“It gets better,” Larry said, sliding one of the pages over.
It was a sketched map of the town, showing the patrol schedules and where guards were posted. “Good thing we aborted instead of trying to make it to your house the other night,” Peter said. According to the information right in front of him, Larry’s street had patrol walking it all night long. Looking at the sketch, Peter could see why—it was one of the easiest places to get into town without approaching on the highway.
“So, there’s a few things Tom didn’t put in writing,” Thorssen said. “They were passed on directly to me, to give to you guys. First is to bring red cloth with you any time you’re near town. If it looks like things are getting hot, tie one to your right arm, one to your left ankle. That’s the sign that you’re on the mayor’s side.”
“Got it,” Peter said.
“There’s also sign and countersign. I’m assuming your dad at least knows what that means?”
The mention of his father caused Peter’s breath to catch in his throat. The fact that he was, yet again, hiding his father’s death from someone felt like a twist of a knife in his guts.
“We’re using them up here ourselves,” Larry said.
“Good.” Thorssen asked for a pencil. He drew a quick chart on a fresh piece of paper.
“Different for morning and night, odd days and even?” Chuck asked, frowning.
“I know it looks confusing, but there’s a logical pattern. Here,” Thorssen said. He pointed out that there was a simple system to how the code words were paired up. “Easy enough that I’m able to remember it along with the rest of the stuff they wanted you to know but didn’t want to write down.”
Peter looked at the chart and realized that it was weirdly intuitive.
“Final thing, before I go. I’m headed back to hide out in town,” Thorssen said. “Mayor knows he’s got to move on Prange soon. They’re just now recovering from getting their asses kicked a couple days ago, and they haven’t gotten a single loaf of bread or can of beans into town since they took over. Everybody knows that the food they seized is going to run out within the next couple of days, and nobody believes them that the relief convoys are going to show up any minute now. I could see the handwriting myself from lockup. When things get desperate, Prange’s crew is going to get real nasty, real fast. Mayor wants people ready to either resist or strike first.”
“I understand,” Peter said. Beside him, he could feel Chuck starting to fidget.
“If he decides to strike first,” Thorssen said, “it’ll be at six in the evening of whatever day he picks. If you’re in to take the town back, be somewhere you can see or hear it every day at six. I don’t know what he’ll do if he needs to get more info out to you.”
Peter looked at his watch. It was quarter to eleven. They had a little more than six hours to decide if they were going to throw in with Grossman, and if so, to prepare and get themselves into position to see if things were going to happen that day or not.
Nancy caught Peter’s eye from the kitchen. He was sure that she wouldn’t be in favor of him going down into the valley, actively seeking out a fight. To be honest, he wasn’t sure himself if he was up for it. The need to protect his own home and family was warring with a need to take care of the larger community he’d grown up in. His gut couldn’t tell him one way or the other which was right and which was wrong.
“This is a lot for us all to take in,” Peter said.
“No. I’m in, all the way,” Chuck said.
Peter looked around the table quick to see how everyone else reacted. They all were looking at him, apparently waiting to see what he would say. “We understand. If we decide to stay, we’ll send you down with a rifle and ammunition.”
“I’d really like it if we all went down together,” Chuck said.
Peter nodded. “Here’s what I propose. This is a lot for the rest of us to think about. For us, family is all up here on this land. So, let me go talk to the folks on duty right now, let them know what’s going on. Lunch is at noon. Let’s take the time until then to each think it over individually, then we’ll discuss it around the table.”
18
“Boss. Hey, boss man. Wake up.”
“Call me ‘sir,’ dumbass,” Prange said. If he could remember that detail while being awakened at the crack of dawn, whoever was hauling him out of bed should, too.
“We just did a headcount, and Thorssen’s gone, sir,” the man said.
“What?” Prange popped right up out of his bed.
“We’re letting Carter know, too, and put some people out looking for him already.”
Prange did not want to be hauled out of bed with that kind of news. “How?”
“Looks like somebody cut the lock on the window.”
“There should be a guard on the backside of this building specifically so shit like that doesn’t happen,” Prange snarled. “Bring me everybody who was supposed to be at that post last night, and everybody who was supposed to be doing headcount.” He looked at his alarm clock. It was a little after five thirty. Headcount was supposed to be done when the guards changed over at the top of the odd-numbered hours. That meant that his guys had either jerked around for a while after finding Thorssen was missing at five, or they had done it late.
He quickly ducked into the bathroom to rinse his mouth a bit and look in the mirror to see how the wounds on the side of his head looked. Neither task accomplished much, but it gave him a little bit of time to keep his hands busy while he thought about what to do next. As he stepped out of the bathroom, Carter’s voice came booming down the hallway from the gym. He’d obviously given the same instructions about seeing the men that should have been on guard duty the night before.
The echoing fury of his partner’s rage slowed Prange’s steps. It wasn’t often that he’d seen Carter with his temper truly up. While it was loud, it was also controlled and focused directly on whatever was upsetting him. That didn’t mean that Prange liked being around to witness it.
