Foreign Enemies and Traitors

by Matthew Bracken

  “Anyway, there was nowhere for me to go, and I was too weak and out of my head to try anything. They put me on the ground and tied my hands behind my back so tight that I thought that would kill me all by itself. Then they tied a noose around my neck, and pulled me back up on my feet and jerked me along like a goat or a cow. They kept pinching me and laughing, but I couldn’t really understand them. For some reason they seemed glad that I wasn’t too skinny, I gathered that much, but I didn’t make anything of it at the time. I’d trip and they’d pull me, drag me along on my face, until somehow I’d get back up on my feet. I could hardly understand a word they were saying, but I got the strong idea my problems were only just beginning. Obviously, if they had wanted to kill me where they found me, they could have.

  “They led me back along the chain link fence to a gate, down a few weedy paths and alleys, and finally to a concrete slab, next to a big rusty steel warehouse that was half falling down. They had set up kind of a camp there, under part of the warehouse’s roof that was still intact, giving them a dry spot. I guess they were used to catching stragglers like me who were working their way along the riverbank. The old warehouse was maybe a hundred yards from the river, all surrounded by weeds and trees.

  “And that’s when I saw the absolute worst. That’s when I gave up my last hope: when I saw the burnt body parts. There were legs and arms hacked down to the bones, and a fire pit, with the big iron grill over it. There were even decapitated heads, set in a row. I was lying on my side, and I looked over and saw a severed head that almost seemed like it was looking back at me. Dead eyes, wide open. The cooking grill was a wrought-iron gate, propped up on angle iron legs that were driven into the dirt. There was a square hole in the cement, where they had built their fire. Now I could understand what they had been talking about. That’s why they had been pinching and squeezing me. That suddenly became perfectly clear. Three weeks after the first earthquake, that was three weeks without supermarkets or fast food joints. Hunger makes people crazy, and some people are crazy to begin with. I guess it doesn’t take much for the ones that are already crazy. An earthquake will do it, that’s for sure. It’ll push psychos right over the edge.

  “They tied my ankles together, and then they tied my hands to my feet behind my back. They trussed me up like a hog. I was lying on my side then, tied to some kind of a pipe that came up out of the concrete. By then I was way beyond shock. I could only hope that they were going to kill me fast and not torture me too much beforehand, but really, I didn’t have too much hope of that. Sometime in the afternoon, two of them left. They said they were going out hunting for more meat. It was like a joke to them. They laughed and said, ‘Honky, the other white meat.’ Or maybe I just imagined that. By that point, I couldn’t tell what was real and what was a hallucination. But I was sure that I was a goner. I had no doubt about that at all.

  “The one that stayed to guard me couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. I tried to talk to him. I told him I was in the Army and they’d come looking for me, all of that, but he wasn’t buying it. He wouldn’t even look at me. I told him he’d get a reward for helping me—nothing, no reaction. He was smoking some kind of homegrown reefer wrapped up in sheets of telephone book paper. He had dead eyes, stone cold dead eyes that looked right through you like you were a ghost. The leader gave him some chores to do while they were gone. His job was collecting firewood and cleaning up, taking body parts and bones down to the river in a wheelbarrow. Heads, hands, feet…he was pretty casual about it. The way he acted, they could have been beef or pork scraps he was picking up and tossing into the wheelbarrow. The whole thing was right out of a grade B horror movie.

  “This was January, like now, and it got dark early. The other two came back after sunset with another teenage boy that they seemed to know already, and two black girls about twelve or thirteen. Black or Hispanic, or maybe somewhere in between. They were just numb with fear, it seemed to me. Or maybe they were in shock, almost catatonic. I can only imagine what hell those girls had been through in the three weeks since the first earthquake, and what they thought after another big quake hit. They weren’t tied up, but I couldn’t tell if they were going to be on the menu with me or if they were going to be on the other side of the dinner table, so to speak. It was about twenty-four hours since I’d had anything to eat or drink, and I must have been delirious. The older guys brought back a big cardboard box, and they were drinking wine from bottles. They must have had a good afternoon of looting. They built up the fire in the hole under the big iron grate, and I thought, ‘Well, this is it: curtains. Just let it be quick when it’s my time.’

