Foreign Enemies and Traitors

by Matthew Bracken

  With its wide median strip and generous shoulders, the state highway before him constituted a danger zone almost a hundred yards across, open to long-range surveillance from either direction and from above. On both sides, the land climbed into woods. The shoulders and median strip were overgrown with brush up to waist height, which would provide some concealment for his passage.

  The highway was the last major obstacle in his path before Tennessee. He was determined not to be captured in Mississippi. He rejected the thought of standing before a military tribunal attempting to explain the deaths of the three Guard officers. Two weeks in the quarantine camp had already tested his patience, and being thrown into a cell to await hanging was not an option he would choose. He’d go down shooting, rather than be arrested in Mississippi. If he could make it to the free states of the Northwest, great. If not, well, he was sixty-four and he’d already lived an interesting life. Several lives, in fact. He’d visited over thirty countries in his time, and he’d seen combat in three of them.

  Directly ahead of him was Tennessee, an American state, but a state at least partially occupied by foreign soldiers. He’d seen foreign militaries in many countries. He’d fought with them as allies and fought against them as enemies. More recently he’d simply watched them strutting down a tropical street while he sipped a beer at a shady outdoor café table. But this had always been overseas, far from America. Drunk or sober, Phil Carson had never dreamed, never imagined, that he might live to see the day when armed foreign troops were standing on American soil.

  The idea of foreign occupational troops in Tennessee both angered and intrigued him. Who had decided to invite them into America, President Tambor? It wouldn’t have surprised him. Jamal Tambor had always been a one-worlder, a proponent of global solutions to every perceived problem. Well, whatever the reason, the idea of foreign troops in America stuck in Phil Carson’s throat like a rusty hook. Sure, the America he’d known as a young man was long gone, after being debased and defiled for decades. Still, he never imagined that in the end, foreign soldiers would be standing on American soil.

  His arms were inside the poncho, across his chest for warmth. He shook the water from the plastic covering and shivered, staring into the wet darkness. Maybe he’d see some more combat in this country he scarcely recognized, these United States of America. United? America was anything but united these days. The Disunited Regions of America was more like it.

  At 2:10 a.m. a single humvee passed below him, driving westward at about forty miles an hour. It was hard-topped, with no visible gun mounts, running with subdued headlights. Routine patrol, the bare minimum. Probably making a token patrol run from Corinth in the east to the northwest corner of the state. Memphis was about sixty miles west. Directly across from Memphis was where the Mississippi Guard would patrol heavily, not out here in the boonies.

  Carson gave the humvee five minutes to depart, then snapped the straps across his chest and his waist, securing his pack tightly to his body. He leaned forward to take the full weight on his back, and rose stiffly. Getting up had always been the hardest part, and it was much harder at age sixty-four. The straps bit into his shoulders, the poncho snagged on thorns concealed in the overhanging limbs, but after a struggle he was on his legs and away from the dripping branches. It was forty feet to the asphalt through the unmowed grass and weeds, hunched over to lower his profile. As a soldier, he might have done it at a low crawl, but not now, not at his age, not with this pack on his back. He held the Army M-9 Beretta pistol in his right hand out of habit, realizing it provided no more than token security under the circumstances.

  He put his head down and hustled across two rain-slick lanes of pavement, then down and up the ditch at the center of the wide median strip, through more high grass and weeds growing into brushy trees. Then there were two more lanes of wet asphalt and another highway shoulder dipping down and then rising toward the northern tree line. He was breathing heavily with the effort as he pushed through the vegetation, the clods uneven beneath his feet. He slipped and fell heavily onto his face when he was almost into the woods. He crawled the last fifteen feet, the pack trying to flip him over as it slid to the left off his shoulders. Finally he was under the cover of forest, and he rolled onto his back. His pack was beneath him, poncho and straps and belt and gear and gravity twisting and pulling him in all directions at once, tying him to the earth like Gulliver as he panted for breath, rainwater dripping from unseen leaves onto his face.

