Black Autumn

by Jeff Kirkham

  The United States military suffered from the same disease. The rank and file of the branches of the military, while good folks, were professionals. They weren’t fanatics, especially the POGs—People Other Than Grunts—the supply and support soldiers and sailors that made up the bulk of the U.S. forces. The POGs often enlisted in the military for free college tuition and a solid paycheck. If all the upsides of being in the military got sketchy, both the POGs and the grunts would start drifting away. Apparently, that’s exactly what had happened; the military had largely vanished like a hard-drinking party at clean-up time.

  Chad was lost in thought, scanning through the AM band and driving like a bat out of hell, when he rounded a bend outside Laramie, Wyoming. As the corner opened up, something in the middle of the road flashed onto his NVGs. Chad slammed on the brakes and skidded to the outside of the curve, ass-first. He felt the Jeep clip the obstacle and then slide off the road, bouncing over the brush until the vehicle lurched to a stop.

  He jumped out of the Jeep with his 1911 at the ready and scrambled up the embankment. In the middle of the gravel road, a boy lay curled up and moaning. Chad didn’t immediately move to assist, running down the road first, then crossing far below the injured boy. Once he was confident he hadn’t fallen into a trap, Chad approached, still ready for a surprise gunfight.

  The boy looked fuzzy in the NVGs since Chad hadn’t focused them down yet. He had to stay ready, so he was caught in a pickle between checking the boy for weapons and readying himself for an ambush from the shadows. After a second, he turned the knob, caught a quick visual of the boy and returned the NVGs to an infinite focus. The boy had nothing on him resembling a gun and there was no obvious trauma.

  “You okay, kid?” Chad scanned the horizon for threats.

  “Yes. I think maybe,” the boy said with a Hispanic accent.

  “What’re you doing in the middle of the road?”

  “I walk to Evanston where my family lives.”

  “The hell you are,” Chad replied with a laugh. “That’s three hundred miles from here.”

  “I go to Evanston.”

  “Okay,” Chad relented. “Come with me to my Jeep. I don’t want to check you in the middle of the road. Can you walk?”

  “I think I can walk.” Chad helped the boy up and they hobbled over to his Jeep.

  The boy wasn’t screaming in pain. He probably wouldn’t need medical attention, as though there was such a thing as “medical attention” anymore.

  “What’s happening out there?” Audrey asked as they approached.

  “I sort of hit someone on the road.”

  Chad had pulled all the fuses from the dome lights, so Audrey had to wait in the dark. “You either hit someone or you didn’t. Are they okay?”

  “I think so. What’s your name?”

  “My name is Pacheco.”

  Chad focused down his NVG and fired up the IR illuminator, like an invisible flashlight on his NVGs. “Where are you hurt?”

  “My leg is hurt.” Pacheco unbuckled his pants and stepped around to the front fender where the lady couldn’t see him. Chad followed. Pacheco pulled his pants down. There was a scrape and one hell of a bruise forming, but there didn’t seem to be any major damage.

  “Anywhere else?” Chad asked.

  “No, just my leg hurt.” Pacheco touched his leg and winced.

  “Well, stop poking it.” Chad laughed, shaking off the anxiety. “You want a ride to Evanston?”

  “A ride? Yes.” Pacheco nodded. Now that he could see him better, Chad figured the boy was older than he’d initially figured, more like a young man.

  “How old are you?” Chad asked out of curiosity.

  “I’m eighteen years old.”

  “And what are you doing way out here, walking in the night?”

  Pacheco gave him a quizzical look.

  “I mean, why are you so far from your family?”

  “I work as cowboy… vaquero. I work on the cows.”

  “Right on, Pacheco. Hop in the back.” Chad tilted his seat forward and motioned for Pacheco to get in.

  Chad stole a glance at Audrey in the passenger seat. If she had an opinion about their new travel companion, she wasn’t saying.

  “Amigo,” Chad leaned in toward the boy, “can I look through your bag?” He pantomimed taking Pacheco’s pack and pawing through it.

  “Okay.” Pacheco handed him the backpack.

