The Glooming (Wrath of the Old Gods Book 1) (8 page)

The last thing she sensed was the child’s incessant screaming.

Texas Border

They called him Bucktooth Billy Ray Rockwell, or just Buck for short. He had received the name because of his protruding front teeth he couldn’t hide, no matter how hard he would push his bottom lip forward. It didn’t help that Buck didn’t have much of a chin either so they had been making fun of him from kindergarten all the way to his sophomore year at the local high school when he finally dropped out. When his parents kicked him out of their house a year later, he tried to work in an auto repair shop but quit a few months after because they were making fun of him there too. After that, he joined in with some childhood friends and made a living burglarizing houses and stealing cars, until he finally got caught and spent eight years in prison for it. Having just been released a few weeks ago on probation, he was staying at a friend’s house when all hell broke loose.

There were very few channels left that were still broadcasting, so Buck just kept flipping through them on the remote control. He sat slumped in the torn-up couch of his friend’s living room while trying to pass the time. Although he heard on the news that the electrical grid was shutting down, the power was still going here, so he kept all the lights on in the house as he waited till his friends got back. The little bit of money that they gave him upon his release was already spent on booze, cigarettes, and a little bit of blow. Empty beer cans were lying around his dirty bare feet, along with crushed plastic wrappers on the dingy carpet. His friend really didn’t seem to care much about cleaning. He had his scalp shaved every morning, just like the skinhead gang he was a part of in prison. Buck didn’t have a whole lot of clothes when he was let go, so he was wearing the sleeveless plaid shirt that once belonged to his friend’s ex-girlfriend. He kept the old, torn up denim jeans he took in with him when he got arrested all those years ago.

It was now early afternoon and just as he was thinking of throwing the remote control at the television set to see if it would shatter the monitor, he heard his friend’s pickup truck going into the front driveway. Quickly turning off the TV, Buck looked around and found a pair of old tennis shoes which he started putting on his feet.

“Buck, what have you been doin’ there, you ol’ possum!” his friend Mark Gooch said as he opened the screen door and strode in, carrying several semi-automatic rifles slung on his back that he then placed on top of the grimy coffee table beside the couch. Mark was about a shade taller than Buck and more heavyset, his hair was deep black and curly but he had a neatly trimmed beard. They had met while in jail and became friends ever since.

“Holy sheeiit,” Buck said as he picked up one of the rifles and started examining it. The weapon was an AR-15, one of the most common types of semi-automatic rifles being sold to civilians in the country and it looked brand new. He noticed that there was a custom made forward grip on it as he checked whether the red dot sight that was attached to the upper rail of the carrying handle was fully operational or not. It was.

Mark put his hands into a black plastic trash bag that he was carrying and took out two handguns, one was a Glock and the other was a chromed .357 Magnum revolver and threw them on top of the couch as he started laughing. “I tell you, boy, we hit the mother lode!”

“Where’d you git all of this?” Buck said as he locked back the AR-15’s collapsible stock and began sighting it.

Mark racked the slide of a 1911 Les Baer .45 pistol before thumbing the safety and holstering it on his hip. “Remember that gun store over at Midland? Well, we waited till the owner had boarded it up and left, then we just came in with bolt cutters and opened her up like a cardboard box. I tell ya, it was easy as pie!”

Mark’s hulking cousin Lance Gooch came through the door pushing a dolly that was stacked with several boxes. “Where in the hell do I put all of this, Mark?”

“Right behind the kitchen counter, if ya please,” Mark said as he picked up another AR-15 from the table and started to examine it. He was wearing desert camouflaged cargo pants and a grey-colored tactical vest that he took from the accessories section of the gun store, they were so new the price tags were still on them.

“Yessiree,” Lance said as he wheeled in the boxes and began to stack them on the kitchen floor. At six foot two, he was the tallest and most heavily built of the three, with dark brown hair in a crew cut and similarly-colored short beard. A former cop, Lance had been fired two years ago after he had beaten up and shot a couple of black men he had seen loitering in a Dallas alleyway. One of the men had died and the family sued. Although Lance’s partner and the police union had stood behind him, the media firestorm that erupted over the whole affair forced the police chief to terminate him although he was able to avoid any criminal liability. At that point Lance began to harbor a smoldering resentment against anyone in the media as well as all types of liberal politicians.

