Midnight Skills

by William Allen

  “Anything else you want to talk about? I noticed you got really quiet after we left the site of the shooting.”

  From her long silence, and her move to snuggle into him while he felt a shiver run through her slender form, told Luke he was on to something.

  “It was that girl and her mother today,” Amy finally managed to say. He could tell from her breathing, she was fighting hard to suppress the flow of tears. After a moment, she continued with her voice at a harsh whisper.

  “I saw them both, and under all those layers of old clothes, they were skin and bones. The girl couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven, and she looked like she weighed maybe fifty pounds, and her mother was even worse. I saw what they had hidden in that wagon, just a few small squashes and barely a handful of radishes. I could hear it in their voices, Luke, and see it in their eyes. They are going to starve to death, Luke.”

  “Maybe things will be better at her uncle’s house,” Luke replied, trying to console his fiancé, but in truth, he doubted it. If the woman’s uncle had any food to spare, she likely would have already made that trip.

  From their own experiences. Luke knew the human body could run for weeks, even without food, if they had water. But the process involved their body, only able to scavenge so much from itself, before permanent damage was done. Eventually, they would die, but only after much suffering.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Amy replied sadly. “They are going to die. Just like you said, so many are not going to make it through the winter.”

  Rolling over, Luke drew Amy closer, lifting her slight form and laid her with her head resting on his chest. This was how Luke liked to hold her close, feeling her body lying next to his. This was a move motivated by his urge to comfort Amy, and show her his concern for her feelings, but soon, this altruistic motive was being nudged aside by other, baser, feelings.

  He felt a surge of attraction, of animal instinct, tug at him for attention, and he admitted if only to himself, that his mother might be right about something after all. This was dangerous, especially when he felt the way Amy had plastered herself against him. She can sense it too, he thought. Craning his neck, he engaged her lips in a kiss as fierce as the one she’d bestowed on him earlier, before forcing his body back and rolling away to create a small sliver of separation.

  “Darn, that was nice,” Amy husked, her voice breathless.

  “Yes,” Luke agreed. “Heavenly. We gotta watch out for that, to keep from getting carried away.”

  Amy huffed, but it was a sound full of amusement, and Luke was heartened to see the dark concerns disappear from her bright blue eyes, if only in the moment.

  “You tempt me, Luke, but no way am I making your momma a grandma any time soon.”

  “Amen,” Luke agreed with a laugh. “But there’s plenty of other things we can do to amuse ourselves,” he continued with a sly grin as he rose to extinguish the lights.

  CHAPTER 8

  “You really think this is a good idea?” Alex asked as Luke steered the old pickup around the scattering of dead cars in the road. They were on Highway 84 headed west and had already sailed through the little town of Timpson. Like Center, Timpson was holding together by sheer force of will of the inhabitants, and by working with the nearest farmers and ranchers in a cooperative effort. Outside the barricades for the second time in two days, though, and Luke and his two passengers knew they were back in contested territory.

  “I think it will kill two birds with one stone,” Luke replied. He hadn’t exactly wanted to do the driving this morning, but he was the only one who had a ghost of a clue as to where they’d be going. Plus, Scott wasn’t in any way up to driving a standard with his legs still healing. Luke felt guilty even having him along in his condition, but when Scott caught up with Luke loading the truck for this trip, the older teen had talked his way into going with them.

  “Dude, I gotta get out of here before I go crazy,” Scott had confided in his friend when they’d stood in the shadow of the smaller storage shed. “I love Helena, but the way she hovers, well, you know.”

  And Luke did know. Helena was a good girl, woman, and devoted to Scott. But since the death of her mother, Connie, and Scott’s own injuries as a result of the attack on the ranch, Helena had thrown herself into making sure her man recovered fully. Which was great for making sure Scott carried out his physical therapy, but Luke could see how it might be a bit smothering at times.