  But at least he was once again in the protective cover of the woods. No hidden sniper with a night vision scope had been watching this remote stretch of highway. He still had several hours of darkness ahead of him, and it was only three miles to Tennessee. He just had to catch his breath, reorganize his pack’s straps and his rain gear, roll back over and force himself to his feet again. Just get to his feet…after he took off the poncho. The poncho was a mistake; there were too many loose ends and flaps for sliding easily through the branches and brambles. He sat Indian style, slung off his pack, and pulled the poncho over his head with difficulty. Then the pack went back on, over his gore-tex parka. The dripping poncho was clumsily rolled up and hung over the bottom of the pack’s strap on his left side. All of this was done by feel, with cold, wet fingers. In the dark, drippy woods, even trivial tasks like rearranging his gear were ordeals. During this process, he had lost track of his pistol, and he groped like a blind man in the sodden forest litter until he felt the familiar Beretta.

  I’m way too old for this shit, he told himself as he struggled onto his muddy knees, which unerringly found a sharp stone, and then up onto his legs, grunting and wheezing with exertion. He remembered a time when he had carried much heavier packs, plus a rifle with a grenade launcher attached, along with a special combat harness loaded with extra ammunition magazines and 40mm grenades, plus mortar rounds, and claymore mines, and LAAWs rockets, and C-4 demo charges… Where had that young warrior gone? It was so, so long ago…

  They had dropped out of low-hovering Hueys in Cambodia and Laos, with more than seventy pounds of gear and ammo and demo and commo and water and rations strapped onto their bodies. Now he had a much lighter pack, and only a 9mm pistol for a weapon, and he was winded after the first few hundred yards. A man my age should be in a dry, cozy house by a fireplace, he thought. Near a crackling fire, with a blanket over his legs, a whisky in one hand and a cigar in the other. Maybe a dog at his feet, and a woman nearby.

  Where is my warm fireplace? Nowhere, he thought with bitter regret while pushing wet, thorny branches away from his face. All of the roads not taken. The women not married (despite two near misses), the children not raised. Well, he’d never been one for settling down; he’d known that since he was a young man. This solitary end game was the price one paid for being an incurable wanderer, an eternal misfit. The Army had been the only place he had ever truly fitted in, but the Southeast Asia War Games had soured him on the prospect of a military career. Now at the age of sixty-four, he was homeless and unmissed by anyone, anywhere. There was not even a stray dog or a cat somewhere to lament his passing.

  Stripped down to its essence, his life story was a catalog of one loss after the other, full only of colorful tales he could tell no one, no one who could even begin to understand. The only ones who knew the truth of his stories were either dead or otherwise lost to him. Just as lost as Paulo, his last crewmember, who was lost at sea, which was as lost as lost gets. Tonight Phil Carson was rich only in aches and scars and memories, all of his worldly possessions packed in his old rucksack and concealed within his belt. He laughed as he inventoried his few possessions. There was still an ammo can containing $25,000 buried back in Virginia, but the currency was in the old greenbacks, as worthless today as Confederate dollars. As worthless now, in the greater scheme of things, as his life. A canceled check from a defunct bank. Void where prohibited, which was anywhere and everywhere.

  So why go on? Why stack more struggle and hardship on top of his already overflow
ing account of desolation? He could simply lie down on the sodden forest floor and give in to inevitable nature. Let the rain fall on his face and surrender to the big chill, the final, unending sleep. It would be easy and painless, simply merging with this forest until roots ran through his remains. Why continue putting one boot in front of the other, tripping through brambles, collecting only cuts and scrapes on his hands and face from invisible thorns?

  Why? He slowly shook his head and laughed again, stooped over beneath his heavy load, forcing himself through snagging brush and over leg-trapping deadfall. The doctor’s pistol was now jammed under his belt; he needed both hands to navigate these choking woods. Why did he go on? He knew the answer, he’d always known it: because he was not the type to give in, to lie down and surrender to fate. He was a fighter, win or lose. He was a Southerner, born a Virginian, and fighting was a natural part of his heritage. Even for lost causes. Maybe especially for lost causes. He wouldn’t lie down and submit to nature, not while he was capable of moving on.

