Chapter 8

“Is it just me, or are the locals avoiding us?” I asked aloud as we walked around the town of Hancock, clothed, of course, as we were in no mood to deal with possibly irate locals.

We got lucky at Hazelton, West Virginia, and we didn’t want to press our luck. I laughed to myself as I recalled that this was the second consecutive town in such a short space of time with a name that started with “Ha.” Besides, the sheer number of mosquito bites that some of us got after we tarried naked in Hazelton ... it wasn’t pretty. Despite our nudist leanings, we would have to cool it on that business, at least for now.

We walked along the mostly deserted streets until we saw them. There were about eighteen of them, to be precise. They all had guns ... and clubs. They all also had white hoods and robes. It wasn’t rocket science why everyone was indoors for the moment, if they could manage it. For some odd reason, the Klan had crawled out of the woodwork, and they were some nasty Klucker bastards from the look of them.

“Oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, fuck ... that’s the KKK, isn’t it?” Becca got visibly nervous, not without cause, though she also looked a bit pissed ... again, justifiably so.

“Afraid so. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m in no mood to back down, are you? Not from those hooded asshats! My great-grandfather made the mistake of visiting a town in North Carolina once, way back in the day. Kluckers ran him out of town to buckshot just before dawn in nothing but his long johns. Just for being a Jew,” Leah cussed.

“I can believe it. My great-uncle Boyd was lynched by the Klan, supposedly for raping a white woman,” Becca gritted her teeth now at the prospect of dealing with those hooded twats.

“Alright, folks, let’s take out some racist trash!” I said, just before someone took a shot at me.

“Okay, let’s do this smart. Find some good hiding spots, snipe at them if you can, don’t meet them out in the open, okay? I don’t plan to get any of us killed if we can help it, after all,” I said as I found a spot behind a tree and took aim with the late Wilbur’s German Mauser rifle (how the fuck did he get one of those, anyway?).

The Klansmen weren’t blind or stupid. They saw us seeking shelter and they didn’t hesitate to try to sniff us out, especially with the hounds that several of them dragged along into this madness. It was a very tense few minutes, as the Kluckers tried to lure us into the open or force us out. Then we heard a shot, and worse still, saw a Klansman seize Pamela by her hair and pull her out of a bush. She was wounded and yet she struggled, not being one to give up that easily.

I heard another shot and saw Cliff rising from his spot to confront the Klan, an understandable, if possibly foolhardy move. I reminded myself that few of us had any military training, aside from me. Lewis and Jared at least had law enforcement backgrounds and did a damn good job of fire discipline, but Cliff was an angry, protective husband. Pamela was one of his two wives and he wasn’t about to just let her get taken away to an unknown fate by a gang of hooded pricks.

Cliff, regrettably, didn’t make it very far before a Klucker shot him dead with a Tommy gun. Damn it, of course, the Klan would have submachine guns and other paramilitary hardware. No gun laws stopped them when they were on the books and they wouldn’t start working now, would they? I cursed my luck before I grabbed an empty glass Coke bottle filled it with gasoline, took a hanky, a match, and lit it. Then I hurled it toward the largest gathering spot for the Klan in the street now.

The explosion was truly stunning and it left a rather disgusting mess behind of charred, torn, and bloody flesh. One Klucker was still on fire, screaming in agony before even I took some compassion and put him out of his misery with a single gunshot. He collapsed to the ground while the other Klansmen scattered and our group arose to take repeated shots at them.

In the process, however, we found that Pamela was killed, too. One of her Klucker captors panicked in the explosion and pulled his trigger, blowing her head off with a .45 Glock automatic pistol. Our company had just lost two members to a violent end, despite every effort on my part to save lives. Damn! Tara was beside herself with grief, her husband and sister-wife now dead and gone. She wept uncontrollably for several minutes, even as our tribe chased down and killed more of the Klan.

It was a clusterfuck of a battle, such as it was, but we won. The price of victory was still higher than I liked paying, two wonderful members dead and gone thanks to a violent band of bigots. What would the town folks do now ... and did they sympathize more with us or with the Klan? If the latter, the sooner we left, the better ... even more than was already the case with our plans.