Age of Survival Series | Book 2 | Age of Panic

by Holden, J. J.

  “I don’t see any reason to not just ride on into town, but with these guys buttoned up…” Peter said, tapping the SKS slung over his shoulder. Larry had an identical model. Their day packs weren’t large enough to completely hide the rifles, even broken down, but if they folded the stocks and tucked the weapons between their backs and rucks, they’d at least not be obvious at a casual glance.

  “Works for me,” Larry said.

  “If we see those trucks, though, we need to get ourselves out of sight right quick. If it is military, they may be bringing Martial Law—that probably means confiscating weapons and maybe putting on movement restrictions.”

  “Like not letting us leave town?”

  Peter nodded. “Exactly.”

  2

  Daniel Prange really hated Wisconsin. He hated the stupid way the people talked, their weird attachment to beer and brandy, the way they were so stereotypically middle-America. He especially hated the northern and western parts of the state, where the wide-open farm fields gave way to wooded hills, rivers, and about half a million lakes.

  But after the way he’d jacked things in Nevada, he was lucky to have gotten off with exile to the north woods. He could just as easily have been hacked up by three guys with machetes and left in a dry arroyo to be finished off by blood loss, thirst, or coyotes. Some days, he thought that latter option would have been preferable. He would have died in an hour or so, instead of lingering in misery for months.

  As he stood in an intersection, staring at the road he was standing on, trying to find anything on the map that looked like it, he was having one of those days. Two old military-surplus cargo trucks were sitting idle. The fifteen people with him, all dressed as soldiers and armed with AR-15s or M-16s, were either pissing in the ditch or leaning in the shade of one of the vehicles, smoking.

  What really got under his skin was that the day had started so well. He and his crew had a task for the day that he was actually looking forward to. They’d spent the night before in a little town some ten miles north of Black River Falls. It was one of those little boutique “destinations” that had been planting themselves in the fading shells of dying farm towns over the past few decades. As the kids born there moved to the cities for work and their parents and grandparents died off, hippie-dippy artists, back-to-nature hipsters, crunchy organic farmers, and assorted new-agers drawn to real cheap property prices and the illusion of mindful community or whatever moved in.

  As a whole, the newcomers of the town were soft and not really built for a survival-of-the-fittest situation. On the other hand, they all grew their own food. The farmers, of course, were doing well. But even the ones living in apartments in town kept gardens. Between them, they had all the skills needed to put food on the table: planting, harvesting, raising and processing livestock, cooking and preserving.

  In short, it was the perfect place for the cartel to set up a base of operations as they worked on getting their hooks into Black River and some of the communities to the west, like Bowman. It didn’t take much for them to convince the granolas that cooperation was very much in their best interest.

  As an added bonus, the products that the cartels were manufacturing and moving through rural America meant that every small town had addicts in varying degrees of desperation. Prange had found one the night before that had already started selling herself to tourists over the summer, but hadn’t yet gone down the dark rabbit hole of no return.

  As he took another look around the intersection, he wondered just how the day had managed to go sideways on him. From the hippietown he’d woken up in, through a few more unincorporated farm towns, it had been smooth sailing. Then they must have crossed a county line or something, because all of a sudden, the quality of the pavement had gone way down, highway markers had become less frequent, and there were more intersections without street signs than with. The endless ridges and valleys didn’t help at all. The way they wound along the rivers made it impossible for Prange to keep track of which direction they were going.

  Prange swore that for the past hour, they hadn’t driven a single straight mile. Before the Event, his GPS had been indispensable in the western parts of the state. Without one, without as much as a compass, his two vehicles had gotten themselves completely turned around more than once. They’d passed the same barn with its big advertisement for a local burger chain painted across one entire wall three times.

  The sun was getting high in the sky. He reached into the cab of the truck and grabbed the antique wind-up alarm clock—the only working timepiece anybody on his crew had—and saw that it was getting on toward ten. He was sure it had to be later than that, judging by how many circles they’d driven in, how many dead-end roads they’d gone down, and how many lazy lanes had turned out to not be the highway that was supposed to bring them into Bowman.

  “All right. Let’s try the left fork this time,” Prange said, scowling at the map. As he was trying to fold it back up, he saw the copyright date on it: 1998. Prange wondered if it were even possible to buy paper maps anymore. Even though he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen one in a gas station, he made a mental note to check the next station they came across.

  “I don’t think it’s an accident we’re not seeing many signs out here, boss,” Hank Carter said from the ditch where he’d been taking a leak. Carter was Prange’s right-hand man, a hard ex-cop who had started his career dirty before resigning from the force to go all in with the cartel.

  “How so?” Prange asked.

  Carter beckoned with a wave. “Never would have noticed it if I hadn’t just about twisted my ankle stepping in it.”

  Prange tossed the half-folded map into the passenger seat of his truck and walked over. The two men side by side made quite a contrast. Prange was a little chubby, his dark hair thin and rapidly balding, skin looking dried out and blotchy from years under the desert sun. Carter had the physique of a bodybuilder who had no concept of leg day. He sported a shaved head, had no neck, broad shoulders, thick arms, and a barrel chest that tapered down to a lean waist and legs that looked scrawny compared to the rest of his body.

