Foreign Enemies and Traitors Page 6

  The land was a checkerboard of small farms, woods, villages, residential areas and open space. Carson could see that it would have been impossible to hike overland without being detected. Every other mile he would have been forced to cross a wide creek, a road, or somebody’s field or backyard. Without an ID badge, he would have been spotted and reported before he made it ten miles, and he felt a little better about his chosen strategy.

  The orange pickup crossed an ancient two-lane bridge over a sluggish brown creek, then wound its way back up to the main road, and continued at higher speed. The truck entered a posted National Forest and soon was driving along a fenced military base. It slowed as it turned past a cement guardhouse and was waved ahead by the soldier on duty. Carson read “Camp Shelton” on a sign by the open gate. The fence around the perimeter of the base was chain link, topped by multiple strands of razor wire.

  Camp Shelton covered a vast expanse, miles and miles of forests and ranges and training areas. The truck drove past barracks, offices, housing areas, warehouses and motor pool lots full of military trucks and humvees. Most of them appeared to be out of commission, rusting and cannibalized for parts.

  Beyond a series of unmowed sports fields they came to another fenced enclosure, more chain link and razor wire, and another vehicle gate. A waiting soldier opened the gate at the approach of the orange pickup truck. A painted plywood sign attached to the gate read “QVC 5.” The truck passed a row of general-purpose tents, old olive drab canvas relics, which stirred long-dormant memories of Vietnam in Phil Carson’s mind. They finally stopped by a U-shaped cement structure that resembled an open-air handball court. The driver and passenger stepped from the truck, dropped the tailgate and opened the cage. The black soldier carried a green medical bag on his side. Both men now wore filter masks over their noses and mouths.

  “See the baskets?” the medic asked. “Strip down to your skin and put everything in there.” A stack of white plastic laundry baskets stood near the open end of the enclosure.

  “What about my stuff? Will I get it back?”

  “Sure, don’t worry,” replied the driver.

  Carson undressed, dropping everything into a basket. In the center of the cement floor were painted-on footprints, three rows by three, enough for nine people at a time. He’d last seen footprints like that in boot camp, more than forty years before. Even after all of the intervening years, somehow it seemed familiar. He already had the short haircut, but this time it was gray. He felt like he was processing back into the Army.

  The black medic said, “Okay, stand in the middle. Don’t worry, it’s SOP, routine decontamination. We’ve all been through this plenty of times. Nothing to it.” The driver walked to the front side of the cement wall. Rickety galvanized pipes extended from the ground and along the insides of the enclosure. He turned a valve, and after a few seconds a series of nozzles extending from three sides of the enclosure blasted Carson with cold water. The black medic said, “Here, catch this,” and tossed him a small plastic bottle filled with brown liquid. “It’s disinfectant. Use it for shampoo and everything else. It stinks, but it’ll clean you up good.”

  Phil Carson did as he was told, sticking to his plan of trying to appear as compliant and non-threatening as possible.

  “Okay, give it a minute to work, and then we’ll rinse you off.” When Carson finished washing, he was sprayed again. The driver cut off the water and threw him a threadbare white towel, saying, “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  Since approaching the checkpoint two hours earlier, Phil Carson had been increasingly worried that he had made a grave error in strategy. At each step he had been rendered more powerless, first at the checkpoint, then in being ordered into the cage on the truck, and now finally in being disinfected, naked. All that was missing, he grimly noted, were the indoor “showers” and the Zyklon B poison gas pellets. At any rate, he had no choice but to follow their orders. He was unarmed, deep within a military base and surrounded by armed soldiers. He tried to imagine that he was simply reenlisting in the Army, instead of being processed into some kind of concentration camp. He had chosen his plan for reentering society, and now he had to ride it out to its conclusion, whatever that might be.

  He stood naked and toweled off while the driver and the medic chatted casually. When he finished, he was handed a set of pale blue hospital scrubs and green flip-flop shower shoes. It took only a minute to dress. He was grateful to be covered again, even in the thin cotton.

