Foreign Enemies and Traitors (18 page)

“You heard me, get in line, fifty yards behind the last one.”

“But…”

“Just do it!”

Amory shook his head as if in great doubt.  He had a rigid grip on the wheel, almost cringing as he gently accelerated out of the gas station, leaving by the exit on the northeast-bound divided road.  It had a flat, grassy median strip, but it was not a limited-access road.  He slowed again when he was fifty yards behind the final vehicle, a humvee with an all-weather metal roof.  After a minute, the highway made a left-hand curve and Carson said, “Now, switch on the headlights while we’re not aiming at them.”

“But they’ll know we don’t belong, they’ll…”

“No they won’t.  In this rain that driver is staring straight ahead at the truck in front of him, and anybody else in there with him is either asleep or bored to death and trying to stay warm.  Stragglers fall behind and catch up all the time.”  Carson chuckled softly.  “It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book: convoy hopping.  It’s a matter of psychology.  It’s the same thing that makes it so easy to sneak onto military bases.  What keeps most people from trying is pure psychological intimidation, nothing more than that.  You get past that fear, and you’ve got it made.”

“You’ve done this before?”

“Yep.  A long, long time ago.  If I told you where, you’d never believe me.  Now as long as they keep driving, we’ll keep following.  If the convoy stops, we’ll peel off.  Let’s hope they’re going a long, long way.”

“What about the Mississippi River, going to Texas, all that?”

“Not tonight, Sergeant.  We just left three dead officers back there, colonels, and if anybody else knew about the plan, that bridge is where they’ll be looking for me.  We don’t know when those bodies are going to be found.  Maybe not for a couple of days, or maybe they already have been.  Either way, I don’t want to be trapped against the river.  Not at that Vicksburg bridge, and not looking for a boat.  Not if anybody alive knows that’s where I was heading.  So we’re going where nobody would expect us to go.”

“Where’s that, sir?”

Carson paused, then asked, “How far is it to Tennessee?”

“Tennessee?  About two hundred miles.  But Tennessee’s even worse than Mississippi!”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Tennessee is practically a war zone.  Tennessee is occupied by foreign troops.”

“Does the Mississippi National Guard go into Tennessee, Sergeant Amory?”

“What?  Go into Tennessee?  Hell no sir, no way!  It’s full of foreign peacekeepers; it’s a mess.  There’s fighting up there—Kentucky too.”

“Well, that’s why we’re going there.  Foreign troops I can handle—but I just killed three Mississippi Guard officers.  I mean, they hang
counterfeiters
in this state!  I’ve seen it.”  Carson chuckled.  “If they hang counterfeiters, what do you think they’ll do for three dead colonels, shot right in their faces?  You think they’re going to just let that go, let it slide?  No big deal, let bygones be bygones?”

The driver shook his head slowly.  “No sir, never.  Never.  I think you poked a big stick in a hornet’s nest back there, killing those officers.”

“So do I, Sergeant Amory.  And that’s why we’re going to Tennessee.”

****

The truck convoy rolled northward
up the eastern flank of Mississippi on Highway 45.  The dual-lane road was almost like an interstate highway, running ruler-straight while ascending and descending long gentle slopes.  Every few miles they passed in and out of rain showers, including some hard downpours.  Their headlights occasionally shone across billboards, many featuring General Mirabeau in different heroic poses among workers, farmers and children.  Sergeant Amory maintained a distance of fifty yards behind the humvee that was the last vehicle in the convoy.
 
Without turning his head the medic quietly said,
“You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”

                By the dash lights, Carson could see Sergeant Amory’s white eyes flickering in the rear view mirror, trying to get a look at his captor in the seat behind him.  “Keep your eyeballs on the road, Sergeant, or you’re going to kill both of us.”

Amory slammed a fist on the wheel.  “You think this is a damn joke?”

“Am I laughing?”

“You
are
going to kill me,” the medic stated flatly.

“Is that really what you think?” said Carson.

“Of course it’s what I think.  You shot three officers, what do you think I think?  You’re gonna just let me go?  You must think I’m some kind of stupid.  You’ve got a gun at my back, and we’re going fifty miles an hour following a military convoy.  That means you’re crazy too.”

