“So, I have to get eight dollars per, Bryan. That’s the only way I can afford to keep the lights on,” Harry explained, and I couldn’t complain, but I did make a face. In reality, I was glad to get the consideration, since he didn’t have to sell me squat. Plenty of customers out there for his limited supplies.
“I’m only doing this so we can harvest what we can of the corn to keep our livestock through the winter,” I grumbled, continuing to sell my story, “and now it sounds like the government is planning to come seize my cattle before I can even get them to market in the spring.”
Harry waved a hand, like he was flicking away a troublesome fly, but his tone was not unsympathetic. “You might be better off selling now instead of trying to hold them over. Prices are already high. You really think this winter’s going to be colder than before?”
Early on, I’d mentioned Harry ought to make sure he had plenty of propane on hand to get through the winter. Not only was it a suitable precaution, we weren’t wedded to propane like some were. Of course, if Mike and I could get that methane digester working over the winter, that might add a little to our heating and energy production, but the difference between propane and methane was vast. The main one being I couldn’t create propane out of cow shit and perseverance. Well, I hadn’t done it with methane yet either. But at least I had the instructions and a willing partner in Mike. Getting back to the subject at hand, I gave Harry a nod.
“I do, but I’m in a bind because while I got a little more than the bare bones of my breeding operation in place, I can’t afford to cut back too much and keep myself solvent,” I solemnly confirmed. Mike had been wanting to have a word with Harry for days now, since his little operation might become the only way to get fuel in later days. We had other gas stations in the county, but he was the only fuel distributor I knew. This visit let us kill two birds with one stone.
“Hell, son, welcome to farming,” Harry intoned with some feeling. “That’s why I got out in ’75 and started selling gas. Everybody needs gas,” he added with a wry grin, but his face grew more serious after that as he followed up his earlier line of questions.
“So, really cold, you think?”
“Depending on how cold it gets, I might just end up moving some of them critters into the house to help keep us warm,” I declared, giving Harry a tight little grin.
“Yeah, I heard a story about how the old-time German peasants used to do that,” Harry agreed with a little chuckle. Then he went on, more seriously once again. “That’s going to be bad around here, then. Folks in these parts aren’t set up for handling snow and ice. I know the county ain’t got plows or salt for the roads.”
“That’s why we plan on staying near home, buttoned up until spring,” Mike added. “That, and we want to make sure Bryan’s menagerie stays unmolested.”
“Anyway,” Harry continued, “I’ll have Cliff run out to your place this afternoon. He’s already got a stop up the road at your neighbor’s.”
“Yeah, Wade’s doing the harvesting for us, so that makes sense,” I conceded. Such agreements between neighbors were common, and I wanted to reinforce the idea that we weren’t outsiders here. This played into the idea that an old, deep-rooted family like the Husbands wouldn’t make such deals with outsiders.
As my research showed, in bad times throughout history, the outsiders would be sacrificed, however reluctantly, to spare the old-timers in the community. Brutal and not politically correct, but as usual, the truth usually offended somebody.
This went hand-in-hand with my “gray man” philosophy. The best way to stay under the radar was to never show up on it in the first place. Only time would tell if my efforts, our efforts, would ultimately bear fruit, but my cynicism aside, we risked little and gained much by simply being good neighbors.
Fishing out my farm account check book, I wrote out the large bank draft and handed it over to Harry. The old man gave me a gap-toothed grin and we shook hands before I headed out the door.
The current state of affairs weighed heavily on my mind as I followed Mike out into the sparse parking lot. The banks remained a sore spot for many people as the Feds continued to zealously control the withdrawal limits set forth in the early days, but in areas outside the Recovery Zones, commerce continued. Had to continue or else the economy would crash, and the flow of goods and services was barely limping along as things now stood. This check tore a hole in my remaining bank balance, especially since we had to transfer diesel out of the big tank to make room for this five hundred gallons, but this storm might just be the event that set off a crisis in our area. I’d rather pay high for diesel and have it than not.
