And that running wouldn’t help. That they’d find him wherever he went.
Or maybe not.
Scum bags like Johnny don’t deserve the same fair shake an honest and hardworking citizen does.
After all, he was a drug dealer who didn’t care much how many people he poisoned. It didn’t bother him when he heard one of his regular customers died of an overdose.
Oh, he’d profess to caring.
He’d say something like, “Oh, damn! That’s too bad.”
He might come off as being remorseful, but any remorse he felt was at the loss of a good customer.
And finding a new customer was never a problem. Not with the nationwide drug epidemic the United States was currently in the grip of.
Johnny wasn’t above selling to minors. High school and middle school kids, mostly. And he hated hearing when his dope killed one of them, for they were especially good at getting their friends hooked as well.
Anytime a kid overdosed and died his sales went flat for a time while other kids rethought their own mortality.
The sales always came back, for the addiction to street drugs is a very powerful thing.
But Johnny always moaned and groaned about his flat sales when one of his customers’ luck caught up to them.
So, Johnny was the worst of humanity. Barely human, he was. He deserved no breaks. If he got any luck it should have been bad luck.
Sometimes, unfortunately, good fortune goes to those who least deserve it.
That’s the way it went for Johnny in the days immediately following the cartel shootout on the streets of Lubbock.
For three days after the shooting, while Johnny was still lying low and convinced any time armed men would bust down the door and shoot him dead… the oddest thing happened.
A story broke, first on CNN and then on national news. It soon earned a “breaking news” crawl on the bottom of every network telecast around the world.
A press conference aired from Washington, D.C., led jointly by NASA and the Department of Homeland Security. It was called to announce the coming of a meteorite called Saris 7, plummeting toward the earth at breakneck speed.
It was at that moment the world changed forever.
The cartel which was making plans to send a team to find Johnny put those plans on hold.
They were looking forward to tying him to a bed and severing his limbs, one at a time, while he screamed in agony.
They’d have put those limbs all over the city, tossed over power lines in the same manner street gangs toss shoes to mark their territories, as a warning to anyone else who might be thinking of stealing from them.
The Mexican cartels do not play.
However, in this case Johnny got a once in a lifetime reprieve.
The cartel had too many other things to worry about to put Johnny on a high priority.
Their growers were jumping ship and running off to far away places in the hopes of surviving the coming freeze.
The rival cartel that killed three members of their drop crew was putting out indicators they were planning their next attack. And promised it would be bigger and better.
With higher placed targets.
And Cartel leaders were doing what everyone else was doing.
They were gathering food and supplies in the short amount of time they had left so they could ride out the freeze too.
Johnny and Tina?
They made no preparations for the years-long winter.
They gathered no food, no water, no weapons or munitions.
They were too scared to leave the house.
It wasn’t until the day Saris 7 struck the earth that they decided they were in the clear.
The skies went dark that day and the temperatures started to plummet.
Cell phones were still working then. That was before the cell towers started going out one at a time because there were no longer workers around to maintain them. Or because covered with sheets of ice they were too dangerous to climb.
When the temperature in Lubbock went below freezing that day, and when the weatherman forecast heavy snow that night, the city went into a terrible funk.
But Johnny, he was happy, for he was still alive.
And still had all his limbs.
Before the cell phones stopped working he called all his junkie friends to tell them he was still in business, with one single caveat.
He was no longer dealing drugs for money.
Until the world thawed out again, he was trading drugs for food.
-14-
Johnny never told anyone what was in those three backpacks.
Tina saw for herself when she opened them up and almost fainted.
Nobody else needed to know.
Between the three bags there was a smorgasbord of illegal drugs.
But no weed. The weed would have come on another delivery, were the drop team not hit with enough bullets to turn them into Swiss cheese.
No, this was the high dollar stuff. The stuff that sells for big money for tiny packages.
This was the powdered cocaine. The crack. The heroin. Bundles of meth. A thousand tablets of ecstasy. And fifty sheets of something which confused Johnny, for he didn’t know what it was. But Tina knew.
“Holy shit,” she said. “Those are LSD tabs!”
LSD was a hippie drug from the 1960s which was making a comeback in recent months.
More commonly known as acid, it was easy to manufacture and commanded a premium price, for it took its users on a psychedelic journey they couldn’t get from any other source.
One drop of acid dropped onto a piece of paper and allowed to dry was all it took. A user would place the paper onto his tongue and sit back and relax. Soon he’d be flying through a multi-colored wonderland, or outer space, or anywhere else the drug took him.
LSD was, quite literally, where the term “trip” came from.
Once he knew what the sheets were Johnny’s mind was boggled.
Each of the fifty sheets of colored construction paper was covered with little dots. Five hundred little dots times fifty.