“Listen, Sergeant: it wasn’t my plan to shoot anybody tonight.  I made a deal with Doctor Foley.  We shook hands on it, man to man—and he pulled a gun on me.  What do you think they were going to do to me back there at that trailer?  Throw me a Christmas Eve surprise party?  Before that scene at the trailer, I thought I’d be across the river in Louisiana by now—and you’d be on your way back to Camp Shelton with the doctor.  So okay, Foley double-crossed me—and he paid the price for it—but that doesn’t mean I’m going to kill you.  After we get to Tennessee, you can go.  You can have the truck and the rest of the gas.  Twenty-five more gallons will get you all the way back.”

“What, you think I can just drive back to the base now?  Just show up, turn this truck back into the motor pool like nothing happened tonight, when three officers have been shot dead?  Including probably the base XO?  Man, what do you think is gonna happen to me now, no matter what I do?  I’m screwed any way you cut it.  And besides, we can’t just drive into Tennessee anyway.  The state border is closed except for official business—which we ain’t—and they check every damn thing going over that border with a microscope.  And only in the daytime.”

“Then just get me close, and I’ll hump it the rest of the way.”

“Huh, you think you’re some kind of geriatric Davy Crockett?  Or Rambo maybe?”  Sergeant Amory glanced at Carson in the mirror, and shook his head.

“Don’t you have family somewhere in this state that could put you up?”

“Yeah, but so what?  What good would that do, except bring heat on them?  How am I gonna hide out under martial law?  How can I stay hid when they’re looking everywhere for the black medic who signed out a truck for Lieutenant Colonel Foley, who just happens to be dead now?  I can’t wear my uniform while I’m AWOL, and if I’m wearing civvies, I gotta wear my badge like everybody else.  First time I’m scanned, I’ll be busted.  Then I’ll hang for sure, just for desertion—even if they can’t get me for the three murders.”

Carson mulled this over for a while, ready to dispute the medic’s assertion that what he had done constituted murder.  He dropped the thought: it was pointless.  To the Mississippi Guard, the three dead officers would certainly be seen as victims of foul play, and their deaths would be investigated as murders.  He could shout self-defense from the gallows platform while the noose was cinched around his neck, for all the good it would do.  Instead, he refocused on more practical matters.  “How do the badge scanners work, Sergeant?”

“Scanners?  Oh, I think just like the supermarket things that used to scan your groceries—back when the supermarkets were open.  Back when they had electricity all the time.  Now they got a portable laser scanner at the checkpoints.”

“Portable, so it runs on batteries?”

“Yeah, what else?  I mean, I guess.  They look like a square flashlight.”

“So how does it know who’s who, there at a checkpoint?  It must be hooked up to a central database somewhere.  It has to get updated, and compare the badges to a central list.”  Carson was thinking aloud.  Then he asked, “How’s the wireless network in Mississippi these days?”

“What do you mean?”

“The cell phones, all of that.”

“Oh, we don’t have cell phones anymore, hardly.  Not for regular folks, anyway.”

“What about the military, the government?”

“Yeah, they got it, some places.  Not everywhere.  Jackson, Hattiesburg, Greenville…around the cities they got it.”

Carson removed the stack of ID cards from his left pocket and examined a black-and-white scan badge by penlight.  It had a small, grainy photograph of his face, a thumbprint, a bar code, and a data bit field on the front side.  The name on the card matched his new military ID card: Jonathan T. Brice, but the face was his.  A spring-clip on top allowed it to be attached to a collar or shirt pocket.  “How often do they check the thumbprint?”

“Depends on where you are.  Up here, things are kind of loose—until you’re right close to the border.  They don’t check your thumbprint hardly ever.  Seems like a waste they even got the thumbprint on it.  Most times, they just look at the picture and your face.  If you’re in a big line of folks, getting food or water, say, then they don’t hardly check at all.  Just so they see you got a badge, that’s all they’re looking for most of the time.  Least that’s how it was in October, last time I was up here on leave.”

Carson reflected some more, and asked, “How many people died in the epidemics?  Must have been thousands, right?”

“Thousands?  Thousands was an average week.  Almost three hun-dred thousand died in the whole emergency zone, that’s the number I usually hear.  Nobody really knows for sure.”

“Then there must be a lot of ID badges from dead folks, right?”

