Age of Survival Series | Book 3 | Age of Revival

by Holden, J. J.

  “I say we keep the radio on this frequency for at least another twenty-four hours before we shift it. If we don’t get another clear transmission, let’s go back to our previous rotation of frequencies every patrol shift.”

  Everybody agreed to the plan, but nobody seemed eager to get up from the table.

  “Come on,” Peter said. “Chuck’s cleaning. The rest of us have other work to do.”

  Among Peter’s other tasks after finishing his herbology lesson with Irene was to go off the property, down to the highway. It was the day that a return message from another nearby homestead should be waiting for him. Not long before the retaking of Bowman, a message had been left at the Meier property with a brief introduction, and instructions for where to find a blind drop to leave messages. Peter had left his first return message on his way down to the fight to throw Prange out of town. He’d been able to keep up the slow correspondence during his days of recovery at the Bowman school thanks to Larry and Chuck acting as couriers to pick up and drop off messages.

  So far, the others were thin on details about their own situation and seemed mostly interested in defining where the two homesteads should set their borders in the interest of not accidentally shooting at each other. Art had drilled the concept of OPSEC into Peter’s head well enough that he was equally opaque about how many people lived at the Meier property, what resources they had, weapons, and the like. As far as Peter could tell, his father had at least known some of the people at the other homestead from online prepper forums, but that wasn’t enough reason for him to freely give up information.

  It did bother Peter that the others seemed to have been close enough to observe his land since the Event. It made him wonder if they didn’t have a larger population and could spare people to go farther afield to scout out than he could. The addition of Chuck brought the Meier property up to seven people, and they never went more than a mile from the property, and that was usually to make quick runs down to town. From what he knew of the other folks, they were a mile away as the crow flies, but much longer by road or any route that could be easily traveled on foot.

  The messages never felt threatening or intrusive, but Peter never let himself forget that there was likely a significant power imbalance between his homestead and theirs, and it wasn’t in his favor.

  While the first message had been dropped on the Meier property itself, it seemed that out of respect for the boundaries the other folks had offered, their new drop point was over on the border. Peter had no way of knowing whether they were still coming across the highway and getting close to his land, but at least they weren’t sending messengers right up to the property line.

  With his leg still healing, taking a bicycle down the hill to the main highway wasn’t an option for Peter yet. The go-kart wasn’t an option anymore after his return from Bowman because they were trying to keep noise discipline around the property. That left Peter with the options of either dispatching somebody else to go out and pick up the message or taking a slow walk down the winding road he lived on. The latter seemed unwise as well. As long as nothing unusual happened, it would be fine. It would be more than fine. It was a perfect day to get out and enjoy a walk.

  But if one thing went wrong, anything that required Peter to run, to jump, to dive for cover, to move quickly, to fire while on the move, it would be a disaster. He’d get himself and possibly whoever he was with killed.

  As much as it pained him, Peter decided he was going to pull up a chair in the kitchen and listen to the radio static while somebody else went down to retrieve the message container. “Hey, Chuck. Want to swap with me? I’ll hit dinner prep if you go with Larry for the message pickup.”

  “Sure,” Chuck said, setting a plate down. “Here. I noticed you missed breakfast this morning and didn’t eat much at lunch.” It was a grilled cheese of homemade flatbread, a thin slice of Spam, reconstituted freeze-dried cheese, and a little bit of fresh parsley from the garden. But he’d also plated it carefully, slicing the sandwich into precise quarters with an artful drizzle of hot sauce and a few more sprigs of parsley.

  “Damn it. I need to leave a tip now, don’t I?”

  Chuck laughed. “Let me try carrying your Glock on this run and we’ll call it even?”

  Peter considered the offer. Could Chuck have seriously dressed up his lunch a bit just so he could try out Peter’s pistol? He couldn’t get why exactly Chuck was interested in it, either. Peter liked the Glock 37 because of the .45 GAP round it chambered. It was a cut-down casing with a stronger powder load, so it had the punch of full-frame .45, but the smaller cartridges allowed for a smaller hand grip. While Peter was strong, he was also compact.

  Chuck was taller, longer in his limbs, and could palm a basketball. Peter figured the Glock would just disappear into his big mitts. Something like Bill Roth’s Beretta 92 with its extended magazines would be a better fit.

  Unless Chuck was still trying to find ways to connect with the others in the household. Peter considered that letting Chuck borrow his own sidearm, feel how it carried, and maybe just hold it in his hands, would give them a little bit of conversation about something. With that in mind, Peter wondered if Chuck had something he really wanted to talk about, and the little bit of care in setting up lunch and maybe a chat on the pros and cons of different handguns was a way to sidle up to what was really on his mind.

  Peter nodded. “Sure,” he said, unclipping the holster from his belt. Chuck handed over the Colt Delta he’d been carrying, one of the “house guns” that were part of the Meier family’s collection but didn’t really belong to anybody in particular. It was large enough that Peter had always found it awkward to fire, but if he was just going to be sitting in the house for the next few hours, it would do.

