Black Autumn Travelers

by Jeff Kirkham

  “What about raiding parties from the big cities?” a disembodied voice thundered over the P.A. system. “Dollars to donuts those city people from Nashville and Memphis are working their way here to McKenzie as we speak. How’re we going to hold them off? We’re mostly a bunch of retired people.”

  “I’m going to ask Sheriff Morgan to step up and address that question. Sheriff…”

  After a brief pause, a tall, rotund man stepped up to the podium. “Since we don’t know how big the possible threat from the cities might be, it’s hard to say. As you know, we have twelve uniformed officers and another six in our auxiliary. That’s eighteen trained officers, more or less. We’ve blocked the main roads, but we’re going to need a few more men to cover the smaller streets. I hope that’ll button up the town pretty tight.”

  Mat heard himself shouting before he realized he was going to do it. “NOT SO, SHERIFF!”

  Three-thousand eyes turned toward Mat as he pushed into the auditorium. Mat swallowed hard, thinking of Caroline. “YOU’RE MAKING A MISTAKE,” Mat shouted again, working his way toward one of the microphones.

  “And who are you, young man?” the sheriff asked into his mic.

  “My name’s Mat Best, and I’m an Army Ranger who walked into your town this morning unchallenged.” Mat started talking the moment he reached the microphone, knowing that his window to convince them would be very short.

  “Officers!” the sheriff bellowed, and Mat noticed several men moving toward him from the edges of the crowd. He resisted the urge to reach for his Glock, reminding himself that he couldn’t shoot his way out of this situation.

  “Here me out, sir, please…” The sheriff made a motion with his hand and his officers slowed, pausing to give Mat another sentence or two. “I came into town seeking medical attention for my wife. We come from Louisville and I can tell you with total certainty what kind of opposition you will be facing in the next two weeks. I can promise you that eighteen officers and a couple roadblocks aren’t going to be enough. You will lose your town.”

  The audience rumbled, and Mat wondered if he had gone too far. He looked to the sheriff, knowing that his fate rested in the big man’s hands.

  “Keep talking, son,” Sheriff Morgan motioned, leaning toward Mat.

  In that moment, Mat knew he spoke with an officer who cared more about his people than looking good. Mat had known both kinds of officers in the military. It was a fifty-fifty bet that this guy would let Mat challenge the assumptions they were making. He had pulled the ace card.

  “Sir,” Mat proceeded, “the gangs have already consolidated the suburbs around Louisville and they’re pushing out to the surrounding farms. I have direct observation of the enemy and we’re facing a more organized force than you would like to believe. The gangs will continue to consolidate men and materiel, and they will begin to probe your town in the next two weeks, give or take.”

  “You said you were a Green Beret?” Sheriff Morgan tested Mat. “What battalion and regiment, please.”

  “No, sir. I said I was an Army Ranger. 75th Regiment, 2nd Battalion.”

  “Officers, take this man into custody. Folk, folks…” the sheriff calmed the crowd. “I’ll collect some intel and report back tomorrow morning. Until then, stay calm. We’ll be okay.”

  The sheriff’s men closed on Mat, guns drawn, and placed him in handcuffs.

  “Let’s hear it, son,” the big sheriff sat heavily on the Middle School teacher’s desk. Mat was handcuffed to the teacher’s chair. It had been a biology classroom; diagrams of dissected animals paneled the walls.

  “Four days ago, we fought our way out of Louisville after checking on my wife’s parents in Beechwood Village. Gangbangers had already killed her parents, but we rescued her little brother. Some neighborhoods were barricading themselves and killing looters. Let’s just say the good people of Louisville were sticking gangbanger heads on pikes. Literally.”

  “Wait,” the sheriff said. “You’re telling me that white folks were chopping off heads and putting them on pikes?”

