“Tell you what, Frank. I’ll meet you in a bit. After being cooped up for so long, I think I could use a good walk on my own for a bit.”
“I hear you. Think I may do the same. You know where the key is if you get back to the house before me.” Miller nodded and crossed the street.
Jerry stood in the road for a minute, just taking in everything he was seeing. While the town’s drinking establishments looked to be all shut down, there were a few people outside the little mom-and-pop market. They were in an orderly line, with two armed soldiers watching them. Each of the people in line held a piece of paper. One had a pen out and was writing on hers.
While he watched, somebody came out of the market, carrying two bags, neither of which looked full. The next person in line stepped in. The larger grocery store was down two blocks and around the corner. Curious, Jerry started walking that way.
As he passed the school, he got a couple of hard looks from the people standing around out front. Nobody said anything or moved toward him, but it was clear he was not welcome to come up and have a chat. The cold shoulder there wasn’t particularly surprising. His brother had always been generous with the school in the town budget and made sure to be present and visible at every athletic or scholastic competition.
At the end of the block, a few people were standing around a pile of split firewood. One of them hailed him.
“Did they get tired of you and kick you out?” the man asked, extending his hand as Jerry walked up.
“You know it. How’s business?”
“Slow for now. I think we’ll hit our first cold snap next week, and I won’t be able to beat the customers off with a stick.”
Jerry bent over and grabbed a foot-long section of branch. “Not if you cut them all down this far.” He noticed a hand-lettered sign advertising the wood as five dollars per wheelbarrow. “That guy from the state running your business for you?”
“No. He and Berkman came by the first day after they laid down the law. Berkie told them this is the same price I offered up before the Event, so he thanked me for being a stand-up guy or something and went on his way.”
“What are you doing about folks without cash?”
“Barter, but I’m keeping it fair. Only trading for stuff we can actually use. If folks don’t have that, I take it out of them in labor, hauling the split wood into town for me. Ten bucks an hour.”
Jerry considered the deal his old friend was offering. A wheelbarrow full of wood stoked into a good stove and managed properly could kick out heat for several hours. “What do you think of that guy from the state, anyway?”
“His guys were a bit rough about getting the shops under control, but he got the job done. Way I figure, if people didn’t want to get hauled in for being crooks, they shouldn’t have been crooks in the first place.”
After a little more small talk, Jerry continued his walk. The next corner he came to was the cross street Dollar King had been on. He imagined he could still smell a bit of smoke wafting up the way, even after the heavy rain a couple days earlier. Curious, he decided to take a walk down and check it out.
Somehow, the burnt-out shell of the building looked bigger than it had while it was in business. The cavernous, empty space inside the brick façade, littered with twisted and blackened shelving, was a testament to how much had been lost in the fire. Jerry figured that even at the stupidly criminal prices they’d been charging, the inventory must have been dwindling by the time the place went up in flames, but there had to have been quite a bit left if Pat Neustadt and her guards had fought so hard to keep it.
There were two places in the parking lot where some fresh-picked wildflowers were laid out. Jerry knew that two had died on site, and that a couple more hadn’t survived their wounds. The bundles of flowers, slowly rocking in the light wind, seemed to be shaking their heads disapprovingly at him. He and Miller and the others that had put the bug into people’s ears to come on down and make a lot of noise and ruckus had started a chain of events that had led to people dying on the spots of old cracked asphalt marked by those flowers.
Jerry looked around. Nobody else was nearby. Nobody was around to either exonerate him or vilify him for whatever role he’d taken. The only judgement he faced was in the random movement of dead plants in the wind.
Besides, he thought to himself, he and his friends hadn’t started anything. Their getting people out to Dollar King was only one link in a long chain of events. If his brother had taken charge as soon as it was clear something was wrong, they wouldn’t have had to get together to make some noise. If Neustadt had just stepped up and done the right thing and found a fair way to conduct business under the circumstances, Tom Grossman could have just limped on by, letting the town run itself like he always had. “Nah,” Jerry said to himself. “This ain’t on me.” He put his hands in his pockets and turned away from the charred husk of the store.
In the distance, he heard the grumbling diesel of one of the Army trucks coming from the west. Curious to see what they might have been up to, he made a quick walk toward the town hall. The vehicle was coming in hot, tearing down the road fast. From the distance, he couldn’t be positive, but it looked like all the glass in the cab was gone.
The speed at which it was approaching seemed to alert the soldiers on guard around the other truck. When the driver laid on the horn, they all got to their feet and stood at the ready while it took the last corner and came to a screeching halt.
As Jerry got closer, he could confirm that the windshield had been shattered—most likely shot out, judging by the bullet holes pitting the rest of the cab.
“Clear the rubberneckers out!” Prange shouted from the cab of the truck. A wad of bandages was wrapped tight to the left side of his head, and his shirt was stained with blood. “You…You…Get rid of the audience.” Four men hopped to and started shouting at townsfolk to move on. “You guys. Help with the ones in back. Get them to Thorssen’s cell.”
One of the soldiers pointed right at Jerry. “I said get the hell out of here. Go!”
