Night of Thunder

Now how could this be? Maybe there were a lot more labs out there than anybody knew. Maybe there was some kind of protected superlab. Maybe some southern crime family was running the stuff in from other places.

Then she heard a strange rumor, thought nothing of it, picked it up again, and had a few hours before dark. It held that someone in the mountains was shooting up the night. Lots of ammo being burned, blasting away, somewhere down old Route 167 before it connected with the bigger, newer 61. Now what could that be? Would that be the famous super meth lab, hidden in some hollow, invisible from the sky, its security so professionally run it demanded its own set of Tommy Tacticals to handle perimeter duties and work out with their submachine guns every night?

Rumor suggested that it lay in the pie of land around the nexus of the 67-167 routes, and, night still being a bit off, she’d poked around there finding nothing except some kind of Baptist prayer camp nesting behind a NO TRESPASSING sign that she ignored and, upon arrival, encountered a Colonel Sanders in a powder blue Wal-Mart suit who gave her a free Bible and tried to get her to stay for supper. She skipped the food, but driving back down the dusty road to the highway-

It was just a piece of cardboard, trapped by a snarl of weeds and held at a peculiar angle so the sun happened to light it, yielding a color not found in forests in steamy Augusts as well as right angles, not found in any forest, ever. Her eye caught it. So she stopped and plucked it up. Something in it was familiar. It was something official looking, military, at least governmental-equipment, ammo, something like that. The scrap was torn, rent by being crushed by passing vehicles, but as her father was a noted shooter and always had boxes of weird stuff around, she knew what this sort of thing could mean, though only a bit of official print was still legible on the scrap.

But then she was disappointed, as all thoughts of ammunition and explosives vanished. She thought it might be biblical, something Baptist, for it also carried religious connotations. It had been bisected in its rough passage to its nest in the leaves, and only a few symbols remained on the piece. Who knew what started the inscription, but it ended in “k 2:11,” though with dirt splashes and spots and crumples she wasn’t sure about the colon. But it made her think instantly of Mark 2:11. Bullet or Bible? Weirdly, both. She remembered the crazed Waco standoff of her youth, the gunfight, the siege, the fire-and-brimstone ending. That was something that somehow combined both bullets and Bibles. Maybe that dynamic was in play here, for the world in many places had not grown beyond killing on what was believed to be God’s say-so. On the other hand: It’s just a scrap of cardboard by the road, that’s all it is, it could have blown in and ended up here a million different ways. Maybe it’s just a function of my imagination, the reporter’s distressing tendency to see more than what’s there. She tucked it in the Bible that the old Baptist minister had pressed upon her so it wouldn’t get lost or crumpled in her briefcase and drove off in search of answers.

But a local gun store, run by a bitter old man who’d turned skank mean after a bit, was of no help, so she set about her drive home.

But now she thought: My dad will know.