“Don’t come to my house looking for help, Jack,” he’d said. “You make plenty of money—cancel one of your European vacations and use that money to prepare for the future. Buy food, guns, and ammunition. Then more food, a few more guns, and a lot more ammunition. You never know when the shit is gonna hit the fan.”
Jack had dismissed the topic of conversation more times than he could count, but inside, he’d assigned it some merit. What would he do if something were to actually come to pass? He had a family—a wife and a daughter to take care of. How would he provide for them? How would he protect them? He needed to know more. He needed to educate himself.
Jack was an expert salesman. He’d developed a comprehensive list of rehearsed questions and formulated responses and approached his neighbor with them still fresh in his mind. At first, Rob was more than willing to offer his advice and suggestions, but the less ambiguous the questions became, the more Rob responded to them with less detail.
At the point that Jack reached for an uncomfortable level of specifics, Rob had countered with, “Jack, please. Preppers don’t talk about their preps—it’s the number one spoken law of prepping. If you want advice on how to get started, I can help you. I can point you in the right direction. But please, don’t ask me about what I have. It’s inappropriate.”
Who did this prick think he was anyway? Rob had told Jack to prep, stressed its importance, and had even admonished him for his lack of doing so. But he wouldn’t discuss his own preparations? Were all prepper-types assholes?
Jack hated the fact that despite how illogical it seemed at the time to prepare for something that would probably never happen, his neighbor, the prepper, had ended up being right about everything. Food availability quickly dwindled and supplies became scarce in a matter of days after the blackout. Two of his neighbors suddenly passed away—one as a consequence of exhausting his blood pressure medication. Panic and unrest filled the towns and it had become unsafe to go anywhere. People began fleeing for mountainous or other less populated areas in search of refuge, with whatever they could carry on their backs. The situation had descended into chaos in relatively short order. When Jack couldn’t handle the panic attacks any longer, he’d decided to take a huge bite of humble pie and ask his neighbor for help.
When he’d arrived at Rob Horton’s home, he’d discovered no one was there. Packages had been left on the porch by UPS and FedEx, and he found a note that read ‘Returning October 1st. Please leave all packages at door’. It was signed at the bottom by Rob’s wife, Mary. It was nearing November, and the Hortons hadn’t yet returned home. Taking what was happening into deep consideration, he’d assumed they probably never would—and with that, Jack came to the conclusion that he was going to break in. And he was going to take everything the Hortons had.
Jack began to recall his first trip and then started visualizing all the other trips he’d made to the Hortons’ for loads of emergency food, rations, and other supplies that he’d taken and made his own. He’d used the only working vehicle he’d had, his zero-turn mower, along with a trailer, to make trips back and forth to the Hortons’—only doing so when he thought no one would notice. Maureen had ended up being the first to see him, but she hadn’t questioned him. She didn’t agree with his methods, but she too had been supremely worried about their future in light of the circumstances and, for that reason, had decided to bite her tongue.
Once he’d finished transferring all of his neighbor’s abundant food stores into his home, Jack had decided to go back and take anything else he thought his family might want or need. It wouldn’t be long before winter would settle into the Shenandoah Valley and he’d wanted to assure that his family would be warm and comfortable as well as well-fed—just like they’d always been. He’d taken kerosene heaters and a couple hundred gallons of kerosene that Rob had stored in his garage. He took candles and candle lanterns, oil lamps and lamp oil, flashlights and batteries. He’d emptied the Hortons’ pantry of all the dry and canned goods it contained. He’d found a brand-new hand-operated pump that could fit on a well head and be used to draw water without electricity, and made it his own. He’d found stockpiled medications, such as antibiotics and painkillers and over-the-counter items such as antacids and cold medicines, and made them his own, too. In the end, Jack had made off with thousands of dollars’ worth of food and supplies by the time he’d emptied his neighbor’s home, and only had come up short when he decided it was time to look for a gun. The Hortons owned a monstrosity of a gun safe, and despite his many attempts at cracking it, none of them ever bore fruit. Once realizing that it was a lost cause, he’d loaded his trailer with baseball bats, knives, and garden tools, and then stashed them all over his house. He would protect his family and all their possessions with those items if he had to.