Now we’ve already established that Johnny was dumber than a rock, but even he could do simple math.
“Holy cow, baby. That’s five hundred hits a page. Times fifty. That’s… five thousand hits!”
Okay, so maybe he can’t.
Tina corrected him.
“No, hon. That’s twenty five thousand.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. All we have to do is cut them into squares and bag them.”
“Holy hell!”
Word got around Lubbock that Johnny was still in business. At the same time other dealers stopped selling, because as snow started to pile up and conditions worsened, their sources all dried up.
Word was that only Johnny’s cartel had the wherewithal to deliver his dope despite the snow and ice. Nobody knew how, and nobody really cared, as long as he continued to sell them what they craved.
Johnny, for his part, professed occasional supply shortages, saying the cartel got iced in outside of Dallas or at the Mexican border.
He wanted his customers to think he was as dependent on his weekly deliveries as they were. For if they knew the truth… that he had pounds and pounds of the stuff, they’d all have come after him.
A week after Saris 7 struck the earth he found out a businessman who lived up the street got stuck on a vacation in Europe when the world froze over. He wouldn’t be back until the thaw, and maybe never.
So he and Tina moved up to better digs.
For six and a half years, during the first freeze, people all over Lubbock struggled.
But not Johnny and Tina.
Johnny and Tina lived fairly comfortably.
A kilo is 2.2 pounds of dead weight. Illegal drugs typically come in carefully weighed one kilo packages.
Each package contained one thousand grams of junk.
And the couple had several packages.
It didn’t matter that the
y were now the only dealers in Lubbock, for they had enough to supply the entire city for a very long time.
By cornering the market, Johnny could set his price, and set up a simple exchange system.
When a junkie came by to buy half a gram or an eight ball of this or that, Johnny would give him a shopping list.
Oh, it would be short and simple, for junkies typically can’t deal in complicated things.
He might say to one, “Tina needs a new coat. And we need five gallons of heating oil,” and send the junkie on his way.
To another he might say, “Ten boxes of macaroni and cheese mix and a package of spaghetti noodles.”
“Where in hell am I supposed to get ten boxes of macaroni and cheese mix?”
“That’s your problem, not mine. You want your heroin, that’s the price.”
Compared to most Lubbock residents, Johnny and Tina lived like royalty.
For there is no one more motivated than a junkie needing a fix.
Regardless of what they demanded, their customers seldom let them down.
Did they care that the very food they ate came from the mouths of the decent people of Lubbock?
Nope.
Did they care that innocent people were sometimes murdered for the food, or driven to suicide when their very last source of nourishment was taken from them?
Nope.
As long as they had what they wanted to live comfortably they didn’t care who else suffered.
As the first freeze dragged on, their customer base diminished a bit.
Some of them overdosed, or died of exposure when they were so high they didn’t realize they were freezing to death.
Some of the ones who were more successful at stealing food were themselves murdered by others who weren’t.
But hey, live by the sword and all that…
Some were arrested for stealing food from others, but once the Lubbock County Jail was full police were no longer making arrests.
When the thaw finally came Johnny had only a third of his original customers.
But his supply was still going strong.
-15-
By the time the thaw came Johnny and Tina had stockpiled an impressive amount of food. A large percentage of it were prepackaged meals with a fifteen year shelf-life, only half of which was used up.
It turned out that one of their regular customers was a wealthy prepper with a taste for cocaine.
He switched over from another dealer whose source had gone dry when he heard Johnny was the only dealer still operating within a hundred miles.
When he offered Johnny a ten day supply of prepackaged meals instead of canned goods Johnny gave pause.
He didn’t know what they were.
“They’re like the MREs the military uses, only they’re made for civilian use. For preppers and survivalists. A lot of people take them on camping trips and such.”
The two met in the early days of the freeze, when the internet was spotty but still worked.
Johnny looked up the website that manufactured the meals and was instantly all in.
Their first deal was a ten day supply of the meals for a gram of cocaine. Both thought they were getting a good deal.
As the freeze dragged on and on, Johnny’s price kept going up. He figured he cornered the cocaine market and that the prepper was a junkie willing to pay any price.
Johnny spent six years pretending he was being resupplied weekly by his cartel source, and complaining that his cost was going up as well.
By the time the thaw finally came six and a half years after Saris 7 the price of a gram of coke was up to twenty days worth of prepackaged meals, from the original ten.
And the prepper was still paying it.
The thaw was only going to last a couple of years, but few people outside the government knew it.
NASA no longer existed. There were a handful of NASA scientists who were still alive and who knew that Cupid 23 was following Saris 7’s path and would strike a few years later.
But they were considered crackpots.
No one believed them, because after the terrible catastrophe they’d just endured, no one wanted to believe them.
