Keith sped up as he steered the boat down the winding bayou that would take him to the river. These waterways and the enclosing hardwood forests that surrounded them were among the few things in his world that were largely unchanged. There were downed and damaged trees, of course, and the banks were littered with debris carried in on the flood waters, but for the most part, the natural world always fared better in such storms than the things built by man. Keith found a little comfort in knowing that. The great swamp and its waterways and woods had a lot to do with why he was here in the first place. Lynn’s family history in the Atchafalaya region went back for generations, and when Keith met her, it didn’t take him long to understand she would not easily be uprooted, and the more time he spent with her here, the less he cared. It was easier for him to stay than to get her to move. He got his job with the sheriff’s department, married her, and the two of them built their secluded bayou home that he thought they would share forever.
The events that left him alone now couldn’t be undone, and though everything had changed in the world beyond the levees, at least the bayous and the river remained. The Atchafalaya’s dark waters still flowed past fluted cypress trunks and muddy islands of dense willows; creating a vast stronghold of bayous, sloughs, canals and lakes accessible only by boat. And now that wilderness of isolated waterways was more cut off from the outside world than ever, with fuel in short supply and the roads leading to it too dangerous to travel. The river was the main artery through the heart of his jurisdiction now, and Keith made it his job to keep an eye on the comings and goings of those who used it.
He’d been south as far as Morgan City and the Gulf only a few times since the hurricane struck, and what he found there was the devastation and death he expected. With a direct hit from what must have been at least a Category Four storm at landfall, the outcome wasn’t really surprising. Most folks living near the coast didn’t get out because they had no better place to go if they even had a way to get there. They simply decided to take their chances with nature rather than face the fuel shortages, roadblocks and bandits they were sure to encounter in an evacuation attempt.
Keith helped those survivors he could find, taking some of them back upriver in his boat where they at least had a chance of finding food and fresh water. But the dead were too numerous to do anything about. Bodies were washed up at random on the riverbanks and throughout the marsh and mixed with piles of rubble in what was left of whole communities. By the time he saw all this, Keith was immune to the normal emotions such a scene would have evoked before. Though it was as bad as anything he’d encountered in the war he’d fought overseas, nothing could get to him after seeing the aftermath of what had happened on the bridge, the day he lost Lynn.
Keith hadn’t been back to what was left of Morgan City in nearly a month now, after evacuating the last of the survivors he found there. He’d had enough to do to keep him busy helping his in-laws and other folks closer to home, but now he wondered if his father’s call had come from somewhere down that way. Wherever it was, it was too far away to answer, and that was frustrating, but not really surprising. The VHF antenna on his patrol boat wasn’t tall enough to transmit more than a few miles. Reception was always a lot better than transmission on those radios, and Bart was undoubtedly aboard a much larger vessel with a taller antenna if he had come all the way here from south Florida. Keith’s best guess that he was somewhere on the main channel of the Atchafalaya, likely already north of Morgan City.
Thinking about it as he wound his way around the bends of the bayou to the river, Keith figured things had to be really bad in Florida for Bart Branson to come all the way here by boat. The last time they’d discussed it, his old man had insisted that he was better off than most everybody down there, with his secluded little hideaway on the Caloosahatchee, but he was concerned about his granddaughter and her mother. There had been major riots just south of them in West Palm Beach, and it was even worse in Miami. Keith hated to think about Megan and Shauna being stranded there, but there was little he could do about it, considering the distance. Taking care of them was Eric’s job, but his brother made other choices long ago, and Keith couldn’t really blame Shauna for divorcing him and moving on. She was doing what she had to do to take care of herself and Megan. He just hoped they were both okay after all this.
If he had been able to get through to his father after the surprise radio call today, he would have bombarded him with all his questions: Did he get Shauna and Megan out? Were they with him now? Had anyone heard from Eric? What about Shauna’s new husband, was he with them too? The answers would have to wait though, because so far, there was nothing to indicate that Bart had received his reply. Keith was too impatient to sit there doing nothing though, and that’s why he was headed for the river now. Maybe Bart was anchored somewhere nearby, unsure of how to find Keith’s property by water, as he’d only been fishing with him there once years prior. Keith would check the stretch of river nearest the bayou, and if he didn’t see him there, he would run up to his brother-in-law’s place on the old river channel north of the interstate and try his radio. Vic Guidry had a much taller antenna on his fishing trawler, and could certainly transmit farther than Keith could. It would be preferable to make radio contact with his father first rather than spend time running miles up and down the river looking for him without even knowing what kind of vessel he was aboard and whether or not he was in the old river or the Whiskey Bay Pilot Channel.
Keith suspected he might be aboard one of the larger motor yachts from his boatyard. Maybe he had a customer there who was based somewhere in Louisiana or Texas, and he’d caught a ride here. Or he could have arranged to come on a commercial work or freight vessel. It was even possible that he wasn’t aboard a boat at all, but instead had called from one of the roads nearby, despite the fact that he’d used the VHF. In normal times it was illegal to use that frequency band for anything other than marine communications, but Bart wouldn’t care about that now, and he would have certainly had access to many such radios in the boatyard he could have brought with him, including handheld units.