Buck had a quizzical look on his face. “What in the hell are in those boxes?”

Lance had finished stacking them and opened up the top of one of the boxes. “Ammo, boy, ammo! We got at least several thousand rounds of ammo here for all the guns we got. And I’ve got some molds and a swag press too so we can even make our own bullets.”

Buck nodded. Lance was the smartest. “Did y’all take everything?”

Mark shook his head and smiled. “Nah, there were some others that were with us and they helped themselves too. With the world as broken as it is, we figured it’s gonna be every man for himself now.”

Lance laughed. “Things got a bit dicey when the owner of that store and his son came back just as we were about finished.”

Buck scratched his forehead. “What happened then?”

“Oh some of the other guys just shot ‘em,” Mark said nonchalantly.

Lance nodded. “Shot his son too.”

Buck had slung the rifle over his shoulder and looked at them. “They dead?”

Lance just shrugged. “Probably. They were bleedin’ out by the time the other boys were done with ‘em.”

Buck started walking around the room with the slung rifle to see how it felt. “This rifle mine?”

“Sure thing, Buck,” Mark said and pointed to the couch. “Take one of them pistols too, you’re gonna need a backup weapon just in case.”

“Yessir,” Buck said as he picked up the revolver and tried to stick it into his jeans, but the barrel was too big to fit in properly.

“Take a look at him,” Mark said to Lance as he started chuckling. “Tryin’ to Mexican carry that big ‘ol Magnum, he looks like a crazy Jethro hillbilly!”

Buck stopped what he was doing and just held the pistol in his hand as the other two were laughing at him. “Shut the hell up, Mark, or I’m gonna shoot ya.”

Mark kept laughing as he put the rifle down and drew the 1911 and pointed it at Buck. “How you gonna shoot me when yer guns aren’t even loaded, boy?”

Buck started to grimace as he moved over to where the ammunition boxes were and started to dig through them to find the right caliber for his gun. Lance got his meaty arms on him and pushed him away. Buck nearly fell as he stumbled backwards a few feet.

“Alright, that’s enough joking around,” Lance said. Like his cousin, he too was wearing civilian tactical gear, although they from his days in the police force. “We’re gonna need each other and we need to work as a team. That means no more fightin’ among ourselves.”

“I was just jokin’ around,” Mark said as he holstered the pistol. “We need to train Buck here on the use of these weapons so that we can properly defend ourselves.”

Buck sat back down on the sofa, his burst of sudden anger evaporated. “Before I got sent in, I had a pistol and then when they let me out they said I can’t have guns no more.”

Lance stood in the kitchen behind them as he continued to unwrap several assault rifle magazines from one of the boxes. “Don’t you worry, Bucky. The law ain’t around anymore so you just hang on to that AR and just make sure you don’t shoot me or Mark, okay?”

“I ain’t got a problem with that,” Buck said as he sighted the revolver. “I’ll shoot just about anybody else though.”

“Now that’s a great idea!” Mark said as he slumped down beside Buck. “We can go after anybody and get whatever we need. We got the firepower now.”

Buck placed the pistol on his lap and looked at Mark. “You wanna go get that ex-girlfriend of yours back here? We can just shoot her dad and take her, now that we got the guns.”

Mark laughed. “Nah, fuck that bitch. I am done with her, but you have a good idea, Buck. I say we just drive around and look for a house with some women in it and we take them back here and choose our wives.”

Buck frowned. “Ah, that’s too bad then.”

“Too bad about what?” Mark said to him before he started chuckling again. “Oh, so you wanted to screw her too, didn’t you? You horny armadillo. I thought all that prison sex must have made you queer or something.”

“I never had any kind of sex when I was inside,” Buck hissed. “Screw you.”

Lance walked over and sat on an old armchair facing them as he placed two fully-loaded assault rifle magazines into the ammo pouch on his tactical vest. “Calm down, boys. I think we may need some target practice just to cool both your heads off. Let’s think about this for a minute. What kind of live targets can we practice on?”

“Let’s go drive around in your pickup and find us some niggers to shoot,” Buck said.

“I know a few buddies of mine that’s been doing that since yesterday,” Lance said. “I don’t know if there’s any blacks still in Odessa. From what I heard, a lot of them started moving up north when a lot of the cops started quitting.”

