Renewal 4 - Down on the River (4 page)

“Good. Let’s head out to the porch. I’ve got more tales to spin.”

Terry smiled. He hadn’t expected another installment tonight, but it was still early in the Spring twilight. They walked out the front door and across the broad front porch. They found a group of wicker chairs arranged for conversation. Without thinking, they both took seats in the chairs facing the street. Subconsciously, no men of that era would ignore a potential threat. Bill spent a few moments packing a pipe with tobacco, and puffed it to life before he began.

Chapter 4 - 5

It was well into June, and the real Tennessee heat was coming on. We were a long way from air conditioning in our new treehouse, but it was still better than sitting on the ground. We began to get in the habit of spending our rare free moments sitting as high in the tree as we could get. The crow’s nest was ideal for catching the stray breezes but we fought over the spot until our parents laid down the law. The crow’s nest quickly became a reward for doing work. I was sitting up there, enjoying my reward for splitting firewood, when Dad called up to me. I groaned, thinking fifteen minutes was a pretty weak reward, and climbed down to the ground.

“Today, you need to learn to shoot,” Dad said.

My inner grumbles were immediately replaced by excitement. As far as I was concerned, it was about time. I was imagining myself with a Western style six shooter and a lightning fast draw when Dad climbed down into the storage pit and came back with two of the military rifles we had taken off of our intruders.

“What are we shooting, Dad?”

“Nothing around here. We’ll have to hike out far enough to keep the sounds of our shots from drawing  in trouble.”

Dad loaded one of the small packs with some ammunition, and made me carry it. We set off to the north, and quickly emerged from our woods into the open field. Dad was watching the horizon carefully as we pushed our way through the tall grass. We came to the road and ducked through the strands of barbed wire on Mr. Carroll’s fence. We sat low in the ditch before we crossed the road. Dad was taking the security seriously, or maybe he was just trying to model good behavior. Either way, we finally crossed the road and kept heading north through another grassy field. There was a small group of houses to our right, but no sign of activity around them. We kept walking until we entered another section of woods and headed down a gradual slope. We stayed in the woods long enough for me to wonder how far was far enough, when Dad angled to the right and stopped at the edge of the woods.

Dad pulled a big silver can from the pack and carried it along the edge of the woods until he found a rotten stump. He placed the can on the stump and walked back to me. So far, I had not even touched the guns. Dad had carried them both and set them on the ground when he set the can as a target. He picked them up and said, “First rule. Never, ever point a gun at anyone, unless you intend to shoot that person. This isn’t cops and robbers. This thing will kill you. Understand?”

I nodded mutely.

 “When you pick up a gun, always check to see it is loaded. See the magazine in the rifle?”

Another nod.

He set one of the rifles down again, and held the other one up for a closer look. “If the magazine is in the gun, assume it is loaded. If the magazine is not in the gun, assume there’s a bullet in the chamber, ready to fire. Pull this lever to see if it’s loaded.”

Dad pulled the lever back halfway, and there was indeed a round in the chamber, and I could see that the magazine was loaded as well. “To unload it, hit this catch to release the magazine, and pull the lever all the way back to eject the round in the chamber.” He demonstrated, catching the magazine and picking the loose bullet off the ground, which he slid back into the magazine. The rifle was empty, and he handed it to me. It was lighter than I expected.

“Ok, let’s practice with the gun unloaded. Here’s the safety. Flip it to here for safe, and here for fire.”

Dad took his time and showed me how to hold the rifle, explained how to aim, and made sure that I kept my finger off the trigger until I was ready to fire. The first time I pulled the trigger, the dry click made me jump. I was already anticipating a big explosion. Then, he handed me the magazine, and watched as I slammed it into place, pulled the lever gingerly to chamber a round and cock the weapon. This was it. I’m sure I expected worse than I got, because when I fired, I jerked the trigger and probably missed the can by four feet.

“Take a deep breath, let it out, and just squeeze the trigger.”

On the second shot I saw rotten bits of wood fly off the side of the stump.

“Better, Bill.”

By the fourth shot, I was starting to relax. The rifle was not nearly as powerful as I was expecting, and I was slowly learning not to fear it.

On the fifth shot, the can flew off the top of the stump. Dad and I both jumped and hooted in celebration, which of course got me in trouble for waving the rifle barrel all over the place. Dad reset the can in front of the stump, so that it wouldn’t fly away every time I hit it.

