Davis shook his head in agreement. “I don’t like this. Peter Meier was down today to get some more first-aid supplies from Thorssen because they were hit again last night. Sounds like a good-sized raid on their place a bit before dawn.”
“Yeah. I heard. Thorssen wanted to take a run up to check things out himself, but with it becoming clearer that Carter’s closing in, even he freely admitted that the risk of him getting shot or captured was way too high. Sounds like it was just some superficial wounds up there, at least.”
The sounds of gunfire wound down quite a bit over just a few seconds. There was a pause, and then one last burst of automatic fire that rang out with an ominous finality. All eyes went to the south.
“So, last night, it was up there,” Davis said, pointing to the west, up the valley wall toward the Meier homestead. “Now we’ve got it coming from that way. Think they’re trying to surround us?”
“We’ve still got them outnumbered, by a lot,” Grossman said. “Even if they’ve doubled their numbers from their last visit, that gives them less than forty men, and we’ve got, what, three hundred adults in town?”
“If their goal is to make a smash-and-grab for Prange, they could do it if they set up enough distraction to split our attention too many ways at once.”
“Think it’s worth moving him? Put him somewhere other than his cell in the basement or the school? Let’s assume that their guy who escaped knew we were holding Prange in this building, they’re going to focus on it. If they do manage to fight their way all the way here only to find he isn’t there, that’ll throw them for a while, and shift the advantage back to us if they manage to get in this deep.”
Davis considered the idea. “I don’t think it’s a good idea. Being at the valley floor, I know that it’s real easy for somebody on the high ground to see where people are and what they’re doing. If Carter has anybody doing solid recon, he’ll know exactly where we’re moving the guy, and I don’t know that setting up some sort of ruse to fake it is a good use of our time, either. Fact is, this building here is probably the most defensible position in town. Anywhere else we put Prange, we’re not as well protected.”
Grossman nodded.
“Of course, we could just remove Prange from the equation entirely,” Davis said.
“No,” Grossman said, shaking his head. “And I say that for many reasons. For one, the sentence says tomorrow morning.” Davis started to interrupt, but Grossman held his hand up. “I know that we could appeal to Keller, make a really good compelling case for it. I suspect we’re going to get hit tonight. Things are just ramping up too fast, and Carter’s men aren’t actually professional soldiers. I honestly don’t think he’s got the control or that they have the discipline to keep poking at us. They’ve hit places around us twice in under twelve hours. They’re ready, they’re coming.”
“Getting rid of Prange takes out a distraction that we don’t need.”
“Yeah, true. But like you said, it’s real easy to see what’s happening here in town from the outside. We take care of that business, anybody paying attention is going to see it, and that’s just going to make Carter and his men furious. If we shoot Prange right before they are planning to come at us, it’s going to ramp them up.”
“We don’t have to do it in the parking lot, you know,” Davis said.
“I’m not going to go old-Soviet style, one to the back of the head in a closet. We’re going to do it, we’re at least going to do it somewhat properly. And that’s all I want to hear about it, all right?” Grossman asked.
“Yeah. All right.”
Grossman stayed up on the roof for a while longer, with the people intently listening into the distance for any further sounds of violence around the town. After a long while, he finally went back down to his office. While marrying up contracts with his map was interesting, the slow tightening of the noose around the town made the task in the small notebook the more pressing issue.
When Keller had declared the sentence, he had only instructed what was to happen, not how. He specifically left that up to the town board. Grossman had volunteered to make the recommendation, which the other two were happy to let him take. As he stared at the item on his task list, he really wished he had a stiff drink handy, even as he chided himself for the thought. He knew that he needed to be completely sober and clear to deal with the issue.
The most logistically simple way to handle the matter was firing squad. No need to build a gallows, figure out how to hook twenty car batteries to a chair, seal off a chamber, or figure out what to dump down an IV. All he really needed was a clear space, some guns, and the people to fire them. If he were to ask for volunteers, he was sure he’d get plenty. There were very few people in town that hadn’t suffered some very personal loss from Prange and his men.
He also knew that selecting from people lining up for vengeance wasn’t the best choice. Too much hot emotion would make things messy, prone to mistakes or collateral damage. He needed people that could detach a bit, that maybe had been down that road of pulling the trigger on another person.
Grossman grabbed a pen and started writing the names of townsfolk that he knew had been in combat at some point in their life. He came up with four that he knew for sure, two others that had served in operational areas, but he didn’t know if they’d ever actually seen action. It was at least a start. He started writing out messages, then called down the hall for the message runner.
“Here you go,” he told the kid. “I need you to get some help, get these out as fast as you can.” There was one more envelope he gave the kid, addressed to Peter Meier. “I’ll also need a couple fast movers over eighteen for this one.”
With a mighty sigh, Grossman kicked back at his desk. His map exercise no longer seemed interesting. It seemed suddenly irrelevant. Next to it, on his desk, was one final message he hadn’t sent off with the runner. It was addressed to himself.
He had recused himself from any role in the trial. There was no reason for him to keep his hands off now that it was over and Prange had been sentenced. By the criteria he’d come up with for who should be on the detail, he fit the bill, being a combat veteran. Granted, all of his fighting had been done from the commander’s seat of a tank, lobbing 120mm shells at targets a mile downrange. But he had already in his life been given the command to kill, and it had been obeyed.
The one thing he could think of that would disqualify him from the task was that he did have a tremendous emotional involvement. Prange had taken over the town that he had been elected to lead. It was his citizens that had been killed and wounded by the man. The circumstances under which the town’s former police chief, and his old friend, Adam Schuster, had died led Grossman to be almost positive Prange had outright murdered him in cold blood.
