RECONQUISTA was very popular, followed by AZTLAN and VIVA LA RAZA.
These alleged forces of the Mexican government were systematically depopulating whole towns along the southern edges of our border, even while the Mexican president was on television, vehemently denying these attacks. Propaganda flew back and forth, while real people died in horrible ways.
“What’s the angle, though?” Nikki asked, her face ashen as she tried to watch the clips without leaving the room.
“They’re going to bring back the draft,” I replied with some confidence, and every head in the room rotated my way. Nancy, in spite of her initial reluctance at being drawn into a family discussion, was one of them.
“How? What makes you think that?”
“They need to clean up the West Coast, control these groups of protesting youths, and give the Mexicans a good old-fashioned ass kicking,” I explained coldly. “How else would you propose doing it?”
No one else took on my question directly, but I could see Nancy giving me a speculative look while Mike and Marta fussed at each other under their breath. I finally looked over at my brother and forced him to share his opinion.
“War, I reckon,” Mike opined, then he gave me a piercing look. “We’ve got to go get Patrick out of Austin, bro. Before he gets reactivated.”
“But his contract’s expired,” Nikki protested. “He’s been out for years. There’s no way they can call him back to active duty.”
“Nikki, he was a Green Beret, honey,” Marta said with some sympathy in her voice. “Not only do they need everyone they can lay their hands on with his skillset, they don’t want them out in the general public, creating a nuisance.”
I saw Nancy react to this bit of news.
“He was like, a real Green Beret? Like in the movies?”
Nikki, despite her concern, had to fight a chuckle.
“Honey, not like in the movies,” my sister explained. “Don’t let that Hollywood stuff fool you. My Patrick was a highly-trained operator, as they called them, but he was an 18 Delta, a Special Forces Combat Medic, and he’s as tough as boot leather, but he’s no Dwayne Johnson.”
“More like Jason Statham,” I piped up, rubbing at my scalp suggestively.
“Oh, hush. My boy can’t help being follicly challenged,” Nikki shot back, then looked over at Nancy again. “If you saw the pictures of Patrick and his buddies clowning around back at Fort Bragg, you’d never know who or what they were. That was the point. They learned not to stand out too much. Anyway, the Army spent a lot of money training him to be the best.”
“Seriously? You think they would make him rejoin the Army, just because of his skills?”
I glanced over at Mike, letting him field the question.
“No doubt about it, Miss Prentiss. Not only is Patrick just about as skilled as your average ER doc, he’s got all that training and experience in leading irregular militia groups in combat. That’s pretty much what his A Team was doing in Afghanistan his second tour there, if I understood him correctly.”
Nikki nodded, giving Nancy a wan smile before speaking.
“That’s what prompted Pat to get out. Well, that, and wanting to make a real life with us.”
“Why was that?” Marta asked out of the blue. She blushed, then offered a shrug to her sister-in-law. “He never said, and I didn’t want to ask back then.”
Nikki, despite the tense mood, had to bite back a chuckle. “He never said exactly, except to say he was tired of trying to convince those tribal warriors to join the twenty-first century. Except he didn’t use such polite terms.”
Mike cleared his throat. “Uh, guys, just leave it alone, please. Don’t put him in a position to tell that story again. Patrick didn’t do anything wrong, but the whole thing is just ugly and tragic. Some things are better buried, if not forgotten.”
Mike’s grim statement, coupled with the terrible coverage we were subject to on the evening news, placed a real damper on the evening and we quickly broke up within five minutes of my brother’s admonition. Unlike Marta, I knew I could live the rest of my life without hearing whatever gruesome tale Patrick might have that soured him on his Army career. And I knew Nikki was lying when she said she didn’t know. She might be eight years younger than me, but she was still my sister, and I’d long ago learned to read her tells.
Following this exchange, Nancy went and tracked down Lisa, routing her out of the girls’ bunk house and heading for their new home. When Marta volunteered me to carry the lantern for our two newest residents, I bit back any protest and went to wait on the back porch in my rubber boots and rain slicker.
