Foreign Enemies and Traitors

by Matthew Bracken

  Her path narrowed and became more constricted as it rose, until there was almost a cliff on her left side. It was nearly as steep on the right. Trees could be vaguely seen on the top of the overhanging precipice. The slope below the top was too steep and eroded to support much in the way of vegetation. Snow was not sticking on the vertical surfaces, and she could see where the sides were cut with smaller erosion gullies at right angles to the main faces. Jenny continued up the dry watercourse at the bottom of the ravine. She had to be vigilant with her footing, because the frozen dirt beneath the snow was cut and chopped by old runoff channels. She found herself waist deep in tight little mini-canyons, using her hands to climb up, over and through them. It was slow, hard going, but she hoped that when she gained the summit, she would be rewarded with a flat plateau or a gradual down slope, and a safe way around the outpost of foreign soldiers.

  The ravine turned again, and she believed she was nearing the summit. She was working so hard that she had to unzip her parka to avoid breaking into a sweat. Using her gloved hands, she climbed onto an uneven area, lumpy and quite different from the narrow and deep erosion channels she had been negotiating with such difficulty. There were logs or trash bags piled under the snow. She thought back to the dump she had passed a half hour earlier, before entering the bottom of this ravine. Snow was three or four inches deep now, obscuring the uneven obstacles under her feet. She put a boot down carefully, and her right leg slipped between two logs. She tried to wrench it free but lost her balance and went over, pulled down by the weight of her backpack.

  She flung out a hand to support herself and grasped something odd. It was a shoe, but it was a shoe that was…still attached to a foot, and a leg! She rolled onto her side and saw a man’s face staring back at her, from only a yard away! An arm reached above the snow, splayed fingers outlined against the sky. Jenny grabbed for her holster, fumbled to push the release button, and drew the gun. The pistol’s light had a switch like a rubber bump on its back end. She pushed it on and the harsh white glare revealed that she had fallen down among people, dead people, dozens of them frozen in every posture, all covered with a coating of white snow.

  Jenny McClure had seen great cruelty since the earthquakes, and dead bodies were not unknown to her, but the scene before her now was far beyond the scope of anything she had witnessed. Everywhere she aimed her light she saw more of them, as the irregular shapes she had been treading upon were transformed under her light’s beam into scores of bodies, bodies on top of bodies, all under a blanket of white. But these were not rotted old cadavers, with scraps of skin stretched over dried skeletons. Nor were they bloated and blackened corpses, dead a few days.

  The snow and darkness softened the picture, but could not hide all of the horror. Many of them still had their eyes open, with mouths agape in silent screams. Horrific body-shattering injuries were visible on many of them. The head wounds were the worst, with grisly, cracked skulls and split faces. One man’s half-missing face in particular grabbed her attention. She snapped off her light and vomited. She crouched motionless for a period of several minutes at least, until she began to feel the spectral presence of the people around her, almost hearing their urgent whispers.

  Growing very cold while lying still in the snow, Jenny finally sat up in the middle of the slaughter field, and she knew what had happened. There was no blood on top of the snow. These people had been killed today, before the snow. They were the people taken away on the school buses. While she was in the back of the Army truck, she had seen them being loaded onto the buses. She knew who they were. Not as individuals, but she knew them. She was sitting on top of hundreds of people, many of whom she had seen only half a day earlier. Friendly people, who had been laughing and smiling just yesterday morning. Tough and practical people who had endured one of the worst years in American history, people who had been maligned and rejected and abandoned by their own government, and yet had turned the corner from bare survival to creating new lives.

  Now they were in this God-forsaken ravine, dead and covered with newly fallen snow. They had not been taken to their promised relocation center for hot meals and showers, after being caught by surprise and rounded up by their foreign enemies. Instead, they had been bused to a ravine in the middle of nowhere and shot. Jenny stood carefully, the heavy pack fighting her rise. It was impossible not to step on them. She had to walk directly across their bodies to get out. There was nothing else to walk on but dead people!

