Midnight Skills

by William Allen

  Matthew hesitated, and Luke shrugged. “Never mind. You took too long, so whatever answer you give now, I have to think is a lie. I wanted to know which hand to start breaking bones, since it is harder for you to write shit down if I bust the wrong hand.”

  Stepping over to the door, Luke stuck his head out into the hallway, where a half-dozen listeners waited nervously. David suggested, based on his own experience, that they let Luke at least start off with no one else in the room to serve as a distraction.

  “David, can you come in here for a little bit? I need some help cutting off Howard’s hand. Can you bring some more tape and that soldering iron to cauterize the wound? Yeah, that would be great.”

  When Luke turned back, he saw an unconscious Matthew Morgan, leaning forward in the metal chair.

  “He’s dead, is he?” David asked, his tone unconcerned.

  Luke, aware the prisoner might be shamming, continued in character. “Doubt it. Their hearts usually don’t give out until you’ve taken both hands. Sometimes a foot, but we are going to hook him up to Old Betsy and fry him a bit. After the hand comes off. Or, you know, if you want, you can use the hammer to break all those bones in his hand, first. I know you like doing that.”

  David gave Luke a sick smile, knowing he’d been suckered. In his condition, Luke wasn’t really up for swinging the hammer. He might be able to drive a nail, but crushing the right bone required a tad more control.

  “Sure, why not? Let me get my hammer.”

  Matthew must have been faking, Luke thought, because David’s words sent the man into a screaming fit.

  “Who told you to set up the attack where you did, Matthew?” Luke asked when the man’s screams tapered off to a ragged, keening cry. “Shit, we haven’t even started hurting you, old son. Wait until we get those bones softened up, then I can use this,” Luke continued, drawing out a small pipe snip used to cut copper tubing. “I know, it doesn’t look like much, but hey, it fits in the toolbox and will take a finger with just a snap!”

  Matthew’s head fell forward again, and this time, Luke was convinced the man had fainted for real.

  “Think he’ll talk now?” David asked, setting out more diabolical-looking devices on the rough plywood sheet.

  Luke looked at the man for a second and shook his head.

  “Eventually. He’s getting there, anyway,” Luke replied with a sigh.

  “You really going to cut off one of his fingers?”

  “For my new best friend Matthew? He only gets first class treatment,” Luke said, using the same sing-song voice from earlier.

  “Man, cut, that shit out. I hope you never use that tone with your girl,” David quipped. “You will definitely be sleeping with the chickens.”

  Stepping out, Luke saw the lieutenant and his father standing close together, talking softly.

  “I think he’ll tell us who ratted you guys out soon, but I got a feeling he has more information tucked away that we can use. The location of their base, for one thing. Anyway, I was going to suggest we leave him with you, Lt. Gilbert.”

  Gilbert appeared surprised, then nodded. “I thought you would want to execute him for what happened to your men earlier. You did sound pretty, ah, worked up in there.”

  Luke shook his head, carefully. “I’m not that guy, like what you’ve been listening to out here. I’d love to put two behind his ear and call it good, but we use the tools we possess. If this guy has good intel, then use it.”

  Sam piped up then, giving the lieutenant a significant look as he joined the conversation.

  “Like I said, Scott, he’s not what you might think. Sixteen going on forty, some days. Look, you get us what we need, and you can have Mr. Morgan in there. I’d suggest you figure out a way to transport him to General McMillan, but that’s just my gut instinct. I agree with Luke, though. This guy knows stuff.”

  Gilbert nodded, then turned his attention back to Luke.

  “So, you are still convinced we have a leak somewhere? Not just bad luck or them having drone coverage, then?”

  Luke thought about the question for a moment before he spoke again.

  “No, don’t think so. Not drones. Between the losses they suffered at Camp Gruber and what I heard went down up in Arkansas, I can’t see these guys having too many more controller systems set up for them. There’s only so much stuff you can squirrel away underground.”

