Age of Survival Series | Book 3 | Age of Revival

by Holden, J. J.

  “I know you’re not being reckless, Peter. You’re not thinking of going to check out cabin yards because it would be fun or because you don’t believe there’s risk.”

  “We’re going to need fresh fruit in our diet. That’s where my thinking is at, Mom.”

  “I know,” Nancy said. “Your head and heart are in the right place. They always are. That doesn’t mean they’ll not take you down stupid paths.”

  “You want me to limit the total amount of stupidity I’m engaging in?” Peter asked.

  Nancy pointedly looked at his bandaged arm in its sling and the way he leaned against the counter. “You know, your father once said almost that exact same sentence to me.”

  “Did he survive that stupidity?”

  “No. He avoided it.”

  “When was it?” Peter asked.

  “Second tour in Afghanistan. They were looking for volunteers to go far forward and provide security to some sort of SEAL communications team up on a glacier or something for a couple weeks. He would have been completely out of contact for the duration of it. They gave him two hours to make the decision. With the time differences and the Army’s tendency to actively avoid asking these kinds of questions at reasonable hours for anybody, the call came in at almost four in the morning. Woke you up from a sound sleep, so your dad and I sorted it out with you crying your lungs out.”

  “How old was I?”

  “Thirteen months,” Nancy said. “I didn’t put my foot down and tell him he couldn’t go, but I didn’t hide my feelings on it either. Three days later, a bad blizzard blew through. Killed three of the five people up at that station.”

  “No guarantee Dad would have been one of them,” Peter said.

  “More likely than not, it would have been.” Nancy set her bowl down and took the knife from Peter. He had just been standing there, not cutting the potatoes on the board in front of him. “There were a handful of times when your father would listen to me when I told him I wasn’t comfortable with what he was doing. Most of the times, nothing bad would have happened. That time, I know down to my bones that it would have.”

  “What are your bones telling you right now, about me taking Irene or Chuck up to check out the fruit trees up the way?”

  “I wish I knew,” Nancy said. “I spend most of my waking time worrying that something’s going to happen to one of us, that the next time I hear about one of our own up here getting shot, it’ll be goodbye.”

  “So, you parcel up your worry into manageable little chunks?”

  Nancy expertly diced up a potato. “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but yes. I think in the back of my head, I’ve invented some chance of somebody not coming back from a town run, or a trip to the message drop, or just a routine patrol shift overnight. Whatever those odds are, they’re probably just random numbers, but I feel like I know those odds. When you talk about going somewhere new, or every time Irene takes someone off the property to just wander the woods or check out the next farm field, I don’t have a number I can rely on. It’s all unknown, unmeasured, and uncalculated.”

  “Maybe we need to quantify it,” Peter said. “Visit one cabin, by the book undetected recon, and come back. Only one cabin per run, so we can let your brain do its math with smaller numbers.”

  Nancy shook her head, but said, “That might work. Worth thinking about for some day that isn’t today.”

  2

  Hank Carter got out of Bowman with one of the two trucks he’d gone in with, five of his fifteen “soldiers,” and less than half of their supply of ammunition for their rifles. In addition, he’d left Daniel Prange behind.

  Truth be told, Carter wasn’t really sure which bothered the cartel bosses more, the loss of the guys and guns, or the loss of Prange. His partner had been up in Wisconsin for a couple of years, effectively on exile from Nevada, where the real action and money were, after having screwed something up real bad down there. Prange never volunteered details, Carter never asked. It was the normal way of doing things when working well outside the law. The less you knew about what somebody did, the less you could give up. The less somebody else knew about what you did, the less they could use against you.

  What Carter did know was that Prange seemed to have a good handle on routine and running ongoing operations. Once he took over the northwoods territory, hiding farms and labs in remote nooks of the national forests, the product got better and moved faster, more money came in, and it got scrubbed better and with less loss. If you needed somebody to just take care of business for you, Prange was the man.