  With three tall, young men sharing the bench seat, the accommodations felt a tad bit crowded, but Alex in particular, was especially cramped in the middle. The tall, young man didn’t complain, though. With all the craziness of the last six months, he was glad to get to spend some time with one of his best friends. But he remained pensive and deep in thought while Luke and Scott scanned their surroundings for signs of trouble.

  With his father’s long-time employment with Gus Messner, Luke’s grandfather, Alex and his little sister, Sierra, spent a large chunk of their childhood visiting the Messner ranch, and over the years, the two had gotten to know the entire Messner family. Alex was still reeling from the deaths of both Gus and now Billy, and he worried that his friend, Luke, was turning into something he couldn’t understand.

  Alex had always sensed something different in Luke. A hardness, and a laser focus that seemed at odds with his somewhat flippant outer persona. He’d known Luke was smart. Heading into their junior year of high school, Luke looked to be on track to graduate valedictorian, and his athletic skills on the football field already had some of the savvy college scouts interested. Alex, as a star on the basketball court, being the starting power forward as a sophomore, knew a little about how that worked.

  But there remained something private about Luke that made Alex wonder if anyone really knew him. Around school, Luke was considered by other kids as one of the alpha dogs, but if Luke noticed, he’d never let on to anybody. In fact, when nobody seemed to be watching, Alex noticed how Luke always tried to blend into the background. Alex attributed some of this chameleon-like ability to his early years of bouncing from school to school, when his father’s military career resulted in repeated moves, but whatever the case, Luke was no longer content to avoid the attention of others.

  “What did Amy say when you told her you were doing this?” Scott asked, breaking Alex’s train of thought.

  “Didn’t tell her the details, just that Dad had a quick run for me,” Luke admitted. “I did talk to my dad first thing this morning. I explained how I thought we needed to expand our network of watchers out this way. He agreed and asked me who I thought we should recruit. I might have fudged on the uncle’s identity, since I don’t know his name, but I have a pretty good idea where they live.”

  “And if we run into trouble?” Scott continued, playing out the possible scenarios.

  “The comm shack has our route, and Angel and Patty have today’s rapid reaction team. We give a holler, and they can have twenty shooters at our location in thirty minutes.”

  “Or your pizza’s free!” Scott quipped, and all three teens laughed at the feeble old joke.

  “I’m surprised your dad didn’t want us to take an escort,” Alex chimed in and then, “He likes to abide by the two-vehicle rule, you know? And thirty minutes is a long time in a fight.”

  Luke nodded, but didn’t respond for a few seconds as he focused hard on the road ahead. They were approaching the curve and the hill where the ambush occurred the day before, and he didn’t want any trouble. Coasting to a halt, he eased the truck off the asphalt, well back from the curve.

  “You guys, please watch the truck. I need to go check ahead. This is where we had the trouble yesterday. Still a good place to hit us.”

  While Luke set the parking brake, Scott moved out of the passenger seat and hefted the M-249, what Luke still called a SAW, after his father’s identification of the light machine gun, and moved across the ditch to take up a position facing their back trail. Scott stepped gingerly but surely, his legs still
causing him pain, but not enough to stop him from doing the job. Alex, carrying a scoped hunting rifle chambered in .308 Winchester, followed Scott at a brisk pace, but split off when he found concealment behind a lightning-struck pine that was about even with the parked truck. By the time Luke slung his rifle and headed into the woods on the other side of the road, he couldn’t see either of his friends.

  Hunched low, Luke made his way through the thick undergrowth lining the verge of the road. He kept his head on a swivel, checking forward, backward, and side-to-side. Thinking about tree stands, he even spent a few seconds scanning above, but he saw nothing. Heel-to-toe, he glided through the waist-high browned grass, but only after checking for tripwires. He avoided following even the hint of a trail as he proceeded, and his progress was measured in feet per minute while he took his time.

  Once he came upon the scene of the shooting from the day before, Luke fought to keep his attention on his surroundings, instead of the five corpses still laying in the road. They looked like dogs may have gotten to them, but he noted the absence of any weapons, and figured someone had stripped them of anything useful, shortly after the shooting had stopped.

