Roadrunner stopped and waited, giving Albert plenty of time to keep interrupting if he wanted and then turned back to the group.
"They're a roving operation, that's why they are here in Buttfuck Indiana which has no strategic value except as a hideout for us terrorist types. They've got that Chinese X10 and four Humvees but they have also deputized a bunch of ass lickers from town and put those police vehicles back on the road. They get a little gasoline once in a while when someone sends a tanker up 150 and fills up the underground tanks at the old gas station across the road from their little headquarters - at Grosevnor's Warehouse, I'm told." He turned his head and looked at Albert. When Albert didn't speak he returned to his briefing.
"It's got a Marathon sign been knocked over and there are three pumps out front. They start up this generator when they want to fill up and that's how they keep it from being pilfered. There is a Humvee crew of five with a .50 cal posted there all the time and they have set up barricades and razor wire about a hundred yards out. It would be tough getting through that wire and all that shit they have set up with the shit we've got. They have flood lights, mortars...I think they might have a TOW. The local pigs come down, pass through an identification check point and then they are allowed to fill up. The .50 is pointed at them the whole time. The crew is three Pakistanis and two human beings."
This brought a titter of laughter and Roadrunner grinned and enjoyed it for a moment.
"They are using the old Provost Police Department units, some sheriff's cars and they have two state police Intruders which they generally keep back. Now as to the jerks inside, they are just off the street and there is not one real cop in the bunch. The soldier boys are sending them out to do the hard stuff, beat up old ladies and steal from refugees and they cruise around the town protecting and serving."
Then the questions started and the meeting lasted about an hour until everyone had pulled every detail from Roadrunner that they could think of. He patiently answered everything and Rumples told him later that Roadrunner had been with Military Intelligence in a Guard Unit out of Biloxi.
"How do these people get up here?" Albert asked.
"Everybody's got stories these days, man and nobody gives a shit. They are just walking around and they end up where they end up."
A day passed with nothing much happening in camp except the interminable games of checkers and some general patrolling of the area. The two deer had been butchered and everyone got a piece, the shooters getting the back straps and the smell of roasting venison permeated the low pressure area between the shoulders of the forest.
The New York trucker had never eaten deer before and he screwed his face up when he first tasted it. Albert showed him how to bleed it with salt water first and then use whatever the MREs provided, whether it was pepper or sugar or mustard or cheese mix to create some kind of medium to cook it in. Wilcox brightened when he tasted it and slipped Albert a three-ounce vial of ethyl alcohol in appreciation.
The following day Albert was restless and started to wonder if he shouldn't just head out on his own. The group, the posse, throng, detachment, contingent, whatever the hell they were calling themselves seemed to be much more interested in sitting around in the woods than going after the authorities. He told Rumples he was thinking of leaving but the other man was able to persuade him to wait.
That evening the proposed attack on Provost was sketched out and opened for discussion. Albert listened and then stood up and announced that he was leaving, that he would not participate in another suicide mission, that his intention was to keep on killing them as long as possible and that he would rather kill a few here and there over time than try risking another frontal assault against .50 cal. machine guns and TOW missiles.
He could feel the hostility being directed at him through the night air and instinctively felt for his pistol.
"Except if you get picked up what happens?" Mayflower asked.
Albert came a little closer into the firelight and looked at Mayflower directly and told him to "Suck my dick."
Mayflower started to rise and Albert moved on him and threw a hard kick into his throat, sending the big man gasping and sprawling to the ground, clutching his neck. Even Rumples was surprised and Albert looked hard at him next, knowing that half a dozen weapons were already pointed at him and they would shoot him at Rumple's nod.
"Go ahead," Albert said. "That fat fuck says another thing to me, I will slit his fuckin throat."
Rumples relaxed and it cued the others to stand down. Two men helped Mayflower to his feet and took him back to his tent.
"I been killing these bastards without your help for quite a while and I intend to keep killing them until they kill me. I'm not going to surrender to them or quit or anything else. I'm not stupid enough to believe anything they say. You fuck heads worry about yourselves."
He collected his kit but didn't bother with the tent. No one said anything as he walked out the front door of the camp. He started his truck and without waiting further, drove back down the logging road. Half an hour later he was running along the Ninth Line that ran past Magneson's farm and hit Highway 61 a mile north of town. He stopped at Magneson's and parked behind his barn. It was a fitful night with no sleep and when dawn finally arrived he gratefully left the truck.
The barn was much as he'd last seen it. The two vehicles remained, though their gasoline had been taken. The hand tools and chains and farm implements remained. Their bones had been scattered and he found Irene's skull under a wheel barrow. Outside, the area around the barn was overgrown and appeared not to have been driven on or maybe even walked on for more than a month. But it was too exposed to air attack and he couldn't hide his truck there. He followed the old cattle trail across the meadow to the west and entered a ten-acre woodlot that had been trampled by generations of beef cattle getting out of the sun or wind. He could probably cut his way in to the near clearing and hide there, at least until the fall. If they were using heat signatures there was no place to hide anyway. If they were simply doing aerial surveillance he might get away with it. He could even make a fire at night. It's easier to hide the flames at night than it is to hide smoke during the day.
