by Jf Perkins
Renewal 10 – Blind Force
By J.F. Perkins
Copyright 2011 J.F. Perkins
Kindle Edition
Website/Blog: http://www.jfperkins.com
Twitter: @WriterJFPerkins
Renewal 10 – Blind Force
Chapter 10 – 1
Tam Rogers gave Bill Carter a hug as he prepared to climb into the truck and head home. Even in the late evening darkness, she was clearly showing the guilt and pain of what she had undertaken on a long day of wholesale killing of the Dragon army. Bill understood completely, but refused to take much of the blame for how it had turned out. He had been at the table when Kirk had written his request to the leader of Bedford County. The note included a quick list of what Bill and Kirk knew about the Dragons and their plans, with a polite request for Tam to slow the Dragons down as much as possible without endangering her own people. Bill held a strong notion that she would take the request as far as she could, but even he was surprised by the damage she had done. The Dragon leader, Gary Tucker Jr., had possessed only a few brief moments in which he had any chance to fight back during the long crossing of Bedford County. Tam had taken the landscape itself and used it to hammer the Dragon army to pieces.
Bill gave Tam a final hug with his sincere thanks and the always-open invitation to visit Teeny Town. In his heart, Bill had always hoped that his brother Kirk had a chance at the widow Tam Rogers. She seemed like a woman who could handle Kirk’s strange way of looking at the world.
Terry was waiting in the driver’s seat with Big Bertha idling when Bill finally turned away and hoisted himself into the shotgun seat. The door shut with a satisfying thump, and Terry took the sound as his signal to put the truck into reverse and back out from behind the little white farm house. As he spun the wheel in the opposite direction and notched the lever into ‘Drive’, Terry and Bill both waved at the proud horse riders of Bedford County and accelerated down the road.
“Wow. That was quite a show with all those big lights,” Terry said as the truck got up to speed on the empty highway.
“Yeah, it was,” Bill replied. “The big lights came out of the old horse arena, where they used to hold the Walking Horse Celebration before the Breakdown. Tam still rolls the lights out for her horse shows, so they had the generators and cable and switches ready to deploy. Maybe we should get some of that equipment.”
“I’d expect all horses to walk. What’s a Walking Horse?” Terry wanted to know.
“It’s just a special breed of horse. They walked with an unusual gait. Not too many people worry about fancy breeds these days. They want working horses that can go all day.”
“Ah. Ok. Well what happened to that last bunch of Dragons? The ones running up the hill?”
“We may find out, but for their sake, I hope Junior was kind enough to pick them up,” Bill replied.
“Speak of the devils...” Terry said pointing to the extreme ends of his headlight beams. He could see flashes of movement in dark camo patterns and glints of light off of weapon barrels as the abandoned Dragon men trotted down the highway.
“Let’s offer them a ride,” Bill said.
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah. Watch this. Just drive right up next to them. I’ll do the talking.”
“Ok... You’re the boss.”
Bill laughed a little crazily and said, “That right. I’m the boss!” Then he gave Terry a friendly punch in the shoulder to let him know it was a joke.
Terry slowed down until he was just creeping forward. Bill closed the metal partition behind his head, and rolled the glass part of his armored window open. “Hey, fellas. We got one running. Need a ride?”
A couple of the men looked suspicious, but they were swept up in a stream of Dragons trying to pile into the back of Big Bertha’s cargo box. Bill slid the steel plate open just enough to see that it was like a can of sardines in the back, and shut it again. “It’s a good thing Bertha is big,” Bill said. He opened his door and stood up on the outside to check the roof. Sure enough, six men had scrambled up top when it was clear no one else would fit inside. With a looser accent than normal, Bill called to the roof riders, “You fellas keep a close lookout. I heard me some bad stories about Tullahoma at night.” Bill turned back to the front, facing the crowd still on the ground. “Ya’ll be real careful up ahead. Cannibals. I reckon more trucks’ll be coming up soon enough, so ya’ll may just want to wait it out.” Bill offered a final vague version of the Dragon salute he had learned in Nashville and sat down. He closed the door and cranked the window tight. As Terry pulled away from the remaining men, Bill said, “We have prisoners and guards in one tidy package. Now we can drive right through and see how the Dragon army is faring, and when we get home, they turn into informants.”
