“I’ve been stuck here nearly two hours. That’s about when it started. They said a box truck blew up just past the 975 exit up ahead. Then another truck exploded on the east side of the bridge before you get to the Ramah exit. After the explosions, they said there were shooters walking through the lanes from both ends killing as many people as they could in the vehicles caught in the middle. The chatter I’ve heard on the radio since said it was over though. People were shooting back and I guess they finally got all the terrorists. There’s no telling how long we’ll be stuck. It’s too backed up to turn around and who knows how many vehicles are burning on that bridge. I guess you can work your way through on that bike, but I think you’re a little late to do any good, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
Keith thanked him and shifted into gear to ride forward, weaving between the parked vehicles or going around them on the shoulder until he reached the part of the bridge where the shoulder ended. With the blue lights flashing, and lots of beeping of his horn he managed to get people to close their doors long enough for him to slip through between the cars in the middle. The stranded drivers here were too far away to have witnessed the attack, but the news spread by the truckers over the CB had left them all in shock and disbelief. There was nothing Keith could say or do to help them now though, and despite the many that tried to stop him to ask questions, he rode on through them with his visor down.
After a little over three miles of weaving his way east, Keith was at last nearing the source of the smoke and a packed crowd of onlookers bunched together at a safe distance to watch and wait. Forcing his way through them, he passed several volunteers helping injured survivors away from the scene, and then he was there—among the bullet riddled cars and the bodies of their occupants. The carnage was horrendous beyond belief. It was impossible to fathom how anyone could do such a thing, but he’d long since accepted this as the new reality. Speaking to one of the busy volunteers he passed, Keith learned that the terrorists had used automatic weapons to do the shooting and apparently some sort of I.E.D.s to blow up the trucks. The objective was to kill as many as possible before they were taken out, and whatever the final death toll turned out to be, Keith knew it was going to be big. Whoever did this had planned it well, and it must have taken time and patience to set up, as they would have had to deal with the traffic just like their victims in order to get the explosive-filled trucks into position. Clearly the perpetrators came prepared to die, which pointed to a jihadist motive, but whether they were foreign or domestic didn’t matter. Those they’d killed were dead regardless, cut down in cold blood simply because they were caught here, trying to escape an approaching storm.
The war had come here, even to St. Martin Parish, but it was a war against an enemy that hid in plain sight among civilian noncombatants. Keith didn’t know how it was ever going to be stopped, but that was a question for another day. Right now he had to keep moving east, to make sure there were indeed no remaining attackers, all the while praying that Lynn had made it safely to her mother’s house. When he passed the camo-clad body of one of the dead terrorists lying facedown on the concrete, he didn’t even bother stopping to investigate. The bullet hole through the back of the head was a sure indication that one was no longer a threat. Keith and his fellow officers hadn’t made it there in time to help stop these monsters, but armed citizens had managed to prevail anyway, once again proving that the idea of confiscating firearms in times like these was ridiculous.
On the east side of that gruesome scene, Keith came to a large group of survivors who’d been caught in the middle between the two teams from the trucks. They would be dead now too if the terrorists hadn’t been stopped before they reached them. Beyond that mile-long safe zone, Keith reached the site of the easternmost explosion, along with many more bodies and burning cars and trucks. As he slowed to a stop, he saw Greg Hebert walking towards him from among a group of volunteers working on the wounded. Keith switched off the bike and removed his helmet. Greg’s face was ashen as he approached. Keith waited until he was closer before he began to speak.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t get here sooner, Greg. I was out of radio contact most of the afternoon. Were you here before it was finished?”
“No. By the time we got word and could get here it was over. We had to leave the truck on 975 and run on foot the whole way here. As far as we can tell there were only six tangos, three on each end. The explosions and the burning trucks gave them plenty of time though, and it could have been a lot worse if there hadn’t been quite a few folks with rifles in their cars. Some of the good guys that shot back were firing from over there on the westbound span.”
Keith was about to respond when Greg stopped him cold with what he said next:
“Keith, I don’t know how to break it to you any easier, but we found Lynn out here too.”
“Lynn? On the bridge?”
“I’m afraid so, Keith. When I saw you coming on the bike, I wondered if you two had been riding together or something before it happened, because her bike is over there….”
Keith felt as if his knees were going to buckle beneath him as he looked where Greg was pointing, back among a cluster of shot-up vehicles. He now saw the back wheel of the Suzuki, just visible where the bike was lying on the pavement on the other side of a Ford pickup. Keith was already moving towards it without conscious thought as Greg walked closely by his side. “Is she… dead?”
“I’m sorry, man.” Greg put an arm around Keith’s shoulder to steady him and walked with him to the place where the bike had fallen. Someone had covered the body beside it with a plastic raincoat, and Lynn’s helmet, its chin strap cut away, was sitting upright on the curb at the base of the guardrail. Keith dropped to his knees next to her and lifted the edge of the coat. All she’d wanted to do was get to her mother in time to see her again. Anybody would have done the same, and like all the others who’d died here today, she had no way of knowing that she was riding into a death trap. He hadn’t been there to stop her from going, and he hadn’t been here beside her to defend her. Keith had never felt such a hopeless sense of failure in his life. How he would go on after this, was impossible to say.
