by Jack Hunt
“Don’t underestimate what people will do to protect the ones they love. And anyway, that’s why we have got to work together. Right now we may be the only chance this town has of fighting back. Now we can run off with our tail between our legs and maybe we will get to live another week, heck, we might even be able to hole up in Dan’s underground bunker but eventually violence will come knocking. No matter what you have heard about violence not solving violence, at times it’s the only way. Whether you like it or not, it’s time to fight.”
Murphy grabbed up a bag of ammo.
“This is insane. Surely we can reason with them?” Luke asked.
Murphy chuckled and pointed outside. “You think back at the library they were looking to reason with us?”
Luke looked at Edgar who shrugged.
“I’m not a violent man, Luke, but this is my home. I grew up here. My family is here.”
“So… about leaving, that’s a no?”
I could see the look of reservation on Luke’s face. I felt the same. I wasn’t ready to battle with a bunch of skinheads. We might have had anger issues and this might have been one hell of a way to unleash pent-up frustration, but killing another human? I wasn’t sure I was ready for that.
“Are we going?” Edgar asked.
“Not yet. I have to contact Dan.”
AMBUSH
We remained at Murphy’s for another hour while he tried to make contact with Dan via a ham radio system. He sat at a desk pressing the button on the side of the mic.
“Come in Dan. This is Murphy.”
All the came out of the speakers was a hum, and the odd crackle. He repeated himself over and over again. While he was doing that I went to get some food. Anything I could scrounge from the cupboards. Luke was sitting in the kitchen having a cigarette, staring at the Glock on the counter. I found a few cans of tuna, a bottle of pickled eggs and some crackers. What did this guy live on? I blew my cheeks out and closed the pantry.
“Did you know this was coming?” Luke asked in an accusing tone.
“No. I mean, they spoke about things but I assumed it was just talk.”
He scoffed and blew out some smoke.
I sighed. “Look, I know you and I don’t see eye to eye. But we need to put that shit aside and work together.”
“Can you imagine getting dropped into enemy territory in the middle of the night? You know, skydiving in and releasing your parachute at the last minute, then wading your way through a humid jungle just to observe and report back your findings. You hear all these horror stories from veterans about getting ambushed. Tortured by the Vietcong. I’m not sure I could handle that. I think I would just shoot myself first,” Luke said. He took a strong pull on his cigarette and then reached for the gun.
“Be careful with that. It’s not a toy,” Edgar said coming into the room.
“And how would you know, old man? You’ve spent your entire life under a truck. What danger is to be found there?”
“I did my time in the war.”
“Oh really? You’re a vet? What war?”
He never replied.
Luke scoffed. “Yeah, just as I thought. The only war you’ve seen, old man, is the argument between you and your old lady after she got it on with some other dude. Yeah, I heard about that. Rumor is, it was Billy’s old man. I bet he gave it to her real good.”
Edgar backhanded Luke across the face, then pulled him up and slammed him against the wall. “Hey, hey, Edgar, calm down.” I rushed in to try and intervene but he wasn’t listening.
“Yeah, old man. I was just joking.”
“You ever mention my wife, I will fucking end you. You understand?”
Luke threw his hands up in the air. “Okay.”
He held him tightly against the wall, Luke’s feet almost dangling off the floor. He caused such a ruckus that Murphy came into the room. By then Edgar had released his grip. I backed away. For someone in his early fifties and as quiet as he was, the guy had some serious kehoners on him.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” Edgar brushed past Murphy and he looked at me and I just grimaced. Luke was muttering something under his breath.
“Any luck?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
“It’s a small unit. We can take it with us, right?”
He nodded.
We began loading up the Glocks, rifles and ammo before heading out. “Take as much food as you can. Keep to canned goods. Down in that bottom cupboard in a box is beef jerky. Grab that.” I looked underneath. He wasn’t joking. The guy had been drying out stack loads of meat. It was encased in airtight containers. I popped them open and started filling my bag with handfuls of the sweet-smelling, chewy meat.
As we busied ourselves, Luke didn’t bother helping. He was pissed off by the way that Edgar had reacted. Leaning against the wall near the window, he blew smoke rings.
“Uh, guys. Guys,” Luke stammered.
“What’s up?”
“I’m guessing these aren’t the Avon ladies.”
His nostrils flared and I knew it was trouble. I bolted over to the window and peeked out. Coming up the driveway were four skinheads.
“Murphy.”
He was out in the hallway zipping up one of the bags. He got up and grabbed his Glock, he loaded a magazine and put the gun behind his back. A few seconds later we heard the sound of boots coming up onto his porch. Murphy didn’t wait, he unlocked the door but kept the chain on it.
“Can I help you guys?”
“Possibly.” One of them went to push his way in but Murphy pressed back against the door.
“Look, we don’t want trouble.”
“Open the fucking door now or I will blow a fucking hole in your head.”
“You don’t want to do this. Walk away.”
Murphy gave them a chance. I heard them scoff then the one guy began kicking at the door.