  “Well,” Mat couldn’t help but add a bit of political correctness. “I don’t know what race was chopping off heads, but every head I saw was an African-American male.” Mat didn’t know why it should surprise anyone that “white folks” would decapitate their enemies and display their heads. In the history of warfare, no one on this planet had ever been more vicious than white people.

  “How do you know if it was gangs who were doing the looting and killing?”

  “For one thing,” Mat answered, “we got into a firefight with twenty or thirty gangbangers. I killed or wounded fifteen or twenty.”

  “How many casualties on your side?” the sheriff asked. Mat got the feeling he was being sized up.

  “No casualties on our team,” Mat answered.

  “You said your wife needed medical attention…” Sheriff Morgan continued his interrogation.

  Cops will be cops, Mat smiled.

  “She wasn’t wounded in the gunfight. She laid her motorcycle down and the road rash got infected. It hasn’t helped that we’ve been riding in the rain and cold for four days. I think her immune system is compromised, worn down.”

  “Humph,” the sheriff looked away, thinking. “Okay. I’m going to send one of my men with you to get your family. If any part of your story doesn’t check out—like you telling my men at the roadblock that you weren’t armed…” the sheriff pulled Mat’s Glock from the back of his waistband, dangling it from the trigger guard, “If there are any more issues with your story, then we’ll part ways right then. You read me, son?”

  “Then maybe I better tell you now that she’s my girlfriend, not my wife.”

  Sheriff Morgan thought about it for a moment. “Okay. Anything else? Last chance…” After a silent moment and a hard stare, he handed Mat his Glock.

  Mat had only been gone eight hours and the wound looked much worse. A blackness crept into the edges of the scab, and it stood up at least a half inch, inflamed and angry. Most concerning were the blisters. They were reddish grey and they had grown larger than they were that morning. Mat had no idea what he was looking at with this wound, but he knew it wasn’t good.

  “Officer Laherty, can you help me carry her to your cruiser?” Mat asked, hurrying to collect their things and get them packed and stowed in the trunk of the police car. He would be happy to leave the motorcycles behind. If he had the time, he would love to light them on fire.

  William helped with the gear, packing up the Paratarp and the sleeping bags, everything sopping wet, and he watched helplessly as Mat and the policeman carried his sister toward the backseat. William opened the door and slid in beneath her, cradling her head in his lap.

  “That thing looks like hell,” the officer remarked as the door closed. “Smells like death.”

  Mat sighed. “I hope you have a decent doctor in town.”

  Sheriff Morgan found Mat in the waiting room while the surgeon worked on Caroline. The room was like waiting rooms the world over. Mat, William, and Sheriff Morgan sat in uncomfortable chairs, surrounded by old magazines. The smell of tangy cleaning products and fresh bandages saturated the area.

  “I hope you don’t mind if I keep you company,” Sheriff Morgan said.

  “No. You’re good. What can I do for you?” Mat wanted to get his mind on something he could control, unlike Caroline’s terrifying wound. To him, it was like a merciless alien had taken over his girl’s body. He still couldn’t wrap his mind around how fast things were happening.

  “How many times did you deploy?” the sheriff started with the typical size-up-an-operator questions.

  “Five deployments to Iraq and then a bunch of work in Afghanistan as a contractor for the U.S. State Department.” Mat watched to see if the sheriff knew enough to know what that meant. To someone with military experience, it meant Mat had done enough gunfighting for fifty lifetimes.

  “So, the Agency?” the sheriff interpreted. Mat didn’t reply or re
act.

  “Okay, son,” the sheriff continued. “I could use your help. How would you go about defending this town from outsiders?”

  Mat thought before answering. He could see no reason why this town wouldn’t be the same as a Forward Operating Base (FOB) in Afghanistan. If FOB defenses had worked in “Indian Country,” they should work here.

  He began with a list of questions. “Where’s our food source? Where is our well? How many residents live outside the boundary? Will they come inside? What kind of weapons do we possess? Is there a military base we can tap for support or heavy weapons? How many military age men live here? What about other towns? Can we coordinate a defense with them? What other resources are nearby such as explosives, lumber, an auto wrecking yard, a heavy-equipment dealership?”

