So the notion that the wonks in Washington had somehow gotten their act together and been able to organize was a pipe dream, and Lucas just rolled his eyes when he heard the speculations. Those beholden to the idea that the same bureaucrats who’d been unable to see this disastrous confluence of events coming had somehow managed to demonstrate anything but incompetence once all the support systems had given way were not long for this world.
Better to suck it up and do what had to be done to stay alive than to believe fairy tales. If anything, the collapse had shown just how unprepared the vast majority were to deal with harsh reality, and how dependent what passed for civilization was on the nanny state coming to the rescue.
When it failed to do so, as it had for many weeks during prior regional natural disasters – like the hurricane that had wiped out New Orleans – the only surprise to Lucas had been the number of people caught completely off guard.
Duke adjusted the lamp to shine on the woman and turned his attention to the wound. He studied the bandage and then called out to Aaron. “Bring the surgery kit. Alcohol. Gauze. Soldering iron.”
“Be right back,” Aaron said, and went into one of the back rooms.
“What’s her story?” Duke asked as they waited.
Lucas shrugged. “Beats me. I found her in the desert, along with some dead friends.”
“Kind of a looker, ain’t she?”
Lucas grunted noncommittally. “Business been good?”
“Can’t complain.”
Duke had set up the trading post once the worst of the chaos had subsided, and it had thrived ever since. Duke’s terms were simple: he was relatively honest, and he didn’t ask or tell where items came from. His discretion was prized, although he reserved the right to refuse anything he didn’t want.
A shortwave radio crackled softly in a corner and went silent. Lucas tilted his head toward it. “Anything new going on in the world?”
Duke laughed, the sound a harsh bark. “Black helos. The Russians are coming. The grid will be back online any day. A nuke plant in California melted down and we’re all doomed. Take your pick.”
“So same old.”
“Yep.” Duke collected gossip like a fishwife and spent his off hours monitoring the airwaves, exchanging rumors with other survivors around the country. It was because of his hobby, in fact, that he’d been one of the first to recognize the true danger as the collapse had unfolded. The media had lied early and often, the Internet had been increasingly censored in the interests of national security, and straight answers had been few and far between. But Duke had collected reports from all over the nation from other like-minded, self-sufficient folks who’d seen disaster coming years in advance and taken appropriate steps to defend themselves.
When the first casualties of the new super flu had begun appearing in Asia and the Middle East, he’d heard accounts from returning servicemen who were in his network, and the stories differed materially from those online or in the news. Unlike prior flu pandemics, this one had a longer infectious cycle with extremely mild, almost undetectable symptoms, enabling the virus to spread like wildfire before anyone realized the extent. By the time the domestic media and the CDC had been willing to admit that the case-fatality ratio of the airborne, highly infectious bug was approaching forty percent, the damage had been done: sixty percent of those infected ultimately survived, but even the survivors were bedridden for ten days to two weeks in the second stage of the disease, and transmission levels were near ninety-six percent, with only a fraction escaping unscathed due to natural immunity.
Speculation had been rampant in the early days that the flu was a conspiracy, lab-generated, an attack on the U.S., part of a larger depopulation scheme, a takeover of the world by some shadowy group, while cooler heads had pointed out that every hundred years or so a bug came along and wiped out a significant portion of the population. The prior lethal pandemic had been the Spanish flu, which had effectively ended World War One, both sides being too sick to fight, and which, in a time before plane travel, had decimated the population with an estimated ten to twenty percent mortality rate.
But as bad as the super flu had been, it was the collapse of the financial system and the breakdown of law all over the world that had tipped the scales. Unlike in 1918, the globe’s financial system was deeply intertwined due to the unregulated derivatives market, with mega-banks in the U.S. holding tens of trillions of paper from European and Asian banks, and vice versa – meaning that if one in the queue collapsed, it would take the rest with it. With the major industrialized nations incapacitated from the flu, derivative instruments in the hundreds of trillions of dollars had come due, and in a daisy chain, every economy and bank on the planet froze up as they were exposed as being insolvent. Once confidence was shaken, the next pedestal of modern finance to collapse was sovereign debt, and the American T-bill became unsellable overnight. The central banks tried turning on the money presses to counter the effect, but that had only resulted in a loss of faith in paper currency, and hyper-inflation that had made Zimbabwe look like a poster child for fiscal conservancy.
When the banks didn’t open, credit cards stopped working, and nobody wanted to accept the government’s paper currency, then nothing could function, not even the military – nobody would work for worthless paper IOUs backed by the nonexistent faith and credit of a bankrupt regime. When a gallon of gas went from $3 a gallon to $30 to $300 in only two weeks, faith in fiat currency and the government’s continued ability to operate in perpetual debt collapsed – and faith was all the system had been running on for generations.
