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There wasn’t much to Coaling, Mississippi, but I didn’t need much. A mile outside of town, I found a small auto repair shop and salvage yard, and I pulled in backwards in one of the bays and shut and locked the door. I wanted sleep, but before I could get that, I needed to see if I could replace some items that were stolen from me in Birmingham. Within the bay, I discovered a small green toolbox behind a workbench, and, to my surprise, it contained a nice variety of screwdrivers, wrenches, a hammer, and a small socket set. I also found a tire iron, even though my spares were gone. I figured I’d find replacements in the salvage yard, but the sun was almost gone. In the shop’s office under the desk, I found a battery-powered lantern, and to my surprise, it came to life the second I pressed the button.
Also, to my surprise, I found an almost fully stocked vending machine in the waiting room. It was about half the size of the ones I’d seen in cafeterias. Even so, it had food in it. I retrieved the tire iron, found an empty cardboard box, and got to work on the vending machine. It took a few minutes to break open the cornucopia, but once I did, I got rewarded with several mini bags of potato chips and pretzels. I’d also scored two dozen candy bars and six packs of gum. I was going to live high on the hog tonight. The business didn’t have a soda vending machine, but it had a mini fridge beneath the counter the coffee machine sat on. I opened the fridge and pulled from it nine bottles of water. I left the long-expired bottle of peppermint coffee creamer behind.
Finding nothing else of value in the room, I carried my box of food back to the truck and sat on the tailgate. I opened a Snickers bar and bit into it. The explosion of flavor in my mouth was immediate and welcomed. The chocolate was a treat, and although I’d never been a fan of nuts, I knew I’d get some protein from the ones in the candy. Since I’d had the large lunch a few hours before, I wasn’t too hungry, so I ate only half of the bar, then folded over the open wrapper and placed it back in the box.
I yawned and leaned back to lie flat in the truck. In my head, I made a list of things I should acquire to make the trip better. A sleeping bag. Extra gas cans and hopefully a siphon. Better luck. I thought for a moment about the drying blood a few feet above my head and resolved to clean up that mess before I left in the morning. I considered finding a new windshield, but I had neither the skill nor replacement to make that happen. Sadly, I thought about abandoning my old mail truck altogether, and although the old truck and I had been through a lot over the last year, it was probably best to find one that didn’t have bullet holes and a destroyed windshield. I added that to my mental list as well.
My eyes were closed, and I was on the verge of sleep when I heard a muffled beeping.
“Kayla!” I yelled as I sat straight up. I jumped from the truck and retrieved my backpack from the secret compartment. I opened the zipper and pawed around inside until I finally had the phone in hand.
“Hello? Kayla?”
“Baker? Where have you been? I’ve been calling for almost two hours.”
I relaxed when I heard her voice.
“Kayla, I’m so sorry. I ran into some trouble today and I’m only now getting settled for the night. Where are you?”
“I’m in a little town called Delhi, Louisiana. It’s about forty miles from Vicksburg. I’m going to rest here for a few hours and move on. I should be in Jackson in two or three hours after I leave here.”
“Hold on, I’ll be right back.” I set down the phone and retrieved my atlas. After a minute, I found where I was, where she was, and compared the distances to our meeting point. “I’m back. You don’t need to be in any hurry. I’ve got probably another half day before I will be there.”
“Okay. Do you know where we should meet?” Kayla asked.
I opened the atlas to the Jackson city insert and gave it a quick look. “Do you have a map?”
“Not of Mississippi, but I’m sure I can find one somewhere.”
“Okay. Good. The airport is on the east side of the city. Just south of that is a cemetery. It’s at the junction of Highway 80 and Airport Road.”
“You want to meet at a cemetery?” she asked.
“Yep. There’s a high chance of no people being there. None that will give us trouble, anyway.”
“Okay. What time?”
I did some quick math in my head for estimated travel time and added an hour to find gas. The other things on my mental list would have to wait until I met up with Kayla and we could resupply together.
“Let’s say high noon. That work for you?”
“Easy as pie,” Kayla said. “Do you still want to touch base at eight tomorrow morning?”
“Yeah, we probably should,” I said, although I planned to be most of the way to Jackson by then.
“Okay. I’ll talk to you then. Goodnight, Baker.”