“Nice, Bill. Remind me never to play checkers or cards with you,” Terry replied with a grin.
“Forget that. Just never get caught playing with Aggie. She beats me every time.”
Terry’s face turned serious as they passed a gutted old Wal-Mart. “If it’s anything like last time, when Seth and I were here, we should probably button up the armor.”
“How long does it take to do?” Bill asked.
“Less than a minute, I think. My sense of time was a little weird...”
“Ok, let’s risk it. We may need to see more than we need the armor,” Bill said. “At least until we know better, “ he added with a shrug.
“Ok, Bill.” Terry’s hands tightened unconsciously on the big steering wheel. He and Seth had come very close to wrecking the truck and being eaten by cannibals the last time he was in Tullahoma, and that had been in the middle of the morning. In Terry’s mind, this was ten times worse.
Big stores rolled by on his left, all damaged in some way and lit only by random bounces of his headlights reflecting off broken glass. A hospital loomed on the right, and consisted of only concrete and steel framework. Everything that made the derelict structure a hospital had been long destroyed, yet it still made itself known as a hospital to Terry. When he consciously noticed the red cross symbols on one end, he understood how he knew. A mall, of a size which would only be named a mall in a small town, stood strangely undamaged on his side of the street. Perhaps this mall was known to carry only useless items for the Breakdown, and remained untouched. Maybe the mall was an important symbolic place in Tullahoma and survived intact on some kind of cultural respect. Who knew? The most important thing now was that it wasn’t swarming with cannibals, zombies, vampires, aliens, or any other bad things that the abandoned city brought to Terry’s mind.
Big Bertha had cleared a couple more dead intersections marked by the ubiquitous traffic lights that had not worked once in Terry’s entire life, and Terry began to see the fallout. He came over a small hill, and immediately recognized slices of the street he had frantically driven before. It was once again littered with bodies, mostly of the filthy cannibal variety, but mixed with more than a few Dragon soldiers as well. One truck had been abandoned on the stretch into downtown, when someone had driven it directly into a utility pole. Steam was still escaping from the split radiator in white wisps.
The cannibals must have some kind of plan for using the tightly spaced buildings on the downtown to trap their victims. That was the place that had almost killed Terry, and it was now the place where four more Dragon trucks were overturned and left to the eaters. Corpses were thick on the street and sidewalk. Terry did his best to weave through without hitting them, but it wasn’t entirely possible, and he winced each time the truck lurched over something in the street.
The good news was that the cannibals had apparently met their match. They had left all kinds of “meat” sitting on the street. Maybe Gary Tucker
had singlehandedly done the county a favor by ridding them of the task of cleaning Tullahoma of its infestation. Big Bertha was not molested in anyway. The bad news was that the remains of Gary’s army was visible ahead. Lines of brake lights were glowing far down Jackson Street, and that helped Terry recall that the Carroll Street bridge over the railroad tracks was out. Terry made a quick left turn, and drove by memory until he found Anderson Street and made the final two turns onto Highway 55. The men packed in the back would be clueless, but the ones on top of the truck would no doubt be wondering why they were pulling away from the rest of their army. Terry held their complaints to a minimum by driving so fast that they were focused on staying attached to the truck as wind-driven tears streamed around their heads.
The next twenty minutes were spent circling south of Manchester and approaching the community land from the west. Bill reached over and used the running lights to send a signal to the front guard. They made the arrangements via old fashioned analog phone system, so that by the time Terry pulled to a stop in the woods, Kirk and Tommy were there to greet the new fighters as brothers.
