bet. And that means we won’t have much time. If they find us here, tending a comrade’s bullet wound, with these two deadbeats laying… well, both beaten and dead… “
“It won't be pretty,” Cody summed up.
“You saw how they deal with addicts. What’ll they do to homesteaders who killed two of their friends?”
“Three, according to them,” noted Bryce.
There was nothing else for it. “We have to go, John,” Cody told him.
“Yeah, we do. This is gonna hurt him even more than it’s gonna hurt us, but let's get Del ready to travel.”
32
1.3 miles west of Slayton Mill, ME That evening
Charlie wouldn’t let it go. “Seriously, I can be back in twelve hours. An overnight run to the camp, and then I’ll drive the truck back here and get Del. We could take him to the hospital, or back with us, whatever we need.”
“No,” said his grandfather, yet again. “You, driving alone in the truck? You’re kidding. There’s no way you’d get through without some bozo trying to hijack you.”
“So, I take Max and Bryce with me. They can ride shotgun and help navigate.”
“Hold on a second. You want me to run thirty miles,” Bryce was imagining, “and then drive through enemy territory in the world’s only working automobile? Which is another way of saying, the world’s most valuable thing of all, right now?”
“Crazy,” Cabot had already decided. “If we lost that truck, I don’t think there’s enough skin on your hide to save you from what would come next.”
His grandfather’s fury was just as effective a motivator as the prospect of confrontation with heavily-armed neo-Nazis. “All right, you’re the boss. But I say it’s possible.”
The alternative was a desperate choice: somehow ferrying Del back through the woods to the camp, where they would try to treat him. “Look,” Cabot said, “we can’t stay here. They’ll be back, maybe in force. And I don’t want to leave the camp unprotected, either. I know we’ve got Henry and Mira, so there’s a couple of solid shooters looking after the place, and old Ezra won’t take any bullshit from anyone, but we’re their best chance of security.”
“So, it’s decided. We get Del back to the homestead ASAP,” Cody spelled out. “What can we use as a stretcher?”
Resourceful as ever, Bryce and Max found the pharmacy’s emergency stretcher folded up in the storeroom among boxes of peroxide, witch hazel, and rubbing alcohol. As they labored with assembly, Cabot and Cody gave Del as many oxy pills as they thought might not actually kill him, washing each capsule down his throat with water from their canteens. After he was slaked and subdued, they managed to move Del onto the stretcher without him crying out in pain, and once he was lofted onto their shoulders, he became quiet and still. “Del, you with us, buddy? We’re gonna move out now.”
“Okay,” he said, his voice terribly weak. They gingerly carried him from the pharmacy, across the parking lot, and back toward the cover of the woods at the edge of town. The place was deserted, though Cabot noticed some flickering curtains and curious faces peering from windows, and hoped would-be enemy informants weren’t surveilling them.
With Bryce covering the group, Cody and Cabot took the front while Charlie and Max shared the back. It could never have been plain sailing, but as they got a cadence going and completed their first mile, they began to gain a little confidence in their plan. Occasionally, one of the men would stumble and jar the stretcher, but Del made very little complaint and repeatedly whispered his quiet thanks. “Bunch o’ heroes, I reckon,” they heard him say after two miles.
By sunset, almost four miles from the pharmacy, Cabot called a halt. Exhausted and deathly pale, Del remained on his stretcher while Max gave him water and some soft candy. Again deciding against a fire, Cabot pooled together their remaining rations, carefully dividing up the calories between today, tomorrow, and—the worst-case scenario—a potential third day of their trip back.
“We need to stick together,” Cabot said to the others as they gathered in the dark before the first watch. “Otherwise, I’d send Charlie on a run back to camp and warn them we’re coming in.” The teenager was most keen to demonstrate his athletic prowess, but the team needed him for the humble task of carrying the stretcher; without their sixth man, there’d be no one to switch out stretcher duty, and the work of transporting Del would become yet harder. “Everyone just get some shut-eye. I’ll take watch and keep tabs on Del. And let’s be clear about something, tonight,” he added. “You see or hear anything, the first words out of your mouth better be, ‘Enemy contact!’ Loud and clear, all right? No more noise discipline, not now. Shout it out and start putting rounds down range as quickly as you can.”
