Don't Call Me Ishmael Read online

  “It may not be the one I want to get a bunch of holes in,” Tom replied, “but it’s the one that will get us the hell out of trouble quickly if we need to.”

  I nodded. “I like the way you think.”

  The chief walked past and handed me a set of binoculars. “If you’re going to be our point person, you could probably use these.”

  “Thanks,” I replied.

  “You ready?”

  “To get shot at again?” I asked. “Not particularly, although I find that it bothers me a lot less than it did a few days ago.”

  “You’ve had a busy few days.”

  “Too busy.”

  “Well, once we’re done, maybe you’ll stay with us a few days.”

  “Maybe,” I allowed. “We’ll see.”

  A large yellow backhoe drove up, driven by a man with a cowboy hat and a long stalk of grass between his teeth. “Time to go,” the chief said. He turned and went to his car—a police cruiser, complete with roof-mounted lights.

  Tom drove us to the barricade and the police cruiser pulled in behind us, followed by a large Suburban. The people at the barricade started the cars they were using to block off the end of the bridge and made a gap for us, and Tom slowly accelerated through it.

  “Heard your story,” Tom remarked, his eyes on the road. “You were some sort of soldier, right?”

  “Not that I remember,” I replied. Not only didn’t I remember being a soldier, I was pretty sure that soldiers didn’t shoot fallen soldiers in the head. There was probably some rule of warfare that forbade doing that. And if there wasn’t, there probably should be.

  “Just good at what you do?”

  “Yeah, shooting people seems to be something I can do pretty well.”

  “You’re on our side, though, right?” This time his eyes came over to me, and he looked intently at me for a second.

  “I’m on my side at the moment,” I replied, “but I’m not going to kill you, if that’s what you’re worried about. These assholes—” I pointed out in front of us, “—have already tried to kill me once. I’m fine with killing them.”

  “You’ll let me know if anything changes with that?”

  I chuckled. “Unless or until you try to kill me, I have nothing against you and don’t want to kill you. Pull a gun on me, though, and we’ll have issues.”

  “Got it,” Tom said, smiling, as we drove up the rise in the bridge. “Don’t pull a gun on the person who’s good at killing people. I think I can remember that.”

  “Then I think we’ll get along just fine.”

  We crested the peak of the bridge and looked down to where the barricade was. “What do you see?” Tom asked, unconsciously slowing the car as we approached the danger area about a mile off.

  “Wrecked cars,” I muttered, looking through the binoculars. “Doesn’t look like much has changed.”

  The police cruiser gave a bleep on its siren, and Tom stopped the car. “What’ve you got?” the chief asked as the car pulled alongside us.

  “Hard to see from here,” I said, “but it looks about like I left it.” I looked through the binoculars again. “I can only see one of the big trucks, though, so it looks like the other may have left.”

  “But whether that’s to flee or to bring reinforcements…”

  “I have no idea.” I finished.

  “All right,” he said. “I have it from here.” He turned on his lights and siren, and led us on to the barricade. I continued watching the area, ready to shout a warning, but didn’t see anything moving.

  “Don’t get too close to him,” I said. “If the chief swings his car broadside, you don’t want to T-bone him.”

  Tom backed off a bit more, giving us some maneuvering room, then slowed as the chief approached the barricade.

  “Pull in behind him,” I said when he started to go into the other lane.

  “But—”

  I pointed behind us. “Unless you’d like the backhoe to have to squeeze past you?”

  “Oh, shit,” he said, whipping it back over behind the chief’s car.

  The third vehicle pulled up alongside the chief’s car. “Guess he didn’t get the memo,” Tom said.

  “Newp. I’d go ahead and turn around so we can leave quickly…just in case.”

  “Good idea,” he replied. He spun the car around in a three-point turn and backed up behind the chief’s car.

  When I got out of the car, the chief was already out of his and talking over his loudspeaker, using his door to shield him from any potential incoming fire. “—come out with your hands up. I repeat, this is Dauphin Island Chief of Police Dan Bradley. If there is anyone in the barricade, come out with your hands up.”

  Seven pairs of eyes stared at the mass of tangled cars. When the truck had run into them chasing me, he had closed off the path between them and jumbled them up pretty well.

  “Last chance,” the chief called. “If I, or any of my deputies, see anyone alive when we come in, we will shoot first and ask questions later.”

  The chief waved us over. “Tom, you and Fred go around to the right. Hector, you and Juan go to the left. Rod, you and I are up the middle…assuming we can find a way through it.”

  “Are you deputizing me?” I asked.

  “Will you do what I tell you, when I tell you?” the chief asked.

  “Go to the right and shoot any of them I see?”

  “Correct,” he said. I nodded. “Congratulations, you’re a Dauphin Island deputy. Now go shoot any of those bastards who are still here.”

  I chuckled and went out to the right shoulder of the road, waving for Tom to come behind me. I didn’t want him in my field of fire. The search, however, was anticlimactic. None of the bandits remaining were alive, including two that now had cars on top of them. They were well and truly dead.