  “Grab your pack and your clothes basket and follow me,” ordered the pock-faced driver. “You know, you’re lucky—you’ll have a tent to yourself. You should have seen this place last year: our daily census averaged almost a thousand, and the dead were stacked up like cordwood. Now we mostly just get stragglers like you, except when a hotspot flares up.” A black family with small children occupied one other tent, but they avoided eye contact and said nothing as the three walked past. Rectangular areas of dead grass showed the locations of previous tents, interspersed among the dozen still standing in this one fenced-off section of the quarantine camp.

  They stopped halfway down the row of tents. “Okay, this is it, your home for the time being. You’re lucky to have a roof over your head tonight. We just put them back up after the storm yesterday.” The tent front was rolled up and tied off, allowing in sunlight and fresh air. The ground was still wet from the recent tropical rains, but the area under the tent was raised above the ground level on wooden pallets. “You can close the flap if it gets too cold for you tonight.”

  The medic said, “Take your pack and your clothes basket inside; we’ve got to check everything.”

  “You already checked it,” Carson complained, but he did as he was told, entering the tent and setting down his load. The medic put on rubber gloves, opened the top and side flaps of the pack, and dumped the contents out on the white plastic table in the center of the tent. He lifted the basket holding Carson’s clothes and dumped them out as well, and then felt the pockets with his gloved hands. He paid no particular attention to the seemingly ordinary one-inch-wide leather belt looped into the khaki pants.

  “This all your stuff?” asked the driver. “Everything here is yours?”

  “Yeah, I think so. My memory is…”

  “Well…look at what we have here!” The driver picked up a large one-time peanut butter jar filled with a dark brown powder. He unscrewed the red lid and took a deep breath through his mask. “Coffee—real coffee! Man, it’s been like forever since I smelled real coffee…”

  The medic joined his coworker at breathing in the aroma of ground coffee, going so far as to lift the bottom edge of his filter mask. Their attitudes reflexively softened, they seemed to lose interest in checking the rest of his belongings: sweater, poncho, extra water bottles and so on. The reason for the second search in the tent was obvious to Carson. They had seen the jar of coffee back at the checkpoint, but they had not wanted to draw attention to it around the other soldiers: they might have had to share its contents. The pockmarked sergeant said, “Okay, mister, we’ll just take this little present here, and you can keep the rest of your stuff. After the doctor sees you, after your blood work is done, you should be cleared.”

  “You mean I’ll be able to leave this place?”

  “I don’t know—that’s way above my pay grade. I mean you’ll most likely be medically cleared. What happens to you after that, I don’t know.”

  The black medic removed a rubber tourniquet and a syringe from the green service pack hanging at his side. “Okay now, sit down and stick out your left arm, and let’s see what kind of veins you’ve got.”

  “What about this cut?” Carson pointed to his forehead as the medic put the tourniquet around his arm just above his elbow.

  “What about it?”

  “Will I get to see a doctor or something? It might be infected.”

  The medic laughed through his filter mask. “What’s the matter, princess, you think this is the emergency room? Don�
��t worry: it’s not bleeding. I’ll give you a little Betadine. You’ll live. You’ll see a doctor eventually, when the lab results are back. Ask him what he thinks.” He lowered his voice, nodding over his shoulder at the white driver with his ravaged face, standing a few yards behind. “We don’t worry too much about scars anymore. Especially not for…older folks. They’ll put in nice stitches for kids sometimes, but not…you know. I mean, it’s a matter of priorities.”

  “Priorities?”

