by Nova
Well, no one seemed to be in a hurry to put this fire out.
“What are you going to do about the equipment?” Night asked. I told her I had the keys and we would go back later for it. It would look a little suspicious otherwise. She agreed.
I left to go weed the garden about ten minutes later. Night had told me that she planned to unveil the new command center later that evening, and I could tell she was distracted.
It was easier to garden than it had been a few years ago. It was probably the same all over the East Coast. The deer were no longer the problem they used to be. Most of the four-legged poachers had ended up in a pot themselves. I would have to talk to Woof later about his job description. Part of it was going to act as deer and raccoon repellent.
Tommy had a pretty decent garden planted. He had planted a lot of bell peppers, eggplant, squash, and cukes. There were a couple watermelon plants that had expanded way past their allocated space, and some spicy peppers.
Too bad tomatoes had become such a rarity due to the blight. Many things I liked to eat used tomato-based sauces. Donna had Tommy plant a couple rows of medicinal herbs, none of which I had a clue about, although the coneflowers were pretty.
Whenever we cut up anything from the garden for food we had to make sure we didn’t eat the seeds. They had to be set aside and saved for next year.
Tommy told us when we first arrived how important it was to save the slippery little devils. His plants produced reusable seeds. Not all seeds were reusable. He told us how the government had begun to make sure that the agricultural states that were not collecting and remitting federal taxes would now receive only one-off-use seeds.
I started hoeing and went on autopilot. It was a lot like walking the trail, leaving just enough brain running with the little man to be aware of my environment while I went to mental idle.
After dinner, Night gathered us outside the trailer for the unveiling of her new command center. I didn’t know what to expect. I knew she had sent Tommy on several mystery missions. I was hoping they had involved hot oil and candles, but it looked like another dream of mine had been shattered. Such is life, I thought.
Before we could go in, Night gave a short speech.
“Welcome to our new command center. My hope is that from here we will all be able to understand what is going on around us and make informed decisions. Any suggestions you have to improve it will be appreciated.”
Then she shot me a nervous look. I could tell by the way she had rattled that off that she had practiced it more than a few times. She was excited to show off the center, but anxious, too. I just hoped it didn’t look too pathetic.
Once again I had underestimated her. It wasn’t NORAD, but it didn’t look like the set for a kid’s play either.
The maps were the main things that jumped out at you.
The woman had maps everywhere. They were stuck to the wall, and some of them were covered with plastic. She had three road maps: one to cover the northern Virginia area, one that covered our area, and one that extended into southern Ohio. She also had a map of the town and a topographical map of the local area.
In the corner was a small shortwave radio with a long copper wire that went out through the window. That had to be an antenna. She also had a laptop attached to a nineteeninch monitor and an old HP LaserJet 4 for printing.
Ninja lit up when he saw the computer. He rushed over and stood there, his hand caressing the keyboard. He was aching to get some computer time.
“You can use it, but”—Ninja looked at her, waiting for the rest, his face a study in apprehension and need—“you better not hog it.” Then she grinned at him, and he descended on it and was lost to us for the rest of the night.
Max took his time looking at the maps. He would nod his head and look thoughtful in front of each one. The town map really caught his eye. He stood in front of it for at least five minutes, the wheels in his mind obviously occupied with something. I liked the topographical map, even though I didn’t really understand it. The roads and houses were interesting. There were quite a few more houses scattered through the woods than I had expected.
Finally, Max stopped examining things. He stood over Ninja for a minute, watching whatever was on the screen, and then turned to Night.
“An outstanding job. This is going to be very beneficial. In fact, I think we should talk about an idea I have. We need to organize this town. Maybe even give it some real law enforcement. What do you think, Gardener?”
“Sure,” I said, simply. But inside I was thinking, Yippee! No more digging holes and pulling weeds.
We never had time anymore for meetings, at least the formal ones, which was fine with me. Dinnertime turned into the unofficial meeting time, especially after we’d eaten. We would all sit on the porch and enjoy the breeze, if there was one.
The kids would play in the yard. Usually they chased fireflies and put them in an old mason jar Donna had found in the basement. I always made them let the bugs go before they went inside to get ready for bed.
In theory they went to bed. In reality, they would usually sneak downstairs and listen to us talk. I tried to be careful with my language then. Sometimes I actually managed an entire conversation without an obscenity. It was difficult though.
Usually everyone would have something to contribute : the status of a project, fresh deer tracks they had seen, what was happening in the world as seen through the Internet or heard over the shortwave.
One thing we had all noticed was that traffic was almost nonexistent on the road. We knew things, but at the same time we didn’t. We were missing the information you normally picked up from conversations with people who kept their eyes and ears open when interacting with the bigger world outside our farm.
It had been two days since the fire and only once had anyone had come by to talk to us. Tommy had met them at the door and answered their questions. They were Virginia State Police and were curious if he had seen any strangers around. Tommy told us they figured that it was a robbery. Apparently a lot of that had been going around.
