Then, when Tullahoma showed up to blow the dam - and it was practically the whole town -somebody should have taken one look at the lake and said, “This won’t work.” Instead, they were too keyed up in anticipation of watching the spectacle to pay any attention to the fact that the lake was at one third of its pre-Breakdown volume. When the TNT blew, the intense spray of concrete chunks was far more exciting and dangerous than the surge of water heading downstream. There was flooding, but by the time the water hit Shelbyville, it was spread too thin to even breach the old flood defenses. Little boys stood on the banks of the Duck River, and threw in bits of wood just to watch them bob in the muddy swirls.
Even if the flood had swallowed Shelbyville whole, it would not have mattered. The real power left in Bedford County was not in Shelbyville proper; it was spread across the countryside in the form of truly massive pre-Breakdown horse farms that had once specialized in Tennessee Walking Horses, but had converted to a more even blend of farming after the recovery began. Having gotten the word, these farmers mobilized their men on a vast collection of horses, and met the Tullahoma army before they made it halfway to Shelbyville. It was a slaughter. The Tullahoma leadership managed to bunch up their forces in a tight valley on the notion that they could fight their way out with massed firepower, and the Bedford County horsemen circled on the wooded hillsides, taking easy shots at the clumped forces. When Tullahoma wisely retreated, Shelbyville let them go home. Out of spite, Tullahoma overran a number of peaceful families, most of whom actually contributed to the Tullahoma economy, and attempted to nationalize – in the city-state sense – whatever those families did for a living, mostly by enslaving them.
The remaining citizens of Tullahoma were seething with anger for how poorly they had been wasted on greed. The so-called war created food shortages almost as bad as the Breakdown. Eventually, Tullahomans lost their collective wits. They beheaded the entire leading family, and sent the heads to Shelbyville as a show of friendship. It wasn’t received that way.
Tullahoma had become a no-man’s land, and except for a few risk-tolerant traders, no one with their marbles intact ever wanted to go there anymore, which was why Seth was getting progressively more nervous as he and Terry drove through the outskirts, past the old industrial park.
“This is stupid, Terry. This place is dangerous and crazy.” Seth said, gripping his assault rifle tightly.
“Hey, I believe you, but Bill said to do it, so we’ll do it. Besides, we’re in an armored truck. Who’s gonna mess with us?”
“Crazy people. That’s who.” Seth seemed so convinced, Terry began to get a little nervous himself.
They turned right on Anderson Street, avoiding the shattered overpass on Carroll. They planned to make contact with several traders, who also did business with Teeny Town through buying agents. Seth knew them because he ran security for those buying meet-ups. These traders were a cagey lot, for good reason, but they were known to come up with some interesting hardware from the old Air Force testing facility from time to time. The closest one kept shop in an old barbecue restaurant on this street, and Terry took his time, bouncing heavily down the old concrete expansion gaps on the roadway.
Seth was noticing quick movement behind some of the houses, but never really caught sight of whatever it was. Terry spotted the barbecue joint easily, from the faded statue of a pig sitting out by the street. He slowed to a crawl. Alarm bells rang in his head when he saw the front door standing wide open with no one in sight. He turned the truck into the lot, and eased up close to the door. He turned on the headlights to light the interior, and saw nothing unusual, other than the lack of any trader inside.
“I’ll take a look,” Seth said. He slid out of the seat and walked the short distance to the door with his head on a constant swivel, scanning the area. He stepped inside, disappeared from Terry’s view for five seconds, and then walked back out, shrugging. He jumped back into his seat quickly, and reported. “Nothing. Nobody, and no merchandise that isn’t bolted to the floor.”
“Maybe he moved his shop,” Terry said.
“Maybe...”
“Where’s the next place?”
“On Hogan Street. Looks like a red barn. Keep going until we cross Hogan Street,” Seth answered.
Terry glimpsed movement on the left side of the truck. It seemed too small and quick for a human. He began to think about feral dogs. He drove a few more blocks and turned left where Seth pointed. The red barn style building was easy to spot. Big Bertha crested the hump where the railroad tracks had been scavenged, but the rail bed remained with its complement of thistles. The truck gathered momentum off the back side of the crossing, and Terry hit the brakes, easing to stop in front of the building. He left the truck parallel to the wall, crossing the barely visible parking lines, in case they needed to drive away quickly.