  The mission out to Bowman was not routine. It was not business as usual, keeping things going day to day. If they had managed to get themselves settled into the town, it would have been, but the process of putting their claws into it to move the cartel’s territory farther west had been anything but an exercise in competent, if uninspired, leadership. Prange may have been tapped for the job because of how he’d turned around the flow of product and cash, but he’d failed to step up to the task and get it done.

  As a result, Bowman was lost, along with some decent men and some valuable equipment. Whatever happened to Prange, Carter didn’t know. By the time the battle had reached the point where he needed to either get out or get captured or killed, he hadn’t seen or heard from Prange for a good forty minutes. Carter had noticed that the amount of firing from other parts of town had been steadily declining as the number of armed people converging on the town hall had increased. If Prange had still been alive when Carter left, he had certainly been either injured or detained, and to have tried to find him would have been suicide.

  None of that meant that Carter didn’t care. He actually cared quite a bit. He considered Prange to be a good friend. In private, he was funny, engaging, and very genuine in ways that most people in the drug trade weren’t. Carter really wanted to know what had happened to Prange.

  There was one thing he was sure of, though, that provided a little bit of comfort. It looked like Tom Grossman was back in charge of Bowman. Carter felt that Grossman had two complimentary flaws: He was a firm believer in law and order and doing things properly. And he was soft.

  Prange and Carter had almost succeeded in getting Bowman under their control because of those two characteristics. Grossman hadn’t been willing to put the hammer down on his people when shopkeepers started gouging, which caused chaos and uncertainty to start percolating, then people started rioting. And when it had come time to lay down the law, he had insisted on doing everything by some sort of plan and procedure. He could have just declared Martial Law for the town and taken all the troublemakers out behind the town hall and shot them as an example. Instead, he’d appointed a defense for them, held an arraignment hearing, scheduled a trial, dragged his feet around, and left people desperate for some solid guidance.

  Carter reached into his pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes. He had only two smokes left. Not counting the three cartons that he’d left in a duffel bag beside his cot in Bowman. After the meeting he’d just finished with the cartel bosses, he could really use a smoke, but with only two left, he wasn’t willing to light up just yet.

  He decided to hold onto them until he got back to Bowman. After all, when he’d left that little pisshole of a town, he’d promised he be back to burn it all down. What better way to enjoy his last couple of cigarettes than by lighting them from the flames of Tom Grossman’s house?

  Without the relief of a nicotine hit, Carter decided to walk off his tension. Even though he’d done his best to shift the blame for the failure at Bowman to Prange, since he was actually the one in charge, they’d given him a hard grilling on what all had gone wrong. They made sure to point out that Black River Falls was doing great. They’d accomplished what Prange and Carter had failed to do in Bowman.

  Carter had to admit that they had a point, too. The cartel had managed to slip seamlessly into the fabric of the town’s government. They’d tried the same ruse, too, pretending to be from the state offices i
n Madison, up to provide assistance and guidance to population centers. They had taken the exact same skills Prange had, in getting people to make things and move them and trade them, and gotten people to work and put food on the shelves of the grocery stores. It was kind of amazing how well they’d scaled things up.

  Rumor had it, though, that one of the cartel’s silent partners from the Russian mob down in Chicago had once been involved with black market ops somewhere else in the world. Ukraine or Azerbaijan or one of the Stans that used to be part of the old Soviet Union. Experience with creating and profiting off government corruption on that scale probably made jerking little old Black River around seem like a game.

  “Hey. Come on.”

  Carter shook his head. His driver was walking up to him. Same driver that had driven him into Bowman, same one that had driven him out. Instead of the old Army cargo truck they’d had for that mission, Carter now had an ugly, eighties vintage CUCV. Basically, a militarized Chevy Blazer that had eventually been phased out when the Hummer arrived on the scene. It was a little cramped and had that distinctive musty smell of an old military surplus vehicle that had been mothballed for quite a while but gave a smoother ride than the old cargo truck had, and came with decent seats. It also didn’t have any bullet holes in the body work, or fresh blood stains in the bed.