When he told us about it that night at dinner, Max’s only comment was, “That’s interesting.”
I had spent some time sitting in a chair on the second floor of the farmhouse, watching to see if anyone came around. People did. They poked around the McKinley house and, when it cooled down, found the bodies. That’s when the state troopers had come calling on us.
Afterward I watched as the black Ford truck and a couple of other vehicles were driven off. A different group arrived later and went through the outbuildings. They left the heavy equipment alone. Max had slipped over there at some point and done something to disable the engines, just to be on the safe side.
Our conversation that night was about the heavy equipment. Max outlined his vision, which was to build a berm around our farmhouse and outbuildings with a watch platform. That’s why we needed the heavy equipment : to push dirt.
“Max, I’m puzzled,” I said. “If we plan to move to Ohio, then why do all this work?” I looked around. I wasn’t the only one who was wondering this.
“Well, for the same reason we always keep a watch when we’re moving. Because we want to live long enough to get to where we are going. Hey, if we were Roman legionnaires, we’d be doing this every time we stopped for the night. If we have to go on the move again, you’ll be digging fighting positions.”
“Okay. What are we going to do with the heavy equipment when we’re done?” I asked because the idea of doing snow removal and road grading was not at all appealing.
“We’re going to give them to the town. It will remove any suspicion, and we’re going to need to score major points right from the start. We need this town, and they are going to learn that they need us.”
A few days later, Tommy, Max, and I went over to look at the heavy equipment and drive what we needed to our place. I didn’t know anything about heavy equipment, but I said I figured it couldn’t be that hard. Tommy laughed in my face.
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br /> “Gardener, you need to sit in the seat of one of them before you can say that. There is a big difference between knowing how to drive one of these babies and knowing how to work on-site with it. The good operators, they are artists at moving dirt.” I was willing to take Tommy at his word on that, especially as he was the only one of us with any experience.
He was happy. He had something he knew about and was good at. We walked around, and I listened to him rattle off numbers and names. I wasn’t really paying attention. He was right. There sure were a lot of levers and whatnot inside them things.
I looked at the various rigs and mentally called them by the names I had used as a kid. There were two scrapers, a dozer, and a digger. There was also a little one called a Bobcat and a couple of tractors. One of them had a lowslung metal thing that I had seen road crews use on grass: a bush hog.
The McKinleys also had an underground diesel fuel tank and a pump just like a gas station. Max saw that and said, “I really hope they topped that off not too long ago.”
He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and spread it out on an oil drum. It was a sketch of his plan to fortify our living area.
“I’m not really happy about this. We don’t have time to build a berm around the entire area. Hell, in some places we can’t. It just isn’t practical from the way the buildings are laid out and the number of people we have. We are going to have to put in motion detectors here and here,” he said, indicating spots on his sketch. “That is, if we can find them. I want to do a couple things. We can’t have the road running straight up to the farmhouse. We need a dogleg in it. I want to berm the front all the way from here to here. Regardless, we are going to have gaps by the outbuildings.”
Tommy was busy nodding his head and pointing at the design. “Yeah, that can be done. Maybe a short wall here and here. Dig the dirt out and push it up. It will go quicker.” Then they started talking about berms they had both known and loved in the ’Stan.
“Hey, guys. What are we defending against?” Nobody had clued me in on that. I figured it was because it was so obvious that everyone knew but me.
“I wish I knew for sure,” Max said, shaking his head. “What I want to do is make us look formidable enough that the drive-by types will move on. But I don’t want to go overboard and draw Fed attention. I want to make it difficult, if not impossible, for a swarm invasion.”
I think I knew what he was getting at but I wanted him to spell it out. “That would be . . .?”
“A crew with a couple of four-by-fours and ATVs racing in from different directions and taking us by surprise. I think that and a park-and-sneak-the-perimeter are the most likely scenarios. It depends on how crazy it gets.”
We stared at each other for a beat. Yeah, it could get crazy. It already had.
Max and Tommy talked for about ten more minutes and then Max slapped him on the shoulder. “I know you got it. We’ll be back in time for dinner at the latest.”
“We? You forget to tell me something?”
“Yeah. It’s time for us to go into town and introduce ourselves to the locals.”
We walked back to our farmhouse. Tommy stayed behind to get the dozer running and drive it over to the house.
Night had set up a chalkboard by the front door. Everyone was supposed to leave notes to each other. They were to include where we were. Sometimes I forgot. That made Night very unhappy with me, so now I tried to remember.
I waited for Max on the porch. Night had signed out to go to Donna’s house to pick up a sewing machine. She had taken the kids and the dog with her. I bet that was a fun trip. Hopefully Woof didn’t get carsick.
Max came downstairs. I heard him pause to read the board before he joined me. “I see you signed us out. That has to be a first,” he laughed. “You got what you need?”
“Yeah.” I got a flashback of walking the neighborhood around the motel with him. Going on patrol is what we called it. Damn, that seemed like a million years ago.
