Catalyst (Book 1): Downward Cycle

by JK Franks

  He had also allowed himself to become familiar with OxyContin in recent years. Sadly, it was one of many things that were no longer available at any price. His current pharmacist had tried to be helpful, but he was a brainless idiot for the most part. Ronald smiled at the thought of Tyrell as a pharmacist. The smile quickly faded as the hunger for food and drugs took over again. His relationship with Tyrell was…well, complicated. The large black man had proven himself most resourceful. He could also, at times, be quite ruthless—a particularly valuable skill-set in the current world order.

  Ronald had always considered himself a shrewd businessman, despite the fact that his net worth had decreased with nearly every business he ran. His silver spoon had been the vast estate his father had left him, and which, ten years later, had decreased by more than half in value. Tyrell had seemed intent on rapidly siphoning off the other half with his supply of increasingly costly alternative pain meds. But where others were seeing calamity in the current crisis, Ronald saw an opportunity. Land and houses were being abandoned, and he had access to all the deeds and property records at the courthouse. With the little remaining law enforcement out of the way, his guys could take whatever property or goods were needed, and, with his former position and clout, he felt satisfied that he could legitimize it. He was also keenly aware that certain commodities would quickly be very scarce, and he wanted to make sure he was the only resource to fulfill those needs. His land and property holdings were already substantial, but soon he knew they would be astronomical.

  Despite how people felt about him, Ronald was intelligent… he just occasionally let his emotions overrule his head. His real skill came in getting others to do the jobs he felt were beneath him. He knew politicians and judges, and he curried favor with many influential men. Money was the grease that America and the world ran on, he believed. When all this nonsense blew over, he was determined to be in a position of greater power and even more wealth. As one of his father’s heroes, Sir John Templeton, once said: “To buy when others are despondently selling and to sell when others are avidly buying requires the greatest fortitude.” One person’s misfortune is a wise man’s opportunity.

  Yes, he knew that millions of people were in a very unfortunate place right now, but a smart person like himself could potentially be set for life if he made the right moves now. Of course, he knew the dollar was dead, as was the stock market—but supply and demand, that was what capitalism was all about. All he had to do was corner the market on the most valuable commodities, and he would be a king. He had seen the list that the council had as priorities and had to admit it was pretty smart. Once they got everything consolidated, he would just step in and take his position as the man in charge. After that, anything a person needed would be available for the right price. In the absence of any real law, he would make the rules, deciding what was right based primarily on how it would benefit him.

  The first order of business would be to take out the trash, and by trash, he meant that fucking asshole, Bartos. Tyrell’s nephew or some other illegitimate relation had been killed by the son-of-a-bitch, so he didn’t even have to pay for this one.

  Tyrell had already searched the man’s house and found it nearly empty. Even Hansbrough was at a loss as to where he might be until he thought to check the property records at the courthouse. It seemed he’d been paying taxes on a small piece of property out on the edge of the swamp for years. It figured the little maggot would prefer the backwoods to the town. Tyrell’s boys had finally spotted him heading that way earlier today. No doubt the Cajun would be dinner for the alligators by nightfall.

  Dinner. His stomach rumbled in complaint. Fuck. He had to eat. He knew he could go down to the aid shelter the bike guy and his daughter had set up, but the thought of eating with the unwashed masses was something he preferred not to entertain. The undeniably aromatic fact that he had not washed for several weeks did not occur to the disgruntled man.

  Ronald was already pissed that they had set up portable toilets for the town to use. Something about keeping the drinking water clean. Hell, they were surrounded by water. He absolutely would not use those things; they were disgusting. He zipped up his fly having urinated in a semi-private corner of the courthouse.

  His empty stomach rumbled again, and he found himself reluctantly walking in the direction of the aid station. One plate of food wouldn’t be the end of the world, would it? He decided he could take the stares from people for a few minutes, as long as it meant a free lunch.