  “Right, priorities. Age triage, they call it. And, well, let’s face it—you’ve aged out. You’re in the third category, agewise. Anyway, I’ll be back in a little while with your vaccination shots: they have to be kept refrigerated. For Cameroon fever, what everybody calls the monkey pox, and the avian flu. Plus a few more. Then you’ll be good to go, assuming you don’t get sick in the next week, and you pass your background check. Speaking of which, the MPs will be by to collect your fingerprints later on. Somebody from the camp staff will bring you a sleeping bag, and you’ll get fed around six. They’ll bring chow around to the tents in a cart. You have to stay in your tent or right by it. No wandering around, okay? Curfew is curfew, even here on base. If you’re out after dark, you might get shot, and I’m not joking. We’re not trying to be hard-asses—that’s just the way it is.”

  ****

  Stanley Fromish slept fitfully, tossing beneath his tangled blankets. He was alone, as he’d been for a year. His wife, Molly, had been on a shopping trip over in Memphis when the first quake struck, and he had never seen or heard from her again. In his dreams he saw her trapped between pancaked concrete slabs in a collapsed shopping mall, calling out to him for help. That was his worst nightmare from the quakes, seeing his beloved wife partly crushed and trapped in debris, unable to escape, dying of thirst, pain and shock. Fortunately, his two young daughters had been home with him on that fateful day, and so they had survived the quake and all that had followed.

  What saved them from the even more terrible aftermath of the quakes was his gas station in the crossroads town of Carrolton, five miles west of the Tennessee River. By some fluke of geography and engineering, the State Road 214 bridge had been deemed repairable after the quakes, while the much longer I-40 bridge twenty miles to the north had not. Interstate 40 was the main route connecting Memphis, Jackson and Nashville, but after the quakes sleepy State Road 214 became a detour route of strategic significance. Stanley Fromish owned the first service station on the west side of the river with large storage tanks, which overnight had made his gas station critically important to the state and federal governments.

  Several of the concrete spans on the high 214 bridge had toppled from their towers after the first quake. In the weeks following the first of the two major earthquakes, a one-lane steel truss had been thrown across the still-standing bridge supports. This one-lane replacement bridge went down in the second big shaker three weeks later and was eventually replaced with two lanes of metal grating over steel I-beams. Trucks had to cross the narrow jury-rigged span at low speed.

  State Road 214 was the only remaining route into western Tennessee, not counting the roads coming up from Mississippi. Little help could come from that direction, since the state of Mississippi was already a disaster area even before the quakes. All of the other bridges crossing the Mississippi and Ohio rivers into western Tennessee were still wrecked. So the rickety two-lane temporary bridge had assumed strategic importance, and along with it, so had Stanley Fromish’s gas station.

  Through hard work and some luck, Fromish had maintained personal control of his service station and mini-mart throughout the year of unending emergency. Food from the mini-mart had helped to see them through the early months of the crisis. After the first quake in December, he’d had the foresight to move every crumb of food and beverage bottle from the mini-mart to his home’s basement. The first waves of looters found an open store that was already empty from ceiling to floor, and they moved on. Thereafter, National Guard troops and later the Mexicans had been stationed right at the gas station. As a result, he had not been forced to fend off bandits or roaming gangs.

  Because of his station’s critical location, it had been chosen to receive fuel allotments. These deliveries came from tanker trucks driven across the Tennessee River under military escort. No matter how it came, the important thing was that his station had been selected to receive the precious gasoline and diesel. A military generator was used to power his pumps, and while it was running he was able to electrify his service station, his garage, and his home.

  The fuel was needed not only by the local civilians but also by the American, Mexican, and other foreign troops struggling to keep the peace and guard the reconstruction crews. For the first three months, the station operated under military control, with Stanley Fromish simply following orders, taking the gas deliveries and pumping it out to military and law enforcement vehicles. Eventually the gas station was put onto a cash basis, and limited civilian sales were resumed. He was paid by the military government in red Temporary Emergency Dollars. Real paper money.

