by Jf Perkins
Ned turned right into a section of stunted trees. Terry could see old rusting machinery scattered haphazardly in the woods, and assumed correctly that this had once been a work yard of sorts. At the end of the narrow road, the white truck stopped and Ned slid out. Bill shut down Big Bertha and joined him for a few words. He waved John and Terry out of the cockpit. John told the other men to open the doors, but to stay with the trucks. Ned led the three of them along a worn path into some thicker woods. Terry fought down a surge of paranoia that this could be a trap. They crossed a rail siding, and rails that still saw some use, judging by the shiny metallic strip down the crown of the rails. Back into the for a short distance, Terry saw the river water reflecting the dull light of the cloudy late afternoon. He stopped short, following a lifetime of trying to stay out of open view. Bill and John stepped off the path, and used the cover of heavy undergrowth to hide themselves on the river’s edge. Ned simply slid up near Bill and began pointing out details. Now that he understood, Terry hunched down and paralleled the water until he was well hidden and eased to a standing position near John.
The Cumberland appeared about four or five hundred feet wide from their hiding place. They were directly across the river from some kind of broad work yard scattered with piles of various debris. The yard had its own pier, set on heavy pilings that trailed foaming swirls of water downstream. At the pier, several large vessels were parked. Two of them looked like tugboats, one a sort of mutilated cruiser, and partially obscured among the other boats, Terry could see glimpses of what must be a river barge, although it looked smaller than he had imagined, among the sheltering boats. To the northwest, less than a thousand feet away, a once-impressive bridge had collapsed into the river. Only jagged pieces of steel and the crumbled approaches gave it away. Most of the bridge was sitting on the bottom of the river. Another thousand feet presented another bridge, smaller than the first but still intact, which meant it was their likely means of getting across.
Twenty minutes later, Terry held an internal dance over his correct guess, as they drove across the Shelby Street Bridge, and turned left at the first major road. His sense of direction sounded the alarm, and he looked over his shoulder in the direction he was sure the target was located. Bill noticed his confusion, and explained.
“They, whoever they may be, could have easily seen us crossing the bridge. We’re heading in the opposite direction to make them think we are going somewhere else.”
It turned out that they only went a half mile and pulled into the broken shadow of the Titans old stadium. They turned off the trucks and John slid open the rear cab window to announce, “Piss break! Shake ‘em if you got ‘em.”
Terry was slightly shocked at the rare show of humor from “Serious John.” The rear guard piled out of the truck and Terry, very much in need of a break, tried to wait patiently for all the map folding bullshit to end, until Bill finally found his pipe tobacco and slid from the cab. Terry catapulted himself out the door with the steering wheel, nearly taking Bill’s hat off as he flew by, and leaving John to watch in mild amazement. Terry felt thankful to clear the area and to get his buttons open before he pissed himself, which he missed doing by less than a second. He groaned loudly as his bladder began to relax.
As Terry buttoned his fly, Jeffry sidled up and offered some handy advice. “Listen, man. You don’t have to wait until my brother says it’s ok. Let someone know if you need to take a leak. We don’t hang you for that.”
Terry laughed quietly, and said, “This has been the craziest day of my life. I honestly didn’t even notice until your brother actually said the word ‘piss’.”
After a few minutes of discussion among Bill, Ned, and John, Bill climbed up and started the truck. He backed it slowly into the deep shade of the stadium, and set his men to unloading the gear. They had a brief scavenger hunt for any materials that could be used to hide the truck from casual observers and stacked them around Big Bertha. They were on the north side of the crumbling building, which helped Bill feel confident that the truck would sit in the shadows until they came to retrieve it. He decided that this was close enough, with a loud, modified diesel to announce their arrival.
Ned shook everyone’s hand and set out to the north in his white truck, taking an entirely different route back to wherever he called home. Bill checked his watch and decided there was still enough daylight for a recon hike. Luckily the stadium’s wide acres of parking lots had crumbled back into scrubby growth, and they walked, fully loaded, across the perfectly flat groves of native trees.
Except for a few brief road crossings, including the road on which they arrived in the area, the miniature forest made excellent cover until they crossed under the elevated bridge approaches to the fallen bridge. The old industrial yards beyond were still active enough to keep the new growth beaten to the ground. They made their way carefully out to the tall strip of trees that held the river bank in place, and walked among the older trees until they had crossed the first yard, and found themselves alongside a tank storage facility of some kind. Unlike the yard they had just passed, this one was unused, which gave Bill an idea. He led his men out of the tall trees and back into a healthy patch scrub woods which had overcome the gravel of the tank yard only months after the Breakdown. He weaved among the tanks until he found the one he thought would serve their purposes.
