Midnight Skills

by William Allen

  He hadn’t slept, couldn’t sleep, and not even the comforting presence of Amy brought him any rest. Each night, Luke went to bed, but nightmares haunted him from the moment he closed his eyes. His subconscious conjured up all manner of cruelties, so he saw his mother on fire, Rachel screaming, Angelina Stanton begging for mercy. All these horrors took up residence in his memory, joining the parade of awful memories he already carried like a millstone around his neck.

  He’d tossed and turned, flailing and kicking. Amy never said anything, but she’d taken to sleeping on the floor, out of range of his wild gyrations, but close enough to wipe the sweat from his head and fruitlessly sought to drive off the night terrors torturing her man.

  “We’re never going to find them,” Luke admitted one morning, as he lay with Amy cradled in his arms. He’d sounded so weary, so defeated, that Amy forced herself not to cry. She’d cried for days after, but now she knew Luke needed her strength.

  “So, widen the search area,” she’d said, forcing conviction into her voice she didn’t feel. In her heart, she knew the killers had moved on to bring their devilment elsewhere. Following orders, no doubt generated from their higher ups. While all over East Texas, the locals continued to struggle back to some form of security, the rumors about the Committee and their reprisal attacks continued to swirl. Tales of families murdered in their sleep, and mysterious explosions destroying local strongholds. Some of it was surely due to the increasingly desperate survivors, taking what they needed in order to live through the coming winter, but all too often, the stories mentioned the pitiless men in their black SUVs, seen leaving the scene of the latest atrocity. For this, Luke and his father continued their hunt.

  Luke wriggled in the thin cushion of the gyrating helicopter seat while he thought about that last day. That’d been the last straw, and the revelations discovered that day continued to populate Luke’s nightmares, just as often as the images of their violated homestead. The memories drew him back, and while he sat in that meditative state, he allowed them to come.

  CHAPTER 50

  He was with his father and a team of six other fighters, including David Metcalf, Angel Guzman, and Shane Feely. Shane’s father Tim continued to work with Mike Elkins to get their mini-refinery up to full production before they tackled the old plant in Tyler. Shane rode in with his father and quickly started training with the rest of the self-defense force.

  The casual murder of Claire Messner and the seven others in the old farmhouse served to hammer home the lesson: nowhere was safe, and Shane realized the lessons offered by Sam Messner and David Metcalf might keep his family alive, so he rotated with the crew, checking the area for trouble.

  The sprawling house at the end of County Road 1147 in the far northeast corner of Shelby County had started life as a mobile home, but over the years, Luke could see where additions had been tacked on, with varying degrees of competence, until the whole structure resembled a hodgepodge of odd angles and wood siding in varying states of decay. Luke had seen many like it since moving back to Southeast Texas and thought nothing about it. Families would grow, and needed the extra space, so the industrious folk would dig out their level and start swinging a hammer until the project was done.

  The builders here, apparently had little faith in the electrical grid, and Luke spotted no less than four chimney stacks protruding from the misaligned roof, but only two of them gave off tell-tale smoke at the moment. This was the first house to show signs of life in a half mile of overgrown yards and damaged ‘houses’. Luke counted the rubble from three homes burned to the ground, and two more with substantial roof damage and missing front doors.

  The name on the mailbox read Wooten, and while the property sat ten miles southwest of the small community of Logansport, the road leading to the house showed a heavily-rutted path, indicating plenty of traffic in and out. Luke had expected to see a gate or some type of barricade, but the road looked clear. That made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

  The eight-man team rolled up in two of the heavy pickups refurbished by the team of wrench-turners started by Mike Elkins, though they now reported to Rudy Artiaga, a real, honest-to-goodness diesel mechanic. These were a pair of late 1980s model Ford F350 diesel work trucks, resurrected from a landscaping company in Center.

  The diesels might not have the top end speed of a gas burner, but Luke had come to appreciate the extra torque, since the modified trucks carried around the added weight of a steel plate in each door and under the hood. The trucks, though, handled the load with no apparent strain. The two trucks pulled halfway up the drive but as was the practice, stopped a good hundred yards from the home. No sense in making the neighbors nervous.