With two of his men dead already and one likely to go soon now that Thorssen was gone, he just hoped that Carter would refrain from shooting the responsible party in the head. When he finally made it to the gym, there were seven soldiers in a terrified-looking knot, and one more standing with his face to a wall, hands and legs spread.
Carter paced, hand on the pistol at his belt. “What do you propose we do about this one, sir? The prisoner slipped out the back window right under his nose.”
“We can’t afford to make a proper example out of him,” Prange said. “Which one of you knobs was supposed to do the five o’clock headcount?”
One of the men in the little knot sheepishly raised his hand.
“You do it at five like you were supposed to?”
“No, sir,” he said. Prange and Carter both fixed him with hard stares. “I grabbed a cup of coffee and a smoke first.”
“So you gave Thorssen, what—fifteen, twenty extra minutes head start on us?” Carter yelled.
“About that.”
“Come here. Both of you,” Prange said to the two in trouble. He zip cuffed each of them and forced them down to their knees. He gestured to take in the two cuffed men as well as the others that had been on guard the night before. “All of you are on duty for the next twenty-four hours hunting Thorssen. You get water only. No food, no coffee, no smokes, no sleep. All because of these two shitbags falling down on the job.” He looked at the six soldiers pulling extra duty on account of the two cuffed men. “You’ve got five minutes to tell these guys how you feel about that. Everybody else, let’s clear the room.”
“We’ve got a couple kids that took the initiative to start the search,” Carter said, out in the hallway.
“I heard. I’m going to put you in charge of the search. Don’t waste more than a couple hours on it, though. He’s got too many friends in this town. He’s either hidden real well or a few miles away by now. Find shit jobs for these guys to fill the rest of the time,” Pran
ge said, tapping the gym door.
“Think it’s wise to have them on for a full twenty-four? We’re short-handed enough as it is, without half our guys being completely burnt out by this time tomorrow.”
“You’re forgetting we’ve got a few kilos of meth?” Prange asked.
“Not at all. But these are the guys we’ve always trusted to stay off the product,” Carter reminded him.
“A couple hits to keep them moving won’t hook ’em. You know how much is just enough for a quick pick ’em up.”
“All right,” Carter said.
“By the way, let’s run the search for Thorssen without the help of the local cops. I don’t trust any of them not to steer us clear if they know where he’s hid out.”
“Think he might still be in town?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me. He doesn’t seem like the kind that would abandon people he cares about.” Prange thought about his own badly wounded soldier that Thorssen had been tending in his cell. “Hell. He has no reason to care about Seth, but it wouldn’t surprise me if we found him sneaking back in here a few times a day to take care of him.”
“Why not just do a house-by-house, then?” Carter asked.
“Same reason we haven’t done it to relieve these people of their guns. Half the people here hunt, more than half keep a piece or three on hand for self-defense. Places like this, people may tolerate controls on public spaces that they don’t like, but you don’t mess with their homes. We start doing anything that has us searching every house, I guarantee people would start shooting at us the second we stepped on their property before we got halfway down the first block.”
Carter touched the doorknob to the gym. “Think they’ve had enough?”
“Yeah. Put ’em to work.”
Prange walked down the hall to the cafeteria, where weak coffee and a disappointingly light breakfast were already set out. Over his small bowl of oatmeal and canned fruit cocktail, he looked at the task list he’d been carrying with him. Prior to the Event, he never would have kept anything like that on paper. It was the kind of evidence a prosecutor would love to get his hands on.
Over the past few days, the number of things he needed to keep track of had become overwhelming. Keeping a running tab of to-dos and notes on paper had gone from a risk to a necessity.
The most prominent entry on the list hadn’t changed since he’d started keeping it: Find Tom Grossman. The next most important item was securing the immediate area. That meant locating and eliminating any armed groups within a mile or so radius of town. His first foray into that had, unfortunately, been a stunning failure. The pain in the side of his face was a stark reminder of that little adventure. The Meier property, that he’d heard about from Jerry Grossman and his friend, seemed to be another such place that would have to be dealt with.
There was a new entry to add that morning. “Where should I put you, Thorssen?” Prange asked, hovering his pencil over the paper. The man was popular in town, more respected than the mayor and police chief combined. Nobody had anything bad to say about the guy.
He didn’t seem like he should be a problem in many ways. As far as Prange could tell, he had no interest in leading any sort of resistance or rebellion. Watching the care he’d given to one of his own men, Prange wouldn’t confuse him with a conscientious objector of any stripe, but also couldn’t see him leading anybody into a fight.
If he weren’t so firmly in the mayor’s camp, Prange would have written him off as a minor annoyance to be dealt with as a target of opportunity. His close friendship with Grossman combined with the respect he held made him more important. He might not be willing to rally people to fight, but his support of the mayor could be seen by many as an endorsement.
The one thing that Prange felt was to his advantage in dealing with the Thorssen issue was that he stood out like a giant sore thumb. If he were still in town, he couldn’t step outdoors without being spotted immediately.
