Foreign Enemies and Traitors (56 page)

“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 anything 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 gentleman 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.

                                                       
18

Doug said, “Boone’s here!  That’s the signal.”

               
“What time is it?” Jenny asked Phil Carson.

               
“Almost one.”

               
 “One a.m. or one p.m.?”

“P.m.  It’s Sunday afternoon.”              

After a minute, Boone crawled beneath the last low portion of the tunnel into the main room, and stood upright.  He was wet through and his clothes were streaked with mud, his face red and streaming with sweat and grime above his beard.  Huffing and panting, the first thing he said was “Doug, is everybody ready to haul ass?”

“Zack and the baby are still sleeping.  I thought it was a good idea to let them rest.”

“I’m awake now,” said Zachary from his sleeping bag.

Boone hid his minor disappointment.  It wasn’t reasonable to expect civilians to be as hard-core as he was.  “Okay, but we need to make a new bugout plan and be ready to go ASAP.  The whole area is swarming with Cossacks.  And they’re going to be really pissed off when they find three of their buddies that I sent to meet Allah, or whoever they pray to.  The snow’s mostly melted, but there are still a lot of tracks around the cave’s mouth where it’s shady.  It doesn’t look good outside.  It’s too slushy to do a good job sweeping the tracks.  I tried, but the sweeping looks just as bad as the prints.  The snow’s too wet.  Just pray that the rest of the snow melts fast, and doesn’t freeze our tracks.  A lot of places our footprints melted all the way through, so they’re like brown tracks on white snow.  You can see them easy.  Even from the air, I’m sure.”

“Did you make it to the massacre site?” asked Carson.  “Was it the way Jenny described it?”

“Yeah, I made it.  It was bad, just like she said.  There were at least a couple hundred bodies in a ravine.  Men, women and children.  All shot.”  Boone pulled a thick handful of ID cards from his parka’s upper left pocket, and placed them on the table.  “These are all I could grab before I had to take off.  A helicopter came and landed on top of the ravine, probably where the people were brought in the buses.  The side where their bodies slid down.”  He unzipped his parka and threw it over a stack of empty crates to dry.  He left on his green combat vest, with its numerous pouches and pockets and pistols in holsters.

“Did you get pictures?” asked Doug.

“I did.  Even the helicopter.  It flew right over the ravine when it took off.”

“They didn’t spot you?  Where were you hiding?” asked Carson.

“The only place I could: right in the middle of the bodies.”  Boone shrugged.  “A few minutes after the helo took off, three Cossacks showed up.  Looters.  They knew what they were doing: they were there for the rings and the cash.  Jewelry, anything they could find.  They were about to walk right into me, so I had to shoot them.  I hid their bodies in with the rest of them, and I hauled ass.  I couldn’t come back the way I planned, because a truckload of Cossacks was in the way.  Jenny, that trailer you stayed at?  They burned it.  Troops were out in squads, beating the bushes and torching houses.  I hid in that junkyard out back of the trailer, under a car.  I figured I could wait until the three Cossacks moved on, but then the damnedest thing happened. 

“A kid about eleven or twelve years old was out there, strolling around and jabbering like an idiot.  He was wearing a red mechanic’s suit, wandering around the junkyard, climbing up on things and hollering.  He walked right past me, a few feet away.  I thought he was going to lead the Cossacks straight to me.  I don’t think he was right in the head.  There was no way I could help him, no way.  The Cossacks started taking potshots at him, but he was pretty good at running and weaving.  I think they were having fun with him.  They took off after him like hounds after a fox.  When the sound of their rifle shots moved away from me a little, I slipped out of the junkyard and made it into a woods full of little fir trees, like maybe eight feet tall.  Planted for harvest, I think, but not really in rows.”

Jenny nodded, following the story.  She said, “The boy was in the trailer last night.  I think he’s retarded.  I guess his grandma is dead now.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” replied Boone.  “All the while I was out there, I was wondering when I’d get blasted.  I had no overhead cover at all, so if there were any UAVs up, I guess they were busy somewhere else, or maybe I was just lucky.  Or maybe they just had too many targets to deal with.  The little fir trees were nice and thick and I had great lateral concealment, so I wasn’t too worried about being seen by the soldiers.  I was just worried about what was above me.  But I never even saw a helicopter supporting the soldiers, except for the civilian chopper that landed by the ravine.”