It's one year after two New Madrid earthquakes have devastated the Mississippi Valley.
Battalions of foreign peackeepers are occupying Tennessee, at the invitation of the President.
Phil Carson, (from "Enemies Foreign And Domestic"), and three strangers are hiding in a well-stocked cave, which is a guerrilla fighter's lair. Across the region Kazakh "contract peacekeepers" are wiping out the last remaining American holdouts, who have rejected the federal government's order to abandon their homes and move to "relocation centers."
This scene is in the middle of the novel.
“The young ones sure need a lot of sleep,” said Phil Carson. He wasn’t quite whispering, but he was speaking very quietly. In the silence of the cave, he didn’t need to raise his voice to be heard.
“Thank God for that,” replied Doug. “The only time that baby is quiet is when it’s sleeping.”
“I meant Jenny and Zack.” Jenny and the foundling infant were sleeping in the blue dome tent at the other side of the wooden platform. Zack was in a green sleeping bag, sprawled on a foam mattress pad next to the tent. Both teenagers were sleeping heavily, after their arduous experiences of the past day. Carson sat across the square card table from Doug, sitting on one of the four wooden folding chairs. Both men were nursing mugs of instant coffee. Doug had his AR-15 carbine disassembled on the table, and he was wiping down the bolt carrier with an oily rag. The handheld radio and some of the other electronic devices from Jenny’s pack were also lying on the table, after having been carefully examined. Both men had changed into dry camouflage BDU fatigues, part of the cave’s stockpile. They were the old woodland pattern BDUs, curvy splotches of green, brown and black, not the digital gray and brown of the newer ACU pattern. A single bare light bulb was suspended above them. Doug had washed his face and hair in a basin and given himself a shave, and his black hair was combed straight back. Carson looked at his watch. “It’s almost noon. How long do you think until Boone gets here?”
“There’s no telling. If there’s foreign troops around he might decide he can’t move in the daylight, and then maybe he’ll wait until tonight.”
“You have a lot of faith in him?”
“Oh yeah. I’d of been dead a few times if it wasn’t for him. He’ll make it.”
A murmur came from within the blue tent, the start of a baby’s cry, followed by a soft reassurance from Jenny. When the sounds quieted, Carson whispered. “You know Doug, that baby can’t live on instant milk powder. At least, I don’t think it can.”
“What if we grind up vitamins and things to add to it?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t think babies can live on instant milk. You know what that means?”
Doug whispered back, “Is it going to die?”
“Maybe, but that’s not what I meant. It means we can’t stay hidden in this cave for a long time. Not if we want that little orphan baby to survive.”
“Let’s wait until Boone gets here. We don’t have to decide anything today.”
“What’s the longest you ever stayed in here?” asked Carson.
“You mean without going outside at all?”
“Yeah.”
“More than a week. We wait for bad weather to go out. ‘The worse the better,’ that’s what Boone says. ‘The worse the better.’ He calls it ‘good operating weather’.”
Carson lowered his voice in order not to be heard by Jenny, in case she was awake. “Well I don’t think that baby can last a week on instant milk. Not a newborn. I hope I’m wrong.”
“Let’s just wait until Boone gets here, okay? He’s the boss; he decides these things.”
“Fine by me.” Carson sipped from his cup of instant coffee. He was surprised that a luxury item that could not be found in the state of Mississippi, was available in a cave in Tennessee. The coffee was from an MRE meal pack, government issue Meals Ready to Eat. Carson had seen only one cardboard case of the plastic meal packs. They split a single coffee packet, and made two weak mugs, but at least it was hot. “So Doug, you already heard me tell my story, back at Zachary’s house. I told you about my voyage from Brazil, the quarantine camp, everything. What about you? Where are you from, and how did you wind up here?” If they were going to spend the next few days or even longer in the cave, they were going to become well acquainted.
“Me? I’m from Maryland. The Baltimore suburbs, north of the city.”
Carson had placed his accent as coming from somewhere in the Northeast, maybe Philadelphia. Maryland was a close guess. “So how did you wind up fighting a guerrilla war in Tennessee?”
Doug smiled ruefully. “It’s a long story. To start with, I was drafted. I was going to the University of Maryland, majoring in Communications, but I had to drop out after my junior year because I couldn’t afford the tuition. Unfortunately I’m just a Category 7—a heterosexual Christian white male. My tuition was tripled with no warning, so that was that. They pulled my student loan, and I couldn’t get any kind of extension, so I was back at home living with my mom. That made me draft bait—except they call it National Service now.”
“The draft is back?” asked Carson. “How’s that work? Do they still have college deferments?”
“There’s a lottery. They can get you anytime between eighteen and twenty-five. College doesn’t get you out if it, but it puts it off, and if you’re lucky they might not call you up at all.”
“How long do you have to serve?”
“It’s supposed to be two years in the military, or three years in the Conservation Corps or the Urban Corps. The CC’s quota was already filled for the year—at least that’s what they said—and forget the Urban Corps. So it was the Army for me. To tell you the truth, I would have picked the Navy or the Air Force, but I didn’t get a choice in that either. I did basic training at Fort Dix. Then I was assigned to an engineering battalion at Fort Leonard Wood. So I was already in Missouri when the first earthquake hit.”
“What are you, about twenty four?”
“Twenty five. I thought I’d have my Master’s Degree by now. Well, so much for my plans—Uncle Sam had some other ideas for my future.” He went on cleaning his rifle, running a small cloth patch up the barrel on the tip of a metal rod.
“Tell me something Doug. You’re obviously a smart guy. I’ve been out of the country for seven years. What the hell happened to America? I always thought Americans would fight to keep their freedom. What happened? How could Americans just roll over and give up? What happened? How could we give up our rights without a fight?”
“Well, we didn’t just ‘give up’ our rights. It wasn’t like that. Not at all. It’s more like they were stolen in broad daylight, at the constitutional convention.”
Carson asked, “How did that happen? I was down in the Caribbean then. American news wasn’t so big down there. Panama was going through its own troubles, and I was keeping kind of a low profile. I didn’t have cable TV, that’s for sure.”
“I’ll tell you what happened—I watched it happen. When the convention was over, that’s when we knew that the old America was gone. It was over. Finished.”
“The convention was in Philadelphia, right?”
“Right. I was in Baltimore when it happened, but it was televised wall-to-wall. On television, the talking heads called it the con-con, like it was a big joke or something. Maybe constitutional convention was too hard to spell, or maybe it took them too long to say it. Too many syllables. You know—time is money. I think a lot of the people behind it couldn’t even pronounce it, much less spell it, so it just became the con-con.”
“It was two years ago?”
“Yeah, two years ago, in September. You have to understand how bad things already were, even before the earthquakes, and before the big hurricanes hit the Gulf Coast. Even back then, the economy was so bad that people were calling it The Greater Depression, or just GD2. People were desperate. And not just welfare types, I’m talking about solid middle class citizens. Or formerly middle class, like my family. Nouveau poor, we called it. I think people were ready to try just about anything to get the economy moving. Nothing the government tried was working; everything was in a downward spiral. The Federal Reserve dropped interest rates to zero percent, but even that didn’t help. We were still using blue bucks then, what they called ‘New Dollars.’ Banks were failing left and right, only the Fed wouldn’t let them fail—they pumped in trillions of dollars in new money to keep them open. Nobody wanted to hear that it might take years to unwind the economic mess we were in. That it took us decades to ruin the economy, and it would take a long time to fix it. Everybody wanted a quick fix, like pulling a rabbit out of a magic hat. But everything the President and Congress tried just made things worse. Especially printing so much money.”
Doug set his rifle barrel back down on the table and continued. “The country was already a mess, and that was undeniable. Everybody and his brother were proposing constitutional amendments, supposedly to fix the economy, or make everything fair for the poor, or whatever. That’s how Congress came up with 34 state legislatures calling for amendments. There were seven or eight totally different amendment proposals, but it didn’t matter. Once Congress had 34 states on record proposing amendments, they went for it. Oh, I think they were just waiting for the chance. Once they had 34 states, it only took a 51% vote in Congress to call for the convention.”
“Congress? I don’t understand. What do they have to do with the convention?” asked Carson.
“Everything, under Article Five. It all came down to Article Five of the old constitution. Congress runs the whole show for constitutional conventions.”
“It does? I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah, well join the club. That was a major surprise to almost everybody, since it had never happened before. Not in over 220 years. So nobody knew much about Article Five,” said Doug.
“I guess that changed in a hurry.”
“You’re not kidding. It was shock therapy. Especially when the Poor People’s Party marched through Baltimore. There were already about a million of them camping out in Washington on the National Mall before the convention. When they took off walking to Philly, it was like a dam bursting. That was on Labor Day. Mile after mile of people with flags, signs, drums, musical bands on trucks—everything you can imagine. Police cars were escorting them, leading them up I-95. They closed the northbound lanes of 95 for something like twenty miles, for the whole time it took them to walk to Philly. They kept moving that closed section of 95 north, to keep up with the marchers. There was nothing else on television, practically. It took them two days just to get through Baltimore, and when they came through, they spread out like locusts. I was in Baltimore then, back in my mother’s house. I’d quit college, and gotten my draft notice. I was waiting to report for basic training.”
Doug took a sip of his own instant coffee, and went on. “Naturally, our own locals got into the spirit and joined the march. They took whatever they wanted from any stores along the way, and the police just watched. There was nothing they could do anyway, or it would have caused the biggest riot in history. It was legalized looting, that’s all it was. Legalized looting, all over Baltimore. ‘Redistributing the wealth,’ they called it. We stayed locked in our house and watched it all on television. It would have been suicide to go out and see it in person.”
“So it was, ah…racially polarized?” asked Carson.
“Extremely. Everything was black and white when they came marching through Baltimore. Blacks marching, and whites hiding. I never saw anything like it in my life. Well, not until Memphis, but that was after the earthquakes.”
Carson asked, “How far is it from Washington to Philly? Two hundred miles?”
“That’s about right. It took two weeks for them to make it all the way, and when they arrived, the constitutional convention was just starting. Perfect timing. What a coincidence, right? It was all planned in advance, that’s obvious now. They held the convention in the Spectrum sports arena. The delegates were down on the floor, and the rest of the stands were full of ‘spectators.’ Yelling and screaming like maniacs—and outside it was worse. They said there were over a million of the Poor People’s Party in Philly by then, coming from everywhere. Probably another million just from the Philadelphia area. They were banging on buckets and pans, turning over cars, barricading streets and smashing store windows. They kept interviewing the rabble-rousers on TV—it was like pouring gasoline on fire. ‘No justice, no peace,’ that’s all you heard. That was one of the big mantras. They called the looting ‘street reparations.’ They said if they didn’t get the economic justice amendment, they’d burn the city down. It looked like they would, too. Every street in downtown Philly looked like Times Square on New Year’s Eve, that’s how crowded it was.”
“Jeez, that had to be pretty rough, with that many people packed into downtown. There couldn’t have been enough public bathrooms,” observed Carson.
“Every store and restaurant was broken open. Needing to use the toilets was always a good excuse to force their way in. That, and needing food and drinking water. And after that, everything was looted.”
“And the police didn’t stop it?”
“They couldn’t stop it. How could they?” asked Doug. “The police just stayed back on the edges, and tried to herd them. Even that didn’t work. A mob that big makes its own rules.”
“Like a human tidal wave.”
“Exactly. A human tsunami. So with that mega-mob outside the Spectrum, you can guess what kinds of radicals were being let in to fill the seats. The real cream of the crop. It was a total farce. That’s when they started to call it the ‘kangaroo convention’ on talk radio. That was back when we still had AM talk radio…”
Carson asked, “What happened to talk radio?”
“Two things. First, a couple of years ago Congress passed the so-called ‘fairness’ laws. That meant that every point of view on a radio station had to be balanced by another radio host or by other callers from the other side. It got incredibly complicated. They literally had to count how many minutes were said for this and for that on every subject. Trying to keep up with the fairness laws made talk radio a money loser, so most stations went to sports or music. Then Congress passed a law against ‘hate speech on the public airwaves.’ Anybody could take a radio station to court for just about anything that they claimed was ‘hate speech.’ They’d cherry-pick a left-wing judge and jury in the right jurisdiction, and it was a slam-dunk every time. After a few million-dollar judgments, the last talk radio stations threw in the towel. Now radio is practically all music and sports, with nice happy-talk in between government PSA’s—public service announcements.”
“This must really be up your alley, if you were majoring in communications.”
“Yeah, I picked a great time to choose that career path, huh? Now all we get on television and the radio is government propaganda.”
“I’ve heard it,” said Carson. “We could get Nashville radio at Zack’s house at night. So, you were up to the start of the constitutional convention.”
“Right. Anyway, to start it off, the Aztlan Coalition said they wouldn’t vote for any other amendments, unless they got their regional autonomy deal first. That was the ‘Southwestern Justice and Compensation Amendment.’ That was the first amendment they voted on, and it passed on a voice vote. Next, it was reparations for slavery. Five hundred thousand New Dollars for every African-American man, woman and child. Right after that, it was reparations for ‘survivors of the Native American genocide.’ Another half million for everybody with Indian blood.”