It took a couple of hours to push his way through into the heart of the knoll where he was able to set up a campsite in a partially caved sink-hole that gave him shelter on three sides. He covered the truck with branches and immediately built a lean-to using a camouflage tarp. He would check out Magneson’s house later for anything useful he could bring back. Now he needed sleep because he already decided where he would attack first.
According to Roadrunner's briefing the other night, the UN Control Unit, as it identified itself along with mother's little helpers Blacklander and the ATF and the new and improved local constabulary had two jobs: Confiscate weapons and wipe out any resistance, whether it was militia groups, criminal gangs or the daunting lone wolves they most feared. The main government forces were marching Napoleonically across the country battling large, organized break-away Guard units that had, on a state by state basis refused to kill the people they had signed up to protect.
They were aiming to close the pincer around the New York and Washington DC areas on one side of the continent and Los Angeles on the other side before the new year. Along the way, they eliminated any civilian organizations attempting to set up even temporary limited government and replaced them with the carefully recruited and indoctrinated "patriots" from what was left of FEMA and Homeland Security. On the policing side, these new minions once again deputized anyone willing to sign a loyalty oath and awarded carte blanch powers to precisely those individuals who were temperamentally and constitutionally unfit to hold office or positions of authority.
Albert knew the road from Ninth to Provost about as well as anyone and Highway 61 , flat and straight most of the way, turned around an old electric transfer station that serviced the now defunct railroad. It was here that the police would park for a nap or a blow job or pick up their cut from whatever contraband w
as the going concern of the moment. They had been repeatedly warned how dangerous it could be but these fellows had seen the way people cattled up at the sight of them and it made them giggle with a near-sexual delight.
Albert moved in daylight, this time, wending his way across fields and through the woodlots, along the banks of the old rail line and under the ancient trestle across the Emit River that had been out of service for fifty years and came in the back way to the electric transfer station where he got in through a window without breaking any glass and crawled under a defunct transformer and waited for night. Just as he suspected, a pair of traders showed up and walked into the old building through the front door. The made a cursory check of the building and he saw the beam of their flashlight strike the wall just over his head, linger and move on. They talked quietly for a while and then the headlights of the patrol vehicle jammed the dirty front windows and they went outside.
He heard the door close and he crawled out from under the transformer, his bad leg pulsing and aching. From cover he could see them leaning down and talking to the driver and then one of them stood up and started back to the building.
Albert felt his heart start its locomotive pounding and he knew there was no time to get back under cover. He moved to the door and took out his Emerson and waited, breathing regularly, long, deep breaths, but regularly, and gripped the knife just as Lenny had showed him, his right hand circling the handle and the blade streaking out past his thumb.
The door opened a few inches and some of the ambient light poured in and then the door stopped and he could see the hand on the handle. Then the man pushed the door all the way open and stepped once, twice, having found his flashlight. The many may have heard the rush of air and maybe even saw the flash of the blade scything across his periphery. It slides right through the skin, through the curling layers of subcutaneous fat, parting the thin wrap of muscle, twisting a little, like a viper striking into a cleave in the rocks, drinking the blood as it shatters the bone and with one final lunge sinks into the palpating thunder of the heart.
The man grunted and his eyes seemed to swell and then cracked and he fell into Albert's arms, the knife buried right to the taped hilt in his chest. Albert lowered him quietly and then took his suppressed .22 and after one moment of reflection walked out and up to the man still talking through the window. The deputy saw him coming and the man in the window half turned when the little swarm of .22 Long rifle FMJ bees buzzed against his cheek and then his eye and then the cheek again and he slipped to the ground. Albert looked in the window.
The fool had turned off his vehicle and he reached for the key and then looked at Albert, his face gaunt and his mouth open. It was Karl Ogle. The barber who had cut Albert's hair for years was sitting in the police car wearing some sort of cobbled uniform and a brown hat with a badge on the peak. They were simultaneously surprised and Karl said: "Albert!" and Albert looked at him and said not unfriendly and not apologetic but simply, "Hi Karl," and then shot him in the face. Karl fell back against the door.
Albert walked around to the driver side and opened the door and allowed Karl to fall half-way out, his head clunking on the asphalt. The radio on the seat beside him crackled and someone asked for a report. There was silence and then the voice came on again. Albert pressed the transmit button and said: "Help." And dropped the radio. Then he turned the headlights on but not the motor and went back into the building and retrieved his kit.
He set the lever on a pipe bomb and placed it between Karl's back and the seat. As soon as they tried to move him, the lever would spring and the contact would be made and the ten inches of crosshatched and nail-filled explosive would detonate, killing anybody within eight or ten feet of it's reach.
Albert took up a position at the corner of the building, out of the reach of the lights but with a one hundred foot shot of the vehicle and the area around it. He waited.
It took only a few minutes and he saw three sets of headlights racing up Highway 61 towards the electric station, cherries strobing and sirens in full howl, though there was no one to get out of the way. It was three police vehicles but no Humvee and no UN troops.