  “You might be surprised about that,” Lt. Gilbert replied mysteriously. “But I see your point. I just hate the idea. We’ve really pulled together at the base and the different groups have sort of melted together, but I see what you are saying. Hell, even our Homeland guys with the port threw in with us, so I’d hate the idea one of them sold us out.”

  Sam shrugged, then clapped the lieutenant on the shoulder. “Might not have even been one of them, Scott. I heard the DHS guys assigned to Pine Bluff stood with the National Guard, not Chambers.”

  “Really? Where did you hear that?”

  Instead of replying at first, Sam Messner hooked a thumb in his son’s direction.

  “That boy’s been everywhere and seen things…let’s just say, Luke’s been around,” Sam finally commented. “He walked most of the way home from Chicago after the pulse. Got to know some people along the way.”

  “Damn, I’d love to hear that story sometime,” Lt. Gilbert said without thinking.

  “No, no you wouldn’t,” Luke replied with a forced grin. “Now, I gotta get back in there before David starts skinning this guy. Now, he scares me.”

  With that, Luke turned on his heel and reentered the room as he heard Morgan begin to cry out again. Going to be a long day, and it ain’t even noon yet, Luke thought.

  CHAPTER 23

  “Well, that was special,” Luke pronounced when they pulled out of the parking lot of the truck stop, getting back on task for their mission. He was riding in the back of the Ought Five Cougar, since even after the medic Eric ruled him out of all combat ops for at least three days, his father figured he could operate the CROWS system with one hand. And somebody needed to mind the store there.

  Scott rode with him, to keep him company, his friend claimed. In reality, Scott needed to keep his leg elevated and despite the painkillers, he was really starting to hurt.

  So, they talked while the miles rolled by. The fuel tanks at the truck stop provided a quick fill up for all the vehicles, so their convoy would be able to proceed unimpeded. The remote location of the truck stop, as well as the presence of the DHS thugs using it, at least temporarily, as an outpost meant the storage tanks still possessed sufficient stock to fill the Beaumont and the Center crew’s rides. That wouldn’t last forever, though.

  The Cougars, with their advanced armor and more effective weapons, occupied the lead and drag positions in the convoy, and Luke kept his eyes pinned on the screens as the steady thirty-five miles per hour brought them closer to their destination. Or at least, to the address in Kingwood where they hoped to locate the mini-refineries necessary to keep their diesel supplies topped off and their technology running.

  “That guy was really in the Navy, then?” Scott asked. He was trying to sleep, but every bump on the asphalt ribbon made him grimace.

  “I guess so,” Luke replied.

  “And you and David tracked down a traitor in their ranks? Dude, that is pretty cool. And allowed you to get some more payback for Rudy and Skeeter and Ben on top of things.”

  “Yeah, and you, too. Don’t forget that. If you were in a real Army, instead of running around with us heathens, you’d be earning another Purple Heart.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’d rather have the leg heal straight. Eric said I was pretty lucky. I said it wasn’t his leg that got broken.”

  Luke chuckled at his friend’s grousing and kept scanning the surrounding terrain.

  “So, they had a Coastie who sold them out? Ratting out his own friends? That’s crazy,” Scott continued, grunting as he shifted on the makeshift pallet.

  “Lieutenant
Commander Schroeder won’t think so when Lt. Gilbert gets back. Turns out, this wasn’t the first time bad luck fell on the survivors holding the Port of Beaumont. I’d imagine he’s going to get a long walk off a short pier, as my grandpa used to say.”

  They rode on in silence for nearly ten miles before Scott spoke again.

  “What do you see out there? I have to tell you, I was a little worried when I saw how close this Kingwood place is to Houston. Practically right next door,” Scott asked, moving on to more important topics, like their continued survival.

  “A whole lot of nothing, man,” Luke replied, his voice tense. “I mean, we are starting to get into some built-up areas, but nobody is stirring. Only thing moving is us, and trash blowing on the wind. The roads are still pretty open here, but up ahead, the dead cars are beginning to build up. And I don’t see any people. Eerie.”

  “You…you think they are hiding from us?”