“How was that paid?” asked Carson in astonishment. “Where did the money for all of that come from?”
“Didn’t matter,” Doug replied. “It was just instant money from the Treasury…or the Federal Reserve. What’s the difference? Ten trillion brand new blue bucks, right out of thin air. The checks came in the mail, or the money was just direct-deposited straight into their bank accounts. It was all just electronic digits, but it was real money just the same. It was just as spendable as any other money.”
“And that brought on the hyperinflation?”
“Among other things, like fraud on a scale never seen before in human history. People were collecting reparation payments right and left under false identities. I think there were about a million double dippers who claimed they were black and Indian…but it didn’t matter. Congress said that the reparations money would stimulate the economy. It would ‘prime the pump and even the playing field’ at the same time. It was ‘The mother of all stimulus packages.’ That was another of those clichés you heard all the time. The convention was already way out of control by the time they passed reparations for slavery and the Indians. Next came the Freedom from Gun Violence Amendment, and that’s when the Second Amendment was annulled. So you see, we didn’t want any of it. Not regular Americans. We didn’t ever vote for it; it was all done at the con-con by mob rule. It was a complete circus by then—the kangaroo convention. But it didn’t matter what average Americans thought, the amendments all became law. They became the new constitution. When the Second Amendment was repealed, the delegates in the Spectrum had a mass orgasm. We watched it all on TV. It was surreal, like a bad dream you get after food poisoning.”
Carson asked, “What did the gun amendment ban?”
“Just about every legal firearm that was left. After the stadium massacre seven years ago, the semi-auto rifles were already outlawed. The ones they called assault weapons.”
“I remember that,” said Carson. “I was here for that one.”
“Under the Freedom From Gun Violence Amendment, there are no more privately owned handguns, none. Um, except for the police. The police and the military. And no pump or auto-loading shotguns. Only single shot and double-barreled shotguns—and you need to get a federal license to keep one in your house. Oh, and you have to take a federal firearms safety course and pass a background check to get your license. If they don’t like your background—meaning your politics—no license.”
“Gun control was never about safety: it was just about taking power away from ordinary Americans,” said Carson. “To make it safe for the police, in a police state.”
“Exactly. And that wasn’t all,” continued Doug. “No rifle scopes…only assassins need them, right? No rifles bigger than thirty caliber, period. And all of the bolt and lever action rifles have to be licensed and registered, just like the shotguns. Everything that’s registered has to be kept in officially approved gun safes, and they’re subject to inspection at any time. They even have to be kept disassembled, with the bolts stored separately in another room. And God help you if they come in to inspect, and they’re not ‘properly stored’ according to the law. That was another part of the amendment: if you manage to get a gun license, you agree to random ‘inspections’.”
“What about ammunition?”
“You have to fill out about a yard of paperwork and get police approval to buy a box of hunting ammunition, and then it’s taxed around 500%. And you have to turn in your fired brass before you can buy more ammo. Oh, and forget about reloading—that’s illegal. You can’t even own gunpowder—that’s a ‘bomb-making material’ now.”
“And this was all in the gun amendment?” asked Carson.
“Hell yes. I think the FFGVA is something like forty pages long.”
“And American shooters just went along with it?” Carson asked with a look of incredulity.
“No, not most of them. I mean…oh hell, I don’t know. I didn’t believe any of the polls I read on it. But you’d be amazed by the number of so-called hunters and sportsmen they found to say it was all actually quite reasonable. They were on TV all the time, telling shooters to be reasonable, and comply with the new laws. They could still go hunting, and a bit of inconvenience was a small price to pay for public safety.”
“They can always find sellouts and traitors.”
“Yessir they can,” Doug agreed. “But any way you cut it, the Second Amendment was finished, dead and buried after the convention.”
Carson sighed, and slowly shook his head. “The end of two centuries of American gun rights.”
“Yep, the end.” Doug smiled, and patted the lower receiver of the AR-15 carbine lying across the table. “Legally, anyway. That is, if you consider anything that came out of that abortion that was born in Philadelphia to be legal.”
“I take it you don’t.”
“Nope, I don’t, not at all. But the con-con didn’t end with the gun amendment. The economic amendment was the last one. That was on the final day of the convention. It was a rubber stamp, another voice vote. By then the con-con was like a religious revival meeting, so of course the EJDA passed. That’s what they call the Economic Justice and Democracy Amendment, the EJDA. It was another mass orgasm in the Spectrum. We were in shock by then, watching it on television at home. It all happened so fast! Only a few months before the con-con, everybody thought the Poor People’s Party was a joke. We thought the constitutional convention would never happen, and even if it did, it wouldn’t really count, somehow. But it did, and nobody’s laughing now.”
“What’s this economic amendment do?” asked Carson.
“The EJDA guarantees jobs for everybody; it guarantees ‘a living wage,’ guarantees ‘affordable’ housing, free health care, free college, free child care… Almost any freebie or handout you can think of, it’s in the EJDA. Basically, it’s communism, written into the constitution. Believe it or not, they sold it as the best way to fix the economy. The new constitution was going to get us out of the depression, and make life fair for everybody. With the new constitution, the President could enact the ‘New New Deal,’ and get us out of the depression. Fat chance! That’s like taking arsenic to cure a stomach ache.”
“Back up a minute,” said Carson. “How did they ratify these amendments? What does the old constitution say? Don’t they need something like three quarters of the states to ratify an amendment?”
“That’s what we thought,” replied Doug, “But they used the back door clause. In Article Five, it says new amendments have to be approved by three fourths of the state legislatures, ‘or by conventions in three fourths thereof.’ That was the fuzzy part, the part nobody could really explain. That became just about the most famous sentence in the constitution. But what the hell does it mean? Who makes up these state conventions? Who nominates the delegates, what are the rules, and where do they hold them? There’s nothing in Article Five that spells it out. You’d see ten so-called constitutional experts on television, and you’d get ten different explanations. It was all up to the Congress to determine what conventions in three fourths thereof meant. At least, according to the Congress it was.”
“It sounds crazy,” said Carson, disgustedly. “It sounds like something that would happen in Venezuela or Zimbabwe. Making up the rules as they go along.”
“It was crazy, especially because the whole thing started with eight Western states that wanted a states-rights amendment. It was mostly over coal and gas revenues, and water rights. They wanted to cut back on federal control of their resources, and then they were joined by seven southern states. That was the original group of fifteen states. But pretty soon lots of blue states jumped on the band wagon, when they thought they might be able to turn a convention in their direction. Nobody really thought it would actually happen, it seemed so far-fetched—but in less than a year there were 34 states calling for a constitutional convention. For six or seven totally different amendments, mind you. Nobody saw the train wreck coming. Well, almost nobody—the radical Democrats in Congress saw it. They wanted it…they saw the potential. It was a setup, a scam from day one. A big scam to turn the country hard-core socialist in one big jump. We all know that now. But by the time we figured out what they were up to, it was too late to stop it. Congress had complete control of how to run the convention, and that meant the Democrats. The train had left the station, and it couldn’t be stopped. Then the Poor People’s Party was organized, and the next thing you know, we had Philadelphia. They held these so-called ‘state ratifying conventions’ right there in the Spectrum in Philadelphia, right there after the constitutional convention. It was such a joke! That’s why we called it the kangaroo convention.”
“And the Supreme Court didn’t stop it?”
Doug said, “Oh, the Supreme Court—I forgot that one. There are twelve justices on the Supreme Court now. That was another amendment: twelve justices instead of nine. The President nominated the three new justices as soon as the convention was over, after the amendments were passed. Congress confirmed them the same day the President nominated them. The old Supreme Court with nine justices was our last hope: that they’d throw the whole thing out. Just invalidate the whole thing. But they didn’t stop it. They voted five to four that the Supreme Court had no standing to overrule the convention results. The majority said that Article Five conventions are up to Congress. That was the last ruling by the nine-judge Supreme Court. Most people think the five liberals on the old court liked the new constitution better. They agreed with the new amendments, so that’s why they voted to stay out of it. Now that there are twelve justices, the liberals win everything. Three of the conservative justices resigned in protest, but that just gave the President three more seats to fill. Since the convention, it’s like living in Venezuela, or Russia. It’s Alice in Wonderland.”
“What about Congress?”
“What about Congress?” Doug asked back. “The Democrats had unbreakable majorities. The whole convention was their idea. Oh my God, the Democrats were all in hog heaven—and the Republicans were as gutless as ever. The RINOs rolled over for the new constitution, most of them anyway. They never had the numbers to stop it. You know, as long as they can keep their snouts in the hog trough, that’s all they really care about. A few Republicans challenged the basic legality of the con-con, but they were shouted down and called fascists and racists, all the usual stuff. They took an unholy beating in the media. So most of them caved in, and shut up.”
“Typical,” agreed Carson.
“Very. It works every time with RINOs. Growl at them, call them racists or homophobes, and they’ll run for cover with their tails between their legs. They just want to stay in Congress—it’s like being royalty. I think most of the RINOs in Congress like being in the permanent minority—it’s easier. Just keep your head down, shuffle along, make your votes, and go to A-list millionaire parties every night of the week.” Doug spat on the ground. “Bunch of losers.”
“But I take it that not all of the states accepted the amendments.”
“You can say that again!” said Doug, laughing. “Most of the Northwest, some of the South, half of Texas…but not enough to kill the new constitution. The President, the Congress and the Supreme Court accepted the new amendments, and that’s who counts. They control most of the military, and all of the federal law enforcement agencies. And they’re in charge in Washington DC, so they make the rules for everybody.”
“Only they can’t enforce it out West.”
“Well that’s right,” agreed Doug, “They can’t enforce it out there in the free states. Their state legislatures rejected the new constitution outright. They said that everything that happened in Philadelphia was illegal and invalid, because their so-called state delegates were stooges and imposters. So now the Northwest is using the old original constitution. They even got rid of the federal income tax, because they said it was unconstitutional. They say that the Sixteenth Amendment was bogus, because it was passed by some kind of a fraud back in 1917. They use a 12% sales tax instead, and it’s the same tax for everybody. Rich, poor—everybody pays 12%. And they keep it in their own states—they don’t send any money to Washington.”
“I’ll bet Washington can’t stand that,” said Carson. “Washington D.C. I mean.”
“Can’t stand it is right. Especially with the federal states still stuck in the depression. Yeah, the feds opened up a real can of worms with this new constitution. The states that rejected the new constitution didn’t just stop there; they started what they call the ‘rollback.’ That’s how they got rid of the federal income tax. They even got rid of New Dollars out there—they use gold and silver instead. They’re hard-core on the original constitution.”
Carson was intrigued. So the Northwest was going back to the gold standard… That was how he had been doing business in the Caribbean, and he still had a few ounces hidden in his belt, and more stashed in the derelict tugboat near his wrecked catamaran. He said, “Politicians can’t just create more gold and silver out of thin air, like they do with paper and electronic money. Taking away their printing press is like cutting off their balls, and putting a ring in their nose.”
“Exactly right. It cuts the power of the government right off at the knees. People are starting to figure this out, and boy, do the politicians up in D.C. ever hate it.”
“What about the South, the emergency zone?” asked Carson. “Which constitution are they following?”
“Basically, General Mirabeau speaks for the emergency zone. He is the e-zone. He’s the only law down there that matters. They haven’t had an election in three years. I don’t know how he really feels, I don’t think anybody does, but I don’t think he’s committed one way or the other. As far as I know, he hasn’t rejected the new constitution, but why should he? He rules like a king from Louisiana to Georgia. He makes up the laws as he goes along, under his own emergency powers act. It’s easier for him to avoid making trouble with Washington. What would it gain him? Washington can’t force him to do anything, so it’s a standoff. Personally, I think General Mirabeau is just for General Mirabeau.”
Carson said, “The folks here in Tennessee can’t be happy about the new constitution.”
Doug asked, “What difference does it make if they’re happy about it, when they’re under martial law?”
“Did people really turn in their guns?” asked Carson.
“Here, or up in the federal states? Up north, people didn’t have much choice. The police already knew where most of the guns were, from all kinds of computer records and registration lists. Most people up north turned them in. At least, it looked that way on television. People had no alternative. It was either turn them in, or get arrested. Or take a chance on having a SWAT team make a midnight visit. Maybe some folks up north buried their guns, I don’t know. If they’re buried, they’re still buried, I guess. But they’re not much good when they’re in the ground.”
“Nobody fought back?”
“Some hardcore types went down shooting, but not many. I was right there; I was still up in Maryland then. There were a few shootouts on the news, but not a lot.”
“What about you, Doug? What did you do with your guns?”
He grinned sheepishly. “I didn’t have any guns to turn in. My family was pretty liberal, and they were always against guns in general. You know, growing up in Maryland, my family blamed guns for violence in society. I never touched a real gun until after I was drafted.” Doug finished wiping down his rifle’s barrel assembly, rejoined it with the lower receiver, and pushed the two cross pins through.
“What about here in the South?” Carson asked.