As a result, when people were able to come out of their houses and feel the warmth of the sun upon their faces again, they celebrated like there was no tomorrow.
Factories reopened and started cranking again, though on a limited capacity. But a limited capacity was good enough, for some parts of the country had lost over half their citizens.
There simply weren’t as many mouths to feed anymore.
The world very slowly started getting back to normal.
That worried Johnny and Tina, for they could see the writing on the wall. That the cartel would regroup and come after them.
The government was now issuing what they called “blue money.” The old dollar was deemed illegal and worthless, since the treasury had lost control of it. Now it was being used as tinder to start fires, or as toilet paper.
The new currency… the blue money… got its name because it was printed on blue paper. It was stamped “LEGAL TENDER” on front and back, but other than that it looked like the old currency.
But it was blue. There was absolutely no way it could be confused with the old greenback.
When the word got around that blue money was legal tender Johnny started accepting it as payment. He figured he and Tina had enough food to last them for years. But the blue money would give them the ability to buy other things. Like weapons and ammo and transportation.
They purchased a half ton pickup truck with a bed cover and stuffed the bed with prepared meals.
It was filled with gas and parked in their garage and ready to go if they ever had to bug out.
For once someone pisses off the drug cartels, having to bug out is always a worrisome possibility.
Slowly but surely the world began to feel normal again. It was warm enough to grow crops, and FEMA was coming around to bring everyone seeds to start gardens and tips on how to plant crops properly.
Food manufacturers were the first to start coming back on line, out of sheer necessity. But other things were being made and sold as well. Big box department stores were starting to reopen, though most of them only had a few rows of merchandise and the rest of the store was roped off and blacked out.
One of the last things to come back was the illegal drug trade.
It was one of Johnny’s regular customers who brought Johnny the news he’d been both expecting and dreading.
“Jake the Snake is back at his old corner selling H,” the customer said. “He asked me how much you were charging and said he was gonna beat it.”
“Did he say where he was getting his supply?”
“No, but he said it’s the same quality and mix as he had before. So I guess he’s getting it from his old supplier.”
Johnny gave the customer a free eight-ball for the information, and told him not to tell his rival of the conversation.
The customer smiled from ear to ear, hurried out the door, and headed home to begin a three day cocaine bender.
He was much too gleeful to notice the beads of sweat which formed on Johnny’s forehead during their conversation.
No sooner had the door closed than Johnny ran up the stairs.
Tina was in the shower, but that didn’t slow him down just one bit.
He burst into the bathroom and screamed, in a panic, “They’re here. We’ve got to get the hell out of town.”
Tina screamed. Not because she was worried about his words, but rather because he startled her when he burst in.
“Don’t you ever do that to me again! And what in hell are you jabbering about?”
-16-
She turned off the shower and opened the curtain, then stepped out to towel herself off.
He caught his breath and tried to explain.
“Jake is back in business on 10th Street.”
“Jake the Snake? I thought he retired.”
�
��Only because he ran out of drugs to sell. Now he’s back in business, back on his corner selling.”
“So what? If he’s the only competition you’ve got you’re far better off than when there were twenty dealers in town.”
“Babe, you’re not listening to me. If he’s got dope it means he’s reestablished his connection. It means the cartel is making visits to Lubbock again.”
“Honey, he never used the same source you did. You bought your stuff from the Medallin Cartel. He got his from somewhere else, didn’t he?”
“Yes. The Castillo Cartel. But listen. If one has found a way to get their dope here the others won’t be far behind.”
“So what are you saying? We’ve got a great place to live here. We’ve got stacks of blue cash and enough food to make us fat for years. Why would we want to leave it behind?”
“Babe, they know I took their dope. I was the last one they visited. On the same block where their runners were gunned down. The cops made no mention of seizing drugs to the media. They know I took it and ran.
“And they’ve had years to think of all the different ways to torture me before they kill me. And you too. They won’t make it quick and painless. They’ll be out for revenge.”
Now she was starting to worry too.
It’s been said that timing is everything in life, and it’s true.
Timing determines who happens to be sitting at a traffic light when a runaway truck comes barreling up behind them and wipes out everyone in their car.
A minute before or a minute later and the car’s occupants would have survived.
Because they wouldn’t have been sitting there. Somebody else would have been.
Timing can be a good thing, too.
It determines who might be walking down a particular sidewalk at the exact moment someone else’s lost hundred dollar bill blows by.
Joe Shmoe might thank his lucky stars when he bends over and picks up the passing bill.
He might consider it found money. Money he didn’t have five minutes before, and therefore money he can waste without feeling guilty.
He might take his wife, Flo Shmoe, to that new Italian restaurant on the far side of town for dinner that night. They might buy a bottle of wine to celebrate while he regales her and everyone around them about how lucky he is.
The Blockade Page 5