  She steeled herself, and switched her light back on. The snow had accumulated unevenly on the bumpy landscape of corpses, here and there revealing random faces and hands. Jenny’s beam of light revealed something else: most of the bodies nearest the cliff and on top seemed to be men. Their swollen hands were all cinched tightly behind their backs with black plastic ties. Many of their heads were blown apart, skulls split, faces gone. She knew what bullets did to people’s heads; she’d seen it. If the men were on top, and if they had been tied up before they were shot, then they must have been brought to the massacre site last. After the women and the children had been murdered.

  Back in the high school gym, they must have been searched and disarmed, and then had their hands secured behind their backs with the plastic ties. What must these men have been thinking, on that final bus ride? They would have been as helpless as sheep being trucked to a slaughterhouse—but at least sheep didn’t understand their preordained fates. What must they have thought when their bus drove further and further into the boondocks and finally stopped up there? Then they must have been forced at gunpoint to the top edge of the ravine, and machinegunned from behind…while looking down upon their already murdered families. Jenny shuddered to consider that somewhere in this ravine were Uncle Henry and Aunt Rochelle, and Sue Bledsoe.

  She realized that this probably would have been her final destination, after being raped by the American traitor and probably by the rest of the battalion of foreign soldiers. What did the traitor call their country, Kazakhstan? What was that, part of Russia? What in the hell were soldiers from Kazakhstan doing in Tennessee anyway? Just who had invited them here? Well, it was brutally clear what they were doing. They were murdering innocent civilians and dumping their bodies in ravines. If there were truly any “relocation centers,” then they were not meant for the residents of Radford County. It was unimaginable what had happened today, but it was here all around her, revealed in the beam of the light mounted under her pistol. Without even being conscious of it, she found herself stammering, “Oh my God…Oh my God…” She couldn’t look down anymore, afraid of recognizing a face, and she tried to walk, but she couldn’t walk without tripping, unless she looked down…

  Before she had taken many steps, she heard a soft, keening wail. For a few moments, she imagined it was her own voice, or simply her imagination. Then she stopped to listen, wondering if she had heard a distant cat or perhaps a baby goat. Kid goats made that same plaintive cry. Only gradually, she realized it was not her own voice, or a cat or a goat or the wind in the trees, but someone else’s voice, someone alive in this ravine full of bodies. She stopped and listened carefully, and the sound grew. It wasn’t an adult voice that she heard, but the sound of crying. It was an infant, a little baby, a live human baby, somewhere beneath her!

  Jenny scrambled, fighting for balance, moving toward the sound. She had to twist and push several stiffly frozen men away, weeping and apologizing to them for disturbing their resting places, as the sound grew louder. She laid her gun down in the snow on top of a man’s back, in a position to light the area from where the crying seemed to be originating. The pack on her back made it too cumbersome to work, and she slipped it off. It took an eternity to push and drag apart the rigid bodies with their intertwined arms and legs, until finally she could see the source of the crying.

  She saw a baby lying on its back, a baby wrapped in a bloody yellow blanket, pressed against a woman with dark hair who was lying on her side. Jenny sat on one body, worked her feet between ot
hers, and reached under and pulled out the infant, who was swaddled tightly in layers of blankets. She had to tug the baby out; its outer blanket was frozen to the woman’s coat. Blankets covered the baby’s head like a papoose, exposing only its face. Even well bundled the infant must have been terribly cold, but it was undeniably alive, crying out to heaven for rescue. Jenny pulled the baby out from beneath the woman with dark hair, clutched it tightly to her chest, and its wailing faded to a whimper. The blood splotches soaking part of the baby’s yellow blanket were frozen, and had stuck the blanket to her mother…

  Jenny could tell the woman with the dark hair was the baby’s mother, by the pink diaper bag looped over her shoulder. Pink, so the baby she held was most likely a girl. The baby had been sheltered between its mother, who was lying on her side, and the padded diaper bag, which was as big as an overnight valise. Other bodies had fallen crosswise over them, sheltering the infant from the falling snow.

