Savage Rising

by C. Hoyt Caldwell

  The last weapon blessed, the men filed out of the church in an orderly fashion. When the final soldier exited, Harley moved through the sanctuary and entered Tawny’s cramped office where Woodrow had been instructed to wait.

  “Cousin,” Woodrow said, sitting slumped in his chair, gently touching the still-fresh wounds on his face.

  Harley leaned against the preacher’s cluttered desk. “Tell me about this man. The one with those two shitheads, Step and Kenny. The one you brought here. Jack Spivey.”

  “I didn’t bring him here. I swear.”

  “So tell me about the man that followed you here.”

  “Didn’t nobody follow me, neither. I made extra care of that. Wasn’t a soul around when I left the Rat’s Tail.”

  “Boy, don’t make me ask a third time…”

  “He come up to me at the club. Asked about the Gray Rise. I told him you were a hunting club like you said to always say if’n I was ever asked. That’s it.”

  Harley reached out and ran his callused finger across one of the cuts on Woodrow’s cheek. “He do this to you?”

  “That fucker Step done this. For no reason. Just come out and slammed my face against a glass. Lucky I didn’t lose an eye is what I am.”

  Harley grinned and was about to send Woodrow on his way when he spotted a chain connected to his belt that disappeared into his pocket. “What’s that?”

  Woodrow looked down. “That. Oh…It’s a…It’s just this watch. It ain’t nothing.”

  “You carry a pocket watch?”

  “I’ve been known to.”

  “I’ve never known you to.”

  Woodrow let out a soft groan. “Okay, but listen…I’ll tell you…It don’t mean nothing, but that fella give it to me. Jack Spivey.”

  Harley hesitated, and then ordered Woodrow to let him see the watch.

  Woodrow nervously detached the chain from his belt loop and handed it to his cousin.

  Harley opened it and held it to his ear. “Why’d he give you a watch?”

  Woodrow shrugged. “He thought I had something more to say on the Gray Rise. Tried to buy some information out of me.” He snorted out a laugh and slapped his knee. “Wasted fifty grand is all he did.”

  “Wasted what?”

  “Fifty grand. That’s what the watch costs. Spivey give it to me for more information, but I give him shit.”

  Harley looked at the watch carefully and then let out his own belly laugh. “You got snookered, boy.”

  “Snookered? Wha’cha mean, Cousin?”

  Without warning, Harley slammed the cheap watch on the desk and smashed it to pieces. “If this thing is worth twenty bucks, I’ll fuck your ugly-ass momma.”

  “What?” Woodrow asked, horrified. “Can’t be…He said…”

  “I’m telling you, you got took.”

  “No offense, but you ain’t no watch expert. How do you know I got took?”

  “’Cause a fella don’t give another fella a fifty-thousand-dollar watch in a strip club full of crackers and crack whores.” Harley stood and dug deep into his pocket for a few seconds before pulling out a pocket knife.

  Woodrow leaned back in his chair. “I swear to Christ, Harley, I didn’t give up no information on the Gray Rise…”

  Harley, confused by Woodrow’s sudden show of fear, shrugged and said, “I heard you.”

  “What’s the knife for then?”

  “You got bits of glass all about your face. Ima dig that shit out.” He stooped down and stuck the knife in front of Woodrow’s nose. “But before I tend to that, I do gotta say, I don’t believe you. Not a hundred percent anyways.”

  “I’m telling the truth…”

  “Well, maybe. Maybe not. I tell you what I’m going do. I’m gonna go ahead and take that eye you almost lost just to ease my mind that you’ve been properly dealt with.”

  Before Woodrow could say another word in his defense, Harley thrust the knife forward.

  Chapter 74

  Paper coffee cups and the crumbs of a dozen donuts decorated Otis’s desk. Nola nibbled on a bear claw while she scrutinized a catalog. She let out a soft chuckle and said, “I mean, this really is fucking ingenious, this whole message thing your buddy used. You teach her this?”