  We met back at the police cruiser, and the chief waved the backhoe forward. There was a screech! as it swapped a small amount of paint going around the Suburban, and then it plowed into the mass of cars with its plow blade.

  “Told ya you didn’t want to park there,” I said as the Suburban’s owner went to take a look at the damage done to his vehicle.

  “Thanks,” Tom said, wiping away a speck of dust from his hood.

  The police chief walked up. “Nice bit of shooting,” he said. “Did they all need one to the head?”

  I shrugged. “The ones that got one in the head didn’t get back up again.”

  “True, but that really isn’t what I’m looking for from my deputies in most cases.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t be a deputy.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement,” the chief said as the backhoe raised its blade, dumping a couple of the cars off the bridge.

  “Going to un-deputize me?” I asked.

  “Nope. Just said I would take it under advisement. Until we get everything set up, I kind of like your thinking.”

  “Hey!” the backhoe operator yelled. “There’s a body on the road! I almost ran over it! What am I supposed to do about that?”

  The police chief looked at me as if I might have an answer.

  “Scoop it up and dump it over with the cars!” I yelled.

  The operator looked at the chief. “You heard what the man said,” the chief yelled. “Just do it!”

  The man shrugged and did it, although he winced and flinched as the body squished into a car before he could get the blade under it.

  It doesn’t pay to be squeamish in this Fallen World.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Sixteen

  Once the bodies were gone, the backhoe operator made quick work of the rest of the cars, but stopped when he got to the semi cab. “I don’t think I can do that one,” he said. “And even if I could, it’s probably going to destroy the concrete shoulder wall if I do.”

  The policeman looked at me again. Apparently, I was the Shell Answer Man. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it,” I said. “We ought to be able to drive it off the bridge
.”

  “Well, how about getting on that, Deputy?” he said, looking at me.

  I sighed, and my shoulders slumped. I wondered if I’d been able to keep my mouth shut before the bombs fell. Probably not.

  The chief and I walked over to the semi cab, and I climbed up to the door. I stepped to the side as I opened it up, and the driver fell to the asphalt. The chief looked at it a couple of seconds and then back up at me. “No bullet to the head on this one?”

  “It wasn’t one of mine,” I said with a shrug.

  “Hey, Deputy?” the chief asked as I started to climb into the cab.

  “Yeah?”

  “Aren’t you going to do something with this body? You can’t just leave it here in the middle of the bridge like road kill.”

  “That’s what it is, though, isn’t it?”

  He stared up at me with a frown.

  I favored him with an eye roll and climbed back down. “This deputy thing is bullshit,” I muttered as I grabbed the body under the armpits and dragged it to the side of the bridge. “Can you at least give me a little help?” I asked.

  The chief gave me a grin, then he came over and grabbed the guy’s ankles. Between us, we pitched him over the side.

  I climbed back up into the cab. The driver had a half-full bottle of water in a cup holder I used to wash the worst of the blood off the window so I could see out, then I started the motor.

  The chief was still standing below, looking at me. “Can you drive that?” he shouted up.

  Without conscious thought, I threw it into gear and turned toward the end of the bridge. The fact that I made him scurry to avoid being run over wasn’t relevant to the decision—it was just the way I needed to go. He had a smile on his face as he raced off to get into his car.

  I drove slowly down the bridge to Cedar Point, speeding up slightly as the rest of the cars started catching up to me. Even the backhoe operator, seeing us all headed in the same direction, began following us after a few seconds.

  Upon reaching the end of the bridge, which ended on the island of Cedar Point, I stopped and rolled down the window. The chief pulled up alongside. “What do you think?” I asked. “Do you want to end your claim here, or claim the route all the way to the mainland?”

  “What do you think, Fred?”

  My eyes rolled. “If it was me, I’d go all the way to the mainland. If those folks come back, they could easily put up another barricade on this island. It’s not much more than a bridge—just the road and a little bit of a shoulder on both sides.”

  “Good point,” the chief said. “Let’s go to the mainland.”

  I put it in gear and drove off again. When I thought about it, I couldn’t really remember how I shifted, or what the configuration of the truck’s gears was. When I didn’t, though, and just let muscle memory have its way, I could drive the truck. Maybe I was a psychopathic truck driver before the war? It didn’t seem familiar, but then again, even psychos have a day job. At least, I thought they did. How else do they afford knives, guns, and such?

  I drove back to the mainland, but found we had the same problem—there was nothing on either side of the road but a little bit of swamp. I drove for another half mile and finally came to what I was looking for—trees alongside the road.

  I stopped the truck, pulling it across both lanes of traffic.

  “Okay, I’ll bite,” the chief said, pulling up alongside me. “Why here?”

  I pointed to the trees. The pine trees weren’t big, but they had lots of branches that would help make them bulky looking.

  “Knock a few of them over,” I said, “and what have you got? Natural made barricade. Put enough of them down, and they will even stop bullets for you, which is a pretty nice thing to have in a barricade.”

  “Yeah…but this is outside my territory,” the chief said.

  I raised an eyebrow. “Who is going to come and push you off this land? The only people who drive down this strip are people going to Dauphin Island; you might as well check them out here, where you can turn them around easily, rather than wait until they’re on the bridge, don’t you think?”