Americans had quickly discovered that their prosperity was a fragile construct that could collapse in a matter of days, and watched in horror as their wealth was revealed to be a mirage, as was every other economy in the world where the same cartel of interdependent, privately owned banks had convinced the population that paper IOUs were a good exchange for their labor and land. When riots swept the cities, starting on the west and east coasts and working inland, the authorities had been unable to cope, and what had previously only been seen in brief flare-ups in Baltimore, Los Angeles, and New Orleans quickly went nationwide as the desperate turned on each other with the realization that survival was now a zero-sum game.
Lucas was jarred from his reverie by Aaron’s arrival with the surgery kit.
“Here you go, boss man,” Aaron said with a smile, and set the kit down beside Duke.
Duke opened the oversized plastic tackle box and extracted a bottle of white lightning and a dizzying array of gleaming surgical instruments. He placed a tray near the woman’s head and filled it halfway with alcohol, and after a long look at the bottle, chugged two swallows and burped.
Lucas regarded him with a neutral expression. “Sure you’re okay?”
“We’ll soon find out.” Duke’s expression darkened. “Aaron, I need more gauze than this. And the soldering iron.”
Aaron nodded. “Be right back.”
Duke busied himself placing scalpels, forceps, clamps, spanners, and a variety of other instruments in the alcohol, and then turned to Lucas. “Let’s go wash our hands. Can you assist?”
“Tell me what to do and I’ll try,” Lucas said.
“First, let’s wash all the grime off. Then, go put on a clean shirt. Don’t need her getting infected from road dust.”
“I don’t have an extra handy.”
“Don’t worry; I do. I’ll put it on your tab.” Duke gave him a hard stare. “Hope you’ve got some real goods to trade, or you’ll be delivering white lightning for free for the duration.”
“I’ve got a half dozen ack-ack guns. Maybe a thousand rounds. Some handguns. Don’t sweat it.”
“What kind of rifles?”
“AR-15s and AKs.”
“Shape?”
“Better than your liver.”
Duke’s face cracked in a pained smile. “Man after my own heart, Lucas.”
Lucas matched his expression. “No acco
unting for taste.”
Chapter 5
An hour and a half later, Duke set down the soldering iron and wiped sweat from his brow. After inspecting his work, he turned to Doug.
“Open some windows. Smells like a Texas barbecue in here.”
The pungent odor of burnt flesh had filled the room as he’d cauterized the wounds, the round finally removed in three fragments. He’d injected the woman with another shot of morphine before operating and had used local anesthetic in the tissue around the chest wound as an additional measure.
Duke and Lucas walked together to the door and stepped out into the morning sunshine.
“What do you think?” Lucas asked.
Duke inspected his nails and then met Lucas’s gaze. “Fifty-fifty. She’s lost a ton of blood. Next thing, we need to do a transfusion.”
“How do you know what blood type she is?”
“Doesn’t matter. Aaron’s O negative. Universal donor.”
Lucas nodded. “That’s a lucky break. How much?”
“Probably a pint or two. I’ll get a line going to start a bag in a second.”
“No, I mean how much for him to do it?”
Duke named a price in ammo, and Lucas whistled. “There goes my retirement.”
“Unless you’ve got gold or silver. In that case, quarter ounce of gold should do the trick. Silver, fifty ounces.”
“You still collecting, huh?”
“Damn right I am.” Duke had once explained to Lucas that the reason he was stockpiling precious metals was because whenever trade with other nations was reestablished, the likelihood of trading partners accepting anything but gold was zero after the fiat currency nightmare. Even now, with the continent a wasteland, gold and silver were prized for the same reason – they had been money for thousands of years and would likely continue to be in demand as such for the foreseeable future. Lucas had twenty gold coins he’d ferreted away for emergencies that he’d carried with him since the collapse, but he’d part with just about anything else before resorting to using any of it.
“Between the operation and the blood, you’ve pretty much wiped out half my stash of guns and ammo.”
“Best things in life may be free, but here, no tickee, no laundry.”
Lucas shrugged. “It is what it is.”
“I’ll have Doug check out the weapons and ammo while I’m draining Aaron dry.”
“Send him out. I want to check on Tango.”
Duke studied Lucas’s face. “You look like you’ve been rode hard and put away wet, partner. Maybe take a nap.”
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”
“That’s the spirit. If you change your mind, there’s a hammock over there in the shade. No charge.” Duke hesitated. “How much do you know about her?”
“She never said a word.”
Duke nodded. “You notice the tattoo on her upper arm?”
“What, the Egyptian-looking eye? What about it?”
Duke eyed a droplet of dried blood on his boot and scowled. “Probably nothing.”
“Spit it out, Duke.”
“Let’s see if she makes it.”
“You have something to say, best to say it,” Lucas said.
Duke shook his head and turned to go inside. “None of my business, buddy.”
Lucas gave Duke an annoyed look and moved to Tango to unpack the saddlebags and the travois. Doug joined him a few minutes later, and they went through the rifles first. The younger man examined the Kalashnikovs with a practiced eye and nodded as he set each aside.
“They’re beat but seem serviceable. We’ll test fire them later.”
“Probably Mexican,” Lucas observed.
“Now let’s look at the AR-15s.”