  “Hello, the house!” Sam Messner called out, stepping down from the front passenger seat of the first truck. “My name’s Sam, and I’m working with Sheriff Henderson to check in on all the homes on this side of the county. He’s been trying to make contact, now that things have settled down a bit.”

  Sam, too, had a hinky feeling about the setup and took care to not expose more of his body than necessary. Sam was wearing his fancy DHS-supplied body armor under his battle harness, but elected to leave the helmet in the truck, along with his rifle. For the moment, anyway. Again, they were trying to toe the line as required by Sheriff Henderson. The sheriff didn’t like what the anger and grief was doing to his longtime friend, but no one on the right side of the law in Shelby County could deny the results.

  So far, every single body dropped by Sam Messner and his band of vigilantes, and Henderson made no bones about what they were, ended up needing killing, as far as the pragmatic sheriff was concerned. Henderson might not condone the cleansing, but he was wise enough to realize he couldn’t stop Sam, short of openly moving against him. Luke knew the sheriff respected his father too much to do that, and he admitted the sheriff might also be a bit reluctant to confront him as well. Confront Luke, that is. The teenager wasn’t so far gone yet that he couldn’t see the watchful look in the old lawman’s eyes. The way you kept a lookout for a wildcat, or a feral dog.

  “Hey there,” came the unexpected reply, that of a woman. Most prudent families in these unsettled times made a special effort to shelter their mothers, wives, and daughters. Luke, from his position in the backseat of the second truck, couldn’t see the speaker from his seat, and he resisted the urge to look around. He had his zone to watch, after all. He was in a state of hyperawareness, his eyes flicking back-and-forth smoothly, like a gun barrel tracking across the unfamiliar landscape while he watched for signs of trouble.

  Luke clocked a pair of what he suspected might be sentry posts, but both appeared abandoned at the moment. That meant they were either decoys, alternate sites, or the men who should be manning those lookout positions might be already inside the house.

  “Got two empty gopher holes over here, Sergeant,” Luke reported immediately, giving David a bearing and distance on the apparently unmanned stations.

  “Got another over here,” Angel added from his spot in the driver’s seat.

  “Look around for anything with a good line of sight for those spots,” David replied crisply. Luke caught a glimpse of David’s head as he too, scanned the area. “Those might be traps meant to suck in the unwary. Some scumbag goes to take out the guards, then gets zapped for their efforts. Look up into the trees, too.”

  “This place gives me the creeps,” Angel continued. “Something feels off, comprendé?”

  Angel seldom used any Spanish, so when he did, it was simply thrown in for extra emphasis.

  “Yeah, same here,” Shane piped up. He was seated next to Luke in the other backseat position. “I’m not seeing anything at the moment, other than a slew of junker cars. That’s funny, though. Looks like the goats or sheep or whatever animal they got keeping the grass down around here aren’t allowed over there.”

  “And here’s your sign,” David whispered, quoting the great southern humorist Bill Engvall. “I’ll bet they got eyes o
n us from that thicket.”

  “No bet,” Angel was quick to reply. He knew his friend had a quirky sense of humor when it came to wagers.

  While the four of them made an effort to survey the scene, Luke’s dad was making progress of a sort when the older lady of the house, Mrs. Betty Wooten, extended an invitation to Sam to come in and sit a spell.

  “My husband Clyde is a mite bit stove up,” Betty explained, her foghorn voice projecting well into the next county when she spoke. “He fell off his horse the other day and the boys had to carry him home. You can come in and give us the news. We’ve been holed up back in these woods, minding our knitting.”

  “Sure thing, Miss Betty,” Sam assured her. “Mind if I bring my son in to meet you? He might know your boys. He was a sophomore over at Center High this past year.”

  Miss Betty cackled at that line, indicating all her boys were well out of school, but invited Luke on in anyway.