“I see what you’re getting at, but it won’t work,” said Amory.  “When folks die, they take the badges.  They keep track.  And a lot of those folks didn’t have badges when they died—the badges came later.”

“But the point is, they can’t keep track of everybody all the time.  It’s impossible.  It’s a bluff, basically.  Put badges on everybody, and they’ll conform like sheep.  It’s simple psychology.”

“Man, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Carson asked, “Okay, so what do you want to do?  If you have any bright ideas, I’m all ears.  Seems to me like neither of us has a whole lot of good options.  If you can’t go back and you can’t hide, what are you going to do?” 

“I don’t know.  Guess I’d go back to Pontapola, where I got family, lots of cousins.  Maybe use my cousins’ scan badges when I gotta be out and about.  Things are a little more chilled out up around there, especially away from the main roads.  I might be able to blend in with the scenery, you might say.  And maybe I could pick up a badge from somebody who died, like you said.  Sometimes whole families died, and nobody checked.  Nobody counted them.  Death records are still a mess, you’re right about that much.”

“Where’s Pontapola?”

“West of Tupelo.”

Carson studied his road map.  “If I jump out near the Tennessee line, then you’d just disappear?”

“What choice would I have?  I’d have to.  Otherwise they’ll connect me with those officers you shot back there.”

“You could be a witness against me.  You could save your ass by going to the police.”

“Oh man, what planet are you from?  Think about it—this is still Mississippi, and some things don’t change.  No matter what I said, I’d hang for those three dead officers, one way or the other.  With you or without you.”

Carson leaned over his map, studying it closely by penlight, thinking aloud.  “We’re about fifteen miles from Tupelo—the convoy might stop there for gas.  Or it might just stop there for the night, or it might just stop there period, end of the mission.  It’s been almost two hundred miles since we hooked on.  We’ve pushed our luck far enough.  So right now is probably our best chance to split off, and go for the Tennessee border on our own.”

“Whatever.  You got the gun.”

“State Road 61 is coming up in a little bit.  Slow down now and drop back a little, just ease off the gas.  No turn signal.  That’s good, that’s good, there’s the turnoff, ready?”

“Are you sure?  I don’t like taking these back roads, especially not at night.”

“It’s not a back road; it’s a paved state road.  It should be all right.  Okay, go ahead and take it.”

****

Sergeant Amory asked, “You see a road on the map
a few miles from the Tennessee line?  Runs right along it on the Mississippi side?”               

                “I see it.  State Road 72.  Goes most of the way across the top of the state.  What about it?”

                “It’s a security zone north of it.  From 72 to the state line is called the ‘buffer zone.’  Like a no-man’s-land, a few miles wide.  No way can we drive across State Road 72.  We have to stop this side of it, and then you’re on your own.  Then it’s maybe three or four miles from there to the Tennessee line.”

                “Why can’t we drive across 72?  It’s Christmas Eve and it’s raining.  They can’t be watching it all.”

                “Look, if there’s any checkpoints in this whole damned state on Christmas Eve, it’ll be up there.  They don’t want refugees from Tennessee coming into Mississippi, and 72 is the line the Guard patrols.  You want us to get caught?  You want to get shot or hung?  Then you just try to make me drive across State Road 72.”  Rounding a downhill curve, Amory hit the brakes, screeching the pickup to a stop.  A tree lay across the road.  Another moment of observation revealed that it was a tree trunk, with most of its branches crudely chopped off.  A hand-painted sign, black letters on a scrap of plywood, was nailed to the trunk: “BRIDGE OUT AHEAD.”

Carson looked between the road blockage and his map.  “What bridge?”  He examined his map with the penlight.  “It doesn’t show a bridge on this map, it barely shows this road.  You know what bridge is out?”

“Hell if I know, it must be further up ahead.  I can’t see anything past the tree but more road.  But we’re getting closer to Memphis, and that earthquake shook everything up but good.  Even before that, it was the floods from Matilda.  Lot of bridges got busted up or washed away.  I don’t know this road.  We have to turn around.  Go back and find another way.”

“Go ahead, pull a U-turn.”

Sergeant Amory did as he was told.  The road was only two lanes wide, with narrow shoulders and steep slopes down to swampy lowlands on both sides.  He accomplished the turnaround in three cuts, using great caution on the slippery pavement.