There were wounded survivors that needed help right now though, and the storm was still coming whether all these stranded motorists got off of that bridge or not. Keith reached under the edge of his wife’s shirt and removed the Glock 43 she always carried in her waistband, but hadn’t even had a chance to draw today. Then he kissed her forehead and pulled the coat back over her face. The time for mourning would come later, when the work that had to come first was done.
Twelve
BURYING HIS WIFE WAS the hardest thing Keith Branson had ever had to do. They laid her in one of two fresh graves in the cemetery behind the small family church she’d attended since childhood. Between her and the decade-old grave of her father, they laid her mother, who didn’t survive the heart attack she suffered that day Lynn was killed. After a somber service performed just two days after the hurricane swept through the area, Keith spent much of the next few weeks staying with his in-laws.
He’d gone back to the house he and Lynn built to check on it after the storm, but even if it weren’t damaged it would have been too painful to stay there alone with all his memories so soon after her death. He secured his gear and supplies and rearranged and covered things that would get damaged by the rain until he could find the motivation to come back and replace the roof, but it was a good month before he took a real interest in it again. When it started to feel crowded at the Guidry house with Jeanette’s three kids underfoot, Keith spent a few nights with his brother-in-law Vic, but that got old too after a while and he finally resolved to go home and rebuild.
The bayou-front house was an ideal base from which to operate in the present conditions, considering its seclusion and distance from the main roads. He had everything he needed on site, and most importantly, access to the entire river basin from his backyard. He’d repaired the dock first, but
that was minor compared to the damage the winds had done to the house. Large areas of the decking and metal roof panels had been torn away and scattered far and wide in the surrounding woods, taking even some of the rafters out as well. Putting it all back together would give Keith plenty to do to stay busy when he wasn’t out patrolling the river.
He knew the work with his hands was good for him, keeping him from spending too much time sitting and thinking, and he knew Lynn wouldn’t want him to give up the house. It had been their dream together, and the more he thought about it over time, the more he realized he couldn’t just walk away from it, not anytime soon, anyway. He worked most days until it was either too dark to see or the mosquitoes were so ravenous they drove him inside to the screened-in porch. At night he sat there and listened to the night sounds of the bayou, thinking how the world beyond was quieter than it had ever been since he first laid eyes on this place.
The power was still out all over the parish and much of the region. He’d been through a couple of hurricanes since he came here, but both were years ago, when this was still a country of law and order. One of those storms had likewise left the area in the dark, but in just a matter of days, endless convoys of utility company trucks from states as far away as the Midwest and the East Coast had descended on the area to go to work. Nothing of the sort was happening now, and Keith and most everyone else he knew simply accepted the fact that they were going to have to get used to living off the grid more or less permanently.
That was certainly easier out here in the river basin than it would be in any city. Keith could cook his meals in a fire pit in the yard if he didn’t want to burn propane. He could run his generator without worry that the sound would attract nearby thieves, and he could catch fish right off his dock. The hardest part of being off grid was the difficulty of communication, but they’d already been dealing with that to a lesser extent before the hurricane hit. Now, he had to run the generator to power the converted base station in the house, but he’d been using the VHF in his boat far more often anyway as he monitored traffic on the river. He’d been thinking he needed to set up a fixed VHF antenna as high above the roof as he could get it as soon as he finished with the repairs. It would give him far more range in that useful band when he was at home, and in the current situation, he wasn’t worried about repercussions from the FCC for illegally operating it from a land base. When the unexpected call came in on Channel 16 from Bart, Keith could have kicked himself for not already completing that project.
Now, even as he was en route in his brother-in-law’s truck to yet another situation that would likely end in a shooting, his mind was more on that call than the upcoming confrontation. Bart had to have a good reason to come here if he came all the way across the Gulf by boat. It was going to drive Keith crazy now until he found him and got all the answers. If it hadn’t been for Greg’s call taking him away from the river, Keith would have spent the evening running up and down the river and listening for another call.
When they arrived at the scene of the shooting, Keith saw Greg Hebert’s sheriff’s department pickup truck parked off to the side of the little café opposite the convenience store. Greg was standing behind the corner of the building with his shotgun in hand, and with him were two men Keith recognized as the owner of the cafe and his brother. There was another man sprawled out unmoving on the asphalt lot in front of the store, and Vic said he was pretty sure that it was the owner, an Indian fellow named Mr. Patel.
“Park over there beside Greg’s truck, Vic. We’ll be out of view of anyone inside that store.”
The convenience store had been closed since the hurricane, of course, as had the cafe, although A.J. Greene, the owner of the latter, opened his doors every morning for a few regulars that came by to have a cup of coffee and trade whatever news they might have heard that needed sharing. Keith and Greg often dropped in themselves, and although it was way past time for the shop to be locked up for the day, Keith figured A.J. and his brother Terry must have been working on something inside when the trouble started. Greg confirmed this when Keith and Vic reached his side.