  The third alternative to quitting here or going on was even worse. If he was captured in Mississippi, the alternative was a rope or a firing squad. That would be a disgraceful and anticlimactic ending for an old jungle fighter, real estate wheeler-dealer and occasional smuggler. They hanged pirates, traitors and murderers, and he was none of those. Which meant that his first order of business was getting the hell out of Mississippi. Then he could figure out just how he would make it all the way to the Northwest, and maybe to some kind of freedom.

  But first he had to hump the last three miles out of Mississippi and lose himself in Tennessee. His parka’s hood brushing against his ears diminished his sense of hearing, so he pushed it back and pulled the rolled-up boonie hat from his left pants cargo pocket. Except for its modern digital camo pattern, it wasn’t much different from the ones he had worn in Asia forty years earlier. It felt exactly the same in his hands, and on his head, protecting his ears and neck as he slid through the dripping foliage.

  7

  The deer stand was one of Zack Tutweiler’s best thinking places. The rain had masked the sound of his climbing up the tree’s nailed-on steps and into the plywood box an hour before dawn. The blind’s roof sheltered him from the rain. For as long as seventeen-year-old Zack had been allowed to go hunting by himself, the blind had been a place he could go without being hassled for choosing solitude. He brought home enough meat that nobody bitched about his disappearing with his compound bow into the forest. Now there was nobody left to bitch at him for anything. He was the last one still living at the end of Bear Trail Road, the last inhabitant of their refuge from the world.

  The Tutweilers had hidden very well, but not well enough. The troubles of the world had sought them out in spite of their preparation, their camouflage and their faith. All the praying in the world had not prevented the flu from choking the life out of his twin sisters Becky and Annie last winter, the winter of the hurricane floods and the great earthquakes. Becky had died first and Annie a day later, both drowning in their own lung fluids. Zack and his family had prayed continuously, to no effect.

  And praying hadn’t stopped the raging infection from killing his eleven-year-old brother Sammy last September. He’d gashed his knee with a hatchet while helping to trim the branches off their winter firewood. The most powerful antibiotics in their family medicine chest couldn’t stop that infection, and poor Sammy had died in horrible pain. Zack had helped teach Sam how to use the ax, but he had not taught him well enough. And now his little brother was buried in the cold ground forever.

  After Sammy died, the praying had stopped, even Mom’s praying. This was some months after Mom had run out of her blue pills, the ones for her depression. These days when pills ran out, they ran out for good.

  All along Mom had been waiting for the Rapture and praying for the Rapture, and in the end it was all for nothing. “We sure got the tribulation,” she’d often say, “But when, oh when, are we getting the blessed Rapture?” It wasn’t long after Sam died that she took the baby up to the bridge. “Rapturecide” is how Zack often thought of it.

  Dad said she must have had an accident, probably baby Sarah had slipped and Mom had tried to save her, the river all swollen and running fast…but in his heart Zack had never believed this. He didn’t know if Dad believed it either, but he’d never challenged his father on the issue. It would have brought nothing but pain, and pain they already had to overflowing. They found Mom stuck in the rushes along the bank, but they never did find little Sarah. Dad said it had to have been an accident, but even he didn’t sound convinced.

  But Zack knew what had happened, in his mind he knew. It was Rapturecide. He’d heard the term whispered at the swap market, at the crossroads town of Walnut, Mississippi, a half-hour bike ride away. Sometimes whole families had gone that way, in their exhausted desperation challenging God to put up or shut up, once and for all. If they were not among the chosen, selected to fly up to heaven and avoid the tribulations, then who was? They were true believers, and God had forsaken them. Zack didn’t believe in the Rapture business, but he knew that many others did. When their deepest belief was finally shattered and crushed, the life quickly went out of them.

  Zack had a clear mental picture of their final moments, gleaned from a thousand imaginings. Mom standing on the low steel trestle of the railroad bridge over the Little Hatchie, clutching baby Sarah to her heart. The dark creek running high and swift on the floods just beneath her feet. Staring heavenward through the clouds and making the final leap for everlasting glory. Giving God one last chance to carry them up on angels’ wings, to relieve them of their unending earthly travails. This was on the tenth of October, after it had rained for forty straight days. Mom had hardly spoken a word in weeks, not since little Sammy died, and she hadn’t smiled in even longer. And then she carried baby Sarah down to the river, in the never-ending rain. One of the few remaining bridges around, and it was her launch pad to heaven, according to Zack’s reckoning.