  Chad found a little water, a small pocketknife, some food wrapped in tinfoil and personal papers: a birth certificate from Honduras, a state-issued ID card from Wyoming, some pay stubs and some letters. Chad palmed the pocketknife and slipped it into his own pocket.

  “No guns?” Chad asked, making the universal symbol for gun with his thumb and finger.

  “No. No guns.” Pacheco shook his head.

  “Okay, then. Good. Let’s hit the road.” Chad hopped in and steered the Jeep in and around a clump of bushes and bounded back up onto the highway.

  They drove for a while, maintaining almost forty miles an hour blacked out. Chad made a few educated guesses with the map, which turned into major mistakes. By the time Chad admitted to himself he had taken them down the wrong road, they had gone twenty-five miles in the opposite direction.

  “Damnit!” Chad cursed as he sat alongside the road, trying to bend the map into giving him a different answer. Apparently, he had headed north almost to the town of Lookout, which put him a long-ass way from where he wanted to be.

  Getting lost is a lot more frustrating when gas is scarce, Chad realized.

  “Screw it.” Chad did a messy U-turn and headed back. From here on out, he was going to stay on the interstate. Maybe it wouldn’t be so damned confusing.

  • • •

  “Son of a bitch!” Chad swore for the twentieth time that night. Dawn approached and he had propped his NVGs up and out of the way on his Team Wendy helmet. Instead, he peered through his father-in-law’s binoculars. A mile ahead, a roadblock crossed both sides of the interstate.

  Apparently, the enterprising men of Elk Mountain, Wyoming were stopping cars and collecting tolls. Elk Mountain sat a good mile off the interstate, so this roadblock wasn’t designed to protect the town. This was post-Apocalypse capitalism in action.

  The roadblock spanned both sides of the bridge over the Medicine Bow River. It had been strategically located so nobody could drive around it. The map showed no side roads circumventing the blockade, which made sense since the Medicine Bow River was seventy yards wide and necessitated a serious bridge.

  The problem with toll booths these days, Chad reminded himself, is you don’t know if they’ll collect a dollar or collect your life.

  Chad drove a couple of miles away from the roadblock, backtracking on the interstate, looking for a place to bed down for the morning. They got off the blacktop and ran dirt roads along the river until they found a remote hidey-hole where Chad could sleep.

  Too exhausted to think about the roadblock, he closed his eyes and his head lolled against the cold of the driver’s side window. His sleep-addled mind pecked at the problem of the roadblock. What he needed was another SEAL. With two operators, he could have some fun with that roadblock. The delirium of sleep began to carry him away and his mind broke free.

  Maybe I could make another SEAL, he confabulated as he slipped away, slumped over in his seat.

  • • •

  “Buenos dias.” Pacheco’s face peered in through the driver’s side window.

  Audrey and Sam were already outside, playing by the river.

  Chad opened the door and rolled out of the Jeep, his legs stiff. “Buenos dias, amigo.”

  Chad was one of those guys who thought every idea that crossed his mind popped into his head God-dappled and inspired. He returned to his nighttime bout of inspiration like a retriever going for his tennis ball.

  “Pacheco, you want to become a Navy SEAL?” Chad didn’t talk much but, when he did, he liked to amuse himself.

&n
bsp; Pacheco raised his eyebrows, understanding the words but not the meaning.

  “You want to become an American operator? Shoot bad guys? Be very good soldier?”

  “Ahh.” Pacheco lit up. “Navy SEAL. Best soldier. Charlie Sheen.”

  Chad tossed his head back and laughed. “Yeah, Charlie Sheen… I make you like Charlie Sheen today. Okay?” He could see this made no sense to the boy, but the kid looked game for anything.

  “I’m a Navy SEAL,” Chad said, louder than necessary.

  Pacheco’s expression morphed into disbelief. “You are no Navy SEAL. ¿De veres? For real?”

  Chad laughed again. “I am a Navy SEAL.” He flexed his biceps. “See. Badass.”

  Pacheco chuckled and pretended to believe him. “Okay. You are Navy SEAL. Maybe.”