The shift in their “rules of engagement” bothered Cody deeply enough that he couldn’t sleep. Any sound in the bucolic silence might indicate approaching enemy, and the neo-Nazis had already shown themselves more than capable of stealth, despite their other slapdash ways. Cody quietly hoped that they’d be at the Anheim-Bolsch plant, drowning their sorrows over these latest combat fatalities—the hapless Wickham and Finn—and would delay any counter-attack for a day or two. But neo-Nazis couldn’t be relied on to react only after careful forethought; going off half-cocked seemed more their style, and that might mean a prompt response, even if it were disorganized.
Cabot nudged Cody just before two o’clock, then retreated to his A-frame tent as Cody sat with Del, listening to the man’s shallow breathing and keeping his ears open for any other sounds. For a place otherwise devoid of people, the forest was surprisingly alive at night; falling branches, active night-time mammals, and the occasional hoot or howl created a steady soundscape over the distant trickle of the river.
By six, when it was Cody’s task to wake the others and start breakfast, he felt every numbing hour of the night in his aching limbs and the looming stress of their journey in his unsettled stomach. He would skip breakfast, saving the calories for an even tougher time.
“Okay, boy scouts, let’s get this guy back to his lady and get him patched up,” said Cabot ambitiously, once their meager breakfast was over. “We’ll switch corners so our shoulders don’t get worn out. Everyone get ready to strike out in ten.”
They made good time, trying to keep Del level and comfortable, regretful of each lurch in his journey. First Bryce, and then Max, was sent on quick patrols to scout ahead, searching for signs of a new camp or OP. “Either the Nazis ain’t here yet,” Bryce decided, “or they’re getting real good at hiding themselves.”
“Make no assumptions,” Cabot warned. “They’re here somewhere. Probably lying low.”
A good deal noisier than they’d have liked and a whole lot slower, the little caravan made progress westward toward the camp. They had to stop when Del cried out, his pain medication waning, but within half an hour, they were able to resume. By early afternoon, they had perhaps twelve miles to go, but Del halted each attempt to get moving again.
“He can’t do it, John,” Cody told Cabot, away by themselves in a grove of trees. “Every movement is agony, both his and ours. It’s gonna get harder to put him through that.”
Cabot mulled everything over, pacing quietly in the forest. The word that kept coming back to him was “inevitable.” Was it certain that Del would die? Could they do nothing to sustain him at least until he could be with his partner, Bethany? She was young and a little fragile; Del had spent a year persuading her to join him and make a move from Kansas, and it hurt Cabot that she might not get the chance to say goodbye.
He growled at himself for being so defeatist. Del’s stoicism was
magnificent; surely, he could find it within himself to travel the remaining distance. Wasn’t it all about will, in the end?
No, Cabot knew. It was about blood loss, and the rate of infection, and a host of other things they could neither control nor wish away. “Let’s just get moving again, and we’ll see how it goes.”
It was unbearable. After only half a mile, Del was begging them to stop, his voice pained and hoarse. “Every step is like…” he gasped, “getting stabbed in the kidneys.” Reluctantly, Cabot called a halt, and they made camp, still more than ten miles from the homestead.
“How many more of those pills we got?” Cabot asked the boys. “Any morphine? No,” he said, catching himself, “that’d be too much like good luck, wouldn’t it?” By a narrow margin, he kept a lid on his anger—at the neo-Nazis with their selfish hatred and immature gunplay, at the EMP that had swept away every vestige of normalcy, at Del for not manning up and pushing through his injury… This last criticism was unfair, he knew, but Cabot felt so tiny and powerless in the face of this ongoing stream of events.