  So if God was watching, He’d flat missed His chance to perform a miracle. Or maybe not, maybe God had snatched up their eternal souls anyway, because of her great demonstration of faith in Him. Maybe God had simply allowed their mortal bodies to fall into the swift current. Zack often wondered about this point: was faith alone enough to cancel out the sin of suicide? Mom just couldn’t bear living anymore. It was too hard, much too hard, especially after losing Becky and Annie and Sammy—and after running out of her blue pills.

  Their lives had been hard before the hurricane floods and the earth-quakes, but Dad had prepared them well, moving the family from Tupelo up to the Holly Springs National Forest near the Tennessee line. Moved them from the city to the hidden dead-end Bear Trail Road, to the cinder block house he’d built with his own strong hands. Dad was a survivalist even before the crash, before the Greater Depression had set in. He’d had foresight; he’d been one of the few mad Noahs who had seen the great flood tide of misery coming, back when there was hardly an unhappy cloud to be seen in the then perpetually blue Mississippi sky.

  Against every friend’s recommendation and well-meant word of family advice, they’d left their comfortable home in Tupelo and moved to their own five acres on the uppermost edge of Mississippi, backed right against the National Forest. They had water from their own well, they had firewood and chickens and enough stored rice and beans to last for years. Even after the dollar crashed to nothing, they hadn’t starved. They could survive, even without electricity from the power grid this last year, since the quakes. They had hidden from the looters, robbers, and gang rapers after the quakes, they had survived all of the visible dangers, but Bear Trail Road was not hidden from the epidemics. Their refuge was not hidden from infections that no antibiotics could defeat. And Bear Trail Road was certainly not hidden from the affliction of despair, not when the flooding Little Hatchie River whispered its siren song to Mom’s beaten-down soul.

  Then it was just the two of them, father and son, and e
ven then they could survive. They had buried all of the rest of the family, had shed rivers of tears, but quitting was not in Dad’s vocabulary. Zack had grown up hearing that and he knew it was true. Dad would never quit—Dad was the rock. His father prayed, but he didn’t believe in the Rapture, and he would not hasten his way to joining his family on the Other Side. Father and son would continue to struggle, they would push on, and they would survive.

  They would emerge intact on the other side of the long emergency, if it were in any way possible. Zack was nearly eighteen, almost “of age,” Dad had said. Zack Tutweiler would find a girl to marry, and the family would not die. Tutweilers had survived wild Indians, the Civil War, the Spanish flu and the Great Depression, and they had not yet been pushed out of Mississippi. Tutweilers had fought in every American war, but enough of their men had returned to Mississippi to carry on the name down through the generations. They were people who knew when to lay low and when to push back and when to fight with animal ferocity. Quitting was not in their vocabulary, which is why Dad clung to the threadbare belief that Mom had gone into the river to save baby Sarah.

  And so it had been only the two of them these last months, until a week ago. Dad had gone out after midnight. He had people to meet over the state line in Tennessee, trading partners who couldn’t come to the swap markets in Walnut or Corinth. Sometimes Zack accompanied him on these walks, but more often not. When Dad went out alone, Zack stayed up waiting, although he pretended to be asleep when Dad slipped out of the house. But that last time he’d heard a single echoing bang, and his father had not returned.

  He didn’t find his father—what was left of him—until the middle of the next day. He was in the National Forest a mile northwest of their home, almost on the border. His father had been blown to pieces, his powerful body shattered. Even his shotgun had been blasted into a bent piece of junk. Zack hid in the woods near the human fragments of his father, shaking, crying, and wondering what to do next. He also found pieces of rocket casing and what was probably part of a rocket tail fin knifed into a tree near the body. His father had been killed by one of those little missiles that dropped down from the unseen drones. He knew of them from his dad, who had heard of them from the men he met in Tennessee. He’d never imagined his father would be killed by one, not in Mississippi.