We took Tommy’s old truck. I let Max drive. He always wanted to drive. I didn’t mind. We had worked all this out a while ago. He drove and I ran the radio. Not a digital radio, either. Digital had really killed the quality of FM programming. There was not a lot to listen to out here. It was classic rock, praise Jesus, and country music, that was for sure. At least it was in English.
Max honked as we passed Tommy. I leaned out the window and flipped him off. He had the dozer on our property and was starting to scrape the ground.
“So, we got a plan, Max?”
“Yep. Go into town first and get a feel for it. You spent some time here. Got any suggestions?”
“Drive around, see what we can see. But we should go over to the diner for lunch. Anybody who is somebody—or wants to pretend to be somebody—will be there. We can order hamburgers and apple pie, and I can shoot a few people to get their attention.”
“Naw, wait a bit on the shooting part. We don’t know who we need yet.”
I thought about the girl I had met at the library for a few seconds and then quickly shut down that line of thought—nothing but trouble down that road. Even an idiot like me could figure that out. We passed a few vehicles. Max gave them the wave. They returned it.
I told him, “If you want to tour the residential areas, you need to make a left at the light. Then we can do downtown. Not much worth seeing on the outskirts, but we should do a drive-by just to take a look anyways.”
He nodded. “Anything like a machine shop or anything industrial out here?”
“I don’t think so. This was a dead town when I was here, and it already looks deader every minute we drive.”
The residential sections weren’t much. There was the good neighborhood, the not-so-good, and where the foreigners and blacks lived.
The good neighborhood covered all of three streets. There were a few brick houses, but most of them were frame, with fading paint. At least a third of the houses looked empty. The vandalism looked minor. Most of the places needed extensive yard work. No one was out on the street here. I caught a couple glimpses of people moving around their yards, and one person was actually sitting on the porch in plain view. I waved. He didn’t wave back.
The not-so-good area was a little livelier. A couple of kids playing. A woman hanging laundry out to dry. Two guys standing around an old but freshly washed BMW. Windows were open to let in the breeze, if and when it decided to arrive. I could hear music coming out of a few of them. There was a tired, sullen vibe in the air. It wouldn’t take much of a spark to create a fire. Domestic disturbances would be the primary call here, if there had been a police force.
The downtown was there in name and material only. A stab had been made at making it shiny again. We were still close to D.C. At the height of the boom, the waters of prosperity must have lapped close enough to here that the speculators and dreamers had hoped to make this a destination town—a Berkeley Springs or a Woodstock.
For a few months in 2005, it looked like it might actually happen. But it didn’t. Just like it didn’t in a lot of other little towns that had smoked the same brand of “hope-ium.” A lot of bed-and-breakfasts began dying in 2008. Their carcasses littered the landscape up and down the Eastern Seaboard.
The town still had a few open stores: a bar, a lottery ticket and beer store, a used clothing and antiques place, a storefront church. The town hall was closed, and the park in front needed mowing. Cracked sidewalks and a lot of windows boarded or soaped up. No place to get coffee that I could see.
The churches were still in business. The Episcopalian one had a cheery message. The Baptists had a sign advertising their Come to God and Feed More Than Your Soul plan. The Catholic church had a sign listing Mass times. At the bottom an arrow pointed to the location of their food bank.
We drove on, headed toward the land of big boxes. Big Box Land once had a Wal-Mart, a couple of fast-food restaurants, including an upscale one, a couple of car lots, two gas stations, and a Southern States co-op. One gas stat
ion was still open.
Everything else was closed—boarded up or just abandoned. The Wal-Mart parking lot already had weeds coming up through the asphalt. The car lots didn’t have any weeds. This puzzled me until I realized that all the oil and what have you dripping from the vehicles over the years had effectively sterilized the land.
“Pretty fuckin’ sad,” Max said. We had pulled over and sat there, the truck engine idling.
“Yeah, but you know what?”
“What?”
“I don’t really remember anymore what it was like. I mean, I do—but it all seems like a dream.”
“Yeah, well, that’s because it was.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
We pulled into the diner parking lot. It was busy. This was the only decent place now to buy a meal for six miles. I got out, stretched, and took a look at the vehicles. Nothing unusual. A couple of trucks and a Toyota Camry that had been hit several years ago in the passenger side door. I guessed at the several years because of the rust that was bleeding through. One bicycle and an SUV. Nothing weird in the vibe as I followed Max inside.
Taped to the door was a hand-lettered sign: No Barter Unless Arranged First!
No Checks.
Weapons to Remain Holstered at ALL TIMES.
We Can and Will Refuse Service to Whoever We WANT!
Someone had added a Burner logo in pen underneath, but it was crossed out.
As I walked through the door, the odor of grease, meat, and potatoes slapped me upside the head. I like that smell. Also noticeable was the sound of all conversation coming to a halt. We paused in the doorway near the cash register. We stood there and looked over the crowd while they did the same. There wasn’t a welcoming face among them.