  “You ready to roll?” Larry asked, peeking his head into the kitchen.

  “Yeah. Let’s do this thing,” Chuck said.

  After the two left to get the message, Peter nibbled at his sandwich, feeling restless. He knew that sending somebody else down with Larry to get it was the right call, but he wished he’d traded with somebody working outside instead. Autumn was coming, and with it, cold, gray, wet days. There was still a lot of harvesting to be done to fill the pantry for winter, and no shortage of improvements to make to the property. With his leg still healing and arm in a sling, Peter was useless with a shovel, terribly slow at picking crops, and almost a liability on patrol. He’d been passing the time by helping his mother can and preserve food outside, or foraging for herbs with Irene, but he was itching to do the kind of real work that built up an honest sweat and got the blood flowing.

  He looked at the date on his watch. If he was going to strictly follow Thorssen’s instructions, he needed to keep to light duty for another two days. He’d been pushing the limits of that, and could tell that he was slowing down the healing of his leg by doing so. If it was life or death, Peter would have just driven on and dealt with it, but as things were temporarily calm at the homestead, he was doing his best to comply with the medic’s orders.

  After a few more minutes, Peter got up and started working on dinner. It kept him inside, and wasn’t his favorite detail, but it gave him something to do while waiting for the message to come back.

  By the time he heard the distinctive sound of Chuck’s heavy tread coming up the front porch, he was about to burst from boredom.

  “Got it,” Larry said. “Nothing to report from the trip down and back. Didn’t see anybody moving, nothing looked different.”

  “Crack it open,” Chuck said, handing over the old soda bottle with its roll of paper inside.

  The letter inside started with the familiar greeting.

  Fellow Free People,

  We would like to thank you for holding to the north side of the highway. We appreciate your willingness to work with us to make sure we’ve all got security and access to resources.

  Like you, we do have some connections in town. Would you be interested in setting up a meeting in Bowman to di
scuss some sort of mutual aid between us at a minimum? Recent events in Bowman, in addition to a couple incursions on our property by others, have us thinking that finding some means of direct emergency communication between ourselves and the town would benefit all of us. We do not know exactly how we might set something like this up, but we are open to any ideas you have.

  Some of us do go into town on Sundays for church services. If you’d like to meet for lunch afterward this weekend, let us know in your next drop. Include some way of recognizing you and a good sign and counter so we know we’re in touch with the right people.

  Thank you, and stay strong, friends.

  “I’m curious who else has been on their land,” Larry said, when the three had finished reading the brief note. “Random people going by, or do you think they’ve got somebody like that Rocky dude who’s got a bug up his ass about them?”

  “I have no idea,” Peter said. The idea of random incursions didn’t seem completely unlikely. One of the advantages of where the Meier home was located was that it was at the top of a steep hill; the only access was by a winding road or by some hard bushwhacking up steep, wooded land. The south side of the highway was easier terrain and crossed by a greater number of small roads. As long as Peter could remember, the only traffic he’d ever seen on his road was people that had a reason to be there, or motorcyclists out looking for a challenging ride. “Regardless,” he continued, “I’m interested and think it would be good to bring this up at dinner tonight to see what we all think.”

  6

  Two days into his new detail, Hank Carter was sitting in the passenger seat of his CUCV, his old cargo truck following, on his way out to a big cornfield.

  He wanted to be going anywhere else. Two days of watching over work crews picking crops, and he was ready to hang himself. As much as Bowman had gone sideways at the end, it had been active. He’d had things to do, people to manipulate, power and authority to exploit. There was no shortage of work to be done in that little town.

  Half the time he was out at whatever farm field he was responsible for, he was tempted to give somebody else his pistol, grab some tools, and get to work. He couldn’t believe it, but the cartel had given him a shit detail that made farm labor look appealing.

  He wondered just how long the punishment was going to last before the big bosses gave him something real to do again.

  When he wasn’t thinking about picking up a rake or a shovel, he also considered just randomly shooting somebody, just to break up the day. He promised himself that if he ever found himself actually putting his hand on his pistol to do it, he’d go to the bosses and tell them they’d made their point, and they needed to get him back onto some real work, something that would produce results. He knew that there was no shortage of heads needing to be busted, teeth needing to be knocked out, smartasses needing to disappear. If the idiots in Bowman had been able to see through the ruse, he was sure there were people around Black River Falls that were figuring things out and needed to be taken care of. That was the kind of work he was good at.

  The only thing about the work he was doing was that the workers were never exactly sure whether Carter and his men were out there to keep them safe or keep them in line. It was a little bit of a challenge to keep his footmen at just the right level of intimidation to discourage the laborers from slacking or whining too much.

  Truth was, he hadn’t been given any real guidance on how to manage the work parties. Most of the people out in the fields were there voluntarily. The businesses that processed the food and the city both offered up extra shares of food for people willing to do the back-breaking work of weeding and harvesting by hand. The worst of the jobs were given to inmates of the county jails, but it was usually the town’s deputies that managed those guys. There was a rough division of attention whenever Carter had a jail crew for a shift. The deputies kept their eyes on the inmates; Carter’s guys kept their eyes outward.

