Rockabilly Limbo

by William W. Johnstone

  Jack fought back the nausea as the camp exploded in gunfire. The young man whirled around at a movement behind him. He lowered the muzzle of the shotgun when he saw it was Anne’s father. “She’s all right,” Jack assured the man. “She’s under this truck.”

  “Stay with her,” the man said.

  Jack nodded his head, then realized Anne’s father could not see the gesture in the early morning darkness. “Don’t worry about her.”

  The fight at the camp lasted less than two minutes. The attackers soon realized they were up against a heavily armed band of people, and gave it up, those able to do so slipping silently away. The eastern edges of the horizon were turning silver as dawn approached.

  “Everybody all right?” Jim Deaton called.

  No one had been hurt.

  “Lucky again,” Cole muttered, just as Gary was dragging in one of the attackers. He threw the man on the ground at Cole’s feet.

  Hank turned on a flashlight and shined the beam at the man.

  “Hell,” Pete King said, walking up. “He’s just a kid.”

  “With a big gun,” Gary added.

  “We’ve got half a dozen wounded out here,” Gene called from the edge of the camp. “What do you want to do with them?”

  “Nothing,” Cole said. “Just watch them until we can pack up and get gone.”

  “That’s barbaric!” Carol Swift said.

  Cole ignored her and stared down at the young man on the ground. “What group do you represent?”

  “Screw you, Pops!” the punk popped back. “You ain’t never gonna make it out of this county.”

  Cole shrugged his shoulders. “Suit yourself, sonny boy.” He looked around him in the slowly gathering light. “Pack it up, people. Let’s get out of here.”

  “I am not leaving these wounded boys here unattended!” Carol practically screamed the words.

  “Then stay here with them.” Cole stared at her for a moment. “I sure as hell won’t try to stop you.” He walked over to his Bronco and lowered the tailgate. Katti had already rolled up their sleeping bags.

  Carol Swift huddled briefly with Jules Von Housen and Henry Pettey.

  “I think they’re going to leave us,” Katti whispered to Cole, cutting her eyes to the reporters.

  “Good. I’m tired of listening to them whine.”

  “One of the wounded just died,” Gene Rockland said, walking up.

  “The other wounded?” Cole asked.

  “Some serious, some just nicked.”

  “You think I’m wrong in leaving them, Gene?”

  “No,” the aging hippie said. “Hell, we can’t stay here and take care of them. We don’t have room to take them with us, even if I wanted to, which I don’t. I don’t see that we have any choice in the matter.”

  It was light enough to see clearly now, and the group watched as Carol and Jules and Henry began unloading their gear from the vehicles.

  “In a very small way I feel sorry for them,” Gene spoke the words softly. “Their world has been shattered and will never be the way it was.”

  Gene’s wife walked over to them, carrying rolled-up sleeping bags. She cut her eyes to the reporters. “They won’t make it out here,” she opined.

  “You feel sorry for them?” Gene asked her.

  “No,” she responded without hesitation. “Over the weeks I’ve talked at length with all of them. I don’t agree with anything they have to say about crime, punishment, morals, values, religion, nothing. They’re ignorant of the real world. Idealists and dreamers. They’ve never had to grub for anything. They won’t last seventy-two hours out here.”

  Cole took the sleeping bags from Katti and stowed them in the rear compartment of the Bronco. “Let’s get out of here.”

  * * *

  Laura Lordan and Cindy Callander had nothing to say about their colleagues’ decision to stay behind. But from the expression on their faces, it was easy to see they both thought the decision to be a bad one.

  As the convoy pulled away, some wondered if they would ever see the reporters again. Cole, being a man who didn’t particularly like network reporters (he’d been on the verbal finger-pointing, accusatory, hanky-stomping end of one of their weepy pieces after a shooting he’d been involved in years back), didn’t give a good goddamn if he ever saw any of them again. Two punks had come at him with knives, at two o’clock in the morning, in a dark alley behind the liquor store they’d broken into. A shooting board had called it a righteous shooting and the grand jury wouldn’t even look at it. But left-leaning liberals believe that police officers are supposed to have super-human eyesight and be such expert marksmen (excuse me, markspersons) that they are able to shoot perps in the knee, while said perpetrators are charging at them out of the shadows with very sharp knives in their precious little hands.

  Cole didn’t like liberal reporters or punks. He didn’t think there was that much difference between the two.

  The former just had their heads stuck up their asses further than the latter.

  * * *

  The group encountered no trouble the rest of that day. They passed through small towns, but to their surprise, the towns appeared, at least on the surface, to be untouched by any violence. Cole was curious about that and his curiosity finally got the best of him. At a town on the east side of a huge lake, Cole halted the convoy on the main drag of town and got out, after getting on the radio and telling the others what he was going to do and to stay ready for trouble. He hesitated, then took off his web belt with holster and 9 mm and laid it on the front seat.

  “Are you crazy?” Katti asked.

  “I may be. But look around you. No one in the town is carrying any sort of weapon. The last few towns we’ve passed through showed no signs of any fighting. My God, look there, Katti! It’s a cop just walking his beat. Heading this way and talking to people. Stay loose. Here I go.”

