“Then what? You’ll reel him in?”
“Not quite. Tomorrow, we’ll try to find the triple floats somewhere near shore. They’ll mark where he is. If everything works out as planned, we’ll grab floats, reel in the wire, pull him up to the boat, and then kill him.”
“With what? Your knife?”
“No, this.” He pointed to a long-barreled revolver inside the nylon gym bag he was carrying. “It’s a .22 caliber magnum. Put the end of the barrel to its head, right between the eyes, and pull the trigger. I’m going to use this bottle as a homemade silencer,” he said as he pulled a two-liter Coke bottle from his gym bag and shoved the barrel of the revolver inside its modified opening.
“Will those coat hooks be sharp enough to go through his snout when he bites down?”
“Nah, he’ll swallow them whole. I’m going to hook him in his stomach.”
I shook my head at his gleeful description while we pulled our boat out of the weeds once again and pushed ourselves into the shallow water just off shore. The moonless night made our work difficult, especially since we couldn’t use any light source to locate the black floating plastic. But we did recover seven of the floats and a total of seventeen fish of various sizes. Not bad at all.
“Here, take these while I bait the wire.” Harley said.
I gathered the trotlines onto the floor of the aluminum skiff while he pulled out the fresh carcass, cut the squirrel in half, and hooked the body parts with the sharpened hangers. He put the end of the electric wire into the water and began to slowly feed the line down to the bottom of the lake.
“You didn’t paint those floats black,” I said.
“He’s going to swallow the line, and we need to find him afterwards. He’ll run after he swallows the squirrels, and black floats will be tough to see.”
He turned to me after releasing the trap . “This is a long shot. The gator could take the bait and end up on the other side of the lake, so don’t get your hopes up. White floats are our best chance to find him, if we find him at all.”
Six hours later, I was awakened by a sharp punch to the shoulder. Harley was hovering over me in the pre-dawn darkness, his smile a faint glow in the dim light. As usual, he was in all black.
“Come on, let’s go look for our gator.”
“It’s isn’t even dawn. I thought we were going to check tonight,” I complained. “Besides, someone might see us.”
“I was thinking about that and changed my mind. By now, the gator’s going to have found a quiet spot to lay up for the day. By this evening, he’ll be on the move, looking for prey in another part of the lake. It will only be harder to find him the longer we wait.”
I was none too happy, having done overwatch from midnight to three.
“You know I just got to sleep,” I complained.
“You’ll get over it once we make a pot of my gator stew. Now hurry up!”
Sleeping in my clothing had its advantages, and I was ready to move within a minute. Outside, we were joined by an equally sleepy Garrett, who was holding a five-gallon bucket filled with water. Two more buckets were sitting at his feet. Harley handed me a container half-filled with soapy water and a heavy bristled brush.
“Here, I’ll need this to scrub the gator clean.”
The dead silence of the neighborhood was both a blessing and a curse. No sound meant no thugs, but it also meant any noise we made would carry a long way. With some luck, we made it to the cove without incident and found where we had set up our gator snare.
“Sun will be up soon,” I said as the eastern sky began to lighten. Faded pink and orange streaked the vista over the water. Within a few minutes we would be able to see more than just shadows lining the lake’s shore, but that meant others would be able to see us, too.
“I don’t see the floats,” Harley said with some pleasure. “That’s good, because it means a gator took our bait.”
“Yeah, but that won’t put any meat in our bellies unless we find him before it gets too light out.”
“Let’s keep going,” Garrett suggested. “Maybe we can spot it farther down.”
We left our buckets by the hidden boat and moved quietly through the next few backyards. We were starting to get uncomfortably close to the end of the cove. Another half a mile would put us near the racket club where we had rescued Beker from the Latin gang.
“There!” Garrett whispered, pointing to a cluster of cattails and tape grass under a dock near the bend of the natural inlet.
“I think I can reach the floats from the dock.” Harley said. “Come on.”
We crept through knee-high grass and weeds, keeping our distance from each other so as not to create a common path. We slid under the yard’s decaying ornamental bushes, and after a couple of minutes of motionless surveillance, we went out on the dock. Harley pulled gently on the line and had enough slack to wrap the electric wire around the dock’s pylon.
“This could get noisy, so we need to be quick about it. After I put a couple of slugs in its head, hustle back to the bushes and hide.”
Garrett braced himself, feet against the pylon as Harley produced his “silenced” revolver.
“I think I can see him in the weeds there!” I said, pointing down and out about eight feet away.
“Help Garrett pull,” Harley said as he leaned over the edge of the wooden platform. “Give a hard, steady tug on three. Ready?”
I positioned myself, feet at the pylon next to Garrett’s, and nodded. I bent out and grabbed the line and began to wrap it around my hand.
“Don’t wrap it like that,” Harley said. “He’ll just as likely pull you in as you pull him up. If he’s too big, let the line go.”
I adjusted my grip, and Harley began his countdown. On three, we heaved with all our might and the water exploded as the hook, buried in the beast’s belly, tore at his insides. A massive head erupted from the water as both Garrett and I pulled a second time, bringing the gator closer to us. The creature’s tail whipped back and forth, sending the monster twisting in the air.