Jerry looked about quickly, for some place he could watch from. Too many others had the same idea, and he wasn’t sure which might be friendly enough to share a spot with him and which weren’t. He decided to take a walk to Frank Miller’s and see if he could get more information later.
17
Peter and Nancy were in the house’s office, surrounded by stacks of papers. While the piles were somewhat daunting, Peter was glad his father had had the foresight to print out a lot of his online research. If only he’d developed some sort of filing or classification system.
“Hey, Mom. I think I found something,” Peter said.
Nancy looked up from the stack of paper she was looking through. “What have you got?”
Peter handed her a printout of a thread from an online forum called Flyover Survivors. “This pic here.” He pointed to an avatar underneath the handle Driftless3. “I saw this one all the time when he was online. But here’s what’s even better.” Peter tapped one of the replies.
Nancy read it out loud. “‘Haha! So you’re the one that snatched up those lead aprons at the auction. Wish I’d known it was somebody I’d been chatting with here. Hope we get a chance to meet formally soon.’”
“Do you think this could be the guy that left us the message a few days ago?”
“I’m not up on old jet fighters, but check his user pic. The guy did say he was an old Sabre pilot.” Peter stood up and stretched out. After several days of especially hard physical work, between more work camouflaging the old driveway, setting up the back entrance from the property through the neighboring soybean field, and improving their defensive positions around the house, he had initially been looking forward to spending a cool, blustery day in the house’s office reading through his father’s notes and books on survivalism. Three hours in, though, and his body was aching to get up and move around.
“How about if I write up our reply,” Nancy said. “It looks like you�
��re getting antsy.”
“Please.”
Peter grabbed a jacket and went outside. It had been four days since the Army truck had come up their road while they were hiding Chuck Larson’s go-kart. While he was relieved that the truck hadn’t come back, it also bothered him. There was no reason to believe that the military didn’t know they were up there, not with the mayor’s brother in town.
Chuck was also a constant source of low-grade stress for Peter. It was very clear that he wanted to get his parents out of detention and was willing to be patient and accept the fact that they needed to move carefully if they were going to pull it off without anybody getting killed. Since the initial run Larry, Peter, and Chuck had made to scout out the town from the vantage point of Barker Road, they’d made two more trips to have a look in. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much they could tell from spying on the town from an overlooking hill. They could see steady traffic of patrols through the streets, guards still posted near the wing of the school they assumed had been converted to a jail, people still going about their business.
What they really needed was actual information from somebody living in town. They needed to know how people felt about the presence of troops, how they felt about Martial Law apparently being laid down, how the people in detention were being treated, how stable things felt.
Every time Peter thought about it, he felt terribly overwhelmed. He tried to quantify his situation by thinking of his role in ways that his father or Mayor Grossman might have. Right after the Event, after his father had died, he felt like he’d suddenly been promoted from Private to Corporal, because there was nobody else to step into that minor role. When they brought the Williamses and Roths up initially, it was a step up to Sergeant. People were deferring to him, and he pretty much supervised them. Whoever was in command was temporarily absent, so it fell to Peter to just make sure the day-to-day tasks were done.
After Jerry Grossman’s two friends made their nighttime raid on the homestead, Peter felt like he’d gotten a field commission to Lieutenant, and he had to actually command his platoon. The raid had exposed weaknesses that needed to be addressed, and everybody had deferred to him again.
When it came to figuring out what to do about getting Chuck’s parents out of detention in Bowman, Peter felt like he was taking another step higher up the ranks. Now he was having to collect and analyze information at a higher level, think about things even more in depth, provide an even greater degree of leadership. He wondered if he was now needing to think of himself as Captain of a company of seven troops, or if he was stretching the metaphor too far. Maybe he needed to think of himself more as a team leader working some sort of unconventional warfare mission, getting in behind enemy lines to cause a disproportionate level of disruption.
Peter shook his head. He wondered if his father would have found that whole thought process ridiculous and counterproductive. He hoped not. As he looked around himself, seeing the work that the small band at the homestead had accomplished, the fact that they were still up there all alive, uninjured, and still healthy and fed, he wanted to think his father would have been proud of him.
Bill Roth interrupted his thoughts, jogging toward him. “Hey, Peter. You’re not going to believe this. Mark Thorssen is walking up the road.”
Peter had no idea how to even start parsing that. He could think of no good reason why the town fire and ambulance chief would be taking a casual stroll up toward the property. “Okay. Let me get someone to cover you on patrol, and we’ll try to intercept him at the old egress point.”
Fortunately, Irene was also outside, and had heard Bill. “I’ll cover,” she said. “You guys go.”
Peter led the way, down into the woods and up the draw to the road. Sure enough, there was a guy there closer to seven feet tall than six, and two grown men could hide behind him. Throw in the bright red hair and beard, and there was only one person it could be. “Mark!” Peter called.
“I am so glad to see you guys.” As Thorssen turned, Peter was taken aback at how clearly out of sorts he was. It was written large across his face, and the slope of his shoulders was clearly the weight of stress, not fatigue from the walk up from town. “Do you have any idea what’s happened in town lately?”
