Night of Thunder

“They haven’t read off the order yet-wait, here it is-” and Caleb listened hard to his little radio in the darkness. Then he said, “Fourth, he finished fourth.”

“Cool,” said Brother Richard.

A half-mile off, the speedway was still a source of immense noise, even with the engines finally turned off as the hot and smoky cars were rolled to their garages. It was the roar of the tribe. It was immense, the NASCAR animal in full throat, and above the stadium one could see the illumination not merely of the lights that made night racing possible but the thousands upon thousands of flashbulbs pricking off to record the moment when the young Dale the junior took his trophy.

“Okay, boys,” said the old man, “time to git ’er ready. Say a prayer for fortune if you’re with me, if you are a secret non-believer, that’s okay, ’cause I will say a prayer for you and as I am close to Him, he will look out for you.”

The boys began to prepare. Caleb quietly slipped under the table, pulled two large plastic bins out and withdrew into the dark space made by the tent above and the revetment of water bottles behind. There, in privacy, he removed two large constructions of metal, the upper and the lower of a Barrett.50 caliber M107. Expertly, he fitted the two together, finding the machined parts connected in the perfect joinery of the well-engineered. Pins secured the two units into one solid mechanism. Completed, made whole, it looked like a standard M4 assault rifle after six years in the gym, the familiar lines where they should be, but the whole thing amplified and extended, thickened, lengthened, densified, packed with strength and weight. Another Grumley-he couldn’t see who in the darkness-handed him a heavy magazine with ten Raufoss armor penetrators locked in and held tense under extreme spring tension. He himself slid the heavy thing into the magazine well, heard it click solidly as it found its place. He drew the bolt back, his great strength helping, let it slip forward, moving one of the quarter-pound, 650-grain, tungsten-cored big guys into the chamber, and locked it.

All up and down the line, the Grumley boys were cowboying up. Most wore bulletproof vests, and the guns were a motley of junky but effective Third and Fourth World subguns from various organized crime arsenals around the South, plus some functional American junkers. The inventory included a couple of Swedish K’s; a couple of Egyptian Port Saids (clones of the K), some beat-up Mk-760s from small American manufacturers after the original S &W variant, which was itself a K clone; an Uzi; a kicked-to-shit West Hurley Thompson; a full-auto AK-47. With all the clicking and snapping as mags were locked in, guns were cocked, belts of spare mags were strapped on, body armor was tightened and ratcheted shut, it sounded like chickens eating walnuts on an aluminum floor. But in a few seconds or so, it was done.

“We all set, Pap,” said Caleb, more or less the sergeant.

“Good, you boys stay back there in the dark, the crowd’s coming out now. Lord God Almighty, there’s a vast sea of people.”

And there was. The first of about one hundred fifty thousand people slithered out of the speedway gates, spread when they hit open air, and fanned across the available ground. It was an exodus from the church that was NASCAR, and now these good folks had nowhere to go except back into the dreary real world and no way to get there except to take the slow-motion parade in the opposite direction of the afternoon’s slow-motion parade. A few runners made it to their cars early, began to pick their way out of the densely packed lots. Meanwhile, seeming to materialize from nowhere, the police in their yellow-and-white safety vests with their red-lensed flashlights moved onto the roadway to govern or at least moderate the huge outflow of people and vehicles. Dust hung in the soft summer air, shouts mostly of joy, the clink of bottle on bottle, the pop of cans being sprung to spew brew, the friendly jostle of people of the same values, the hum of insects drawn by the lights, the acrid drift of cigarette and cigar smoke, the occasional boastfulness of the young and dumb, the wail of a too-tired baby, a whole human carnival of happy yet exhausted people.

In just a few minutes gridlock had set in; so many cars, so many folks, so few roads. Honks filled the air, but mostly the crowd had made peace with the ordeal of the egress. In short order, the lanes immediately in front of the Piney Ridge refreshment station were jammed with cars full of citizens, bumper to bumper and door to door in either direction, frozen solid. The people in the cars unaware that a commando force, heavily armed and full of aggression and craziness, lurked just a few feet off in the shadows.

Ain’t you folks gonna git a thrill in just a minute or so, thought Richard.