Tempest of Tennessee (Episode 3): Tempest of Tennessee

by McDonald, Terry

At the top came the scary part of leaving the ladder to climb over the parapet wall bordering the roof. The redeeming feature was that they’d secured the ladder with tie-wire to the metal band capping the wall.

  Standing on the rubber-membrane covering the flat roof, visibility was still bad. I thought to go straight to the front wall, but decided it would be safer to walk the border of the building. The first time there, the snipers were near the corners of the roof but that time was that time and this time might be different.

  I turned right. Afraid of accidentally falling over it, I stayed as far from the low parapet as I could and still see it. The water soaked bib of my cap decided to collapse and droop in front of my face. The cap turned backwards exposed my face to the full quantity of the downpour and blinded me. It forced me to walk with my head tilted down and further restricted how far I could see in front of me.

  When I reached the corner, I almost had a heart attack. So bad was my view that three more steps would have put me over the wall.

  I turned left, walked the end wall and stopped at the front corner. The roof at that corner was lower than other parts of the roof I’d walked. Water pooled to the top of my boots because the rectangle drain hole at the bottom of the parapet couldn’t handle the volume of so much water falling for so long a time.

  I took a deep breath. If there were a guard up there, I’d soon know. I’d never had reason to wonder before, but I hoped the pistol in my hand would function after such a soaking. With the pistol held ready, I moved on.

  Objectively, a guard on duty near the end of the front wall of the huge building was relative. Subjective, I walked a long way, long enough to believe there wasn’t anyone on the roof with me.

  Suddenly, scaring the crap out of me, facing away on a folding chair positioned for targeting the front entrance of the parking lot, sat a sniper wearing yellow rain gear. The noise of the rain covered my approach. Point-blank, I shot the sniper’s temple. The rain muted the sound of it.

  Reaction to my shot turned the sniper’s head so I saw the face… the face of a woman. I guessed her age around thirty. Her mouth was half-open as if to shout or scream, but no sound came. Her AR fell from her hands. She slumped and followed the weapon into the water pooling on the rubber.

  It was hard to strip the chubby young woman of her raingear, but I was freezing. Pulling the hood from her head revealed she had red hair. It also revealed she had piercings; nose rings, and a lip ring. Raindrops washed the blood from the hood. Clothed in the gear, I felt warmth returning.

  I left the flooded rifle with her for retrieval if I was still alive. It took long minutes to complete the walk along the front parapet of the roof. I reckon they figured one guard was plenty for such a day. Except for the dead woman, I was alone.

  I thought to caddy-corner my way back to the ladder, but so bad was the visibility, I fell into an array of black solar panels, breaking a couple from the frames that held them. Except for a fifteen or twenty-foot border, the entire roof was a field of solar panels. That explained why I smelled meat cooking. This Walmart had electric power to run the freezers and coolers. Even so, I was amazed that after all this time they still had frozen meat.

  I backed away from the panels and returned to the parapet wall. At the ladder, the storm, rather than showing intention to abate, it somehow found more water to dump on me. Getting onto the slippery ladder was trickier and scarier than getting off. I’d like to say my legs didn’t shake as before, but they shook more. The unfamiliar plasticized rain suit, slippery and stiff, made it worse. Close to the bottom, I again began to hear the sounds of people. When my feet touched pavement, I wanted to kiss it.

  Sideling along the back wall of the Walmart, the voices grew louder and I began to see a glow. I came to a point where the wall ended and a long loading dock began. I tossed back the yellow hood of the rain jacket to peer past the edge. The roof over the dock blocked the rain and allowed me to see a group of ten or more, mostly men. There were no children among them.

  The light came from Tiki lamps and candles. All of the people were sitting in chairs. From what I could see, many had pistols holstered at their sides. Though there were several open liquor bottles on the table, I watched long enough to determine not all of them were drinking.

  I figured most of whoever they were, were on the dock, but there might be more of em inside. I wanted to open fire, but with only a pistol, it was likely some of them would escape into the vast store. I couldn’t imagine tracking them down inside of that maze.

