Chapter Thirteen
Creed
“Clear the net. Clear the net. Clear the net. Logistics for Striker Force,” came the call.
When that pattern was used over the radio, it meant that only Logistics and the commander were allowed on the radio frequency.
The commander, Striker Rheas, designated his role by calling himself “Striker Actual.”
Creed opened the back of the transport and loaded Rou into her crate.
She stared at him and stomped her foot. He hadn’t seen that before and wasn’t sure how to interpret it other than that Rou probably wanted to check on Auralia.
Creed would like that himself. Instead of her danger thermometer going down as she drove away, it seemed to be rising to a fever.
“Go for Striker Actual.”
When Creed closed the crate door, Rou was barking angrily. “Sorry, Rou.” And he shut the back doors, making sure the transport was locked.
“Striker Actual, Logistics began satellite surveillance of your area after shots were fired. Be advised, there is a serious accident on the northbound bridge, creating a pile-up in both directions. Our view is five minutes delayed. We are augmenting the visual with AI due to weather interference. At this time, AI estimates that there are fifteen or more vehicles involved. We have emergency response en route. Each car traveling on a northern path is adding to the numbers. We are standing by. Over.”
“Striker Actual, Copy. On it. Randy, stay where you are and direct cars only to the south. Strike Force rally at the transport.”
Creed did a quick calculation. Auralia and Doli had left over fifteen minutes before.
He hadn’t gotten a text that they were in trouble.
He stilled and tried to get a sense of her.
In response, he thought ‘car’ and then ‘concentrating.’ Both of those made sense in this storm, which seemed to follow a cycle of intense downpour followed by a light drizzle.
The sun was just now getting swallowed by the tower of thunderheads.
The rain was just heavy enough that those traveling north would be hard-pressed to distinguish between a car that was moving and one that had come to a stop. Everyone would be riding their brakes down the hill, so a red light added nada to the equation.
With this kind of rain, the roadways became just slick enough for the tires to lose their grip. It was always the most slippery as the rain began washing the roads clear of accumulated oils and other fluids.
And it had been a long while since the last good rain.
And now that the torrent wasn’t filling Creed’s ears, he could easily pick out the scream of tires and the unmistakable sound of car bodies impacting way down the road.
Then the hits kept coming.
Creed locked eyes with Gator as he jogged up.
“Damned, it’s like live-action dominoes,” Gator said as he rounded next to Creed and popped open the back. He reached past Rou’s crate to grab up emergency response kits.
“Bowling pins dropping,” Deep said as he accepted the first bag and handed it over to Blaze.
Gator handed a pack to Creed. “She feels like she’s stressed out but not hurt. I tried to call her, but it went to voicemail.”
“I sent Auralia a text. She hasn’t answered. She never does when she’s driving.”
Gator held a hand up by his head. “You picking up anything?”
“Deep concentration?”
Gator stilled. “Yeah, that’s about right.”
Did that let Creed drop his worry meter? Maybe by a couple of degrees.
“Gentlemen, comms will be used uniquely amongst our Strike Force. Each of you has a Logistics professional dedicated to helping you accomplish your tasks that you’ll contact via cell phone. When you call in, you will automatically connect with your support staffer.”
There was another bash, and then another.
“Randy’s trying to warn people, but their nervous systems are so fried, they aren’t rolling down their windows, and they aren’t following his hand gestures.
He’s even moved into the road with a high-vis vest on, and they’re maneuvering around him like he’s the escaping gunman, looking to carjack someone for an escape vehicle.
It’s a shit show.” He turned. “Jack, you’re our tallest, and I hope our most intimidating.
Get dressed head to toe in a high vis suit.
Get some flares going, run up the street to let folks know this is a dead end. ”
“That’s not optimistic-sounding.” Jack held his hand right in front of another car whizzing by. And all seven men waved and yelled, “Stop.”
The young female driver looked over at them with fear on her face as she accelerated.
The team held its breath.
Fourteen was the number Creed used when he was a boy to tell how hot it was.
Creed would count the number of cricket chirps for fourteen seconds, then add forty to get the temperature.
Today, he counted fourteen and then got a bang as the young woman’s car hit.
From that measure, Creed could get a fair calculation of how long the pileup was growing.
The problem was that surviving the first impact meant you survived the first impact; as long as cars kept driving forward, the hits would keep coming.
“It’s on us, boys,” Striker said. “It’ll be a while before we have support.”
Creed reached past Rou’s crate to grab the suit for Jack.
“The two sheriff deputies?” Jack asked, tugging on his neon limon coveralls with reflective tape stripes and zipping them up to his neck.
“Their patrol cars were at the bottom of the parking lot by the security entrance. I don’t see how they’re getting out of there,” Deep said. “I didn’t see either deputy around.”
They were a team of seven that day, eight if you counted Rou. And as young and goofy as she was, Creed always counted Rou as a force multiplier.
Parked facing south, Rou was hard focused up the north road, her body tight. Creed knelt beside her to get her line of focus.
“It’s the keening,” Blaze said, “The wind is blowing the sound away from us. But Rou can hear it.”
Creed knew what he was about to get into when he ran down that hill through a cloud of physical and emotional pain.
The keening sound of grief and pain could crawl under your skin if you weren’t careful.
Then, it could come alive at night and strip you of any respite from the world’s pain.
Exhausted from night terror, that’s when things could turn southward with a soldier’s mental health.
Something Creed had noticed when he was a kid was that pain was manifested, and Creed would swear that once it had form, it didn’t go far. It set up house and lived in that spot, forevermore.
When he was little, Creed could walk past a spot, and it would scare him something terrible.
He thought that the centuries of Hoodoo and Voodoo that had been practiced in the Bayou might have put spotlights in dangerous areas, so people would know to walk the long way.
Creed was never sure that pain wouldn’t tail him home.
Creed felt it every time his team entered an area devastated by the acts of war.
Mrs. Moony, his high school A.P. science teacher, taught him the Law of Conservation of Energy, which states that energy can’t be created nor can it be destroyed.
The only thing that could happen is that energy could transform.
Energy in the universe remains constant over time.
It can change its type or its location, but it will never disappear.
When Creed thought on that, it explained a lot about what he sensed in the woods, and later, on the battlefields.
Fear and pain, anger and grief, have ridden the wind and saturated the soil since time immemorial. But so did love. So did kindness and hope.
As a child, he’d learned that putting on mental body armor was a poor way to deal. If Creed shielded himself from the atmospheric angst, his senses were equally insulated from his ability to be aware of his survival signals, both as a child of the Bayou and later a Marine Raider.
To stay safe as a boy, Creed imagined that there was space between his cells and that his body became porous. Like water running through a sieve, it came and touched on him, then left.
Yeah, Creed’s trick meant he was freed of the miasma of haints, boo hags, and booger men so his soul could sleep safe at night.
He had taught Auralia how to protect herself that way, to open up the spaces in her physical body and mental space, and let the air and all the particles waft on through.
After that, she said she slept better at night, free from the spooks that haunted her dreams, but never free from the safety of her family’s etheric connections.
Time to open up and let the pain waft through.
The team slung their own high-vis vests into place, buckling them at the waist. It not only helped keep them safe, but it also served as an identifier for the team to keep track of one another.
Next, they dropped their hoods to pull the headlight straps over their visored caps and set to red light. The hoods on the Iniquus raincoats were tightened down over their visored caps, keeping their light system in place and the rain out of their eyes.
With everyone suited up, emergency packs on their backs, Jack stationed up the road,