  Chad went through a mental inventory of everything he used to teach in BUD/S—the Navy SEAL selection course. But BUD/S wasn’t really training. It had been selection. Selection found guys with the “right stuff” to be SEALs, not to train them per se. He supposed he had already completed the selection process by running this kid over in the first place.

  Now that he thought about it, what he really needed right now was a sniper. Maybe he would train Pacheco on that first.

  Chad dug out the 30-06 and set aside some shells.

  “You learn to shoot with these.” Chad held up the shells. “You shoot rifle before?”

  Pacheco shook his head.

  “I teach you.”

  They shot most of the shells in the box, leaving only six rounds. Pacheco took to shooting like a woman, and Chad had taught many women. Women had no ego tied up in the process, unlike men. They listened to every bit of instruction and applied that instruction relentlessly.

  Ninety-nine percent of accuracy, especially with a long rifle, boiled down to trigger squeeze. If the shooter achieved a surprise break—where the pressure increased incrementally on the trigger until the gun fired—then the shot would be good. If the shooter “mashed” the trigger, like snapping his fingers, the shot would go wide of the target every time.

  Pacheco picked up right away on shooting dead calm. He was a natural at controlling the aggression response that often proceeded trigger mash. The boy performed so well Chad kept moving the target farther and farther, picking out distant rocks for Pacheco to bust. Before they knew it, they had blown through most of their ammo.

  The last watermelon-sized boulder “killed” by Pacheco was almost five hundred yards away. Secretly, Chad had doubts he could make the shot himself.

  Chad clapped with exuberance. “Muy bueno, amigo! You are a sniper.”

  Pacheco’s grin looked like it might break his face.

  “I think you like to shoot, huh?”

  “Yes. Shooting is good.”

  “You ready for a fight? With the rifle?”

  “I help you fight. With this.” Pacheco held up the 30-06.

  We’ll see, Chad thought. Busting rocks is a lot different than busting men. Anyone can kill a rock.

  • • •

  Around 2:00 a.m., Chad and Pacheco parked alongside the road, and jogged the last mile to the bridge with the roadblock. They had taken plenty of time to discuss the plan beforehand, not moving out until Chad was convinced Pacheco understood exactly what he was supposed to do.

  They could see the floodlight illuminating the barricade and could hear the generator humming. Without any further instruction, Pacheco broke right and slid down the embankment, wading into the deep grass. He set a course toward the Medicine Bow River several hundred yards downstream from the bridge.

  Chad carefully picked apart the roadblock with his NVGs. Nothing had changed from the night before. A jumble of beat-up trucks, parked ass to nose, blocked all four lanes of the freeway in two rows, creating a gap in between. In the gap, the country boys had lined up a row of plastic camping chairs, each with its own cooler. Three of the chairs were occupied by the graveyard shift, young lads who had no doubt drawn the short straws of dark and cold night duty.

  Good. Chad hoped they were comfy in those chairs.

  Behind the chairs and coolers, they had parked a Chevy Blazer off the side of the road. The vehicle must have been used to shuttle back and forth between town and the roadblock. All three men sat in the lawn chairs, talking smack and telling tales, probably trying to stay awake.

  Their operational procedure, apparently, was to wait until a car came into view, then step up to the barricade. Until such time, they defaulted to country-time lawn chair routine: sitting around with guns slung across their laps, downing Pabst Blue Ribbon.

  The bridge made a perfect chokepoint. Nobody could drive around the roadblock. The Medicine Bow River presented an absolute barrier to vehicles.

  However, as Chad thought about it from the perspective of an assaulter, the bridge made the guards sitting ducks. The guards couldn’t counter-flank. In a fight, the local yokels would have to win a head-on gunfight against an approaching enemy. While the guards could hide behind the old pickup trucks, those approaching could hide behind their own cars, too, evening the odds. The guards had only one direction to retreat, and that would leave them running down the middle of an open road, tucking tail back to the Chevy Blazer.

