by Steven Pajak
“Yes, anything.”
“What he says goes. No debate. This isn’t going to be a democracy.”
“I understand.”
“And everyone is going to have to do their share. Everyone. No exceptions.”
Bob was nodding his head. “Agreed.”
Brian looked at me. “What do you say, brother? Are you up to saving the world?”
I smiled at that. The world? No. This little community that I called home? Definitely, yes.
The fire of vengeance I felt burning through my veins last night passed with the burial of my wife. Putting her into the cold ground had sobered me and brought me back to reality.
I did have something to live for; I needed to honor the memories of my lost family. And also, I would avenge them, yes, but I’d do it smartly.
“If it’s the will of the community I’ll do it,” I said. “Get them together and put it to a vote, Bob.”
“We need to do this before tonight’s meeting,” he said anxiously. I could tell he was enormously relieved.
“That doesn’t give us much time,” Brian said. “We need to work out some details, create some sort of hierarchy, draw up regulations and TOE for the militia. We need a plan.”
Bob finished the rest of his coffee and slid the cup into the middle of the table. “I’ll start rounding everyone up and tell them what’s going on and put the vote out. In the meantime, you guys come up with your plan. Whatever it is, we’re in.”
“Just like that?” I asked. “You’ll just fall in?”
“Yes.” Bob leaned forward in his chair. “Look, I’m not just turning over command to you because I don’t want it. I know what you guys are capable of and I trust my life, hell, my family’s life, to you. I know you’ll do whatever is necessary and what is best for us as a community. That’s good enough for me and it will be good enough for them.”
I nodded my head. “Thank you, Bob.”
“Get out there and do your part, Bob,” Brian said. “Meet us back here as soon as you’re done. You need to be involved in some of this planning, too. We’re going to need you.”
“I’ll be back soon.” Bob grabbed his coat and was out the door.
When he was gone I picked up my coffee cup and looked at my brother for a sign of how he really felt.
He shrugged his shoulders and asked, “What do you think?”
“I think this is crazy.”
“Yep.” He smiled.
“So where do we start?” I asked.
“Work on the hierarchy,” Brian said.
“Okay, let me think on it.” I paused long enough to light a fresh cigarette. “Here, write this down. I’m first in command. You’re second and Bob’s third. We’re done.”
Brian looked up at me and pushed his fallen locks out of his eyes. “And you graduated college? Twice?”
I grinned. “At least I can spell ‘college’, can you?
“A-s-s-h-o-l-e.”
We both had a good laugh at that. I went into my office and grabbed a notebook, then sat beside my brother again.
“Aside from being second in command, I need you to be in charge of the militia. Form them up, train them, get them prepared. We can work on the regulations and the TOE as we go along. I’ll help you with that. You still think you’re up for this?”
He considered this briefly and said, “Yeah. I can handle this.”
“Good. Just tell me what you need to get started.”
“I just need everyone to have the will. But once we get trained, we’ll need to open up our armory. Contrary to what Bob said, I’m willing to bet maybe half of these people have guns. And those that do probably have a handgun that they keep in a safe in case they hear something go bump in the night. That won’t be good enough, though. We’ll need real guns. And ammunition.”
I sighed. That was the difficult part.
Between us two, we probably had enough firearms to outfit most of the members of our community. Ammunition, however, was another matter entirely. I’d used most of mine up for target practice in the spring.
“We’ll figure something out.”
Brian nodded his head. “Quickly, I hope. Let’s not wait too long.”
* * *
While we waited for Bob to return with news about how the vote went, we made our way down to the family room to inventory our weapons and ammunition.
The family room was actually where my brother slept on the pull-out couch. My office was down a small hallway from the family room, and outside of my office was an 8x10 room that was billed as a playroom when we purchased the house, but it was currently dedicated to my armory. Brian kept his stash there as well. And as long as it was out of sight and locked away, and the kids could not get into the room, my wife didn’t care what we stored in there.
God, I missed my wife. Every moment I was alone I couldn’t get her and my children out of my mind. If I was not careful, I’d fall into a deep despair that I feared I might not find my way back from.
The door to the armory stood open. I entered this familiar space and sat behind my work table to start a list while Brian went through and called out what we had.
“I’ll start with the shotguns,” he said. “We have two 870’s with six round magazine tubes. Here’s an Ithaca 37 riot gun that will hold four shells and your Mossberg 500 will hold five.”
“Got it. How are we on shells?”
Brian knelt down beside one of the lower shelves and pulled a large .30 caliber ammo can marked ‘Shotgun’ with black permanent marker and pulled it off the shelf. Setting it on the floor he opened the lid and started pulling out boxes.
“There’re two boxes of birdshot, twenty-five shells per box, so that’s fifty. And there’s ten boxes of 00 buckshot, five shells per box, so that’s another fifty. And you have, oh, about four hundred of those Estate high velocity shells you thought you were going to use on waterfowl.”
“So I never got around to it. I’ve been busy. Some of us have jobs.”
Brian gave me a dirty look. “I have a job. I’m just laid off right now, dickhead.”