“Mr. Patel was here with A.J. and Terry when they heard glass breaking next door. He had an alarm running off a 12-volt battery system, but it wasn’t turned on at the time because he was over here.”
“We told him to wait for us,” A.J., said, “but he took off over there in a hurry, and the next thing we heard was several gunshots. They sounded like high-powered rifle shots to me. By the time we got to the door, Mr. Patel was already dead. Whoever is inside there took a couple of shots at us too.” Terry pointed to the splintered cypress trim at the corner of the cafe building.”
“Your partner, Greg here just happened to come along in his truck a few minutes later and we waved him over. We’ve all been watching and waiting ever since.”
“You don’t know how many are in there then, do you?” Keith asked Greg.
“No. I still haven’t gotten a look at them. They’re probably holed up in the back in the coolers or store room.”
“All I can tell you is that it sounded like more than one rifle to me,” A.J. said.
“Are you sure they didn’t slip out the back?”
“They couldn’t,” Greg said. “There’s only one other door back there for loading and Mr. Patel had it chained and padlocked from the outside. I went around back of the café to get a look. There aren’t any windows big enough to crawl out of either, just one way in and one way out, and that’s the front door. I didn’t really want to go in there after them without backup though.”
Keith certainly understood. Whoever was in that store had already proven they had no regard for human life. What they expected to find there, he had no idea. Probably food and anything else useful, but Mr. Patel’s shelves, like most every other store in the region, had long since been cleaned out. In situations like this, Keith wished he had a few grenades. They would certainly come in handy, as would a man on a M249 for backup, the way they’d done things when he was clearing houses in Fallujah. The intruders in that store deserved no quarter after killing the owner in cold blood, and Keith didn’t plan to risk his life trying to take them alive.
Tear gas or flash-bangs would have been helpful if they hadn’t already used up the supplies of non-lethal options they had on hand during the various riots the department had been involved in. Smoke or fire might work too, but Keith and Greg didn’t really want to risk burning down the building, as it was too close to A.J.’s for that and there was always the hope that one day, somehow, stores might reopen for business in St. Martin Parish. That left them with few options at the moment other than watching and waiting. Waiting was the last thing Keith wanted to do right about now though, knowing that his father was somewhere out there in the river basin close enough that had gotten through by VHF radio. It would be dark soon though, and wherever he was, Keith figured he would have to stop for the night. Whatever the case, their reunion would have to wait until tomorrow now. There was no way they could risk letting these killers slip out of that store in the dark, so wait it out they would.
“You might as well go back to the house, Vic,” he told his brother-in-law. “Greg and I can handle this. It looks like it’s just going to be a matter of waiting.”
“I don’t mind helping out if you need me, bro.”
“I know, and I appreciate it, but they’re pinned down. They’re not going to hurt anyone else as long as they’re inside.”
“What if they don’t come out? You can’t wait forever, especially now with your old man coming to visit.”
“No, but we’ll give it ’til morning if we have to. Just do me a favor and see if you can reach him on 16 with your taller antenna. If you do, tell him I’ll see him in the morning.”
“What was that all about?” Greg asked, as Vic drove off into the night.
Keith filled him in on the unexpected radio call and what it likely meant.
“So, your old man came all this way from south Florida by boat?
That’s one hell of a trip!” Greg said.
“Yeah. I have no idea if he’s running the boat or if he’s just caught a ride with someone. He knows what he’s doing when it comes to seamanship though. But I’m still surprised he would consider it after what he said last time I talked to him. I figure Florida’s really gotten rough since then to make him change his mind about staying.”
“The hurricane had to be bad there, seeing how bad it was up here. It may have been even stronger when it hit Florida that it was here.”
“Maybe. Even if it weren’t, the effects would be bad that far down the peninsula. There simply aren’t enough roads to move that big of a population in a hurry, even if the hurricane was the only factor. With gas already unobtainable before, it must have been a nightmare. Getting out by boat would be a lot easier for those who had the option, and my father certainly did.”
“Well, that’s good to know. If you heard that call today, I’m sure you’ll be seeing him by tomorrow. He can’t be too far away.”
“No, and if it weren’t for these dirtbags we’ve got to wait out now, I’d probably be seeing him tonight.”
“Sorry I had to call you man. I could have kept them pinned down by myself now that I know there’s only one way out. But when I got here and saw that Mr. Patel was dead, I wasn’t sure what I was dealing with and whether or not they were going to try and shoot their way out of this.”
“They probably will when they get desperate enough, unless we can think of a way to get to them first.”
A.J. and Terry had gone back inside the cafe building when Keith arrived. He certainly didn’t want them involved, as neither of them had the training or experience for something like this. Their presence in there did give Keith an idea though.
Feral Nation Series: Books 1-3: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Series Boxed Set Page 28