  Oh my dear God, she thought, I can’t take a baby with me! It’s already hard enough to travel alone—how can I possibly carry a baby and still evade the foreign enemies? She’s probably already hypothermic, she feels so cold, and she’ll die anyway. She should just stay with her mother, and remain with her family where she belongs…

  All of these excuses ran through Jenny’s mind, and were rejected one by one. There was no choice: she had to take the baby with her. She had to. How could she possibly place the baby back down in the snow, among the icy corpses? But if she took the baby, how could it survive? There was no 911 operator to call. There was not even a cell phone to call with. Jenny looked back down at the mother, and she suddenly realized that the pink diaper bag was the key. It was almost as if the baby’s mother willed the idea into Jenny’s head. She had done enough babysitting to know that diaper bags meant not only diapers but also usually baby bottles, milk, and formula. She placed the blanket-wrapped baby gently back on the ground to remove the diaper bag, and it began crying again, its tiny eyes tightly closed. While she extricated the pink bag’s shoulder strap from around the mother’s head, Jenny spoke aloud to her. “I’m so sorry that this happened, so sorry, but I promise, I promise I’ll take care of your baby. I’ll do the best that I can for her. I’ll do my best. That’s all I can do, but I’ll do it.”

  Jenny picked up and reholstered the pistol, after switching off its light. Because she was working on her knees while sliding around in the snow among frozen bodies, the backpack was very hard to lift and swing onto her back, but she was filled with new resolve that gave her the necessary strength. She looped the diaper bag’s canvas strap over her head and across her right shoulder, so that it rode against her left hip, keeping her pistol and gun hand unencumbered. Finally, she picked up the swaddled baby and pulled her against her chest, and began the clumsy and difficult process of getting up onto her feet. She had to stand on their frozen bodies. There was no other way. She tried not to look down, tried not to see if she was stepping on faces. Fortunately, the snow covered most of them. How she had found the baby, and managed to pull the bodies away from her and extricate her, it still seemed impossible, it must have been a miracle. The people around her were all so hard and cold and frozen so tightly together…but she had done it.

  Jenny couldn’t stomach the thought of climbing uphill over hundreds of more bodies. She was closer to the beginning of the mass of corpses than the end, so she gingerly backtracked down the ravine, slipping several times to her knees. Once she was off the massacre site, off the bodies, the frozen dirt beneath the snow made for easier going. This time, the sides of the narrow erosion channels actually steadied her, giving her something to lean against when she lost her footing on the slippery snow.

  The baby was no longer crying, but Jenny could feel its breath against her neck, could feel it squirming inside its blanket wrappings. It was too difficult to hold her this way, and Jenny needed her arms for balance and support while moving through the labyrinth of frozen flood channels. She unzipped her outer camouflage jacket, placed the bundled baby against her chest, and zipped it inside. Even wrapped in a blanket, the infant was so tiny that she fit between Jenny’s neck and the web belt that fit snugly around her waist. The belt kept the infant from sliding down. Now it was easier to move, because she could use her gloved hands to grasp at the sides of the gully channels, and catch herself when she slipped.

  Images of the massacre site in the ravine filled Jenny’s mind, and she was hardly conscious of walking through the Christmas tree forest, until she passed the edge of the junkyard and found the twin parallel depressions of the snow-covered dirt road.

  But how far could she walk now, with a baby? Realistically, it was a hopeless situation. If the odds were against her before she had literally stumbled across the massacre site, they were impossible odds now. But what kind of odds had the helpless baby faced? What were the chances that she would have been rescued, found buried alive in that massacre ravine? Yet here she was, still alive, and so was Jenny McClure. If God had gotten them this far, alive, then He must have a reason. The baby’s rescue was a miracle; there could be no other explanation. If that was true, then Jenny was part of that brushing of God’s hand. Why would God send her out, lost in a snowstorm, to find one living infant buried in a massacre pit, if it was not part of a larger plan? The thought kept Jenny moving forward. God has a plan; this is no time to give up. Just keep hope alive, thought Jenny, almost laughing at the madness of it all. Just keep a spark of hope alive, and God will do the rest.

  I hope.

