Renewal 9 - Delay Tactics

by Jf Perkins

“Thanks, Jeff. We’re going to see the show,” Bill said in return.

  “Well, if today is any way to judge, Mom throws a heck of a party. By the way, you should have plenty of time. The Dragons are very cautious now.”

  “Ok. Thanks again, Jeff. Come over and visit,” Bill said with a wave.

  “Same to you, Mr. Carter.”

  Terry pulled away from Jeff’s position and headed down the road at a steady thirty miles per hour. None of the houses he passed showed any signs of life. He had just enough time to start speculating about how wide the Tullahoma danger zone spread when Bill pointed to the left and said, “There it is.”

  The house was a convenient landmark, but completely unnecessary due to the large number of horses milling around the yard. Terry pulled onto the side road and Bill turned on the cabin lights so that no one would mistake them for Dragons. Another young man waved them around the back of the house, where Terry pulled Big Bertha to a stop and shut off the engine. Bill was already out the door before Terry had all the switches flipped the way he wanted them. He dropped to the ground and locked the doors. He found himself facing a man his own age.

  Bill introduced him. “Terry, meet another one of Tam’s boys. This is Dennis, sixth in line if I remember... Dennis, this is Terry Shelton.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Dennis.” Terry stuck out his hand.

  Dennis grabbed it in a firm grip and gave it a couple of sharp pumps. “Good to meet you, Terry. Mom’s got a good spot picked out down that way. I heard your leg is banged up, Mr. Carter. You up for a walk in the woods?”

  “Just take it slow and I’ll make it,” Bill replied with a smile.

  Five minutes later, Bill was hugging Tam Rogers. The introductions were made once again, and the two leaders walked a short distance away to talk shop. Terry and Dennis were left standing in a gap in the trees at the top of a steep bluff overlooking a third of a mile of the highway. In the dim light, Terry could just make out a pair of structures just on the far side of the road. He tuned in as Dennis was talking, “And that was the store that Mom said used to be famous for selling alcohol to kids. They called it ‘The Holler’. This valley is the same place we beat the last of Tullahoma’s fighters, so we’re pretty familiar with it.”

  “I remember Bill saying you rode all over these hills, shooting at the bad guys down in the valley,” Terry said.

  “Well, I wasn’t there back then, but that’s what I heard too,” Dennis replied.

  “Is that the plan tonight?” Terry asked.

  “No. It’s a little simpler tonight. You’ll see.”

  “I met your brother back up the road. He said you’ve been busy with the Dragons all day,” Terry said, pumping for information.

  “Oh, yeah! You should have seen it. First we slathered the highway with mud and spikes and barriers just over a hill. Then we blocked the road further west with about four hundred riders. That crazy little rooster came up and started sassing Mom. She gave him shit until he lost it and tried to run us all down. We were heading out when they started hitting the barriers, so I didn’t see it, but it sounded terrible. Good terrible. They lost a big chunk of their army right there.” Dennis grinned at the result.

  “Wow. That’s really smart,” Terry said, trying to imagine all those trucks crashing.

  “Mom’s idea... Then, there’s this big bridge over the river just this side of Shelbyville. Mom had our guys cutting the steel to weaken the bridge. When the trucks came across, we thought it wasn’t going to fall, but then it did. Maybe fifty trucks sank in the water. The trucks that were left on the west side hightailed it back to where they came from.”

  “Nice!” Terry said.

  “Yeah, thanks. So this is our last shot at slowing them down, maybe taking a few more out, and just basically putting the fear of God in them. We’ve been shadowing the convoy from the ridgeline since the bridge. Now they’re stopping to check every little creek crossing. I figure some gunfire in unknown territory should make them pretty nervous before they get to your neck of the woods.

  “I’ll say...”

  “I think you’ll like this,” Dennis concluded.

  A blue-white beam of light shone on the trees about a half-mile away. The word spread quickly in a wave of murmurs, and Bill returned to the viewpoint with Tam.

  “Here they come,” she reported.

