Midnight Skills

by William Allen

  In addition, they were still inside radio range, and reinforcements from the quick reaction force could arrive as rapidly as fifteen minutes from the ranch. Even with diverting personnel to work on the oil refining project, and placing extra security on site, Luke’s father insisted the community keep a ten-man QRF on tap during the day.

  Over the next two hours, David and Dale ferried multiple boxes out the truck, stacking them neatly in the bed and covering it all with a plastic tarp retrieved from the garage. Luke had never visited Mr. Ferguson, but he’d been a friend of Sheriff Henderson’s parents before they’d passed. When Luke quizzed the sheriff about anybody in the county who he knew to be a serious HAM radio enthusiast, he’d quickly zeroed in on Mr. Ferguson. What especially intrigued Luke was when the sheriff said his father used to call Mr. Ferguson ‘Elmer’ when his given name was actually John.

  Luke laughed, then went on to explain to the sheriff that Elmer was a HAM expression, meaning someone who spent a lot of time either on or fiddling with his radio. No, Luke went on, he didn’t know the origin of the name.

  When David and Luke cleared the house, they’d easily located the old man’s workshop. Unlike the rest of the house, the looters left this converted bedroom alone, once the searchers verified the absence of anything edible. Mr. Ferguson turned out to be quite the electronics tinkerer. Sadly, most of the equipment plugged in at the time of the pulse turned out to be hopelessly fried, but the hobbyist stored many replacement parts in his grounded metal filing cabinet.

  David, fortified with his studies, recognized several loose components he knew could be used in the manner Luke suggested. He also ran across a few items that looked intriguing, but rather than constantly bugging Luke to see if he recognized them, David simply added them to one of the boxes for later examination. They had the space, after all.

  Once they had the tools and equipment collected, David and Dale moved on to the more physically demanding part of the mission. This involved disassembling the tower and pulling the various antennas. Again, much of the wiring appeared to have melted with the pulse surge, but David reasoned they could still use the pieces left.

  Luke, when he saw Dale begin to crank down the tower, felt the urge to go help, but as the minutes stretched into hours, he began to grow antsy. Something gnawed at his senses, just at the edge of perception, and he began to worry they’d overstayed their visit.

  “Look alive, folks,” Luke reminded everyone on their frequency, “Does anyone see movement?”

  Of course, everyone saw movement. That was an inevitable side effect of working outdoors, and his team knew what he meant. Motion where they shouldn’t see any, or more activity than one might expect. Luke feared they might be sitting in someone’s crosshairs, and he didn’t like the sensation one little bit.

  “You getting a feeling?” David asked, suddenly dropping the guide wires as he brought his rifle up to low ready.

  “Something,” Luke confirmed. “Angel? Amy? You guys getting goosebumps?”

  “Yeah, man,” Angel replied. “Can’t place it, but something is wrong. I can’t see it, though.”

  That was enough for David. Ever since the pulse, his internal gauge for danger seemed to be pegged at ‘oh shit’, so getting a second and third opinion when his sense of doom flared became instinctive.

  “All right, let’s wrap this up,” David announced over the team radio. “We are ditching the tower for now. Melanie, Amy, fall back to the truck immediately and take a knee, rifles out on your back trails. Angel, I want you and Luke to hold position for thirty seconds and listen hard. Let’s find out if we’re being stalked here. Move back about halfway, take a knee and stop for another thirty seconds. Then haul ass back to the truck. If either of you start taking fire, hold position and I’ll move up to relieve you.”

  David didn’t mention what he might do if both positions started taking fire. Die, probably.

  “I’ll just around stick here and hang out,” Lori piped up, and David knew she was feeling the pressure. She might be young, but according to Luke, Lori had already stood her ground in combat. He had plenty from his original group that fit the same bill, so he thought he might understand. Just like some of his old students.

  “Your choice,” David replied evenly. “We could sure use the help, and you’ve got a nice elevated position there.”

  “I’ll stay.”