“Oh, it was way different down here. Even after the new constitution was passed, the local sheriffs wouldn’t cooperate with the feds, not when it came to gun control. They wouldn’t set up collection centers like the city cops did up north. Then they had the hurricanes and the earthquakes, so things just worked out differently down here. The local police down here could barely find enough gasoline to drive around, much less to go out on gun raids. Not that they wanted to anyway. With all of the looting, people needed their guns—the local police understood that. Taking people’s guns away wasn’t a priority down here. After the earthquake, the feds couldn’t even bring food in, so they sure as hell couldn’t come in looking for guns. So anyway, folks down here are mostly still armed, just like before the Second Amendment went down the tubes. And with what happened after the earthquakes, people damn sure wouldn’t give up their guns. Guns mean survival—life or death. If people didn’t understand that before the quakes, they sure know it now. They won’t give up their guns now, no matter what the law says.” Doug Dolan picked a loaded thirty-round magazine up from the table, and slid it into the rifle. He stood the weapon up on the table, pulled down the charging handle, and let it fly home with a rasping metallic snap, chambering a round. “And I won’t either. Not while I’m alive.”
“And that’s why the feds are coming down so hard on Kentucky and Tennessee?”
“That’s what most folks think,” replied Doug. “If the feds can’t get Kentucky and Tennessee and the Carolinas whipped into shape, they’ll never be able to get control of the Deep South, what they call the emergency zone. That’ll leave General Mirabeau in charge, except he’s not really under Washington’s authority. All Washington really controls now is the Northeast and the Midwest, from Maine to Minnesota, and down to Virginia—and Virginia is shaky. There’s a lot of mountains in Virginia, just the same as eastern Tennessee, Kentucky and the Carolinas.”
“Mountain folks are a different breed, that’s been my experience.”
“Mr. Carson, the federal government is just an empty shell any more, and that’s how I think it looks in most of the country. Why should General Mirabeau toe Washington’s line, if Washington can’t even get a handle on Kentucky and Tennessee? And if they can’t get Kentucky and Tennessee under control, then they can forget about the Northwest. They’d never have a chance of getting control out there. Not while the East is still divided. That’s why Kentucky and Tennessee and the Carolinas are so important. If Washington can’t even get their own backyard cleaned up, they can forget about the Northwest. I think that’s why the President was willing to bring in foreign troops. She doesn’t care what anybody thinks—it’s make or break time. The whole world is watching. If she can’t even get control east of the Mississippi River, then the federal government is finished, and everybody knows it.”
“That’s sure something to ponder,” said Carson. “The end of the United States of America.”
“Maybe America died a long time ago, and it just took us this long to realize it.” Doug shouldered the reassembled rifle, aimed it at the ceiling of the cave, and sighted along its barrel.
“That might be right. Maybe you could write a book about it some day. You’ve got a lot of ideas, a lot of insight for a young man.”
“I’ve thought about it.” He took the rifle, and propped it against a crate behind him, in easy reach. “Did you ever hear of a book called ‘The Black Swan’?”
“No, never.”
“You ever read about chaos theory?”
“Sure, a little.”
“It’s related to that. Risk, randomness…it’s sort of where mathematics meets philosophy. Anyway, a black swan event is something nobody thinks can be possible, like a black swan in nature. All swans are white, right? That was a certified known scientific fact forever—until they found black swans in Australia. You can’t even imagine a black swan, until it hits you between the eyes. Planes taking down buildings on 9-11, that was a black swan. The constitutional convention coming out of nowhere—that was a black swan. The global financial collapse, that was one too. After they happen, everybody has an explanation, but never before. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but foresight is blind. The twin earthquakes sure as hell were black swans. All the experts said that a big Midwest earthquake should only happen about every five hundred years. They said that like it meant we had another three hundred years to go, counting from the last big New Madrid quake. Like earthquakes followed schedules. So much for experts!
“Hell,” said Doug, warming to his subject, “We got attacked by a whole damn flock of black swans, and the experts didn’t see a single one of them coming. Nobody believed any of this could happen. But it did! When it comes to predicting these off the bell curve events, the experts were all wrong, wrong, wrong. Speaking of bell curves, some people call these black swan things ‘fat tails.’ That means a big fat bulge out on the skinny edge of the bell curve, where things should be astronomically rare. Fat tail events happen all the time out in the real world, but the experts can never see them before they hit.”
“Like ‘five hundred year floods’ that happen twenty years apart,” said Carson.
“Exactly. I read that Black Swan book back at the University of Maryland for a course I was taking. I’d love to read it again some day. When I read it in college, it seemed kind of far out. Not any more. I’m a big believer in black swans now. What you can’t see can kill you. What you can’t even imagine can kill you—or wreck your country. You think that just because your country has been chugging along pretty well for two hundred years, it’ll keep on going forever, nice and easy. Like some kind of American birthright, or natural law. But black swans are out there—even if you can’t see them, or predict them. And they can change everything.”
“Doug, you have got to write a book about this.”
“Maybe I will. But who’s going to read it?”
“I would.”
“Thanks. I’ll start tonight. Or today, or whatever time it is.”
Carson checked his watch. “It’s half past noon.”
“It never changes in here. It’s easy to get disoriented, and lose track of time.”
“You were telling me how you dropped out of college and got drafted. So how did you wind up in Tennessee with Boone Vikersun?” Phil Carson understood that this might be a sensitive topic, if the young man was still supposed to be serving on active duty in the Army.
His weak coffee long since finished, Doug reached under the table for a half-filled plastic water bottle, and took a drink. “Well, I was stationed in Missouri at Fort Leonard Wood when the first earthquake hit. December 15th, at ten o’clock in the morning. Saturday. I was outside the barracks, throwing a football around with some buddies. It lasted for almost four solid minutes. The first real big shaker, I mean. There were aftershocks that went on for days, and you never knew if they were the start of another big one. We were two hundred miles from the epicenter, and it was still almost strong enough to knock you off your feet. I was outside, and you could see land waves, like rollers on the ocean. Not that high, but you could actually see them. Pretty amazing. When you can’t trust the old terra firma under your feet, what can you trust? Anyway, most of the troops at Leonard Wood were put on buses and sent to Saint Louis. Saint Louis didn’t have too much direct earthquake damage, but the power was out and the gas and water were down. A lot of fires started, and just kept getting bigger. As soon as the power and lights went out, you might say that the civil order fell apart pretty fast.”
Carson said, “When I was down in Panama, I saw some video of the damage. It hit between Saint Louis and Memphis, right?”
“Closer to Memphis. It’s 250 miles from Saint Louis to Memphis, and the quake’s epicenter was fifty miles north of Memphis. Just below the bottom of Missouri’s boot heel, but across the river in Tennessee.”
“Is that near New Madrid? The news I heard said it was almost as bad as the big New Madrid quake, back in the early 1800s.”
“It was in 1812. New Madrid is in Missouri, just above the boot heel. But it doesn’t matter exactly where the center was. It was almost an eight on the Richter scale for about a hundred miles around the epicenter. Midwest earthquakes are a lot worse than California ones. I mean, they’re wider; they cover a lot more territory with the full power. We sure felt it at Fort Leonard Wood, and we were two hundred miles away. Like I said, most of our available troops went to Saint Louis, to try to restore civil order. My battalion was held back, because we had the assault bridges. We were staging up for bigger and better things.
“While we were waiting around, we were watching television every chance we got. Cable news. Some of the base was on generator power, so we could watch satellite TV. There was rioting and looting in Saint Louis and Nashville, but the video coming out of Memphis was the worst. Video shot from helicopters. It was like the end of the world down there. It seemed like half of that city was unreinforced masonry—brick—and most of it went down. Even regular wood frame houses were shaken to pieces. All kinds of natural gas lines go through there; it’s like a big energy corridor from the Gulf to the Northeast. Well, at least it was. The gas pipelines broke in a million places, and a lot of Memphis burned to the ground. Then it was the chemical plants. They had all kinds of chemical plants and fuel farms along the Mississippi, and the ones that didn’t burn, spilled. It was a mess! And smack in the middle of all of that, a million people. No electricity, no drinking water, no gas stations or supermarkets open, roads blocked, bridges down…you couldn’t imagine such a place. And that’s where we were going.”
“It sounds like Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana,” Carson said.
“Oh, it was much worse. New Orleans wasn’t on fire after Katrina. And New Orleans had a big rescue effort going in after just a few days. FEMA was ready and waiting to go into New Orleans, because you can see hurricanes coming a week out. Earthquakes catch you totally off guard. The worst earthquake damage went for more than a hundred miles around the epicenter, and it just nailed Memphis. There was damage everywhere from Little Rock to Nashville to Saint Louis. Memphis was just the worst hit major city, so it got the most media attention.
“My unit spent until Christmas at Fort Leonard Wood. We were watching television news reports all the time we weren’t on duty. Most of the film was shot from helicopters. It was too dangerous to land in Memphis. Any helicopters that landed were swarmed with people trying to get out. So many people would grab on that that they couldn’t lift off the ground. And when they did airlift people, where could they put them? You can’t just drop them off in a field—that just moves the problem from A to B. They dropped pallets of food and water bottles, just hovered and threw them down, but that caused riots. Every time they dropped pallets of food or water in Memphis, it was like Mad Max—survival of the fittest. The law of the jungle. Every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost. They did hundreds of airdrops, but it was just a drop in the bucket, and the meanest thugs got it all anyway. No way could we land and set up distribution centers, not right after the first quake. We had to wait to go in with a big enough force, that’s what my battalion was gearing up for. It was just dog-eat-dog on the ground in Memphis. And it was freezing cold, remember. The city burned for days, and some chemical dumps burned for weeks, so the air was horrible.”
“And no food, and no drinking water,” said Carson. “I can’t imagine what it must have been like in there. It must have been hell in Memphis.”
“Apocalyptic, that’s the word. When you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it got a lot worse. I was in the Headquarters Company, so I had a little better idea what was going on. Some of my friends were in communications, they let me know what was really going on. The whole earthquake rescue operation was totally botched. FEMA was just overwhelmed, and they did almost everything wrong. It didn’t help that so many highway bridges were down. You just couldn’t get relief convoys in. People coming out of Memphis had to walk, because their cars were out of gas, or they were stuck in massive gridlocks. Too many roads were cracked, and too many bridges were down… Anyway, not very many people got out of Memphis in cars, not after the first big quake. It’s not that every single bridge collapsed, they didn’t. But enough did that it turned the evacuation into a permanent gridlock. Thousands of people got out by walking…but they weren’t exactly greeted with open arms out in the country. A lot of the black refugees…well, they were shot. At least I think they were black. Everybody looks black after they’re lying on the ground dead for a few days. That was what we saw on television, back at Fort Leonard Wood. The TV networks all had their news anchors up in helicopters, filming it. Dead black people on the ground, everywhere.
“Well, we finally got our orders to move out the day after Christmas. We went with our equipment on trucks, and worked our way down into Arkansas in a two-hundred-vehicle convoy. So many highway overpasses were down that we had to keep making detours, which was a real problem because every time we slowed down, we’d get swarmed with refugees. And that was in Arkansas, which wasn’t half as bad as Tennessee. We crossed the Mississippi north of Memphis, on barges. Tugboats pulled us across, going back and forth like an amphibious landing. Some of the chemical plants were still burning, two weeks after the quake. The air burned your eyes and made your lungs ache. It was like D-Day meets Apocalypse Now.”
“Is it true that all the bridges above Vicksburg are still down?”
“Down, or unusable. Well, there’s a new cable-stay bridge at Cape Girardeau, and it came through the quakes, but that was the only one.”
“So what was the problem? Why didn’t you cross there?”
“The problem is the river doesn’t go under it any more. There’s just a lake there now. The river cut a new channel, a few miles west of the bridge. It’s not the same river anymore. The quakes made a lot of new channels. The Ohio and Tennessee Rivers too. Paducah was wiped flat when the Kentucky Dam failed. That sent all of the water in Kentucky Lake down into the Ohio like a tidal wave, straight through Paducah.”
“Kentucky Lake is huge,” Carson noted. “It goes practically all the way across Tennessee.”
“It was huge. But not after the dam collapsed. It was just an earthen dam; they built it way back during the first Great Depression. Cairo Illinois is gone, just plain gone. I don’t just mean the buildings, I mean the land under the buildings—it’s not there anymore. It’s under water. That’s where the Ohio meets the Mississippi now, right where Cairo used to be. That happened after the first earthquake, a year ago on December 15th. So our battalion made it across the Mississippi on barges. Our mission was to put a temporary bridge across the Wolf River, and another one on Nonconnah Creek. Have you ever heard of them?”
“No.”