  “All right. Let’s go,” Carter said, stepping into the passenger seat. Two more of his men from the Bowman disaster were sitting in the back seat, sharing space with an awkward metal radio mount. The truck was a two-door, meaning that to get out, the passengers in the back seat had to wait for the guys up front to exit and pull the seats forward. From the couple shootouts he’d been involved in around Bowman in the previous weeks, he knew how frustrating it was to get in and out of the big cargo trucks, where the only challenge was the climb up from or jump down to the ground. He couldn’t imagine needing to get out of the back of the CUCV under fire, squeezing through the narrow gap, trying not to get a rifle tangled up with the front seatbelt, hoping you didn’t trip and go down.

  He couldn’t imagine why the military would have fielded such a deathtrap and hoped that if the cartel let him go back to Bowman, they’d let him have the cargo dinosaur back.

  “Sounds like we’re out to the collection point where the beardos are bringing in the crops, unless you’ve heard anything different,” the driver said as Carter buckled in.

  “Nope. That’s still the plan. I guess we get to learn how to not spook horses.”

  Ten minutes later, Carter was watching his two men try not to crash and burn as they extracted themselves from the back seat. At least fifteen Amish “beardos” were helping some of the Black River folks unload bags and baskets of crops from their horse-drawn wagons.

  A few of the cartel’s other men were hanging around their own vehicle, a venerable old Toyota Hilux. Like Carter and his men, they were also wearing Army field uniforms and carrying old M-16s. The kinds that could go full auto instead of three-round bursts. The men he was relieving looked mostly relaxed. They weren’t watching over the fields or moving about as if they could feel crosshairs on the backs of their necks.

  Despite their ease, Carter couldn’t unpucker himself. Not with a quarter mile of empty farm field between where he was standing and a heavily wooded hillside. Ever since the trip out to Bowman, he’d been unable to shake the feeling that somebody was always watching him. It had started on the initial drive out to the town, when he and Prange had noticed that street and highway signs had been pulled up. Then there were some of his guys getting ambushed from the woods when they went out to check on some of the mayor’s hunting land, after the guy had skipped town just ahead of Prange arresting him. Then the same folks presumably lit his guys up a second time when they went out in force.

  There was a family he knew about living just up the valley from Bowman, and he’d picked up comments or overheard bits of conversation here and there about other little enclaves or homesteads of preppers that held swatches of land. Carter knew that a lot of those folk didn’t hold with government types, and he was out and about every day, dressing and acting like a soldier. He reached again for the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket.

  He knew that he needed to find some substitute for a smoke right quick, or he was going to start losing it. Especially if the bosses were going to keep him on informal punishment by making him stand guard over Brother Ezekiel’s vegetable stand, or whatever the hell was going on.

  The Amish guys didn’t say much. What little bit of their conversation he heard was focused on getting the work done.

  “Pretty much like this every day,” one of the cartel men he was relieving said. “Twice a day, they bring a convoy down. Bosses say to not mess with ’em, just let them unload and be on their way. It’s usually this same crew, never anybody younger than mid-twenties, never any women with them.”

  One of the Amish stopped and took his hat off, then wiped the sweat off his forehead with a faded handkerchief and took a drink from an old tin canteen. Another cut off from the main work party to talk to one of the Black River folks. They shook hands and spoke quietly, before exchanging a couple pieces of paper.

  “Money’s no good to the beardos. The local guy’s giving them a receipt for the food they brought in this load, they’re giving him a list of things they need and an estimate of how many hands they could use. Tomorrow morning when they come by, whatever stuff they asked for and some warm bodies will be waiting for them.”

  Carter looked around and noticed a half dozen exhausted-looking people sitting in the shade nearby. “I take it those guys worked with them today?”