“So that’s five hundred shells for the shotgun,” I said, trying not to laugh. “That’s not too bad. What about the C&R’s?”
“Are we really going to hand those out?”
“Yeah, we’ll probably need them. You have a problem with my curios and relics?”
Brian shook his head. “We better test some of them. I don’t trust them. I don’t know what the fascination is with these old things anyway.”
“You wouldn’t. Now just inventory and don’t think about it too much.”
I reached under the work table and opened the small refrigerator. I pulled out a Diet Coke. “You want a soda?”
“Nah, not yet. Write this down. We have five Mosins that are all in good order. One K98K? Dude, that’s pathetic.”
“How many do you have?” I asked.
“None, but I don’t have my C&R. What kind of collector are you?”
“Focus, please,” I said and swigged the soda. “How many Swiss K-31’s?”
“Five of those, too.”
“So that makes 12 C&R if we count the SKS. Check the ammo.”
“You’ve got over seven hundred rounds of surplus for the Mosins. Good but could be better. You only have about two hundred rounds for the K98K and six hundred rounds for the K-31’s.
“We can probably find more ammo for the Mosins and the K98K but it’s going to be hard to find for the Swiss.”
“I think I know a place.”
“I hope you do,” Brian said and put the ammo cans back on the shelf. “What next?”
“AK’s. There’s three of those. The WASR works well enough for what we need it for. The Yugo folder just had a G2 trigger group replacement so there won’t be any more trigger slap there. She’s good to go. The Bulgarian hasn’t been fired but I have no doubts it will function. What about ammo?”
“I’ll check.” Brian reached up to the top of the four-shelf fixture
and pulled down one ammo can. “You’ve got about one thousand rounds here. What do you think?”
“I think we need more. I have no idea how many crazies we’re going to have to kill. And we don’t know how many people we’re going to have to send away if things get too crazy. At least two or three thousand more rounds would be nice.”
“Now the .223’s?”
“Yes. Tell me what we’ve got.”
I downed the rest of my Diet Coke and dipped back into the refrigerator for a bag of Red Vines and started munching.
Brian put the ammo can back and moved to the other side of the room. “We have four AR-15’s, one M16, two Mini 14’s, and we have two MSAR STG’s, that’s including mine.”
“Only four AR’s?”
“Uh, let me check.” He counted again with the same result. He opened another cabinet and found what he was looking for.
“There’re two more but they need some work. One needs a barrel torque, an easy fix, but the other one had some problems with the trigger pack. Do you have a replacement?”
“I think so. Check the bin in that locker.”
“I don’t see one right now, but we’ll look more. So we have nine .223’s and maybe one more if we can fix it. Now let’s see about ammo.”
Brian closed the door on the open locker and then went back to the other side of the room.
“Ammo, ammo, okay, we have…a pathetic two thousand rounds of .223. That’s, like, enough for 7 magazines per. It’s a start but we really need to bulk that up.”
“So noted,” I said. “What about the 10/22’s?”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, seriously. We need to arm them with what we have. They’ll be good for women and teens. And besides, let me shoot your ass with five or ten rounds of .22 and see what happens.”
“Whatever, dude. Don’t be a baby I’m just fucking with you.”
“Shut up and give me a count.”
After flipping me the finger, Brian moved on down the line.
“You have three 10/22’s including one that you dressed up in a Krinker-Plinker kit. The good news is you have like five thousand rounds of ammunition. We’re good there.”
“What are we forgetting?”
“Handguns?”
“No, long guns. We’re missing something.”
“Oh, yeah, M1 Carbine,” he said.
He went back to the ammo shelf and took a quick inventory. “You have five hundred rounds.”
I wrote it down in my book. “Okay, now handguns. Forget the C&R this time.”
He went to another cabinet and opened the door. “Let’s see, you have two 1911’s, one Sig in 9mm, you have a Ruger P95DC in 9mm, two Glock 17’s—why?—a S&W three-inch in .38. Dude, this is really pathetic. Seven hand cannons?”
“Please, no comments from the guy who has one pistol. We’ll keep handguns for anyone on patrol who needs the backup.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Add one more Glock 17,” he said and lifted his shirt to show me his pistol.
“Got it. Ammo, please.”
“Wait for it…wait for it…wait for it…five hundred rounds of 9mm, five hundred rounds of .45ACP and a whopping one hundred rounds of .38 +P.”
“Yeah, definitely one for the ‘needs more’ list. That’s it then?”
“Magazines?” he asked.
“Nah. I have so many magazines I don’t even want to count. Anything else?”
“That’s it for now. We can have the guys load magazines as part of their training.”
“Done deal,” I said.
I finished off the bag of Red Vines while waiting for Bob. He showed up fifteen minutes later with news that the vote was unanimous. I was now the commander of the Randall Oaks Community and its soon to be formed militia.
In a couple of hours we’d join Frank and his Community Watch group in an effort to coordinate our defense and supplies. There was a lot of work to be done and we had very little time to do it.