  It was rare that Carter had that situation, though. The cartel didn’t know exactly who in the Jackson County jail might have worked for them before. It wouldn’t do for somebody doing time to call out a supposed captain in the National Guard as a former drug-running associate.

  “All right, sir. We’re here,” his driver said, pulling over to the side of the road. He hadn’t ridden with this guy before. His old driver was at the wheel of the cargo truck.

  Carter got out of the vehicle and slid the seat forward so his other two men could get out. He looked around, still not liking how many fields in the area seemed to have wooded hills close by. This detail was farther out than any of the other shifts he’d guarded so far, on land nobody from Black River had been to yet.

  “Gimme that,” he said to one of his men, snatching the M-16 from his hands. With nothing but iron sights, and not having zeroed it for himself yet, Carter knew it wouldn’t do him any good out behind two hundred yards or so. Nowhere near enough to deal with anything in the trees he was looking at, but he felt at least a little less vulnerable with it than he did with just his sidearm.

  The day laborers were just hopping down out of the back of the big cargo truck when his nerves were shown to be more than just paranoia. A bullet crackled past Carter, followed by a second that went through the CUCV’s side window. He immediately dropped down to a knee and crouched by the front bumper.

  “Back on the trucks! Back on the trucks!” he shouted. The man he’d taken the rifle from just stood there, not sure of what to do. “In!” Carter shouted at him.

  A few more rounds came in, hitting windows on the CUCV. He could tell they were coming in from the tree line but couldn’t see muzzle flashes, and they were too far out for him to really narrow down their source by the sound. “Load up! Come on.”

  The work crew were stepping all over themselves trying to get back up into the bed of the cargo truck. At least the driver already had the engine running. One more bullet hit the ground a few feet to Carter’s left while he waited for everybody else to mount up, but that was it.

  “Okay. Let’s get out of here. Straight on, and we’ll turn around at the next intersection up there.”

  “You want to come back through here?” the driver asked.

  “Yeah. I think we were being warned off. If they wanted to take some of us out, they definitely could have.” As the driver hit the gas and sped off, Carter looked at his map. Every option at the next intersection went a long way through territory that he knew nothing about. It still seemed safer to him to spin around and move quickly back the way they’d come from than to take his chances even farther out. “Just do what I said,” he told the driver.

  “Let’s just hope the other guy follows.”

  “Shut it.”

  The driver did as instructed, and to Carter’s great relief, his gamble paid off. They weren’t shot at again as they sped past the farm field.

  “I’m making a command decision. Take the next left, back to that field we were at yesterday.”

  There was another crew working that site, including one of the county jail work details. Carter talked to the cartel folks and deputies just long enough to let them know what had just happened. He left his cargo truck and the two backseat passengers from his CUCV behind to get some more work done, and had his driver take him back into town.

  Halfway back to the city, he realized that he was crouched down in his seat, even though the vehicle’s doors weren’t armored against bullets. He swore, and sat up straight, furious at himself for being so rattled by a few warning shots that he was still trying to hide. At the same time, it was clear to him that that sense of unease he’d had since the drive out to Bowman was not irrational paranoia. It was a legitimate fear for his safety and his life.

  It wasn’t lost on him that the uniform he was wearing and the vehicle he was in only increased his risk. It wasn’t only people looking to hold whatever they owned or were claiming that were likely to take a pot shot at him. Anybody that was opposed to the government sending in troops to do anything
on American soil just might have a go at him as well. Add in the fact that he wasn’t government at all, and that if people found that out…Well, it’d be Bowman all over again, and Carter figured he could just save everybody a whole lot of time by just painting a gigantic bullseye on himself.

  Carter realized he hadn’t yet checked in on his driver. He looked over, and the kid had a white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel and was staring intently straight ahead, not looking left or right. The last words out of his mouth had been back when Carter had told him to turn around and drive right past where they’d been shot at.

  “Hey. We’re clear. We’re good,” he said.

  The driver glanced over quickly and put his eyes right back to the front, still tense.

  “Look. It was just some guys posturing. Just telling us we were on their corner and needed to move it along. Nothing you haven’t dealt with before, right?”

  “Yeah, I know,” the driver said curtly.

  “It’s nothing different.”

  “I lost my best friend to somebody ‘just posturing’ last year,” the kid said. He reached down to his side and pulled his shirt up, showing a long scar. “Got two more on the other side.”

  Carter knew a knife wound stitched up by a well-meaning amateur when he saw one. “You were the messenger, then?”

  “Yeah.”

  “If the time comes to send a message back to those guys that just had at us, you want in?”

  The driver looked over at Carter, narrowing his eyes, first looking hostile, then confused, before settling on resolve. “Yeah. I think I do.”

  “Great. I could use a good driver when the time comes.”

  That seemed to calm the kid quite a bit. Carter’s gamble on his emotions had paid out. He didn’t like not being able to hit back. Dangling the possibility in front of him had snapped him out of dwelling on what had just happened to thinking about what he was going to do next.