Two full magazines later, I was able to hit the can almost every time. Dad stopped me at that point because I was getting tired and starting to miss. He watched me unload and safe the rifle before he picked up the other rifle and shot a magazine himself. I never thought of my dad as a hunter, but he could shoot. His groups at fifty yards were small. It was getting hard to tell, though. The can was punctured by at least fifty holes.

“Good enough,” Dad said. “Nice job.”

My reward was a hike home carrying a fully loaded weapon.

When we reached the campsite, everything was just as we had left it. Kirk was taking his turn at wood splitting. Mom was tuning out Francine, who had gone from completely catatonic to downright chatty since she had met Mr. Carroll and heard the magic word, “Marine.” Lucy was on babysitting duty with Tommy and Jimmy, and they were all up in the treehouse, playing some kind of game involving pirates.

Without even trying, we had all learned everything there was to know about Francine. She had three kids, all in their forties, and all with kids of their own. She had lived through her husband’s three rounds of cancer from his exposure to chemicals in Viet Nam, and she had watched him go from the ultimate fighter in the first round, to a man just hoping the pain would end by the third. She didn’t blame him for giving up on himself on a school playground in Tennessee, but she surely did blame him for giving up on her, just when she needed him the most. On the other hand, she was the picture of gratitude to my family, and was willing to help in any way she could.

Francine assured my parents that she could shoot quite well, and convinced my father to let her wear a handgun. It was on her belt at all times. A couple of mornings later, Dad had put all of us through his version of basic weapons training. Even Tommy and Jimmy received a chance to shoot, but Dad was more concerned with teaching them the gun safety aspect than how to actually shoot. He figured the best way to do that would be to let them shoot and to get the curiosity out of their systems. They returned to camp with an obvious respect for the weapons, and it turned out that they learned their lessons well.

Between Francine’s obvious confidence with the gun, and the fact that she seemed to be entirely recovered from the trauma of her husband’s death, Dad made the mistake of choosing her for his scouting trip to the schoolyard. The group that had refused to leave the school during the Breakdown were still there, as far as we could tell, and after a solid month, Dad felt some pressure to investigate. We all stood and watched as Dad and Francine headed toward the quiet schoolyard.

Lucy gasped and asked, “What if they find her husband on the playground?”

Mom clenched her jaw with the tension, and replied, “Your father and Arturo buried him by the tool shed. It was the only right thing to do.”

Lucy breathed with relief. “Oh, good. That would be horrible to see.”

“Yes,” Mom said, thinking about her husband walking into a potential nightmare. She probably couldn’t imagine any situation in which those people were doing well, and she was right.

An hour passed. It was a hard hour for all of us. Even the young boys were watching carefully for any sign of Dad and Francine. We had seen enough by that point to know how much could go wrong, even though we couldn’t imagine what that might be. Kirk made a point of watching every point of the compass while the rest of us stared in one direction. I finally decided to climb up to the crow’s nest in the vain hope of getting a better look. I felt better being up there, even though I could barely catch a glimpse of the school through the full summer leaves.

We all heard the huge thump and whoosh, but I was the first one to see the black smoke billow upwards from the school. It was a thin stream at first, but rapidly the smoke grew to a broad column, pushing high into the clear sky. I could see naked orange flame off the roof when the tar began to burn, and I could hear the crunching sound of overheated masonry cracking loose and falling in the pulses of massive heat. The wind was mostly calm, but occasionally, I could catch the smell of hot oil overlaid with something horrible, worse than that rancid country ham my parents were always trying to feed us. Eventually, the weight of metal roof framing sagged enough to pull huge slabs of wall down, and the fire settled into a smoldering pile. At least I could no longer see it, and the smoke had faded from black to a sooty gray.

I was vaguely aware of the argument below. Kirk was demanding to go find Dad, and Mom was demanding that he stay right here. As was always the case when Mom got serious, she won, and Kirk stalked impatiently around the camp, looking like he could bolt for the schoolyard at any second. I climbed down, just because I knew he might do it, and I had the notion I might be able to stop him. The whole point became lost when we saw Dad emerge from the woods near the school. He was alone.