  Cole walked up to the officer and said, “Excuse me, Officer. I’d like to ask you a question if I may.”

  “Sure, mister,” the cop replied with a friendly smile. “What can I do for you?”

  Cole chuckled. Took off his ball cap and scratched his head. The badge on the cop’s chest read: CHIEF OF POLICE. “Officer . . . the whole country is in chaos. The government, for all practical purposes, is not functioning. Just at dawn today, we were attacked and had to fight our way clear. But for the past hour, every town we’ve passed through in this area seems to be untouched by the insanity. It’s . . . well, unreal.”

  The cop smiled, took off his hat, and waved it in the air. “It’s okay, boys,” he shouted. “These folks are all right. Take it easy now.”

  Cole did a slow 360; several hundred armed men had suddenly appeared on the rooftops of the buildings on main street.

  The cop said, “We’ve been following the progress of your little convoy for the past twenty-five miles, sir.”

  “Hey, Chief!” a man who had just stepped out of a hardware store called. “I know who these two ladies are. They’re network reporters.”

  “Laura Lordan and Cindy Callander,” Cole said. “They were held prisoner over in East Tennessee by a bunch of militiamen headed by a nu ... ah, man called Ely Worthingham.” Cole suddenly realized that this might be some sort of trap, and until he was sure of his footing, he’d better watch his words. “We just got out of Memphis in the nick of time. It’s a war zone there.”

  “So is Little Rock,” the chief said. “But not in this county. It flared here, but we put it down. Real hard.”

  “Chief Hightower!” a woman called from the door of a cafe whose sign proclaimed HOME COOKIN’ HERE. “These folks look like they’ve been doin’ some hard travelin’. I bet they’d like a hot meal. Now where are your manners?”

  The chief chuckled. “Welcome to our little community, mister. You can go back and get your pistol. Strap it on if it makes you feel better. Come to think of it, that might be a good idea. The towns in the two-county area are secure, but gangs of all types are ro
aming the countryside. Then get yourselves a good hot meal and we’ll talk. Miss Lilly is the best cook in the county.” He leaned forward and Cole tensed. The chief whispered, “But don’t eat the pecan pie. It’s too damn rich for my taste.”

  Fourteen

  The food was delicious, and there was plenty of it. Hank smiled as he bit into a hot dinner roll. “Heaven,” he said.

  The mayor, members of the town council, the county sheriff, and a state senator were among those who had gathered at the cafe. From listening to shortwave radio, they all knew what had happened on the outside, but this was different: these folks had been there . . . and lived to tell about it.

  But Cole and his group were more interested in learning just how this community had dealt with the madness and had come out of it virtually unscathed.

  “We just put it down hard,” the county sheriff said. “Before it could get started. I ... ah ...” he sighed in painful remembrance. “I had to shoot my chief deputy. Me and Jerry had been friends since high school. He just went wild the morning it all started.”

  “Of course,” the mayor picked it up, “Gene wasn’t alone by any means. We know the exact number of people who became . . . infected, or whatever you want to call it. We buried many of them,” he added grimly. “Good friends and family members all. It was . . . not pleasant for any of us.”

  The state senator said, “We didn’t pay much attention to legal technicalities or civil rights or past Supreme Court decisions when it started, Mr. Younger—”

  “Cole. My name is Cole.”

  Everybody grinned at that.

  “I know, I know,” Cole said. “My father had a weird sense of humor.”

  “Anyway,” the senator said, “when the rioting and looting and other acts of senseless violence began, we started shooting. I can speak for the entire community when I say we had long been very weary of federal judges telling us how to treat criminals. And I am a lawyer, and a damn good one if I say so myself. Every community knows who the bad ones are. You’re a retired cop, Cole, you know what I mean.”

  Cole smiled and nodded his head. “Only too well, Senator.”

  “It only took us about a day and half to restore order around here,” a town council member spoke up. “It was . . . well, terrible, and I hope I never have to go through anything like that again. But we got the job done, and no really innocent person got hurt or killed.”

  Cole smiled. He knew exactly what the man meant by “no really innocent person.” People, whether they be family members or friends, who have direct knowledge of lawbreakers and openly condone it, are just as guilty as the criminals they protect. In all his years behind a badge, Cole knew of only a few cases where judges actually sentenced family members for perjury on the witness stand. Which is just one of the reasons why so many cops despise judges. When judges start putting mother or father, brother or sister, uncle or aunt, in the slam to do some hard time for lying under oath, the judicial system will start the long road toward straightening itself out.

  It also helps when parents open their eyes and learn—preferably not the hard way, as did Pete and Jane King—that occasionally a kid is either just born no good, or turns that way through no fault of the parents.

  “I think the bad seed theory is no longer a theory,” Hank said, after chewing contentedly for a moment. “I believe that gene has been found.”

  “Yes,” the Chief said. “Just proves that we cops were right all along.”

  Being of the “take a punk to lunch bunch generation” Cindy and Laura both stirred at that remark, but wisely kept their mouths shut.

  “Where were you folks heading?” the mayor asked.

