Age of Survival Series | Book 3 | Age of Revival

by Holden, J. J.

  When they pulled up to the Black River Falls municipal building, Carter couldn’t believe his eyes. Standing out back with some of the other cartel guys who had some downtime was a face he recognized. It was one of the kids that had gone into Bowman with him but hadn’t come out.

  He jumped out of the vehicle before it had come to a complete stop.

  Carter shouted the man’s name.

  “Yeah? What do you want?” the man asked angrily.

  Carter stepped closer, saying quietly and firmly, “I want you to keep up the act where the locals can see us. You got words for me, let’s take them inside and you can have them.”

  “Why? So you guys can keep this one going a little longer before you jack it up, too?”

  “Inside. Now,” Carter said, putting a hand on the grip of his sidearm.

  “All right,” the man said. “Usually, people invite me to step outside with them, you know.”

  “Things are a little sideways these days. Come on,” Carter said, leading the man into a section of the building set aside for the cartel’s fake soldiers. “All right. You got something to say?”

  “Yeah. I watched you drive off while I was trapped inside a house.”

  “You don’t look so bad off,” Carter said, giving the man a good once-over. There were no obvious wounds, his clothes were clean, and he looked like he’d been eating as well as anybody. “Seems somebody took care of you.”

  “Yeah. I gave it up when I saw you abandon us. Thought for a minute them yokels might take me apart.”

  “Obviously, they didn’t.”

  “They were all right.”

  “And then you busted out?” Carter asked.

  “Yeah. They had me in the basement of the town hall. Managed to get the window loose enough to wiggle out night before last.”

  “How many of you were caught?” Carter asked.

  “I don’t know. They took me over to the firehouse to check me out before tossing me in lockup. Saw one of our other guys brought in bleeding bad, and Prange. He wasn’t bleeding, but he was breathing funny and looked red. They cut his shirt off to do something, and he had a vest on underneath.”

  “So Prange is still alive?”

  “Was a few days ago. Don’t know what might have happened to him since.”

  Carter went right upstairs to the bosses’ office. He had something to tell them that was more important than some local yahoos taking a couple shots at his work detail.

  7

  Tom Grossman was sitting in his office, looking at a stack of paper that wasn’t going to go away on its own. There was also no obvious place to start dealing with it. The one thing that seemed most pressing was Vic Davis’s report on the escape of one of Prange’s men the day before. Grossman knew the rough details. He’d managed to separate one of the narrow metal strips from the folding chair in his room and used it to dislodge the window in the middle of the night and squeeze through it. The only thing in the report he’d need to know beyond that was how Davis planned to prevent a recurrence. The answer would most likely be to not give any other detainees folding chairs.

  All he had to do was sign the paper approving of the investigation and preventive action, but he was still trying to get a read on his new police chief and felt he needed to really give the report another good read-through before approving it.

  There was a larger sheaf of paper form Cathy Berkman. Her reports were always interesting to read in their own odd way. The town’s former admin, now acting Secretary/Treasurer had a strange ability to make financial documents readable and engaging. Her latest report on how the town’s finances and barter system were in the wake of Prange’s takeover would certainly be a good read, but the size of it was daunting.

  There was a memo from the head cook over at the school. It was just a single sheet of paper, which meant it probably wasn’t about some major issue. That seemed like a good place to start.

  He had just gotten into the first paragraph, when there was a careful knock at his door. It was Davis, with two slightly steaming travel mugs in his hand.

  “Come in,” Grossman said. A rich aroma of good-quality hot coffee followed his new police chief into the room. He popped the lid on the mug Davis had set in front of him to see it was filled with honest to goodness opaque black coffee.

  “The last of my single-pot packets I keep for hunting season,” Davis said. He stayed standing while he took a sip from his own mug.

  “Have a seat, please.”

  “I was actually wondering if we could take these to go. Join me for a stroll?” Davis asked.

  Grossman considered this for a moment. One of the few things he really knew about Davis was that he preferred to have personal conversations while doing something. Shooting pool or darts, walking, making sawdust in his woodshop. “Sure. Why not,” he said.

  Davis handed Grossman’s cane over to him. “I think it’ll do the town good to see us getting along together, after everything that went down between you and the old man.”

  “I hadn’t actually thought of that, but it’s a good idea. Let’s go.”

  Grossman looked up at the sky as they stepped out onto the street. There was definitely weather moving in again. “Good time to get out,” he said, pointing up at the gray cloud tops that were visible over the ridgetop to the northwest.

  “Yeah. Might be our last couple hours of good weather for a while.” Both men had lived in Bowman long enough to know what those kinds of clouds coming from that direction meant. At least two or three chilly, damp days were on tap, with cold, clear weather coming after. “Going to slow down the harvest some.”

  “Yeah. It’s hard enough work as it is without folks having to slog through mud. The cooler temps may not be bad, though. That warm spot we hit earlier in the week was really taking it out of the guys out there busting ass in the fields.”

  “Any luck with the hunting parties you’ve sent out yet?” Davis asked.