  “Fix the locations for Angel and Luke in your mind,” David suggested, his voice still calm and deliberate. “Don’t shoot our guys, or these ladies coming in now,” he continued and lifted his rifle, shifting off the route when Melanie came to a stop a few yards shy of the truck. On the other side, he imagined Amy taking up a similar position.

  After a tense two minutes, all of the team members save Lori were back at the truck, and Dale covered David’s rear while the older man assisted the younger woman off the roof. Well, he really just caught the girl after she’d slung her rifle and lowered herself off the side of the building.

  “Woof,” David complained when he took the young cheerleader around the waist and deposited her on the ground, “You are heavier than you look.”

  “Old dude,” Lori hissed, bitching right back, “didn’t your momma ever teach you not to say anything about a lady’s weight? That’s just rude.”

  In spite the tense mood of the whole group, Amy and Melanie managed a laugh at the exchange. That was just Lori’s way, Amy mused. She was proof dynamite comes in small packages.

  Back in the truck, the six occupants strained their senses to locate an unseen danger while Luke drove at an erratic pace back to the highway.

  “Why the starting and stopping?” Angel asked, his voice curious. He’d been in enough life or death situations by now, he no longer experienced that sudden rush of fear like he had before. This being the case, Angel could stop and analyze the situation in a rational fashion. A quick glance around the cab and Angel knew the same was true for David, Luke and not surprisingly, Dale. This wasn’t a sexist realization, just a recognition of others who’d been deep in the shit and survived the experience.

  “Throw off any snipers,” Luke replied, never taking his eyes off the road and the surrounding tree line. The calendar might still read late fall, but winter was in the air and only the evergreens maintained their leaves, improving visibility. “Makes it harder for them to gauge that way. Anybody else see anything? I don’t know why we all suddenly got so skittish.”

  A chorus of ‘no’ echoed in the cab of the truck, but none had any better responses and Luke held his tongue while the highway miles flew by.

  “Try the radio?” Melanie suggested, her eyes wide as she strained to find something to explain the nervous reaction of this team. She didn’t understand what had them spooked, but Melanie was more than willing to follow Angel’s lead.

  “On it,” Amy replied, embarrassed she hadn’t thought of that earlier, and ignoring the fact nobody else thought of it, either. Checking the three-by-five card taped to the dashboard for the truck’s callsign, she keyed the microphone on the citizen’s band radio.

  “Fox 153, this is Mike 179, do you read? Fox 153, over?”

  Amy paused, waiting for a response. Just as she picked up the mike to make another call, an unknown voice replied over the speaker.

  “Case X-Ray,” the unknown man said. “I repeat Case X-Ray. Out.”

  When the voice faded, Amy looked hard at the code sheet, but couldn’t find an entry.

  “What does Case X-Ray mean?” Amy asked, her voice rising in alarm as she spoke.

  David cleared his throat, and his words barely sounded over the thrum of the growling diesel engine.

  “Not on the list, Amy. It means there was an attack on the home place.”

  Luke never uttered a sound, but the increased scream of the big engine showed he had his foot buried in the accelerator.

  “Everybody hang on,” Angel murmured, but nobody even suggested Luke should slow down.

  The teenager urged
the truck to go faster, but the lump of fire in his stomach told him they were already out of time.

  CHAPTER 29

  Luke never remembered passing through the reinforced gate or coming to a stop in front of the Old House, home to four generations of Messners. Now, the reinforced facing of the front of the house sagged down like a drunken cowpoke. The single seam metal roof was just gone, peeled away by the unimaginable force of some explosion, and bright orange flames licked the sky. As Luke watched in growing horror, the back wall of the second floor toppled forward, collapsing into the brewing flames in the center of the house. Glowing cinders and shrapnel filled the air, and Luke surged forward, his heels barely touching the ground as his legs pumped to charge into the maelstrom.

  The tackle came from out of nowhere, and Luke barely noticed the form of his friend Alex as the taller boy rode him into the heat-curled grass of the front yard.