  “When the fire was up and burning hot, the two biggest guys came for me and untied me from the metal pole—but they kept my feet and ankles bound. I’d lost all feeling in my hands. I was waiting for one of them to take a machete to my throat. I figured that they’d do it that way, but no, they just dragged me over by the fire like a slab of meat. There was a square hole in the concrete, where they had the fire going, with the grate over the top. The two girls were sitting together on a log a few feet away, getting warm by the fire. They weren’t tied up, but they weren’t trying to get away either. What else could they do? They were just young girls. The whole thing was surreal: the half-tumbled-down warehouse, the cooking fire, everything.

  “Then the leader, the older guy with the dreadlocks tied up in a bundle, he seemed to gradually notice that I was still in my Army uniform. I got the idea that he was comparing his size to my uniform. Staring at me, sizing me up. This presented a problem, because my wrists and ankles were still tied. I think if I wasn’t wearing the uniform, they would have just thrown me over that iron grate and burned me alive then and there. Or maybe hacked my arms and legs off with the machetes and just cooked them, I don’t know how they were going to do it. I think that he was so drunk and stoned that he couldn’t figure out how to get the uniform off of me without burning it up or getting it soaked in blood. I got the impression that this was a serious mental challenge for him, a real puzzle. He’d been smoking weed pretty much the whole time I’d seen him, and drinking wine, a lot of wine. Bob Marley meets Frankenstein—in hell.

  “By now it was dark out, except for the fire under the cooking grate. The tallest one, the leader, he pulled me up on my feet, but they were still tied together, like my hands. He was wearing a bright green Urban Corps jacket. He had his pistol shoved in his belt, a machete in one hand, and he was holding me by the shoulder with the other. I was sort of hopping around with my feet tied together, trying to balance, while he held me up and considered his next move. I thought he was just going to push me over the fire. We were nose to nose. He looked like the devil himself, his eyes glowing yellow in the firelight. He said, ‘White boy, I’m gonna untie you, and then you gonna get all naked and give me them Army clothes.’ I knew that once I was out of the uniform I was a dead man, so I was thinking of something to say, to stall him. I was going to try the ‘earn a reward from the Army’ pitch again, and see if it worked on him. I knew it was a long shot, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say. He was their leader, so probably he was the smartest, and maybe he’d go for it. He looked right in my eyes; I can’t imagine what he was thinking.

  “And then he just let me go without the least bit of warning. I hit the ground right by the fire pit, fell on him and rolled off. For a second I couldn’t understand why he’d dropped me, but then I saw that most of the top of his head was gone. Smashed apart, blown open by a gunshot, it looked like. I heard thumps and cracks, and sounds I didn’t recognize, and all of my captors went down, one-two-three. They were so stoned and drunk they didn’t know what was happening, and then they were dead. I wondered what the hell had just happened, and what can possibly happen next? It was three weeks since the first earthquake, and I thought I’d seen it all—but I hadn’t seen anything compared to what I saw in the twenty-four hours after the second quake. The horror just kept ratcheting up, like a nightmare that keeps ac
celerating until you fall into a bottomless well or off a cliff and then you wake up screaming. Only this was no dream, this was all happening. Even as delirious as I was, I knew all of this was for real.

  “So there I was lying on the ground, still tied up hand and foot, close enough to the fire pit to feel the burning heat, right next to Mr. Brains Hanging Out, and then I heard a friendly voice behind me. ‘Well, soldier boy—this appears to be your lucky night. It looks like your dinner plans have been unexpectedly canceled.” A white voice. He had a Southern accent, but he sounded educated. Somebody knelt behind me and cut the rope off my hands, and then my ankles. I could barely tell I even had hands by then, until that pain came ripping back into them. I guess I was wincing or yelling, and the man behind me said, ‘That’s a good sign. If they hurt, that means your blood is moving again. Do you think you can walk? No offense, son, but this is not the kind of dining establishment that we generally prefer to patronize.’ I’ll never forget that. I laughed in spite of everything.