Without thinking about it, I slid my pistol belt on under the slicker and only noticed what I’d done when I was adjusting the grips on the Rock Island 1911 I’d taken to carrying. I was still waiting for the sheriff’s department to return my other pistol, but I figured it was already sold out the back door and in the hands of a convicted felon somewhere.
As if to mock my prepared state, the weather gods knocked off their precipitation for the moment and the three of us were treated to the damp night air without the steady drone of raindrops. I did note the air seemed to have a bit of a chill though, and resolved to check the weather station when I returned to the main house.
We’d been chatting about the various kinds of livestock we had on the farm on the walk over, pausing now and then to avoid some of the deeper mud puddles in the yard as we went. Lisa seemed as excited about having new baby goats and calves to play with as she was making new friends, and she dominated the conversation all the way to the short set of steps up to the mobile home. Once we arrived though, I could tell Nancy had something to say.
“Thank you again for letting us stay here, Bryan,” Nancy said once again. Then she grew more serious as she waved for Lisa to precede her into the small foyer we’d converted into a mudroom.
“I’ve never been one to look for charity, but my family has always been there when Lisa and I needed help. Now, I find myself beholden to a man who’s nearly a stranger to me, and the feeling is peculiar. You’ve shown yourself to be a gentleman, and I’m not accustomed to that. Please, give me some time to get used to the idea.”
Nancy seemed almost upset by the time she finished her little speech, and I wasn’t sure what to say back to her, so I stumbled a bit.
“Uh, Nancy, helping you…is helping my family too. I mean, I try to do the right thing, but this was a no-brainer. Not just for cementing our working relationship with Wade and his family, but because you offer so much by living here with us. Please, don’t feel like you owe more than you’ve already agreed to do in helping us out around here.”
“As you wish,” Nancy replied sweetly, and I had to take a step back in mock horror.
“Did you just ‘Princess Bride’ me? Really? And I’m Buttercup?”
Nancy laughed, as I’d intended. She gave me a nod of acknowledgement, as if she could sense my own discomfort at the emotional turn of our conversation. I was offering a way out of what might have been a painful conversation for both of us, and she accepted.
“Live with it, Buttercup. Now, go home and dry off. We’ve got work to do in the greenhouse tomorrow.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Sunday turned out to be a rarity, a day without rain, and everyone on the farm jumped to take advantage of the fair weather. While Bea and Marta led the kids, including an eager Lisa, in an assault on the garden, harvesting the ripe and in some cases, overripe produce, I took Nancy and Mike over to the new property for some strategizing. Nikki, as per Mike’s new security protocols, remained on watch in the control room. She would stand duty until noon, when Marta would come to relieve her.
From the basement office, anyone in the security room had access not only to the expanded ring of cameras erected at key points around the property, but also had the Kenwood HAM system set up, as well as my old Panasonic shortwave radio.
I’d forgotten about the Panasonic after Mike had installed his much more versati
le Kenwood, but Marta dug the twenty-year-old boombox-sized radio out of storage one day when I was in town and set it up to listen to music while she was working on the back porch. That was fine, but sort of like using the farm truck to pull your little red wagon. As a result, I’d picked up a smaller, battery-powered Sanyo at the overpriced Variety Store downtown about two blocks from my office and reclaimed the Panasonic. I’d paid twelve dollars for the palm-sized device and now Marta could listen to her music, but from a local radio station now instead of one in Costa Rica.
Mike and I decided to use the side by side ATV instead of saddling the horses or taking one of the trucks, so Mike and I ended up rubbing elbows stuffed in the front bench seat while Nancy lounged on the back bench with only a canvas bag full of tools to keep her company. Slower progress, but we didn’t have a saddle for Nancy yet and I worried the soggy ground where we were going would simply swallow one of our trucks.