Harley leaned out from the dock and hovered over the water, frozen and ready to strike. The gator belched out a roar. The twelve-gauge electric line was just strong enough to keep from being bitten through. As we pulled on the line, I could feel the primal strength of an animal whose species had stopped evolving hundreds of millions of years ago. The gator was a perfect fresh-water killing machine and needed no more improvement. We were trying to kill a modern dinosaur with a coat hook and a .22 caliber bullet.
The silenced revolver coughed three times.
The line went slack, and an eerie silence came over the cove as the massive beast’s carcass settled into the shallow lake. The maelstrom was over, leaving the three of us lying on the dock in shocked silence.
“Hurry!” Harley hissed as he grabbed his rifle and sprinted for cover in the tall grass.
Both Garrett and I were right behind him, our AR-15s clutched in our hands. The three of us went to ground, waiting for any response to the gator’s final fight for life. We held our position for nearly five minutes before we dared to move.
“I’ll stay here and keep watch.” Harley said. “You two go to the boat and bring back the buckets. I’ll make my way back if someone shows before you return.”
By the time we returned, the sun had begun to break over the treetops on the eastern shore. We dragged the carcass to the edge of the water, using the dock as a shield from any observers further down the shoreline. The ten-foot-long creature had to weigh almost four hundred pounds, so we could only bring him partially out of the lake.
Harley began by scrubbing the gator’s back with the soapy water. Dumping one of the two buckets of clean water over the lathered scales, he then removed the creature’s dorsal scutes, peeling off the back of the monster’s armor in one piece.
“We won’t have time to get all the meat,” Harley said. “But we’ll get the good stuff.”
He cut along the spine and removed the tenderlo
in from both sides of the gator’s back and dumped the two pieces of meat into the third bucket, which was still partially filled with clean water. Continuing up to the head, he cut out the jowls—two giant pieces of white jaw meat that were each as big as a turkey’s breast. Then he cut off the creature’s legs and put them into a garbage bag he had brought along. Finally, he cut into the tail and quickly removed two straps of meat he called jelly rolls. They peeled out easily, almost without a cut from his knife.
Garrett retrieved the line and floats, ripping the hook from within the body, and then we pushed the carcass back into the water. We watched it sink into the tape grass where it had originally taken refuge, all signs of its death and our involvement now hidden under the lake.
Harley returned to his house with the meat we had ripped from the beast. Exhausted, I barely remember my head hitting the pillow. I didn’t awaken for another six hours. That afternoon, after my shower and a change of clothes, Janice greeted me with a smile.
“You guys had a good haul! Ashley said she’s dehydrating over forty pounds of meat. You should see what she did. It’s amazing.”
Janice pointed to a couple of Fords parked in a nearby driveway. Our neighbor’s SUVs had been converted into dehydration machines. The sun heated the inside of the vehicles. Oven racks were lined up on the floor of their cargo areas over a bed of aluminum foil. The racks were layered with thin strips of marinated alligator meat. Salted and dried, they would be edible for months. An oven thermometer sat among the strips of meat, it read 135°.
Ashley waved me over from her front door, and as I joined her, I could smell the gator stew cooking. She had boiled the dark meat from the beast’s legs and added vegetables and spices to the mixture after it cooked. Waiting to flavor the stew once it was inside her house prevented the aromatic smell of the herbs from spreading to our unwanted neighbors. She handed me a bowl of gator stew that made all the craziness from the night before worth it.
I sat down and greedily shoved the food into my mouth. It was the first cooked meat I had eaten in weeks, and it was heavenly. It almost made me forget what waited on the other side of our eight-foot wall.
CHAPTER 13
VANDERBILT MEDICAL CENTER
NASHVILLE, TN
“Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”
— Thomas Mann
FOR WEEKS AFTER RETURNING FROM Smyrna, Claire Kramer had been throwing herself into her work. There were more and more trauma cases in the emergency room as gangs and armed citizens clashed over the dwindling resources of the dying city. Over a dozen gunshot wounds had already been admitted since midnight, and the day wasn’t even half over. Nine of the thirteen GSWs had come from a single encounter, when a large gang invaded a subdivision being guarded by a local militia. Four of the gang members and one of the militia had succumbed to their wounds, but the other four were expected to survive, albeit two with limbs missing, amputated to save their lives.
“Hey, Doc,” one of the surviving militia patients croaked.
Claire had come to the intensive care ward to check on her handiwork, having transferred the man here after removing a bullet from his neck and a stitching up knife wound to his hand that had come perilously close to removing his four fingers.
“Yes?” she replied absently, jotting down notes on the paper charting that the hospital reverted to since the computer systems installed by DHS didn’t have any hospital software on it.
“The old man,” he said, grimacing in pain. “How is he?”
“Didn’t make it,” she replied, scanning the chart to make sure the appropriate vital signs were being monitored and recorded.
