The Last Infidel (5 page)

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9
}

Cody pulled his truck off the road.  The millions of stars in the night sky could do nothing to penetrate the dark canopy of hackberry trees standing guard over the old, pioneer cemetery on the side of the road.  Murfreesboro was miles behind him, maybe ten miles or so, and Cody reached for a small flashlight, one he’d stolen from Jadhari.  He got out of the truck.  A wind was coming up from the south, filling the air with the scent of rain, and the limbs on the trees were shaking and rustling.  A sudden gust, cool and welcome, nearly blew the cap off of his head. 

The possibility of rain urged him to hurry, and so he did.  He threw down the tail gate of the truck and climbed up into the bed.  “You have a choice,” he barked out to the woman.  “You can come with me – which is what you want to do – or you can walk back to Murfreesboro by yourself and be raped every night for the rest of your life.  The choice is yours.”  He aimed his flashlight at the tarp near the front of the bed and loosened it.  When he threw it back, he looked at the woman, noticing first her shaven head, then seeing she was no longer dressed in a burka.  He looked into her eyes once and turned away.  Then he looked a second time.

“I’m supposed to be at the courthouse,” Tracy said stiffly, “a half hour ago.”

Cody didn’t pay any attention to what she’d just said.  He just knelt down beside her with his little flashlight aimed at the fifty-pound stack of explosives stored beneath the tool box.  His flashlight began to go out and he slapped it with his palm.  “Have you seen my---?  Well, you wouldn’t even know what one looked like, would you?” His flashlight went out, dimming quickly, and he threw it against the metal bed of the truck.

Tracy pulled a small flashlight out of her jeans pocket and flipped it on.  She waved it around like a fairy holding a wand and said, “Light up the darkness, right?  And yes, I know what a detonator looks like because I saw it magically disconnect itself and fly out of the back of the truck.”

Cody, still kneeling in place, turned his head.  “It couldn’t have.  It was duct-taped onto the---” He reached out and tried to grab the flashlight.  Tracy pulled it back.  “You---”

Tracy put the flashlight under her chin and made her signature platypus lips, something she used to do with Pringles back when you could still get Pringles.

Cody felt himself become breathless and his heart began to race.  He looked at the woman’s face – if it was Tracy, she’d changed – but maybe the absence of her long, blonde hair, usually worn in a ponytail, skewed his memory. 

“Light up the darkness,” she said.  “That’s what you always said.”

Cody stood up, but he never took his eyes away from Tracy’s face.  He watched her stand up, turn off the flashlight, and sit on the tool box.

“It’s been a long time, Cody,” Tracy said.

“You mean since you tossed my detonator onto the road?  Why did you do that?”

“I didn’t like sitting in a truck rigged up as a car bomb, that’s why.” 

“You make me ill.”

“You’re getting out, aren’t you?” Tracy asked, running her hand down the back of her shaven head.  “You’re going to take out the checkpoint and hike out of here.  Fifty pounds of C-4, a backpack, and a couple of canteens.  You’re just going to slip out of here under cover of night, Mr. beacon of light?”

Cody shook his head.  “You and me?  We stopped talking two years ago and I see no reason to start now!”  He turned around and walked towards the tailgate of the truck.  He stopped, turned around, and pointed his finger.  “You run out on me and then, somehow, it’s not fair for me to run?”  He jumped to the ground and started walking towards the driver’s side door.  Tracy came off the tailgate just behind him and walked around the truck towards the passenger side door.  She tapped her hand on the bed of the truck with every step she took, almost rhythmically.  When the sound stopped, Cody looked in her direction.  He couldn’t see her.

A few seconds later, Tracy popped back up.  “You’ve never run before, Mr. Sheriff of Rutherford County, Mr. Line-in-the-sand!”