  “Your men are welcome to use the pump over by the wellhouse, if they’ve a mind to,” Miss Betty added. “Water’s sweet and even as cool as it is, sitting in the car all day’s thirsty work. Them all deputies, too?”

  “No, ma’am,” Sam replied smoothly. “Just some of my ranch hands who don’t like me out roaming around on the Sheriff’s business.”

  As the two bantered back and forth, Luke proceeded to swap out his gear in the truck. Like his father, he wore the improved body armor, but he quickly shucked out of the weapons harness and pulled on a long-sleeved hoodie sweatshirt to conceal his armor and other weapons secreted on his body.

  “You know there’s likely trouble in there,” David warned, sparing a rapid glance over his shoulder to spear Luke with an intense expression.

  “I know,” Luke replied levelly, adjusting the straps on his low-profile chest rig to tighten the fit. The sweatshirt would serve to obscure the outlines of his hidden weapons, but Luke couldn’t afford to get sloppy. His mission, the mission, wouldn’t allow for it. “We are running out of places to look, David. Let’s see what these down-home country folks have cooking, and see if they remember seeing any strangers in the neighborhood three weeks ago.”

  “And when shit goes sideways?”

  “Kill those sentries in the automobile graveyard and unass the rides. Dad and I will handle whoever they’ve got inside.”

  “You willing to make them talk?”

  “Aren’t I always,” Luke replied, and it wasn’t a question. He remembered those words, months later, and what they’d represented. An admission, if you will, that he’d gone down a long road that few dared, and from which even fewer managed to return.

  He stuffed his gloved hands into the unexpectedly deep front pockets on the sweatshirt, checked the grips, and twisted his shoulders in a series of rapid jerks. Everything felt settled and ready to rock. Slipping out the side door, he made eye contact with each of the men seated there. In a few minutes, they all might die, or suffer horrible injuries. Thinking of his best friend Alex, in agony from his debilitating burns, Luke realized he preferred not to see the bullet coming that killed him.

  “Be cool, my brothers, and aim straight.”

  “Aim straight,” came the reply. It was a mantra now for the fighting men and women of the Messner ranch. Just another little saying his father liked to say, and the others had picked up on the significance of the statement. A blessing before battle.

  Luke caught up with his father as they approached the sagging front porch, and Luke gave him a quick once-over with Sam returning the look. He couldn’t tell what his father was thinking or see the mixture of pride and trepidation that danced in the older man’s heart. Luke knew he was no longer the same kid he’d once been. Gone was the coltish, unsure youth who had gone off to Chicago in search of validation, scholarship money, and perhaps a misguided mission of vengeance.

  “They’re laying for us,” Luke murmured. “In the weeds, back by the dead cars.”

  “You want to abort?”

  “And what if they know something? We are running out of hiding places to search. Nah, David’s got that covered.”

  “Well, then, after you,” Sam said, raising his voice when the duo stepped up on the cracked cement steps.

  “Thank you, Dad,” Luke replied, trying to make his own voice sound relaxed and casual, instead of the dead monotone he found himself using almost constantly. “I hope we can finish up early today and get back home in time…”

  Luke forced himself to keep up an inane monologue while he reached for the handle of the screened door on the front porch. His nose picked up several competing scents wafting out of the house, and all of them made his stomach churn. Old blood, piss, shit, and rotting meat all carried to him, and he stepped to the side of the door and gripped the handle with his left hand while his father stepped behind him, stacking up.

  With a quick flick, Luke flung open the filthy screen door and shrank back a step as a shotgun blast peppered the wooden door frame. So much for subtle, Luke mused, and he launched himself into the room at knee height, even as the shotgun barked again, buckshot whizzing by inches above his head. Behind him, Luke thought he heard more shots out by the vehicles, and then he had no more time to think.

  Betty Wooten stood tall in the center of the cramped living room, breaking open the action on a double-barreled shotgun to eject the spent hulls, even as age-spotted fingers deftly inserted fresh shells. She never got a chance to snap the chambers shut when Sam Messner triggered three rounds into her body so fast, the boom in the confined space sounded like one long gunshot. Two in the chest, one in the head.