  Going to one knee, Luke used the optics on his rifle to pan around the area slowly, and his upper body barely moved as he swept the trees and bushes on both sides of the road. He focused, observing everything from the playful antics of the scolding blackbirds across the ditch, to the light wind stirring the dried cattails in the low spot of the tangle of pine saplings across the road. Runoff from a leach field or maybe a natural spring, Luke decided. What he didn’t see, however, was a threat, and in the past six months of living more or less on a knife’s edge, Luke was very good at spotting trouble.

  Satisfied for the moment, Luke eased back from his position, carefully retracing his path as he wound back down a patch of forest near the truck. Tucking his rifle in close to his body, butt braced against his shoulder, the young fighter pressed his transmit key, two short and one long. He waited for the response, now gripping the synthetic front stock with his left hand and his right hand wrapped around the pistol grip, index finger alongside the trigger guard. Then he heard the pulsed response over his earpiece, two long and two short. All clear. Clicking a single, short pulse, Luke stepped out of the underbrush and duckwalked over to the truck. He then took up a kneeling cover position while Alex and Scott worked their way closer to the other side of the truck.

  Once they were back inside, Alex released a long, stress-relieving sigh.

  “It’s not really paranoia, when you know people are out there trying to kill you,” he said, returning the scoped rifle to the rack behind their heads. Not the best place to stow your weapon, Alex knew, but a necessity in their cramped cab.

  “We’ve only got maybe another half mile to go, if that is the uncle’s driveway,” Luke replied, trying to bolster Alex. He knew Alex was still a bit leery of venturing out, which made his agreement to tag along for this run puzzling. The trip was not that far, but still, the risks remained very real.

  “Then we gotta hope the uncle doesn’t start shooting before we can talk to him, or decides Luke’s got a purty mouth,” Scott joined in, his spirits still high, despite the nagging ache in his legs. He’d held out hope the doctor in Center might’ve had some ideas about speeding his recovery, but his disappointment was mollified by this chance to get out and play a part in a real mission again.

  “I doubt that, seriously,” Luke shot back, his voice betraying his distraction as he continued to strain his focus on their surroundings. “I’m still too skinny to play Ned Beatty. Scott, you up for the role?”

  “Not in my current state,” Scott demurred. “Looks like the pressure is on you, Alex.”

  “Yeah, that shit ain’t happening, no matter how good-looking I may be,” Alex responded grimly. “And how’d you guys get off on this creepy tangent anyway? Not funny.”

  “Sorry, Alex,” Luke replied contritely. “Just something we did on the road. Relating our adventures to lame movies we’ve seen. With me and Scott, probably best to just stick to Dumb and Dumber.”

  Just then, Luke stepped on the brakes and their slow progress came to a halt when he saw the blocked driveway. Someone had dropped a pair of trees a few months back, cut off low down to ground and expertly laid to bar the narrow dirt road almost completely. If Luke’s sharp eyes hadn’t discerned what looked like a pair of skinny wheel marks in the dirt, just off to the side and continuing around the end of the downed pine on the left, he likely would have kept on going. Checking the likely twice-rolled odometer on the old truck, he noted the location was almost exactly two miles from the site of the aborted ambush on the blacktop.

  “I think we are here,” Luke announced, and all humor faded from his voice. “Alex, I want you and Scott to hold up here. Guard the truck and watch my back. I’ll load up the backpack with the radio first, then make a second trip for the food, if they accept.”

  “You are not going in there alone,” Alex warned, beating out Scott’s protest by a second at most. “That wasn’t the plan.”

  “No way we are leaving the truck unguarded, not when anyone could happen by and see,” Luke countered. “We aren’t trying to scare these people or prompt a panicked response. I’ll go alone, and I’m leaving the rifle here.”

  “Bullshit,” Scott replied. “I see the need to cover the truck. We should have brought at least one more shooter, but you are taking your rifle. Slung if you need to, but I’m not going back to face your mom or dad if you do something stupid here.”