  The credit card machines had stopped working the day of the first quake, when the power and the phones went down. The electronic credit system had never been restored, not in a way that he could use to run a business. That was all right, paper TEDs were fine. Assuming, of course, that he would be able to redeem them for whatever permanent currency was ultimately issued by the federal government, once the banking system was back up and running in Tennessee. Until then, he was quite satisfied to cooperate with the authorities and accumulate growing stacks of crisp red $100 and $500 TEDs. A mental image of his hidden money comforted him. Stanley straightened his covers, adjusted his pillow, and settled back down to sleep.

  Something shook him and he awakened, believing for a moment that another quake was rocking the world. He opened his eyes, disoriented by bright lights around him. A rifle’s muzzle was aimed at the bridge of his nose, just above one of the high-powered beams. Another light shone in his face from the right side of the bed, from beneath a pistol with a long silencer. His blankets had been snatched off him, leaving him exposed in the brown sweatsuit he wore for pajamas. His own Smith and Wesson .38 revolver lay only a yard away from his right hand. It was in the top drawer of his bedside table, but with two guns aimed at him, it might as well not have existed.

  It was painful to try to look at them in the crossed glare of their beams. Reflected light illuminated his attackers, if he squinted and looked carefully. The man holding the pistol and leaning over him was dressed in camouflage, his face hidden behind a black ski mask. At first, as the conscious segments of his mind clicked into place, his brain rejected the presence of bandits in his second-floor bedroom. He had a high chain-link fence around his entire two acres, behind his gas station. His idiot brother-in-law lived in the gas station itself, and was armed with a shotgun. Hansel and Gretel, his two German shepherds, were given free run of his property at night. There were solar-powered motion detectors hooked to lights and silent alarms at his gas station, his mini-mart, on his fences, and on his house.

  Additionally, his gas station and home were only a half mile down State Road 214 from the company of North American Legion soldiers that had been posted to the town. The Mexicans were living in the old Rite-Aid drugstore, a motel, and the empty Ford dealership next door. More than a hundred NAL troops were only a few minutes away, yet two armed intruders were in his bedroom—how could this be? Stanley Fromish had solar-powered lights and alarms, he had his revolver and his dogs, and he had his brother-in-law sleeping inside the gas station with a shotgun. None of them had protected him.

  How could these men have penetrated these defenses to his second-floor bedroom, unheard and unseen? Were they some kind of police? His .38 caliber revolver was properly registered under the new law. He had been granted a rare handgun license because of his critical position as a gas station operator. The revolver was his only remaining firearm besides his double-barreled over-and-under 20
-gauge shotgun, and that was a legitimate hunting arm that was also legally registered. He had a valid firearms license and the correct permit papers for both guns—so why were the police here? If they were police…

  After what seemed like several minutes of silence, the man standing over him with the pistol whispered one word. “Stanley.” Then he was quiet again.

  “Are y-you the p-police?” Fromish asked hopefully.

  “No. We’re not.”

  “Then, w-what do you want?”

  “We just want to talk to you.”

  “Who are you? What…do you want?” He was thinking about the three million TEDs he had in his safe, concealed behind a false wall in his basement.

  “Stanley, we just want your help,” said the man with the pistol.

  “My help?”

  “Your help.”

  “What…what can I do?”

  “Stanley, we want some help at your gas station. We want you to give us fuel when we need it. Off the books.”

  “That’s all?” he laughed nervously. “Look, I would, but I can’t. Every gallon is accounted for, I—”

  “Don’t give us that bullshit, Stanley, it won’t play with us. We know you too well. We know when you get your deliveries. We know how much goes to the Mexicans, how much goes to the traitor police, to the Kazaks, the Pakistanis, the Albanians, the Nigerians—all of them. We’re just asking for a few extra gallons of gas and diesel now and then. Without ration cards, without anything put in the record.”

  “You don’t understand, that’s impossible. I—”

  “No, Stanley, you don’t understand. You don’t understand that we can come back here anytime we want to. We killed your two worthless dogs without making a sound—do you really think you can stop us? No, of course not.”