Jack stood up with his cup of coffee and walked past Maureen to view the morning sky outside the window above the kitchen sink. He knew that he’d gone too far now to turn back. He slowly turned around and gave his wife a blank stare. He shrugged indifferently.
“Fuck ’em,” he said.
Just as he uttered the words, a rumbling sound that hadn’t been heard in a year’s time began to fill the air. The sound of motorcycle engines.
Chapter 1
“It is a man’s own mind, not his enemy or foe that lures him to evil ways.”
—Buddha
Town of Edinburg
Shenandoah County, Virginia
Friday, October 15th (Present day)
Damien couldn’t help but think about the night he’d killed his father when he looked down at the Pfaltzgraff dinner plate on the table before him. As his knife sliced through the fine grain of a thick beef tenderloin, the crimson-pigmented myoglobin permeated the dish. The dark red liquid’s contrast against the white porcelain looked unmistakably similar to Charlie’s blood on the shards that Damien had used to slaughter him. Even though he had seen his share of blood in the many years since then, and killed scores of others, that night would always reign supreme in his mind. It’d been the first time he’d ever taken a life. It’d been an emotional experience for him that had no words to go along with it. Killing that bastard was integral to Damien becoming who he was today. It had helped him develop a taste for inflicting pain and an appreciation for bloodshed that he’d turned into an art. As the president of his Marauders MC chapter, Damien had used that taste and appreciation to work his way up the totem pole to the ultimate high seat and now commanded a regiment of subservient, fellow murderers, all just as ruthless and coldblooded as he was. Almost.
As he placed a large slice of medium-rare beef in his mouth, he closed his eyes and savored the majestic flavor of it. Few things tasted as good as a steak that’d been cooked just right. Add to that the fact that he and his men were feasting now while most folks were starving or had already starved to death made it taste even better.
Damien felt he and his men had reached a turning point. For the longest time, they’d been forced to survive on what they could scavenge or steal, and scavenging wasn’t easy work. Once the food supply was exhausted, they’d pack up and move elsewhere, siphoning gas for their motorcycles by mouth from stranded cars along the way. It had been hard for them. He remembered, at one point, how he and his men had been forced to resort to cannibalism. Damien wasn’t fond of that memory, and he’d never thought for a second that things would’ve ever gotten so dire as to necessitate it. The sight of human blood was much more pleasurable and palatable to him than the actual taste of it. Still, if he and his men were to survive, they had to do what was necessary—and at the moment they had reached total desperation, it had become such.
Now that they were in the Shenandoah Valley, Damien and his Marauders had access to a collection of thriving farmlands, most of which were still in operation. One they’d come across recently was inhabited with beef cattle, and his men had slaughtered a steer today. Far from being trained butchers, they’d squandered most of the meat, yet were still able to bring hom
e a bounty. The meat had been cooked over a wood campfire and a makeshift grill, using remnants of gas grills in the neighborhood that had long since run out of propane. Damien had been served four of the most spectacular tenderloin steaks he’d seen with his own eyes—both before and after the collapse. He was down to his last one now, and his stomach was the fullest it had been in months.
As he chewed with his mouth open, juices and saliva escaping from his lower lip, Damien looked down at the table to a wrinkled photo—a picture of a young girl and her friends enjoying a day at a waterpark. He’d taken the girl’s life so viciously—so prematurely. The same as he’d done to so many others before her. It was what he felt he was placed on earth to do: to take from others—to hurt others without remorse. Charlie had taught him that. His father had taken from him and his family and damaged them all irreparably. And now it was Damien’s turn. This was his world now. He liked being this person—this monster. It brought him pleasure seeing people cower to him. He loved the fear—the despair in the eyes of his victims. He loved hearing them beg for their lives. It made him feel like a god. Young Katie Anderson had given him all those things when he’d tortured and killed her parents. His encore was murdering her in cold blood.