  I backed from the corner of the dock to think. My thoughts congealed around Billy’s teachings; I needed to go to Lowes.

  I could have walked to Lowes, but the dump truck was about the same distance. I figured with the obscuring rain and no guard on the roof I could cruise undetected past the Walmart.

  Though I was soaked, the rubberized rain gear acted at an insulator. On the walk to the dump truck heat built up inside the raingear and I felt as if I were being steam-cooked.

  At the Lowes, I used extreme caution to enter. Though we were there earlier and found it vacant, I did not assume that it remained so.

  The chemicals I was after were in the lawn and garden area of the store. First, on my mental list was potassium nitrate, K-N-O3. It wasn’t available under that name, but one of the popular products for rotting stumps was pure Potassium Nitrate. Three, five-pound units went into my shopping cart.

  Sulfur, another common garden chemical went into the cart. A bag of softwood barbecue charcoal joined in.

  I had my chemicals. Black powder, the original gunpowder is easy to make. Billy and I made it several times. The proportions of the mix is forgiving, roughly the formula is seventy-five percent Potassium Nitrate, fifteen percent charcoal and ten percent Sulfur.

  I am making a bomb. I’m going to blow those bastards at the Walmart into another dimension, one called death.

  Near the canning supplies, I located a hand grinder. A trip to the pet section gave me several large stainless-steel dog bowls for mixing my explosive components.

  My next foray was to the hardware department. I needed shrapnel, but like the bowls, the metal needed to be non-sparking.

  In the hardware department was an array of drawers that held different types of nuts, bolts and screws. I dumped the contents of a display box and emptied several drawers of brass pieces into it.

  While in the hardware department, I grabbed a hacksaw. Now I needed a shell to confine my explosive. A metal shell would be best, but the practice bombs Billy and I made were what he called “Quick an easy.”

  Stopping first in the paint department for a block of paraffin, quick and easy required a trip into the depths of the store, so deep into it that the pale light from the overcast sky barely penetrated. It was spooky back in the plumbing department.

  What I wanted were short sections of four-inch schedule-40 PVC pipe, a few end caps and PVC glue. The pipe and fittings were easy to locate, but I wandered aisles for several minutes before I found the glue. In the same area, I grabbed a propane torch kit and tossed it into the cart.

  In lumber, I found a short plank to use as part of an easy scale to weigh my chemicals.

  I returned with my cart to the entrance of the outdoor garden center and propped the doors to allow light inside the space. My first chore was to break the charcoal briquets into a size to fit the mouth of the grinder. I had thought stomping them, but that didn’t work. I rushed to the tool center for a hammer.

  With the grinder mounted to a metal shelf, even with the finest grind attachment, the resulting bits of charcoal were too coarse. To remedy the problem, I had to dump the grind onto the concrete floor and finish the job with the hammer.

  Proportionally, I wanted about fifteen pounds of black powder. That would take twelve-point-five pounds of Potassium Nitrate, two-point-five pounds of powdered charcoal and one and a half pounds of Sulfur.

  To weigh these, I made a balance scale with the plank laid over the handle of a shovel. I pos
itioned an empty plastic pail on each end and adjusted them until the board seesawed. Further adjustment found a close balance point. I used one-pound boxes of nails in one of the pails as a counter-weight.

  I poured the measured chemicals into a five-gallon bucket and then added about ten-pounds of shrapnel… thousands of small brass screws, nuts and washers. I stomped the bucket lid closed and began shaking the batch to mix it.

  Time was passing. To reach that point in the construction of my bombs had taken time, mainly because of having to dash for the items like the bucket, nails and hammer. An hour and a half had passed since I left the Walmart. I was worried that a possible replacement for the guard I killed had discovered the body.

  I could have achieved a better mix by dampening the chemicals, but then I’d have to wait for the mix to dry. I shook for ten minutes, long enough for the muscles in my arms to burn.