  “Yeah. It’s rare we see the same folk go out two days in a row. They’ll work a guy’s ass clean off. Word is, they feed you real well, but you still come back lighter than you went out. Anyway, we’re going to head back in. What you see here is about it. Don’t jerk the beardos around, don’t let anything walk off. Quietest job you could ask for.”

  “Right,” Carter said, again feeling his hand go for his pocket.

  He’d asked his bosses for permission to go into Bowman and level the place. They’d told him to get over it. Carter wasn’t over it, and he wasn’t going to get over it. He needed to move and to do something. Burning Bowman to the ground would be something. Standing on a concrete pad watching bags of carrots come in was not.

  3

  As much as Tom Grossman didn’t want to see Peter and Larry go, it put a tick mark on the list of small victories. One more person that had been wounded in the fight to take back the town was recovered enough to leave the convalescent wing of the school building and head home.

  He was also glad to have the Meiers and their friends up at the top of the ridge. He’d heard about how they’d come into town and cleared four of Prange’s men out of a house together. The time they’d spent working together day by day had made a decent team out of them. Having a group with that kind of cohesion and ability to get a job done sitting above the highway between Black River Falls and Bowman was a definite advantage. There was still the matter of how to get reliable, fast communications set up. One of the thousand little details he was still trying to keep from getting lost in the responsibilities of managing the town.

  Even four days after having led the push that captured Prange and drove Carter out, Grossman felt unsure of how much he was still in charge. On paper, yes, he was still the mayor. Since Prange was not an actual official of the State of Wisconsin, he’d had no authority to remove Grossman from office and order his arrest. An arrest which never did happen, as he’d managed to elude both the town’s police and Prange’s thugs. The town board had never held an actual vote on removing him from office, either, so there was no recognized authority that had officially taken any action.

  After Adam Schuster, the town’s police chief, had been killed while retaking the town, the most senior deputy was appointed as his interim replacement. Vic Davis, born and raised in Bowman, was in his late thirties and physically fit
but with a sly, boyish look about him. He had been on the police force ever since he’d graduated from the academy when he was twenty. On duty, he tended to be stern but generally friendly. He was a rules guy that didn’t let you bend them, but he’d at least be nice if he had to bust you for breaking one. He had always struck Grossman as the kind of guy that liked to stand behind a strong leader and help get things done. Off duty, he was much quieter and more reserved, as if he put on a persona with his uniform.

  How he’d felt about Prange and Carter was never exactly clear to Grossman. It seemed like he had just fallen into line with Schuster and done what he was told without really questioning anything. Since being bumped up to acting chief, he was still a bit of an unknown quantity. Grossman had definitely noticed a change in his demeanor. He didn’t seem to be putting on the jovial-hardass schtick anymore, instead tending more toward the quieter person he had been on his own time.

  The change made Grossman wonder whether he was feeling overwhelmed by being suddenly thrust into a leadership role, still processing his role in backing Prange and Carter, both, or something else. It left Grossman unsure of how much support or opposition he could count on. There also hadn’t been enough hours in the day for the two men to really have a few good conversations, feel each other out, and get a good handle on where they were in or out of sync with each other.

  Grossman had enough going on just dealing with the job he had in the aftermath of the takeover and the fight to end it. Davis was dealing with the law enforcement side of it while also trying to fit into the new job he’d suddenly been given, and mourning the death of his old boss and friend. Grossman knew he needed some time to get his feet under him, but also just needed to figure out how to best work with him.

  The route from the Williams house to the next couple of families he needed to visit, and finally to the town hall, took him past the Catholic church. There were two fresh graves, marked by simple wooden crosses with the names painted on. Bouquets of hand-picked wildflowers were piled on the mounds of dirt. It was the same at the other two churches in town. There was a small group of mourners at one of the graves. They glanced over at him as he stood on the street, a few of them nodding silently in his direction, and he moved on.