Cody, angry, came back around to the rear of the truck – as did Tracy – and they crashed together right behind the tailgate.  Cody put his finger within an inch of Tracy’s face, and he watched as her eyes weighed him.  “I will tell you this, little miss . . . little miss . . . whoever the hell you think you are.  You and all the rest of these idiots brought this upon yourselves.  You and your cheap Muslim labor!  You wanted to keep all of those wonderful little stock portfolios of yours looking nice and fat.  Didn’t I tell you all this would happen?  I sure as hell did, and I said it over and over again – at council meetings and in private.  But did anybody listen to me?  No.  Enough said.”  He shook his finger, thinking of something else to say, but he just bit his lip and turned and walked away.

Tracy, not to be outdone, came up behind him with her hands up.  She put her right foot forward and around Cody’s left ankle, tripping him.  He fell to the ground and started to get up, but Tracy put her foot down on his neck.  She grabbed his arm and cocked it up underneath his shoulder blade, not expecting him to moan, and she put her mouth next to his ear.  “You will take me back to Murfreesboro so I can do my job for Tennessee, do you hear me?  As far as your little plan for escaping goes, it’s a no go, unless you have another detonator.  So bite into that, big boy.”

Cody swung around, lifted his legs, and caught Tracy’s head between his knees.  His move surprised her, caught her off guard, and she found herself pinned against the ground.  “If you want to go back to Murfreesboro, you can walk.”  He released his hold on her and jumped back up to his feet.  Tracy came back at him, ready for more, but he raised his fists.  “You hurt me enough already.  And you know what, Tracy?  I never, ever hurt you – not even once.  And you know it.”  He got back into the truck, started it up, and put it in reverse.  He leaned out of the window and looked at Tracy.  “You’d better get your burka out of the back.”

Tracy, who had just picked it up off the ground, waved it in the air and smiled.

Cody drove onto the road, not bothering to look back, and he headed towards town with a vengeance.  Never in his wildest dreams could he have imagined such a scenario.  Two years after Tracy had stood him up – almost to the day – she reappeared.  And what were the chances that he, of all people, would be asked by Bashar el Sayed to pick up a woman for one of his aides, and that woman be Tracy Graham instead of Susan Reid?  And then, either because she felt afraid of being blown up in the bed of the pickup, or because she didn’t want him going through with his escape, she disarmed the bomb and threw the detonator out of the truck to land who-knows-where along highway 41A?

Cody shook his head.  No matter how much he resented her, and though he struggled against his better judgment, his sense of duty compelled him to turn around.  Just as he stepped on the brake, and just as he began to make a U-turn on part of an old, grassy driveway, one of the rear tires began to make a funny noise.  Just as he completed the U-turn, the vehicle began to drive wobbly: he had a flat tire.

Up ahead in the darkness, he saw the beam of a small flashlight bobbing up and down, dancing in his direction.  Tracy.  She’d been jogging for years.  From the looks of it, she hadn’t stopped.  She reached the truck faster than Cody would have thought possible.

Tracy stopped in front of Cody, barely out of breath.  She dangled the flashlight between her thumb and first finger, offering it to him.  “Right rear tire,” she said.  “Go check it.”  She reached into her pocket and brought out a switchblade.  “And check and see if this doesn’t match the cut in the tire.”

“You cut my tire?”

“Maybe.”

“Do you know how long it will take for us to get back to town?”

Tracy leaned out to the side, looking past Cody, and raised her eyebrows.  “Car lights.  About two miles out.  Do you think we can get all of those explosives out of the back of your truck before you-know-who gets here?”

Cody turned around, saw the lights, and yelled. “Crappie diem!”

“What is that?  Latin for seize the sh--?”

Cody jumped up into the bed of the truck and grabbed his back pack.  He handed it down to Tracy.  “Dump what’s in here into the ditch and cover it up – but keep the canteens.”

“Does that makes us a team now?”  Tracy countered in an effort to one-up Cody.

“No – but you’re going to be carrying the back pack!”