He took first watch again, monitoring Del’s slow breathing as it became more ragged and disturbed, as though the wounded man were stuck in a long, bad dream. Around them, the forest provided its auditory counterpoint as ever, sounding vast and forbidding but also somehow comforting and familiar. When Cody tapped him out at 2 am, Cabot was red-eyed, leaden, and depressed, and headed to his A-frame tent without a word.
33
10.8 miles east of the Russell Homestead Day 10
Two men and three teenagers stood forlorn, surrounding a stretcher covered by a green poncho.
“What time?” Cabot asked Charlie.
“Between four and five, I think,” he answered. “I was listening to his breathing and… well, I held his hand, and I thought I felt a little squeeze.”
“That’s good, Charlie,” said Cabot, his arm around his grandson. “It’s good you did that.”
“But then,” Charlie managed to say, “there was nothing.”
“You did everything right,” said Cody. “He wasn’t alone when it happened, and that’s important.”
“That was a precious gift,” said Bryce, adding without any drama whatsoever, “You’ll do the same for me when the time comes?”
They would carry Del home, tied to the same stretcher; only the impatient master sergeant who dwelled in Cabot’s mind was willing to recognize how much faster they’d now be able to travel. “The funeral,” Cabot explained, “will take place back at camp. We’ll treat him with dignity, but they need us back there in case anything happens, so we’re gonna double-time it back. It won’t be the solemn procession he deserves, not yet, but we don’t get to choose how this cookie crumbles. Everyone with me?”
Urgency took over. They progressed swiftly, switching sides each mile, nursing bruised shoulders and sore arms, marching at a steady pace through another warm forest morning. Five miles from camp, with summit fever starting to set in, Cabot restricted their break to only a few minutes, pushing his men to close the gap so that they’d be ready to defend the homestead.
“We’re gonna have work to do,” Cabot warned them. “Gonna need defenses, and not just trip wires and flares. Maybe ditches, fortified emplacements…”
“We’re short on manpower,” said Cody. “Even more than before, I mean.”
“Yeah, so we’ll have to leverage what we’ve got, and I mean every little thing. How’s your boy doing with his radio experiments?”
To everyone’s delight, Jacob had taken to his task with zeal; his Heath Robinson unit had a range of about a dozen miles, even if reception was a bit patchy. “Better than everyone expected, myself included,” said Cody.
“That’s good. I don’t know who we’d even call, but I feel better knowing we could if need be.”
The last miles were a draining slog westward as the sun warmed the forest, but by 3 pm, they could see the chimney of the main house. “Fellas, this isn’t going to be easy,” warned Cabot. He would break the news to Bethany, but the words had yet to form in his mind. “Ol’ Sharpshooter was the most recent of us to pass, but that was in a hospital, not here at the homestead. There are gonna be some long faces.”
He was more right than he knew, but the expressions of concern and sadness were in place before the group even arrived back. Cody found Mary, but before they could even hug, he caught sight of the Dodge truck, parked in its spot; something was extremely wrong, but he couldn’t figure it out until he got closer.
The windshield, hood, and driver’s door were covered with blood.
“Mary… what the hell happened here? Emma and Jacob...?”
“We’re fine,” his daughter said, appearing from the cabin and hugging her fetid, exhausted father. Jacob joined the embrace. “We had… um, visitors.”
“Who?” Cody demanded, just as they heard the first wails of grief and pain from the neighboring cabin. “Oh, God, that poor girl.”
“I’ll go over there later,” said Mary soberly. “Cody, who were those people? The same ones you ran into at the pharmacy?” she speculated.
“I don’t think so, hun. Neither of them made it.”
“Jesus,” she whispered. “There was a gunfight?”
“Yeah. And here, too, by the looks of it. What happened to the truck?”
The full story didn’t emerge for a couple of hours when Cabot corralled the group at dinner. “I guess I’m asking for an after-action report. You tell me yours, and I’ll tell you mine.”