  Walking into what had been the parking lot to the sports bar, now covered by a giant awning, he felt eyes on him. “Oh, how the mighty have fallen,” they all said to him. He knew this was what they were thinking. He pushed out his chest and walked briskly to the serving line, smiling and greeting everyone like he was the one in charge. That stopped when a man held out his arm, blocking him from getting a tray.

  “Sorry, sir, this is reserved for volunteers only.” The young man had a T-shirt on with the local fire department logo printed on the chest.

  “What do you mean volunteers? Do you know who I am? What my family has done for this town?” the now red-faced Ronald Hansbrough shouted. Smiling slightly, the young man replied.

  “Yes, we know you, and you’re not on the list of volunteers contributing to the survival of our community. Therefore, you get nothing. Who you were or what you did before is irrelevant now.”

  Ronald got up in the young man’s face. “You little shit, you listen to me. You give me a goddamn plate of food right now, or I will have this entire place shut down by nightfall. Everything you have and ever will have doesn’t add up to a fraction of what I threw away last year! You think that just because someone said you have authority you can punish me?”

  Ronald went to push him out of his way, but a thick arm and a meaty hand came around his neck and pulled him out of the line. Preacher Jack tossed the enraged Hansbrough onto the street.

  “Keep your ass out of here, Ronald. If you want to eat, find Bartos and sign up for one of the recovery crews. Do some real work for a change. You need to get it through your head—no one gives a shit who you are. No one is going to share their food with a lazy asshole like you.”

  Ronald wanted to have an appropriate comeback, but he was speechless. He shuffled backward away from the large man. Wasn’t this guy a preacher or something? He was angry. He was scared. He was pretty sure he had pissed himself. Finally standing up, and at a loss to muster any sign of dignity, he wandered, seething, down the street. He would get his revenge… he would have it all.

  Chapter Fifty

  Day 78

  “Morning, Preacher.” Scott handed Jack a thermos of coffee as he got into the Jeep.

  “Thank you, Brother!”

  Coffee was a resource that was disappearing fast. Like cigarettes and other vices, coffee was becoming almost too valuable of a trade commodity to actually drink. Scott was still making a few small pots each week, although even he had taken to rationing and watering it down. “Where are we headed?” Jack asked. Scott’s scouting trips on his bike had covered a lot of ground, and he was now venturing farther away and into unknown territory. The missions were two-fold: make contact with more farmers and hunters who may want to trade, and find additional unoccupied houses and neighborhoods for the recovery crews to come and clear for supplies.

  “We are venturing into the woods today, my friend,” Scott answered.

  They drove out of the county up Highway 50, then cut over to a smaller road. Finally, Scott turned the Jeep down a two-track dirt trail and dropped it into four-wheel drive. Jack eyed Scott suspiciously. “Are you telling me you came all the way out here on your bike? What is this forty, fifty miles from town?”

  “Yeah, I came out earlier this week, the day you and Kaylie were working at the clinic. I went out a bit farther and cut over. When I was crossing one of the bridges several miles ahead, I saw something over this way through a firebreak in the trees. I guessed it might be a train, but I wasn�
��t completely sure until now.” Scott was struggling to clear some of the deeper ruts with the trailer.

  They had been on the trail for about ten minutes when Jack saw what Scott had targeted. On a spur of train track sat what appeared to be an abandoned freight train. “Wow, now there is a target of opportunity,” Jack said.

  “Yep, several hundred cars, must be nearly two miles long. What’s better is it isn’t near any houses or major highways… if I hadn’t been looking, I would never have spotted it. With luck, no one else knows about it either.” The collection crews had already been down all the local tracks collecting batteries and solar panels from the track signals. No one had seen an actual train on any of the railways until now.

  “So, what’s the plan?” asked Jack as they pulled alongside the black, brown and gray railcars.