  11

  Carson guessed their average speed on horseback to be about twice a man’s walking pace. This might have been eight or ten miles an hour, but he knew his estimate could be far off. A straight-line distance would have been almost impossible to estimate, and their route had been anything but straight. After two hours, Boone led them along the edge of more woods, along and then through a wooden fence, and into a small barn. Boone climbed down, and the others followed his lead and dismounted. Carson was bone-tired and sore in places he hadn’t remembered, happy just to put his boots on the straw-covered floor of the barn. Until they entered the stable, he had feared that they might ride all night.

  A dark compact car was parked in the center of the musty barn. Without talking, the men unloaded the packs from the horses by flashlight. They transferred some of the loads into the back of the waiting four-door mini-wagon, beneath its raised hatchback. The rest of the bags went on the wagon’s roof, and were lashed down to its luggage rack.

  “How did your ass hold up?” Boone asked in a loud whisper.

  “I’ll live.” The recently healed gash was outside of his weight-bearing areas, and his posture in the saddle had not stretched the wound apart.

  “I think you’ll find this a bit more comfortable. You ride in the back, with Zachary. Doug, you’re riding shotgun. Keep your weapons ready: if we come across a checkpoint or an enemy patrol, we’re not stopping.”

  They slid into the dry interior of the car and Boone started the engine, but left the headlights off. In fact, no lights came on at all, not even when the doors were opened. With night vision goggles over his eyes, their driver had no need for lights. The vehicle was small for a four-door wagon, and with all of their gear, weapons and bags it was a tight fit. Carson thought he saw a shadowy figure enter the barn, probably to take care of the horses, but it was too dark to be certain. They left the barn, bumping and jouncing cross-country over snow-covered fields until they encountered the first dirt track.

  They drove for miles on rutted gravel and dirt roads hidden by snow, and sometimes on asphalt, by the feel of it beneath their tires. Overhanging tree branches often formed a ceiling above their path. There was enough moonlight penetrating the low overcast and reflecting off the snow for Carson to make out the basic contours of the gently rolling terrain, but no more. With NVGs, Boone had no difficulty keeping the car’s speed up, even when Carson saw nothing ahead of the windshield but swirling flakes in the darkness.
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  The baby began crying again, struggling within its blanket wrappings. Jenny could do little to comfort the infant tucked inside her parka. She knew that she had to find a place to get out of the blowing snow, to check the diaper bag for milk and try to feed the infant. To come this far, to find the baby and save it, only to then lose it to death seemed too cruel a fate. If God had sent her to save the child, well then, she had to be up to the task and do her best to keep her alive.

  Jenny passed the junkyard, and approached the trailer home. If she could just get out of the snow and check the diaper bag for milk or formula, the baby would have a fighting chance. Inside the house, she could use the mini-flashlight attached to the pistol to see what was in the bag, and perhaps find something to make a fire. If there was any formula or milk in the diaper bag, it would be too cold to give to the baby. She prayed that there was formula in the bag. If not, the baby would cry until she died. It had been at least twelve hours since she had been fed, and almost as many hours that she had been alone in the freezing weather.

  Jenny walked directly across the snowy yard to the wooden porch built along the front of the trailer. She could see that the snow was now about three inches deep on the edges of the steps up to the porch. First, she would just try the door, to check if it had been left open. The white door didn’t appear to have been damaged by looters, who often used crowbars or battering rams to get inside. There were no hinges visible, so it opened to the inside. The knob was on the right side. Above it was a separate keyhole for a deadbolt lock. She would give the door a good strong push, and then shoot the lock out if she had to.

  Before trying the door, she stepped to the window that was on the right side of the porch, and tried to look into the mobile home. A heavy curtain was pulled across on the inside, blocking her view. Not even a faint glimmer of light was visible. She drew her pistol, just to be ready. She held the big gun in her gloved right hand and switched on its light. With her left hand, she grasped the knob and slowly turned it in both directions. It stopped after only a few degrees of travel. It was locked. Still, she might be able to slam her hip or shoulder against the door and force it open. After all, it was only an old mobile home. She pulled and pushed as hard as she could, using every bit of her strength while turning the knob. The snow on the wooden deck hindered her efforts, preventing her from getting a solid footing while she tried to slam her 120 pounds against the door. It didn’t budge.