  “We’re moving cautiously for now. We don’t know exactly who might have called dibs on what. We’re sticking exclusively to property owned by townsfolk, and hoping nobody else has decided to claim it for their own. After Prange’s guys got ambushed twice on the road out to my land west of here, I haven’t wanted to send anybody out to hunt it yet. Not sure if folks out that way lit up Prange’s guys because they knew he was bad news, or if they’ll hit anything that comes up the road.” Grossman took a sip of coffee. It was a damn fine beverage to have a conversation over. Even better than a cold beer would have been. “Fishing’s been good, at least.”

  “Yeah. I can smell the smokers from over at my house.” Davis looked up at the sky again and sighed. “Look. I’ll just say what I need to say. We both—meaning you and us on the police force—really stepped in it, and none of us really gave enough to find a good middle ground. For my part, I’m sorry. I could have used my long friendship with Schuster to see if we could have talked with you instead of pushing against you. Maybe we could have found some better middle ground to work from.”

  Grossman considered this against his own thoughts on everything that had happened to the town since the Event. “I think our antagonism distracted us from seeing problems until it was too late. We lost some really good people, you know.”

  Davis nodded. From where they were standing, they could see all three of Bowman’s churches, but the chief’s eyes were clearly on the yard of the Baptist church, where Schuster was buried. “I’ve noticed we both stop by the graveyards on our way to work in the morning.”

  “And on our way home in the evening. A part of me wonders if we’d still have lost people, even if we’d both stepped up and made the right decisions every step of the way.”

  “If we had perfect foresight, maybe we wouldn’t have lost any. I wonder how other towns are doing. The only news we’ve gotten so far is what Prange told us, and it’s probably safest for us to assume every word out of his mouth was a lie.”

  Grossman nodded. “Well, we know that my brother and h
is buddies were involved in at least two shootouts early on that killed Art Meier and some other guys that own land up on the ridge. We’ve heard the shooting downriver every few nights. Most of that is definitely not hunting going on. The guys on the way out to my land shot first and never got around to asking questions. This area’s been through some rough spots, but this one has people legitimately scared in some big ways. I’m sometimes amazed that if you take Prange out of the calculations, we lost so few to violence since this all started.”

  “You may be right,” Davis said. “I still know we could have done better.”

  “We could have. Well, we pushed the elections for a new town board back a couple weeks because of Prange. I guess we’ll see then how the rest of the town feels about the job I’ve done.”

  “And we’ll see how the mayor feels about my job as acting police chief. Will I get a big promotion, or what?”

  The two walked along in silence for half a block, waving to passersby and listening to the whistle of the wind as it picked up.

  “Did you get any chance to chat with Peter Meier while he was down here?” Grossman asked. “He says there’s a group of families that’s banded together to hold a good swath of territory out beyond Tackhill Road.”

  “Nah,” Davis said. “I recognize him, but never really knew the family.”

  “Circling back to our situation regarding hunting land and where else we might go to harvest crops,” Grossman said. “I’ve been mapping out places where it’s probably not safe to send people out. Folks like the ones I just mentioned and the ones west of here that shot up Prange’s boys. Still a good amount of territory where I don’t know if it’s safe to send folks out. We should come up with a plan for how to find out if anybody is claiming it. If we can’t establish that somebody’s got active ownership, I want the town to annex and post it.”

  “Could be risky,” Davis said. “Carter mentioned a few times how nervous he was outside of town, feeling like somebody was always watching him through a rifle scope.”

  “Yeah. Finding out about all the street signs being uprooted was probably my first real sense of how many people out there are in a very defensive mindset about their property. Because of the risk, I would want to involve your people in any effort to scout property or contact folks. I just want to find out how you feel about that before proposing it at the next town meeting. I suspect a lot of people will be in favor of the idea, and that puts you and your team on the line.”

  “It’s something we need to do. Thing is, you know that my jurisdiction ends at the town line.”

  “Yeah,” Grossman said. “But if we start annexing property, that moves the line.”

  The two men hit an intersection and stopped, looking around to see which way they wanted to go next. “Good point,” Davis said. “If we wanted to go strictly by the book, I wouldn’t have to support anybody stepping outside the town to explore. First contact would be completely on your own.”

  “But you have been sending escorts out with the work details harvesting crops.”

  “Strictly off-duty. They’re volunteering their time. I guess I never bothered to tell you that,” Davis added, a bit sheepishly.

  “You didn’t. So, do you think you’d have any men willing to volunteer to go with me or my people to scout prior to annexing land?”

  “Officially, I’d say you’d need to work it out with them. Unofficially, I can’t think of anybody on my team that wouldn’t step up. Of course, if you were to annex first and visit later, I could officially detail them.”

  Grossman shook his head. “I’d rather not deal with the hassle of annexing and un-annexing plots of land if we find somebody’s staked it. I know there’s no book for this situation, but if things ever do get back to normal, I’d prefer to have clean paper trails for everything we’re doing.”

  Davis nodded. “I’d recommend at least annexing any property owned by folks that are willing to give the town access for hunting and forage. Start there, see if somebody else has put their thumb on any of it, and then try to connect the plots.”