“Gentlemen, I’m Larry Jenkins,” said Kirk, “And this here’s my brother, Moe. Wyatt sent us out to set you fellas up with some sleepin’ quarters for the night. He said the rest of your crew will be along before mornin’.”
Bill stuck out his hand for a shake and said, “My name’s Curly Shemp. We had a real tough ride up here, so we’d appreciate a place to grab some shuteye.”
Terry was trying to understand why Tommy Carter looked like he was about to burst out laughing and ruin the whole thing. Kirk led the way off into the darkness as men continued to pour out of the back of the truck. Terry didn’t know what a clown car was, but he understood the concept now. These men were not stupid. They might catch on any second, but they had been through a hellish day, and probably were desperate to sleep anywhere there were no bullets raining on their heads. They trailed up the spiral staircase into the main building in the trees. Kirk showed the men where to stow any weapons they didn’t want to carry. He didn’t make a point of it; he just showed them as he walked by and they mostly stowed their long guns in the rack. When the men had climbed another flight of steps, Kirk had shown them to the open, covered deck above the training headquarters. Normally, Kirk and his officers would stand on this deck, looking down on teenaged guards-in-training as they worked through their drills. Tonight, it would become a jail cell. In the morning these men would find themselves completely disarmed and ready for a nice question and answer session.
Even better, Gary Tucker Jr. would fight with twenty-two fewer men.
Chapter 10 – 2
Gary was ready to give his entire army to his driver. After the mess he had just clawed his way through, he was caught among three options. One, chew on the end of his revolver. Two, kill Wyatt Jenkins just for the aggravation he had caused. Or three, put someone else in charge and walk away. The driver seemed as good as anyone to lead this bunch of morons, and he was convenient. Gary could say, “Hey, whatever your name is... You’re in charge now. Good luck. See ya!”
First there was the two-hour delay as his so-called army got done with pissing and crapping and hugging girlfriends and fixing suddenly-busted trucks until the whole convoy was finally on the road. Then there was that uppity, bitchy horsewoman in Bedford County. Even Gary was forced to admit she had kicked his ass before he lost his first man. He fell for her crap and led a fifth of his army right into a deadly trap in the middle of the highway. Then there was the bridge. Sure it might have been the day God said that bridge was going to fall, but Gary was sure the bitch had something to do with it. Another chunk of his army had gone into the river, and even more tucked tail and ran. After that, his men refused to cross any bridges, even the little ones, until they were checked. Gary had done the checking personally, convinced that there was not a man in his entire convoy that was smart enough to do it.
Between the bridge checking and the fact that most of his remaining trucks were stuck in first gear, it had taken until well after dark to reach the third trap of the day, where he had been hammered by bright lights and coordinated weapon fire from the ridges. Gary honestly had no idea what he had lost in that hollow, but considering he had started down from the west with the notion that his time was up, he was forced to call it a win. God had not taken him in that hollow, and Gary had the new belief that he had passed God’s tests, that he was now worthy of leading his father’s army. The cannibals in Tullahoma had slammed the door on Gary’s latest delusion as they attacked like bugs in a swarm. His men had fought them off without too many losses, but they had burned through an incredible amount of ammunition in the process.
Then, when Gary managed to convince himself that they had gone through everything that could possibly go wrong, the bridge was out. In reality, it hadn’t taken more than ten minutes to find the way around that bridge. In Gary’s frustrated mind, it had taken at least sixteen hours, the last fifteen of which had spawned the idea of leaving the whole thing to Mr. Driver here.
Now Gary found himself cruising down Highway 55 in the small hours of a Saturday morning, too wired to relax, and too tired to sleep. The convoy had stretched out over two miles behind him because even though he was traveling less than twenty miles per hour, he had no more patience for the trucks that would only go fifteen. He directed his driver to pass right through Manchester. He knew that the Jenkins farm was burned to the ground, but he didn’t have any other place to go.