  “How are we going to knock them down?”

  “Got any chains? Got a chainsaw?”

  “I’ve got chains,” the chief said.

  “Hell, I’ve got chains,” the backhoe operator said. He’d pulled up and caught the last bit of the conversation. “I won’t need them to knock down the trees, though—just to drag them into place.”

  He drove the backhoe off the road on the right to where the trees were and began pushing over the ones alongside the road. I got out to watch—everyone likes watching destruction, right?—but after the first few fell, I realized they didn’t quite block the road, so I climbed back into the cab and pulled it forward until the wheels were just shy of the large draining ditch on the left shoulder of the road. It was muddy as shit, so I couldn’t tell how deep it was. I had just about decided to break off a stick and test the depth, when I saw a log about 100 feet away that was swimming along the ditch. Crocodile. Or alligator; I didn’t know. All I knew was it was a big-ass reptile.

  I decided I didn’t need to know how deep the water was.

  “Incoming!” Tom yelled suddenly.

  He pointed up the road, and I turned to find several cars and a semi cab about a quarter of a mile away.

  “Is that the one that got away?” the chief asked as he came to stand next to me.

  I shrugged. “Could be,” I replied. “Hard to tell from here.”

  All of them started forward at the same time, and I could hear the cars’ engines revving from where we stood.

  “On second thought,” I added, “I’m going to guess that’s the one that got away, and he’s brought friends back with him.”

  “Grab your weapons!” the chief yelled.

  I scrambled up into the cab and rolled down the passenger window. That gave me some elevation to shoot down on them and a little bit of cover. And no one would be stupid enough to ram something as big as a semi, right?

  From my new perspective, I could see there were three cars in addition to the semi. Two of the cars led the charge; the third car hung back behind the semi, probably using it for cover. The cars continued to accelerate as they raced toward us, and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what their end game was—we had the road blocked with trees, and then a row of cars. The cars roared closer, with one headed right at me. I shook my head. I only knew one thing—this was going to be messy.

  The two cars were side by side as they came into range, and I fired. At the sound of my pistol, everyone else opened up. My first shot starred the window of the one on the left—the one headed at me—and the driver jerked the wheel to his right. He went off the road and into the drainage ditch, throwing a huge sheet of water into the air as the car slammed to a stop. I turned to the other car and saw at least one hole in its window. I added a second, and it went off the other side of the road, crashing over small shrubs and underbrush. The soft ground slowed it a little; the tree that it ran into brought it to a complete stop.

  The semi continued straight for the downed trees, and I thought he was going to try jumping them, but then smoke poured from his brakes as he locked them up. The car behind him wasn’t ready for the maneuver—there’s no way the driver could see what was coming—and he jerked the car out from behind the semi.

  I had time for one shot before the car plowed into the side of my cab, directly underneath me. I saw it coming and dropped below the window so I wasn’t thrown through it by the impact; instead, I was slammed into the side of the door, face first. Things went dark for a moment or five—I don’t know how long—but when I came to my senses, it sounded like a war was going on.

  I shook my head, trying to remember where I was and why everything looked strange. I realized where I was after a second, and that I was only looking through one eye, which made things appear differently than normal. I wiped my face, and my hand came away red. There was a lot of
blood on my face and in my eye, which I tried to blink out as I crawled up and looked through the window.

  The truck driver was trading fire from the window of his cab with the police chief. A guy was pulling himself out of the drainage ditch. The men in the car below me were probably dead—neither of them had their seat belts on and there were two impact marks on the front windshield. Most worrisome was the car off the road to the right. Four men were coming out of it, and we were going to get flanked.

  I looked around for my pistol for a few seconds, then realized my second one was in its holster. The man in the semi cab must have seen the motion as I extended the pistol out the window toward him; he jerked back. He took the round in the shoulder instead of my original aiming point; however, when he jerked back, he exposed himself to the chief, who put two rounds through his chest.

  I turned and fired twice at the man coming out of the ditch. One hit him in the chest and the second in the stomach as he fell back. I could see that there wasn’t a vest under his t-shirt; he was out of it.

  The men in the trees were trying to get behind us. Rather than meet them face to face—four on one isn’t great odds—I decided to go around behind them, too. I opened the door and pointed toward them when the police chief looked up at me; hopefully, he and the rest of the guys could keep them busy while I got behind them.

  I climbed down from the cab and shot each of the men in the car once through the head. I didn’t know if they were dead; now I didn’t have to check. The chief’s head whipped around toward me when I fired. All I could do was point at the men and shrug before running around the other semi cab and into the brush.

  The shrubs and tall grass grew to a height of almost three feet, and I was able to run through them doubled over. They still probably could have seen me, had they looked, but I wasn’t high enough above the grass to catch their eyes since I wasn’t running toward them. I hoped.

  I couldn’t see the men; they had dropped into the shrubbery to sneak up on my group. Not knowing where they were, I ran for their car while I switched magazines; I figured I could start at their vehicle and follow their trail, hoping that they wouldn’t be watching behind them.