Not Dead in the Heart of Dixie (52 page)

Both girls are
sleeping on the sofa bed again tonight. Mick plans to work on their room while the other men work on the fence tomorrow. Deuce, Luke, and Larson will help. I suppose that means they're going to Lowe's.

Kevin has backhoe duty tomorrow, and Dane
wants to learn how to operate the crane truck. Jeremy and Jason will be out, taking bolts from utility poles.

We
’ll have to do laundry again tomorrow. There's not a lot, but Lisa and Shawna brought quite a bit with them. They haven't washed clothes since this whole mess began. I don't wanna think about how their laundry will look and smell.

Shawna asked that she and Lisa be allowed to do their first laundry loads alone. I suppose they're embarrassed.

Why do we keep finding teenagers? Where’s the rest of the middle aged folks? There's gotta be a few somewhere. I never imagined that teenagers would take over the world in my lifetime.

I'm headed to bed. It's been an emotionally exhausting day.

Bye for now.

T
uesday, March 18

I’
m gonna lose my mind.

It's already 9:30 and
Rebecca and Lisa just started making breakfast.

We had visitors this morning. Kevin was screaming his head off at 6:30 AM when a large motorhome came flying up the driveway.

Two men jumped out and screamed for help while they carried a woman inside to the dining room table. Kevin recognized them immediately.

The woman is
Major Josie Minor, and she's in bad shape.

She has been raped, starved, and beaten. Hisa
had them carry Josie to Clinic Diane because the medical equipment is there.

I got most of the story from the two men who brought her in. Their names are Rick and Ian
, and they are soldiers from Josie's unit. They may be the only ones left.

P
er orders from top brass, they were heading from South Mississippi to Nashville for an important meeting involving high ranking officers. Every member of the unit was sworn to secrecy and ordered not to reveal their destination. They crossed the Tennessee State line and decided to make camp for the night.

Suddenly,
several grenades landed in the middle of camp and explosions followed. Rick said there were strangers in military vehicles and ATV's tossing grenades all over the place. The entire unit became frightened, confused, and panicked. Rick began looking for something to climb to get a clear shot at the attackers.

The unit was attacked by a
large group calling themselves “National Guard.” The battle was bloody, and Josie’s unit quickly lost control. Rick said most of them were murdered in cold blood by grenades and gunshots in the back as they scrambled for their weapons.

Two or three
civilian motorhomes traveling with the unit quickly fled the area instead of fighting.

Dark was almost upon them and Rick was having trouble distinguishing between the members of his unit and the arrogant, blood-thirsty attackers. He knew that all was lost, so he climbed down and carefully began searching for survivors.

After an hour of searching and finding no one alive, he heard HDI's approaching. The attackers quickly left the area and Rick headed for the river under the guise of darkness.

Ian was actually
in
the river, bathing, before the attack began. His clothing and gear was tucked under the overhang of a large rock on the riverbank. A group of attackers drove past. He stayed in the water for several more minutes before climbing out to get his clothes and gear. He dressed and headed for camp.

Bullets
were flying all over the place and loud explosions lit the night. There was so much dust and debris in the air that he could barely make out the camp, much less the identities of the people running to and fro. He turned and headed back to the river.

Ian found Rick the following morning. They
both were hiding out in trees and brush on the banks of the Tennessee River when Ian saw Rick sneak to the river's edge for water. He recognized Rick and called out to him.

The battlefield was covered in dead bodies
, and HDI's were roaming around. Rick and Ian watched the area from the branches of a couple of large pine trees for two hours before deciding that there was no one left to save.

They grabbed what supplies they could carry from a partially burned gear truck
and headed south along I-65, running from HDI's who noticed their presence. They didn't shoot because they feared that the attackers were still in the area.

They walked for two days. When night approached on the second day, they decided to go into the woods alongside the highway to set up camp, find water, eat, and sleep. They set up a small tent and gathered firewood to heat water for their MRE's. Rick
was ready to strike the match when Ian stopped him.

Ian
pointed toward twinkling lights further back in the woods. He and Rick went to investigate.

They found a large camp.

Uniformed and civilian men were outside the tents, going about their business. Rick recognized the insignia on their uniforms. It was the same
insignia their attackers were wearing.

The group was huge
, and most of them were drunk. Neither man would venture a guess as to the number of men there.

There was a larg
e motorhome on the edge of camp.

They decided to try and get close enough to hear the guards talking
. They hoped to hear conversation from inside.

They climbed a massi
ve oak tree and hid in the branches above the motorhome. They stayed there all night and into morning, listening to the guards. They hid themselves behind the thick trunk and prayed that no one in camp would tilt their head and look up.

Sometime near mid-morning
, the door to the motorhome was thrown open and a body with its hands and feet bound was thrown out. It landed at the feet of three guards keeping watch.

The guards yelled “thanks, man!” to whomever had tossed the body their way. Rick and Ian were struck with terror when they recognized the body lying on the ground. It was Josie and she was almost unrecognizable.

She had been beaten. Her face was severely swollen and her uniform was covered in blood.

Rick almost jumped down from the tree right then and there to blow the guards head off
but Ian lifted his hand to stop him. He motioned across the large camp. There were armed soldiers milling about and many were heading toward the motorhome. Rick sat back on the branch and never took his eyes off Josie.

