Invasion USA 3 - The Battle for Survival (18 page)

The next day they came across a smaller Budweiser beerwagon on its side on a desolate part of the I-40, half a mile south of where they had found the meat and only a mile north of where I-40 connected to I-95.

Again, there was nobody around and the trailer was a third full of frozen pools of beer where most of the bottles had broken. They salvaged a hundred dry cases of beer cans of all sizes which hadn’t burst with the freezing conditions. There were several bottle cases where only one or two bottles had broken and within two hours of work they had their trailer packed with everything drinkable.

Half a mile down the road on the southern side of the highway they spotted a very old tractor-trailer with Nevada plates on it. The rig had crashed into a smaller truck and another couple of cars. Untouched bodies were still obvious in two of the crashed vehicles. The truck driver was slumped over the steering wheel and had died in this seat; his head had hit the windshield pretty hard. Joe and his sons managed to get the stiff and frozen body of the large driver out and lay him gently on the side of the road. Joe took the dead man’s place and tried the engine.

The battery was dead, but fifteen minutes later they had the rig idling sweetly as Joe backed it away from the mass of broken and squashed metal in front of it. He just missed ramming the rear of the trailer into an old Dodge truck which had crashed into another car a hundred or so feet directly behind the rig. Behind the Dodge on a trailer was an old, dirty-looking Bobcat. This to Joe was worth more than gold. The Dodge was an old 1970s Ram Diesel and he knew that he could get it started. There was nobody in the Dodge’s cab, but a frozen dead lady was in the car the Dodge had crashed into. The car was a mess but the Dodge only looked slightly damaged. Its battery was also flat and the keys were still in the ignition.

After an hour tinkering with the engine Joe and his boys got her started. The Dodge sounded like it needed a few new parts to run properly and Joe knew he would have them back on his farm.

“She will run for another couple of hundred thousand miles,” he told David sitting atop one of his ferrets, machine gun at the ready.

“What are we going to do with the bodies?” David asked.

“Pauli, see if the Bobcat can be started,” shouted Joe to one of his sons. “If she starts, we can use the digger and bury the dead around here. I counted twelve bodies and that shouldn’t take more than an hour.”

The old Bobcat started first time and within minutes a hole was being dug with the bucket mounted on the rear of the vehicle, while the others dragged the stiff corpses to where the machine was digging. It was a gruesome task and it was the first time they were actually doing this, but each thought it necessary. Somebody would have to do it sometime. Identity was collected in the form of handbags from the dead women, wallets from the dead men and a pair of ID tags from a soldier in civilian dress before they were buried in the ten-foot deep hole. The ground wasn’t frozen and the task of burying the bodies in the wet and soft earth was completed in an hour.

They could do this forever. Mangled vehicles could be seen in both directions on both sides of the highway, an average of forty to fifty yards separating the dead vehicles.

“We have two hours of daylight left,” stated David.

“I was thinking of that,” replied Joe. “Did anybody check the trailer of this Nevada rig?” Nobody had, so Joe and David opened the back door.

They were shocked at what they found inside: pallets and pallets of Indian-made blankets and rugs, Indian Reservation-made cookies, jerky and a pallet of cans of corned beef, dog food, and cat food.

“Something isn’t right,” stated one of Joe’s sons. “What the hell is this stuff doing on the East Coast?”

They checked the transportation papers in the cab and found that the destination was a movie company based in Wilmington, North Carolina.

“I bet they were making an Indian store on the set for a film or something,” suggested Joe.

The group planned to get down to the I-95/I-40 intersection, then head north and return via Highway 64, the same road Captain Mallory had driven to RDU.

Interstate-95 had more broken vehicles on it than I-40. Here people could be seen scurrying away from broken trucks and trailers like animals.

Several miles up I-95 they came across a desolate part of the highway, the northern route they were driving on had a thick forest of trees surrounding it.