Kayla clicked off, and I put down the phone. I had to fight the urge to take another pass through the shop to search for supplies, but I didn’t want to risk anyone seeing the light. Exhausted, I also needed sleep, so I laid down, put my head on my arm and before I knew it, I was dreaming about a special reunion and better days.
I woke the next morning to the trill of the phone. As I rose, my back protested from sleeping on the truck floor all night. The sun was streaming in through the shop windows, and I wondered how long I’d overslept.
“Kayla?” I said into the phone.
“Baker? I’ve got a problem.”
My heart skipped a beat when I heard those words. I really didn’t need any more problems or delays on this adventure.
“What is it?” I asked.
“The bridge is gone.”
“What bridge?” I asked. “Can’t you go around or find another?”
“The bridge over the Mississippi River,” Kayla said.
I slapped my forehead. How could I have been so dumb to think that the military had taken out the bridge over the smaller rivers like the Tennessee, but somehow ignored the ones that spanned America’s largest river. “Hold on, Kayla.”
My trusty atlas was laying right next to me where I’d placed it last, and I picked it up and turned to Mississippi. I found where Kayla was going to cross at Vicksburg and ran my finger north and south following the river and looked for the next available crossings. It looked like it was a hundred miles in either direction.
“Kayla?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re across the river from Vicksburg, right?”
“Yes.”
I flipped to the Louisiana page and glanced at it. “It looks like there’s a little town close to you called Delta.”
“I saw a sign for that. I think it’s a bit to the north.”
“Okay. Go there and hunker down. I’ll come to you. I’ll go to Vicksburg and find a boat or barge or something to get across the river. Once I do, I’ll call you when I get across the river. If I don’t make it there by eight tonight, I’ll call you then and give you an update. Sound good?”
She apologized for causing an inconvenience and gave me a few words of encouragement before she hung up.
I stood and stretched to get the knots out of my back, then ate the other half of my Snickers bar and nursed a bottle of water. Once I finished breakfast, I did another pass through the shop. I found four gas cans. Two were empty five-gallon cans, one was a quarter-full two-gallon can, and the last one-gallon can appeared filled to the brim. I also discovered a rudimentary siphon pump on the bottom shelf of a workbench.
I checked a few of the cars on the property and collected enough gas to fill all the gas cans. When I had all my hatches battened down, I got in my truck and pulled out of the garage.
Feeling a need for speed, I broke my rule about taking only local roads and headed for the interstate just east of Tuscaloosa to move things along faster. By faster, I meant no more than sixty. Once I pushed it to over that, the truck would shake, but I didn’t want to take a delay by looking for another vehicle. Instead, I kept it at just under sixty and made slow but steady progress.
The interstate stayed relatively clear. The only issues I had were several closed off-ramps I hadn’t intended to use anyway, and a large pileup on the eastern outskirts of Jackson. That one forced me to leave the interstate, take surface streets for a couple of miles, then hop back on.
A half hour west of Jackson, I decided I needed a break. The gas gauge was dipping low, and my back ached from the uncomfortable ride. I’d also been daydreaming of another Snickers and perhaps a bag of potato chips. I spotted a gas station sign in the distance and pulled off of the interstate. Once I exited the interstate, I did a U-turn and pulled into the gas station. The pumps weren’t on, but I’d learned to get around that to access the underground tanks. I’d also learned that the rural stations offered much better chances of hitting pay dirt than the urban ones did.
I pulled my truck up to the tanks, pointing it outward. After I lined up my near empty gas cans, I dug out my siphon, and went through my secret process to access the gas beneath the pavement. The process had me so focused that I never noticed the person approaching me from behind.
“Mister?”
The voice surprised me, since I thought I was alone. I turned around, tripped over a gas can, and fell flat on my butt. The thought of reaching for my gun was replaced with frustration when I realized I’d once again left it in the truck, where it would do the least good if I actually needed it.
The sun was in my eyes, so I couldn’t see the owner of the voice until she took another step closer and blocked the light.
“Are you okay, mister?” she asked.
“I think so,” I said.
She reached out a hand to help me up, which I took, although even though I doubted she could put any actual strength behind it. Before me stood a skinny girl who couldn’t have been over fifteen. She wore denim shorts and a red and blue striped T-shirt that displayed her long, light, chestnut-colored limbs. A Seattle Mariners baseball cap covered her long, shoulder length raven hair.
“Can you help me?” she asked.