Staring at his list wasn’t getting him anywhere. There were items on it that could be dealt with easily enough if he just got around to doing them. The first of which was decide which of the bar owners to let out of detention. Locking down all the watering holes hadn’t made him any friends. Letting one open again might swing a little bit of goodwill his way. Especially if he could figure out which one had the clientele that was most aligned with the brand of law and order he was bringing to the town.
He went to the office he and Carter had taken over and requested that the bar owners be brought in, one by one, so he could talk to them. Each conversation started the same, with profuse apology for having shut down their businesses and locked them up for a few days. He decided to shuffle all the blame onto Carter, claiming his captain had gone way more aggressive than he would have opted for himself. It was a bit of good cop/bad cop, with the bad cop not even being in the room.
The fact was that the bars had been the most honest businesses in town. Like a lot of little towns, each one had its regulars, and their customers had all self-selected for companionship with each other and the proprietor. With so many options in town, nobody was going to drink someplace they didn’t feel at home. The owners had decided to both informally ration out their drinks and mostly work on credit or the exchange of food or other goods.
While he was talking to the owners to feel out who should be allowed to open back up first, he was also feeling them out for his other business venture. People used to peddling one vice might be amenable to distributing another. He had to tread very carefully, though. A lot of rural barkeeps were actively hostile to the kind of product the cartel traded in. The crazy drinking culture was one of the other things Prange hated about Wisconsin. Booze was some combination of sacrament and Constitutional right, and people up there felt nobody had any reason to look to any other substance to get hooked on.
Just before lunch, Prange had decided which place he’d allow to open back up for the evening. He arranged to let the owners out, and even woke up a couple of his off-shift guys to go over and pull down the boards they’d sealed the places up with. He was starting to feel like he was slightly salvaging the day, until he sat down in the cafeteria and saw just how much plate he could see around his portions of food.
Since the first messenger from Black River Falls, he’d only had one other come through. The news from the bigger bosses there was that they had gotten themselves in deep and were ready to start operations. They had access to food and fuel, but vehicles were still in extremely short supply and were mostly being used to deal with more urgent matters to the east.
Prange’s patience with the glacial pace of progress on getting goods flowing his way was wearing extremely thin. The entire point of embedding themselves into local governments was to set up a black-market trade and distribution network. Prange was holding up his end of the plan, and his bosses were leaving him hanging. He really didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to keep control if he didn’t start putting food in bellies. It was at a point where it wasn’t even worth it to think about how to turn a profit from it. He desperately needed to show people he could get the job done, or they’d throw him off. If they did that, the cartel would never be able to pull the town under their control.
He overheard somebody talking about how worried she was that somebody was going to raid her garden. When asked why she didn’t go ahead and harvest herself, the woman said that most of her vegetables weren’t ripe yet, or were just good enough to pick, but not at the peak of their quality or yield. It got Prange thinking about how many farm fields he’d passed coming into town. He also had a lot of people locked up in the basement of the town hall and the school building doing nothing but eating food and shitting it back out.
His first choice would have been to run them up the highway to Black River and dump them there. The situation in town didn’t lend itself to freeing up the trucks and men to make the trip. Second would have been to get the biggest problems he had in detention and run them just far enough out of town that
nobody would hear the gunshots. Maybe there was a third option for those people.
Prange quickly finished his lunch and went over to the town hall to talk to Schuster. Since the actual takeover of the town, he’d been sidelining the local cops. If there were local police partnering up with his faux soldiers, he made sure they were outnumbered and didn’t do any work that brought them close to the more “sensitive” cargo he’d brought into town. Prange also made sure it was only his own men guarding prisoners now. He didn’t trust any of the locals to put loyalty to his “government” over their family and neighbors if it came down to it.
Giving Schuster’s force something to do with direct benefit to the town and keeping them away from his own troops seemed like a great idea.
“Afternoon, Chief,” Prange said, stepping into Schuster’s office. As usual, there was a pile of papers on his desk.
Schuster looked up but didn’t say anything. The more his men had been shuffled aside, the chillier he had become.
Prange stepped closer. “I’ve got some work for your deputies. Important stuff.”
“You found a stack of toothbrushes and noticed the undersides of the toilet seats aren’t as shiny as you’d like?”
“Let’s take a walk,” Prange said. “Just you and me. I know Carter’s been cutting you out lately. I want to bring you back in.”
Schuster looked dubious but got up from his seat. Prange led him out the back door of the town hall toward the edge of town.
“As you’ve noticed,” Prange started, “my superiors are coming up short in getting resources out here.”
The police chief nodded.
Prange turned a corner. “We’re feeding a lot of people that were willing to just let your town starve. I’m thinking there’s got to be something productive we can do with them. I noticed there are plenty of wheelbarrows and garden tools at your hardware store still. There are also a lot of crops that are just going to rot within a couple of weeks if they’re not brought in.”
Age of Survival Series | Book 2 | Age of Panic Page 16