  Prange thought they looked perfect for the roles they were playing: state bureaucrat and National Guard Infantry officer. “What’ve you got?” he asked.

  Carter pointed at his feet. There was a hole right between them, narrow, straight sided, and deep. “I think somebody’s been out pulling up the road signs.”

  “Well, I feel a little less stupid now,” Prange said, kicking at the gravel shoulder of the road. “Gotta admit, it’s a pretty smart idea.”

  “It’s had us driving circles around our own dicks.”

  “At least we know.”

  “Yeah,” Carter said. “There’s folks around here that put some thought and preparation into something like this. Best keep that in mind.”

  That made Prange suddenly conscious of how long he’d been standing still at an intersection surrounded by cleared land. He could feel a paranoia that he didn’t really need welling up inside of him. “Those kinds of folks tend to live off grid. I suspect this next town we’re going to will be more like that last.”

  “I hope so,” Carter said, with a leer. Prange knew his sidekick had spent the night before the same way he had. The thought of the product they were carrying reminded him to take a look around at the rest of his people. He’d always been real strict that his meth cooks and couriers stay off the stuff. With the way things had gotten weird, he had to make damn sure that nobody on his crew was tempted to cope by dipping into the goods. He couldn’t afford to have any of them going down that road.

  “Let’s mount up,” Prange said. “Left fork, take it a little slower this time, easier at the intersections. We need to stop bumbling around out here.”

  “What’s the right response to that?” Carter shouted. Prange had to admit that he had slipped right into his role.

  In response, he got a disjointed chorus of “Yes, sir.”

  “C’mon. Like you me
an it. Like you’ve had it drilled into your empty little heads, you dumbasses.”

  A couple of veterans led off with a more spirited, “Yes, sir!” The rest managed to follow suit.

  “Once more,” Carter said.

  The response that time almost sounded right. Prange shook his head. If they were going to pull off the charade, the ones that had never served needed to be paying a lot more attention to the ones that had. And the ones that had really needed to get back into the swing of things. He got it that the three former servicemen in his crew had chosen a very different life, but he knew all of them had spent enough time in the military to have picked up the discipline and the bearing, and they really needed to step up and model it for the other guys.

  As he climbed up into the truck, his doubts that they’d be able to keep the act up resurfaced. It was a bold plan that his bosses had come up with, to play at being legit long enough to really get themselves established in towns and figure out who was corruptible and who needed to be eliminated. If they pulled it off, they’d have as much control over the communities in their northwoods territory as they’d built up in northern Mexico. There’d be no way to tell where government ended and cartel began.

  If they pulled it off…Prange’s part was the hard one, being able to convince people he was a legitimate government bureaucrat. He’d been developing his persona and polishing his schtick as much as he could, but the distraction of riding herd on his shitbirds that were supposed to look like soldiers seemed to get in the way too often.

  A half hour later, Prange was snapped out of mentally rehearsing his opening speech by the vehicle behind his blaring its horn. “I think we’re lost again, sir,” his driver said.

  Prange pointed to a driveway on a narrow, curvy road. “Pull in here.”

  His driver swung the truck up the steep driveway. To Prange’s ire, the second truck followed right on their tail. He leaned out the window. “Back up. Don’t follow us. We need to turn around,” he yelled.

  “I can’t get this thing backed up out of here,” the driver of the second truck said.

  “Then just stop moving already.” Prange hopped out of his truck while it was still moving and stomped up to the following vehicle. “We must’ve taken the wrong fork again. Get this thing backed up.”

  The driver looked into his side mirror. “Can’t see shit.”

  “Somebody get out and guide us back,” Carter yelled through the small window in the canvas panel that separated the cab from the bed.

  “Get it to the road and back it up the hill,” Prange said.

  “Hey. There’s a good turnaround up top, big enough for both of us,” his own driver called back.

  “Hold on,” Prange told Carter’s driver before jogging up to his own vehicle. He caught sight of a cabin. It looked like the typical summer getaways he’d seen all over the state: small, lightly built, with a nice porch and in need of a good paint job. “Stop!” he shouted to the driver, ducking behind the rear of the truck.

  “What’s going on?” one of his men asked from the bed of the truck.

  “I need all of you to get down here and get your rifles on that cabin in front of us. We have no idea if anybody’s in it, but if it’s occupied, they certainly know we’re here.”

  “Got it,” the man said, hopping down.

  “Listen,” Prange said, grabbing him by the front of his shirt. “From here on, every time you fail to call me ‘Sir,’ I’m going to punch you in the mouth. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Same for the rest of you.”

  Prange waited until his men had set themselves up, covering the cabin. Carter and the men from his truck started filling in from behind.

  “State of Wisconsin Emergency Management. Anybody home?” Prange called out.

  “We need to bug out quick, ain’t gonna happen,” Carter whispered beside him.