Bill was the first to speak up. “Just that the military took over, seized all the businesses, arrested some folks, and locked the place down.”
“They’re not military. Organized crime or something. It’s bad and getting worse.”
“Let’s talk up at the house,” Peter said. “Bill, can you get hidden and keep watch, make sure he wasn’t followed up here?”
“Yeah,” Bill said. “Want me to hold tight for a half hour or so?”
“Sounds good.”
Just to be on the safe side, once they got off the road, Peter led Thorssen on a needlessly circuitous route that came up and around the back of the property. Bill peeled off along the route at a thicket on a spot of higher ground that gave him good visibility over a good part of the draw.
“You need some chow before we grill you?” Peter asked Thorssen as they came up to the house.
“Nah. I’ll talk first, eat later. Just get me some water.”
With Bill Roth watching the draw and Irene and Sally on patrol, Chuck, Larry, Nancy, and Peter gathered around the kitchen table with Thorssen. The big man took a drink of water and started to tell them what had happened. He was able to give a few more details about the day Prange and Carter had taken over to fill in what Chuck had already given them.
“They sent people out to grab Tom and me as well,” Thorssen said. “Somehow, he must have gotten wind of their plan and got himself hidden before they snatched him up. I was too busy to notice anything outside the firehouse, so they took me completely by surprise. They locked me up in the school building, but with a classroom to myself so I could essentially be their captive medic. Whenever somebody needed some care, they’d wheel them in on a gurney and one of the thugs would bring my medical equipment and hover over me while I worked.”
“Are my parents all right?” Chuck blurted out.
“Yeah. The people detaining them are assholes but seem to be too busy themselves to waste time going out of their way to be cruel. Rations are below subsistence but not starvation level. They’re supplying clean water, and now that they’ve got the whole east wing for detention, people aren’t dangerously crowded. Yesterday, they had me give everyone in detention a quick once-over. Your mom and dad are healthy and healing up from the beating they took when they got arrested.”
Peter looked over at Chuck. The news seemed to simultaneously calm and rile him up, as if just hearing that they were alive brought them back to the forefront of his mind. Hearing that they weren’t being fed well probably gave him a sense of urgency to get them out of the situation as well.
“How’d you get up here, then?” Nancy asked.
“Somebody busted me out, but there’s more I need to tell you first. Prange is lightly injured, and he lost some guys. I don’t know exactly how it all happened, but a few days ago, I heard one of the trucks pull out of town. It came back a bit over an hour later and they dropped two wounded guys on me. One wasn’t too bad off, gunshot wounds to an arm and a leg, but nothing life-threatening. The other took one to the chest.” Thorssen took a drink of water and looked down at the floor.
“And?” Chuck asked.
Thorssen held a hand up to silence him. He took another drink of water. “I don’t think he made it more than a few hours after I left. I was doing my best to keep him stable, but now that I’m here and not taking care of him…” He shook his head.
Peter felt the man’s pain. The best way to think of Thorssen was as a man who lived to save lives. Once, Peter had seen him the morning after he lost someone at a crash site, and it looked like the spirit had been sucked out of him. There was no telling how hard it would have been for him to abandon a patient who needed his direct care in order to save himself. He gestured to the rest of the people at
the table to give Thorssen as much time as he needed to recompose himself.
“Sorry about that,” the big man finally said. “Anyway, Prange and Carter had two KIA that morning, one critically wounded, one on crutches with an arm in a sling. It must have shifted things around enough in town that the mayor managed to smuggle a message in to me last night. Told me to be ready to go before dawn. Sure enough, about three thirty, two guys pop my window and I’m free. They got me out of town and into hiding and left me this.” He reached into a pocket and pulled out a few sheets of paper.
“All I had was the clothes on my back,” Thorssen continued, “so I decided to just sit tight until I got enough light to read it. It told me to come up here and bring this to you guys. I would have gotten here a lot sooner, but I opted to stay off the roads close to town and be real careful bushwhacking it. Took me a while to find a good place to cross Vasa Creek, then I got turned around, trying to find my way cross-country to your road.”
“No worries. You made it.” Peter looked at his watch. “As long as there’s nothing here asking us to do something by eleven, we’re good.”
“Now can I get some grub?”
“Sure thing,” Nancy said.
Peter took the papers and spread them out on the table so Chuck and Larry could read along with him.
There weren’t many details in the letter. Peter imagined the mayor left things as vague as possible in case it was intercepted. It did say that he’d managed to find a place to go to ground and a way to communicate with friends in town. The next section confirmed Thorssen’s suspicion that Prange and Carter were not state government and National Guard, more likely criminals of some sort. What followed was a list Grossman and his allies had managed to compile of the resources that were arrayed against them. It listed Schuster’s police forces as well as a count of Prange and Carter’s men, including any names and descriptions they’d caught, and the weapons they had available.
Peter looked up from the paper, barely able to believe what he was reading. He was looking at a lot of the information he had been wishing he had just a short time earlier. “This is great,” he said.
Age of Survival Series | Book 2 | Age of Panic Page 15