“Well, they both run into the Mississippi. The Wolf runs along the north side of Memphis, and the Nonconnah along the south side. Most of Memphis lies between those two rivers, and of course the Mississippi River is on the west. Memphis was practically an island once those bridges went down. All of Western Tennessee was basically an island when the big river bridges went down, so that made Memphis an island on an island. The only way out of Memphis across dry land was straight to the east between the Wolf and the Nonconnah, through suburban towns like Germantown and Collierville. Our mission was to open a supply route from Memphis straight south into the state of Mississippi. Getting a bridge over the Mississippi River was out of the question, that’d take years. The Ohio and Tennessee Rivers weren’t much better, those bridges were down too. Interstate 55 was going to be our main supply route from Mississippi into Western Tennessee. The highway runs straight south from Memphis to Jackson Mississippi, and then New Orleans. Our mission was to bridge the Wolf and then the Nonconnah, to open up the route down into Mississippi.”
“I thought General Mirabeau sealed the state border?”
“He did, to refugees coming out of Memphis. We were opening up a route to bring in relief supplies. I have no idea what kind of coordination happened between Mirabeau and Washington, or what kind of deals were made. At the time, we were just operating under our original orders: put temporary bridges over the Wolf River and Nonconnah Creek, and open up the I-55 from Memphis down into Mississippi.”
Doug sipped his water and continued. “The Memphis airport is south of the Nonconnah too, near I-55. Between Nonconnah Creek and the Mississippi state line. Once they got the runways fixed, they were bringing transport planes with relief supplies into the airport, but they could only get it from there into Memphis by helicopter. It was the mother of all bottlenecks. Once we fixed the bridges, FEMA and the military could bring the stuff into Memphis on the roads. As it was, thousands and thousands of refugees were crossing the Nonconnah on foot, or in little boats, or even swimming. Pedestrians could get across some of the wrecked bridges. All of these people were swamping the airport, turning it into a giant refugee camp, and that made the bottleneck situation there even worse. Without a working road from the airport into Memphis, all they could do was helicopter airdrops, and that wasn’t enough. FEMA was stuck way behind the curve. The situation in Memphis was getting worse by the day, not better. But first we had to bridge the Wolf River, north of Memphis.”
“How did that go?”
“We set up a series of assault bridges. We had the Wolverine bridge system at Fort Leonard Wood; it can extend out across an eighty-foot gap. The Wolf River averaged about two hundred feet wide—over the water, I mean. The bridge was much wider, to get the roadway up onto high ground. Sections of the old bridge were still useable. We got a lane open with our Wolverines, plus what we could pick up out of the river with cranes. We broke every safety regulation there ever was putting old bridge sections back up, but our mission came first. Open a lane over those two rivers ASAP, no matter what! Our welders and riggers really kicked ass. We had our own operating engineers, so when we needed bigger equipment than what we brought, we just commandeered what we could scrounge up and we got to work. Big road cranes, mostly, plus ‘dozers and backhoes.”
Carson asked, “What do you mean, commandeered?”
“We just took what we needed. Emergency law, it was all under emergency law. We could take the crane operators and mechanics too, when we could find them. Sometimes they helped us willingly. I mean, it’s their city, and they wanted to fix things even more than we did. Plus, they’d rather run their own equipment, than see it driven off by strangers and maybe be ruined. We usually got help with the heavy equipment, one way or the other. We had our own fuel tankers, and we were armed, right? We had plenty of qualified equipment operators in our battalion. We could run any machines we could find. Well, it took us three days to get a single lane open across the Wolf. We left a reinforced company for security, and the battalion pushed on south to Nonconnah Creek with the rest of our equipment.
“It took them two days to make it ten miles as the crow flies. Whoever decided our battalion should cross the Mississippi River above Memphis should be shot. We should have come across the Mississippi further south, into the state of Mississippi, and then gone up into Memphis. Instead, we did it ass backwards. Typical Army planning—go the shortest way, not the best or the easiest. I think they did it because the Mississippi River was blocked by the fallen bridges: they had to use the barges and tugs where they were, north of Memphis. Anyway, we ended up driving clear around the city in a big zigzag circle, trying to get to the Nonconnah. We couldn’t use the highways, I-40 or the 240. That’s the beltway around Memphis. Too many overpasses came down in the quake, so we had to use the surface streets. It took us two days of moving telephone poles and pushing through rubble and fending off refugees. It was a nightmare. We were supposed to put up bridges to bring in relief supplies, and allow refugees out. In the end, it was us who needed to be rescued, along with everybody else.
“We had to use live ammo—fire warning shots, then shoot to kill, the whole nine yards. Our mission was considered that important. We lost a third of our convoy along the way: ambushed, split off, looted or burned. Our battalion CO had orders to press straight on to the Nonconnah, but she kept detaching elements to rescue people. It was a horror show. It was hard to drive on by when you saw little kids begging for help, drinking ditch water…starving and freezing. We had our own rations, but it was tough keeping our minds on our mission. You just wanted to stop and help people everywhere, but you couldn’t. We had to get the highway into Mississippi open. We had to open the way to the airport. By then we had some big road cranes that we’d picked up along the way. Anything we could use, we took it if we could. Just took it. Finally on January 7th, we opened up the bridge over the Nonconnah. The interstate highway down to Mississippi was open, and that meant the Memphis airport was open too. Only one lane, but it was open. Technically open, anyway. Then my company was sent back north, to bring down more supplies from the barge crossing point north of Memphis.”
Carson asked, “The state of Mississippi was already a disaster area from the hurricanes, wasn’t it? Did they really expect Mississippi to come and rescue Memphis?”
“That kind of decision was way above my pay grade. I was just there to help open the highway down into Mississippi. But it didn’t matter in the end—it was a moot point. On January 9th, the second big quake hit. Nobody expected it! At first, we thought it was just another aftershock. Our temporary bridges fell into the rivers. Our best cranes went over too. Our own, and the big civilian cranes that we’d commandeered. It was the best heavy equipment that we could find around Memphis, and down it went. When a crane goes over, you need another crane to lift it back up…but there were no more cranes. And their booms and lifting cables were totally fubared. You don’t just go down to Home Depot and get more of them. They don’t stock cantilevered booms for hundred-ton cranes, or spools of one-inch rigging wire. Not to mention that all of the Home Depots were looted anyway… So all that work we did to get heavy equipment to the rivers was wasted. After the January quake, all that equipment wound up getting stuck. Stuck, trapped or ruined, and the bridges were back in the river. Here we were, an active duty Army battalion, and we basically needed to be rescued. Our rations ran out. We didn’t bring any heavy weapons, just our rifles and a basic load of ammo. That was almost all expended just getting through Memphis.”
Carson asked, “Didn’t the Army use choppers to fly food and ammo in to you?”
“Some, but hardly enough. Remember, there were millions of people in a bad, bad way from Nashville to Little Rock. We were just a battalion of soldiers, so I guess they expected us to be able to take care of ourselves. We were a low priority, just one of probably hundreds of military units stranded all over the place.”
“How big was the second quake?”
“I’ve heard all kind of numbers. At least an eight on the Richter Scale, about as strong as the first one. I don’t truthfully know. It was big. The second earthquake hit after dark, seven thirty at night. There was a curfew. No more vehicle traffic at night except for the military—not that anybody obeyed the curfew. It was a madhouse, nobody was in charge, there were no police. We had camps on both sides of the Wolf River, guarding the bridge, manning refugee checkpoints. There were refugee squatter camps on both sides of the river, trying to get protection and begging for some of our rations, our MRE’s, and our clean water.
“Anyway, I was walking across the bridge with a couple of my squad buddies when it started moving, slow at first, then bucking real hard. I tried to run for the land, it was about fifty yards in either direction to get off the bridge and onto solid ground—our steel Wolverine spans and the concrete sections that came through the first quake, or that we’d lifted back up with cranes. I couldn’t run, the bridge was going wild. I tried to hang onto a girder; it was like trying to hang onto one of those bull-riding machines. Felt like it went on forever, minutes anyway. Very long minutes. Our cranes all went over. One landed across the bridge and almost nailed me.
“You can’t even imagine how frikkin’ scary it was. Thousands of birds were going insane, screaming and flying in every direction, just flying straight into things and breaking their necks. Lightning was striking all around us. The sky was kind of a sickly yellow from the chemical fires that were still burning over on the Mississippi River, and there was a new sulfur smell just to remind you that hell was opening up. You could smell it: the sulfur was so strong it burned your nose. It was apocalyptic, supernatural, anything you can think of like that—times ten.
“The steel bridge girders were grinding and wailing, up and down, side to side, back and forth, and then it all let go. I was sure I was going to die. I went down with the bridge section; it was about fifty feet down to the water. I went underwater, and then I was like a goldfish in a blender full of black paint. I thought, ‘well, it’s my turn now.’ I’d seen so many dead bodies since I’d crossed the Mississippi River into Tennessee…it was hardly a surprise that my time had come. I was on the verge of just taking a great big breath of Wolf River, when I was spat up into the air, and then I was just carried along like on white water rapids. Mind you, this was on the Wolf River that most of the time barely moves. But there I was, just getting swept along for the ride with trees, cars, telephone poles, I can’t even imagine what. It was pitch black except for the earthquake lightning, and the chemical plants back on the Mississippi River that were still burning.
“I grabbed a hold of a door or something that felt like a door and just held on for dear life. Everything was just tumbling and rushing around me, and I thought I was going to get killed again, only this time I’d be crushed first and then drowned. But as sudden as it started, all of the crap I was surrounded by became still, and the water rushed out from under me. It was still almost totally dark, but there was no more lightning, just that stink of burning chemicals and sulfur. And dead bodies…there was always the smell of death since I’d gotten to Memphis. That was my last memory, being buried in a mountain of trash while the water was sucked away. The whole thing from the first shake to going into the river, to washing up high and dry maybe took ten minutes—but who’s counting minutes in the middle of a frikkin’ nightmare from hell? My watch was gone anyway. I was wearing ACU’s and combat boots; they were still on me anyway, thank God. My pistol, my wallet, my watch, they were all gone. But I was alive. Freezing cold, soaking wet, but I was alive. During that entire ride, from the bridge and down the Wolf River, I was sure I was going to die. Positive. So even freezing cold, cut up and bruised all to hell, I was happy. I was going to see another dawn. At some point, I passed out. From shock, probably.
“The sun woke me up. I was deep in a giant tangle of trash and debris. Broad daylight. Lucky for me, it wasn’t too cold for January, and I didn’t die of hypothermia or something. I was so packed into trash, that maybe it kept me warm over night. Insulation, you know? Otherwise, I don’t know how I didn’t freeze. When I came to, I was just shaking like a leaf. Shivering. It took me an hour to get myself untangled and work myself loose. I was weak, I had no energy. After I climbed out of my tangled-up nest where I’d spent the night, up on top where I could see a little ways, I saw things I never imagined. Cracks and crevices in the ground that were deep enough to fall into, and too wide to jump across. Huge trees, oaks even, split right up the middle from bottom to top. Half a tree on one side of a crevice, half on the other, just ripped apart like a celery stalk. And all around there were big white sand hills that formed during the quake. I found out later they’re called ‘sand boils’. It’s like quicksand underground, then it shoots up like a geyser during a quake. Some of them were twenty or thirty feet high.
“A lot of the land around there liquefied: houses and cars just sank into it like it was instant quicksand. You might see the corner of a car, or a man’s bare foot sticking out, and the mud all around it was just as smooth as a beach after a wave passes over it. I didn’t see much of anything during the January quake, it was dark and I spent most of it in the river. Afterwards, the next day, I saw plenty. I saw people half buried in mud, dead. Almost everybody was already in a bad way after the first quake, so it was like the second one came along three weeks later to finish the job. I saw dogs, wild dogs, dogs gone feral, feasting on corpses. Just chowing down on human bodies. That was commonplace. You saw that everywhere.
“I had my uniform shirt and pants and my boots, but that was all. My wallet was gone, my M-9 pistol was gone from my holster, my watch was gone…and I had no idea how far I’d been swept by that flood. I couldn’t see the bridge supports, or the bridge. I was dehydrated, I was in pain all over, I’m sure I wasn’t thinking straight. I thought I was carried downstream of the bridge, toward the Mississippi River, so I started walking east, trying to get back. It wasn’t until later I figured out the quake had turned the Wolf around. That flood had already swept me way to the east, so I was just walking farther and farther away from my unit. Or what was left of it.
“And it wasn’t easy going. It took all my concentration and effort just to make a little progress, weaving my way over and through piles of debris. I kept running into dead ends and backtracking. The Wolf was running the right way again, toward the west, but the banks were all washed out, and they were covered with every kind of debris. It looked like a picture I saw after the Johnstown Flood. Wreckage on top of wreckage, all tangled together and coated with mud. Eventually I couldn’t go any further. The debris had piled up against another wrecked bridge almost like a solid wall or a dam. I had to try to go around it, the only way I could. The river cut through more or less open country, but after I left the river I wandered into the edge of some suburbs, or what had been suburbs. There were survivors, digging into rubble.