  To make the shells for the bombs; I wanted two; required cutting two sections of the PVC pipe to six inches. To each section of pipe, I glued an end cap. Then I used the propane torch to heat a nail used to burn a hole through the ends of the remaining two end caps.

  To make a fuse was easy but time consuming. From the bucket, I took a handful of the mix and placed it in a pan for later use. Into another pan went a small chunk of paraffin for melting.

  Turned off the torch and moved it well aside. Into the melted paraffin I dumped the handful of blasting powder, stirred the mix to make slurry. To the warm slurry went two twenty-four-inch lengths of garden twine that I’d folded and twisted to eight inches to make it thicker and to provide crevasses to enable it to pick up the black powder infused wax.

  After rolling the twine to imbed the wax-covered granules, I waited until the wax was cool enough to remove them from the pan and stretch em straight.

  I forced the fuses through the ends of the prepared caps, leaving four inches poking out. After filling the pipe sections with the blasting powder/shrapnel mix and gluing on the fuse caps, I had my bombs. I’d made way too much of the explosive mix.

  I snagged two long-stemmed lighters from a display, ripped away the packaging and checked them to make sure they lit. On my way to the main exit, I stopped at a checkout counter to triple bag my bombs and lighters.

  Checking my watch, over two hours had gone by. Outside I discovered that the rain had slackened, still heavy, but visibility had improved.

  On the way back to the Walmart, the rain fell to a heavy drizzle. At the rear wall of the store, because of going to the Lowes I was approaching the loading dock from the opposite direction. The weakening of the downpour allowed voices to carry further. Nearer to the loading dock, I again smelled the odor of meat cooking.

  Before peering around the corner of the dock, I decided to remove the cumbersome raingear. Warm it was in the gear, cold and wet was I when it was off. While undressing I’d listened to the chatter of many people relaxing and drinking with meat on the barbeque grill.

  Peeking, I discovered that there were a few more people on the dock than before. I was glad to see no children among them.

  I heard nothing of interest until a man said, “We’ll give Rene another hour to prove how tough she is. As soon as you eat, Stovall, you’re up.”

  A woman said, “She’s tougher than any of us. I wouldn’t have lasted an hour up there.”

  A man spoke, “I don’t see the use in having a guard. I’m not looking forward to climbing that slippery ladder. The way it’s raining, no one with any sense is out. Hell, before today it’s been over a week since anyone came.”

  The first man spoke to that. “Yeah, but those today got away, didn’t they?” Now we have to worry about what they might do now that they know we’re here.”

  Another man spoke. “I doubt they’ll be back. There’s too many other places for looting. Why would they bother with a place that shoots at them?”

  While they continued talking, I’d begun crawling along the base of the high dock. The group was concentrated in the middle and that was where I stopped. It wasn’t raining hard enough to harm the waxed fuses. I removed both bombs from the bags, tested a lighter to make sure it lit.

  I lit a fuse. The fuse lit with a fluttering of sparks and burned faster than I thought it would, but I held the bomb until there was an inch left. I wanted an airburst. I heaved the heavy cylinder up and over the edge of the dock.

  That bomb, loud as hell, blew before I got the other one lit. Black acrid smoke rolled over the edge of the dock and people began screaming in pain. Choking on the fumes, I tossed the second bomb. The noise it made didn’t seem as loud. Diminished in numbers by the second bomb, neither did the screams of the injured.

  To escape the noxious fumes, I scrambled to the end of the dock, stood, drew my pistol and peered around the edge to see the damage I’d caused. The heavy load of smoke was fast dissipating.

  Though several people continued to scream and groan, only one person was standing, a woman. She was turning in circles trying with both hands to reach her back. Blood covered the back of her long sleeved sweatshirt. She was bleeding from other wounds, but I reckon the shrapnel that tore into her back had her main attention.

  A man was on his knees. Intermittent screams mixed with cussing came from him. He must have been beneath the bomb when it detonated. Blood streamed from the top of his exposed skull and from his blast exposed shoulders. The sleeves of his jacket hung in tatters.

  Taking a two-hand stance, I shot the woman and then the man. The headshots decked em.