Terry shut off the engine, and opened the window a few inches to listen to the neighborhood. Something was making him very uneasy, but he couldn’t identify any immediate problems. He pulled the keys and stuffed them in his front pocket. “Ok, let’s check it out.”
“You sure?” Seth asked, with a pleading expression on his face.
“I’m sure I’m not going back to tell Bill we didn’t try.”
“Good point. Can’t be any worse than Nashville, right?”
Terry didn’t answer that. He was still worried about being eaten by a feral dog.
The men dropped to the ground, rifles in hand. Seth scanned to the right, and Terry was looking left. There was a strange, unpleasant odor on the air but not strong enough to be troubling, until Terry opened the door.
“Holy Jesus Christ!” Seth shouted. It was oddly appropriate.
Terry was choking back his lunch in rapid gulps.
The smell had gone from faint to overwhelmingly bad in one swing of the door. There was no way either of them could force themselves over the threshold. It didn’t matter. In the back of the room, under a scorched ceiling, a naked man was trussed, spread eagle, to a wooden X. The skin and muscles of his legs were split open like a fileted fish, revealing charred bone, blackened skin, and roasted muscle that reminded Terry of the pork barbecue he had his first day in Teeny Town. As that thought flitted through his swooning mind, he sprayed vomit eight feet across the vinyl tile floor. Pieces of the legs were missing, cut free in incongruous square chunks, and a pile of ash littered the floor. The heat of the fire had reached over halfway up the body. The genitals were either missing or crisped beyond recognition. The face was hideously intact, showing the tortured grimace of a man who had died hard and recently.
Terry backed into Seth, who was frozen in shock, and rolled off to the left, heading for the far side of the truck. “Let’s go, Seth!”
Terry was in the driver seat and turning the key. Seth was still staring into the gates of hell. Terry shouted again, and honked the air horn. With the door open, it was loud enough to damage Terry’s hearing. Still Seth stood, unmoving, transfixed. Terry had the engine running, and was preparing to physically drag Seth away from that door, when a rock flew in from somewhere behind the truck and hit Seth high on his shoulder, just below his neck. That broke the spell.
Seth looked up, managing to vomit convulsively and bring his rifle to bear simultaneously. Terry heard the gong noise in his head and the world slowed down. He had time to watch the flying yellow soup hit Seth’s rifle, and drip off the front grip. The spent cartridges spun out once, twice, three times. Seth’s face tightened into a battle grin, and Terry turned his head to glimpse sprinting figures in the side mirror. He did an instant calculation before he opened the door, spinning out of the cab on the pivot of his left hand on the bar of the roof rack. His handgun had already appeared in his right.
Filthy person, running for Seth, squeeze, dog out front, squeeze, second dog, squeeze, person, squeeze, slower person, squeeze. From the other side of the truck, Seth heard five shots in about three seconds, and stood there, watching his entire target list tumbling forward to the ground.
“Hey, Man. Save some for me!” Seth yelled, looking at his puke-sprayed rifle.
On Terry’s side of the truck, God hit the
Play
button and the world returned to normal speed. That’s when he saw the rest of them pouring over the railroad bed. “Gotta go!”
Seth raised his eyes, felt a new surge of adrenalin, and leaped into the truck. Terry pivoted back inside, and grabbed for the column shifter. The diesel roared and Terry started to turn back the way they had come.
“No!” Seth cried. “That way! That way!”
Terry reversed his turn to head for a wide street a hundred feet away. The truck was heeling hard to the left, and the tires were groaning in complaint. A three-inch rock bounced off the corner of the hood and skittered up to the windshield before rolling off from the force of the turn.
“Turn the cranks!” Seth shouted, remembering the retractable armor. He grabbed the second lever on the door and jerked the thing in circle until a steel plate rolled up to cover his side window.