“It was all black people, African-Americans. It was a black area, I have no idea where. Small one story detached houses, mostly tumbled down in heaps. Some apartment buildings pancaked down, they were probably three or four story buildings, but I’m just guessing. I couldn’t tell if they collapsed during the first quake, or the second. No police, no ambulances, no paramedics, no sirens—no nothing. Just quiet, except for people cursing and crying over their fallen down homes. And a few random gunshots, that was about it. No cars were moving. Even if you had gas, there was no way to drive with trees and poles and cables all over the roads. And there I was, Mr. White Boy, in my muddy Army uniform and boots. My empty military holster had a flap, so maybe it was hard to tell if I had a gun in it, but it was a weak bluff. I got a real bad feeling that I had better not go any further south, into Memphis. People were looking at me with pure evil in their eyes, or at least it seemed that way to me. Like the earthquakes were my fault, somehow. Or like it was my fault that they hadn’t been rescued by the federal government already. I turned around, and headed back to the Wolf. It’s not as if I was going to get to a phone and call into my unit. Who had a phone that worked? There was still no electric power since the first quake, three weeks before.
“I edged my way back toward the river, got around the big debris field piled up against the other bridge, but it wasn’t my bridge, it was a different one, with a few big round concrete pilings in a line, instead of lots of square pilings in pairs. That’s when I finally figured out I must be on the wrong side of my unit, walking further away, instead of getting closer. That’s when it came to me, the way all the debris was piled up. The flood had swept in from the Mississippi, right up the Wolf River against the current. But hell, everything in the whole world was so strange by then…that it almost seemed natural that a river could flood backwards. Why not?
“I didn’t know if I should turn around, and head back west, or what. I hadn’t eaten or had anything to drink in probably eighteen hours. I was getting ready to drink straight from the Wolf, and I knew that was a bad idea. Everything from oil and chemicals to dead bodies was in that river. Anyway, I didn’t have to think about it long. I was pushing along between chest-high bushes and an old chain link fence, and I ran smack into a dead end. The fence ran right into the side of an old wall from a warehouse or something, and I had to turn around.
“That’s when I was captured. It was just casual, easy, no problem at all. I turned around, and there were three black guys trailing me about ten feet back. Two teenagers, and one maybe about thirty years old. He had a revolver, and he just waved me out. He was the tallest, my height, about five eleven, with a big pile of dusty dreadlocks bundled together up on top. That made him seem taller, maybe. The other two were carrying machetes, like Mexicans use. The others had spiky dreadlocks and they were very dirty, but they were all dressed pretty well, considering. Nice jeans and jackets, not ripped or filthy like you might expect, not three weeks after the first earthquake. Stolen or looted, probably.
“Anyway, there was nowhere for me to go, and I was too weak and out of my head to try anything. They put me on the ground, and tied my hands behind my back so tight that I thought that would kill me all by itself. Then they tied a noose around my neck, and pulled me back up on my feet and jerked me along like a goat, or a cow. They kept pinching me and laughing, but I couldn’t really understand them. For some reason they seemed glad that I wasn’t too skinny, I gathered that much, but I didn’t make anything of it at the time. I’d trip and they’d pull me, drag me along on my face, until somehow I’d get back up on my feet. I could hardly understand a word they were saying, but I got the strong idea my problems were only just beginning. Obviously, if they had wanted to kill me where they found me, they could have.
“They led me back along the chain link fence to a gate, down a few weedy paths and alleys, and finally to a concrete slab, next to a big rusty steel warehouse that was half falling down. They had set up kind of a camp there, under part of the warehouse’s roof that was still intact, giving them a dry spot. I guess they were used to catching stragglers like me, who were working their way along the riverbank. The old warehouse was maybe a hundred yards from the river, all surrounded by weeds and trees.
“And that’s when I saw the absolute worst. That’s when I gave up my last hope: when I saw the burnt body parts. There were legs and arms hacked down to the bones, and a fire pit, with the big iron grill over it. There were even decapitated heads, set in a row. I was lying on my side, and I looked over and saw a severed head that almost seemed like it was looking back at me. The cooking grill was a wrought-iron gate, propped up on angle iron legs that were driven into the dirt. There was a square hole in the cement, where they had built their fire. Now I could understand what they had been talking about. That’s why they had been pinching and squeezing me. That suddenly became perfectly clear. Three weeks after the first earthquake, that was three weeks without supermarkets or fast food joints. Hunger makes people crazy, and some people are crazy to begin with. I guess it doesn’t take much for the ones that are already crazy. An earthquake will do it, that’s for sure. It’ll push psychos right over the edge.
“They tied my ankles together, and then they tied my hands to my feet behind my back. They trussed me up like a hog. I was lying on my side then, tied to some kind of a pipe that came up out of the concrete. By then I was way beyond shock. I could only hope that they were going to kill me fast, and not torture me too much beforehand, but really, I didn’t have too much hope of that. Sometime in the afternoon two of them left. They said they were going out hunting for more meat. It was like a joke to them. They laughed and said, ‘Honkey, the other white meat.’ Or maybe I just imagined that. By that point, I couldn’t tell what was real, and what was a hallucination. But I was sure that I was a goner. No doubt about that at all.
“The one that stayed to guard me couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. I tried to talk to him. I told him I was in the Army and they’d come looking for me, all of that, but he wasn’t buying it. He wouldn’t even look at me. I told him he’d get a reward for helping me—nothing, no reaction. He was smoking some kind of homegrown reefer wrapped up in sheets of telephone book paper. He had dead eyes, stone cold dead eyes that looked right through you like you were a ghost. The leader gave him some chores to do while they were gone. His job was collecting firewood and cleaning up, taking body parts and bones down to the river in a wheelbarrow. Heads, hands, feet…he was pretty casual about it. They could have been beef or pork scraps he was picking up and tossing into the wheelbarrow. The whole thing was right out of a grade B horror movie.
“This was January, like now, and it got dark early. The other two came back after sunset with another teenage boy that they seemed to know already, and two black girls about twelve or thirteen. They were just numb with fear, it seemed to me. Or maybe they were in shock, almost catatonic. I can only imagine what hell those girls had been through in the three weeks since the first earthquake, and what they thought after another big quake hit. They weren’t tied up, but I couldn’t tell if they were going to be on the menu with me, or if they were going to be on the other side of the dinner table, so to speak. It was about 24 hours since I’d had anything to eat or drink, and I must have been delirious. The older guys brought back a big cardboard box, and they were drinking wine from bottles. They must have had a good afternoon of looting. They built up the fire in the hole under the big iron grate, and I thought, well, this is it: curtains. Just let it be quick when it’s my time.
“When the fire was up and burning hot, the two biggest guys came for me and untied me from the metal pole—but they kept my feet and ankles bound. I’d lost all feeling in my hands. I was waiting for one of them to take a machete to my throat, I figured that they’d do it that way, but no, they just dragged me over by the fire like a slab of meat. There was a square hole in the concrete, where they had the fire going, with the grate over the top. The two girls were sitting together on a log a few feet away, getting warm by the fire. They weren’t tied up, but they weren’t trying to get away either. What else could they do? They were just young girls. The whole thing was surreal: the half tumbled down warehouse, the cooking fire, everything.
“Then the leader, the older guy with the dreadlocks tied up in a bundle, he seemed to gradually notice that I was still in my Army uniform. I got the idea that he was comparing his size to my uniform. Staring at me, sizing me up. This presented a problem, because my wrists and ankles were still tied. I think if I wasn’t wearing the uniform, they would have just thrown me over that iron grate and burned me alive then and there. Or maybe hacked my arms and legs off with the machetes and just cooked them, I don’t know how they were going to do it. I think that he was so drunk and stoned that he couldn’t figure out how to get the uniform off of me without burning it up, or getting it soaked in blood. I got the impression that this was a serious mental challenge for him. He’d been smoking weed pretty much the whole time I’d seen him, and drinking wine, a lot of wine. Bob Marley meets Frankenstein—in hell.
“By now it was dark out, except for the fire under the cooking grate. The tallest one, the leader, he pulled me up on my feet, but they were still tied together, like my hands. He had his pistol shoved in his belt, a machete in one hand, and he was holding me by the shoulder with the other. I was sort of hopping around with my feet together, trying to balance with my feet together, while he held me up and considered his next move. I thought he was just going to push me over the fire. We were nose to nose. He looked like the devil himself, his eyes glowing yellow in the firelight. He said, ‘White boy, I’m gonna untie you, and then you gonna get all naked and give me them Army clothes.’ I knew that once I was out of the uniform I was a dead man, so I was thinking of something to say, to stall him. I was going to try the ‘earn a reward from the Army’ pitch again, and see if it worked on him. I knew it was a long shot, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say. He was their leader, so probably he was the smartest, and maybe he’d go for it. He looked right in my eyes; I can’t imagine what he was thinking.
“And then he just let me go without the least bit of warning. I hit the ground right by the fire pit, fell on him and rolled off. For a second I couldn’t understand why he’d dropped me, but then I saw that most of the top of his head was gone. Smashed apart, blown open by a gunshot it looked like. I heard thumps and cracks and sounds I didn’t recognize, and all of my captors went down, one-two-three. They were so stoned and drunk they didn’t know what was happening, and then they were dead. I wondered what the hell had just happened, and what can possibly happen next? It was three weeks since the first earthquake, and I thought I’d seen it all—but I hadn’t seen anything compared to what I saw in the 24 hours after the second quake. The horror just kept ratcheting up, like a nightmare that keeps accelerating until you fall into a bottomless well or off a cliff and then you wake up screaming. Only this was no dream, this was all happening. Even as delirious as I was, I knew all of this was for real.
“So there I was lying on the ground, still tied up hand and foot, close enough to the fire pit to feel the burning heat, right next to Mr. Brains Hanging Out, and then I heard a friendly voice behind me. ‘Well soldier boy—this appears to be your lucky night. It looks like your dinner plans have been unexpectedly cancelled.” A white voice. He had a Southern accent, but he sounded educated. Somebody knelt behind me, and cut the rope off my hands, and then my ankles. I could barely tell I even had hands by then, until that pain came ripping back into them. I guess I was wincing or yelling, and the man behind me said, ‘That’s a good sign. If they hurt, that means your blood is moving again. Do you think you can walk? No offense son, but this isn’t the kind of dining establishment that we generally prefer to patronize.’ I’ll never forget that. I laughed in spite of everything.
“I rolled onto my back, now that my wrists were free. I could look up, and see who was talking to me by the orange fire light. There were four guys in camouflage BDU uniforms, but not the regular Army camouflage. The old pattern, like we’re wearing now. Woodland, I think it’s called. Green and black face paint, not a bit of skin showing, but I could tell they were white men by how they talked. They all had rifles, and different kinds of load bearing vests and magazine pouches. The one who had been talking had a suppressor can on the end of an M-4 carbine. It was a flattop rifle with a scope on top, a night scope. They were very well equipped. Everything was first class.
“He hoisted me back up to my feet, and two of them half-carried me about fifty yards down along the riverbank and into a boat. A big squared-off Jon-boat like they use in the South, with an outboard motor. A big enough boat to have a steering wheel on a console in the middle. Then we were out of there, but moving slowly, to keep quiet I suppose. Plus, I knew the river was full of floating debris. One of the guys had night vision goggles, so I guess he could see well enough to drive, and avoid the debris. It was as black as a coalmine to me, once we were away from the cooking fire.
“They told me they were on a rescue mission. They were coming down the Wolf River the day after the second quake, trying to get to some trapped relatives. They couldn’t get past the wrecked bridge that was blocked up with debris. They had to give up on their rescue mission and turn around, and that’s when they saw me about to become the main entrée. My luck had changed 180 degrees, just like that. All of this happened in the space of about 24 hours, from the second earthquake, to my rescue. Crazy, but I couldn’t complain about how it ended. Not when I’d been about to be thrown on a fire, and eaten by cannibals.
“The only thing that bothered me was that my rescuers shot the two black girls along with the three men. The guy with the silenced carbine was using a night scope, and I thought maybe he couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad guys, I don’t know. Maybe they all looked like bad guys to him in his night scope, except for me, the tied-up guy about to be thrown on the fire. I gave them the benefit of the doubt about those two girls, when they rescued me. Hell, I don’t know, maybe they saved those girls from getting gang-raped, and going onto the fire after me. Or maybe those girls would have been gnawing on my bones in another hour. I’ll never know what would have happened to those two girls, if they hadn’t of been shot by my rescuers.
“But I’ll tell you this: a lot of people died after those earthquakes, and most of them didn’t die from the earthquakes, if you know what I mean. It’s hard to tell who died from dehydration or hunger or disease, from those who were shot or stabbed or clubbed to death. Dead is dead—and dead men tell no tales, right? You could kill anybody after those earthquakes, and who would ever know what really happened? Dead bodies were all over Memphis, and I didn’t see any cops or CSI’s around them, that’s for sure. Just buzzards and feral dogs. Anyway, those two young girls died right there by the fire. If my rescuers had any regrets about that, they didn’t show it. Not one little bit.”
Both men heard the zipper of the tent slide open, and turned that way. Jenny emerged, still wearing the brown camouflage trousers, but with a green wool military sweater for a top.
“The baby’s sleeping?” asked Carson.
“Yes. At least she’s taking the instant milk, and keeping it down.”
“Did we wake you up?” asked Doug.