Even from that distance, the story was told. Dad’s head was down, his shoulders slumped, and his rifle held low. He trudged back to camp, and ignored the rapid fire question we were asking. He went straight to his pack, dug the flask Mr. Carroll had given him, and took a long slug from the shiny flat bottle. Still holding the flask, he dropped onto one of his homemade benches by the nonexistent fire, and stared at the ashes for a long time.

Mom had discreetly waved us all to silence while she cautiously sat down beside him. She left a few inches between them, having been married long enough to know that he needed some time and space, but she refused to leave him alone. Her compromise was effective, because eventually, Dad spoke.

“She just walked in,” he said. “She just walked in.” Dad leaned towards my mother, and she put her head on his shoulder. We couldn’t hear it, but we could see Dad’s body shaking with grief, and we took the hint to walk away.

The story eventually came out in bits and pieces. They arrived in the schoolyard. There were no signs of life anywhere inside the fence. Dad showed her to her husband’s grave, and waited while she spoke to him and prayed angrily to the god of cancer. They circled around to the front of the school, expecting to find the useless people, as Dad called them, milling around the entrance, waiting for the help that would never come.

What they found was far worse than useless people. There were bones piled by the door. Human bones. Dad said some truly choice words before they attempted to look into the dark interior of the school lobby. The stench was too much for Dad and Francine, and they were forced to retreat out of the cloud of death. They stood leaning on the hood of a Dodge while they considered what to do. The picture was clear. The people inside, instead of hiking off to find some help had resorted to cannibalism. Whether they killed people for food, or simply waited until people starved to death was unknown, but there was no doubt that cannibals made for some dangerous neighbors, and they decided that something should be done about it.

Dad remembered an old trick he picked up somewhere, probably on some TV show. He found an old black t-shirt in the backseat of the car and pushed it into the gas tank with a stick. He held onto one end of the shirt so he could pull it back out, and just hoped it would reach the gasoline. He got lucky and pulled the shirt out with gas dripping off the bottom hem. He wrapped the shirt around the wet part until the whole t-shirt was damp with fuel. He tore off some broad strips and wrapped one around his nose and mouth. He handed the other to Francine.

They could still smell the horrors, but the gasoline made it possible, just barely, to enter the school. No movement showed among the scattered corpses in the lobby, and they stepped over the random arms and legs on their way deeper into the school. Dad clicked on his flashlight as they passed the glass-windowed office, and headed down the hall to the cafeteria. Dad admitted that he was still hoping for more canned food, but the evidence made that a foolish expectation. When they crossed into the open eating area of the cafeteria, they still had not encountered anyone alive, and almost relaxed a notch. The food prep area, where he and Arturo had collected the food before, was the opposite. In fact, Dad told me later that if he could have crawled into a hole and screamed, he would have. The broad stainless steel tables were littered with a ragged and bloody array of body parts. Francine pulled her mask up and vomited explosively on the tile floor. Dad said he was in too much shock to throw up, at least at the time.

The scraping sound gave away the cannibals before Dad or Francine saw them. Even when they did catch a glimpse, the sheer filth of the people, darkened with dried blood and grease and dirt, made excellent camouflage in the dark room. Dad was never sure how many of them were even there. He just grabbed Francine and pulled her out the door. They ran down the hall in the unique bilious terror of being pursued by human monsters. They were skidding to a stop in the front lobby and its glorious daylight before Dad realized that no one was following. He relayed the information to Francine, and they looked at each other in panting silence for a minute. With a sharp glance over her shoulder, she snatched the flashlight out of his hand and stalked back towards the cafeteria. Dad followed her, whispering loudly for her to stop, but she didn’t. He figured that she was offended on some subhuman level, or irrationally blamed the monsters for her husband’s death, and was out to clean house. Dad could only rely on Francine’s direction, since she had the light, and he caught a glimpse of one of the cannibals lurking in the cafeteria entrance. It, no longer a he or she in his mind, was suffering. It was hunched over, panting and coughing wetly, in a way that suggested that lung tissue could plop out of the floor any second. Francine walked right up to the thing, and kicked it square in the crotch. Dad heard a nauseating popping sound, and the thing collapsed. Francine kicked it in the head, and stepped over, heading for the hell pit in the food prep area. Dad followed, noting that the thing was dead from Francine’s attack, and making another mental note to avoid pissing her off.