  Either that, or they’re all dead, Luke thought. He remembered one of the meetings he’d sat in on with Major Warren and his father where they’d discussed the state of the country after seven months without power. He remembered cringing when they’d discussed the dismal fate of Southern California, with no power to pump the water and a massive population, the remnants of the military forces, from the Marines at Pendleton to the Naval personnel left stranded at the base, all engaged in a mad scramble to evacuate their dependents out of the path of destruction. Last word over the HAM network indicated most didn’t survive.

  For the civilians, clueless and in most cases ill-prepared, they were scattered like mindless lemmings in the face of the worsening fires. Lacking in food and water, they had no clue how to obtain more, except steal these crucial supplies from others. The desert was said to be carpeted with the desiccated corpses of the horde, blindly fleeing the ruined cities. Luke could see it in his mind and tried not to dwell on the tragedy. As his father sometimes said before in times of sadness, the sea is made of man’s tears.

  “I don’t know, brother,” Luke replied solemnly. “Anybody in their right mind would run away from this convoy. Even with Angel digging out that big old flag he’s got flying,” he continued, trying to lighten the mood. Indeed, for whatever reason, Angel Guzman turned out to have an enormous Texas flag tucked away in his pack.

  “I’m afraid they really are all dead,” Scott replied, sitting up as if to look out the narrow, ballistic glass window. Moving just made his leg hurt more though, and he finally gave up.

  “Try not to think about it,” Luke cautioned. “Just push those bad thoughts aside and live in the moment. Think about how your leg hurts, or how much you miss your wife.”

  “Is that how you keep going? Just bottle up all the emotion? I get it, but by the way, you suck at inspirational speeches. Really, I should just focus on my own pain for now?”

  Luke shrugged. “That’s what I try to do. Like right now, I’m just focused on making sure we don’t get jumped again. And how much my head hurts.”

  “If you think your head hurts now,” Scott finally quipped, sensing Luke’s own dark mood and trying to lighten the conversation, “just think about how Amy is going to react to you getting banged up again. And to think, you told her this was going to be a milk run.”

  “I’ve got to start wearing a helmet,” Luke grumbled to himself, but then he went back to the topic at hand. “I’m worried how Mike is taking this. I think he’s blaming himself for losing Rudy and the guys in Scout Truck One. He was pretty tight with Ben and Skeeter, you know.”

  “I noticed, but I can’t think of any way to approach him about it,” Scott replied honestly. “He’s almost old enough to be my dad, so it’s kind of awkward. He’s obviously carrying around a load of guilt, but you know as well as I do, no matter how hard you plan and work, shit just happens sometimes.”

  Luke was impressed at Scott’s insight, because the older teen sometimes projected an attitude not in line with such deep thoughts. He often worked to keep their conversations light and easy-going. If anything, his younger sister Lori, cheerleader jokes aside, seemed to be the most philosophical of the Thompsons. Maybe this meant Scott was just growing up. None of them, not even little Summer at only thirteen, were kids anymore. Their childhoods ended when the lights went out.

  “Maybe so,” Luke temporized, thinking about how grief had aged both his father and his father’s best friend in recent months. The two men were barely into their forties and yet, the brown in his father’s hair looked nearly gone, replaced by gray. Grief, and high-stress living, he mentally added.

  “Well, at least Helena will get her wish, after all,” Scott said, changing the subject.

  “How’s that?” Luke asked, his head not moving an inch from the screen when he spoke.

  “Well…I was thinking about volunteering to go with Captain Bartaloni. When he goes back north. You know, do my part for the War,” Scott explained, as if Luke didn’t know who Nathan Bartaloni might be.

  The War. That’s what they called it around the ranch. Maybe what was left of the country too. Luke didn’t know, because like getting word about the fate of his old home area in California, the folks in East Texas heard things second and sometimes third-hand. For a child raised on the twenty-four-hour news cycle, trying to piece together details over the HAM net proved unsatisfying.