Seth was in an insane cranking match with the handle on his door and the larger crank on the headliner at the same time. It was the world’s ugliest dance move. He was still turning the handles when Terry turned left on Jackson Street. Filthy people were popping out of every gap along the street. They peppered Big Bertha with anything they could throw, and the truck echoed with a continuous clatter that vied with the roaring diesel for volume. Terry drove by peering through a narrow slit in the windshield armor, which made the sounds seem that much more intense. By the time Big Bertha was racing through the remains of downtown Tullahoma, the quasi-people were getting desperate. The next meal, Terry guessed they thought, was getting away.
They began to jump at the truck. For every ten attempts, nine of them bounced off the truck with a sickening crunch, or rolled under the tires, sending a lurch through the cab. The tenth managed to cling to the truck. Terry felt a rising panic as he watched the thing slide towards the windshield. There was something so primeval and horrifying about being someone’s meal that terry couldn’t decide what to do. In reality, he probably could have kept a half dozen cannibals as hood ornaments with no risk at all. Bertha was well built, but he couldn’t think at the time.
“Swerve! Get it off!” Seth screamed, apparently just a bit less panicked then the driver.
Terry jerked the wheel to the left, and the cannibal held on as its bare feet flung violently to the right, harder to the right and the legs went left. One hand slipped free, but the thing on the hood regained its grip.
“Harder!”
Terry gave the wheel a mighty turn to the left, and as soon as the truck shifted momentum, he went back to the right even harder. The creature flew off the hood, leaving Terry’s narrow view, but in the process, another one had grabbed the brush guard on the front. Terry went back to weaving in the chaos of flying bodies. In an instant of bad timing, he juked left as a cannibal body passed under the dual back tires. With no traction on the rear wheels in that particular moment, the back end of the truck slid around to the right. Big Bertha was skidding almost exactly sideways. This situation was well outside Terry’s skill level. He just held on.
At in the first second, nothing changed. Sliding sideways, squealing tires, and a freaking cannibal on the bumper. In the next second, the tires began to hook to the pavement, causing a rapid deceleration and flinging the creature violently off the truck. In the third second, the tires had stopped, but the truck... not quite. Bertha tilted as the left side came off the ground. Terry couldn’t see it, but swarms of cannibals were piling under the left side of the truck, trying to help it fall on its side. In the fourth and fifth seconds, they almost managed it. Big Bertha hovered just below the tipping point. Terry grabbed the door and held on. Seth followed some instinctive urge and almost climbed on top of Terry. That may have made the difference. In the sixth second, Bertha won. She ponderously crushed the life out of a whole mess of straining, snapping cannibals.
Terry didn’t waste any time. He was churning through the pile of bodies even before Bertha stopped rocking from side to side. He could not have been higher on adrenalin, his eyes zipping all over the narrow field of view. It was over. However many he had mowed down, it was enough to send the others back to the lair.
Following Seth’s half-guessed directions, Terry trucked through once-friendly neighborhoods at high speed, in search of the way out of Tullahoma. Only when they were on the highway, five miles out of town, did the adrenalin give way to total exhaustion.
“Son of a bitch,” Seth said, encompassing the whole ordeal.
“You were right. Bad idea.” Terry said to his big friend.
“When I said bad idea, I was thinking someone might try to shoot us, not eat us.”
“Could’ve been worse...” Terry said.
“Really? How?”
“Could’ve been zombies.”
Chapter 7 – 4
Terry and Seth traded jokes on the last few miles back to Manchester, but the laughter never really settled their nerves. Seth was ready to head back to Teeny Town to report to Bill and to get some rest, but Terry wanted to stop by the square before they went back. He was hoping to get another chance to talk to Charlie, and if nothing else, to soak up some of the rare happy atmosphere.
The town looked abandoned until they made the last turn into the square. The convoy of state trucks was still parked on the north side, doling out sacks of food to the long lines of Coffee County families. Dusty was sitting on the hood of the truck he had borrowed from the community, hand folded behind his head as he enjoyed the long afternoon light, and the sounds of joy.
A few people had naturally turned to look as the truck approached. Terry saw jerking heads and double takes in the crowd. Faces turned to surprise, and then shock, and finally horror, as people ran away from Big Bertha. Dusty jumped to his feet on the hood of his truck, and after a quick look, put his face in his hands.