  “Hold on, hold on, hold on. Let’s take it one question at a time. Let’s start with food… We have a large pig farm about a mile and a half outside of town, plus a couple of dozen smaller farms.”

  “Mr. Best…” The surgeon came through the double swinging doors from surgery and into the waiting room. Everyone went silent, all eyes on the doctor.

  “Gentlemen, Caroline is suffering from gas gangrene. It’s not uncommon when soil and debris are involved in a serious infection, especially when there is continued exposure to wet conditions. The bubbles made the diagnosis certain. I had to sedate Caroline to remove the necrotic tissue around the wound. Unfortunately, its reach was extensive, and I’ve spent the last two hours trying to re-route her vascular system to provide decent blood flow to the affected area. She’s on a heavy regimen of antibiotics, but gas gangrene is sometimes known to be resistant to antibiotics. If we had a hyperbaric chamber, we could put her on oxygen therapy, but the nearest chamber is in Louisville. For now, all we can do is wait to see how the wound responds to the removal of the tissue and the regimen of antibiotics.”

  Mat sighed heavily, not knowing what to say. He considered asking if the gangrene was a threat to her life but, given the level of medical intervention she was getting, he considered it so unlikely that he didn’t ask. He had known guys who survived much worse, and he didn’t know anyone who had died once they reached a surgical unit. Plus, Mat didn’t want to think about the possibility of losing her. “Can I see her?”

  “She’s still sedated and I want her to stay that way. If you wish to go in, please don’t wake her.”

  Mat stood, and William followed. The surgeon walked them through the double doors and pointed to a mask dispenser on the wall. They put on surgical masks and entered the recovery room.

  Mat’s eyes went straight to the gaping wound on Caroline’s leg, uncovered and draining. The surgeon had removed maybe half a pound of her flesh. He struggled with his emotions, choking up as he turned to William, who stared into the massive cavity in his sister’s calf muscle. Mat’s throat tightened with a groan and his hand moved to his face.

  Gathering himself, Mat put his other hand on William’s shoulder and steered him back out the door.

  Highway 89, Outside Fredonia, Arizona

  Cameron had plenty of time to think. He had been watching the roadblock since before dawn—the roadblock where he had been shot.

  The sun had set on another day, and he used the mounting darkness to creep up on the spot where the pilgrims liked to take a piss. As far as Cameron could tell, these fanatical assholes had an overblown sense of modesty. Even the men would walk fifty yards away from one another before they got their dicks out to pee. They had fallen into a pattern. Every man on roadblock duty pissed in a sage ditch fifty yards into the brush, the erstwhile bathroom.

  Everyone, including the old guy who appeared to be in charge, used the pissing ditch. As Cameron thought about it, he figured they had probably been ordered to piss there. This community wasn’t like other communities; they seemed to make a lot of rules and then obey them with extraordinary precision. Like Charles Darwin might have observed, they appeared to select their men across generations for one trait in particular: strict obedience.

  Watching them talk, eat, and shoot approaching cars, Cameron marveled at how much he had grown to know them. Even observing from several hundred yards away, his sense of their town culture grew. He began to understand their strange hierarchy and maybe something about their motivation.

  From where he sat, tucked under a juniper tree, the math of polygamy looked like the unseen hand guiding everything. The community needed a certain number of productive men to pay the bills and fill the bellies of the town. The women worked hard, but the men ran the businesses and farms—and a baseline number of men were required to keep the hierarchy and town afloat. That number of capable, obedient men had to be kept in a certain numerical range or there wouldn’t be enough wives for everyone. He remembered that it took three wives to get into the celestial heaven described by the FLDS, at least according to the television show.