The assault rifles had all been modified to full auto and, based on the work, by someone with skills. The AR-15 was the civilian version of the M16 rifle, sold as single-fire only, but with a full-auto sear, disconnector, and bolt carrier, they could be converted with considerable machine-shop time by cutting out the lower receiver to accommodate the full-auto sear.
Doug smiled as he finished inspecting the last rifle. “Nice work. Where did you say you got these?”
“In the desert.”
“Duke will be happy. They look pretty clean compared to the AKs.”
“So’s the ammo.”
Half an hour later, Doug had counted the rounds and separated out the lots he wanted. He’d grown friendlier as he’d worked and, as with many of the people Lucas had met after the collapse, had been quite open about the circumstances leading up to his working at the trading post.
“I was stationed in Houston. We were supposed to ship out for the sand bowl, but by the time our lot got called, everything was going haywire already. Most guys on the base were sick or dying, and the few officers left standing wound up immobilized by conflicting orders from Washington. Ultimately, we stayed put, and later my group was sent on riot patrol in Dallas and then funeral duty. Man, talk about ugly.” Doug swallowed hard. “Anyway, you know how it went down after that. Eventually no food, no money, and one day, no chain of command.”
It was a common story: soldiers in their late teens and early twenties ordered to fire on their fellow citizens by officers who were themselves conflicted. Soon the contested zones were open warfare areas among heavily armed gangs of criminals, civilians trying to protect themselves, and the authorities. Once power went down and food and potable water became nonexistent, the military mission stopped even trying to maintain order and degraded into an effort at self-defense as the streets clogged with the rotting bodies of the dead. What the flu had failed to destroy, starvation, thirst, and desperation had their way with, and within weeks the cities were ghost towns, the vast majority of the citizenry dead.
“You never saw combat?” Lucas asked.
Doug looked away. “Plenty. All of it in Texas. Some of the older officers said Iraq was Disneyland compared to Dallas at the end.”
Lucas yawned and rubbed the back of his neck. “Tell Duke I’ll be in the hammock.”
“Roger that.”
It was midafternoon when Duke nudged Lucas awake. The temperature was cool, the air crisp. Luke’s eyes were slits when he looked at Duke.
“News?” Lucas asked.
“Gave her a shot of antibiotic – expired, of course – but she’s still in pretty rough shape. She needs a full course, Lucas. The wounds are already getting infected.”
“You have any more?”
Duke shook his head. “Nothing I’d use on her.”
“So?”
“I can send Clem up to Loving. I talked to the doc up there on the radio. He’s got some that’s still pretty good.”
“I can just take her myself.”
“Clem can ride a lot faster than you dragging teepee poles on that barn-sore mule, Lucas.”
“Hey. Tango’s a trooper.”
“Just saying. He looks tired as you do.”
Lucas considered the offer. “You’re probably right. How much?”
“Another five hundred rounds.”
“What!? You’re a thief, Duke.”
“Strictly business, Lucas. This isn’t a nonprofit.”
Lucas got out of the hammock and spit to the side. “Remind me never to play cards with you.”
“Easy come, right?” Duke said with a smile.
Lucas grew serious. “Think she’ll make it?”
“She’s looking a little better since the transfusion. In the old days, we might have been able to use some plasma. That would have increased her odds.”
“Has she come to?”
“Negative. She’s on the edge, Lucas. It could go either way.”
“Well, hell. Might as well go back to being broke again. Take the rest of my ammo, you swindler.”
“I’ll throw in a meal.”
Lucas nodded. “Tell Clem to stay off the road. Lot of bandits lately.”
“You tell him. He’ll be up and around again soon.”
“You’re leaving?”
“I’ll check back in when I’ve got the horses. Doesn’t look like she’s going anywhere.”
“You got that right.”
Lucas held the trader’s stare. “Duke? I’m leaving her under your protection. Means you’re responsible she comes to no harm.”
Duke nodded. “10-4, good buddy. Nobody’ll lay a hand on her. You have my word.”
“Get her whatever she needs. On my tab.”
“Sure thing, Lucas.”
Lucas walked in silence back to the main building with Duke, hoping that when he returned to the trading post he wouldn’t owe Duke for a coffin.
Clem appeared a few minutes later, Kalashnikov in hand, plate carrier cinched snugly to his torso, well rested after four hours of sleep following his shift, and ready to leave. Duke warned him about staying off the highway, and Clem nodded as he mounted up. He saluted Duke and Lucas as he departed, and they watched as he sped away on a sleek chestnut mare, kicking up a faint trail of dust behind him.
Duke elbowed Lucas. “Must be hungry by now. Probably smart to fill your belly while you can.”
Lucas checked the time. He’d slept longer than he’d intended – it would be dark again in a few more hours. “I could eat.”
“Let’s chow down before you hit it.”
“How long do you think it will take Clem to get back?”
“They agreed to swap a new horse, so figure, what, six hours each way at a fast trot, maybe a little more.”
“Think that’ll be soon enough?”
“It’s going to have to be.”
The Day After Never (Book 1): Blood Honor Page 4