well. No need to change course. Drive right on through the city.”
Ottumwa was anything but a ghost town.
Colonel Gray’s people had sealed the bypass around the city with old semi-rigs, carefully placed so it looked as though there had been a terrible accident months before and the wreckage never cleared.
There was about to be just that. But what was about to occur to Col. Valeska Fechnor’s IPF troops was to be anything but an accident.
The old highway ran through the center of the once-thriving little city, and on both sides of the main drag of town, waiting behind dusty and broken windows, crouched on rooftops and hidden in ground-level old stores, were the trained troops of Gray’s Scouts. They waited, hands gripping weapons, their only movement the shifting and blinking of eyes.
“Convoy approaching the city limits, sir,” a forward-placed LETTERRP radioed back to Dan Gray.
“Received,” Colonel Gray’s aide radioed back. She turned to Dan. “Convoy coming in, sir. And it’s a big one.
“Good, good.” Dan smiled and rubbed his hands together. “Excellent, dear. Now we shall teach the bloody arrogant bastards a hard lesson about life. Or,” he laughed, “the loss of it.”
She returned the soft yet hard laughter of the professional fighter.
The lead scout APC cautiously turned the corner and swung onto the main street.
“Hold your fire,” Dan whispered into a walkie-talkie. “Let them get clear; our lads south of the main area will bloody their knives on the scouts.”
Colonel Fechnor felt it first. An experienced soldier, he felt that anticipatory tingle on the short hairs of his neck. He looked around him. His entire convoy stretched out behind him on the main street of town.
Where were the dogs? he thought. There should be mangy dogs slinking about. Birds, too. But the street was void of all life.
Suddenly, Fechnor knew he had been suckered.
Sitting ducks! he thought. “Floorboard it!” he yelled, startling his young driver. “Get the hell off this street and out of town.” He grabbed up his mic. “Ambush!” he shouted. “Ambush!”
The driver jammed the pedal to the floorboards and the car shot forward just as a building exploded to Fechnor’s right. A second later the building on the opposite side of the street blew, just as two buildings far down the street erupted in rubble-filled fury, effectively blocking both ends of the street and sealing the IPF column.
Fechnor’s armored car just barely escaped the carnage only heartbeats away.
“Cut to the right!” Colonel Fechnor screamed.
“Head to the west.”
The frightened young man obeyed instantly as the sound of automatic weapon fire and grenades reached their ears.
The taste in Colonel Fechnor’s mouth was sour and ugly as his frightened young driver found Highway 34 and roared toward the west. Toward safety, the young man feverishly hoped.
On the main street of Ottumwa, the troops of the IPF were being brutally slaughtered, many of them taken by such surprise they were unable to fire their weapons before slugs chopped them to death.
Using M-16’s, M-16A2’s, .50-caliber and M-60 machine guns, AK-47’S, anti-tank rockets and grenades, the Rebels cut and slashed at the IPF personnel. Screams from the frightened and the wounded and the dying echoed off the buildings, mingling with the yammer of rapid fire and the booming of grenades and rockets. The air was filled with gun smoke and concrete dust from the shattered buildings. Small fires had broken out, the smoke adding to the confusion of the ambushed IPF troops.
The fire-fight was over in five minutes. Those men and women from the IPF who had managed to jump from the trucks and run inside the buildings, seeking safety there, were riddled with bullets from the Rebels waiting for just such an action.
Col. Dan Gray’s Scouts and LETTERRP’S took no prisoners. Teams went to each fallen IPF member to deliver the coup de grace: a bullet to the back of the head.
“Gather up all the weapons and equipment,” Colonel Gray instructed his people. “Every piece of equipment
that is workable, every vehicle that will run, anything we can possibly find some use for, take it. We’ll head south and cache it.”
The smell of blood and urine and relaxed bowels from the dead that littered the shattered streets was foul in the air.
And the dogs had returned, warily, sniffing at the dead.
“What about the bodies, Colonel?”
Colonel Gray looked at the dogs, then carefully smoothed his trimmed moustache with a finger tip. “Leave them. The dogs appear hungry.”
The sounds of the long, blacksnake whip cutting into flesh was followed by the cries and screams of the man being beaten and the sobs of the naked woman who was being forced to watch. The woman was held by two men: occasionally one or the other of the men would carelessly reach out to fondle some part of her nakedness. She had resigned herself to this humiliation and no longer struggled when one of them touched her. In the background, a huge wooden cross had been erected, its butt jammed into a hole in the ground and secured. It was blazing, sending shimmering waves of heat into the coolness of the autumn air.
Tears streaked the woman’s face. “Please stop,” she implored the men. “You’re killing him. For the love of God-stop it.”
“Naw, we ain’t neither,” a white-robed man casually informed her, not taking his eyes from the naked man being beaten. “We jist mar kin’ him up some; teach him a lesson furst, then we’ll get to you, seein’ as how you
lak’ niggers so much.” He laughed. “Yeah, we got a right nice treat in store for you, missy.”
The long, leather whip whistled and sang its painful tune as it hummed on its way to impacting with bare flesh. The impact was a cracking slap, blood leaping from the cut. The young man screamed as the pain tore through his body. He sagged against the post where he was bound. His crotch rubbed against the rough wood of the post.
“Lookee there!” another white-robed man called as he laughed. “Nigger-lover looks lak’ he a-tryin’ to fuck that there post. Hunch agin’ it, boy!”
The woman averted her eyes from the sight of her husband.
“OF Henry there is an expert with the blacksnake,” one of the men holding her said. He reached across and pinched a nipple. The woman bit her lip to keep from crying out. The man grinned at this. “For a nigger-fucker, missy, you got nice titties. Yep, I seen ol’ Henry make a whuppin’ las’ for near’bouts three hours once. I believe that were back in ninety-six. “Course hit were a nigger buck we was whuppin” then-bigger and some tougher than your little man. Built up better, too. I can see why you like nigger meat so much; your man ain’t got no cock on him at all. Never could make that nigger beg. So after we whupped him rawer “an a skinned pig, we strung him up.” He pointed to a tree. “Rat over there. We choked him to death. Took ‘bout a hour. That was fun, watchin” that nigger dance. We lowered him a dozen times, let him suck air. Man was lak’ an animal.” He grinned lewdly. “Had him a cock lak’ a horse. Way you lak’ nigger meat, missy, you’d have cummed jist a-lookin’ at that nigger’s whork.”
The woman shook her head and sobbed out her reply. “I have never had sex with a black man. Only with my husband.”
“You a lie!” another man told her, walking up to the nude woman. His robes were satin, much more ornate than any of the others. “You nothin’ but white trash, woman. We caught you travelin’ with niggers.”
“We were only helping them escape!” the woman screamed. “I’ve told you people that. Why don’t you believe us?”
was “Cause you a lie, ‘at’s why.” The man turned away from her. He looked for a moment at the beating, then called,” ‘At’s enuff, Henry. Don’t want to kill the boy. Cut him down. You, Richie, you go get that nigger buck, drag his monkey ass out to the circle.”
A slender black man was dragged into the circle of robed men and women. He was naked. His eyes were blazing with fury and shame. “You people had no right to do this,” he told the Klansmen. “This man and woman were merely helping me and my wife to escape from the IPF.”
That got him a crack across the mouth from the Klan spokesman. “Shut your nigger mouth, boy. “You stay in your place, you hear? “Round here, boy, niggers talk when spoken to.”