{
10
}

Sitting in his usual place at the
See You Latte Café
, a glass of illegal whiskey sitting on the table in front of him, Cody seemed to look right through Jose into a vast, dark, and empty space.  He’d been free of Tracy for almost a year now.  During that time, he’d given no thought to their years together, felt no longing for what might have been, and never wondered about why she’d left him two years earlier.  In fact, when he first saw her, sitting in the back of the pickup on that dark road the night before, he hadn’t even recognized her.

“All I want to do is get out of here,” Cody said.  “And then I get a job – straight from Bashar – to go to the camp and pick up a wife for some guy named Zafar Katila.  And the universe throws Tracy Graham in my face.”

“Just have a drink, my friend,” Jose said, “and you will wash her away, just like that!”

“I was that close,” Cody said, holding his hands a foot apart in front of him.  “That close to getting out of here.  That checkpoint to the south wouldn’t have had chance against me.  It would’ve gone sky high and twice as wide and taken out the whole regiment camped there.”

Jose drained his mug of whiskey and waved for another.  Then he leaned forward and looked closely at Cody’s face.  “Sky high?  What are you talking about?”

“You don’t need to know,” Cody said.

“Are you talking about a bomb?”

“I told you I don’t want to talk about it, and I mean it.”

“You’re just a little drunk, that’s all.  But you’d feel better if you had a few more drinks – so bottoms up!”

“Why?  So you can get information from me?  That’s not going to happen.  I told you no already, so just die, Jose – okay?”

“We can split it, seventy-thirty,” Jose said.  He sat up and leaned back, moving himself out of the way of the café’s proprietor, who poured a clear, sparkling liquid into Jose’s empty mug.

The man started to top off Cody’s mug as well, but Cody placed his hand over it.  “And then she decides she wants to fight me,” he said.  “And that’s something we never did.”

“Look,” Jose said.  “You don’t want to go getting mixed up with her again.  You just keep away from her.”

“Why don’t you come with me?” Cody suggested.  “We’ll end up killing a couple hundred of those Muslim bastards, and we’ll tell everyone we did more than our fair share.  We go south, cross into Georgia, and I’ll live happily ever after without Tracy by my side.”

“What did you tell Bashar’s men about your truck sitting there on the side of the road?”

“I’m still working on that,” Cody said with a smirk on his face.  “But the bullet holes in the tailgate tell the story.  They chased me, I ran, and that was that.”

“Do you think they’ll buy it?”

“Only if they were buying it from you, Jose,” Cody said.  “Some of Bashar’s idiots are towing it in right now.”  He took a sip of his much-celebrated, Cannon County moonshine and looked around the old café.  The place was barely lit, even at noon.  Ten or so oil lamps, salvaged from the old antique store on Church Street, burning what was probably the last kerosene left to mankind, left a sweet smell in the air.

Because he wanted to distract himself, Cody looked at the people sitting around him.  Men, every single last one of them.  Men whose wives and daughters, if they hadn’t escaped south when Murfreesboro fell, were now Islamic wives, whores, or dead.  But Bashar had kept these men alive.  These were the mechanics, carpenters, brick layers, plumbers – every tradesman needed to get the mosque finished by July fifth.  Every one of them, to the last man, were quartered in what was left of the old hardware store, sleeping in bunks and hammocks, eating breakfast from the same, long table on the bottom floor, pissing in the same rusty bucket that leaked and splashed and left a trail across the floor on the way to the gutter in the street.  Cody knew them all by name, had known them for years – some of them as classmates, some from church, others he’d locked up for one thing or another.

The door to the café swung open with a bang and everyone in the room jumped.  Cody turned around, as did Jose beside him.  Others, acting is if they’d been expecting Jadhari, or some other Bashar lackey, rose to their feet before Jadhari, who in fact had just entered the café, uttered the words: “Everybody out on the street.”

Cody and Jose got up and, through the front widows, they saw a farm wagon being pulled along by Cody’s blue F-150.  On the wagon sat a short cage, and in that cage were four young girls, all dressed in white.