  “Nope,” Spivey said. “Don’t even know how it works.” He sifted through Dani and Nola’s notes trying to find what the Gray Rise was up to. So far all he’d found was the list of people and organizations that were secretly funding the militia. There was nothing but a general warning about a big hit the group was planning.

  Nola whistled and tossed Spivey a catalog. He dropped the notebook he’d been reading from in order to catch it. “Double slash begins the message. Single slash begins a sentence. Backward slash ends a sentence. Double backward slash ends a message. Find an asterisk of any kind at the bottom of the page, you look for underlined letters in the text. The underlining is faint, and there’s never more than two or three letters underlined on each page. I guess she didn’t want to draw attention to what she was doing.”

  Dani stuck her head in the door, her face red with anger. “Gotta run to the high school. Disturbance.”

  Spivey looked at her cockeyed. “Send someone else. This shit is more important.”

  “Says the man who disappeared for a couple of hours yesterday. I can’t send no one else on it. There ain’t no one else. Randle’s on Otis duty and Friar just ended a double shift.”

  Before Spivey could protest again, Dani walked away. But from the moment she did, she ran visions of the underlined messages in Mac’s catalogs through her mind. She toyed with the idea of calling Armstrong, but she wasn’t exactly sure what the messages meant yet. She wanted to call her with a theory, not questions.

  Before she knew it, she was out of her cruiser and pushing the double doors of the front entrance to the high school open. Principal Gardner greeted her by admonishing her for taking her time. The old man had been around when Dani was in high school, but thanks to her father she had been off getting her virtue corrupted at a private Christian school. She’d never had to deal with Gardner as a student.

  “It’s a brazen act of aggression,” Mr. Gardner said. “Brazen.”

  “What is, Mr. Gardner?” Dani asked him as he guided her through the wide corridors.

  “As you may know, we’ve got a big game this week. Against General Webb High School.”

  “I know. Everyone in town’s going on and on about it.”

  “A trip to the playoff is on the line.” They turned a corner. “Mischief is to be expected. I understand that. I do. But this is beyond the pale. This is just disrespectful.”

  “It might help if you got to the point, Mr. Gardner.”

  “The point is, Deputy Savage, some students from General Webb spray-painted profanities on our mascot costume.”

  His back to Dani, she took the opportunity to roll her eyes. She didn’t have time to deal with high school pranks.

  They turned down another corridor where she saw two large doors padlocked shut. “That cougar costume cost two thousand dollars, Deputy. It’s ruined.”

  “What kind of profanity are we talking here, Mr. Gardner?”

  “It’s vulgar. Just vulgar.”

  They reached the double doors and Mr. Gardner stuck a key into the padlock.

  “Can’t you just cover it up?”

  “It’s a phrase. Written on several locations on the costume.” He removed the lock and unwrapped the chain.

  “And the phrase is?”

  He opened and closed his mouth several times, trying to work up the nerve to speak the offensive phrase. Finally, he let it escape his lips in a mumbled whisper, “Your pussy stinks.”

  Dani bit her cheek so she wouldn’t break out into fits of laughter. As it was, she let an uncontrolled snort eke out.

  “It is profane, and I would expect you in particular would find it offensive.”

  She gave him a furrowed-brow glare. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?�
�

  A look of horror spread across his face. “Oh goodness…I’m not saying that you…That’s not what I meant at all. I simply meant that you, a woman, would find the sentiment offensive.”

  She smiled to let him off the hook. “Technically, the message don’t”—she instinctively corrected her English in front of the principal—“doesn’t contain any profanity, and the ‘sentiment’ could be taken in a totally nonoffensive way.” She didn’t believe that for a second. She just wanted to find a quick way back to the sheriff’s office to continue working on Mac’s message.

  “Don’t be naïve, Deputy.” He pushed the door open.

  Dani was somewhat surprised to see three students wearing entirely too-clean Baptist Flats Cougars T-shirts and restraints around their wrists.

  “We caught three of the little vandals, but the others got away.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What don’t you understand, Deputy?”

  “I thought you said the students were from General Webb.”

