Foreign Enemies And Traitors: Part 3
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. 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 blond 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 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 south-east 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. The store employees said you had to pay with cash. 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. And all of the ATM machines I saw were smashed open anyway. Looted.
"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 in 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 in line, and then they started pushing inside too. Police were there trying to keep order, but they 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 right away. 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 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, and we were a block off of Poplar.
"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 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. Smaller than this platform we're on.
"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 to 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 imagine that? Didn't believe in them! That's like not believing in rocks, or hammers or knives. He didn't believe in guns! I mean, guns are reality, so not believing in guns is like not believing in reality. 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 even 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 ax and a baseball bat for weapons. We barricaded the doors with furniture. The window curtains were already closed tight. Some of the windows were cracked from the earthquake, but the glass was still in the frames.
"My dad told me to get ready to run away if they broke in. I was the younger of two children, and 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. I don't even know if she's alive... Well, 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 gang-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 of 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--and they wouldn't. 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 home.
"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 ax raised, and that was the last I saw of 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 ax.
"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, until 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. Physical pain. Pure fear, absolute terror. 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 torture me to death. I didn't know if I should try to kill myself with that carving knife if they pulled back that plywood 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 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 just 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, not from Poplar. 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 little machine to reload 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 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 bugout plan. That was the first time that I ever heard that expression, 'bugout 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 about twenty miles out past Germantown, 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 Buchanans' 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. The ones without night goggles, I mean.
"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 streetlights 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 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 real 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, or maybe just one minute, Bobby and his father came back to the Suburban. They had two people with them from one of the other families who were shot and wounded. 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 and backpacks 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 her sweater's sleeve. After a deep sigh, she 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 heading east, 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 that 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 on that first night. I kept the revolver in my hand the whole time, and I would have shot anybody who came at me, but nobody did.
"By morning, I had 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 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 that an earthquake had hit above Memphis. Well, shoot, they didn't need a radio to tell them that?they felt it! Everybody did for hundreds of miles around. And there were aftershocks all the time too, and every time you thought it might be another big one starting. You could never relax.
"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 pulling up 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. They were all staring at me like I was from outer space.
"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 roads 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 hay trailers across it and blockaded it. Bobby's escape convoy had probably driven straight into a barricade like that the night before, 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 thirst 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, down by Route 57. They drove on the bare field around the roadblock, past the warning signs, and the towns-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. Mostly deer rifles, you know the kind.
"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 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 gangbangers. 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 St. Louis were in bad shape too. 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 German-town, 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 to defend themselves.
"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 African-American 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. His family 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? That sounds like a good place to me."
"Nothing, not a thing. But these guys were twisted. I went out with them on 'rescue missions.' It sounds plausible. They were 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 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 campfires 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 or three 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. From the front, when they were going slow, you couldn't hear them at all. 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 four 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 still 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 up and sent into Tennessee. So these were just poor dumb Mexican illegal aliens, not NAL troops or any-thing like that. That came later." Doug pronounced NAL so that it rhymed with pal.
"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 carbine, but otherwise it's the same as a military M-4. 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 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 killers. 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, 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. The Rescue Rangers. I would 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. That night, we really were 'rescue rangers.' Hardesty was a perfect gentle-man toward those two, and he returned them to their families. One of those girl's brothers joined up with Hardesty's band right on the spot, after Web brought her home. That one mission made me question if what they were doing was more evil, or more virtuous. I was actually proud to be with Hardesty then.
"That, plus we shot plenty of looters, and we found some more evidence of cannibalism. Cooked, half-eaten evidence. Humans were on the menu at a lot of those campfires. 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, far from it.
"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 just a pure 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 crawling 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. A week after that, Boone Vikersun found me."
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 were 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 then eaten! And you even admitted that you rescued some people, and found more looters and cannibals."
Then Doug was talking, but Jenny was not hearing his words. She was hearing her mother's last screams. Unbidden memories were once again taking her back to her hiding place in the cellar of her family's home in Germantown, and to later painfully evil memories from the long journey to Mannville. When her mind returned to the present she heard him say, "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 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 worst savages."
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 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.
"Almost one," replied Phil Carson.
"One a.m., or one p.m.?"
"P.m. It's Sunday afternoon."
(The above excerpts were just 50 of the 570 pages in the printed book.)
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