  “The mountains of North Arkansas,” Cole answered.

  The senator shook his head. “I’d advise against that. From what we’ve been able to learn, that area is a free fire zone. Several thousand escaped prisoners from prisons around the state headed for there. They ran smack into various survivalist groups, the extreme edge of the religious right—I call them the lunatic fringe—and all sort of other groups, all of them heavily armed. You can guess what happened.”

  “I’m glad we stopped here,” Ruth said.

  The senator cocked his head and stared at her for a moment. “Forgive me for staring, but your face is certainly familiar to me, Mrs. Deaton.”

  Ruth smiled. “Oh, I’ve been on the cover of a few magazines, Senator. Before Jim and I were married not long ago, my name was Ruth Pearson.”

  “The Ruth Pearson?”

  “As far as I know, there is only one.”

  “It’s an honor, ma’am. Perhaps we can convince you to relocate right here in our little town?”

  “Anything is possible, Senator. As we all have just recently found out,” she added, very drily.

  * * *

  When federal troops started moving out of the East, to attempt to bring some order and stability to the rest of the nation, the troops soon found that they had, as one general put it, “A goddamn tiger by the tail.”

  People had been warning their elected officials for years (without any success) that the average Joe and Jane Citizen were fed up with government rules and regulations, high-handed government agents, and mealy-mouthed bureaucrats, many of whom did not appear to know horseshit from hog jowls (sadly, if they were promoted on anything other than merit that was probably true), government meddling in private lives, politicians that did nothing but talk incessantly and in the end say absolutely nothing and do even less. Jane and Joe Citizen were especially irritated with the Internal Revenue Service, the most hated of all government agencies.

  During the madness that had lasted for months, certain militia groups (among others) had raided National Guard and Reserve armories and come away with heavy artillery, heavy mortars, machine guns, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. The military, which had been reduced in size by almost sixty percent during the insanity that had gripped the nation, found themselves badly outnumbered and outgunned by the citizen groups.

  President Mason went on national radio and the few operating television stations and pleaded with American citizens to tell him just what type of government they wanted. Please let him know.

  He certainly was not prepared for the hundreds of thousands of responses, many of them uncommonly blunt and dealing with a certain part of his anatomy.

  The hard right wing of the religious right movement wanted a government based on the Bible, with all liquor, gambling, and filthy books, magazines, and movies banned. Homosexuals would be rounded up and imprisoned until their sexual deviancy could be exorcised. They wanted prayer at least three times a day in school, and anyone who refused to pray would be denied admission to any public school. They also included a list of their other demands . . . about forty pages long.

  The liberal left wanted government womb-to-tomb protection for everybody for everything that might conceivably occur in one’s lifetime. They wanted all property and bank accounts seized and a wealth redistribution plan (run by them, of course) put into effect immediately, a good job for everybody, and dozens of other pie-in-the-sky programs that would be guaranteed to bankrupt the Treasury in a few years. They had a program for America to feed and police the world. They also wanted a total ban of private ownership of any type of firearm.

  A mush-mouthed civil rights leader (so called) managed to get on national radio and talk for an hour and forty-five minutes, in rhyme . . . surely a world record. When he had finished (much to the relief of everyone of any race, creed, or color who possessed even a modicum of intelligence) the one question on nearly every citizen’s lips was, “What the hell did he say?”

  Of course, moderate conservatives and moderate liberals were, once again, caught up in the middle. But then a strange thing happened: the two factions began seeking each other out in an attempt to form what had to be the most unlikely coalition in the always strange world of politics.

  * * *

  “The military refuses to fire on American citizens,” the C
hairman of the Joint Chiefs informed the President. “Even had the various unit commanders not informed me of that, I would have stood them down. The use of force is not the way to settle this problem, Mr. President.”

  “General,” the President replied. “Government is at a standstill. Another two or three months of this, and we will have total anarchy.”

  General Stovall wanted to ask the President what the hell he thought the country was in the grips of now? ... but he curbed his tongue. “With all due respect, sir, perhaps it’s time, past time really, for this country to be broken up into nations within a nation. Each part answerable, to one degree or the other, to a central government.”

  President Mason stared at the man for a moment. “Go on,” he urged.

  “As Speaker, Mr. President, you were well aware that there were millions of very unhappy citizens out there.” He waved his hand.

  President Mason nodded in agreement.

  “Liberals and conservatives will never agree on how best to govern this nation.”

  Again the President nodded his head. “That’s why we have elections, General.”

  “With only about forty percent of all registered voters taking part, sir. The rest are so goddamned disgusted with government, they’ve given up.”

  “I could debate that last hypothesis with you, but go on.”

  “If you debated it, you’d lose,” the marine general said. “Let’s face facts, Mr. President: this nation has had it.”

  Mason stared hard at the general. The general stared right back without blinking. Mason knew from the grapevine the others on the Joint Chiefs had asked General Stovall to be their spokesman on this issue, and General Stovall was facing this the same way he’d faced every thorny issue in his long career: straight on and head first.

  President Mason sighed and blinked first, as Stovall had known he would. Stovall could stare down a rattlesnake. “Nations within a nation, General?”