“I guess we know where your truck is,” Jose said, his face turning ashen.

Jadhari repeated his order, more loudly this time, and the café was emptied.

The truck drove along the street slowly, turned right, and proceeded into the courthouse parking lot.  Behind it came a crowd of ISA fighters, followed by twenty or so soldiers attached to the Black Lies Matter Regiment (BLMR). 

“The same mindless rabble,” Cody said.  “Some of those black guys were once Christians – they turned towelhead to save their own worthless hides.  Look - see the second guy from the front?” Cody said, pointing.  “Louis Holcomb.  Used to own the ice cream shop on Lytle.  Let’s see if he gets a conscience and decides that young, innocent white lives matter, too.”

Jadhari selected ten men from the street, all of them infidels, and ordered them towards the cage.  Ten frightened men, surrounded by a cordon of club-wielding, anxious-for-murder Muslims, formed a ring around the wagon.  Together, they lifted the cage, slid it off the back of the wagon, and carried it over to a dark, blackened spot on the asphalt.  The truck was driven away and parked. 

Cody, still standing on the sidewalk with Jose, caught movement out of the corner of his eye.  He nudged Jose, and they both turned and looked.  Women, all of them in burkas, were leaving the old Title and Deed building – probably taking a break from their weekly women’s re-education class.  All of them except one, probably Tracy, who hadn’t yet learned to submit, had their heads down.

“That would be Tracy,” Cody said, pointing her out.  “She really blends, right?”

“That’s her?”  Jose asked.  “I haven’t seen her in like forever.  And I guess I still haven’t.”

“Funny, right?  She’s gone – safely away from here, and then she just shows up.”

Other Muslims came out onto the square, maybe fifty or more, a mix of Muslims and useful infidels.  They circled the cage, but not too closely, with the women taking the front row.  Cody and Jose, under compulsion by some of Bashar’s men, were pushed along towards the crowd with rifle butts against their backs.  But no sane ISA soldier would dare strike either of them, not out here where they’d be seen.  Bashar wouldn’t be pleased.

One of Bashar’s officers, young and reckless, climbed to the top of the cage.  A roar of voices rose from the crowd, roars of approval and encouragement, and the young man aimed his weapon towards the sky and let off a staccato burst of gunfire.  The crowd shouted
Alahu Akbar
, and then fell silent.

“He’s going to have kids one of these days,” Cody said.

“By orders of Bashar,” the officer cried, “these girls – these Christian infidels – who refuse to bow to the rule of Allah, peace be unto him, have been sentenced to death.  Allahu Akbar!”

More cheering filled the square.

“He means they refused to marry one of Bashar’s guys,” Jose whispered.

“I wonder what will happen to all these Muslims when there aren’t any more people to torture, rape, and kill,” Cody said.  “But I guess they’ll always have the goats.”

The man on top of the cage waved for someone on the ground, and a five-gallon container of gasoline was handed up to him.

The girls in the cage, resigned to death, walked towards the bars closest to the burka-clad women.  Each stood shoulder-to-shoulder in a straight line, facing them; and they started singing
Amazing Grace
, but quietly and reverently.

“That’s odd,” Cody said.

“Like, these girls are probably not even ten years old,” Jose said. 

The young man unscrewed the lid on the gasoline container like he was part of some opera act, and he grinned as he poured gas down on top of the girls, soaking them from head to toe.  The girls stood there, not once flinching; and they stared across the distance separating them from the other women.

“And this guy always makes a game of it,” Cody said. 

“I liked it when his pants leg caught fire last time,” Jose chuckled.

“Maybe his foot will get caught and he’ll get a preview of where it is God’s going to send him,” Cody said with a smirk.  “That’d be poetic justice.”

The officer handed the gasoline jug down and was handed a stick with a white cloth wrapped around it.  “Now you will see the mercy and justice of Allah, who is gracious and kind!  Praise be unto him!”  He pulled out a lighter, flipped back the lid, and lit it.

