The Broken and the Dead (Book 1) (16 page)

Mrs. Driscol looked unsure and Janey just tried to not make eye contact.

“Sounds okay to me” Elaine said.

That brought violent, if silent, objections from Lucy who started to sob and pull on Elaine’s arm. Elaine started to tell her that it would be okay or something like that when Old Man Tucker knelt down in front of her. I heard him ‘huff’ with the effort and both his knees cracked as he did it. He waited until Lucy looked at him and made eye contact. Slowly he raised his huge hand, his thick, scared fingers stretched out and with gentleness I didn’t think possible he carefully pulled Lucy’s hair back and tucked it behind her left ear. He carefully rested his palm against her cheek. In a voice nearly imperceptible he said

“Miss Lucy, you are absolutely correct, we cannot spare Elaine for this mission. We need her and you and Ronald Bear here, just to keep everyone safe. Isn’t that right?”

After a moment she nodded and he smiled a deep sad smile. He groaned as he stood up and arched his back. “Ouch…” he said. He took a deep breath and said

“How about this, Mrs. Driscol...”

“AMY.” she corrected again.

“Umm...Right, Mrs. Driscol. If you could please just give me a ride to that spot you could leave and come back right away. You could come back in say an hour, if I am standing in the road, all is good, otherwise, you just head back to the visitor center and yall take off.”

              Mrs. Driscol seemed to be considering it when Old Man Tucker felt Lucy tugging on his sleeve.

“Hmmm? What is it sunshine?” he said.

She just tugged on it again so he leaned over so she could whisper in his ear. Suddenly, he started chuckling; he stood back up and said “really?” Lucy nodded then disappeared behind Elaine’s legs.

“What?” I asked getting tired of this whole process.

“She says we should just use the radios.” he was shaking his head and he asked “we have radios?”

Mrs. Driscol laughed and said “I’ll get them.”

She headed off to the SUV. I was seething. Those were the radios that Billy and I had used. Now HE was going to use them. Lucy’s arm snaked out from behind Elaine and she pinched Old Man Tucker. “Ow!” he said.

“Oh right, she also said that ‘yall’ is not a word.”

Satisfied, the delicate little arm disappeared behind Elaine with the rest of my little sister.

              We were lucky because when we got to the visitor center it was unoccupied, albeit it had been raided and everything edible had been taken from the smashed vending machines. It was finally agreed that Janey would drive the SUV. I would go with her to ride shotgun and act as radio operator. I told Old Man Tucker the call signs Desert -1 and Rock-3, the Humvee and the SUV, Sky-2, the other SUV now useless on the side of the road at the scene of our disaster. I told him he would be OMT.

“OMT?” he asked. “Old Man Tucker” I spat, hoping to hurt his feelings but he laughed out loud.

“I love it. That is a great call sign for me John.”

I wasn’t buying it, all the good humor and acting all ‘nicey-nicey’ wasn’t going to save him. It took us a few minutes to get ready and get everyone else settled down for security. But if all else fails, they could just button up in the Humvee and hit the road. We could catch up with them with the radio. The one in the Humvee had a greater range than the little hand held units. 

              We rode in silence until we got to the private road on the other side of the highway. OMT, as I now thought of him, smiled at me but was only met with a stony gaze from me.

“Right then, keep your eyes out guys.” he said.

Janey nodded and held up the radio and he held up his in response. OMT then turned and jogged (at least that is what I think he thought he was doing) up the private road. We did a radio check with Desert-1 and found they could read us loud and clear. We decided that since it seemed quiet we would just pull the SUV off the road and into some high brush so we could better keep a watch over things.

              Old Man Tucker moved into a row of Boxelder trees. Some were old growth and soared 70 or 80 feet high but the majority was new growth, more shrub than anything and they provided excellent cover for him. He moved slowly, a couple yards inside the brush. After about 15 minutes of steadily moving up a slow rise he could see a sprawling house. It was of log construction, but not vintage but rather one of those new prefab things with the factory cut logs. But what bothered OMT was the abundance of vehicles. In addition to the missing van, there were three others. One was an all-black Escalade, it sat high on huge, low profile tires mounted on polished chrome wheels. Another was a black Golf low-rider with multicolored flames painted across the grill and over the front fenders. The last was a silver Acura, this one also with very thin, low profile tires.