  “They are. Don’t let the T-shirts fool you. They were purchased at the Walmart not an hour before they got here. The little sneaks Trojan-horsed us. Walked through the front doors completely unnoticed.”

  Dani sighed, realizing she was now stuck processing the paperwork on three teenage idiots for the next few hours. She was tempted to plead with Gardner to let them go, but in the end, she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

  She got only a step farther into the room when her phone rang. She picked up on the second ring. “Yeah. Deputy Savage.”

  “Dani…” Sam Walker let a soft “damn” slip through the phone and said, “I mean Deputy Savage. This is Sam.”

  “Sam, can this wait? I’m—”

  “I got another one.”

  “Another what?”

  “Person, um…dead. A body. And I didn’t twitter no picture out this time. Mostly ’cause this one ain’t as funny as Percy.”

  Chapter 75

  Spivey poured through the notes. He and Nola had completed deciphering Mac’s code. They got mostly fragments of information. The names were easy to compile. There were some seventy-five individuals and organizations that had funneled money to the Gray Rise, mostly through the Patriots for the Second First.

  At the time Mac had put the message together, the Gray Rise had eleven members. She graded them a low-level threat, but the funding was in place to make them high-level if they ever upped their recruitment game. Given the hit on the sheriff’s office and the men he had seen at the church, Spivey assumed their recruiting game had been upped.

  The section about Nolen was cryptic. In Dani’s absence, Spivey had found a few more passages about him, but none of them made sense. There was a reference to a fuckup involving some inventory that had disappeared from a bunker. Whatever it was, Nolen was afraid the inventory could be traced back to him, and Harley had the paper trail for the tracing.

  While Spivey tried to find any hint as to what the inventory was, Nola picked up the catalog that was the first one in the bundle and flipped through the pages. She twisted her lips and clicked her tongue against her cheek, making a repetitive noise that caused Spivey to involuntarily flinch.

  “Do you mind?”

  She didn’t immediately stop because she wasn’t even aware that he was even talking, she was so deep in thought.

  “Hey,” Spivey said, throwing a wadded piece of paper at her.

  She snapped to. “What?”

  “That noise. Stop. It’s annoying as shit.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Sorry. I didn’t even know I was doing it.” Her expression suggested she was wrestling with some thoughts.

  “What?” Spivey said.

  She looked at him, confused. “What what?”

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “It’s…Nothing probably.”

  “Go on.”

  “It’s just that this book, it’s different than the others.”

  “They’re all different. They’re from different schools.”

  “No,” she said, moving closer to show him what she meant. “The way she marked it is different.”

  He grabbed a catalog at random and opened it to a page Mac had marked. “What’s different?”

  “These two marks,” she said, pointing to a spot on the page of the catalog she was holding. “You see how dark they are?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Now look at the marks on that page in your catalog.”

  He did as she requested. “They look lighter.”

  “Not just lighter. They’re neater. They’re straighter. But the lines in this book are messy and crooked.”

  Spivey picked up another catalog and turned to a page with Mac’s markings. They were similar to the catalog he’d just had. A third and fourth catalog yielded the same results.

  Spivey took the catalog from Nola. “She did this one in a hurry. She didn’t have time to be careful.” He hesitated before adding, “She was running out of time.”

  “It was the last one she did.”

  He looked at Nola. “What’s in this catalog? Her message, I mean.”

  Nola moved quickly to the table and snatched up the notes from the catalog. “Something about mothers against guns. Another message about a shipment of weapons. And then just one word. Dog.”

  Unbeknownst to them, Friar had entered the building and made his way to Otis’s doorway. He watched them as if they were a prime-time television show. When his curiosity got the best of him, he asked, “Wha’cha y’all doing?”

  Nola barked out a grunt in surprise, and Spivey quickly twisted around in his chair.

  “Y’all talking about them mothers?”

  “What mothers?” Spivey asked.

  “The ones, you know. They got that group.”

  Spivey gave him a second to elaborate before gesturing with a twirl of his finger to continue. “That group?”