“Now I’m sorry I sold him that lighter,” Jose said.  “So I’m okay, right?”

“You’re sorry about a lot of things,” Cody replied.

The young soldier lit the torch and held it to the sky, screaming, “For you, oh great Allah!”

The crowd roared just as a series of gunshots rang out, and the young soldier on top of the cage fell to his knees with his hand to his chest.  The torch slipped from his hand just as a long burst of silenced, automatic gunfire rattled through the air.  The bodies of the young girls, jerking like marionettes in the hands of an amateur puppeteer, fell to the ground dead.  A split second later, an explosion, a ball of orange flame and dense, dark smoke, consumed the cage and the girls in it.  The man on the top of the cage ignited in the ball of flame that shot skyward.  He screamed like a woman and rolled over the side.  He flailed his arms about like a monkey warding off flies as he fell.

Cody, now on the ground with his body pressed against the hot asphalt, watched as one of the burka-clad women raised a pistol to her head and fired.  The other woman, the one holding the rifle, turned and emptied her clip into the ranks of the stunned BLMR.  She died a martyr’s death almost instantly; but she took three Muslims with her.

Cody whispered over to Jose: “That was your gun.”

“But I didn’t sell it to her,” Jose said. “I promise – but I wish I had.”

Bashar’s men swung into action.  They rounded up the women, who they dared not touch, and dispersed the others with their rifle butts, both Muslim and infidel alike.  A pock-faced man with a bushy afro and an unbuttoned shirt headed towards Cody, Jose, and the others from the café.  He motioned with his rifle for them to stand up, poking the barrel into the ribs of some of the older men, then he started shouting orders as if they were to blame for the ambush.

“I’ll bet you a silver half dollar everyone’s eating lunch and swimming back in the civilized city of Chattanooga,” Cody said out loud, so loud that even Bashar’s thug with the rifle looked over at him.  Cody saw him and said, “Will you kindly leave us all the hell alone – like you’re supposed to be doing? 

The man laughed, derisively.  He walked up to Cody and, through his blackened teeth, said, “You better hope Bashar takes you with him when he goes.   Because if he doesn’t---”

“Mr. Cody Marshall!”  It was Jadhari, and he was walking towards Cody.  He’d been standing with the men of the Black Lies Matter Regiment.  He’d been hiding behind them, no doubt, because he always distanced himself from things he considered ugly; and the execution of little girls was one of those things. 

Cody had never once thought of Jadhari as a man with no hope, a man who had irrevocably sold himself to ISA, Sharia Law, and Islamic barbarism.  Jadhari hated ISA, or so he’d always said; but he hated Sharia Law even more.  He made it a point of making his feelings known to Cody over an occasional drink, when he was sure nobody of any stature, infidel or Muslim, was looking.  And Cody believed him because whiskey never lied.

And Cody, always holding out for Jadhari’s conversion back to civilization – it had happened with others in ISA, and usually with wonderfully devastating consequences for ISA – never lost hope that his old friend would remember what true Christian freedom felt and looked like.  Cody had often remarked to Jose it was only a matter of time before Jadhari would come back and, in the end, do something big and wonderful and magnificent.

“What now, Jadhari?” Cody asked, just like he used to do when the two were kids.

Jadhari put his hand on Cody’s shoulder and turned him towards the café. “There seems to be a very great problem that has come up.  Two guns in the hands of terrorists---”

“Some might call them women, Jadhari.”

“Two women, dead---”

“And four young girls.”

“One soldier burned up, horribly, and three BLMR – and who cares about them anyway? – shot to death in front of Bashar’s men.  But that, my friend, is only a small part of the problem.”

Cody raised his eyebrows and said, “Oh?”

“My guards found something interesting in your truck.  What do you have to say for yourself?”

Cody, grinning, looked at Jadhari and said, “I’ve been saving up those bottles of Jack Daniels’ for a special occasion – looks like you’ve spoiled your birthday surprise.”