  “I brought bolt cutters and new locks. Many of these cars will contain items we can't use or can’t easily get out of here. I do want us to list them, though—particularly any chemicals. Some of them may be dangerous, but all are potentially useful. The cars with grain, fertilizer or equipment we flag for trade with the farmers; they can come out and recover those. You can use the spray paint we brought to identify those cars. We’ll begin checking the enclosed boxcars. When we find something, we will list it, flag the number on your pad and if it’s small and valuable enough, we’ll take it back with us—at least as much as we can carry.”

  Jack whistled. “No way we can get this done in one day.”

  “Nope, we’ll be here a few days. Kaylie said she’ll be okay, and Bartos is going to check in on her.” Scott put the Jeep in park, grabbed the bolt cutters and a clipboard and began opening the doors on the closest railcar.

  The work was dirty, tedious and mostly unsatisfying. He felt sure someone probably knew how to read the codes on the cars or could go up to the engine and find a manifest. Scott had a feeling that everything could potentially be useful, and he wanted to know exactly what was out here before letting anyone else in on the find. He made the first real score with three boxcars full of canned and dry goods, destined for a large wholesale grocery chain. Tomatoes, fruit, crackers, beans and soups. There were tons of food; potentially, it was the difference between life and death for his town, at least for a short while.

  Jack found eight box cars loaded with paper products, from toilet paper to diapers. They also found an enormous quantity of TVs, consumer electronics, and computer monitors; what had been one of the most expensive cargos was now the least valuable. Dozens of open rail cars full of new cars and trucks were tempting, although both men doubted any of them would ever work again. They had plenty of abandoned cars around anyway; fuel was what they did not have. Many of the tanker cars had the words “Deadly,” “Explosive!” or “Corrosive” on their warning labels. Several of the tanks contained molasses and dextrose. They dutifully recorded all of the specifics on the clipboard.

  Scott guessed they had worked through only half of the train cars as night began to fall. Jack had moved the Jeep up closer to one of the open rail cars and began to set up camp for the night. Scott was unsure about a campfire as he knew they could be seen and smelled from a distance, but Jack had devised a clever solution by digging a deep hole, lining the bottom and sides with rocks, and using only very dry wood. The flame couldn’t be seen above ground, and it produced very little smoke. It was not cold, and they didn’t need the heat, mainly they needed the fire for cooking.

  Scott pulled out his go-bag and put on a pot of water to boil. Jack was opening several cans of the soup they had found and let them warm directly in the fire, while Scott added some tea bags and honey to the boiling water. Both men had worked up quite an appetite, so Scott also pulled out some of the country cured ham he had packed. As he warmed it on another skillet, the smell was divine.

  As both men ate and sipped on the hot tea, the night sounds of the forest began to come alive. “You know, for a computer geek, you seem to have adapted well to all this.”

  Scott nodded, “It’s odd, I loved my work, but much of this…suits me. I like the pace and the simplicity of life now. Growing up on a farm gave me the basics, I guess, but the last few years I think some of what I wanted was a simpler life.” Both men were looking up at the amazingly clear night sky. Without any man-made light polluting the view, everyone could see the night sky in all its glory again.

  “Preacher, a question. Do you think this was God just smacking us around to get our attention?”

  Jack didn’t answer for several seconds, “I haven’t completely come to terms with all this, Scott. I don’t believe in a vengeful God. Mostly I think he lets us choose our own paths and live with the consequences. Also...like hurricanes or drought, random chance is simply part of nature. The solar flare was simply more of that. The fact it costs so many lives is our fault, not God’s. We’re the ones who chose to be so dependent on electricity, dependent on the government, dependent on modern medicine. If we had thought things through a little better, all of us would have realized something like this was probably inevitable. We should have lived more simply, prepared better and held on to the wisdom of the past. This isn’t evil, Scott. It’s simply the hand we have been dealt.”

  “I like your answer, Jack. What about some of the ugliness we are seeing, though? Is this what we have to look forward to? I am worried about the world Kaylie will be growing up in. Are we going to see the worst or the best of mankind come out of this?”