The guards stripped her naked and positioned her with her forehead and knees on the ground.

A skinny guard in an ill-fitting uniform picked up a long, thin stick from the ground and began whipping her across the back and buttocks. Her body jerked with each blow. She grunted every time the stick landed, but she didn't scream. Blood was running in rivulets down her back. Rick almost bit through his knuckle, watching the torture.

The skinny guard threw the stick to the side and stepped back.

Josie was flipped onto her back and her arms and legs were positioned in a spread eagle position. Four men sat on her arms and legs, pinning them to the ground.

A tall, obese
man dressed in civilian clothes stepped up near her head and dropped his pants. The entire group laughed while Josie almost choked to death on his urine.

Several men bent down and began pinching her all over her body. They pinched and pulled at her nipples, spit on her, and several peed on her face and torso. One man pulled chunks of pubic hair from her body and tossed it into the wind. Her skin was red and inflamed.

Several men extinguished burning cigarettes on her thighs. She grunted, but she didn't scream.

Rick was about to come apart at the seams and almost had to tie himself to the tree branch. The soft human side of his brain was telling him to get her out
of there, but the well-trained military side was telling him that any attempt at rescue during the event would get all three of them dead and left to the buzzards.

Ian was fee
ling the same way. He left bloody scratch marks on the tree branch where he was sitting. Both men felt anger and rage at the highest level they've ever felt.

For one split second
, Rick thought that Josie had spotted him while she was lying there on her back, being tortured. She quickly averted her eyes and took a deep breath.

Suddenly, she yelled out “are you gonna screw me or play with me?” at the top of her lungs. The men around her laughed at her response and a few of them bent to bite her thighs and breasts. She spit at them and was rewarded with a punch to the face and a kick in the ribs. Her lips were busted, bleeding, and swollen.

They lifted her by the legs and tied them to two separate tree branches about three feet apart. She was hanging upside down with her legs spread. A large blanket was thrown over the branches, and covered her almost to her armpits. The men formed a line in front of the blanket tent and the man at the front of the line began slapping her hanging breasts.

They entered the blanket tent one at a time
, and viciously raped her as she hung upside down. They were shouting vulgar comments and giving each other high fives as they walked away.

Ian and Rick counted 19 men enter and exit the blanket tent before Josie was cut down and thrown back inside the motorhome. One of the guards threw her clothes in after her.

At this point of the story, I got up and ran around to the side of the house to vomit. I felt the same as I did when we found Valerie.

I was more enraged than I have ever been in my life and thought I could actually feel my blood boiling. It took a few minutes for me to pull myself together and go back for the rest of the story.

Rick and Ian sat in the tree branches until after dark. They couldn't risk climbing down and being seen in the light of day.

They quietly hit the ground and cautiously went back to their own little camp to plan Josie's rescue. Both men feared she would be killed before they could get her
out of there.

They spent two hours working on a plan. They ate MRE's, erased all signs of their camp, and covered themselves with mud,
leaves, and debris. They laid down behind a fallen log and tried to sleep. They had gone days without sleeping and needed strength, energy, and level heads to execute their plan.

Both men barely slept because they couldn't get images of what they had witnessed out of their heads.

They rose with the sun and gathered wood for a small fire on the opposite side of the Interstate. They had their morning meal and began physically, and emotionally, preparing themselves.

Ian said that, after lunch, they heard laughing and cat calls from the direction of the camp. They both believed that Josie was being tortured again, and their anger grew as the
y waited for darkness to fall. Rick had to tell his brain “calm and level head, calm and level head” over and over. As soon as dusk came, they began final preparations to execute the plan.

It was compl
etely dark when they quietly made their way back to the attacker's camp and climbed the tree to listen to three guards near the motorhome. All three guards were drinking and laughing, and Ian knew that one of them would have to relieve himself soon. He picked the guard he wanted and sat there, waiting.

An hour passed before the guard
left the group to take care of nature's call. The man began gathering leaves, and Ian was overjoyed in the midst of his anger.

The guard went a little further back in the trees, pulled his pants down around his
ankles, squatted, and started whistling. Ian was thankful because the whistling man was completely relaxed and had no idea what was coming his way.

Ian quietly approached him from the back. He was two feet from him when the guard reached to wipe his rear end. It was now or never. Ian grabbed him by the hair, yanked his head backwards, and slit his throat without hesitation. He quickly threw the guard's body over a large rock so the blood would run down his face and away from his uniform.
He removed the uniform and handed it to Rick who was already naked and standing nearby.

Rick slipped into the uniform and stepped right out into the open. He coughed to disguise his voice
as he told the other two guards that he would “be back in a minute.”

Rick said that he “walked like a boss” through the camp. He cautiously sliced the tires and punctured the fuel tank of every vehicle there except the motorhome. Ian waited in the shadows for Rick's return. It took more than two hours for Rick to carefully complete his tasks
without raising alarm.

Rick motioned for
Ian to come out of the shadows. Ian walked with his hands behind his back as Rick pretended to lead him to the guards beside the motorhome. When they got close, they each pulled their knives and caught the guards unaware. They slit their throats and dragged them into the shadows within a matter of seconds. They walked straight up to the motorhome door, opened it, and went inside.