  “Somebody might be in there!” Luke cried out, and in his heart, he knew with searing certainty the identity of at least one of them. He couldn’t stand the idea, and his soul felt torn into pieces when he wondered how much of his family remained alive.

  “Luke, they’re gone,” Alex husked, his voice rough and husky, his lungs already seared.

  “You were in there?!” Luke cried, his voice incredulous at the idea. Looking down, he saw what he thought at first were Alex’s tattered clothes, his shirt blackened by the heat, and then he realized with mounting horror, some of the shreds hanging off his friend were his flesh. Burned and flayed from the bone in places.

  “Yeah,” Alex managed to rasp. “Just heading in when the whole world turned white. Momma was in the kitchen, helping out Miss Nina and…your mom, Luke. She was there, too. And so was little Rachel. I don’t know who else.”

  “Oh, God,” Luke sobbed, trying to hug his friend while laying him down gently on the grass. “Just lie still, brother. Amy, David, get the first aid kit!” Luke screamed, and his shocked friends sprang into action. Suddenly, Luke became aware of people streaming in around him, approaching the house while the conflagration only grew and intensified.

  “We gotta move these people back,” David called out from what Luke seemed to think was a tunnel, his voice sounding far away. “There’s ammo in the basement that might cook off at any time.”

  “Luke, honey!” another voice cried out. “You have to move. You can’t stay here.”

  Numb, Luke let himself be led away, but his eyes refused to move off the raging fire that now singed his eyebrows. The young man didn’t seem to notice. He kept his eyes focused on the dancing flames, for he could not stand to look away. If he looked away, he might see those…things again, and he didn’t think he could survive seeing the carbon-blackened shapes a second time. He could tolerate what his eyes proclaimed.

  “Take care of Alex,” Luke whispered to no one in particular, his tone distracted. “His momma will be so mad, he got himself hurt like that.”

  “We will,” Amy replied, her voice a whisper. She didn’t look either while she led Luke away, but she thought she knew where the flame-eaten body of Alex’s mother already lay. She’d counted six bodies and knew there were more in the house that might never be identified. Or even noticed. High explosives did that to victims, after all.

  She’d also recognized the fire-darkened strips of yellow on another of the dresses as well, though the features were unrecognizable. She remembered it was the same dress Claire Messner was wearing to breakfast that morning.

  Luke followed Amy’s lead with legs numbed by loss and pain. The world was a blur of fire and tears, and the young man’s mind traveled down a dark and twisting road. He hurt, and soon he would make the world feel his agony as his sadness eventually gave way to rage.

  PART TWO: THE WAR

  CHAPTER 30

  Bouncing around in the back of the blacked-out five-ton truck, Luke tried to get comfortable as he lay reclined against his backpack. The other nine passengers in the truck bed tried to sleep, with varying degrees of success, but Luke knew better. Ever since his mother’s funeral, and with the row of sheet-draped dead laid out now burned into his memory, the teenager found his slumber endlessly disrupted by nightmares.

  Captain Bartaloni reported the trip north from the recruiting center in Nacogdoches to the marshaling point near Neosho would last three nights. So far, the ten recruits had endured five nights of bouncing passage along a variety of dirt roads, sleeping in ditches or under the truck during the day to avoid detection. They weren’t the only recruits heading north in the convoy, but their escort and minder, Sergeant Barker, discouraged mingling with the passengers in the other three trucks. Security, Luke assumed, since if captured, none of his fellow recruits could give up information they didn’t have.

  The nine recruits in his group were strangers to Luke and he went out of his way to avoid getting to know any of them. He didn’t need friends where he was going, and he knew many of them would not survive this winter. Better, Luke thought, he spared himself the pain of mourning more dead friends.

  By the end of the second day, Luke decided he’d done enough to make his position clear. He was willing to talk, and even carry on a conversation, as long as nobody asked him about his background or tried to share their own personal details. Even so, Luke gleaned enough details from comments made by the others to learn their names, approximate ages, and fighting experience, if any.