  While his father was momentary occupied, Luke scanned the room in a split-second, catching sight of the motion of the middle door in the back of the room when the wooden door began to swing inward. That was poor planning, since the slight delay allowed Luke a chance to withdraw one of his own pistols from under the hoodie. He’d been prepared to shoot through the fabric, but this was better.

  “Ma! Ma!” The shriek cut through the air and even as the older woman crumpled to the floor, three young men began pushing their way into the living room in an explosion of grasping arms and ranting cries. Apparently, Betty jumped the gun, as Luke thought back derisively, by mistaking the potential threat posed by the Messner men.

  The three latecomers, apparently some of Mrs. Wooten’s boys, shared a common sense of style. Boasting greased mohawks, black Gothic makeup, and a taste that ran to Doc Martin boots, dark leather pants, and open-chested vests, these creatures reminded Luke of certain characters he’d seen in a movie. For no reason Luke could discern, one of them was wearing a 1920s aviator mask, including the large bug-eyed goggles.

  They ran through the door firing, spraying a massive amount of shotgun pellets straight ahead, into and through the now-closed front screen door. Sam, like his son, had wisely stepped to the other side of the narrow room and hugged the smoke-tainted wall while the onslaught thundered by, missing him by a good three feet. The three attackers managed to empty their weapons in the tiny room without so much as scratching their opponents.

  Seeing the insanity projected by the Wooten boys, Luke felt that same battle madness infect his soul as he released the pistol in his hand and ripped apart the sweatshirt to reach the other weapons sheathed on his harness. Weapons that sparked a primal, bloodthirsty roar as the young man moved into the fight.

  Luke exploded with his blades out, borrowed KaBar in his right hand and a long, bent, single-edged blade held reversed along his left forearm. Slashing low, he used the razor-edged KaBar to open the abdominal cavity of the nearest attacker, then ducked under a swung shotgun barrel to bury the Marine Corps blade hilt deep into the heart of the middle of the Wooten boys. Releasing the KaBar, Luke pirouetted with the inward curved cutting edge of the other blade, now extended from his left hand, tracing a bloody path from hip to nipple and the masked attacker shrieked in shrill agony, the sound echoing strangely from inside the rubber mask.

  Riding on adrenaline and his growing
need to inflict some payback on the world, Luke reveled in the madness of the action, in the sheer release he found in taking these lives. He wanted to make the fight last longer, but found only the mewling cries remained, and the pitiful sound made Luke’s head hurt.

  Sam stared, and Luke read the mixture of horror and fascination written across his father’s bare features. Since his wife’s death, Sam had shaved off the beard and cut his hair short, returning to the regimented appearance of his time in the Corps. Despite her half-hearted protestations, Luke knew his mother had loved the beard, and all it’d represented.

  “That was…unexpected,” Sam managed to say, before drawing his attention back to the three doors leading off from the back of the room. He’d changed magazines and dropped the partially used one into the cargo pocket of his fatigue pants. “That the knife Gaddis made for you?”

  “Yeah, well, I helped him with it. A modified kukri design. Good steel.”

  “Why are these fools dressed that way? That was just embarrassing.”

  “Yeah, they were like the Tremor brothers in that movie Smokin’ Aces,” Luke replied absently, kneeling to wipe off the kukri’s eight-inch blade on the leather pants of one of the fallen. The blood beaded on the leather and rolled off without soaking into the material.

  Sam snapped his fingers, no small feat while wearing gloves.

  “That’s what I was thinking of. Those crazy assassins.”

  “But they weren’t very good at it,” Luke continued with a shrug. Unable to get the curved blade sufficiently clean, he set it aside on the back of the pellet-shredded recliner and returned to work.

  Luke tugged the KaBar loose and used it to finish off the other two men with a quick, casual stab to the throat. The one with the cut running diagonally across his body struggled feebly, but the other, intent on stuffing his exposed and perforated intestines back into the brutally excavated wound, barely noticed.