  No one could dispute that after President Dandridge came out and denounced Jeffrey Chambers as a traitor and murderer, Chambers and his henchmen doubled-down on their assault on the small city of Joplin, MO. Chambers acted by mobilizing his still-loyal mercenaries, alongside certain renegade Regular Army units and augmented by a scattering of subverted National Guard troops, but the bulk of their combatants came from their ‘volunteer’ brigades.

  Volunteers got fed, so young men volunteered in droves to serve in Chambers’ army. Again, if the radio reports could be believed, they also died in equal numbers. No one in the Allied States knew if the Recovery soldiers were actual volunteers or conscripts, but they carried their rifles and charged the trenches, so the battered Missouri National Guard unit holding out in Joplin honored the threat. The battle lines were drawn out over the months, and a bloody struggle ensued when overwhelming numbers of hastily-trained and poorly-armed Recovery soldiers threw themselves at the sandbagged and barbed-wired redoubts of the well-organized but severely outnumbered defenders.

  Soon, Joplin began to run low of fighters, and the call went out. Captain Bartaloni was only one of several recruiters dispatched from the enclave to help bolster their numbers, and he was getting ready to escort another levy of fighting men to join in holding the line in Joplin.

  No one seemed to know why Chambers remained fixated on stomping out the enclave in southwest Missouri. Some said it was because they were the first to restore even limited power production and the man wanted control of the old coal-fired plant, while others claimed Chambers wanted Joplin as a jumping-off point. Clearly, the alliance between Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Eastern Texas formed a core of resistance, and Chambers wanted, needed, to drive into the center of the states spearheading the fight against his Recovery Committee.

  Luke, having seen what rogue elements of the Missouri Guard did to their own civilians, had reservations about trusting anything Bartaloni and his kind spouted. He couldn’t deny Chambers continued to pour troops into the cauldron as the War still raged. That he would dispatch groups like those led by Matthew Morgan to weaken the states sending aid to Joplin, shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

  “Fuck, Scott, haven’t you done enough?” Luke hissed through his teeth, trying to avoid adding a scathing ‘dumbass’ to the end of the question. “You’ve been shot at, blown up, and gone from one gunfight to the next for several months already. Why go looking for trouble?”

  “Because somebody has to, Luke,” Scott replied with a heated tone. “I thought if anybody would understand, it would be you. I mean, hell, you LIKE the fighting.”

  That comment made Luke jump, and for a s
plit second, he shot an incredulous glance at his friend. Then he turned back to the screen and the hostile world around them as he felt his headache intensify.

  “Why would you think that? What have I ever done to give that impression?” Luke spoke the words softly, as if weighing each one before allowing it past his lips.

  “Because you’re so good at it, and you jump in with both feet every time something happens,” Scott replied sharply. “Dude, I’ve seen you shoot men and not even blink. No hesitation, no second-guessing yourself. So I know the killing doesn’t bother you at all and you never get scared. I just thought…” Now he finally hesitated, sensing he’d said something wrong. “I thought you enjoyed testing your skills against the bad guys.”

  Luke sighed, leaning back in the thinly padded seat while he scrubbed his palms into his eye sockets.

  “I hate it,” Luke growled. “I hate it, Scott. I hate having to snuff out another man’s life and leave more widows and orphans behind.” He paused, and his voice softened a touch as he continued. “And I’m scared all the time. Scared for me, and for my family. Heck, I’d be scared for you, but you’ve proven to be made entirely out of rubber.”

  He let his lips turn up at that last jab at his friend, but the half-hearted joke did little to relieve Scott’s sudden horror at how badly he’d misunderstood Luke.

  “But, I just thought…you make it look so easy. And your dad and your uncle must have been training you for years. To be this good at it, I mean. And I’ve never heard you complain about having to kill people. Not really, you know?”

  “Maybe so,” Luke conceded. “But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Nick Keller told me he thought I had a gift for violence. A talent. I think he’s right. Doesn’t mean I’ve developed a taste for the slaughter just yet.”

  “I’m sorry, Luke. You’ve never really said anything, and I honestly thought you didn’t mind having to do the things you’ve done. Please forgive me,” Scott managed to say, his voice thick with emotion.