The front door opened and the sergeant-at-arms of the Marauders MC stepped over to the high-top dining room table, where Damien sat proudly at the head, like a king on his throne. Damien acknowledged his presence by holding his knife in the air and twirling it around.
“Good cow, boss?” Danny asked. “Did the boys cook it right?”
“Ab-so-lutely,” Damien said while nodding and gnawing on a hunk. “It’s a meal fit for a king.”
“There’s a bunch more where that came from,” Danny said. “Should be enough for all of us to eat like kings for a while.”
“Hearing that is music to my ears, Danny.”
Damien smiled and gave his cohort a curious look. He assumed Danny had interrupted his meal for something other than a conversation on cattle. He swallowed his food before continuing.
“So what’s up?” Damien asked. “Have the boys returned from their hiatus or something?”
“No…”
“Well, what do you want, then?”
Danny pursed his lips and shot a thumb over his shoulder toward the door. “Someone must’ve felt us talking about him. That DHS prick is outside with his entire entourage,” he said. “The whole damn street is full of fed SUVs. You want to see him, or should I tell him to kick rocks?”
Damien looked down at his plate and stirred up the red juices with his fork while he chewed happily on another piece of meat.
“No. By all means, welcome our guest—but just him,” Damien said.
Danny nodded, turned on his heel, and walked back out the door. As the storm door hissed closed, Damien walked to the kitchen wet bar and poured himself a tall glass of Maker’s Mark bourbon, took a sip of it, and then returned to his seat. About a minute later, a stocky, balding man, wearing a khaki-colored ensemble, walked inside and removed his aviator sunglasses. Danny followed close behind after informing the visitor’s armed guards that they weren’t welcome inside, a sentiment they didn’t appreciate. After rubbing his eyes a bit and taking an inordinate amount of time to look around the room, the man nodded his head at Damien. Damien sat back, crossed his arms, and exhaled loudly.
“Well, it’s about fucking time,” Damien huffed.
The man exhaled through his nose, smirked, and shot his eyes at Damien. “Is that the tone you want to set for this conversation?” he asked, his voice dripping with dissatisfaction. “You’re lucky I came at all.”
The man held out his arms and made a show of examining his surroundings. “I see you’ve taken it upon yourself to acquire the nicest house in the entire damn neighborhood,” he announced, and then paused to move closer. “Very nice. Very nice indeed.” He paused again and nodded flippantly with a bulging lower lip. “I do have a rather profound question for you, though, if you don’t mind me asking. Just what exactly do you and your men think you’re doing?”
Damien smiled cunningly and took a sip of his drink. He sucked the remnants of it through his teeth before rubbing his lips together over the warmth and continuing. “I’m doing what you asked me to do,” he said as he gulped. “Forgive me…I’m a bit confused as to why you’re taking this tone with me.” Damien pointed to the bottle of Maker’s Mark. “Perhaps you need something to calm you down so we can talk like the business associates we are. Can I offer you a drink?”
“No!” the man retorted almost furiously. “I don’t want a damn drink.”
“Suit yourself,” Damien said calmly, unaffected by the brashness of the man’s voice.
With an angry look building on his face, the balding man pointed out the door to the street behind him, his finger almost hitting Danny’s nose in the process.
“You and your men were given a simple task,” the balding man bellowed. “Your job was to seek out insurgents and, if necessary, put some fear into them so they would turn to us for support.” He paused and took a breath. “But this—whatever the hell this is you’re doing here…is way beyond anything you were ever given permission to do.”
“Permission?” Damien questioned, his eyes squinting as he focused on the word.
“Yes. You work for me,” the man advised. “Or have you forgotten the terms of our agreement?”
“I haven’t forgotten anything,” Damien said matter-of-factly. “But you have me at a loss.”