I looked behind her, and from side to side, wary of her being a distraction for a larger gang wanting my property or my life. I saw no other people around, so I lowered my suspicion a notch.
“What do you need? Food? Water? A ride somewhere?” I asked.
“My daddy and brother are in trouble,” she said.
“Trouble how?”
“Some rovers got them. They’re tied up to a tree in town,” she said as she pointed toward the south.
“No one else can help?”
She shook her head. “Everyone around here is too scared. A big gang came through about a week ago. Maybe thirty or forty men. Ran a lot of folks off. Killed a bunch, too.”
“I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can really do against forty men. I’m not Superman.”
“There’s not that many anymore. Most of them cleared out. There’s only about five or six left.”
“I don’t know what I can do against six men,” I said. “I’d probably get killed.”
She frowned, which only triggered a deep-rooted feeling of guilt in me.
“Okay. I’ll tell you what. I’ll take a look. But if it’s too dangerous or I don’t think there’s anything I can do, I’m going to walk away. Is that a fair deal?”
She considered it for a moment, then nodded. “Okay.”
“Okay, then. Let me finish this and then I’ll take you into town. Unless you’ve got your own car here somewhere.”
She smiled and shook her head. “No.”
She watched as I tinkered with the gas. After a few false starts, I got the siphon to work and started filling my cans.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Jasmine.”
“Jasmine. Pretty name. I’m Baker.”
“Baker? That’s a funny name,” she giggled.
“No funnier than Jasmine. You think you can take this can and fill my truck?”
She nodded, and I handed her one of the cans. When she stepped away, I filled the other cans. When she returned, I gave her another can and filled up the empty one, and we continued like that until both the truck’s tank and the gas cans were full.
When we finished, I helped her into the truck, wishing I’d cleaned up the blood stain. Although overnight it had dried darker, and I hoped if she noticed it she’d mistake it for rust.
Jasmine never said a word about the stain. Instead, she kneeled on the floor next to my seat and guided me toward town. As we got into the heart of the small town, I realized just how small it was. On Main Street, the tallest buildings around were only two stories, and all the shop fronts had an old-time feel to them.
“Park up by that blue building. We’ll walk from there,” Jasmine said.
I pulled up where she told me to and I noticed the small building, about the size of a small one-bedroom house, was the town’s police department. I shut down the engine, and we left the truck.
“Holy God,” I sputtered as I got out of the truck and looked at the next lot over where the town’s water tower stood. It gave me a punch in the gut I wasn’t expecting. The tank at the top gleamed in white paint and carried the town’s name emblazoned in black, just like any other old-fashioned water tower in American. What made this one different was the naked people hanging by the neck from the crossbeams. I didn’t count, but there were at least twenty of them. The majority were Black men, but I spotted one Black woman and one White man among them.
“Ain’t no God here,” Jasmine said dourly. “God left us a long time ago. Come on and be quiet.”
After a long minute, I pulled my eyes from the corpses and followed Jasmine down a short street. We crossed over a set of railroad tracks, then walked past two mobile homes. We cut through a small copse of trees, then she slowed and crouched when we got to the far edge. I slipped in behind her and looked over her shoulder at where she was pointing.
Perhaps fifty yards away on the opposite edge of the property, I spotted two men, who I assumed to be Jasmine’s father and brother, tied naked to the trunk of two apple trees. Sitting under the shade in lawn chairs were four men. One man got up, took a drink from a bottle, and passed the bottle to the person next to him. He bent down and picked something up from the ground, but from the distance I couldn’t tell what it was. The man approached the smaller of the bound men and moved his arm back. The crack of the whip and the screams from Jasmine’s brother hit my ears at the same time.
Jasmine backed into me, and I gave her some room and she went back in the direction we’d come. I crouched down and watched in horror. Her brother got three lashes in total. Although the sound of the whip snapping stayed constant, the screams from the boy and the laughter from the men grew louder with each beating. Satisfied, the man dropped the whip to the ground and took his seat.
I was about to leave the area when I saw the door open. A woman walked out. I assumed it was Jasmine’s mother. She wore a knee-length blue skirt and nothing else. She carried a tray of what looked like sandwiches, and behind her, the fifth man followed, holding a dog leash that was connected to a collar she wore around her neck. I’d seen enough.
Silently, I stood and turned to find Jasmine. I’d made it almost as far as the mobile homes when my legs gave out. I dropped to my knees and retched.
