Foreign Enemies and Traitors (55 page)

“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 townspeople 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.