It crossed OMT’s mind that such tires might be ugly and far over-priced but at least they made a car ride like a brick. There was music coming from the house, it was a song by a rapper named he thought was named
Lil Dip Shit
, it might be music anyway, but he wasn’t sure. The tune it sounded juvenile and talentless but that didn’t bother him too much. What did bother him was Mr. Franks. He was naked and chained to a base of a flag pole in the center of a circle drive. Mr. Franks had been beaten severely and his head was covered in dried blood. He thought Franks was still alive but he wasn’t sure. He moved a few yards closer and then slid into a rain gully that was shrouded in shadows.

A few minutes later the front door was slammed open and the music offended Tuckers 1955 issue sensibilities even more. A black woman, perhaps in her late 20’s or early thirties dragged Mrs. Franks from the house by her hair; Mrs. Franks was wearing an oversized and blood stained ‘wife-beater’ shirt and nothing else, her ample backside and thick legs ,were pale and clearly bruised. She was screaming at her, OMT was not sure what she was saying. He couldn’t understand her vocabulary or her accent. Mrs. Franks was not screaming or resisting at all, she just took the abuse. Mrs. Franks was kicked in the back and she tumbled down the front steps. The black girl cursed her again and called her several names. A large black male, perhaps in his mid-thirties appeared at the door, he wasn’t wearing a shirt and his body was taut and well-muscled, he proudly displayed his iconic ‘six-pack abs’. He was laughing and he flicked a lit cigarette into the grass.

The girl stepped down the steps and dragged Mrs. Franks back to them, she stepped away and left Mrs. Franks to crawl half-way up the stairs on her own accord. The girl went up and stood next to the man who promptly unzipped his jeans and urinated on Mrs. Franks. This caused great hilarity from inside. It was clear that the
invaders
(as he was already thinking of them) were using threats against her husband to control Mrs. Franks. Tucker’s mind clicked in some deep seated, prejudicial way, his ‘
us vs them’
mentality was put into over-drive. They became somehow less than human to him; like the
towel heads and camel-jockeys
of the Gulf Wars, the
gooks and slope heads
of Viet Nam, the
nips and krauts
of World War II and probably just like in every other war ever fought. Soldiers who de-humanized their opposition, were not murderers in their own minds.

To Tucker, the images and music portrayed in the once popular ‘
gangsta
’ culture, the crime shows on TV that showed everything in high contrast, the observed behaviors of two out of five people in the lodge, and his own unwillingness to see beyond his own pain and his own frame of reference, congealed into an over-simplified label:
thug
. A label without redeeming social value, a label that once worn, allowed him to kill without consideration or mercy. I don’t know why he pigeon-holed things like that, I don’t even know if he actually believed it, maybe somehow he had to do it in order to psychologically survive. All I know is that from that moment, the people in the hour were no more human to Tucker than the monsters that hunted us.

The laughing pair re-entered the house not even bothering to keep an eye on her. She crawled over to her husband and cradled his head in her lap, she spoke so quietly OMT couldn’t hear but he could imagine her trying to assuage his anguish both mental and physical. He lifted the Moisan sniper rifle and looked through the scope. He counted at least one other male and at least one other female in the house. The other male looked young, perhaps 19 and the girl about the same age. The male was boney, rail thin and short, wearing jeans so low that his red underwear was hanging out; the girl was exceptionally tall, perhaps 6’ 1”, and heavy as well, especially through the hips. She wore skin tight jeans with beads or something on them because they glittered in the light. She had a top on that revealed rolls of fat that drooped over her waist.