They scrambled to a stop and three men got out holding rifles and pointing them at the station.
"He's probably still in there," someone said.
Albert watched as one of the cops came around Ogle's car and stopped when he saw the other body.
"Look at this," he said.
The two others hiding behind their car doors seemed to forget the danger of the building and they came around to look at the dead man.
"Fuck," one of them said.
That was the last thing he said before Albert started shooting. He carefully aimed and fired a short burst into the speaker and then followed each of the other two as they tried to get away, sending short, concentrated streams of lead slug into each of them. It took fifteen seconds and they were all dead. Albert came out from behind the building and checked each man to be sure but they were all dead. They had army issue M16s and he collected them all and managed to find a dozen magazines among them. Their handguns were junk and he left them. Their radios crackled repeatedly, only this time he did not reply. He set another pipe bomb in the glove box of one of the other vehicles and then he booby-trapped the front door of the station. The first man would walk into a cloud of steel shards and nail heads and glass flying towards him at about eight hundred feet per second.
He needed cover if he wanted to watch the show. North of the site the road switched back and the woods offered some protection. It was only a hundred yards or so and if they spotted him he wouldn't get away. But it was worth the risk and he took his kit and crossed the road to the west side and followed it to the point where it started to curve and there he ducked down through the ditch and up the other side into the tree line. He set up his rifle, laid out five full magazines and placed the .45 on a flat piece of limestone. There was one pipe bomb left and he had decided he'd arm it and then lie down on it if it looked like they were going to get him. His calm about it wasn't that surprising. There was no alternative. Surrender was not an option; these guys didn't take prisoners. They had sounded the Deguello. Then he started to tear up again, inexplicably, the water running down his face. It was simple emotion, a fact that he didn't understand and had nothing to do with fear or sadness. He really wasn't worried about dying except that it would mean he couldn't keep killing them.
He expected the two Humvees but he was a little surprised by the arrival of the Z10, though it's huge searchlight would be of some use. It hovered over the scene, whipping up the gravel and bending the new grass while eight heavily armed troops broke from the Humvees and began a traditional search operation of the immediate area.
They were convinced the building was still occupied and they plastered themselves against it and one man tossed a hand grenade at the window overlooking the highway. But the glass was wired safety glass and the grenade bounced back and the soldiers all flew in different directions and hit the ground. A few seconds later the grenade went off but no one was injured.
Albert was laughing so hard he couldn't see properly. He shook and shook and tears flooded from his eyes and he had to open his mouth to breathe.
The soldiers all pulled back after that and stood behind their Humvees while the Z10 lined up a shot and then sent a Hellfire into the building which detonated in a resounding thud and flash that blew the windows out but the 1930s limestone block held pretty well and there was no collapse. The explosion had probably blown the door out, Albert guessed and wasted his pipe bomb. But the show had been a winner so far. He was still laughing when they entered the building and he saw their flashlights playing around the walls. They emerged and wandered over to the bodies outside, everything ringed in a perfect circle of brilliant light from the helicopter. They were more professional as they turned over two of the three men on the ground, but finding nothing, the third man was left untouched.
The troop leader shone his flashlight on
Karl Ogle's body and inside the car and then ordered two of the men to remove it. They grabbed Ogle by the shoulders and pulled him but his leg was caught by the steering wheel so one of the men reached inside and freed it and then they pulled again and Albert's pipe bomb exploded slaughtering both of them in a steel rain and ripping Karl's body in two. He could hear them screaming instructions and a machine gunner on one of the Humvees inexplicably opened on the smoking ruins of the electric building and swept a wide area all the way around to the empty farm fields, the tracers cutting through the night in beautiful green arcs.
The rest of them climbed back into their vehicles leaving the police cars untouched. They were gone in thirty seconds. The Z10 hovered a few moments and then backed away a few hundred feet. It's machine guns opened up on the police cars for about a minute before it turned and left as well.
The following day, The Control Unit arrested twenty people at random and accused them of assisting the terrorists who had attacked deputies and soldiers doing their duty. Those arrested included a sixteen year old boy and his mother, a demented bag-lady in her sixties and one woman who had just arrived in Provost after walking to Indiana from Nebraska and had called on the UN post looking for food.
The head of the UN unit was an English Captain who had received some training in Northern Ireland before being transferred to the United Nations International Peace Army.
He found the sixteen-year-old the most interesting and had him suspended with his hands drawn behind his back from a lamppost, his feet dangling an inch from the ground. The strain pulled his shoulders out of their sockets. He wept constantly and his mother begged and howled at the captain's feet to let him go. She was required to observe and refused to watch so the captain had her head taped to a board and the board nailed to a chair but then she closed her eyes, so he was forced to remove her eyelids with a razor blade. The boy confessed and the captain thanked him.
"I don't want to do these things," the Captain said. "But we must have order. We cannot allow this great civilization to descend into barbarity. We must resist the tendency to make judgments we are not qualified to make!"
As Wind in Dry Grass Page 35