Buck thought about it for a minute before he answered. “Let’s go shoot some wetbacks then. A couple of them beaners came at me with a shank while I was in the joint. I got a long scar on my belly and I need some payback.”

“Whoa, I think he’s onto something here,” Mark said. “Remember the news last night? I dunno if you watched this in your house, Lance, but last night the reporters said that several million Mexican refugees were now in El Paso and the Border Patrol and the National Guard couldn’t even stop them.”

Lance nodded. “Yeah, it was something like ten million I think. Too many wetbacks for the authorities to shoot and that traitor president of ours probably let them in anyway.”

“The news weren’t sure of what’s driving them up north,” Buck said. “I didn’t understand what that anchorman was sayin’.”

“I was on the internet in my house just before it got slow two days ago,” Lance said. “Some reports said it was packs of chupacabras that was killing ‘em down there, but then I saw some of those videos they posted from the survivors who made it here, and those things looked more like vampires or zombies.”

“What’s a chupacabra?” Buck said.

“Some sort of monster dog or bear or something like that,” Mark said. “Stupid Mexicans and their dumbass religious crap.”

“Whatever is causing it shouldn’t be our problem. It’s theirs and they should be dealing with it,” Lance said. “Those goddamned Mexicans have flooded into our border states. Before it was just a few hundred thousand and now its millions of them brown-skinned scumbags, we gotta do something.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” Mark said before turning his head to look at Buck. “You cool with shooting a few hundred wetbacks today?”

Buck grinned. His yellow teeth were crooked and it made him look like cartoon character so he didn’t smile much except for special occasions. “I got no problem with it.”

Lance got up and took out his mobile phone as he went to the kitchen. “Hang on, since I can still get a cell signal, lemme call up a friend of mine. He personally knows Obediah Smith.”

“Obediah Smith? The chairman for AFAF?” Mark said.

Lance waved at them from the kitchen as he started talking to someone on his hand phone. “Yeah, that’s him. Hold on….”

Buck leaned over to Mark. “What’s AFAF?”

“America for Americans Foundation,” Mark said. “They are one of the biggest anti-immigration groups in the country. Obediah Smith’s their chairman and a local boy from Houston. He’s been on TV a lot of times and a regular commentator on XOX News.”

“I think I might have seen him once or twice when I was in the hole,” Buck said.

“Obediah’s a good man. If he ran for president, I would vote for him in a heartbeat. The only good times this country had was when a Texan was president,” Mark said.

“Okay,” Lance said as he walked back over to them with a smile. “I just talked to one of his assistants. There’s huge numbers of Mexicans trying to cross the border and ICE is pretty shorthanded. Since we’re in Odessa, they could use some volunteers over at Fort Hancock, that’s only a few hours away. They said there’s already a small group of citizens over there defending the place and they need more. Obediah is also on his way over there so we can meet him in person.”

Mark grinned. “That’s mighty fine! How much ammo do we bring?”

“My friend said that Obediah will be bringing in a truckload of ammo, but let’s bring at least ten full mags each,” Lance said. “That way we still have a reserve in case their supplies run out.”

“That’s gonna be at least three hundred rounds for each of us,” Mark said as he got up and headed to the boxes by the kitchen.

Buck was now grinning ear to ear as he also stood up from the couch to join Mark in loading his guns, this was the best day of his life since he got out of prison a few weeks ago. While most of the news reports were saying that the world was turning into Hell, he never felt better.

The drive south towards Fort Hancock took almost three hours. Traffic was pretty light since most people were trying to flee northwards instead of going down to the southern border. Mark drove the pickup truck while Lance was in the front seat. Buck was riding shotgun in the back along with a few boxes of extra ammunition for their rifles. He was so excited, he started firing a few shots at a group of Mexicans that were trying to thumb a ride north on the other side of the road. Mark kept the gas on the pedal as Lance opened the truck’s rear window and told him in no uncertain terms to stop shooting until they got to the border. Buck complied and sat back down on the rear bed of the pickup, as he was scared of Lance and he hoped they wouldn’t leave him behind. Anyway, he didn’t think he hit any of those Mexicans since the truck was at a high speed and he saw them diving to the ground as soon as he pointed the AR-15 at them. Buck was still somewhat keyed up as he took some ammunition out of one of the boxes and reloaded his spent magazine. The sun was out and it looked to be a beautiful, hot afternoon.