  “The ones against the guns? I don’t want to speak ill on anyone’s momma, but they’re going against the Constitution is what they’re doing.”

  “What are you talking about?” Nola asked.

  Friar rolled his eyes. “I’m talking about the group of mothers that are protesting the law in Tennessee that says we all have a God-given right to carry guns at colleges and schools and such.”

  Spivey stood. “Protesting? Where? When?”

  “Most colleges that I know of. They’ve been doing it pretty much on a weekly basis for the past four…six months or so.”

  Spivey’s mind raced through this new information as he tried to connect it to what they’d learned from Mac’s message.

  “Heard they’re gonna have a big one coming up, though.”

  Spivey turned his focus to Friar.

  “Wha’cha call simultaneous demonstrations at a bunch of schools? Something called the Million Moms Against Guns Day or Million Moms for Gun Safety or something or another. Can’t remember which. Un-American is what I call it.”

  Spivey and Nola looked at each other.

  Chapter 76

  The woman’s skin was coated in a waxy sheen. Her clothes were tattered and torn, covered in dirt, grime, and dried blood. There were several bullet wounds. Dani guessed the one that entered the brain through the forehead was the most merciful. That was the kill shot. The others seemed to be carefully placed to cause pain but not death. Her body seemed to bloat as Dani examined it under the heat of the day.

  “She don’t look familiar,” Sam said with his hand over his nose. “ ’Course she may have looked different entire when she wasn’t all swoll up like that.” He tilted his head and tried to imagine the dead woman’s face without the disfiguration of death. “Guess she could be close to looking like Rachel over at the seed and feed.”

  The dead woman had been tossed haphazardly behind a rusted-out johnboat in a tall patch of grass.

  “Rachel’s alive, Sam,” Dani said. “I saw her yesterday.”

  “Oh, I know. I was just trying to give me
a point to start from. Rachel looks like that Connor woman over at the preschool.”

  “She’s alive, too.”

  “Huh,” Sam said, scratching his head. “I’m all out of look-alikes. Must be a stranger.”

  “I got a good idea who she is.” Dani pulled a pair of latex gloves from her pocket and squatted next to the body. Before putting them on she sighed. The face she was looking at didn’t look anything like the face on the ID. The dead woman had a generic appearance to her that was only vaguely human. The woman on the ID was strong and vibrant. Dani found herself hoping that the dead woman wasn’t Mac. She couldn’t understand why. She didn’t know the woman. If it wasn’t Mac, it was some other poor woman whose family tragically lost a wife, daughter, mother.

  “I gotta say. Finding two bodies on my property is a might unsettling. I got no idea why she decided to up and die on my property.”

  “She didn’t die here,” Dani said, searching the body. To her surprise, the fabric of the pants tore easily as she pulled her hand out of one of the front pockets. “She was buried and forgotten about at one time or another.”

  “Somebody remembered her.”

  “Somebody wanted to make a statement.”

  “That is one messed-up statement. Can’t imagine what they’s trying to say.”

  “They ain’t hiding anymore.” Dani stood and retrieved her phone, hesitating long enough to take in one deep breath before calling Spivey.

  Chapter 77

  Spivey had never mourned the dead. He saw people as necessary inconveniences. The tribe mentality had never appealed to him. He lived among the humans because they were convenient vehicles to the basic necessities in life. Food, water, clothing, shelter, they were acquired at the expense of interactions with members of his own species.

  Mac was a different story. She was the one person he didn’t just tolerate. He wanted her in his life. He felt just the slightest bit more at ease knowing that there would be days, hours, moments ahead when he would get to spend time with her, giving her shit, laughing with her, counseling her. Spivey had one friend in this life, and she now lay lifeless in a patch of tall grass behind a rusted-out johnboat. As much as he hated to admit it, until he’d looked at her bloated body full of bullet holes, he’d let himself hold on to a modicum of hope that he’d find her alive. Hope was not something he usually allowed himself. Hope was for suckers and chumps. He was neither of those things. Hope invariably led to disappointment, and he’d had enough of that in his life.