  Other men and women, not many, were twitching and crying, one man screaming over and over, “Oh God, help me.”

  None of the living seemed capable of posing a threat, but climbing onto the dock and walking the blood covered concrete to finish off the wounded, I kept a wary eye on the store entrance to the dock.

  Standing outside of the circle of dead bodies centered around two long folding-tables I saw men and women ranging from their late teens all the way to grey-hairs. I went to the man begging for God’s help. Like all of the ones in sight, his face, head, and shoulders had taken the brunt of the explosive-driven shrapnel.

  In the air, the bomb blew up in front of him. The face that the begging came from was mangled, shredded meat, unrecognizable as human. Hypersonic lead from my pistol aimed for the center of the mess gave him mercy from his suffering.

  Another surviving victim, a man, lay on his back. He must have been facing away from the blast because blood was pooling around his head but his face was unmarred. He was conscious and he spoke to me.

  “Why?”

  “Why? Did you ask me why?”

  “Please don’t kill me.”

  “Crap man, the way you’re bleeding, you’re as good as dead already. I can’t leave you alive behind me and I’m for sure not waiting for you to bleed out.”

  “Bitch.”

  I shot the ‘man of few words’, moved from him to finish two more men that were breathing but unconscious. One of those men had a curved, jagged piece of PVC pipe imbedded in his chest.

  Standing where I had a view of the open doors leading into the receiving area, I surveyed the dead to search for any further signs of life. The brass bits must’ve hit a great many arteries because straight-line streams of blood were as common as puddles.

  I gathered two pistols from the bodies, took a few moments, drew some deep breaths and then walked among the dead for the macabre chore of putting a lump of lead into the heads of them all.

  Walking the bloody kill spot, I counted eighteen bodies. Finished with the finish up, I took another breather and got to wondering about children. With this many grownups, there had to be some. If there were some, then it was very possible there would be grownups with them.

  Though the space was lit with overhead fluorescents, the partier’s had placed several Tiki lamps, I reckon for ambiance. The blast had blown over all but one of the lamps. Fuel ran from the wicked metal cans but there were no fires. I figured the blast blew out the wicks. The standin
g lamp was out as well. I could have lit it and taken it with me into the pitch-black cavern of the receiving area but I wanted the dark.

  I did take a plastic chair with me, one of the few not so destroyed by the bombs as to be unusable. While at the table, a large Ziploc bag caught my attention. Familiar with the stuff because Billy smoked it, it took only a sniff of the punctured bag to know it was Marijuana. Billy liked smoking it; claimed it was as good a painkiller as prescription meds. I retrieved one of the bags used to keep the bombs dry and stuffed the shrapnel riddled bag of pot into it.

  Inside the Walmart, I turned to the right, went a short distance, placed my chair in the darkest of spots and settled in to wait. If there were kids or other people, eventually curiosity would send them my way.

  The dark space was cold and dank. I was wet, soon chilled to the bone. I stood it for thirty minutes, but when my teeth began chattering, I knew I had to move.

  Stealth my middle name, into the dark rear recess of the vast store I went. Toward the front, I could see a faint glow of light coming through the glass of the entranceway. Where I stood, thinking about which way to go, I could barely see my hand held up in front of me. It was close to seven p.m., soon the sun would set and I’d be blind.

  Hey, maybe so, but so would anyone else that might be inside with me. I decided to continue to rely on curiosity. Eventually, someone would venture out to check on the group on the back dock, bringing them to my attention. To reach the back dock they would need light.

  I’d been inside this Walmart many times before the disaster and I knew the general direction for clothing. Watching every move and step, fearful of making a sound in the quiet space, it took a few minutes to reach the racks.

  Now, closer to the front, I could see a bit better. I could also hear the sound of children playing, their voices muted by walls. They were inside the front office. Venturing nearer I could see light outlining the frame of the closed door.

  Nearer still, reloaded pistol in hand, ear pressed against the door, I could make out individual voices. Above the babel of the children a woman said, “Who wants to help put away toys?”