As Mike started the truck, I absently rested my elbow on the sill of the open window and continued thinking about the state of our union. The West Coast, from the tip of Baja all the way up to the outermost Aleutian Islands, remained virtually uninhabited as the force of the tsunamis had scoured the landscape down to bedrock as far as two hundred miles inland in some places.
Where the news had initially covered rescue missions charging in to assist the beleaguered locals, that footage began to run dry soon after. The would-be rescuers might have charged in with the best of intentions, only to find the residents either dead or fled. On the gradually improving HAMnet reports, rumors now centered on the FEMA teams struggling to find their way through the tangles of lifeless, destroyed cities and mapping out plans to eventually resurrect the lost cities. I figured we’d experience Atlantis rising back from the depths before we ever saw any significant population return to those haunted lands. And no one in any of the official news outlets spoke of Hawaii anymore, as if the dead island chain had never existed.
The rest of the country fared better, relatively speaking. All along the East Coast, cities from Miami all the way up to Portland, Maine, experienced coastal flooding as the blasted shockwaves of the Pacific Ocean continued to reverberate through the world’s waterways like a fat man wallowing in his bathtub. The Third Coast, as some called it, suffered a similar series of inundations when the sea level in the Gulf of Mexico rose, then fell, and over six feet all along the southern edges of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and coastal Florida took it again, this time all along the western shore.
Even writing off the West Coast, the rest of the damage caused by the sea rise had resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars in damages as buildings collapsed, roads disappeared, and vital port cities flooded. None of this was openly discussed in the national news, but HAM radios continued to spread the news. I wondered when, or if, the federal government would step in to shut down their broadcasts.
“You want to go by Sally’s place first?” Mike asked, drawing me out of my sad, reflective mood.
“Nah, let’s stop at the Feed and Seed first,” I replied absently. We were in my flatbed farm truck, but I let Mike have the wheel without argument. I was more sore after our little workout earlier than I wanted to admit, and wrestling with the wheel, absent power steering, seemed like a sure recipe for throwing out my back. Plus, Mike was better at backing the damn thing up to the loading dock, anyway.
Driving through town was an eerie reminder of those first few days after Rockfall as locals scrambled to clean out the grocery stores and stock up on plywood at the lumber yard. People were out and about in a frenzy, but at least this time we all knew, or thought we knew, what to do in preparation for yet another hurricane.
When Mike made the turn into the parking lot at the feed store, I only counted half a dozen vehicles out front. No idea how many were clogging up the loading dock in back, but we would find out soon enough. I had my list out before I’d even unfastened my seat belt, then slung open the heavy door and stepped out on the cracked pavement and patched asphalt lot.
“Marta give you a list too?” I asked Mike, taking my chance like always to poke the bear.
“Let’s call it more of an advisory,” Mike explained, a sly grin on his face. “My woman knows she can trust me to get the things we need
, as opposed to the things it would be nice to have.”
“That’s a good point,” I conceded. “What’s on your ‘good to have’ list today?”
“35 Whelan,” Mike replied instantly, and I had to suppress a chuckle of my own. Mike was here to play scavenger hunter again, once he got Marta’s orders filled.
Despite what many of his detractors claimed, the president hadn’t used the growing civil disruption as an excuse to institute a gun ban. Such a move would have triggered an uprising of some sort by many of the people; the blue-collar working-class folks he was seeking to placate, if not openly court. Why would the president want to appeal to what many in his class thought of as the great, unwashed masses? My own theory was one of his advisors had reminded him that he needed those kinds of people to operate the steel mills and other manufacturing concerns the nation suddenly needed.
