After The Fall (Book 4): Undercover

by Nees, David

  He went on. “You’ve managed to survive okay on your own. Vincent says you’re pretty vague about your past, but you’ve managed things it seems. And you slipped into town without any problem, wound up coming to our attention and getting yourself hooked into the organization. Now you’ve got a good situation for yourself. You don’t have to be an outlaw or road bandit. That’s a hard life.”

  Jason nodded. “I’ve encountered some of them along my travels.”

  “And just where have your travels taken you? Where did you come from?”

  “Further north, in Virginia. I headed south to get away from the feds—the army, mostly. They wanted people in relocation camps. Control the chaos with regimentation.”

  Joe nodded and waited.

  “So, I eventually wound up in Knoxville and then here.”

  “With a stop in Hillsboro.”

  “A short one.”

  “Let’s talk more about that.”

  Jason repeated what he had said before. Joe listened without interrupting.

  When Jason had finished, he leaned forward; his eyes bright with enthusiasm. “Seems as though there’s a lot of talk going around about what we’re up to. In our crews and probably among the civilians. I’ll tell you what it’s all about, if you haven’t already figured it out.”

  He pointed his finger at Jason. “It’s about power. Always has been, always will be.” He leaned back. “And power now days comes from resources and one of those is energy, along with the obvious ones, guns, ammo, food, fuel…” He ticked them off on his fingers.

  “That’s why the interest in the power plant and the coal?”

  Joe nodded. “Feeding that damn monster is the problem. The engineers got it up and running, but we need to increase our coal supply.”

  “Beyond the abandoned trains?”

  “Beyond them. I need new leadership for the project. We got a guy who’s out of his depth.”

  “You thinking about me?”

  Joe stood up. “Let’s go for a drive. I want to show you something.”

  He picked up his phone and told the receptionist to get his car sent around. Jason thought the mob was wasteful of precious gasoline. Maybe they had more reserves than he imagined.

  “Where are we going?” Jason asked when they were in the car. Up front was a driver and a large man who held an M16 carbine in his lap. The bodyguard.

  “Out to visit the coal operation. It’s about energy, I told you. Energy leads to chemistry and medicines, however that works. Energy also gives us mobility and the ability to extract more resources. We gotta provide services in order to maintain control. And with control comes wealth.”

  He looked at Jason. “You understand, first the power then the wealth.”

  “Which leads to more power and then more wealth.”

  “You got it.” Joe smiled.

  Chapter 20

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  W est of Charlotte, they came to the stalled coal train. There was a camp set up in a field along the side of the tracks. A barricade had been set up on the road fifty yards before the rail crossing. A fence separating the pasture from the tracks had been removed. In the field, there was a large tent with smaller ones set up in multiple rows next to it.

  Workers were busy with hand tools at several of the coal cars. One of the hoppers on a car had been opened, dumping some of its coal underneath. Jason could see a line of men, all covered in coal dust, shuttling wheel barrows of the coal that was being shoveled from under the cars. They dumped their loads into a pile where a front-end loader could get to it and put it in a dump truck. It looked like close to a hundred men working at the site.

  “Each car holds a hundred tons of coal,” Joe said. “We have the crews working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week and we still can’t keep up. That’s why we don’t have the whole city electrified.”

  “How many cars are in the train?”

  “A hundred.”

  Jason did the math in his head, one hundred cars times one hundred tons. It was a staggering amount of coal—ten thousand tons of it. And still not enough. The energy demands of a city were staggering when he considered how hard it was now to find the fuel.

  “If we could get the natural gas pipelines back working, it would be easier to get power plants on line,” Joe said.

  Jason just stared, taking in the scene. There were boys and men in the work crew. They looked tired and were covered in coal dust. There was no sound except for the noise of the tools; no talk, no banter, no calling out. The silence gave the scene an eerie, hellish quality.

  “How do you get people to volunteer for this?”

  Joe’s smile was sinister. “We don’t. These are the ones who broke laws. If we don’t have enough from that group, we just take who we need off the streets. No one gets to say no if they’re picked.”

  “And you work all one hundred cars from this camp?”

  “It’s worked in sections. When the cars you see here are emptied, the men move down the train and work the next section of cars. They return here at the end of each shift.”

  “How long is the train?”

  “About a mile in length. When the trek gets to be too far, we move the camp.”

  The two men walked towards the work area. From what Jason could tell, the method was to open one hopper at a time on each car and let the coal spill out. Everyone got out of the way when that happened. Then the men with the shovels moved in and started shoveling it into the wheel barrows, which moved it to a pile accessible to the front-end loader.

  Once the majority of the coal was cleared from the car and off the tracks the crew would move to the next one. A second crew, mostly boys, moved in to glean the remains from under the just-emptied car.

  “Impressive sight, isn’t it?” Joe asked.

  “How long does it take to empty one car?”

  “With ten men on a car, they’re doing one car in about ten hours. You can see the more men we can set on the train the more cars can be emptied in that ten hours. Right now, a one hundred car train will take over ten days.”