The night before, he was told, a group of four men had approached the camp and tried to steal the truck. “Didn’t see ‘em,” Ezra Cobb recalled, “until they were messing with the dashboard, trying to get it started. Must have blown in on the breeze, they were so goddamned quiet.”
“And what did you do?” asked Cody.
“I guess I talked him out of it,” said Cobb laconically.
“Talked?” queried Cabot.
He sniffed. “I let my twelve gauge do the talking.”
Cabot glanced over at the Dodge with its ominous red spattering. “Looks like both barrels.”
“Dude wouldn’t listen,” explained Cobb.
“And that was his mistake. So, where is he now?”
Cobb rose and took Cabot to the second-oldest building in the homestead, the little woodshed behind the main cabin. He eased the door open and gave Cabot a view of the corpse; the tired senior couldn’t help shuddering at the awful effects of dual shotgun blasts at close range. “Looks like you talked him out of it.”
“Goddamned punk son-of-a-bitch,” muttered Cobb, and expectorated derisively.
Back at the dining hall in the main cabin, there was strategizing to do. “Tell me everything about these four guys,” said Cabot to the gathered group; everyone was there except Bethany, whose crying could still be heard, and Mira Margoles, who was trying to comfort her. “Everything you can remember.”
Emma felt able to help. “One of them was really, really full of himself. Like he was on cocaine or something. Even when Mr. Cobb threatened to shoot that one guy. He was parading around, announcing things like he was suddenly in charge.”
“Announcing what?” asked Cabot. The behavior of these imposters might provide clues as to what they’d do next; certainly, it felt like good news to find that the enemy’s forces had been depleted not by two, but by three.
“That we’re all ‘under new management’,” said Cobb. “He was making pronouncements and laying down rules, but everyone was just staring at him, wondering what the hell he was talking about. Dude by the name of Burridge.”
Cabot stopped short. “Not that skinhead lunatic, Scott and Marlene Burridge’s boy?”
“Still a skinhead, still a lunatic, but now he’s got friends,” said Cobb. “He talked up a storm. Said we were all going to live in a…” He frowned and turned to Emma and Jacob. “What did that idiot call it?”
“An ethnostate,” said Emma. “That means no black people, right?�
��
“It means,” Cabot spelled out, “they want their own little tiny country where racism is enshrined as the formalized, national policy. They want to reintroduce segregation and ban mixed marriages.”
“Back to the fifties,” said Emma.
“Yeah, the eighteen fifties,” Henry clarified. “For them, slavery is a defensible moral position.”
“All the more reason to keep sharp and knock a few of ‘em down when we can,” said Cobb. “Believe I already presented my credentials, but I’m happy to do it again,” he said, glancing at his double-barrel twelve-gauge, which was never far away.
“So,” Cody said, finishing the task of piecing the incident together, “this guy, Burridge, announces he’s president of the world, or whatever…”
“Yeah, he claimed the governor was dead,” said Henry, “and the mayor, too, so they were taking over as the legal authority.”
“Which mayor did he mean?” Cabot asked. “Ach, it doesn’t matter. He was probably lying anyway.”
“He had his own theory about the power outage and the EMP,” Henry added.
“Oh, I can’t wait to hear this!” Cody said.
“The EMP was a punishment from God, Mr. Burridge said,” Henry reported skeptically, “for our permissive attitudes.”
Jacob wasn’t following. “What’s permissive mean?”
“He means,” Cabot explained, “that Burridge’s philosophy doesn’t have room for gay marriage or welfare programs for migrants…”
Maddy picked up the thread. “Or any kind of gun control, or personal income tax…”
“Or really anything that appears to limit the power of white people to do whatever the hell they want,” Cobb summed up. “Don’t get me wrong, I love the freedoms I have, but it’s never once dawned on me to completely ignore the wishes and beliefs of everyone else.”
“What else did he say?” asked Cody.
Protecting Our Home Page 21