What happened next occurred so quick, I just stood there with my jaw hanging down.
Murphy undid the lock and as he opened the door in one smooth motion he pulled the Glock from behind his back. Four bullets later and they were dead. The first three went down fast but the other tried to run. He’d made it halfway down the driveway before he collapsed. All of them were shot in the head.
“Come on, help me get ’em around back.”
Killing was as easy to him as breathing.
Luke and I stood there staring while Murphy and Edgar went out.
“Are you going to help?” he called out. I hurried out and looked down at one of the bodies. A dark hole in his head seeped out thick blood. I didn’t recognize them. My eyes darted to the driveway to check if there were any more. If they had made it this far west in the town, for all we knew there could have been another fifty down the road. Had they heard the gunfire? I took the dead guy’s wrists and Luke grabbed a handful of jean around his ankles and we hauled him around the rear of the house. Murphy had a shed with a metal door on the front. He unhinged the lock and swung it wide. Inside was an old lawn mower and a few garden tools. Murphy dumped the guy he was holding, went inside the shed and grabbed up two large cans of gasoline. He brought them out and set them down nearby. He then proceeded to drag the next guy into the shed. He fished through the skinhead’s jacket and pulled out a knife. He pulled a packet of cigarettes and tossed them. Luke went and collected those.
Ten minutes later they were all inside doused with gasoline.
“Luke. Lighter.”
“I need it.”
“I’ll give it back.”
Luke reluctantly handed it over. Murphy flipped it open and a flame came to life, and then he tossed it inside. A sudden burst of fire and the wooden shed was engulfed in flames. It was followed by a loud explosion.
“My lighter.”
Murphy walked past him. “Time to quit.”
Luke stared back at it. I think he was more surprised by the reality that he had just seen his lighter get tossed into the fire than t
he fact that four men had just been turned into human kebabs.
“Why would you do that?” Edgar asked.
“They might come looking for them. It’s a shed, not my house.”
We went back around to the front of the house, collected the bags and headed down the driveway. Edgar was about to step into the road when I pulled him back. There were others further down going house to house.
“Great, how do you suppose we get past this rabble?” Luke asked.
“You’ve got a weapon.”
“What?”
He shoved one in Luke’s hand.
“Use it.”
Had it not been evening, I was certain that we would have been spotted lingering in the shadows. We waited until the next group approached another house before making a move.
“If we get separated and you can’t get back to City Hall, go to the library. Smash one of the lower windows. Chances are they won’t look inside.”
“No, they’ll probably just set it on fire, for the heck of it,” Luke said.
Crouched down behind a vehicle holding a Glock in my hand seemed surreal. Murphy indicated with two fingers when to move. None of us hesitated; we moved fast and stayed close together.
Further down the road we saw a man step out of his house with a woman and three children. One of them was a teen. They were all carrying bags, except two of the kids that were too young. They hadn’t made it a few yards when five skinheads encircled them. The reactions were fast and quick, the father tried to hit one of them but he missed. The skinhead brought down a metal bar on the man’s arm. He screamed. They didn’t seem to care that the younger kids were under the age of ten, they just unleashed a brutal beating on them. When they stepped back, the family huddled together in the middle of the street, frightened and in tears. A skinhead with a knife moved to cut them when another stopped him.
“No, these are mine.”
He brought up a metal pipe and was about to bring it down hard when a gun went off. The bullet knocked him down instantly. At first I thought it was Murphy but it wasn’t. Out from one of the houses nearby came a guy with a rifle. After he had taken down the other skinhead standing near the family, he unloaded bullet after bullet as the rest of them ran at him. When the gunfire ended, he was the only one standing. The family remained frozen in place.
“Move!” Murphy shouted to them as he broke out from his position and ran towards them. The guy with the gun was an African American, he turned the gun towards Murphy.
“Whoa! I’m on your side. You need to get out of here now, all that gunfire is going to attract them.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
And with that he turned around and walked back into his house, slamming the door behind him. It was the first sign that townsfolk weren’t going to just take this lying down. I raced over to where Murphy was, all the while holding my gun slightly low and looking around. Murphy told the family they either needed to get back in the house or come with us.
They stared blankly back at him. Shocked. Bruised and battered, they looked as if they were unable to process what had just happened.
“Move!” he yelled. That seemed to snap them out of their comatose state. They turned and hobbled back to their house. The father had taken the full brunt of the beating. His face was covered in blood, his clothing drenched. I caught sight of the youngest girl who had taken a hit to the ear and was bleeding. She looked at me and I know in that moment she thought I was one of them. I’d never felt so ashamed to have ever associated with the group. It wasn’t about brotherhood.
These were acts of senseless violence against humans.
KILL SHOT
Society had stepped over an invisible line. I couldn’t imagine every skinhead wanted to kill but people were people and they would embrace the mob mindset. When two or more were out of control it didn’t take long for others to do the same. And now that the world was experiencing a blackout, the infrastructure of law and order had collapsed and the grid was down, the rules of how other humans treated others would soon go out the window, at least for the white supremacists who were assaulting anyone. They knew people wouldn’t just give up generators, food or other resources. They knew that people would defend themselves. That’s why they were attacking first. No questions, no requests, just brute force tactics.