They came across a group of people emptying a Walmart tractor-trailer which was lying on its side. A couple of minivans looked flat and squashed underneath the heavy Walmart trailer. A second white trailer was upright a couple of yards away. It looked like it had crashed into the Walmart rig and then into several cars, mounting them as it came to a messy halt. This trailer looked identical to the white unmarked pork trailer Joe and his guys had found the day before.

David, in the first rat patrol jeep with both its guns manned by two of Joe’s sons, drove up to the people, who didn’t scatter this time.

“You guys have to wait your turn here for a few more minutes,” stated a brave man in front of the rig cradling a shotgun. “We are allowing our town’s hungry people to get as much food as they can carry out of here. They are desperate and need help, and can’t carry much more on their lawn tractors and little trailers.”

“Of course,” replied David. “What is in the other white trailer over there?”

“It doesn’t have any writing on the side and it’s bolted with thick chains, far too thick for us to break. There are two dead men in the cab, both shot by somebody who got here before us. It looked like they tried the back doors but couldn’t get through the chains either. It’s a reefer. We heard the reefer cough a couple of times and stop yesterday late afternoon, about an hour after we arrived here. We tried the tractor’s engine, but the battery is dead and it’s totally out of fuel. This Walmart trailer is mostly canned foodstuffs and boxes of dried foods for the Walmart’s food departments. You guys look like you have enough room to carry more than we can. This is the third rig this week we have found on I-95. Our little town has already emptied the other two so we have enough food until spring now. You can take the rest.”

Twenty minutes later one of Joe’s sons returned with a few gallons of diesel siphoned out of another crashed vehicle. They managed to pour the fuel into the empty tank, jolt the battery and start the tractor’s engine and the freezer motor. This tractor was slightly newer than the one yesterday and had a local trucker’s name on the side of the cab. The engine was diesel and the trailer had a diesel reefer motor on its front, which excited Joe. Preston had thousands of gallons of diesel fuel in one of his tanks.

They had their turn in the Walmart rig and as the sun started going down they began to salvage and break up another five pallets of foodstuffs. The last pallet hidden right up front was a pallet of cases of wine and Joe thought that Preston and Martie would enjoy that. He and his boys weren’t wine drinkers, just beer and bourbon.

They were hot and sweaty after moving the food cases by hand into Joe’s backed-up trailer. That, too, was now half full, a good tally for the day.

In the next week they found several more trailers. Two carried items they couldn’t use and the others were half empty of canned foodstuffs, sodas and several more pallets of beer. Several generators along with other building supply odds and ends were in one trailer bound for a tractor supply. Joe made sure nothing usable was left behind.

The last three tractor trailers, one closed and two open wood-carrying trailers, were spotted twenty miles north of the Virginia border, only hundreds of yards apart with Home Depot on the trailers’ walls. One had been opened but the contents were basically untouched. Not many people wanted building supplies at this time, but to Joe it was worth uncoupling the modern, useless tractors and dragging them back to the farm with his.

Preston headed out as the farm slowly woke up. It was still dark with the sun about to rise in the sky as he headed out to check for ice on the runway surface as he usually did when he got up so early. It was mostly dry and without enough ice to cause any tire slippage. He had his handheld on him as he heard a C-130 trying to reach him. It was still twenty miles out as he gave them the temperature, told the pilot that the air was absolutely still and there was no ice buildup. He double-clicked the radio’s speak button and his runway lights came on showing clear and dry tarmac. There was no mist around.

The C-130’s landing lights came on as it reached Jordan Lake and she came in, knowledgeable on how to land at Preston’s small field, information now known by all the pilots at the air base. Noisy and vibrating the cold air at this quiet time of the morning, the aircraft’s engines wound down and the tail door dropped, once the pilot had parked his aircraft sideways on the apron.

His old friends under Sergeant Perry, the Air Force soldiers who he had said goodbye to a day earlier, walked out of the door to greet him and introduced another dozen of their friends assigned to increase the protection for the President’s arrival.

The Air Force had planned to reform the trenches and battle areas surrounding the airfield, but as yet had not started. Now the President’s requests were putting their work on hold. A second C-130 called up on final approach twenty minutes later asking for landing instructions as the first C-130 was taxiing to the south end of the runway preparing for take-off.