He was just about to back away when yet a third male exited the house, this one was older, perhaps in his early 40’s, was bald and while carrying a fair bit of extra weight he looked strong, he stormed down the stairs, slapped Mrs. Franks then dragged her by the throat up the stairs and into the house. He heard more laughter then he heard Mrs. Franks screaming. He lowered the scope and closed his eyes; he took a deep breath and slowly worked his way back down the road until he could no longer hear Mrs. Franks’ screams. He reported in to Janey and me, giving us an over view of the situation. Janey then radioed back to Desert-1 and told them of what was happening.

OMT insisted that he would handle the situation and that under no circumstances should anyone else come up the road until he contacted them again. He was going to leave the radio in the woods so that only he would be using it. He told us to sit and wait and if we didn’t hear from him within an hour we were to leave, join up with Mrs. Driscol and head on out. After fifteen minutes of discussion between me and Janey we decided that we had better check this out ourselves. We checked our rifles and letting Mrs. Driscol know we were going radio silent for a bit we headed up the road. I wasn’t sure if what OMT had told us was a complete lie or not, but we had to know, and if it was all a lie I was going to shoot OMT myself.

OMT circled around to the back of the house, the ‘music’ had progressed to some ballad about a hotel or a motel or something but the sound worked to OMT’s advantage. He gathered up a pile of dry leaves and twigs and set them on the back porch. He lit a cigarette and then folded a match book around it. He nestled it into the pile and then slipped back into the shadows and waited. He didn’t have long to wait, the cigarette slowly burned down to the matches and lit them. He had seen the trick in a movie years ago and sure enough it worked. The flames caught and soon thick black smoke rose and filled the awning of the back porch. The clouds billowed into the back of the house and soon there was screaming and commotion from inside.

Two men and two women stumbled onto the back porch. OMT sighted carefully on the one furthest back in the group, took a deep breath and held it, he squeezed the trigger. The back of droopy pants’ head exploded and sprayed bits of brain and blood over fat girl’s face. He worked the bolt; fat girl had started to scream but hadn’t got out of the way. The old guy shoved her clear and was half way through the door when OMT’s second round caught him between the shoulder blades. Before he could squeeze off a third round both women had ran into the house, the thin one pulling fat girl in behind her, the remnants of the smoke flowing about them like a cloak. He sighed and circled around to the front of the house.

Janey and I were in the shadows on the outside of the circle drive, they had seen Mr. Franks just has OMT has described but that didn’t prove anything to me. Suddenly we heard screaming and then two rifle shots.  I started to head towards the door but Janey put a hand on my arm and whispered “wait.” So we did but both of us shouldered our M-16s. Pretty soon the two black women came running from the house, one held a shiny pistol in her hand and was waving it around, she was crying and she was screaming something about “Dimonte.” The bigger one looked like she was in shock. Johnny didn’t do anything but Janey did. A three round burst from her M-16 cut the heavy one down. At least one round had found its mark.

Suddenly automatic fire threw up sprays of dirt around us, a man on the porch held a fully automatic Tec 9 in one hand, the first few rounds hit low the others went high as the barrel rose and he continued to pull the trigger. Janey and I kept our heads down when suddenly the rapid fire blasts of the Tec 9 were permanently interrupted by one of OMT’s .41 colts. The bullet caught him under the arm pit, pierced both lungs and the path of the bullet must have left the major arteries looking like a tangled mess of ramen noodles in pink lemonade. The man was dead before he flipped over the porch railing to the ground.

Suddenly Mrs. Franks appeared in the door way, she was held in place by a very muscular arm attached to an unseen body. She was trembling and things instantly slowed down. Janey and I both waited and when it became apparent that we were not going to shoot her, ‘muscles’ made his appearance, he pulled Mrs. Franks in front of him, his powerful left arm moved around her throat, a Glock 9mm pistol in his right hand was pointed at her head. The tall, powerful man’s eyes were wide and he was screaming something but his voice was so low and he mumbled so badly that what came out sounded a bit like

“FREEZMUTHAFUDDER R ISHOSHDISBEECH!”

Janey and I stayed where we were. The big man yelled at the surviving woman to get the Tec 9 and head to the Escalade. She obeyed and headed that way, the big man’s teeth gleamed metallic and golden in the dark light and he gathered himself, regaining control.