CHAPTER 9:
Providence
After a late lunch of peanut butter and jam sandwiches, Brian and I met with Bob Brown in my office. Bob was excited and nervous all at the same time. I could see that he was immensely relieved to have turned over command of our community, and he was his usual animated self again.
“From this point forward, anyone going outside the community must be armed,” I said. “And I want no less than teams of two, but I’d prefer teams of four.”
“Sounds good,” Brian said.
Bob nodded in agreement. He moved around anxiously in his chair like a child who needed to pee.
“Bob, do you have any firearms besides your shotgun and pistol?” I asked.
Bob shook his head. “No. We had AR-15’s in our patrol cars, but I never got my own for personal use.”
I nodded to Brian and said, “Let him pick something.”
After a few minutes Brian and Bob emerged from the armory. Bob was carrying the Mini-14 in one hand and four loaded magazines in the other. He was smiling like a kid that just came out of the candy store but Brian was shaking his head.
“Is there a problem with Bob’s selection?” I asked.
Brian rolled his eyes. “There’s better in the armory but he’s set on that thing.”
Getting up from my chair I grabbed my SKS. I raised an eyebrow and asked, “Problem with my selection?”
“Dude, are you fucking kidding me? Grab an AR or an STG. Don’t embarrass me with that damn thing.”
I laughed at his frustration.
“It’s gotten me this far. I took out more than ten of those crazies with this beauty. How many heads do you have on your STG?”
Brian blustered. “That’s not the point.”
I chuckled. “And if Bob’s comfortable with the Mini, that’s his business.”
“I used to shoot the ranch rifle a lot when I visited my uncle in Arizona. I’m partial to the platform,” Bob said.
Brushing past Brian, I grabbed my go bag and set it on the table, adding another 10 stripper clips to what I already had in the bag.
“I’d like to take one more guy with us when we go to the meeting. Do you have anyone in mind, Bob?”
“I have a few ideas. Kevin from across the way—”
“Uh-uh, he’s a freaking moron,” Brian interjected. “I don’t want him with me.”
I gave Brian a stern look. “You’re going to be responsible for training that moron, so take it easy. Whatever feelings you have about anyone in this community, you need to put that shit aside. These people are going to be our responsibility as well as our lifeline. We’re going to have to depend on them, and you’re going to have to work with all of them so get over it.”
I paused a moment and then added, “Kevin is a moron, though. Do you have anyone else in mind?”
Bob thought about it for a second. “There’s John Morris, the mechanic from up the block. And also Charlie Pruett. He’s a good guy. He’s been helping cover the gates the last couple of days. He’s pretty sharp.”
“Bri, what do you think of Charlie?”
Brian shrugged. “He’s cool. Maybe he has some cigarettes. I’m dying for a smoke.”
“I guess he’s our fourth,” I said.
Picking up his backpack and loading it with full mags, Brian said, “Before we go we need to walk the perimeter and see what security is like. We need to see where our weak points are and plug them up. I know there hasn’t been much action here yet, but we need to be preemptive. Do you have shift rosters, Bob?”
“I do. For the last two days I’ve had teams of three guarding the gate around the clock on eight hour shifts.”
Bob unzipped his coat and reached inside, pulling out a piece of paper. He held it out to Brian, but my brother didn’t take it.
“Hang on to it, Bob. Brian’s responsible for training and militia operations but I want you to be in charge of community security. You’re in charge of militia police.”
Bob was quiet.
Brian j
abbed him in the arm. “You can handle that, right, Bob?”
“Yes, I guess I can,” he said. He put the duty roster back into his pocket. “I’d like to make some changes to the rosters then. Add some more men and have shorter shifts. I’m also going to want some patrol groups to wander the grounds and report back.”
“Sounds good, Bob,” Brian said. He looked at me and said, “We’re all going to need a base of operation. I think we should take over a few of the inventory homes that haven’t sold. One can operate as a police station for Bob. I’ll take one as our CP for mission planning and operations, and I think we’ll need a third one for supplies. And we’re going to need someone to act as supply officer.”
I was nodding my head as Brian talked.
“Excellent ideas, bro.” I glanced at my watch. “We still have couple of hours before we need to be over at Providence. Let’s go house shopping.”
* * *
It took about an hour for the three of us to walk the grounds and find three unoccupied homes that would fit our needs for police station, command post and supply depot. There was no debate about the choices.
The three model homes were already furnished. We’d remove any furnishings that were not appropriate for the purpose of particular rooms. Furnishings were a bonus, however.
We chose these particular homes because they were centrally located within the community which we all agreed was a plus. The largest of the three homes was chosen as the supply depot. It was a raised ranch model that had a large semi-finished basement, which was perfect for our needs. The smaller of the remaining two homes was designated the command post, with the large family room perfect for planning operations. And the last home would be Bob’s station. It too, boasted a large basement, but this one was finished with four separate rooms, which were currently set up as bedroom, office, family room and workshop. These rooms could easily be converted into holding cells.
As we made our way toward the main and only gate on the south end of the community, we discussed the need for additional security teams on the north end, which butted up against a large wooded lot.