  “Looks like tough work.”

  “It is. That’s why we use prisoners.”

  Jason could see the armed guards standing around. They weren’t there to protect the resource from theft.

  “You can look around some more. I got to meet with the camp bosses.” Joe pointed to the large tent in the pasture. “Meet me at the mess tent in an hour.”

  Jason started walking around the site. He got surly looks from some of the men in the shovel and wheelbarrow crews. The work area was full of dust and dirt—and quiet, except for the sound of the shovels and the engine of the front loader. It felt odd to be dressed for the city, so obviously out of place in this rough, dirty environment.

  As he was walking around, one man stood up after dumping his wheelbarrow and stared at him. Jason looked back. Most of the workers only gave him a surly glance and then turned away, back to their work, as if not wanting to attract undo attention to themselves. This man was staring directly at him.

  Suddenly he walked up to Jason. “You’re Jason Richards, aren’t you?”

  Jason stared back. There was only one person he had told his real name, the father of the family he had met on the road before getting to Charlotte.

  “Ernie? Is that you?”

  The man nodded. “You remember.”

  “What happened?”

  “No time for that,” Ernie said. “We’re not supposed to talk to anyone, not even other prisoners.”

  One of the guards yelled out for him to shut up and get back to work. A few other workers looked over as if interested in what might happen to the man.

  “Please check on my wife and family. They’re at an apartment building on Grove Street, 4256.”

  Now the guard was headed towards him. “I told you to shut up!” he shouted. He had a night stick in his hand along with a revolver on his belt.

  “I asked him a question. It’
s not his fault,” Jason said, stepping in front of the man before he could strike Ernie.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m here with Mr. Nicoletti. He told me to look around. You want to argue with him?”

  The man’s aggressive demeanor softened. “Well, he ain’t supposed to talk…to anyone.”

  “I didn’t know that and I asked him a question. He felt he needed to answer me. No harm done. He’s back to work.”

  Jason gestured to Ernie who had shuffled off with his wheelbarrow.

  “Just look,” the guard said. “Don’t talk to the prisoners.”

  Jason nodded and the man strode off.

  After Joe had finished his discussions, he and Jason drove back to the city. Joe spoke about a scouting party that had visited the Cliffside Steam Station far west of Charlotte. The power plant was unusable since the EMP attack, but there was a mountain of coal and a partially unloaded coal train there. All of which was waiting to be harvested. Joe wanted men transferred to this location as soon as possible.

  The never-ending search for coal to run the greedy furnace to produce the steam that ran the turbines weighed on Joe. He didn’t want the job, but Al Tagliani, his boss, insisted he do it. Joe wondered as they drove along if Jason could take over some of this burden. He was new and Joe felt some of the caution Vincent had expressed to him, but he could discern no hidden agenda with the man. Jason’s arrival and coming to the mob’s attention still seemed coincidental enough. There was no way anyone could have discovered all the players in order to set up such a sequence of events. Still Big Al would have final say. The thought provided him some comfort.

  “Joe, you’ve got so many huge projects, why are you concerned about Hillsboro? They seem small time compared to what’s going on here,” Jason asked as they drove along.

  “Good question. They’re small but their reputation is much larger.”

  Jason gave him a questioning look.

  “They have a big reputation in the other smaller towns. They’re an example of government run by civilians, democracy, when what is needed is top-down authority, something we can provide. We can give the populations security, safe travel, and safe trade in a chaotic world. We can suppress the gangs and outlaws.”

  “Kind of like Rome?”

  Joe looked at Jason. He didn’t understand the reference.

  “Not modern Rome, but ancient Rome…the empire. It provided what was called Pax Romana, peace under the roman dominance.”

  “Yeah. Something like that. And Hillsboro and any other towns like them stand in our way. They have to be brought under our control.”

  Jason didn’t say more. He sat in silence as the car made its way into Charlotte. Jason’s mind was swirling as he said goodbye to Joe and started walking off down the street.

  Chapter 21

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  J ason made his way to the address Ernie had given him. He knocked on the door. No one answered. He knocked, louder this time—more insistently. Finally, he heard footsteps.

  “Who’s there?” a woman’s voice called out.

  “Jason. I met you on the road. I’ve seen Ernie.”

  A latch turned and the door opened. Ruth stood there. Her hair was disheveled and her face drawn. She had on a pair of loose jeans and a shirt. She stepped back from the door and Jason entered.

  He told her about his visit to the coal train.

  “You’ve seen Ernie? How is he? Is he coming back?” The fatigue in her face was replaced with an eager look. Her eyes lit up.

  “Let’s sit down,” Jason said.

  “Oh God. Is he hurt?”

  “No, but we have much to talk about.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Jason saw the two children standing near the front room. Ruth went over to a couch and motioned for Jason to sit next to her.

  “First of all,” Jason said, “Ernie’s okay. He’s not injured as far as I could tell.”

  “Will he come back? They took him away without telling me anything.”