  “I rolled onto my back, now that my wrists were free. I could look up and see who was talking to me by the orange firelight. There were four guys in camouflage BDU uniforms. Not the regular ACU Army camouflage; the old pattern, like we’re wearing now. Woodland, I think it’s called. Green and black face paint, not a bit of skin showing, but I could tell they were white men by how they talked. They all had rifles, and different kinds of load bearing vests and magazine pouches. The one who had been talking had a suppressor on the end of an M-4 carbine. It was a flattop rifle with a scope on top, a night scope. They were very well equipped. Everything was first class.

  “He hoisted me back up to my feet, and two of them half-carried me down along the riverbank and into a boat. A big squared-off Jon-boat like they use in the South, with an outboard motor. A big enough boat to have a steering wheel on a console in the middle. Then we were out of there, but moving slowly—to keep quiet, I suppose. Plus, I knew the river was full of floating debris. One of the guys had night vision goggles, so I guess he could see well enough to drive, and avoid the debris. It was as black as a coal mine to me, once we were away from the cooking fire.

  “They told me they were on a rescue mission. They were coming down the Wolf River the day after the second quake, trying to get to some trapped relatives. They couldn’t get past the wrecked bridge that was blocked up with debris. They had to give up on their rescue mission and turn around, and that’s when they saw me about to become the main entrée. My luck had changed a hundred eighty degrees, just like that. All of this happened in the space of about twenty-four hours, from the second earthquake to my rescue. Crazy, but I couldn’t complain about how it ended. Not when I’d been about to be thrown on a fire and eaten by cannibals.

  “The only thing that bothered me was that my rescuers shot the two black girls along with the three men. The guy with the silenced carbine was using a night scope, and I thought maybe he couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad guys, I don’t know. Maybe they all looked like bad guys to him in his night scope, except for me, the tied-up guy about to be thrown on the fire. I gave them the benefit of the doubt about those two girls, when they rescued me. Hell, I don’t know, maybe they saved those girls from getting gang-raped and going onto the fire after me. Or maybe those girls would have been gnawing on my bones in another hour. I’ll never know what would have happened to those two girls if they hadn’t been shot by my rescuers.

  “But I’ll tell you this: a lot of people died after those earthquakes, and most of them didn’t die from the earthquakes, if you know what I mean. It’s hard to tell who died from dehydration or hunger or disease, from those who were shot or stabbed or clubbed to death. Dead is dead—and dead men tell no tales, right? You could kill anybody after those earthquakes, and who would ever know what really happened? Dead bodies were all over Memphis, and I didn’t see any cops or CSI’s around them, that’s for sure. Just buzzards and feral dogs. Anyway, those two young girls died right there by the fire. If my rescuers had any regrets about that, they didn’t show it. Not one little bit.”

  17

  Both men heard the zipper of the tent slide open, and turned that way. Jenny emerged, still wearing the brown camouflage trousers, but with a green wool military sweater for a top.

  “The baby’s sleeping?” asked Carson.

  “Yes. At least she’s taking the instant milk, and keeping it down.”

  “Did we wake you up?” asked Doug.

  “I slept a little. I was listening to your story.” She sat down on a folding chair between the men. Zack was still snoring softly in his sleeping bag, blessedly oblivious.

  Carson said, “There’s hot water in the thermos. You want something?”

  “Hot chocolate?”

  Doug went to a box and returned with a brown paper pouch. He tore it open and made the cocoa, mixing it in a mug on the table. Jenny sipped the warm liquid and stared into the space between the two men. Her long blond hair, mussed and matted on top, spilled across her shoulders in the absence of the fur hat. Her bangs hung almost to her honey-colored eyes. She spoke quietly, because Zack and the baby were still sleeping. “I found something in one of my pockets.”

  Jenny placed a small Ziploc bag on the table. Inside was a thin black rectangle: a pocket-sized notebook. Carson opened the plastic bag, withdrew the spiral-bound booklet, and opened it. She looked at Doug and said, “I’m glad you got away—that was an incredible story. It brought back a lot of my own memories. Do you guys want to hear it?”

  Carson nodded and Doug said, “Sure.”