It was militant in its own way. That’s why we were referred to as foot soldiers. We were the ones that would go out and do the dirty work and get our hands bloody. I had never attended a skinhead rally; neither had I met those higher up in the organization, if it could even be called that. My exposure to the neo-Nazi group amounted to a small-town experience and back then law and order kept them in line. They knew their boundaries and they operated within them so as to never attract unwanted attention.
I understood that Luke and the others must have thought I had seen this coming but I hadn’t. At monthly meetings, the topic of discussion centered on recruitment. Talk of how they would take back America occurred over beers. They were just words of drunken men. I had no clue that the organization was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. The very notion seemed ludicrous. How did they obtain them? I’d heard about the Cold War, spies that entered America smuggling in suitcase nukes and 84 that had gone missing. I’d read the news articles about the feds and CIA searching for them but there was no indication that the white supremacists had them. They had kept this under tight wraps. It would have been something that would have only been discussed with higher-ups. And for good reason. They didn’t want to risk having anyone letting the cat out of the bag.
We retraced our steps, though this time giving a wide berth to the library. Murphy was certain that because a few survived, they would have returned to the group and no doubt that was the reason why they were banging on doors where windows were dark. Initially there wouldn’t have been a need to go house to house. Supplies could be gathered from the local stores, but eventually they would have to turn their focus to homes and factories in the area.
The decision to not turn onto Pine Street but continue on Front and turn down Cedar meant we would be getting dangerously close to Main Street. It was a risk that had to be taken. The only thing we had working in our advantage was that it was a moonless night. The sky was a blanket of darkness shrouding us as we skimmed along the sides of buildings.
We had made it to the intersection of Fifth and Cedar when Murphy stopped. We continued to move past him thinking he was just watching our back but that wasn’t the case. He stepped off the curb.
“Kate?”
“Hey, hold up,” I said to the others. “Murphy,” I said in a half whisper.
“They’ve got Kate.”
I ran up to join him. Peering around the corner towards Main Street which was lit up like a Mexican fiesta. A large rowdy crowd was pushing forward five police officers. One of them was Officer Kate Shaw.
“It’s too late,” I muttered, trying to motion for us to go.
“I’m not letting them kill her.”
“There’s nothing we can do, Murphy. There’s too many of them. And if we continue to stand out here, we are going to be screwed ourselves.”
“He’s right, Murphy,” Luke added.
“Go then. I’m staying. I’m not going to…” he trailed off looking at the large crowd that were riled up and preparing for a public execution. My eyes scanned the surrounding area. I was certain that at any minute another cluster of those fuckwits would show up and we’d have to engage with them. I sighed and ran a hand over my head.
“What do you want to do?”
He must have realized the predicament they were in. Had this been Iraq, no doubt more troops would have been sent in to help but there was no one else. No one was skilled to handle this kind of situation. Heck, even a riot squad would have had trouble pushing back this group. They were pumped up on liquid courage and fueling the fire in each other. With a community terrified, the police department dead or on their way to be executed, they must have
seen this as a victory.
Murphy turned to say something when a loud boom rang out and he stumbled forward onto me. Behind him, further down the street, were some of the guys that we had ran into at the library. They were now charging towards us. Luke and Edgar didn’t hesitate, they returned fire immediately, which slowed them up and made them dive for cover. In the dark I couldn’t tell how bad Murphy had been shot, just that he got back up and told us to head east down Cedar.
Murphy slumped one arm over my shoulder and I started taking him down the street while the other two kept firing. Bullets were pinging off metal and ricocheting off concrete. A chunk of concrete hit me in the side of the face. Pain coursed through my body.
“Split up.”
“Screw that.”
“Just listen to me. You’ve got the other two-way radio. Go!”
I was still carrying a rifle in one hand and my arm was looped around his waist to support him.
“I’ll take him,” Edgar said rushing over. They darted across the road while Luke and I provided cover. I raced down an alley, and Luke did the same. Within a matter of minutes we were off the main stretch. In between the buildings it was even darker. My eyes scanned for anywhere I could hide. Upon reaching a chain-link fence, I slid the gun case beneath it then scrambled over. With a Glock in my hand, my heart was pounding against my chest. All I could think about was getting caught and having my face smashed in with a hammer. Fear permeated and caused sweat to drench my shirt. As I dropped to the other side I heard a couple of skinheads coming down the alley. Their boots pounded against the asphalt. Had they seen me? I hurried across the gravel and ducked behind a large green dumpster. The stench coming from it was putrid but that was the least of my concerns. My pulse sent blood rushing to my head and I felt a wave of dizziness. I pressed my back firmly against the dumpster trying to stay out of view while I cast a glance to my left and right. The only thing between them and me was the dumpster and fence. If they decided to jump over, I was going to be in a fight for my life.