“I slept a little. I was listening to your story.” She sat down on a folding chair between the men. Teenaged Zack was still snoring softly in his sleeping bag, blessedly oblivious.
Carson said, “There’s hot water in the thermos. You want something?”
“Hot chocolate?”
Doug went to a box and returned with a brown paper pouch. He tore it open and made the cocoa, mixing it in a mug on the table. Jenny sipped the warm liquid and stared into the space between the two men. Her long blonde hair, mussed and matted on top, spilled across her shoulders in the absence of the fur hat. Her bangs hung almost to her honey-colored eyes. She spoke quietly, because Zack and the baby were still sleeping. “I found something in one of my pockets.”
Jenny placed a small Ziploc bag on the table. Inside of it was a thin black rectangle: a pocket-sized notebook. Carson opened the plastic bag, withdrew the spiral-bound booklet, and opened it. She looked at Doug and said, “I’m glad you got away—that was an incredible story. It brought back a lot of my own memories. Do you guys want to hear it?”
Carson nodded, and Doug said “Sure.”
She sipped her cocoa, then took a deep breath, and began. “You were describing the January earthquake. I was already away from Memphis for the second one, but I was there for the first. My family lived in Germantown, that’s between where the two rivers almost come together. The Wolf and the Nonconnah, like you were saying. It’s about twenty miles southeast of downtown Memphis. That meant it was one of the only ways out of the city when the bridges went down. Our house shook but it didn’t fall down, thank God. We had some cracked walls, but we were lucky: a lot of houses did collapse. It was Saturday morning, or I would have been at school. My school pancaked…so we were lucky it happened when it did. In Germantown, the earthquake shook us around and broke some things, but I didn’t see it kill anybody. Not directly. Roads were buckled and cracked all over the place, so you couldn’t drive very far without making a lot of detours. The main thing was the gas and electric went out, and the water. That was all right at first. We’ve had tornados and ice storms that knocked out the power. We weren’t too worried. It always came back on in a few hours…or at least by the next day.
“Only this time, the power didn’t come back on. Not a blink, nothing. The whole system was down—telephones, cell phones, ATM machines, gas stations—everything. On the second day, when we were lined up at the Safeway supermarket, that’s when it started to get crazy. Police were there, trying to keep order, but the store employees said you had to pay with cash money. But the ATM machines didn’t work, so how could you get cash? People who didn’t have enough cash started to get angry, real angry.
“By then the refugees from Memphis were starting to walk out to Germantown. I’d been waiting in a line all the way around the block with my father, and then these people walking out of Memphis just started cutting the line, and pushing right to the front. Mostly black people, and Germantown is mostly white. It got ugly fast. There was a lot of pushing and shoving and yelling.
“People started saying we were stupid to wait while everybody else cut the line, and then they started pushing inside too, and the police gave up. What could they do? Shoot everybody? The police were a joke, useless. We waited in that line for six hours, my father and I. We were probably about number five hundred in the line to get inside the Safeway, and then the mob just pushed ahead of the line anyway. The supermarket was stripped bare to the walls by the time we got inside. There was nothing left. Nothing you could eat or drink, anyway. We felt like fools for wasting half of a day waiting in line, but who could you complain to? Nobody. We were fools, for acting civilized.
“We figured the electric company would get the power back on in a few days, or a week at most. Water became a big problem in a hurry. Our neighborhood was on city water, and it stopped during the earthquake. We were lucky because we had a swimming pool, so it wasn’t so bad for us. It cracked during the quake, but it still had a few feet of water at the bottom. We shared it with our neighbors on each side of our house; we let them dip it out with buckets. We used our propane grills for cooking, and for boiling the water to drink.
“And then on the third day more and more refugees started coming. That was Monday. Little groups at first, then big crowds, and then just continuous, like a parade. Mostly blacks from Memphis. Lots of them were pushing shopping carts full of stuff. Their own stuff or looted stuff, who knows? Our street was only one block off of Poplar Avenue, it ran parallel to it. Poplar’s a big street; it goes all the way into Memphis, and the other way it goes out to the country. We had a lot of people walking through our neighborhood. I mean, thousands, like a stadium letting out.
“At first, folks came up and knocked on the door, fairly polite, asking for water and food. They thought we were rich or something, because of our neighborhood. Somehow, they found out we had a swimming pool, and they wanted water. That sounds pretty reasonable, but then some of them started sitting all over our yard. At first we hoped they were just ‘resting’ but then it went from a few people to dozens to hundreds. We had whole families sitting all over our yard, camping out almost. Then our car disappeared. We could only fit our Expedition in the garage, so our Acura was parked in the driveway. Then it was gone, and the people sitting all over our yard just shrugged. They didn’t say anything; they just glared at us like we caused the earthquake or something. I peeked out through the curtains—only my father went to the door to talk to them. On the third day the refugees went right into our backyard too, and then we couldn’t get water out of our own pool. We were too afraid to go outside, not even in the backyard to get water. I was never a racist, I had lots of black friends at school, but this was different. I was scared to death every minute. The people outside didn’t seem grateful for the water, they seemed more angry. Resentful, I guess because we had a little swimming pool.
“In the afternoon of the third day it started raining hard, cold hard rain, and people started banging on our doors. Women. There were men too; in fact it was mostly men outside. I think they sent the women knock on the door, just to play on our sympathy. They were pleading for us to open up, and let them come inside and get some shelter. They said they had babies and children with them, please God have some mercy and let them in! And about then there were some loud bangs around the neighborhood, and I just knew they were gunshots.
“My father didn’t have any guns. He didn’t believe in them, can you believe that? Didn’t believe in them! That’s like not believing in rocks, or hammers or knives. He didn’t believe in guns! Well, some of our neighbors must have believed in them, because we started hearing gunshots, and it was pretty obvious that no matter what happened, 911 wasn’t coming, not with the phones out. The police were not even a factor. I don’t know if they all ran away to look after their own families, or maybe they were guarding something more important than our street. Whatever it was, we never saw them around our neighborhood after the second day, during the riot at the supermarket. After that, they evaporated. Disappeared.
“My mother said, maybe we can just let the women and the children in for a little while, as long as it was raining? My father said no, we can’t let them inside, not for a minute. If we do, we won’t be able to keep the men out, and once they’re in, they’ll never leave. They’ll take over. We had an axe and a baseball bat for weapons. We barricaded the doors with furniture. The window curtains were already closed tight.
“My dad told me to get ready to run away if they broke in. I was the youngest of two, and I was the only one still living at home. My sister Julie was away at college in Nashville. I still don’t know what happened to her. My father said that in case they come in the house, I should be ready to hide, or to run away. He didn’t have to tell me why. We all remembered what happened to those kids who were carjacked and kidnapped in Knoxville. They were raped and tortured to death. It was hard not to think about that, because I’m blond, like that girl in Knoxville was, and about the same age she was.
“So I got a hiding place ready in the cellar, and I got a cellar window ready just in case. I had a big meat carving knife too. Without gas and electric, the house was so cold that we were already dressed like we were outside, so I was ready to run away if I had to. I was wearing jeans and sneakers, and a waterproof green parka with a hood over a couple sweaters. My father said that we were going to try to get to my uncle’s house in Mannville. Uncle Henry. That was our plan. We packed our SUV in the garage for the trip, but with hundreds of refugees from Memphis camped out on our yard and our driveway and all over the street, we didn’t think we could make it. We’d have to run over too many people, if they didn’t get out of the way. It just wouldn’t work, there were too many of them. Plus, there were telephone poles and trees all over the roads. We were waiting for the refugees to go away somewhere, but it just seemed like more and more were coming every day, walking out of Memphis. And all of them were cold and wet and hungry—and mad. We kept waiting for the police or the National Guard or FEMA or somebody to show up and save us, but they never came either. We listened to a radio that ran on batteries, but they just said, ‘Wait in your homes until the authorities arrive.’ What authorities? I think the authorities ran away too, like the police. Totally worthless. So we were trapped inside our own house.
“It was terrifying every minute. You couldn’t sleep a wink, even after three days. We were hoping and praying that the people outside would just go away, and leave us alone! It was raining hard, and the people outside kept yelling and demanding that we let them in. They were banging on the front door and kicking on it, getting madder and madder because we wouldn’t let them in. My father yelled back that he had a shotgun, and he would shoot if they came in, but it was just a bluff. He didn’t believe in guns, remember? Not until he really needed one—and then he only had a make-believe gun. It was quiet for a little while after he said he had a shotgun. We thought his bluff had worked, but then big rocks came crashing through some of our windows, paving stones from our walkway and our garden. Right after that, our front door was smashed in with a metal pole, I think from a street sign. They demolished the door and pushed right over the table we had against it. My father was standing there with his axe raised, and that was the last I saw him. He never had a chance. A whole gang of men rushed in at once, and they were climbing through the smashed windows too. They all had knives and spears and clubs. I ran for the cellar, praying that nobody saw me. I think they were all focused on my father, because he had an axe.
“I ran down the steps and crawled backwards into my spot behind the old oil furnace. The furnace was cold because we didn’t use it anymore since we switched to gas heat, and of course, the gas stopped during the earthquake. So we had two different furnaces that didn’t work. Anyway, I’d found some plywood scraps to cover my little hiding place behind the furnace, like a false wall. I was sitting on the floor in a little ball, not moving an inch. All I could do was pray. Hold onto my carving knife, and pray.
“The worst part of it was I could hear my mother upstairs screaming. The sound came down through the air ducts to the old furnace right next to me. She screamed and cried for at least an hour, and her cries grew weaker and then they stopped. I felt like such a coward, hiding in the cellar. I could hear them stomping around upstairs, knocking things over and raising hell, looking for food. They must have found the liquor cabinet, because when they finally came down to the cellar, they were drunk. I don’t think they even realized there was a cellar in the house; they were probably just checking closet doors and found it by accident. I could just tell that they were stinking drunk coming down the steps by the way they laughed and carried on. I don’t know how many came downstairs, I couldn’t see from my hiding place where I was curled up, but I know there were at least a few men looking around the cellar. I could see their flashlight beams, through the cracks of my hiding place. I was never half so scared in my entire life. Not a quarter, not ten percent. I turned the knife around, pointing it at my own heart, holding it with both hands. That’s how scared I was. I thought I was having a heart attack the whole time. I had an ache inside that I’d never felt before in my life. I kept remembering what happened to that blond girl in Knoxville…and to her boyfriend.
“I was just petrified that they were going to find me, and drag me out and gang rape me and kill me. I didn’t know if I should try to kill myself with that carving knife, if they pulled back that plywood back and found me, but they didn’t. It wasn’t a big cellar, it was old and rough and very dark even in the daytime. It wasn’t a fixed-up rec-room kind of cellar, especially not on the side where the furnace was. Anyway, they didn’t find me, or I wouldn’t be here right now telling this story. My mother and father were upstairs when our home was invaded. I was certain they were dead, and there I was, hiding like a scared rabbit behind the old furnace. That was the low point of my life, up to that time. I think my parents stayed upstairs to save me. If they had run downstairs with me, we would have all been killed. Instead, they stayed upstairs and died…died for me I guess.
“After midnight, when the house finally got quiet, when the party upstairs died down, I eased out of my hiding place, and snuck over to the basement window that I’d already gotten ready. I didn’t even have a flashlight so I had to move across the cellar all by feel, like a blind person, about an inch a minute. I was so afraid that I might bump right into somebody who might be hiding there in the basement in the pitch dark! My God, that was so, so scary. I was glad I’d gotten the cellar window ready, and that I knew the way by heart. There were bushes outside the window, so nobody could see me climbing out. Once I was outside, it was just barely light enough to see, if you knew your way around. I knew my neighborhood better than anybody, so I could sneak around in the dark and I made it to a little woods behind our street without being seen. That was the very beginning of my journey to Mannville.
“I had an old boyfriend who lived a few blocks away. Bobby Buchanan, he was in my ninth grade homeroom, and our families went to the same church. His neighborhood didn’t connect to Poplar Avenue. You had to know your way in; his whole neighborhood was like a big loop, with only one entrance road. You could only drive into it from another direction, and not from Poplar Avenue. It was on the other side of a creek and a city park that ran along the creek, so I was hoping it wouldn’t be overrun with refugees yet. Once when we were going together, Bobby told me that if there were ever riots in Memphis, his father and his friends were going to guard the road into his neighborhood. I laughed at him and said he was paranoid. I know better now. There were no refugees on his side of the park, at least none that I saw, thank God.
“I knew all the shortcuts, even in the dark. Like the little footbridge over the creek that cuts through the park, so I made it to his street okay. His parents still liked me, even though I kind of dumped him. His father was a real gun nut, a deer hunter and all that. He had an entire room in his basement that was full of guns and stuffed animal heads and Army stuff. He even had a machine to load his own bullets down there, which I used to think was crazy. I hoped the Buchanans would still be there. Prayed, actually. They had a big property, about an acre. There were two trucks in the driveway. It was so dark I practically had to feel my way, like tonight. I’m lucky, I’ve always had cat’s eyes, and I’ve never been afraid of the dark.
