Constant Danger (Book 2): Defeat The Anarchy

by Westfield, Ryan

  People these days, people like Barb, who lived mainly inside and relied on computers, newspapers, radio, and TV for the weather forecast, knew basically nothing except what the weather was currently doing.

  Barb could, though, recall the odd expression that related to the weather. For instance, “pink skies at night, sailor’s delight, but red skies in the morning, sailors take warning” rang through her head as clearly as her grandmother had said it years and years ago. But what did it mean? Barb really had no idea and even if she had, it probably didn’t apply to a landlocked mountainous area like the Berkshires, especially not during winter when the snow fell heavily and the clouds did what they wanted.

  Barb’s eyes scanned the distance, but she saw nothing but snow. Nothing but cloud cover that seemed to hang so low it almost touched the ground.

  Barb had been to many places in her life. She’d met famous people. She’d attended conferences all over the world. She’d traveled on every continent and been to practically every major city. She was a journalist of the highest caliber. She was good at her job and wasn’t ashamed of it.

  But despite all her intense travel, there was always something about coming back here. There was nowhere else in the world quite like it, and that was coming from someone who’d taken helicopter rides over the tallest mountains in Indonesia, and met with tribal warlords in the remote mountains of Afghanistan.

  In short, she’d seen it all, yet she was still impressed with the relatively simple Berkshires. They weren’t particularly tall mountains, nor were they particularly impressive. And, frankly, the weather was terrible nearly all year round.

  But there was something about them. Barb liked to think that even if she hadn’t spent vacations from school here with her grandparents, she would still be able to appreciate the charm of the surroundings.

  When she hit thirty, both her grandparents had died. Not long after that, her parents had passed away. Her travel schedule had increased, and she’d found herself working more and more hours.

  It was sometime around age thirty-five or thirty-six that she’d decided to take a little retreat back to the Berkshires every winter. Initially it had been just to decompress, just to have a place that was in some way “home,” even if she hadn’t grown up here. But she owned the property, since she was the last heir in the family line, so to speak. And she’d never felt particularly at home in the town where she’d grown up, about a half hour outside of Boston, all the way on the other side of the state.

  Barb had enjoyed her first little trip here; spending a calm two weeks by herself at her grandparents’ old cabin was a breath of fresh air, a reprieve from the constant shuffling around the world that she was used to and, in a way, had come to both love and dread.

  It had become something of a tradition for her. Every year she’d come here by herself. She didn’t mind being alone. She’d never married, having been too focused on her career to have time for another person’s nonsense. She figured she had enough problems of her own and didn’t need to be bogged down in someone else’s.

  Barb had just turned fifty-one. Almost every winter since that first one in her thirties, she’d returned here to the Berkshires, with the notable exception of last winter, when things just hadn’t worked out and there’d been too many work obligations. Instead of her calm retreat alone in the cabin here, she’d been in one of the busiest cities in the world in Pakistan, surrounded at all times by people of all sorts, constantly communicating in writing and speech, giving lectures, teaching classes, answering questions. She’d sorely missed her time in the Berkshires, so when this year came around, she’d made sure that she could be here for the winter.

  Unfortunately, in her one-year absence, the cabin had fallen into complete disrepair. The elderly man whom she’d employed part-time all year round to take care of the place appeared unfortunately to have begun suffering from dementia or something similar, since he’d forgotten to work on the property at all.

  When Barb returned this winter, the chimney hadn’t been repaired and any attempt to use it filled the small cabin with thick smoke, making it impossible to breathe.

  The heater hadn’t been run at all and the pipes had frozen. Fortunately, they hadn’t yet burst, but she knew that as soon as the weather warmed up, they would, flooding the house.

  She’d need to find someone competent who could do the work in her absence. That was a tricky job on its own, finding someone in such a rural place who could be relied upon to such a great extent.

  So her vacation had quickly turned into something not relaxing but instead frustrating, as she called everyone in the phone book, only to find out that they were either no longer in business or some bad fate had befallen them. It was, after all, an area that had been pushed to the wayside. It was arguable whether Western Massachusetts had undergone something of an economic resurgence or not, but what was clear was that out here, in an area that didn’t even have a formal name, far from North Adams or the rich vacation areas of the Berkshires, there wasn’t much of an economy at all. No one new moved here and those that remained were only growing older and less capable. It would have been one thing

  The heater still worked to an extent, but it made a tremendous amount of racket, and two days ago had stopped working completely, along with everything else.

  Barb had figured that it was just a normal power outage. However, the crank radio that didn’t work puzzled her. And as the day wore on, she’d found a number of battery-powered devices that didn’t work. Her three laptops that her job required, for instance, didn’t work. None of them. They didn’t even turn on. And that had never happened once in all the years she’d been working and writing on computer. Her electric razor, which she used for her legs every three days, didn’t so much as flash a single light. Her cell phone was dead. The answering machine, powered by batteries, was as dead as a doorknob.