  Grossman pointed down a side street and the two started walking again. “Sound logic there. If I bring it up at the next meeting, will you stand behind it?”

  “It was my idea. Why wouldn’t I support it?”

  “Because I just told you I’m planning on stealing it,” Grossman said. He noticed a smile on Davis’s face. The first genuine smile he’d seen in quite some time.

  It was still a bit early to be sure, but it seemed like he was on the road to repairing his relationship with the town’s police.

  8

  Prange remembered how Carter had talked about the itching feeling between his shoulder blades, like somebody always had a weapon aimed at him whenever he was in the open country outside of Bowman. Prior to the big fight in town, he’d always dismissed that as the result of an overactive imagination.

  Not anymore. Tom Grossman had been by a while earlier to tell him he’d get thirty minutes a day to get some air out in the town hall’s parking lot. One of the town’s deputies—part of the original, pre-Event police force—came down and shackled his ankles and cuffed his wrists together before leading him upstairs. All things considered, the restraint job was decently humane. He could take full steps, but not run, and his wrists were at least cuffed in front of him instead of behind. The cop even gave him a cup of fruit juice.

  It was a cold day, but clear. Prange felt like he could have enjoyed his time outdoors, if it weren’t for that itch that he couldn’t reach around to scratch. Every person that walked by shot him a look like they wanted to just kick the shit out of him. He spent half his time wondering whether the deputy was there to keep him from running or to keep him from getting lynched.

  If it was the latter, Prange would have appreciated a couple more guards. He’d already seen firsthand how quickly the town could rise up and take somebody out if they wanted to.

  “Hey,” he said to the guard, nervously, wanting to get a sense of how the man felt about him. He had the cop stone face down pat, and had handled the shackling without any unnecessary words, efficiently without being unpleasant about any of it.

  “I’ve got nothing to say to you.”

  “You’re kind of stuck with me for a bit. Want to at least do something to pass the time?”

  “I’m getting paid by the hour, regardless of how fast or slow that hour goes.”

  Prange chuckled at that. Last time he’d heard that line out of somebody was a DMV clerk when he was trying to get license plates for one of the antique military cargo trucks the cartel had bought at auction. Possibly the very truck that he’d been riding in during the mighty “Battle of Bowman.” The same truck that was parked just a hundred feet from him, with two old shade-tree mechanics pulling the radiator to patch the bullet holes in it. “Mind if I check out my old ride?”

  “I’d rather you not. The guy there lighting the blowtorch right now…his brother was killed by your guys. You get within arms’ reach, he’s going to take that torch and light you on fire with it. Not only will I need to piss on you to put out the flames, but there’ll be a six-page report I’ll have to fill out. By hand, on loose-leaf paper.”

  Prange figured that answered the question of how his guard really felt about him. More out of boredom than any hope it’d make any difference, he said, “You know. My operation runs with a lot less paperwork, and you don’t have to save anybody you don’t like. Pay’s probably better, too.”

  “What? Two grams of ice a day and freebies with toothless tweaker hos? No, thank you.”

  “We don’t like our guys on the product. I’m talking better food, top-shelf liquor, trade goods. I notice you don’t have a watch. We could fix you up with a self-winding Citizen, like the mayor’s got. Better guns, too. You saw what we had.”

  “Yeah, about that. You realize that we got one of those M-16s off every one of your punks we buried, right?”

  Prange scratched his nose. “Yep. And I’m guess
ing you’ve got, what, maybe a hundred rounds total, judging by how much my guys were sending downrange at you. That works out to ten rounds a gun, maybe less? That’ll give you a whole second of full auto fire right there, and those guns will be as useless as all your cars here.” To his credit, Prange noticed that if he was getting to the deputy, he wasn’t showing it.

  “I’m guessing you might want to consider that the AR-15 is kind of a popular weapon. Maybe one or two guys here in town own one and made sure to keep an extra box or two of ammunition on hand.”

  That silenced Prange. It was something he hadn’t actually considered.

  “Didn’t think you’d have anything to say about that,” the deputy continued. “So, if your guy finds his way back to whatever rock you guys crawled out from under and brings your buddy Carter with, they may be unpleasantly surprised.”

  Prange couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. He’d been locked up alone in his closet since he’d been captured. Grossman and Davis had both mentioned that a number of his men had been killed in the fight and that a few had escaped, but they’d stubbornly refused to say whatever had come of Carter, and if any of his people had been taken alive. The deputy had just let slip more information in one sentence than he’d been given in days.

  “Well, if you think only a handful of guys will come to get me, you’re going to be mighty surprised, too,” he told the deputy.

  It seemed of finally dawn on the deputy what he’d done, and he took a step away, turning his face away from Prange but still keeping an eye on him. Prange tried a few more times to get him to talk, but the cop stone face was back in full effect again.

  9

  After two days of wet, rainy weather, Peter woke up without any pain in his leg. He did the exercises Thorssen had taught him to keep the uninjured muscles around the wound from atrophying and to keep the joints limber, and found himself feeling pretty good.