  Garvin, a slender black man in his early thirties, had served in the Army right out of high school, and claimed he was promised a bump in grade as soon as he arrived at the camp. All of them, having taken their oaths at the recruiting offices, were already sworn in as privates. Garvin, Luke didn’t know if that was his first or last name, maintained his old rank in the Army had been corporal, and he had served in a water purification unit. A 92 Whiskey, he’d called it.

  After Garvin gave his background, one of the other men, a blonde youth in his early twenties, made a joke at the veteran’s expense.

  “Well, if we need our canteens filled, I guess we know where we can get a water boy.”

  Even in the dark of the truck bed, Luke saw the older man’s glare as he ground out a response aimed at the insolent wisecracker.

  “Son, I fought my share of hadjis in the desert, and I’ve killed more than my share of smart-ass crackers since this whole mess started. But, yeah, I’m trained by the Army to test, filter, and purify water sources. Haven’t you figured out how important clean water is yet?”

  “Hey, no reason to get testy, Mr. Garvin,” one of the other men piped up. “Wesley is just a dumbass is all. I, for one, would be happy to get a drink and not worry about getting the trots again.”

  This speaker looked nearly skeletal, with the short-cropped hair of someone the medics treated for head lice before passing on to the trucks. Luke noted the man when they’d first boarded the buses and had wondered how the recruiters even allowed the man to enlist. He might have been anywhere from nineteen to forty-nine, and to the other recruits, he’d only introduced himself as Ed.

  In Luke’s mind, Garvin would likely get promoted to sergeant, at least after the convoy reached their destination. And then probably sent straight to a line company to help stiffen the troops. According to Captain Bartaloni, the acting adjutant general of the Texas Army National Guard, a colonel whose name Luke never heard, instituted a reorganization of all the units still under his command. Gone were the old parent units of outfits dating back to World War Two, consolidated into a pair of brigades. First Brigade remained scattered around the state, working in company-sized elements to hold the fragile peace in places like Nacogdoches and Mauriceville.

  Luke was headed for Second Battalion, Second Brigade, which he understood to be a framework of experienced cadre from the Guard, with newcomers making up a large percentage of the lower ranks. That was fine. The anger in Luke, banked like coals in a fire, awaited the opportunity to be unleashed. He’d tried to keep his head down and tend to his knitting as his grandfather migh
t have said, but the bastards wouldn’t let his family be. Yes, they’d killed all those Committee raiders outside Kountze, but yet again, if the raiders hadn’t attacked first, Luke liked to think his father and Mike would have simply chosen to avoid the fight. Finally, though, he felt the need to finish this thing.

  As he’d explained to his father, during the times he seemed to be paying attention, this was where the Allied States and the Recovery Committee met in open, declared conflict. This was the pressure point, where the Allied States finally had an enemy they could fight, and bleed. Along with the stated goal of protecting a key power source and all that useful farmland, Luke sensed this was a fight that could well decide the course of the nation.

  And so it went, for the five days and nights. Early on the first day, Luke registered that two of the recruits were actually women, but not much beyond their gender stuck out in his mind. He had his anger to nurse, and this somewhat kept him company. He was also missing Amy, Luke realized for the hundredth time.

  The two young women in their group hung close together but didn’t appear to have much in common. All recruits were technically required to show up with a rifle, a minimum of fifty rounds of ammunition in the proper caliber, and a backpack. Sergeant Barker insisted the Army would issue them new, or Luke figured more likely refurbished M16s or M-4s, as soon as they reached the marshaling site and training base outside Neosho. Since Luke carried a government-issue Colt M-4, he planned to just keep what he carried.

  The taller of the two, a tight-faced woman in her late thirties, bore a lever action 30-30 rifle she carried to the truck her first night and never bothered removing after that. Luke had concerns if the weapon was even functional, and he wondered what the woman planned to do if the convoy came under attack.