Two hours after the shooting stopped, the Templars began to file into town singly or in pairs. They gaped at the bodies lying in the street and at the bodies of the bikers that were being dragged into a growing heap by the Northwest Militia.
One of the Templar women recognized the boy who had been found in the wall locker. She identified him as the son of her hairdresser before the onset of the Crunch. She asked, “Where’s your mommy and daddy, Timmy?”
The boy gave her a vacant stare. After a long pause, he uttered, “They shot my dad when they first came. My mom’s dead, too. Greasy stabbed her. I saw him do it.”
With tears in her eyes, the woman asked, “Would you like to come and live with us? We live near Troy. It’s safe there. There are no bad men there.”
Still sullen, the boy said, “Sure, I guess so, Molly. But first I want to see Greasy. I want to see him dead.”After a few minutes of walking from corpse to corpse, Timmy pointed out the body of the biker called Greasy. He walked over to the corpse and spit on it. Then he walked back to stand under the arm of Molly.
Taking the boy by the arm and leading him away from the corpses, Molly said, “Don’t worry, Timmy. It’s over now.” The boy looked up at her and gave her a painful look of disbelief.
After posting a perimeter of security, Todd, Mike, Roger Dunlap, and Ted Wallach sat down for a quick meeting in the back of the gas station. First, they compared notes on the number of gang members that they had killed. Todd brought out matter-of-factly, “We killed sixteen. Captured zero.”
Dunlap nodded and said, “We got seven in our ambushes. That adds up to twenty-three, which squares nicely with the figure that your man Trasel gave in his recon report. At most, one or two might have slipped away.”
With an edge on his voice, Todd said, “I hope that we got every single one of them. There’s no way to be sure, though.” The discussion then shifted to their options for dealing with the dead bodies and captured equipment.
Most of the afternoon was spent in an even more thorough search of the houses, including, basements, crawl spaces, and attics. Both the Northwest Militia and the Templars were used in this search. No more bikers or towns-people were found, except for one putrefying corpse in a basement. Todd ordered that anything usable, including fired brass, should be collected. During this time, both of the groups sent small patrols out to bring back their respective vehicles.
All captured equipment from the gang was piled by the side of the bikers’ van. The van itself provided some of their best finds. There, they found over two thousand rounds of assorted ammunition, a pair of night vision goggles, four cases of liquor, and one-hundred-and-twenty gallons of gasoline. In the various buildings and in the saddlebags of the motorcycles, they found still more ammunition, road maps, marijuana, clothing, and a pair of binoculars. In searching the bodies of the bikers and their personal effects, they also found the keys to the van and all the motorcycles.
The only particularly curious find was a box of nearly a hundred caltrops. These devices, three-inches long and an inch-and-a-half wide, were pieces of sheet metal cut in the shape of bow ties. Each of them was twisted 90 degrees in the middle. This twist insured that one of the four points on the caltrop pointed upward, regardless of how it landed on the ground. Mike surmised that the bikers had made the caltrops either for vehicle ambushes or perhaps to seed on roads to evade pursuers.
When it came to divide up the captured equipment, all that Todd asked for was the M60, its ammo, and accessories. The rest, he said, could go to the Templars. Dunlap quickly agreed to this proposition. Todd also offered to let the Templars keep four of the unused Claymore mines. Dunlap considered this a tremendous windfall, and expressed his gratitude.
From the heap, Todd and Jeff extracted four belts of 7.62mm ball ammunition, a twenty-millimeter ammo can brim full of metal links for assembling additional belts, and a rubberized green nylon bag containing a spare barrel and cleaning kit for the M60.
Todd took Dunlap aside, and described how they had taken the gear captured previously from looters and set it aside for the use of deserving refugees or charity groups. Dunlap nodded his head and agreed that it was probably a good course of action. With this in mind, Dunlap selected six of the best, captured weapons to set aside for Timmy. These included a Mini-14, an M2 carbine, two Springfield Armory XD .45 automatics, a Mossberg riotgun, and a Smith and Wesson Model 629 .44 magnum revolver. He also set aside all of the ammunition in the calibers that would fit these guns.
Dunlap announced, “We’ll clean these guns up and crate them up with the ammo in some sealed cans and call it Timmy’s trust fund.” He later said that he would save the rest of the gear and food for refugees or for locals who were particularly in need.
All of the dead bikers were dragged to an abandoned frame house at the north edge of town. The dead townsmen were dragged to another abandoned house across the street from it. Then flammable items from nearby houses, including stacks of newspapers, firewood, cans of waste oil, furniture, and the bikers’ marijuana were piled on top of the two piles of corpses. Tom Kennedy then conducted a funeral service in front of the house containing the dead townsmen. No one asked for any prayers for the dead members of the biker gang, but Tom said one anyway.
When the funeral prayers were over, Tom Kennedy lit a road flare and set both houses afire. Within minutes, they were both totally engulfed in flames.
After half an hour, it was clear that neither of the burning houses presented a fire risk to any of the other houses in town, so both groups proceeded to load their vehicles. After exchanging handshakes, the Templars drove off in their three jeeps and the captured van. They remarked that they would be back later in the day with their large flatbed pickup and a ramp to collect the motorcycles, including the four that had been caught in the Claymore mine blast.
Mike soon had all of the militia loaded into their two trucks and headed back to the retreat. In the cab of the trailing vehicle—Kevin’s Ford pickup—sat Kevin, Lisa, and Todd. After they were a few miles down the road, Lisa turned to Todd and gave him a sour look. She complained, “I can see why you asked for the M60. Tactically, it’s worth as much as everything else combined. But you should have asked to keep those night vision goggles, too. They would have been great to use at the LP/OP.”
Todd answered, “The only problem with those goggles is that they were the PVS-5 model. As I recall, that model needs a high-current two-point-seven-five volt battery, and it’s a battery that’s been known to explode if you try to recharge it. I didn’t see any spare batteries when I looked through that pile of captured gear, did you?”
After a few moments, Lisa said glumly, “No.” After letting out an audible sigh, she gave in, “If that’s the case, then you were right when you insisted that we invest our money in trip flares, parachute flares, and the tritium sights and scopes, rather than night vision equipment.”
Todd brought out consolingly, “Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that starlight gear is no good. It’s just worthless without the proper batteries, and most of them are exotic, can’t be recharged, and have a limited shelf life.
There are a few of the later models made that use standard batteries like the double-A nickel metal hydride and standard nine-volt rechargables we use in some of our electronic equipment. Now any of those would have been a good investment. The only problem was that all starlight gear was so expensive, particularly the third-generation stuff. And as for the Russian gear… It was so poorly made I didn’t bother with it, either. The imaging quality is low, the weapon sights don’t hold zero very well, and the intensifying tubes burn out pretty quickly. If only we’d had the money, I would have bought some good quality American-made gear….”