Wyatt Jenkins seemed to know. He was waiting on the scorched front steps of his former mansion when the convoy rolled into sight. Before the first truck turned through Wyatt’s gate, he knew the numbers were all wrong. He made a quick count of trucks and came up with roughly two hundred. Either Gary had lied about his forces, or the fight had started ahead of schedule.
Wyatt couldn’t wait to hear that story.
Chapter 10 – 3
Bill was chattering about a long eventful day as Terry drove him back across the open fields to Teeny Town. The leader of the community had been grim for days, and Terry was glad to see him looking hopeful for a change. Tam Rogers had knocked the Dragon army down to a size that Teeny Town could handle. With help from Larry Harris and his people, the ten state police who had been loaned to Bill for the duration, and hopefully a few forward thinking citizens of Coffee County, the community might just pull through. The citizens were the big unknown. Bill had made several attempts to sway the people in his direction, but he knew that they had been subject to many years of the Jenkins’s influence and may not have the gumption to make a tough decision if it came down to do or die. For the first time since they first encountered the Grand Dragon, Bill felt as if they had a reasonable shot at victory.
They rolled through the western gate just past midnight, leaving Kirk to deal with the Dragons who Bill had cleverly picked up and taken right into custody. He would love to be nearby in the morning to see what happened when those men discovered their plight, but he would have to give that particular pleasure to Kirk, who would be playing unpleasant mind games to get more information. Bill expected that there was not much to garner from those men. If they were left on the roadside to fend for themselves, they probably weren’t important enough to know much of anything. On the other hand, the watch posts Kirk had left around the Jenkins farm might just yield some useful information about the current strength of the Dragon army. Bill hoped that was the case. He needed to know hard numbers.
Terry noticed that Bill was slowly losing his limp as the men wandered back to Bill’s house. The town was dark, as it was supposed to be during times of threat, but even Terry had made this walk often enough to find his way without trouble. When they walked in through the kitchen door, dense shades were covering the glass, and Aggie was waiting at the table with a single candle and a plate piled high with sandwiches. Bill gave her a kiss on the top of her head as he walked to the refrigerator and pulled out two big brown bottles of beer.
&nb
sp; “How’d it go?” Aggie asked with a look of concern.
“Better than I would have guessed,” Bill replied as he waved Terry into a chair and slid a beer to his young friend. “Kirk and John did a bang up job at the Cox and Talley places. We talked to both heads of the family. They agreed to stay out of the fight, but I’m expecting Garrett Cox to show up anyway.”
“He is a sneaky bastard,” Aggie said lightly.
“Yeah, after our little ‘talk’, we probably could have recruited his son right on the spot. It’s a safe bet that Derek will not think too much of his father after tonight. Kirk was in the thick of his torture act and Garrett seemed just fine with letting Kirk do some damage to his boy,” Bill paused to take bite out of a sandwich. “George Talley spoke up first.”
“George never should have been mixed up with the rest,” Aggie said.
“He was, though. We’ll see what he does next,” Bill said through a mouthful.
“What about Tam? How did she do?” Aggie asked.
“Oh, she did as well as she usually does. I’d guess she took out at least half of the Dragons without putting any of her people in real danger. Maybe more. I hope we’ll find out first thing in the morning.”
“Good. I wonder if she thinks we owe her now.” Aggie said absently, and then refocused on the men. “Well, speaking of morning... Now that I know you two are home safe, I’m going to bed. Good night, boys.”
“Good night,“ Terry said. “Thanks for the sandwiches.”
“I’ll be up shortly,” Bill said between licking his fingers.
Aggie snorted. She knew the odds. Both men watched her leave the room and take the turn at the foot of the staircase.
“I forgot to ask where Sally is,” Terry said.
Bill looked at the chalkboard nestled between the two doors leading out of the kitchen. “She’s out on patrol until two, looks like.”
“So there’s time for a little more of the second winter...” Terry said hopefully.