  The deliverables that would keep the younger men in the running for their own wives were a combination of productivity and obedience, two character traits that didn’t commonly occur in a matching set. Most Type A guys in the real world kept their own counsel and would inevitably run afoul of the priesthood peckerwoods. At the same time, most obedient guys could follow orders, but they weren’t go-getters. Any young man who could prove he had the magical combination—competency and obedience—could survive the FLDS selection process and get his hands on some wives. Anything outside that range would get the young man the boot.

  So two out of every three of the young bucks had to be eliminated for the racket to pan out. That meant pretty much every man under the age of thirty-five was working to prove his worthiness on one level or another, and that was precisely what it looked like from three hundred yards away beneath a juniper tree. It looked like the young guys were working their asses off to prove they were good enough to have their share of the wivestock.

  As a relatively young man of thirty-five years old himself, Cameron compared the shitty deal of the FLDS men with his own shitty deal: working from the bottom up in corporate America, slaving at school to get a degree he suspected would buy him nothing, raising a family he felt like he didn’t deserve. Then losing it all when some nameless asshole nuked Los Angeles. He could definitely relate to the young shit-kickers down at the roadblock, kowtowing to the old man.

  Over the hours, with a passion fueled by boredom, Cameron chewed through one hair-brained plot after another to screw the old men of the FLDS out of their harems. He would die happy if he could take down this evil empire. If he couldn’t have his wife and kids back, he would settle for destroying a bunch of cocksure old autocrats. Killing the FLDS cabal felt analog to killing the thankless world that had already crippled Cameron’s soul.

  He had been wracking his brain all night, sitting up against that craggy, malodorous tree, about how to jack the FLDS system. He didn’t want to kill any more young guys if he could help it. He would rather poison the system and take it all down at once. He spent half the day imagining scenarios where he would abduct the second- or third-in-command and frame him for the murder of the prophet, tipping the whole shebang into chaos.

  Even in his muddled state, Cameron knew the odds were long that he could pull off a coup. But he could certainly try. What else did he have to do with his time?

  The old bastard running the roadblock wasn’t the head honcho. Cameron knew as much from the television show. The prophet, Rulon Whatever, drove around in a big, blue Cadillac Escalade. Cameron vaguely remembered the guy being in his seventies, with over sixty wives. The old priesthood dude at the roadblock was an underling to the prophet, but maybe an important underling. Maybe he was the Number Two or Number Three guy. The young men at the roadblock treated him like some kind of general, obeying his every command with alacrity.

  It had been at least an hour since the old man had taken a piss, and that was a long time for an old geezer. Maybe in his early sixties, General Turd, as Cameron had taken to calling him, was due for a leak.

 
Cameron skulked down to the piss ditch and wedged himself between a couple of big sage bushes. There he waited.

  General Turd wore a big, white cowboy hat, probably to keep the sun off his lily-white skin, and Cameron held vigil, looking for that hat to come bobbing over the sagebrush in the night, backlit by the campfires behind the roadblock. Eventually, the general would want to head home to his harem for some bumping uglies with one of his wives. Cameron wanted to grab the old guy and maybe beat some information out of him. If he got lucky, the old guy might turn out to be the key to derailing the priesthood poontang racket.

  Two young pilgrims came to the piss latrine over the next hour and neither of them used a flashlight, probably saving precious batteries. Neither noticed Cameron hiding. Finally, the white cowboy hat bobbed over the edge of the sagebrush and General Turd appeared, hitching up his suspendered pants as he climbed down into the ditch. When he got his pecker out, Cameron stepped from between the sagebrush and pointed his rifle at the General.

  “Make a sound and I’ll shoot you in the face,” Cameron spoke his first audible words in three days. It came out sounding like a croak.

  With the camp fires behind him, the general’s face was a dark tableau, but Cameron could see from body language that he had scared the living shit out of the old man.

  “By the POWER OF THE PRIESTHOOD,” the old man shouted, “I CAST YE BACK INTO OUTER DARKNESS! GET YE HENCE, MINION OF SATAN!”