  “I don’t know. The men live in a camp out there. It looks like they could be there for a while. Now tell me what happened.”

  Ruth took a deep breath. “We got into town. There was a checkpoint at the bridge. Ernie decided to bring the gun in, to have it with us, wherever we wound up living…to protect us if necessary. I hid the gun under my clothes. They searched the packs like you said they would.”

  “Did they find the gun?”

  She shook her head.

  “After we were assigned an apartment, some people, they looked like gangsters, came in and searched the rooms. There were some uniformed police, but the gangster guys were in charge. That’s when they found the gun.” She looked at Jason. “You’re dressed like one of them. Are you one of the gangsters?”

  Jason shook his head. “I’m working with them for the moment, but I have another plan, another purpose.”

  “What’s that?”

  Jason shook his head and didn’t respond.

  “Can you free Ernie? If you’re one of them, you can put in a word, get someone to let him go. We can’t survive without him.”

  She gripped her hands tightly together in her lap. “We get a ration card, but it’s only for one meal a day. The kids are always hungry. I was so scared after they took Ernie, I took the kids out of school. They have schools set up. I was afraid someone would take them. I don’t go out except to get food to bring back here. The children don’t go out at all. I’m afraid for Jennifer. The men were looking at her…” She shuddered visibly. “I don’t think she’d be safe outside.”

  “You’re doing the right thing.” He put his hand on her arm. “It’s hard, I understand. But you’re being careful and that’s good.”

  “But…we can’t live this way. And when will they let Ernie go? He didn’t do anything. He just had a gun. They could have just taken it. They didn’t have to take him.”

  “The mob that rules Charlotte doesn’t want citizens armed. They want everyone to be defenseless and compliant. And Jennifer may not be safe now. She might have been, but these people are predators. Since Ernie was taken, you’re a marked family and who knows what that allows. You could be culled from the herd so to speak.”

  Ruth put her hands to her face and started to cry. Both children came over to her and put their arms around their mother.

  “Don’t make her cry,” Jennifer said. Her voice was angry, defiant.

  “I’m not trying to be mean, but you need the truth. Ruth, look at me.”

  Ruth lifted her head and turned to Jason.

  “Things are going to change around here. I’m going to see what I can do to get Ernie freed. You do what you’ve been doing. Keep yourself and your kids out of sight as much as possible. But if I come to you and tell you to go, to leave town, you go without hesitation. Your life may depend on it.”

  “I can’t go without Ernie.”

  “You may not connect with Ernie until you’re out of the city. In any case, you need to do what you can to save your kids.”

  “You’re scaring me. Even more than I’ve been scared.”

  “Your situation is serious. You know that. I’m just confirming it and telling you that it may get worse. On the plus side, you have me as an ally. I’ll be trying to do what I can for Ernie. That’s better than it was before…right?”

  He paused to get a reaction from Ruth. She managed a hint of a smile but tears still shone on her face.

  “I guess so.” She bowed her head for a moment. Then lifted it and looked directly at Jason. “We can’t live here, can we? If you get Ernie free, we’ll have to leave.”

  “Yes. This place isn’t for you. I still think you should go to Hillsboro. This city is run by the mob, the mafia. That means civil rights are subject to their whim, not the rule of law.”

  She put her hand over his. “Thank you. We’ve just been surviving with no hope. Now you’ve given us some hope. It’s painful, but you’ve made me think the
re may be a way out of this nightmare.”

  “Nothing’s guaranteed. But I’ll try.” He stood up. “I’ll bring some extra food around when I can. You stay close to one another.”

  “Can we go out? The children need to get outside.”

  “Pick a time when the mob isn’t around. Or a time when other civilians are out in large numbers. Go out and blend in. There’s safety in blending in.”

  Ruth nodded and Jason turned to go.

  “Thank you,” she said as he left the apartment.

  Chapter 22

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  A lbert Tagliani, Big Al, was a large man. He was over six feet tall and weighed in at two hundred and forty pounds. He could bench press more than three hundred pounds. He had a massive chest to go with his thick torso and large arms. His face was usually florid, heightened by his explosive temper. No one wanted to be on the receiving end of his temper.

  The plans for the mafia’s consolidation of power in the east presented an opportunity for him to move up. His Charlotte organization was small-time compared to the more prominent families in the larger northeast cities. This was his chance to gain power and stature. Charlotte was the southern anchor for now. Big Al wanted to make sure it played a key role in the success of the overall plans.

  To do that, he needed power, and right now, energy meant power. He had enough weapons and was building a sizable militia. A good energy source would enable those under him, those with the knowledge, to rebuild the capability to produce some of the vital resources like fuel, medicine and ammunition. That would be a huge step forward. The city would not just be consuming left-over resources. But the effort was going too slowly.

  The meeting was attended by Joe, his underboss, all the capos, including Nino Vitale, the man assigned to deliver the coal. Everyone was on edge. They sat around a table with Big Al at the head and Joe sitting next to him.

  Big Al started talking about the need for more coal to expand the hours of operation of the power plant.