Keith called again as he neared the river, hoping he was getting closer and that he might get through, but there was still no reply, and when he reached the broad expanse of the Atchafalaya, he saw nothing moving either upstream or downstream as far as he could see to the next bends. He motored out to the middle of the channel and killed the engines, sitting there adrift in the lazy current as he tried the radio again:
“Vessel calling St. Martin Parish S.O., this is Deputy Branson, St. Martin Parish S.O… I repeat, this is Deputy Keith Branson, St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Department. Do you read me, Dad?”
Keith waited and tried again several more times before starting the outboards again and speeding downriver to the next bend to have a look. There was nothing in sight there either, and his calls went unanswered, so he turned the boat around to run up to the north and try the radio on Vic’s boat. He had just reached his brother-in-law’s dock when his other radio came to life, this one the Motorola two-way unit that operated on a restricted band used by the sheriff’s department. It was an urgent call from Greg Hebert, the only other deputy in this north end of the parish and he was calling from nearby Henderson.
“I need to borrow your truck,” Keith said; when Vic came down to ask what was going on after seeing him tying up his boat. Keith grabbed his rifle and the bag with his magazines as he explained. “Greg just called and said there was a shootout in Henderson; looters that wandered in off I-10, from what I gathered. They’re pinned down in the convenience store next to A.J.’s Cafe, and he needs backup!”
“I’ll drive you, let’s go!”
“Better grab a rifle or shotgun then. You never know with these things!”
Keith sat on the passenger’s seat of the pickup with his rifle in hand as he reflected back on all the times he’d responded to such calls since the madness began. It was unlikely that today’s incident would be of much signifi
cance, because the hurricane had left so much of the area in ruins there was little left to steal and fewer people left to fight over it. Keith wasn’t worried, because no matter what he encountered, nothing could top what had already happened. He would engage these thugs like all the others, and if they didn’t surrender, he would kill them if he could or die trying. He was just doing his job. If not for that voice he’d heard on the radio earlier, he wouldn’t care much which way it went, because until now, it seemed he had little else to lose. The final incident on the bridge had taken care of that, and the imagery of what he’d found there would be imprinted on his brain until the day he died.
Ten
THE BRIDGE WAS THE perfect kill zone—an eighteen-mile-long trap that was essentially a funnel at both ends with little hope of escape. It was the Interstate 10 crossing of the great swamp: officially called the Atchafalaya Basin Bridge, but also known locally and through it’s own social media pages as the Long-Ass Swamp Bridge. “Long-ass bridge” was an appropriate description, to be sure. The parallel spans of concrete stretched on to the horizon, traversing a surreal and mysterious world of cypress, Spanish moss and blackwater swamp alive with cottonmouths and alligators. Once committed to the crossing, there were only two exits that presented an opportunity to get off or turn around, but just because they were there didn’t mean they were easy to reach. With some 25,000 vehicles per day crossing the bridge on an average day before all the trouble started, traffic even then could sometimes be backed up for hours by the frequent accidents that occurred on those narrow, shoulderless lanes.
Before the latest attack, the bridge had already been the scene of a deadly incident since the riots and violence began. That wasn’t surprising really, considering it’s proximity to Baton Rouge and New Orleans and the fact that I-10 was the major coast-to-coast traffic corridor across the Deep South. The first one involved a large group of ill-advised protesters who thought it would be a good idea to stand in the road as a human blockade near the midpoint, in that narrowest and most dangerous stretch where the eastbound and westbound lanes converged and crossed the main river channel. They apparently thought that impeding thousands of commercial trucks from making their deliveries would be a major victory against the capitalistic empire they despised and so desperately desired to bring down.
The clash that ensued was Keith’s first taste of the growing insurrection, although he’d been following the developments in other parts of the country through the news on television and the Internet. At that time it had seemed unlikely that such problems would arise in his rural jurisdiction, although the sheriff’s department in nearby East Baton Rouge Parish was certainly getting plenty of experience with both riots and terror attacks. Keith had no doubt that many of the four hundred or so protesters that got off the buses that brought them to the bridge that day were from Baton Rouge and New Orleans, reinforced by activists from other cities in the region as far away as Houston and Atlanta.
They’d seriously miscalculated in their expectations for such a campaign out here though. A rural stretch of highway in south Louisiana wasn’t the same as the city streets of Berkeley or Los Angeles. Some of the protesters came armed, perhaps having some inkling of this, but they weren’t prepared for drivers who refused to stop—or for truckers who stepped down out of their big rigs with their own weapons, unafraid of the consequences of using them. Keith didn’t know what started the actual shooting, because by the time he and his fellow deputies got there, it was mostly over. There were bodies strewn everywhere though, amid cars and trucks with shattered glass and bullet-riddled sheet metal. The black-clad protesters that remained alive were lined up against the bridge guardrails, held at gunpoint by Levis-wearing truckers and local residents alike; all of them lacking the patience for the kind of crap they’d been seeing on the news every night for weeks.