  Jack finished off his cup of tea. “Yes.”

  Scott nodded. Jack expression gradually took on a faraway look. He looked deep into the fire as if he would find answers there. “I haven’t spoken of this to anyone yet.” He took a long pause before continuing. “The first few days after we started the council, I tried to get in touch with every minister in the area. I only managed to see a handful, but I thought they would be the best to get our message out. In doing so, Buck took me down to a Holiness church over on the south side. I knew the preacher there, a deeply conservative man of God. A good man with a loyal congregation. Buck said all the members of the church had been holed up in the sanctuary praying for a miracle for nearly two weeks. As we got close to the church, we saw birds. Ravens and vultures…they were on the grounds, the roof, the steeple… just sitting up there like gargoyles, watching us approach.

  “The smell hit us before we even got near the door. Scott, I will never be able to erase what I saw in that small building. At least a hundred men, women and children, all dead. They stayed in there, trusting the Lord to deliver, and they starved to death. One father had strangled all of his children. Then I guess he just waited with their bodies until he died too.

  “There is evil in this world, Scott. Lots of it. But it often takes a backseat to stupidity. Those people sat there and died because a man of God convinced them it would make a difference. They could have walked a half a mile and found water. God does not want us to waste our lives or our talents. That’s why you are so important to our survival. We need a leader. Someone who can think logically even when the rest of us are falling apart.”

  Jack cleaned the plates and produced a small bottle of bourbon which they shared. Scott was shaken by the preacher’s story. The conversation drifted to their friend Todd, and each wondered how he was doing. Scott asked Jack how long he had known Todd. “He and I went to school together over at Pass Christian. We were friends. He found Liz, and…well, I found something much darker. Scott, you never asked me about my past, and I appreciate that, but you surely guessed I came to the church by a less than a righteous path.”

  “You are a different kind of preacher, but your past; that’s none of my business,” said Scott, “You're a good man, a good friend, someone I have grown to trust completely. That’s all that matters to me.”

  “I appreciate that,” Jack said, his warm smile still visible in the dim light. “The truth is, I simply made bad choices, poor decisions. In high school, I hung out with guys I knew were bad news. We drank too much, smoked t
oo much weed. Over time, we went on to harder stuff. Eventually, I found myself pinned against a wall in the light of an angry cop’s flashlight. I served five and a half years for armed robbery. I wasn’t armed, but one of the guys was. They had told me they were going in to get something that a guy had been holding for them, but …well, I knew better. I knew they were up to no good. They were takers… I was a taker. I was not a very good person, Scott.”

  Scott looked over at his friend, “What changed you?”

  “God changed me. All the other guys that went to jail just got angrier. I just felt ashamed. I knew this was not who I was. I knew I was raised better. Honestly, I was ready to give up. The first day I was allowed to have visitors was my forty-fifth day of incarceration. You know, not a single member of my family came. None of my friends were there either. No one except for Todd. He had joined the Navy by then but got a furlough to come and check on me. Everyone else was ashamed of me. Todd though…he said he was ashamed of himself. He hadn’t kept up our friendship when he met Liz. He was blaming himself for where I was. I cried that day… I cried a lot. Todd is a good man— the very best of us. He never stopped seeing the good in me, and over the next five years he made sure I saw the good as well. He told me to be tough enough to survive and man enough to learn from it.”

  Jack continued, “I stumbled several times… one day I beat a man in prison… a man who did very bad things. I would have gotten in some real trouble for it, but the prison chaplain intervened. With his help, I started reading the Bible, like lots of cons do, but I found it calling to me in different ways. After three years, I was preaching many of the sermons at the prison chapel each week. I felt renewed! The burden eventually lifted from my shoulders. When I got out, Todd and Liz were waiting. They brought me to Harris Springs, and he set me up with a job and a place to stay. Eventually, they helped me interview with the church I’m in now.”