Anyway, that was beside the point. What the president did to control gun violence in America was make it more expensive to carry out such acts. No new tax, either. Instead, the federal government, immediately after Rockfall, instituted a buying spree on weapons and ammunition that caused a severe shortage of ammunition for the civilian market. Want to pick up a few extra boxes of 9mm, or 45ACP? All gone. Same with 38 Special, 40S&W, and even .380 for goodness sake. Forget about common rifle rounds, especially anything ever used for military use in the past. Stores that used to receive cases of Lake City overruns in 5.56 were now getting one or maybe two twenty-round boxes. Ironically, the price freeze kept the actual cost of a box of ammunition down, but finding anything useful was proving challenging. Of course, as warehouses emptied out, some dribs and drabs of ‘non-mainstream’ ammunition was being shipped out to stores, and Mike was eager to snatch up what he could find. “What? No 7.65 Argentinian?”
“Dude, you know I have to…” Mike started, then looked away. At first I thought he was thinking about his ammunition supply, but his attention was drawn elsewhere. My brother merely responded with an absent wave as he cocked his head.
“What?” I asked, catching my brother’s distracted attitude. He was staring out at the two-lane highway, back the way we’d come. I noticed the roads seemed clear of traffic from that direction, which was odd this time of day and given the stirred-up-anthill situation.
“Sirens,” Mike murmured, nodding back towards downtown. Wilson’s Feed Store was located about a mile from the courthouse, and about five hundred yards off the blacktop. The location was close enough to town for commerce, situated on the outer edge where land was presumably cheaper, but still within the municipal boundaries of New Albany.
“Gunfire,” I added, my ears now picking up the distinctive pow, pow, pow, followed up by a rapid succession of pop, pop, pop, pops that seemed to stretch on for nearly thirty seconds. Several bursts, and then a persistent squeal of metal pressed against something equally hard. This sound wasn’t something familiar to anything I could place at the moment.
“Light automatic rifle or submachine gun,” Mike concluded, and I felt the tension rise in my stomach as the adrenaline butterflies began to loosen up their wings for yet another round of chemical dumps into my body’s key systems. When that lone gunman at the gate had started throwing shots at me, I hadn’t enjoyed the feeling then, and I’d learned to hate that surge of emotion-laden jet fuel when I’d stood off the three kidnappers on the backstreet behind my office. I tried to tell myself how much I enjoyed the quiet life, one free of conflict, and I ended up repeating the words in my head like a mantra. The quiet life, the quiet life…
Knowing we would have to move the truck around back at some point to load up, Mike had pulled in to park us off to the left side of the lot, nearer to the side of the building than the front. That left us a good forty yards from the double doors and the perceived sanctuary of the interior of the business. At least Felix, or more likely his predecessor, had invested in solid cinder block walls when he’d built the place. In any event, we were not likely to be making a sprint across the parking lot before trouble arrived. And trouble was most definitely coming.
“You ready?” Mike asked as he eased his hand into the side waistband of his pants, using the door to hide his action as the semi-automatic pistol appeared in his big paws as if by magic.
“You want to just sit this out instead? Sounds like more trouble than I signed up for this morning,” I commented.
Mike seemed to consider my words for a moment before responding.
“If they keep on going, I’m not one to chase trouble,” Mike replied tersely. “If they turn in here, though, I aim to do what I can. Wish I’d brought my AR, though.”
Shaking my head slightly when I finally caught sight of the source of the squealing sound coming limping into sight, I reached back behind the truck seat as I withdrew my old friend, the hog rifle.
“What you got in there?”
“180 grain jacketed hollow points,” I replied, forcing my frozen facial features into a wolfish grin. Fake it ‘til you make it, I thought to myself as I lifted the short-barreled rifle free.
Mike nodded. “Heavy enough to take down an elk, so that’s going to sting.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The truck that came wheezing into the parking lot of the feed store looked a lot like those vehicles you’d see on television where they’d been driven though an artillery barrage, except instead of Mogadishu or Fallujah, this devastated late model Ford was coming from the direction of downtown New Albany. Of even more significance, I couldn’t hear the sirens anymore.
