Allied Zombies for Peace. Craig Nybo

      “Hold on, cowboy,” Smash said, raising a hand to stop his partner. “Serge said, no heat.”

      “But I think that kid’s got a gun.”

      With a single, shaky hand, Schecky drew out of his pocket the little zip gun he had made in his father’s tool shed. The gun was no more than an L of galvanized steel pipe. On the back end of the barrel, he had attached a plunger that accessed a spring-operated apparatus inside the barrel. He had loaded the gun with a single .30-06 round, a bullet he had taken from his father’s hunting bandoleer. He raised the little gun, pulled back the plunger on the back of the weapon, and aimed into the mob of Nam vets. “I’ll show you my second amendment rights,” he said under his breath.

      Veterans scrambled, running in a bewildered scatter, trying to get out of the kid’s aim. Schecky shouted a visceral cry and let the plunger snap. Rather than reporting with an earsplitting KABLAAM, the homemade gun merely popped. The sound could have been the backfire of a Comet station wagon. As crude as the weapon was, the single bullet it shot that day sparked a wildfire of violence that burned a gaping hole in civil rights history.

      Chapter 14

      The World War I veterans marched, all smiles and winks. Henry waved at a six-year-old boy sitting atop his father’s shoulders. The kid was all dimples under an oversized Cincinnati Reds baseball cap. As the boy waved back, Henry heard a pop from far back in the parade route. He stopped and turned toward the source of the sound, visoring the sun from his eyes with a flat hand so he could get a better look.

      “What was that?” Flash said.

      “Gunshot.”

      “No, had to be a firecracker.”

      Henry fixed Flash with a stoic stare. “After a tour in the French trenches, I know a gunshot when I hear one.”

      A clamor rose from upstream in the parade route. Henry and Flash, along with the rest of the World War I vets stopped their march to see what was going on. They stood, wearing their mushroom shaped helmets, their legs done up in canvas gators, their hair gray and flipping in the breeze, their eyes vivid and alert, all staring straight back along the parade route where a fight had broken out.

      The monolithic Mark VIII clattered to a stop. The steel hatch on the top chunked open and its driver, an elderly man who still had shades of red in his otherwise snow colored hair, pulled the tank goggles from his eyes and snapped them up onto the front of his leather helmet. “What’s going on?” He asked.

      Henry glanced around at his brothers-in-arms, most of them over seventy years old, most still spry due to hard working lives and seasoning as soldiers. A wave of nostalgia hit him. It might have been the picturesque cuts of the old soldiers from the background of flag waving parade spectators. It might have been the sound of brawling, which seemed to escalate with each passing second, from back in the parade route. As Henry looked over his brothers, he recognized that they still had fight in them. He remembered how they had seen each other through the terrors half a century ago in the Belleau Woods and on the fields of Cambrai, battling the bunkers and machine gun emplacements of the Hindenburg line. His heart lurched, steeling in his chest, sending a shot of adrenaline through his veins. He looked at the unfolding brawl a few blocks back then turned to face his brothers. Something in the moment took hold of him, an old sense of duty that can never be taken from an American soldier. “Looks like we may have an honest-to-goodness conflict on our hands,” Henry said, raising his voice so all of the vets could hear him.

      Heads turned toward him.

      “What do you say we send a scout back to survey the damage?”

      Elderly vet heads bobbed in agreement.

      Henry turned to Flash. “How are your legs, old man?”

      Flash leapt twice, practically clicking his heels. “I walk two miles a day if I’m not laid out with a fever.”

      “Good.” Henry’s eyes settled on the patch on Flash’s upper sleeve, a red emblem with a pair of A’s, surrounded by a blue field. “Who do we have from the 82nd Airborn?” Henry shouted.

      Most of the men raised their hands; they wore the same patch as Flash.

      “All American!” one of the vets shouted, a hunched over man, his upper back lumped up with osteoporosis.

      “That’s right,” Henry said. “All American. And do we have anyone here from the 67th Infantry?”

      The tank operator slapped the metal hatch of the Mark VIII with a gloved hand; it rang like the liberty bell. “67th and die,” the tanker shouted, flecks of his pale, red hair stabbing down over his forehead.

      “What’s your name, soldier?” Henry said.

      “They call me Red.”

      Henry chuckled. “Well, Red, glad to have you with us.”

      Red nodded.

      A wide smile peeled across Henry’s face. “What do you say we see what we can do to help?” Henry shouted, nodding at the expanding altercation.

      “We’re old men,” the soldier with osteoporosis said, struggling to keep his head up where he could watch Henry.

      “As they say, you’re only as old as you feel. I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling froggy, ready for a scrap,” Henry said.

      Some of the soldiers nodded.

      “Tell you what, I’m going to send in Flash.” Henry rested one hand on Flash’s bony shoulder. “If he can keep his clothes on long enough, maybe he can get us a report on what’s going on back there.”

      The soldiers from the 82nd broke into a gale of laughter; Flash’s brave run in the Belleau Woods, the one that gave him his nickname, was the stuff of legend. Flash smiled, feigning bashfulness, even going so far as kicking an imaginary stone on the road.

      “When Flash gets back with his report, we’ll see what we can do to help; that is if they need our help.”

      Heads nodded.

      “Go, Flash.” Henry slapped Flash’s steel helmet twice. Flash winked, clenched down on his unloaded vintage Winchester Model 1917 rifle, and dashed away.

      Chapter 15

      Schecky’s homemade gun acted like a pipe bomb; the galvanized steel barrel exploded as he let the pen spring firing pin go. Along with the .30-06 slug zinging off roughly in the direction of the Vietnam Vet marchers, bits of shrapnel buzzed away like wasps from where Schecky lay on the pavement. Schecky’s hand burst into a fireball of pain. He yowled in agony, his eyes instantly tearing up.

      Bits of shrapnel from the exploding zip gun found various marks. A parade spectator with a leather overcoat and beaver fedora jerked forward, a sting exploding in his shoulder. The man reached over his ear to feel the spot and pulled away a palm full of blood. More surprised at being hit than reacting to the pain, he looked around with quick glances, trying to identify the source of the projectile.

      Another man tottered hard to one side, dots of blood flecking out in a fan from his face, his ear cut to shreds by a flying piece of galvanized steel.

      A woman with a stroller fell to the ground, her calf bleeding. She sobbed as she looked at her ruined pantyhose. Blood bubbled from a gash exposing puckered skin and ruined muscle tissue halfway between her ankle and the back of her knee.

      Along with the shrapnel damage, Schecky’s single .30-06 round whizzed in a straight path. The bullet grazed the right shoulder of Ziggy Poulson, a Nam Vet twice decorated in the field for valor: once for toppling the gunning nest of a squad of VC who had hunkered along the side of a game trail; the other—a purple heart—for taking a piece of shrapnel in the rear end from a claymore.

      The bullet continued on its path, zinging through the ranks of the Columbus High School marching band, nearly taking out a sousaphone player with halitosis at the rear flank. One of the bass drummers wondered