  “I don’t think this shack can hold enough people to drive us off. Between the vets and the real hard ones, I’m not worried.” While most of the men on his crew were meth cooks or couriers, he did have two of his reliable “troubleshooters” with him. The ones that he relied on to shoot trouble, or at least give it a real good roughing up.

  “Well, something to consider for next time we swing up a drive.”

  “This is Daniel Prange, State of Wisconsin Emergency Management. We are conducting a survey of occupied properties in the area. Is anybody home?” he shouted again. Then he leaned close to Carter. “I know. We stepped in it on this one. So, we deal and do it right next time.”

  “If anybody is home, we are going to send somebody to the door. Do not threaten them in any way,” Prange called out. He pointed to one of his vets and one of his enforcers. The two stepped out from cover and approached the cabin. Prange didn’t realize he’d been holding his breath in until they made it to the front door without any bullets flying out at them.

  One knocked hard on the door; the other glanced in the window. They exchanged a few words with each other quietly, both looked in the window, then they conferred again.

  “What?” Carter asked.

  “Been a fight in here,” one of the men said. “Place is a mess, at least one dead on the floor.”

  “Anything else moving in there?” Prange asked.

  “Nothing.”

  Prange slowly came out from the cover of the truck. “Anything moves in there, light the place up,” he said to one of the men as he passed. He repeated his name and cover story again as he approached the cabin.

  The first thing he noticed as he got to the front porch was a distinctive stink coming from inside, despite the closed windows. He took a closer look inside. His guys were right. The place had been tossed and there was one dead body draped over a couch that had been pulled back from the wall. A little more peeping in from outside and he saw the feet of a second body sticking out from behind it.

  “Open it up,” Prange said. The door swung open as soon as one of the men touched the knob, showing that it had already been forced recently. The stink of death immediately got stronger, but not quite overwhelming. Still, he took his handkerchief out of his pocket and put it over his nose. “Go on,” he said as his two guys just stood there watching the door swing open. They pulled their t-shirts up over their noses and cautiously stepped inside.

  There were spent shotgun shells on the ground, but he didn’t see any shell casings. There were at least a dozen scars on the walls, all clearly from shot. The cabinets and drawers were all open, and Prange noticed there was no food left in the place. A couple duffle bags were in the bedroom. Most of the clothing around was camouflaged, and there was fishing tackle in the living room.

  “Assuming standard hunting pieces and not tactical shotguns or any sort of aftermarkets, it was at least three on two,” Carter said, startling Prange, who still wasn’t used to how quietly such a bulky man could move. “Probably a couple groups of hunters that came up on each other. The home team had twenty-gauge pieces, the away team had twelves. One of the visitors took a good hit, and they’ve got somebody that knows at least the basics on fixing bad boo-boos.”

  “A few days?” Prange asked, turning around. He noticed that Carter seemed oblivious to the smell in the place.

  “Probably. Wouldn’t be so bad, but it’s been pretty warm and humid, and the place has been shut up.”

  “Well, unless you can think of any good reason to stay, let’s get back on the road.”

  “Nah,” Carter said. “I had a pretty good breakfast. Should hold me ’til lunch.”

  Prange shook his head. He knew Carter was pretty nonchalant about death, considering the kinds of work he’d done. Too often, he went over the top with it.

  3

  With Frank Miller and his brother, Jerry, both having surrendered peacefully, Tom Grossman felt simultaneously relieved and more exhausted than he’d ever been in his life. Since the violence at the Dollar King the night before, he’d been running on pure adrenaline. Not only had he found himse
lf in a live firefight for the first time since Iraq in 1991, he also felt the stability of the town itself starting to rapidly spin out of his grasp. It was something he’d never imagined he’d have to deal with when he ran for mayor of his old hometown after leaving the Army.

  The pain in his bad knee was almost immobilizing after the abuse he’d given it since the Event. He wanted nothing more than to just sit down for a long time, but with everything that had happened over the past sixteen hours or so, he knew he had to walk tall while the two main troublemakers were arrested and walked to the town hall.

  Every so often, he’d catch people talking about the first thing they were going to do once the power came back on. Throw a case or twenty of beer into the fridge, binge whatever series the Event had interrupted, a solid month with their video game of choice, and so on. For Tom, it would be to finally buy one of those mobility scooters he’d been putting off for at least a year and never walk another step in his life.

  It was only four blocks from Frank Miller’s house to the town hall. As he walked steadily beside Ed Schuster, Bowman’s police chief, he was glad the Army had taught him to march steady and placid. Drawing on that old discipline was what kept him putting one foot in front of the other, hiding most of the agony from his face. Of course, as much as the Army had given, it had also taken away. If his driver hadn’t rolled his tank into a ravine, Grossman wouldn’t have suffered the career-ending injury he was trying to fight through in the first place.

  Most of the faces he passed looked on with a mixture of guilt, relief, and a little bit of approval. Bowman was a good town, a neighborly town. It was the kind of place that thought it would react to a catastrophe in a civilized way, everybody pulling together when the going got tough. Having a food riot devolve into a shootout was something they had all assumed other towns would do, not theirs. Grossman dared hope that the previous day’s events were out of character enough that everybody would reset and reorient themselves toward their better natures.