  Luke took a second, searching the face of his friend and seeing no back up in Scott. Scott was a good man, and he’d suffered painful wounds defending their families. Giving him a nod of understanding, Luke slung his rifle and gave his two teenaged friends an exaggerated thumbs up before he stepped around the front of the old truck and disappeared into the ragged undergrowth.

  “What’s gotten into him lately?” Alex asked, while the two took up defensive positions around the truck. They had an excellent view of the road, as well as being able to at least, keep part of their attention on the expanse of heavily-overgrown pine trees and bushes that seemed poised to overrun the intervening strip of asphalt running through the woods.

  “Not sure,” Scott said, his voice low. “He hasn’t been the same since he went off with those soldiers to get McCorkle, and then springing his dad. I missed a lot, though, getting blown up.” He paused, trying to pick his words carefully. “I think, it had to do with the attack on the ranch, though. Don’t get me wrong. He was a scary son-of-a-gun the first time I met him, but now, he’s just so tense all the time. Like he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

  “Back before,” Alex said, “he was always a bit of a loner. Good guy to have at your back and friendly, but he wasn’t someone who went out of his way to forge a lot of close bonds. We were friends, but I never felt like I was inside his circle, if that makes sense.”

  “You think it’s because you’re black?” Scott, never one to beat around the bush, asked.

  Alex shook his head in the negative. “I’m not sure he really notices. I mean, I’m sure it registers, but not much. Thing is, I don’t think there’s anybody he allows to get that close.”

  “Amy,” Scott replied immediately. “You have to understand, I killed a bunch of my neighbors when I caught them, after they’d overrun our house. I won’t apologize for that. You just can’t imagine what that was like. I always carried around guilt from that, since I was off playing house with Helena, instead of defending my family. Killing them didn’t bother me, Alex. Still doesn’t.”

  Scott looked away, overcome by emotion when his memory traveled back to the terrible images burned into his soul.

  “For Luke, when he thought Amy was dead at their hands, well, I gotta say, I wish I was out there with him, killing those bastards. I didn’t see his run, but I helped Lori pick up the guns, afterward. You know, that story about him cutting off their heads and sticking them on
stakes? Not true, but he was trying. Gutshot and bleeding out, he was trying to make a monument. Out of their dead.”

  “So, he’s hung up on this girl. I get it,” Alex countered, “but what makes you think she’s got a handle on Luke?”

  “It wasn’t just that he was killing them, then trying to mount their heads on stakes, Alex. It was the look I saw in his eyes. For just a split second, when he still thought she was dead, I saw his expression. Like he was hollowed out of all his softer emotions, and all he had left inside was hate.”

  Alex shivered in spite of himself.

  “I guess I can understand it,” he finally managed to say. “If something happened to my family…”

  Looking over at Scott, Alex saw the fire still near the surface, and the other teen nodded grimly before speaking. “Yeah, I know. But I hope you never have to feel that pain, Alex. Never.”

  With that, the two teens took up guard positions and waited.

  CHAPTER 9

  “Hello, the house!” Luke called out, his back resting comfortably against the wide oak tree. He’d unslung the heavy, canvas duffel bag where he’d stowed the radio and the accompanying equipment and set the unwieldy package on the ground near his feet. The tree stood roughly a hundred yards from the wood-clad, A-Frame house situated in the middle of a wide but overgrown clearing. Behind the house, Luke spied a pair of tin-clad outbuildings, likely barns or machine sheds. He’d seen how the homeowner had redirected the gutter spouts into large plastic rain barrels at the corners of the main house. Smart move, Luke thought.

  After a few minutes, he heard a reply. The man’s voice was harsh and gravelly.

  “Whatever you want, you’d best keep on moving. We don’t have anything to spare.”

  “Yes, sir!” Luke shouted back in reply. “We don’t want anything from you. I wanted to see about setting up a trade, but we don’t want your food. The other way around.”