  The train of headlights looked feeble from way up on the ridge. Terry tried to get a quick count, and figured there were about two hundred trucks coming down the highway at a crawling pace. They started down the long slope from the far side of the “Holler” and chugged along until the lead pair of trucks reached the lowest point almost directly in front of the watcher on the ridge. The trailing trucks passed the last turnoff back up at the top of the hill, and two tall trees, one on each side of the highway, simultaneously fell across the roadway and burst into flames, blocking any hope of retreat for the Dragon army. The lead truck could not see the burning roadblock, but the following trucks surged away from it, creating a wave of confusion in the convoy. Gary Tucker did notice that.

  Gary had spent the hours since sundown literally in fear for his life. He wasn’t worried about traps or falling bridges or even mad horsebitches with 9mm’s. He had begun to believe that God had decided to punch his ticket, and that some horrible combination of events would conspire to do him in. With that conviction firmly in mind, the rippling static of headlights in the rearview mirror gave him his final notice.

  “Here it comes,” Gary said, prompting a strange look from his driver, who had kept driving through everything the day had thrown his way.

  Without warning, the entire roadway was blasted with intense light. From Terry’s location on the ridge, it was clear that Tam’s people had lined the ridges with high intensity spotlights, the kind that hunters and fishermen used, and had wired them to generators or car batteries. From the passenger seat of the lead truck, the Junior Dragon thought that the light signaled his final judgment, and he relaxed, waiting patiently for his meeting with God.

  The lights also served as the signal to fire. All along a two-thousand foot stretch of rugged ridgeline, gunfire crackled and muzzles flashed. The rounds littered the highway without much concern for accuracy. Exactly ten seconds later, the lights went out with a trailing orange glow of cooling filaments. Tam’s people were as blinded by the lights as the Dragons, and what happened in the darkness was only detectable by the sounds that were drifting upwards. After the blast of spotlights, the headlights were simply too dim to see.

  The results were predictable. There was a cacophony of yelling men and the crunches of trucks trying to maneuver in the equivalent of a parking lot at 5 AM on Black Friday. Shrieks of pain carried over the trees and running feet could be heard faintly above the engines. Transmissions buzzed, engines roared and surged, and brakes squealed. A few of the smarter Dragons were firing blindly at the hillsides.

  Tam waved her companions down for cover, but nothing dangerous came her way.

  Gary was confused for at least eight seconds. Why did God sound like weapons firing? Then the lights went out, and he decided that it wasn’t God coming for him after all. It was probably that amazingly annoying woman again. Luckily, his driver had experienced no false religious fatalism, and was pulling away almost as soon as he could see by his headlights again.

  Twenty seconds passed, and the lights blazed to life once again. The scene below was incredible. If it were possible to take the convoy, tie each truck together on a string and give the string to a giant cat for two days, the mess you got back would not even compare to the chaos on the highway. Tam’s people sent thousands of rounds into the midst of the glaring tangle. A significant number of the Dragons were ready this time, and began to return fire with some accuracy.

  Ten seconds passed, and confusion reigned again. Men are nothing if not adaptable, and by the third blaze of light, order was forming out of the noise. By the fourth, most of the still-operational trucks were disappearing o
ver the hill to the east. At the fifth round, the highway was completely quiet and littered by ten or fifteen trucks and perhaps 150 bodies. Tam took the handle of the nearest light and panned it to the right. Seventy-five men were sprinting up the hill in pursuit of the trucks that had left them behind.

  Tam left her light burning when the rest were extinguished for the final time. She flashed it into the tree above her head three times, and signaled the end of a long and deadly day.

  Terry felt the same urge to vomit that had overtaken him at the Jenkins farm. It was not that he had any real sympathy for the Knights of the White God, but he did have some sympathy for the fish in the barrel. He looked at Bill and saw the same green-gilled expression looking back at him. How would he ever defend his new people? Why was the world so messed up that it came down to wholesale slaughter to ensure safety in Teeny Town? Why couldn’t he find a nice place in the woods alongside a burbling stream and argue for sport with Miss Sally B. Carter? First things first.

  As for the Junior Dragon, Terry vividly recalled the horrors of passing through Tullahoma’s cannibal bands in broad daylight. He felt pure pity for the men who followed Gary Tucker Jr. down Jackson Street on a moonless night.

  End Part 9

  Author’s Notes:

  Thanks again to all of you. I appreciate the fact that you are reading this, all the conversation on my blog, all the reviews, and all the support. Who is “opinion”?