Claire was becoming irritated at the inconsistency of the recovery room staff. Several of them had abandoned their shifts over the last week, never to return. Most had been working in the intensive care and step-down units, with whom Claire had had little interaction until recently. She’d had to treat four patients who had been returned to the emergency room for infections or re-opening of wounds while in recovery. The state of the chart, along with the disorganization she found at the nurse’s station, reinforced her concerns that the hospital was dropping the ball.
Her work spent saving lives was being squandered by the lackadaisical care provided during the recovery phase. Claire, her head buried in the chart, finally became aware that the patient was sobbing.
“Hey,” she said, focusing her attention on him. “What’s wrong?”
“Did he say anything?” The man wiped his eyes with the corner of his hospital gown. “Did he suffer?”
“No, he never regained consciousness. I’m sorry.”
The patient turned his head and stared out the window. Outside, a fine mist swirling under a cloudy, grey morning sky. Spring was here, promising new life, but death still reigned in the city.
“You know,” he began, “the Vols should be having their spring football game about now. And the CMAs and Bonnaroo Festival wouldn’t be far off.”
Claire stopped scribbling notes. The realization of just how far society had fallen blindsided her, an emotional sucker punch. She looked at the man lying in bed, his far-off stare into a past that would never return. The hum of the overhead fluorescent light was the only sound in the sterile room as each of them became adrift in thoughts of what had been.
“He was my dad,” the man said, turning his head back to Claire. “He was fighting to keep our family safe.”
The patient’s eyes begged to tell her more, but Claire turned away. Then she stopped in her tracks and looked into her own heart. She realized that she was fleeing the conversation because it frightened her. She also knew a good man, an ethical man, who was putting his life on the line to help others. She didn’t want this conversation. She didn’t want to think about her family. She didn’t want to recognize that she was helpless. She just didn’t want to think about any of it anymore.
A tear began to form in the corner of her eye, and she fought to keep it from dripping down her cheek. Her dad had drilled into her the need to control her emotions. She was taught to fight the fear and bury the despair. Her Jewish legacy was filled with a history of oppression and enslavement, and yet their heritage continued by pushing forward and never giving up. To learn from mistakes both past and present.
Claire batted away the tear and grabbed a chair. Pulling it to the side of her patient’s bed, she sat down looked into his eyes. She saw both love and pain, as both emotions begged and deserved to be voiced.
“Tell me about your father.”
Minutes flew by, and Claire found herself sharing memories of her own father. The conversation was therapeutic for both doctor and patient. Claire felt her emotional heaviness lifted away.
After a lull, the patient asked, “Why are you working for them?”
“What do you mean?” Claire asked.
“The DHS agents. They killed my dad. They brought that gang to our neighborhood and let them loose on us. Just because we wouldn’t move to one of their camps.”
“I know,” Claire said. “But I am doing so much good here.”
“You could do good out there, too.”
“It’s not that easy. Where would I get supplies? Where would I get clean water to sterilize my instruments and wash my hands before surgery?”
“You boil the water. You find the drugs and tools you need. You run a generator to power lights. You just do what you have to do.”
Claire wrestled with her conscience. She stood up and stared out of the window. Most of the snow had melted and tulips were popping up in the trash-cluttered landscape beds that lined the multi-story concrete hospital buildings.
She sighed. “I guess I’m just doing my job.”
“Sounds a lot like the excuses I read about when they asked the soldiers who guarded the prisoners at Auschwitz and Treblinka why they did it.”
Claire gasped, and her hand flew to her mouth. “No,” she said.
“Then why stay?”
“I have nowhere
else to go,” Claire tearfully admitted. “I have nothing else.”
“You would have us,” he said with more certainty than Claire would have thought. “You’d have a city full of patriots that won’t back down from these goons. We’d take care of you. I promise.”
A few hours later, Rachael walked into the break room and found Claire sitting in one of the lounge’s chairs, staring at the wall, crumpled tissues clenched in her fist. Rachael quietly sat next to her friend. She said nothing; Claire would talk when she was ready.
Rachael and Claire had been working side by side for almost fourteen hours. Since just after midnight, they had successfully saved over a dozen people. What was becoming an issue was that gang members who had been successfully treated by them in the past were returning with fresh wounds from newly fought battles. DHS had been taking the thugs away once the hospital had repaired the trauma, but obviously the criminals weren’t being put in prison. They were back on the street, continuing to create mayhem throughout the city. One of their “return customers” even recognized Rachael as she was treating him for a knife wound. Whether out of bravado or because he had a warped sense of timing, he had the audacity to ask her out on a date while she was suturing his laceration. The man had reacted badly when Rachael laughed in his face, and security had to intervene as the thug tried to assault her.
“I’m tired.” Claire sighed. “I don’t have anything left in the tank. I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”
“I know. Me too.”
The two women sank further into the leather chairs, each drifting off into her own world, when the door to the lounge exploded open and Rachael’s boyfriend rushed into the room.
Billy was in full battle rattle, and his combat uniform was streaked with dirt. His rifle was slung over his shoulder, and his battle belt was still bulging with a full complement of magazines. Whatever had happened, he hadn’t fired a shot, but his appearance indicated that he’s been through hell.
“What is it?” Rachael gasped, seeing her boyfriend’s appearance.
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