Despite the lack of rain, I could feel a heaviness in the air, and the dark bellies of the cumulous clouds scudding across the sky gave credence to my worry. The weather report warned of the tropical storm building in the Gulf but for some reason, the National Weather Service remained strangely mute on the timetable and the likely storm track.
“You think this overblown tropical depression in the Gulf is going to go all megastorm on us?” I asked Mike, keeping my voice low to barely carry over the sound of the engine.
“Fuck if I know,” Mike admitted. He’d become even more concerned over the ominous turn for the weather, and I knew he was trying to dig deeper into what was only now becoming available online. Navigating Netfeed reminded me of trying to find a light switch in the dark, only to find out the bulb was burned out. In other words, a lesson in humility I didn’t need at the moment, but Mike was always the more persistent between the two of us. He was convinced someone inside NOAA was posting forecast information that the Netfeed bots promptly removed, but he was determined to get at the numbers before they disappeared.
“Well, let’s see if we can find a site we can use,” I replied, glancing back thoughtfully to Nancy as I spoke, raising my voice to be heard.
“Nancy, any chance we can borrow a skid steer or a track loader?”
The woman laughed, then gave me a considering look as she gauged my serious expression.
“Really? What do you have in mind? I thought we were just looking for a place to set up the other greenhouse. Some place back off the road where it wouldn’t draw attention, but where it could be maintained and harvested from whoever ends up living at the second house.”
Now it was my turn to blink in surprise. She’d deduced an awful lot from our rather cryptic discussion about this backup plan.
“That’s true, but you can see from the tangle ahead, we’re going to have our work cut out for us,” I gestured, encompassing the overgrown thicket as we motored closer. This ten-acre patch of trees looked to have never been harvested, and the kudzu vines seemed to give the secluded mixture of pines and oaks a jungle texture.
“You want to build in there?” Nancy’s simple response told me my idea might actually have some merit. If we did this right, no one would think to search in that thicket of vines and creepers.
“When winter comes, we’ll lose a lot of the visual cover we now have,” I conceded. “But the idea is to haul out some of the standing dead trees for fire wood, and then construct the greenhouse in the middle of that mess.”
“Won’t the limbs and vines obscure the sunlight you’re going to need?”
I turned to Mike, who’d actually done some research on the subject.
“Not as much as you might think. The pot growers in the north used these kinds of greenhouses in the woods to pretty good effect,” my brother lectured. “We just need to cut our way into the middle, doing so from the back side away from the road, then remove some limbs while leaving the bulk of the screening trees in place. You lose some solar coverage to the obscuring foliage in the mornings and evenings, but the idea is to keep the plants warm inside, as well as giving them sunlight. We have the little stoves just about perfected, using the already built model to experiment, and I’ve found using pine knots and the like work nicely for fuel.”
Idling the ATV when we drew near the outer edges of the small clump of trees, I waited while my brother and our new friend studied the tangled mess. From this angle, an observer could barely see five feet into the densely-packed gloom of the trees and bushes.
“You just want to snake some of the dead trees out, then pull the stumps and level the ground for the concrete slab, right?” Nancy inquired, and as she discussed the equipment requirements with Mike, I guided the ATV around to the back side of the grove of trees and approached to give them a closer look at what we might need to do.
From this side, the trees opened up a bit more, but I saw three pines that would have to go before we could even consider hollowing out the center of the thicket. One looked to have been struck by lightning at some point and was split about a third of the way down from the crown, and it leaned into the neighboring two trees like a drunken sailor being supported by his shipmates. That was a hazard, and I resolved to do the cutting on that one myself.
“We also want to be careful with the kudzu,” I chimed in, and while Mike understood my reasoning, Nancy gave me a curious look.
“Now you’re just messing with me. Careful?”
“Oh, yeah,” Mike added, moving in to steal my thunder. “Bryan’s been studying all these wild plant books, and turns out, kudzu is actually edible.”