“I was only about twenty feet up the driveway when somebody shoved something hard in my back—a gun. He said, ‘Stop right there. Where are you going?’ I didn’t recognize the voice. I said that I was coming to see Bobby. Like it was any normal night, but there was nothing normal about it. He asked if anybody was with me, I said no. He whistled, and Bobby came down. I told him what had happened at my house, how it was taken over by refugees, and that my parents were dead. I’m sure I was hysterical. It was kind of a blur, what had happened the last three days since the quake.
“Bobby said they were leaving that night, just as soon as they finished packing. He brought me into their garage through the side door. They were packing their SUV, a Suburban or something big like that. They had lots of lamps and flashlights turned on in there. In their garage it was so bright, it was almost like the regular electricity was still working. Bobby’s father listened to my story. Then they made me wait in the laundry room, while they talked about bringing me along on the trip. Only it wasn’t just Bobby’s family that was going that night, it was three families.
“I could hear what they were saying through the wall. They were arguing about me, because they had all agreed not to take anybody outside of their group. They had already turned people down, left friends behind, so it wasn’t fair if I went. That sort of argument. All of the seats were taken. Their trucks were jammed with stuff inside, and up on their roof racks. They were going to some hunting place down in Mississippi, and they knew from the police radio that the Mississippi National Guard was going to close all of the roads the next day, to keep out the Memphis refugees. The Buchanans had police radio scanners, night vision goggles, and guns all over the place. This trip down into Mississippi was their bug out plan. That was the first time that I ever heard that expression, ‘bug out plan.’
“They had all agreed to a plan, and that meant no outsiders, none at all, but Bobby and his father were on my side. I think the hunting place belonged to one of the other families; at least that’s what it sounded like to me. They compromised, and agreed to take me out of Germantown about twenty miles, but not to their place in Mississippi. They said it would already be too crowded at the hunting cabin with three families. They wouldn’t budge on that. They were even yelling at each other about it. They were not happy to see me show up, that’s for sure, but they took me.
“I rode in the middle seat of the Buchanan’s Suburban, squished in with Bobby’s two younger brothers, with his little sister on my lap. She was about seven or eight, not really so little. Bobby’s mom was in the front middle, and Bobby was on the right side, by the passenger door, with his rifle. Literally riding shotgun, except with a rifle. The third row seat and all the way to the back was piled with boxes and bags right up to the ceiling. I mean, from right behind my head to all the way back was just full up to the roof, every inch. When we pulled out, the Suburban was the front vehicle of the three trucks, like the convoy leader. Bobby’s father drove with night goggles on, and his headlights turned off. They put little green chemlites on the front and the back of each truck, that’s how they saw each other.
“It was wet and cold out, nobody was walking around thank God, and there were almost no cars moving, at least, not from what I could see with the street lights out. A city is a completely different place when the lights go out. I guess all the Memphis refugees had found houses to take shelter inside of—one way or the other. There were a few cars driving, but not many. Sometimes we put our headlights on, but most of the time they were off. They had walkie-talkies to communicate between the three trucks. Sometimes the trucks had to go slow and kind of weave around telephone poles and things, but at least the wires didn’t have any electricity in them. For once, I was glad about no electricity—funny huh?
“I was hoping that they’d just sort of forget that I was there, or maybe take me along to be a babysitter. I was being quiet, just a perfect nanny with the little kids, keeping them calm. It felt so warm and comfortable and safe in the Suburban, that I never wanted to leave it. I couldn’t believe that they would put me out, no matter what kind of agreement they had with their friends. And all the time, I was trying not to cry about my parents, and my friends back on my street. But what could I do to save anybody? It was everybody for themselves.
“We almost made it out of Collierville. That’s the last town in Shelby County, the county Memphis is in. After Collierville, it’s mostly open country. I’d been on that road lots of times, so even in the dark I kind of knew where we were. We were almost through Collierville, but a bunch of wrecked cars were smashed together in a tight spot between some buildings, and we had to backtrack. We messed up the convoy order turning around, and our Suburban ended up in the back of the line, number three. I couldn’t see much of anything outside, it was too dark. All I could see was the green chemlite on the truck in front. We were driving down a small side street between houses, and somebody started shooting at us. No warning, no nothing: just shooting. I almost had a heart attack again, and everybody started screaming at once.
“And not just one gun was shooting at us, there were at least two of them, you could tell by the different booms and bangs they made. The truck in front was hit. They were yelling in the walkie-talkie that they had people shot. It was pure panic. Bobby’s father stopped real fast and he and Bobby jumped out with their rifles, and ran up to help their friends. A bunch of stuff that was loaded behind the middle seat fell all over us when he hit the brakes. I stayed in the Suburban with the kids and Bobby’s mother; we got down as low as we could.
“There was a lot of shooting, and it was close, very close. Shooting and yelling, and the bright flashes from guns going off. I mean hundreds of bullets—I was just hoping they were our bullets, going out. It’s funny how you can think of something like that, at a time like that. It was the loudest thing I ever heard in my entire life, it sounded like machine guns. Bobby had an Army rifle like yours, one that takes thirty bullets at a time in the clip—I mean magazine. So did his father, and they both had lots of extra magazines in pouches. Bobby’s mother had a big pistol. She was scared to death, I could tell. She kept saying, ‘we should have left yesterday, we should have left yesterday, I told him and told him, we should have left yesterday!’ The boys were crying, the little girl was hysterical—it was basically a nightmare. Another nightmare.
“After just a few minutes, Bobby and his father came back to the Suburban. They had two people with them who were shot and wounded from the other family. Or maybe they were just hit by glass, I’m not really sure, but they had blood all over them. The truck that had been up front after we got turned around couldn’t drive anymore. Its motor was ruined, and it had flat tires. That’s what they said. The men were all yelling and screaming at each other, and they were yelling that I had to get out. Just like that. I wasn’t part of their group. They had a deal, and it was the group first, and no room for strangers, period. Bobby’s father said ‘I’m sorry Jenny, I’m so sorry.’
“There was no room for me, not when they had to put two more people in the Suburban and two more in the other truck that wasn’t shot up too bad, but would still run. And there were all the boxes that fell over onto the middle seats when they stopped so fast. It was all yelling and screaming and crying, it was another nightmare from hell. They had people bleeding but they were too afraid to stay there and do first aid. They had to get moving, and they had to fit two extra people into each truck. They were screaming and crying and yelling at me, like I had brought them bad luck or something. I had broken ‘the plan.’ I guess I was their Jonah, that’s how they saw it. I can’t blame them, in a way. I felt like bad luck. Jonah, that’s me.” Jenny sniffed and wiped away tears with the back of her sleeve, but she soon continued.
“And so…I was put out on the side of the road, right there near the end of Collierville. Bobby gave me a flashlight and a pistol, a little .38 revolver, just put them in my hands and got back in that Suburban and his father hit the gas pedal. They took off, just like that, heading down Route 86 toward Mississippi, trying to get across the state line before the Mississippi Guard blocked off the roads. I was pretty damned depressed about not going with them to their hunting cabin in Mississippi, but at least I’d gotten past Collierville, and now I had a gun and a light.
“There were railroad tracks that went along our road, and I figured less people might be on them than on a real road, so I just started walking. At least I had a good head start over most of the people walking out of Memphis: I’d made it all the way to the outskirts of Collierville. I heard later that most of the refugees couldn’t drive out of Memphis. Most of the roads were blocked because of earthquake damage, and when everybody tried to drive out at the same time, it just gridlocked and then it turned into a gigantic gun battle. They used to call Memphis ‘Mogadishu on the Mississippi.’ After the earthquake, I guess it really was. So most of the people in Memphis had to either walk out, or just stay where they were and take their chances finding food and water. At least I was ahead of most of the walkers. It was something like seventy miles to Mannville. I figured I could hike there in a few days, and get to my uncle’s house. Boy, was I ever way off on that guess! It ended up taking me over a month.
“So I just hoofed it down the tracks, walking slow and careful, not using the flashlight because I was afraid people would see it coming, and then they’d lie in wait for me. I knew the railroad went way, way to the east, because when I’d gone that way with my family, I could usually see trains running parallel to the road. I actually liked it better walking at night, nobody could see me, and nobody was out wandering around. Nobody jumped me or anything—at least not that first night.
“By morning, I made it to where a two-lane road crossed the tracks. Down to the south I could see a little town, sort of a village. Just some houses, really. I was starving by then, literally starving, and I needed water bad. It was worth a try. I walked about a mile south on the two lane road between bare fields, and then I came to the town of Brandonville. It had one of those cute little welcome signs, with the population and the elevation. Just a few hundred people, I think.
“I walked up to the very first house I came to; it was set way back from the road on a few acres. They had some religious things outside, crosses and Jesus and Mary statues, so I hoped they would treat me nice. An old couple lived there, and they opened the door for me. They could see from way off that I was only one girl by myself. I explained that I was walking all the way from Germantown to Mannville. They let me in, I think because they wanted to hear what was happening back in Memphis. They had a radio that ran on batteries, but they couldn’t get any local news, and the national news didn’t make any sense to them. All they knew from the radio was an earthquake had hit above Memphis. Well shoot, they didn’t need a radio to tell them that—they felt it! Everybody did. And there were aftershocks all the time too, and every time you thought it might be another big one starting.
“They let me sit in their kitchen, and I told them my story after they gave me some lemonade, and biscuits with butter and jelly to eat. They had an old-fashioned cast-iron hand pump right behind their house that went straight down to its own water well. Let me tell you, there’s nothing better than a hand pump when your electricity goes out, or your city water pipes get broken. You’d know what I mean, if you ever had to haul twenty gallons of water back from a community well, almost every day for a year. Even if you had a wagon to carry the water like I did, it’s still hard work lifting that bucket rope forty or fifty times, and handling all those jugs. But I’ll bet I’m stronger now than most of the boys at my old high school. Sorry, I got sidetracked. Simple things like water pumps leave a strong impression on you, when you have to use a bucket well for a long time.
“While I had breakfast the old man walked over to the next house, and then some kids ran around to fetch all their neighbors. I told my whole story again to about twenty people who were standing in their living room. Everybody knew everybody else by their first names. Not like in Germantown, that’s for sure. They were all friendly, but I could tell they were afraid. I told them that no matter what, they couldn’t let the refugees from Memphis into their town. If they did, they’d get overrun with people, and the refugees would just flat take over, and probably end up killing them. I told them what happened on my street, and what happened to my parents in our own house, once the Memphis refugees broke down the doors. You could have heard a pin drop in that living room.
“Most of the houses in Brandonville were just a little ways north of route 57, maybe a quarter mile. That’s the road that runs just above the Mississippi border, all the way back into Memphis. The railroad tracks were about a mile to the north side of the town, running parallel to 57. They discussed what I said, and they argued a little about Christian charity and whatnot, but in the end, they decided to barricade the Brandonville road and not let any strangers in, no matter what. Except for maybe a few folks like me, that came in ones or twos, but no gangs or big mobs. They’d keep them out—no matter what.
“And that was no empty threat. The men were all carrying rifles and shotguns, and some of the women too. The people in Brandonville put up warning signs on the road coming into their little town, and they parked old hay trailers across it and blockaded it. Bobby’s escape convoy had probably driven straight into a barricade like that last night, and that’s why they got into a gunfight. Anyway, it was daytime now, a nice clear day. A few cars passed by down on 57. Then there was a group of four cars that went by, but they stopped and came back, very slowly. Like they were deciding something. Hunger and dehydration can make people do desperate things. Stupid things. Or maybe they were almost out of gas. The gas station was at that end of the town, by route 57. They drove on the bare field around the roadblock, past the warning signs, and the town people didn’t wait for them to get any further. They just opened up on those cars. I was watching what I could see of it, from the front porch of the house where I was staying with the old couple. The men from Brandonville just riddled those four cars with rifle bullets, like a turkey shoot. Their rifles all had scopes, so I’m sure they could see exactly what they were shooting at.
“A man came back to our house, and I heard what happened. There was a lookout hiding down near the barricade, and when he saw that the four cars were all full of young black men, he called back a danger warning on a walkie-talkie. There were probably twenty deer rifles scoped in on those four cars, so it was just a massacre. But nobody felt too bad about it after they checked the car registrations, and found out the cars were from Germantown, not Memphis, and the dead men didn’t match the car registrations. They had stolen the cars, probably carjacked them, or taken them after home invasions. The cars were full of stuff that had obviously been looted, including fancy hunting rifles and expensive liquor. I had no trouble believing this at all, not after what I’d been through. I didn’t feel one little twinge of pity for those dead gang bangers. Not one little bit. They probably couldn’t get their own cars out of Memphis, so they walked out, and stole cars along the way. Probably after killing their owners, like my parents had been killed.
“Somebody in Brandonville had a radio with a giant antenna that could reach pretty far across the country. The folks I was staying with said he was on a HAM radio network with people all over the place, including lots of people in Tennessee. He said Nashville and Saint Louis were in bad shape too, but not as bad as Memphis. That’s also when I heard about the dams breaking, and wiping out Paducah and Cairo, and flooding over the levees all down the Mississippi.