The men climbed over the steel gate protecting the maintenance ladder. Luckily the ladders were mostly in the middle of the group of tanks, and invisible from the salvage yard. Rob scrambled up to the top for a look around. He gave a thumbs up to the rest of the crew and they quickly joined him on the roof. Bill had chosen well. This tank and one other had a solid steel wall around the edge of the roof, hiding them from anyone on the ground. A steel cage was perfectly positioned on the southeast to provide some cover for surveillance of the target. The cage was the top end of the stairs that wound around the tank for normal maintenance access, but they used the vertical emergency ladder, since the stairs would not only make them visible to the salvage yard, it would make them almost impossible to miss. When Terry asked how Bill knew, the older man only replied that he had seen a lot of tank farms in his time.
Bill spoke quietly for fear of echoes bouncing off the hard steel. “Ok, this is our camp tonight. When it gets dark, we’ll do some sightseeing. Obviously, no fires or lights for the usual reasons, and the extra reason that whatever is in this tank could possibly shoot us into outer space.”
The men chuckled, and Nick said, “Fine by me. I didn’t want to collect all the firewood.”
Seth looked around and asked, “What firewood? There’s no... Oh.”
“Exactly, moron.” Nick reached over and patted Seth on the head.
Chapter 4 - 10
The men from Teeny Town set up the bare minimum of shelter on top of the giant storage tank. In the warm weather, the steel roof was a comfort, pulling the humid heat away as the sun went down. Bill hated to imagine what it would be like up here in the winter, but for now, it was about as good as they could get. In any case, camp consisted of ponchos in case of rain, and carefully arranged backpacks for pillows. Rifles were set carefully on the steel, and bags of dried jerky and fruit were handed around. The conversation was sparse and quiet, which gave Terry plenty of time to think about how he had started the week in his parent’s shack. This adventure began only yesterday at Teeny Town, and the morning had begun at a luxurious house in Murfreesboro. Now he was perched atop a hundred foot storage tank in the burned out remains of Nashville with Bill and five other people he barely knew, in all likelihood preparing to walk into a hostile situation a thousand feet away. Life is strange.
After dinner, Bill said, “Ok, we’re going to take a quick look at the target. John and Terry, let’s go, quietly. Everyone else, stay alert in case we’re spotted.”
Nick and Jeffry sat up tall, Seth and Rob merely spun around so they could watch the recon group while laying on their packs. Terry followed the two older men ov
er to the cage in a delicate, crouching walk. The steel wall was about four feet high, which meant they were on their feet, much better than crawling across solid steel. They found positions that broke up the lines of their heads and shoulders from anyone who happened to look their way, and saw basically nothing. One of the boats was lit with a dim series of low voltage bulbs, barely casting light past the immediate pier. Bill wanted to try his binoculars, but the only light source for miles would reflect perfectly from his lenses in this position.
They waited for any sign of movement, any indication of what had happened in the state salvage yard. They saw no state police, no workers, nothing. Bill was about to about to call it quits when he heard a blurry voice, a deep voice, a very loud voice. It spoke from the general direction of the salvage yard, but it was loud enough to cast echoes from everywhere. He realized it must be some kind of bullhorn or loudspeaker, but if so, it was pointed away from his ears. All he was getting was reflected sound, and words that were unintelligible from here.
Bill’s eyes were well adjusted to the dim light, which made it easy to see the lighter spark, even at a thousand feet. The spark became a tiny bluish flame, which rose upward until it ignited a much larger flame, a torch of the classic variety. It burned with an ominous orange glow, bright enough in itself but still too dim to cast much light on the scene. The torch bearer was revealed, in what appeared to be a state police uniform, but Bill could not say for sure. If it was the uniform, something was wrong with it.
The muddy voice became harsher, more imperative, and the torch bearer staggered forward taking painfully slow steps in the apparent direction of the pier. He stopped several times, which triggered a new explosion of sound from the hidden voice, driving the man forward. He finally stopped at a point halfway between the boat and the place where the torch first came to life. The voice chanted, demanded. The torch wavered and shook. New voices joined the chant and took over, while the loudspeaker spoke angry sounds into the night. More angry shouts broke through the chant, and the torch slowly drifted forward until it ignited the next item in the unknown series. Flames shot skyward with an explosive whoosh, sending sparks raining all around the torch man, who promptly fell to his knees and buried his head under his hands.