  In short, nothing worked, including the heat.

  But Barb hadn’t been fazed. In fact, not much fazed her. Traveling the world for decades had shown her just about everything. She’d lived at forty-degree temperatures for months without heat while doing investigative journalism. She’d had to hike miles to meet with tribal leaders in Africa in sweltering heat and with a mild case of beriberi. She’d lived without toilets and running water. She’d stayed in the worst dumps imaginable. And she’d also stayed occasionally in the most luxurious spots one could think of.

  Barb had seen just about everything. She’d seen the good and the bad, the pretty and the ugly sides of the face of humanity. She’d stared death in the face on numerous occasions.

  So after having gone two days without heat, when Barb found herself confronted by a man and woman armed with a large handgun, she hadn’t been as worried as your average citizen would have been.

  Barb had stood with a shotgun pressed into her belly; she’d been blindfolded by Somali pirates and told to say her last prayers while a .45 made an indentation in her temple.

  Her heart may have been beating a little faster than normal. But not by much.

  In fact, she hadn’t cried out in shock, surprise, or fear. Instead, she’d looked the woman holding the gun in the eye and said, “What were you doing in my shed?”

  The woman with the gun advanced toward her. A man, several years younger, walked forward. He looked bad and he walked like a man in his eighties rather than his twenties. His face was battered, covered with bruises and there was matted blood in his hair.

  The pair didn’t look good. Not at all. They looked like they were on the brink of something. Maybe madness.

  Barb saw it in their eyes and in their posture. She’d seen it before, in the far-flung corners of the world where governments had fallen and the people had been left to fight for themselves in desperation, unsure of their next step and unsure of what would become of their families. Barb had learned long ago that it didn’t take much to push a person to their limits, and that once beyond those limits, that person was capable of things they’d never
be capable of in normal times.

  There was no answer from either of them. Not yet.

  They just advanced unsteadily.

  There was ice in the woman’s hair. Her pupils were small.

  Her mouth was open in some sort of snarl.

  Something had happened to her. Something recent. Something serious.

  “I’m not armed,” said Barb, realizing as she spoke the words that she should have been armed. But that’s the way things were when traveling around the world. You couldn’t exactly fly from country to country with a weapon of any sort.

  There was an ancient shotgun hanging above the mantle in the cabin, but she was almost positive it didn’t work. And even if it did, it wasn’t like there were cartridges for it.

  “Who are you?” said the woman. “How long have you been following us?”

  “I wasn’t following you. This is my shed. When I was out walking I saw footsteps leading up to it.”

  “Likely story,” spat the man, who was shaking, his words not coming out that clearly, as if he’d recently lost some teeth.

  “It’s the truth,” said Barb, in her voice of practiced calm in the face of danger. She didn’t miss a beat. She looked each of them in the eye. She’d long ago learned that no matter what culture she found herself in, no matter what kind of crazed criminal stared her down with a gun, the best thing to do was look the offender in the eye. There was always some basic humanity in the eye, no matter how crazed, drugged, or debased the man or woman was.

  “We’ve had a rough time of it,” said the woman, who’d stopped in her tracks, her gun leveled pointedly as Barb’s stomach. “I’m frankly tired of being attacked. I’m at the end of my rope. So give me one good reason why I shouldn’t shoot you right now and let you bleed out here in the freezing snow.”

  It wasn’t that Barb got scared.

  Sure, she’d been in situations like this before. She knew when and how to keep her cool.

  She also knew when to recognize desperation.

  And she knew enough that desperation could quickly lead to violence. Pointless violence where nothing was gained but lives were lost.

  And if any lives were about to be lost, it was going to be her own.

  3

  Hank

  It was cold. Cold enough that they had to crank the engine every half hour, running it for ten minutes at a time so that they wouldn’t freeze. And even then, they were as bundled up as they could be. Hank would have never admitted it, but he was periodically stuffing heating packs into his socks and pockets when Jimmy wasn’t looking.

  “Still nothing?” said Hank, sitting in his beat-up SUV.

  His partner, Jimmy, sat next to him, a variety of cell phones spread out on the floorboards and the backseat.

  “Nothing,” said Jimmy. “I thought one of these would work.”

  “How long ago was it that you charged them?”

  “I dunno. Some of them, a couple days. Others, a couple months.”

  “Why so long?”

  “That’s the thing with these phones. You’ve got to keep cycling them. You’ve got to put them away for several months unless you want to keep throwing them away. And you know that these things are expensive.”

  “What? The cell phones?”

  “Yeah. Even the cheap ones these days cost a decent amount.”

  “In the TV shows, they’re always breaking phones in half and just throwing them away.”

  “Well,” said Jimmy. “That’s why you’ve got me in charge of these phones. You don’t know anything about them. If we did it like they do in the movies, we’d be broke.”