The second flight in from Seymour Johnson carried dozens of tents and bedding taken away only a few weeks earlier. A third C-130 arrived with another platoon of thirty new soldiers. Sergeant Perry who was in charge of the three incoming flights told his friend Preston that the Air Force just couldn’t keep him and his men away from the farm.

Two jeeps identical to the ones Carlos had taken to Colombia drove out of the rear doors of the third C-130, as well as a dozen large mortars and several shoulder-rocket launchers with cases of rockets and bombs, and a couple of tripod machine guns. This reminded Preston of their growing stocks in the old shed. The military seemed to forget quickly that they left equipment on their last visit and Preston’s farm was becoming a massive ammo dump. It was time to get the bulldozers that remained on site to actually build a proper ammo building behind a dirt wall as the arsenal already there could wipe the farm off the map, if attacked.

All cargo was unloaded within an hour of the sun’s appearance over the trees to the east. The Air Force engineers who had arrived understood the farm’s ammo dilemma and immediately began searching for a safe position away from all the buildings to start digging a wall of dirt and building a safer storage armory.

Within minutes of his discussion with the engineers, a large helicopter appeared from the south with a large wooden box hanging beneath it. Preston directed it to the side area behind where the line of aircraft usually lined up next to his red barn. Upon inspection the cargo box held what looked like metal building-walls. The helicopter pilot stated that he would be returning with another five loads and that the delivery was prefabricated building pieces to erect floors, roofs and walls coming from the army at Fort Bragg.

“General Patterson has sure been busy,”
thought Preston to himself.
“At least I’ll get a safe harbor for our ammo out of this. But it looks like my peaceful farm is gone forever.”

By 11:00 more C-130s had flown in with more equipment, the bulldozers already working on a hole in a southwestern corner of the property a mile away towards the lake. The dozers were just in view from the airfield as more equipment and troops arrived to set up buildings. The more permanent buildings, Preston knew, would not be moved again until they fell down.

He and the engineers decided on the place to build more hangars adjacent to a possible second runway, fifty yards behind the old barn.

“I don’t think we’ll have a runway for a while yet,” suggested Preston to the Corps of Engineers major who had arrived with the last flight.

“What do you mean, Preston?” the soldier asked. “We already have several trucks on their way here from Bragg with runway building machinery and dump trucks with fine granite chips for the first layer. I’ve been told to make the stone base strong enough for C-130s and larger, and long enough for what we have flying today. There’s no way we can get any of the Jumbo Jets in but it looks like our new runway should be about the same as the great job you did on yours. Apart from a couple of new cracks, your asphalt has fared pretty well. We’ll resurface it for you once we have completed the new one.”

Preston was shocked. He was right—there would not be any peace here for quite a while. He wondered if the President was going to mind arriving in the middle of a building site.

“We only have five military dump trucks working, sir,” the major continued, “but we found a place in Fayetteville which had several old dump trucks in storage which should be running in a day or so. At Bragg we have several building sites where we can bring in all the different-sized pieces of stone, sand and rock to underlay the runway surface. Unfortunately, we only have one tarmac laying-machine and it needs some electronic parts replaced or bypassed. The technicians working on it said that it should be ready in a few days.”

“Do you have tarmac?” Preston asked.

“Yes, sir,” was the answer. “Enough for about ten miles of road surface and yours is the one and only job ordered so far.”

Preston heard new aircraft arriving and walked back to his hangar to prepare to help them in. Sally was first overhead asking for clearance. She came in over the runway low enough for Preston to see two heads and he wondered who her passenger was. The Colombian A-37B Super Tweet had two seats side-by-side and he noticed new rocket placements under her wings. Carlos was a few seconds behind her, diving in low and fast, Preston knowing that his cruise speed in the propeller-driven Mustang was only twenty to thirty knots slower than the twin-engine jet. Carlos’ range with his drop tanks was still triple the jet’s, even though Sally had two wing drop tanks, which increased her range to 750 to 800 miles.