After the initial burst of flame, Bill watched the new fire settle into its proper, yet demented form. Unfortunately, there was now plenty of light to resolve what he was seeing. The first thing he recognized was the huge, burning Christian-style cross. The second image was of the perfectly-straight ranks of figures in white robes and pointed white hoods, forty of them at a guess, and the third, less obvious sight was of the two crosses to either side of the dominant burning cross, each one adorned by a struggling dark skinned man in state uniform. And last, the light revealed the barge on the river, loaded with iron-barred cages full of battered and bleeding state police.
Bill almost lost his knees to the full realization of what he was witnessing, but held on long enough to understand the rest of it. The initial burst of flame was gasoline or kerosene. Underneath, a coating of pitch burned slower until the wood of the cross became the main fuel source. A line of pitch on the ground connected the three crosses, and two aggressive flames were travelling from the middle cross to the ones on the sides, the crosses with living black men for kindling.
John made the same realization at the same moment and brought his rifle up. Bill grabbed the barrel and pushed it away.
“One shot and we all die tonight. We have to be smarter than that.”
John jerked the rifle back up to his eye, sighted on a target, but failed to pull the trigger. He set the rifle down, and watched helplessly as the traveling flames reached the outer crosses and triggered a cascade of orange pain up to the victims. The police in the cages were screaming wildly with frustration, and the men in white were screaming with triumph and excitement. The men on the crosses began to scream in pain, and desperation, and finally some kind of scream from below and beyond the human threshold, until they finally, mercifully, screamed no more.
Terry sat down with his back to the steel wall, gulping rapidly to hold down the bile in his throat. John clenched the edge of the rail until his knuckles cracked and the sound of his teeth could be heard, grinding across each other. Bill sagged, sliding his hands down the metal wall, until he too was seated with blank steel blocking the view. He looked up at the sky, looking for some sign of God in the night, but all he saw was a devilish orange glow bouncing off the low hanging clouds.
“Oh, shit. We’ve got trouble,” Bill said quietly, “Because we’re not leaving until we kill every last one of those white-robed sons of bitches.”
###
Author’s Note:
This one took some research. I set it in Tennessee because that’s where I spent most of my life, and because that’s where I first spotted the ridiculous development set out in the middle of nowhere. My muted rage at people who were building cheap houses in perfectly good farm fields started the idea of the original short story, which has become this sprawling tale. I’m borrowing from my childhood, which started on Long Island, but only really filled my memories once we moved to Brentwood, Tennessee, a suburb of Nashville. We made a couple of Mom-driven moves, ever farther out into the country, and ended up in Coffee County. Even being in Washington for seven years has not dulled my memory of the old stomping grounds, but moving the story to Nashville only reveals how little I actually know about the city and its surroundings. It’s the old rule that we tend to take our local sights for granted, and spend our energy on the distant places we visit. For the sake of wherever you live, take the time to see your neck of the woods. Really see it.
The other, and far riskier, new element in the story is racism. I grew up in the South, where racism, conservatism, certain kinds of extreme religious views often get the opportunity to run well outside the boundaries of political correctness. Now I live in the Pacific Northwest. Those ideas are still present, and easily as extreme as anywhere else, but they are not as public. Out here, people take pride in the ability to openly accept all kinds of thought and lifestyle choices. I can tell you it was pure culture shock when I first moved here, but it’s always good to have multiple points of view on any issue. On the other hand, political correctness can easily overflow the banks as well.
In the end, I think we are all seeking some kind of balance. Can we ever say all people of a certain race or creed are bad? No way. Can we ever say that all people of our own race and creed are good? Not a chance. Can any of us honestly claim to have the ultimate answers of right and wrong, where it starts and where it ends? Nope. That’s never been part of the human condition. We receive our race at birth, and we ultimately choose our creed. We decide how we want to see the world.
About the author:
Creative people tend to be lousy at self-promotion, and I fit the cliché almost perfectly. After many years of asking myself why I have anything to say that is worth writing, the answer can only be that I have finally, in middle age, managed to make enough mistakes to say something solid about how not to live life. If I hold up a mirror to my own life, I get a backwards reflection that may actually contain some value. More importantly, I have been fortunate enough to know many people who may have suffered, but did so with far more skill and grace than I have, and they set a solid example for a realistic method of how to live well.
In the meantime, I live in Washington with my wonderful wife, who happens to be one of those good examples, and our five rescue dogs, who manage to encompass an entire school bus full of joyous, childlike personalities. And to add to the rapidly mounting collection of loose fur and allergens, I also share the house with two cats; one with no social boundaries, and one who is nothing but social boundaries.
In a difficult denial of the self-promotion bit, I must suggest that you stop by my semi-neglected blog and leave me a note. That way, I’ll be able to say that not everyone who signs up is preparing a spam attack. http://www.jfperkins.com
Thank you for reading.
JF Perkins