  I get a lot of questions about Kirk and Terry. Is their ability supernatural? No. It’s safe to say that anyone would experience something similar in the right circumstances. We all know the urban legend of the proverbial mother who lifts a wrecked car off of her child after an accident. We watch martial arts movies loaded superhuman feats. These days, most of it actually is superhuman, I’d say. I’ll take it back if I see someone dancing through my backyard treetops. We’ve all felt a surge of adrenalin at one time or another, and watched something happen in slow motion. Luckily, thanks to YouTube, we can all experience vicarious life-threatening events all the time. It’s not the same in real life.

  I read about a study in which the idea was to get people to jump off a building into one of those stuntman bags. The jumpers were supposed to try to measure time during the fall. I think the experiment failed to show that everyone experienced time differently during the fall, but it did show that many people experience that slow motion effect.

  As you read this, there are probably thousands of people deliberately working to create and control altered states of consciousness through an act of mental discipline. A great deal of it falls into the martial arts category, but there are many forms of discipline intended to alter our perception. And in some cases, our commonly accepted reality is being challenged.

  I heard from a respected (and respectable, to my mind) pastor who had gone on a mission trip and had seen some Christian mystics who could literally levitate. I haven’t seen it myself, but given that I think we know very little about the nature of reality, I’m not willing to dismiss much of anything.

  My own personal experience with Kirk’s effect came largely from football. (And perhaps an altercation or three) My sophomore year in high school, we had the worst football coach in history. I believe he sells life insurance now. We also had a very young team, myself among them. After losing entirely too much, Coach decided that the problem was simply that we were not tough enough. He set up a special session before practice. This session amounted to suiting up a bunch of high school kids in football gear, taking us out to a distant field, and having us fight. Yep. The only rule was to start when Coach blew the whistle, and to stop when he blew it again.

  I was without a doubt the biggest wuss out there. The biggest and the wussiest. Coach naturally pitted me against an older boy who was already legendary in his cruelty. Rumor had it that he had once bit a chunk of someone’s face off in a fight. Needless to say, I was scared. The whistle blew and I was instantly flat on my back with a hand wrapped around my throat.

  This went on for days. Funny thing, though. As the days went by and the fights kept coming, they also began to slow down. Within a few weeks, I had all the time in the world between the whistle and first contact with my opponent. One day, I finally got the better of him, and that was the end of the special sessions. I guess the whole program was to cure the biggest wuss of his wussiness.

  A couple of years later, the whole game of football had gone from a frantic series of flashing movement to an almost leisurely experience. By the time I was a senior, I could easily make decisions in the middle of the play. I could see facial expressions change and eyes darting around. I could watch the play developing and analyze it in motion. The game had slowed down, or my perception had sped up.

  Then I went to college and had to start over, but the point is that there is nothing supernatural about the ability to shift into overdrive. I think all of us can do it if the need is great enough. For Kirk, it’s simply a discipline that he tries to develop without any guidance. For Terry, it’s something that he will spend years trying to understand and direct. I suspect you will see other forms of mental discipline in the coming story of the Breakdown.

  About the Author:

  Creative people tend to be lousy at self-promotion, and I fit the cliché almost perfectly. After many years of asking myself why I have anything to say that is worth writing, the answer can only be that I have finally, in middle age, managed to make enough mistakes to say something solid about how not to live life. If I hold up a mirror to my own life, I get a backwards reflection that may actually contain some value. More importantly, I have been fortunate enough to know many people who may have suffered, but did so with far more skill and grace than I have, and they set a solid example for a realistic method of how to live well.

  In the meantime, I live in Washington with my wonderful wife, who happens to be one of those good examples, and our five rescue dogs, who manage to encompass an entire school bus full of joyous, childlike personalities. And to add to the rapidly mounting collection of loose fur and allergens, I also share the house with two cats; one with no social boundaries, and one who is nothing but social boundaries.

  I can no longer claim that my blog is a wasteland populated only by Russian women who want to make my fantasies come true. In fact, I have some dedicated commenters stopping by, which makes me want to stop by and write something. Perhaps you would like to visit as well. Thanks for reading!

  http://www.jfperkins.com