To reach that scene in the middle of 18-miles of traffic-packed bridge, Keith and the other deputies with him had used the Kawasaki dual-sport motorcycles and small ATVs the department kept for working the mud and gravel roads at the fringes of the basin. The bikes made it possible to split lanes through the gridlock, but by the time they arrived, it was too late to intervene. Still, they’d made hundreds of arrests on both sides of the battle lines, and the incident had closed down the bridge for two days while the scene was mopped and evidence collected. The anarchists had gotten what they wanted to an extent, but many of them got a lot more than they bargained for, as they didn’t live to see the results of their efforts.
At the time, it was the biggest shootout Keith had ever dealt with as a civilian law enforcement officer. He’d seen urban combat in Iraq, to be sure, but when he joined the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Department after getting engaged to Lynn, he’d thought he was leaving all that far in the past, and the past was where it could stay, as far as Keith was concerned. He’d done his service to his country and felt it was enough. His brother Eric though, was different. Eric thrived on the adrenaline rush of combat and danger and couldn’t get enough of it. Keith had looked up to him when he was younger, wanting to be just like him right up until his big brother joined the Navy and completed the intense training to become a SEAL operator. Keith didn’t share his brother’s enthusiasm for the water though; so becoming a SEAL did not appeal to him. He’d joined the Marines instead, hoping to serve his time on dry land, and that’s what took him to Iraq. Two tours and losing three of his best friends was enough for Keith, but Eric just kept going, hiring himself out as a private security contractor after leaving the Navy. Keith rarely saw him in recent years, and had no idea where he might be now, especially since the collapse and breakdown of communications here at home. The last time he had seen him; Eric had been working mostly in Europe, where the kinds of things that were happening here had started even earlier. Paralyzed by sustained and constant terror attacks, several countries on that continent had unraveled into anarchy and finally, civil war. It made for lucrative opportunities for professionals of Eric’s caliber, but Keith wanted no part of it. Eric’s adventures had cost him his marriage, and caused him to miss out on most of his only daughter’s life. Keith didn’t look up to his big brother quite as much after seeing all that. How could a man give up so much at home to go and fight for strangers in places where he really had no business? Keith didn’t know, but he was pretty sure Eric wasn’t in it for the money alone.
Of course Keith knew that civilian law enforcement had its share of risks too, but being a deputy wasn’t the same as hiring out as a mercenary, and the odds were good that he’d come home to his wife at night. He carried a gun every day, but before that first incident on the Atchafalaya Basin Bridge, Keith had fired his duty weapon only twice—once in a domestic dispute involving a drunken husband and once during a drug raid. Since then, of course, the shooting incidents were far too numerous to count, but more often they involved rifles and riot shotguns than his Glock 22. And like in Iraq, one-by-one, Keith had witnessed his close buddies fall. Law enforcement officers were targets of opportunity for the violent factions on both sides of the battle lines now, mainly because they represented authority and order in a world where those ideas became more hopeless every day.
In the beginning, the trouble was confined mostly to the cities. Keith’s department was called up several times to help out with the situation in Baton Rouge, parts of which quickly became an urban war zone like much of New Orleans and most other big population centers in the region. The local authorities were overwhelmed, and the state police and even the National Guard units deployed to help were spread thin because of the scope of the problem. All available law enforcement personnel were frequently needed in the hot spots, and that included rural sheriff’s department deputies, wildlife enforcement officers and even civilian volunteers. The riots had reached critical mass and as had happened in so many cities across the country, when the shooting started between the protestors and the counter-protesters, the escalation of violence exploded faster than anyone could have foreseen.<
br />
The hard-core anarchists quickly learned that such amateur tactics as blocking highways, burning cars and smashing windows would not achieve their aims. Congregating in the streets simply made them targets, and not just for the police, but for their enemies on the other side of the ideological divide as well. They still found it useful to encourage such activities among their supporters, stirring up racial issues and hatred of authority in the urban centers, but that alone wouldn’t bring the change they desired. The leaders among them and the agitators funding them knew they needed to shift to the kinds of tactics other insurgents around the globe had already proven effective. Coordinated terror attacks were a good start, and it was easy enough to borrow from the playbook already in use by the Islamic jihadists who had also ramped up their activities in the U.S. amid all the confusion and chaos. The targets of choice were law enforcement officers and anyone else who represented or protected the authority of the system they loathed. Regular citizens who supported the politicians and lawmakers were fair game as well though, especially those among them who vocally opposed what the insurrectionists were doing.
Feral Nation Series: Books 1-3: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Series Boxed Set Page 26