  She sipped her cocoa, then took a deep breath and began. “You were describing the January earthquake. I was already away from Memphis for the second one, but I was there for the first. My family lived in Germantown, that’s between where the two rivers almost come together. The Wolf and the Nonconnah, like you were saying. It’s about twenty miles southeast of downtown Memphis. That meant it was one of the only ways out of the city when the bridges went down. Our house shook but it didn’t fall down, thank God. We had some cracked walls, but we were lucky: a lot of houses did collapse. It was Saturday morning, or I would have been at school. My school pancaked…so we were lucky it happened when it did. In Germantown, the earthquake shook us around and broke some things, but I didn’t see it kill anybody. Not directly. Roads were buckled and cracked all over the place, so you couldn’t drive very far without making a lot of detours. The main thing was the gas and electric went out, and the water. That was all right at first. We’ve had tornados and ice storms that knocked out the power. We weren’t too worried. It always came back on in a few hours…or at least by the next day.

  “Only this time, the power didn’t come back on. Not a blink, nothing. The whole system was down—telephones, cell phones, ATM machines, gas stations—everything. On the second day, when we were lined up at the Safeway supermarket, that’s when it started to get crazy. The store employees said you had to pay with cash. But the ATM machines didn’t work, so how could you get cash? People who didn’t have enough cash started to get angry, real angry. And all of the ATM machines I saw were smashed open anyway. Looted.

  “By then the refugees from Memphis were starting to walk out to Germantown. I’d been waiting in a line all the way around the block with my father, and then these people walking out of Memphis just started cutting in line and pushing right to the front. Mostly black people, and Germantown is mostly white. It got ugly fast. There was a lot of pushing and shoving and yelling.

  “People started saying we were stupid to wait while everybody else cut in line, and then they started pushing inside too. Police were there trying to keep order, but they gave up. What could they do? Shoot everybody? The police were a joke, useless. We waited in that line for six hours, my father and I. We were probably about number five hundred in the line to get inside the Safeway, and then the mob just pushed ahead of the line anyway. The supermarket was stripped bare to the walls by the time we got inside. There was nothing left. Not
hing you could eat or drink, anyway. We felt like fools for wasting half of a day waiting in line, but who could you complain to? Nobody. We were fools…for acting civilized.

  “We figured the electric company would get the power back on in a few days, or a week at most. Water became a big problem right away. Our neighborhood was on city water, and it stopped during the earthquake. We were lucky because we had a swimming pool, so it wasn’t so bad for us. It cracked during the quake, but it still had a few feet of water at the bottom. We shared it with our neighbors on each side of our house; we let them dip it out with buckets. We used our propane grills for cooking, and for boiling the water to drink.

  “And then on the third day more and more refugees started coming. That was Monday. Little groups at first, then big crowds, and then just continuous, like a parade. Mostly blacks from Memphis. Lots of them were pushing shopping carts full of stuff. Their own stuff or looted stuff, who knows? Our street was only one block off Poplar Avenue, it ran parallel to it. Poplar’s a big street; it goes all the way into Memphis, and the other way it goes out to the country. We had a lot of people walking through our neighborhood. I mean thousands, like a stadium letting out, and we were a block off of Poplar.

  “At first folks came up and knocked on the door, fairly polite, asking for water and food. They thought we were rich or something, because of our neighborhood. Somehow they found out we had a swimming pool, and they wanted water. That sounds pretty reasonable, but then some of them started sitting all over our yard. At first we hoped they were just ‘resting,’ but then it went from a few people to dozens to hundreds. We had whole families sitting all over our yard, camping out almost. Then our car disappeared. We could only fit our Expedition in the garage, so our Acura was parked in the driveway. Then it was gone, and the people sitting all over our yard just shrugged. They didn’t say anything; they just glared at us like we caused the earthquake or something. I peeked out through the curtains—only my father went to the door to talk to them. On the third day, the refugees went right into our backyard too, and then we couldn’t get water out of our own pool. We were too afraid to go outside, not even in the backyard to get water. I was never a racist, I had black friends at school, but this was different. I was scared to death every minute. The people outside didn’t seem grateful for the water, they seemed more angry. Resentful, I guess, because we had a little swimming pool. Smaller than this platform we’re on.