“Yeah, laugh it up, but you still ate the jelly I made from the flowers last year,” I said, nodding to Nancy as I spoke. “That was easy, but I’m still working on a way to make the cornstarch substitute like they use in Japan. I mean, I can make it, but there’s got to be an easier way of reducing the leaves.”
“That sounds interesting, but like you said, makes for a whole lot of work. Any reason why?”
I started to give one of my noncommittal answers, but I decided if she was willing to throw in with our crew, then she deserved the truth. Or at least, the truth as I saw it.
“Nancy, before things get back to normal, I predict we’ll need every scrap of food we can grow or forage.”
The long pause before she spoke told me Nancy was running some calculations in her head.
“Just how bad do you expect the situation to become?”
“Don’t know, but we’ll need alternatives,” I temporized, not wanting to get into my dark speculations. Mike gave me an odd look, but I shook him off as I continued, trying to sound more upbeat for once. “We’re lucky, in one respect, with the timing of this disaster. As it is, most of the garden will be usable, and some of the field corn crop can be saved. Looking at using things like kudzu, or curly dock, or some of the other forage foods just makes the resources stretch further. I think…”
Before I could provide any more information, the walkie talkie strapped to my hip gave a warning chirp. Mike got the same, and since I was driving, he reached his first. Keying the microphone, my brother muttered a gruff, “What?”
“You and Bryan need to get back up here right now. They’re finally talking about that storm on the news,” Marta said, her voice tinny and distorted by the electronics. “They’ve upgraded it to a hurricane.”
Mike gave a sigh, but I nodded in response and warned Nancy to hang on, turning the ATV to head back.
“How big are they projecting it?”
I heard Mike’s question, but I couldn’t make out Marta’s answer. But then, I saw Mike’s face and I knew it was bad. He paused, like he was gulping back bile.
“How deep is it, Mike?”
That was simple slang that went back to our shared childhood and hanging out in the summers, riding our makeshift rafts in the nearby creeks and rivers. We didn’t get many summer days like that, so the two of us made a point of slipping off for some creek time whenever we could get away with it. For years, I had dreams of those lazy summ
er days, laying up on sand bars with the creek waters flashing by. We knew the danger, in an abstract fashion, as the unseen snags and drifting tree limbs threatened to reach out and grab the unwary. As midday drifted implacably into dusk, we would need to get out of the water and make our way home. At these times, Mike and I invariably found ourselves on the wrong side of the water.
We took turns, Mike and I, though never in a perfectly linear fashion, so I might go first twice, then Mike would feel the urge to prove himself and would thrust himself into the swirling waters. As an adult, the memory of the stupid shit we did as kids seemed near suicidal, and yet with the invincibility of youth, we never hesitated for longer than a second.
Whoever went first, whoever braved the current and the threat of obstructions under the water, would always turn back from the bank to give a report. That was another example of our shorthand, and Mike and I could exchange a paragraph of information in only a few spoken words. In this case, I wanted to know just how deep we were in the shitstorm to come.
“Like I can’t see the bottom,” Mike responded, and I fought the urge to shiver. Whatever Marta had said about the hurricane, Mike thought the news was the equivalent of drowning waters.
“What are you two talking about?”
Nancy’s words brought us back to the present, and I offered her a rueful grin of embarrassment.
“Sorry, that’s just a private joke,” I explained, raising my voice to be heard over the droning of the engine. “Marta wants us to get a move on back to the ranch. She seems to think we have work that needs doing before this hurricane makes landfall.”
“Uh, what hurricane?” Nancy asked.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The local news stations were providing heavy coverage of the building storm in the Gulf, and for once, I thought they might actually be underselling the threat. Not just from the storm, but from the likely aftermath. With all of the federal government’s focus on the plight of the West Coast survivors, I guessed there weren’t going to be any FEMA trailers or long-term housing vouchers provided in this latest round of disaster recovery efforts. Reading between the lines, I felt a sense of dread creeping into my thoughts. With the Feds otherwise occupied, individual states and the affected communities would bear more responsibility for fixing the damage. If it ever got fixed.
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