  “Huh,” said Hank. “I had no idea.”

  Jimmy made a clicking sound with his tongue.

  “Cut that out, would you?”

  “What?”

  “That noise.”

  “I’m not making any noise.”

  Hank sighed. He was exasperated. He’d had about enough of Jimmy. But Hank had enough self-understanding to know that it was only natural to be frustrated with his partner after sitting in the same car with him for the last forty-eight hours straight.

  All of Jimmy’s little habits were starting to get to the point where they bothered Hank about as much as anything ever had.

  “I hope they show up soon,” muttered Hank. “Because if they don’t, I’m about ready to jump you.”

  Hank had never been one to mince his words.

  And Jimmy had never been one to take things to heart.

  “Oh, yeah?” he said, chuckling a little as he toyed with the various phone chargers.

  “You know,” mused Hank. “There must be something going on. The phones don’t work…. the radio…”

  “Of course there’s something going on,” interrupted Jimmy, sounding exasperated. “You don’t know what though, do you?”

  “Do you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then why haven’t you said anything?”

  “I thought it was obvious.”

  “What’s obvious?”

  “That we’ve been hit with some kind of EMP.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s a good thing I’m in charge of communications,” said Jimmy.

  “You’ve already said that. Why don’t you make yourself clear?”

  “An EMP is an electromagnetic pulse. It knocks out all electronics, no matter what they are. Usually, once an EMP hits something, it’ll never work again.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Dead serious. I doubt they’ll tell you about that on TV though.”

  “Hey, don’t knock me for watching a few hours of TV. Don’t you ever do that?”

  “Hell no. I read.”

  “Just internet trash.”

  “Well, sometimes it’s helpful.”

  “So this EMP… that’s why the phones aren’t working?”

  “Exactly.”

  “They’re dead forever?”

  “Exactly.”

  Hank was getting mad now. “First of all,” he said, making little effort to control the anger in his voice. “You should have told me about this…. It makes no sense to keep it from me.”

  “Like I said, I thought it was obvious.”

  “Second of all,” said Hank, cutting him off. “Why the hell are you wasting time on those phones if you think they’re all dead for good? What’s the point of all this?”

  He was mad now. Hank was not a man who liked to have his time wasted.

  Hank was old-school. Brought up in Buffalo, NY, he’d grown up with a pool hustler for a father and a mother who was in and out of mental institutions. He’d learned early on that he needed to get tough and act tough in order to make it.

  So in their little drug-running operation, Hank was the tough guy, the guy who’d swing a bat at someone’s face when they were asking for it. Jimmy, on the other hand, was a little short guy who knew too much about everything, whether it was electronics, car motors, or the logistics of their operations.

  They’d been waiting here for two days now. They’d heard nothing from their normal contact. Nothing at all. Of course, none of the phones worked.

  But they were following protocol. They were supposed to wait here no matter what until the third day.

  They were waiting on a shipment of fentanyl, which was a synthetic opiate many times more powerful than heroin. A speck of fentanyl, about the size of a grain of sand, was strong enough to kill a large man.

  The fentanyl, as Hank understood it, came from China, where it was manufactured in large, sophisticated factories. It arrived by ship into Canadian ports, particularly Vancouver. From there, it spread down like rain across The States, crossing the relatively unpatrolled border in the wilderness mainly on four-wheelers and snowmobiles, depending on the weather.

  After the drugs crossed the border, they made their way down by various cars, trucks, and SUVs. The system was intricate and large, and Hank didn’t know any more really than his own part.

  Hank and Jimmy worked
for a larger organization that had been called different things at various times in history. To them it didn’t really matter what it was called. They were doing this for the paycheck. They took their orders, they waited for the drugs. They drove the drugs to Baltimore, handed them off in an anonymous parking garage. One week later they received envelopes of cash. That was it. Simple and easy. The way Hank liked it.

  So Hank didn’t like it when things got complicated. He didn’t like it when the people who were supposed to show up didn’t show up, because it meant that he and Jimmy were out here, exposed, with unregistered weapons in their car, with dozens of cell phones, with all sorts of things that they shouldn’t have.

  At least they didn’t yet have the drugs. There was nothing Hank liked less than having to sit in Baltimore with pounds and pounds of drugs. That was when you got caught. That was when you went to jail for decades.

  So at least this wasn’t that bad.

  But Hank still didn’t like it.

  There was something off. Something wrong. He’d always had a feeling for these sorts of things. It wasn’t really an emotional thing, more an adding up of the bits and pieces, looking at the available information.

  Where were the other guys?

  Two days late wasn’t unheard of. Shit happened up at the border. And shit happened on the back-country trails.

  But no communication?

  And what was with all this EMP shit?

  Hank wasn’t sure if Jimmy knew what he was talking about or not. He might have been making it all up.

  “All right,” said Hank, slamming his fist down on the top of the steering wheel. “Time to get the hell out of here.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”