“You want specifics? Some particulars? Would that help?”
Damien nodded. “It would help me pinpoint what has you so worked up.”
“Worked up? You want to know what has me worked up?” the balding man repeated with a face that had now turned nearly beet red. “I’ll tell you what has me worked up. How about…the burned houses. Damn near hundreds of them. Or how about…the corpses. The trail of burned houses and corpses. The trail of which we followed today like damn breadcrumbs…that led us right to you!”
Damien went to take a drink but chuckled into his glass.
“This is funny?” the man probed irksomely. “This is somehow funny to you? Because it’s not to me. It’s tragic and demented. Something only a savage would consider amusing. You must have some sort of fetish for burning houses and leaving dead nude bodies lying around—I mean, I’m assuming they’re deceased—they could be sleeping, I suppose. But my educated guess is that the former is true.”
Damien snorted and slurped down a sip of his whiskey. He still said nothing. His lack of response only seemed to further aggravate the balding DHS commander.
“I’m sorry, does any of what I’m saying ring a bell, or should I continue?” the man asked, his voice now showing signs of profound frustration.
Damien cocked his head to the side passively. “No need,” he replied. “What you saw were the remnants…of the job you gave us to do.”
The man placed his hands on his wide hips and stiffened his posture. “Excuse me?”
“Fear. Fear was the job. You said to invoke fear—and that it would serve to persuade them to seek assistance from the government. Those were your words, verbatim. That, Mr. Bronson, is exactly what we have done,” Damien proclaimed, with as much rationality as he could muster.
Bronson gritted his teeth and glared at Damien. As he began to respond, Damien interrupted him with a finger held in the air. “I also remember a small part in our initial conversation where you said to use whatever means I deemed necessary,” Damien spat.
There was a pause.
“I never said that,” Bronson stated.
“Yes. You did,” Damien asserted, pointing his fork at the man with his eyebrows raised.
The man removed his hands from his hips and shrugged, then shook his head in dismissal. “Well, I certainly never meant it in the way you took it to mean,” he said. “I definitely didn’t mean for you to turn my region into some sick satanic ritual.”
Damien took a long gulp of the
remaining liquor in his glass. It was at this point that he began contemplating what his next move should be. Any normal person who dared to talk to him this way would have been dead by now. His allegiant sergeant-at-arms was standing just behind and would kill Bronson in an instant if Damien ordered it so. Damien knew that Bronson had nothing short of an army outside and an even bigger one not far away. Killing Bronson now wouldn’t serve any purpose other than to cater to his ego, and would no doubt start a war that didn’t need starting. Like it or not, the two were allies in this world of shit. In lieu of that admission to himself, he decided to take a different approach—which was rare.
“What happened to all the food and supplies you promised us, Bronson? Shall we talk about that?”
“So now we change the subject? Is this conversation uncomfortable for you?” Bronson jeered.
“It may not seem like a big deal to you, Mr. Bronson, but I have men to feed.”
Bronson looked incredulously at Damien and pointed down to the remnants of the steak on his plate. “It doesn’t appear to be an issue for you at the moment.”
“I’m going to pretend for a second that you’re allowing your sarcasm to overcome your intellect,” Damien spat. “This is the best any of us have eaten since the world decided to take a massive dump on us.”
Bronson sighed, relented, and rubbed his bald spot. “Mind if I have a seat?”
The brusque MC president shrugged and Bronson pulled out the chair across the table to sit. He placed both hands on the table and turned his palms to face upward.
“We’ve been floundering lately, I admit,” he said. “Our once-prosperous supply chain has been encountering setbacks as of late. We’ve had to beef up security due to raiders and—pirates of all things. And we’re not alone—other camps and outposts in the region are experiencing setbacks as well. Camp Alpha near Fredericksburg is running low on nearly everything now—and that’s a problem. They’re four times our size, and they were once a logistics hub for the region. Now they’ve been forced to utilize what they have warehoused, even though it was destined for use elsewhere.
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