“The radio guy reported what I said about what happened in Germantown, and about keeping the city refugees out no matter what. He said that the word was already getting around. He’d already heard lots of stories like mine from other HAM radio operators. That was becoming the normal pattern. Every country house and little town became a fort like the Alamo. The locals would guard the roads, barricade them, and shoot any strangers who tried to get in. There was fear, real fear, of those Memphis refugees. I wasn’t the only one who escaped with a story about being overrun by refugees. People learned that they had to keep the refugee mobs out of their houses, out of their towns, no matter what they had to do. And they did. They did what they had to do.
“And that’s why they call us racists now, on the national radio programs that I hear sometimes. That’s why they call us killers and say we committed genocide on those ‘poor hungry black refugees’ from Memphis. They’re all Monday morning quarterbacks now, with nice clean hands. It’s so easy for them to call us that, when they never experienced what we’ve been through. I know what happens when you let mobs of starving, desperate refugees in. They start out just by asking for water, real friendly-like. But they end up taking over your house and killing your family and stealing your cars. Then they go and do it again to somebody else. So Doug, it doesn’t surprise me one bit that your rescuers shot all of the people that were getting ready to cook you on a fire. I’d probably have done the same damn thing. I have no pity and no mercy left for the ‘poor hungry refugees.’ I’ve seen what ‘poor hungry refugees’ will do when they get the chance. Those girls would have eaten you for dinner, if your rescuers hadn’t shot them first. That’s the only thing you can do with those people. Once the shit hits the fan and they’re hungry enough to kill you—you have to kill them first. Before they kill you—and they will kill you.”
There was dead silence around the table when Jenny finished her story. Then Doug hesitantly said, “I don’t blame you for feeling that way. If that’s all it was—a form of self-defense. But I’ve seen when it goes too far…way too far. Completely out-of-control too far. Let me tell you what happened after I missed being barbequed. I stayed with my rescuers for two weeks after the second earthquake. Their leader was a man named Web Hardesty. He was the guy who cut my ropes off when they saved me. Wade Ewell Browning Hardesty the Third. They called him Web. He was maybe in his mid-forties, with a beard like Boone’s. Well, maybe it was trimmed shorter. Like a big goatee, sort of. And his hair was darker, and he wasn’t quite as tall as Boone, but otherwise they could have been related. Maybe brothers even.
“Hardesty had a great setup. He owns about a hundred acres on a side creek off the Wolf River. Both sides of the creek, all the way down to the Wolf. He’s rich, seriously loaded, but I never heard him mention where he made his money. It was family money, I think. I got the impression that this wasn’t his only place. Hardesty had his own little band of survivalists staying with him, after the earthquakes. There was even a little barracks house with ten bunk beds, just ready to go. Generators and everything. Like your friend’s hunting retreat in Mississippi, but on a bigger budget, a way bigger budget. He had a nice house there too, where his close friends and their families were living. Hardesty was probably just waiting for the shit to hit the fan. His friends and him were ready for anything, and fully equipped. Picture a whole squad of Rangers or SEALs. Maybe a little past their prime, but still hard asses, and armed to the teeth.”
Jenny shrugged. “So what’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing, not a thing. But these guys were twisted. I went out with them on ‘rescue missions.’ It sounds plausible. They’re going out to rescue their friends who were stuck in dangerous places when the shit hit the fan. They had boats, jeeps, dirt bikes…I heard they even had a Cessna, but I didn’t see it while I was with them.”
“I wish a group like that had come and rescued my family,” said Jenny.
“I’m sure you do. But that wasn’t the whole picture. The ‘rescue missions’ turned into something else. Those good old boys, they had night vision scopes, infrared lasers, silencers, everything. They were very intense, very high strung. To listen to them, it sounded like they all knew somebody who had been raped or murdered by blacks, and you know that’s just not possible. But maybe they did see some pretty terrible things.”
“Like to you, about to be eaten by cannibals,” Jenny noted dryly.
“Yeah, that’s true. That’s one example. But I think those guys were just waiting for something like the earthquakes to happen. Not just for earthquakes—they were ready for anything. For the end of the world. Like they were expecting it all along. And if you ask me, they were enjoying it. It was almost like a game for them. They wore camouflage uniforms, they put on face paint, the whole nine yards. When they had that green and black grease paint on their faces, you couldn’t tell what color they were underneath. Oh, they really got into it. They called black people niggers, of course, but they also called them zombies and goblins. Hardesty’s group could just roam around at night and kill people like it was a video game, all in the green light of starlight scopes. I think the ‘rescue mission’ part was just an excuse.
“At night, refugees would build little fires for warmth and for cooking, so they were easy for Hardesty to find. You could see them from literally a mile away, and then just stalk in toward them, using night vision. If they were white people, sometimes Hardesty helped them, gave them some food and water, or gave them directions and advice on where to go. Sometimes Hardesty just went on around them, and left them alone. But if they were black…most of the time, they were shot. From a hundred yards out, with a night scope and a silencer, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. They said that they were taking out the trash, cleaning up Tennessee while they had the opportunity. They called it ‘coon hunting,’ they said it was ‘open season on niggers.’ They said they were culling the herd, and flushing out the gene pool. After shooting some blacks they’d say, ‘NHI—no humans involved.’ I think they enjoyed it, from what I saw.
“And not just blacks. One night on a ‘rescue mission,’ we found a camp that they thought was white people, but when we got up close enough to come into their firelight, we could tell they were Mexicans. Or maybe from somewhere else in Central America, I don’t know. They were talking in Spanish. There were at least eight or ten men, from their teens to their fifties, and two women.
“That night there were seven of us out with Hardesty, counting me. We went out in two big aluminum hunting boats. They had special muffler boxes over the outboard motors to make them run so quiet that you almost couldn’t hear them, especially from the front when they were going slow. The boats were painted green and brown camouflage, but they mostly used them at night when I was with them. The Wolf River was their secret highway at night. When we saw campfires, we’d beach the boats about a half mile away, and patrol in on foot.
“The Mexicans were camped in a field between three old cars. Like circling the wagons, you know? It looked like they were sleeping in their cars and under plastic sheet lean-to shelters, but when we approached, most of them were sitting in a circle around their fire, between the cars. It was a wretched, miserable night. Not really raining, but misting, almost drizzling.
“Hardesty could speak pretty good Spanish, I’d heard him, but that night he wouldn’t. He could speak French and German too; he was very well educated. He could whip out quotes from famous people for almost every occasion. Lines of poetry too. Just pull them out to fit any situation, and not miss a beat. A real renaissance man. Great sense of humor, at least with his group. A natural leader.
“So he kept ordering these Mexicans to speak English, speak English dammit, this is America! He asked them why were they in America. He asked them if they had snuck over the border, or come in legally. ‘Where were you born? Show me your green cards! Show me your visas!’ They didn’t have a clue what he was saying. He called them invaders and thieves and blood-sucking parasites. He said they didn’t belong in Tennessee or any part of America, and to get the hell out of his country. He was livid, he was even angrier than when he was just killing blacks. He kept firing questions at them in English, but they couldn’t answer him. Remember, this was last January, and that was months before the first North American Legion battalions were formed and sent into Tennessee. So these were just poor dumb Mexican illegal aliens, not N.A.L. troops or anything like that. That came later.
“They were all huddled around their fire when we snuck up on them. We must have been a terrifying sight, all cammied up, with rifles. I had a rifle too by then—this rifle in fact. Hardesty gave it to me himself. It came with this suppressor, just about all of his rifles had suppressors. He had a weapons room in his river house like a big city SWAT team might have. This one is a semi-auto AR-15, but otherwise it’s the same as a military M-4 carbine. I have a night scope for it, but its batteries died and I couldn’t get any more. They’re special batteries, impossible to find. You brought some in the dead traitor’s pack, so I’ll be back in business with night vision now. I just need to put the scope back on.”
Jenny nodded, but didn’t say anything.
“Since Web Hardesty rescued me, since he saved me from being cooked and eaten by a gang of blacks, he must have assumed that I’d be thrilled to join his little band of butchers. I was another trigger puller in his private army, and obviously, I’d be highly motivated, right? At first, I was grateful, how could I not be? He had generators, diesel and gas tanks, freezers, meat, ice, cold beer—everything. All hidden in his own personal survivalist paradise. And I was grateful! They had saved my life, saved me from being killed and eaten by cannibals. So sure, I went out on ‘rescue missions’ with them. After all, we’d be saving more people like me from a horrible fate, right? I thought they were heroes, at first. I really did. For a while, I thought we were doing a good thing. It was like being in an unofficial National Guard unit, almost. An unofficial militia, kind of on the vigilante side. I’d stay with them until I found the Army, or the Army found me. I suppose that’s how I rationalized it.
“But they were enjoying it, especially killing blacks. They called black women ‘breeders.’ Hardesty said, ‘for Pete’s sake, don’t let the breeders get away!’ His friends laughed, and said ‘we’re finally breaking the cycle of poverty. We’re the best welfare reformers in history.’ And they meant it, too. After they shot them, they usually dragged their bodies into the river. ‘Sending them down the river,’ that’s what they called it. ‘Mail us a postcard from New Orleans,’ they’d say. If they were too far from the river, they’d drag the bodies over their own campfire, and burn them. Or they would just leave them where they fell. There were already so many bodies, who would ever notice a few more? Like you said Jenny, there were no police anywhere.
“Most of the time, they just snuck close enough to campfires to see if they were black people. Then they’d start sniping away, with their night scopes and infrared lasers and their sound suppressors. Fish in a barrel. But once we did actually rescue two white girls. They had been raped and beaten for days and days, so it wasn’t entirely clear in my mind that what we were doing was just plain out-and-out murder. That night when we found the two white girls was a real rescue mission, no doubt about it. Hardesty was a perfect gentleman toward those two, and he returned them safely to their families. One of those girl’s brothers joined up with Hardesty’s band right on the spot, after Web brought them home. That one mission made me question if what they were doing was more evil, or virtuous.
“That, plus we shot plenty of looters, and we found some more evidence of cannibalism. Cooked, half-eaten evidence. In those cases I didn’t mind shooting them so much, but murder is still murder. I knew that what Hardesty was doing was mostly wrong…but nothing was completely clear after those two earthquakes. Normal reality had definitely gone off kilter after those quakes. Nothing was the same after the earthquakes, especially that first month or two when there were aftershocks all the time. There were no police, no military…and no laws. Web Hardesty’s law was the only law for miles and miles around. I’ll be the first to admit that I went off the deep end. Way off. My hands are not clean.
“So anyway, that night with the Mexicans, Hardesty thought they were white Americans until we got up real close. And I think those Mexicans thought that we were the real military, or the National Guard or something. At first they were smiling, like they thought we were there to help them, or maybe give them some food. Until Hardesty started to rant and scream, and shout questions at them in English. He switched from infrared to a visible red laser on his rifle, and he’d put that bright red dot on somebody, and ask that person another question, in English. They were just numb with fear, petrified, crying and pleading in Spanish. When Hardesty got tired of it he opened fire, and so did the rest of his team. It was a massacre. Very different than sniping at blacks from a hundred yards away.
“While their attention was focused on shooting everybody around the fire, and getting the ones who were running away or hiding under the cars, I went the other way. Why I didn’t shoot Hardesty and his team, I don’t know. I was behind them, I could have. Maybe because I owed them my life. But I went the other way, and they didn’t find me. I don’t know what they would have done if they had found me after I ‘deserted’ Hardesty’s group, but lucky for me, they didn’t.”
When Doug finished, he looked down at the table. His folded hands were trembling.
“So what’s the point of that story?” Jenny asked. “That white people are just as bad as blacks? I can guarantee you that for every Web Hardesty, there are a hundred blacks that did worse, a lot worse. And at least being shot is quick, a lot quicker than being raped and tortured to death at the hands of savages! And you even admitted that you rescued some people, and found more looters and cannibals.”
“But those two white girls were the only time we rescued anybody, other than me. The rest of the time they were just shooting innocent people in cold blood.”
Jenny snapped back, “How do you know they were innocent? You just said some of them were looters and cannibals. And Web Hardesty’s group rescued you, didn’t they? If it wasn’t for him, you’d have been roasted over a fire and eaten.”
“I know, I know, and that’s why I still have mixed feelings about them—but you can’t ever excuse cold-blooded murder, no matter what. Or you’re no better than the savages.”
Phil Carson had been a silent listener to this emotional exchange, occasionally glancing between them, while examining the pages of the newly discovered notebook.
Jenny was about to tell Doug that she wished that Web Hardesty’s group had not rescued him, and thus prevented him from becoming a cannibal feast. Before she could utter these words, the line of Christmas lights that marked the passageway back to the cave entrance blinked out, and then it came back on. Then it blinked twice, and stayed on as before.
Doug said, “Boone’s here. That’s the signal.”
“What time is it?” Jenny asked Phil Carson.
“Almost one.”
“AM or PM?”
“PM. It’s Sunday afternoon.”
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