  The most lethal disadvantage of their roadblock was the same for any roadblock: it inspired false confidence. Anyone willing to swim the Medicine Bow River could come up behind the guards and slit their throats. They were betting their lives on human nature, that an opponent would take the lazy path.

  Little did the local boys know they would be squaring off with one-and-a-half Navy SEALs. Navy SEALs didn’t mind getting wet, so long as they got to kill or screw someone afterward.

  Liking what he saw at the barricade, Chad committed to the assault, breaking to the left and sliding down the embankment. Before slipping into the river, Chad pulled a pair of Ziploc bags out of his pocket and sealed up his Rob Leatham 1911 handgun and five magazines. He felt confident the water wouldn’t screw up the ammo and he knew it wouldn’t hurt the gun, but a gunfight was the wrong time to find out your ammo sucked.

  He wore his bump helmet, and he had clipped his NVGs to it. He had swum a cumulative total of about fifty miles in his life doing the Navy SEAL sidestroke, and there was zero chance Chad would get his helmet and NVGs wet while crossing.

  The Medicine Bow ran smooth, brown and calm, and Chad made short work of paddling across. He swam directly under the trestles of the bridge, completely hidden from sight.

  On the other side of the interstate, Pacheco crossed the same river, but Chad wasn’t worried. He had made the boy test-swim the river a couple of times that day, just to make sure he wouldn’t drown. Pacheco did fine. He had given the boy double garbage bags to seal up his rifle and the ammo, mostly worried about the optic getting wet.

  Chad climbed onto a boulder, unwrapped his handgun, and returned the mags to his now-soaked chest rig. Not wanting to jinx the mission by littering, Chad folded up the Ziplocs and tucked them into an empty mag pouch.

  The embankment under the bridge was all sharp boulders, and he quietly climbed up, waiting just below the guardrail. The plan was for Chad to spring into action as soon as Pacheco gave the signal.

  Several minutes later, right on cue, the floodlight exploded in a shower of glass. The light winked out. A half-second later, the 30-06 boomed.

  Chad sprinted for the Chevy Blazer.

  The local boys sprang to their feet with the explosion. They jumped behind the old trucks, pointing their guns up the interstate, the opposite direction from Chad.

  Chad reached the Blazer and crouched behind the front wheel, unnoticed by the local boys. He smiled big, getting that rush when he “back-doored” someone and they didn’t know it yet. The boys had their backs to him. His only concern was that Pacheco might shoot him accidentally—or the even less likely possibility that the shitkickers had some kind of overwatch guy with a long rifle covering the roadblock from a distance.

  Chad f
igured the country boys were in Pacheco’s scope, their denim-clad asses filling his reticle. By swimming the river, both Chad and the boy had these guys dead to rights on the wrong side of their roadblock. The only thing left was the crying.

  Chad stood up behind the engine block of the Chevy Blazer and took his time formulating what he would say. He didn’t like to rush a sweet coup de grâce.

  “If you turn around, I’m going to shoot you another asshole, right through your Wranglers.”

  Of course, the dumbest one of the bunch turned around, startled.

  Boom!

  Chad’s 1911 punched a hole in the guy’s shoulder, deliberately hitting him off-center.

  “Stay put, dumb ass!” Chad yelled. The guy he’d shot whimpered loudly.

  “Shut up, numb nuts. Put your guns down on the asphalt and show me your hands over your heads.”

  The boys complied.

  As soon as they were disarmed, Chad glanced over his shoulder, checking his six. About seventy yards down the road, he saw a shadow scamper across the pavement—Pacheco, moving to cover the road from town in case someone heard the shots and came to investigate.

  Navy SEAL material, Chad smiled. The boy had just needed a bad-ass instructor.

  “Step away from the roadblock backward and stand in front of your lawn chairs.” The cowboys shuffled back toward the chairs. “Keep your hands straight up, shitkickers. Look straight forward. Don’t look at me.”

  Chad walked behind and checked them one at a time for other weapons, finding a handgun and a knife on all but the guy he’d shot.

  “Now sit your asses down.” The guy who’d been shot squealed as he flopped into the chair.