Only crawling along at about thirty miles per hour on three wheels and one shattered hub casting a trail of sparks out nearly fifty feet in a rooster tail of grinding metal, the white paint job of the F-150 was marked with puckered dimples through the sheet metal running along the driver’s side front quarter panel, showing signs of battle. Judging from the smoke, or steam, billowing out from beneath the hood, this truck’s engine was in the final stages of failing, or eating itself. Either way, the battered Ford was operating on borrowed time, and the driver was steering straight for the feed store parking lot.
“Think that’s a group of lost Bible salesmen?” I asked nervously, switching my attention between the approaching disaster on three wheels and the rifle in my hands. The eighteen-inch barrel looked distinctly out of place on the normal-sized action on the semi-automatic rifle, and I hoped the attached 3x scope wasn’t too far off center from being knocked around behind the seat. I’d only taken it out to test fire it about a week ago, resetting the scope for three hundred yards when I did, so I had high hopes in that category. At least I knew this time I wasn’t going to succumb to buck fever.
I was committed to defend the folks in that store if it came to that juncture, but I wouldn’t fire the first shot. That was not due to some sense of fair play, but because of my ardent desire not to end up in prison. Self-defense and defense of others was something I’d spent considerable time researching since that violent altercation behind my office.
“No, I think we can also eliminate an Amway convention,” Mike deadpanned as he withdrew two more magazines for his concealed carry pistol from a waist pouch and stuffed them in his shirt pockets. I was glad to see we’d accidentally decided to both carry the Springfield XD. That way we could share magazines if necessary, and after seeing the two men visible in the back of the truck, we would need every round.
Reaching into my left side attached magazine holders, and catching my brother’s eye, I extracted my two spares and tossed them underhanded to Mike. He nodded his appreciation as we turned back to studying the approaching vehicle.
One of the men I saw standing in the truck bed, braced against the cab, was brandishing what looked like an AR-15, but the other one appeared to be clutching tightly to something shorter and more compact. The shape looked vaguely familiar.
“Is that…” I started, and Mike finished for me.
“Yep. Looks like a MAC-10. Either modified or original fully automatic,” Mike observed with a s
niff, going into full-blown, gun snob mode. “Spray and pray, which may explain the absence of our city police for the moment.”
“Focus, brother. Now, what the hell are they doing?”
“Maybe they just robbed the bank. Now their getaway vehicle is toast.”
As soon as the words left Mike’s mouth, the two of us seemed to reach the same conclusion within a fraction of a second.
“They’re looking to switch trucks,” I started, and Mike gave a fractional nod before he finished the thought for me.
“Or failing that, taking hostages. We can’t let them get into the building,” Mike simply concluded. “I count five. Two in back and three up front. How many do you make it?”
I didn’t bother to respond, as I rummaged through the glove compartment of the farm truck. If Mike spotted five bandits, if that was the proper term, then I would have to take his word for it. Then my fingers closed over a familiar object near the bottom of the pile.
“Ah-ha,” I muttered, and Mike glanced over with a look of consternation.
“What is it? And you need to focus on the problem at hand, Bryan.”
“I am. This rifle is great. Only problem is, the hunting magazine only holds four rounds. This,” I pronounced, holding out the black metal rectangle in my left hand, “is an extended magazine. Ten more rounds of 180 grain justice. And where’s your long arm again, Mr. Don’t-Lay-Your-Rifle-Down?”
“Wanted to stay low-profile,” Mike muttered, then he hissed between his teeth before continuing. “Getting in a shootout here is the opposite of low profile, but we can’t leave the people in that store defenseless.”
Again, we were on the same wavelength as Mike popped open his door on the driver’s side, and I instantly followed suit. The old 1986 Chevy was a bit long in the tooth, and the faded red paint job needed touching up, but the doors were sheet metal instead of plastic, so that gave us the illusion of cover if nothing else.
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