If he were going to be part of the firing squad, either shooter or commander, he knew he’d have to set those emotions aside long enough to get the job done right.
He got his second interruption of the afternoon, a different message runner tearing down the hallway.
“What?” he called out, way more annoyed than the kid deserved.
“Some guy came from the highway to the west under a white flag. Says he’s from Carter, and he wants to deal.”
The west approach was where Prange and Carter had been ambushed several days earlier when they were looking for him after he’d gone to ground. He wondered how many men Carter might have out that way, and why he hadn’t heard any shooting from that direction if they were out there, since it was clearly hostile territory to them. It was also the exact opposite direction from Black River Falls, which reinforced his impression that Carter was actively surrounding the town, meaning that a real attack could come from any direction.
Grossman took a deep breath and wished again that he had some brandy in his desk. “Sure. Let’s go.”
In the lobby of the building, a young man in an Army uniform holding a white cloth on an old rake handle was standing, surrounded by deputies with hand
s on their guns. The messenger looked unconcerned with the number of armed men around him, and subtly sneered at Grossman when he stepped into the room. He was clean shaven, unlike every other man around, and looked like some street punk from a big city.
“What’s the offer?” Grossman asked.
“Hand over Prange and any others you’ve got—I’m guessing it’s just one, by the number of graves out across the river—and we’ll leave you be. Real simple.”
“Any reason at all why I should believe you’ll hold your end?”
“We’ve really got better things to do than jerk you guys around. You made your point, captured our boss, whacked most of our guys, tossed the rest out. We’re here to get what’s ours. Give it back to us, and we have no need to stay in the area. There’s easier pickings elsewhere.”
Grossman looked around at the rest of the people in the room. Not a one of them was buying it. He wasn’t either. “Tell Carter that we don’t deal with terrorists or criminals. You all need to go back to wherever you came from and stay there.”
“Be a lot easier on you all if you deal,” the messenger said.
“You’re a lot likelier to make it out of town alive if you leave now. You’re surrounded by a lot of really angry people, some of whom would be glad to take a shot at you regardless of me telling them not to.”
The messenger turned and started to walk away. As he opened the door, he looked over his shoulder and said, “I’d say it’s your funerals, but there won’t be enough left alive to bury the dead.”
22
Peter gathered up the last of the waste from the living room and sorted it into the relevant bins. Cloth bandages went into one bin with diluted bleach water to be laundered and boiled to return to the homestead’s stocks. Cotton gauze, paper goods, and other natural fiber items that could not be reused went into another bin to be composted. A few plastic items that looked like they might be reusable were set aside to be cleaned and returned to Mark Thorssen, in case he would be able to cycle them back in or find some other purpose for them. Metal goods went into a tray to be scrubbed and sterilized.
Bill and Irene were up in the attic, keeping watch through the firing ports in the shuttered windows up there. Since Thorssen hadn’t been able to come up and check out their wounds from the night before, it was decided they’d take thirty-six hours off patrol and instead take short shifts during daylight hours, using binoculars to keep an eye on things around the homestead. It was an imperfect solution, but with Larry just coming back online after his own injury, that left only four people fully capable of walking patrol.
While Peter was filling a pot to boil water for the metal first-aid equipment, he heard an unfamiliar voice that clearly sounded like it was speaking English. Larry, over at the kitchen table and sitting next to the shortwave, immediately perked up and looked at him.
“This is DL Strike three three six four three broadcasting from Erlangen.”
Peter held his breath and double-timed to the table. Larry already had a pen in hand. The voice had a very pronounced German accent.
“This is DL Strike three three six four three broadcasting from Erlangen.”
“Come on. News!” Larry whispered.
There was a hiss of static from the radio, then the voice started again.
“DL Strike three three six four three. We are able to power the generator and safely broadcast for only short periods of time. Germany appears to have been hit simultaneously by several advanced cyberweapon attacks. We have direct knowledge that our government ordered a counterstrike with EMP weapons. We have several eyewitness accounts of high-altitude airburst weapons detonated south of Berlin shortly after our order was given. Unknown who launched the cyberattack or the EMP at us. Reconstruction of transmissions manually recorded just prior to the EMP suggests the United States went offline approximately three minutes before we were hit, with Russia and China going offline about twenty seconds after the US went dark. This is all we can say with confidence now.”
The radio went silent again.
Peter tapped the signal-strength dial. “Highest we’ve recorded so far.”
“Think they upped the power for the English language broadcast, hoping somebody over here would get it?”
Peter looked over the log of maximum signal strengths they’d been recording. “Twice as strong as any transmissions they’d made in German.”
“Directional antenna, maybe?” Larry asked.
“I don’t know if you can do that with shortwave. But if I needed to ration power, I’d go with a lower setting for communication locally and crank it up only if I felt a message needed more range.”
“Maybe I’ve spent a bit too much time reading your dad’s prepper notes over the past few days; I think some paranoia is rubbing off on me.”
Larry’s remark rubbed Peter the wrong way. The situation they were in showed that, if anything, his father hadn’t been quite paranoid enough.
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” Larry said. “Just, I think reading his printouts of conversations and things, I’ve gotten a real hefty dose of somebody actively thinking about the worst things that could possibly happen.”
“Yeah,” Peter had to admit. “I know that you know what he was like. He took this stuff real seriously but didn’t let it stop him from living his life.”
Larry nodded. “But, worst case to consider is that we didn’t just get a little friendly news update, and whoever was broadcasting has an agenda.”
“Not enough information to judge, but I see your point. My gut, just by listening to tone of voice even of the stuff we couldn’t understand and this last transmission, is that the guy’s on the level. I agree that we shouldn’t take it at face value and need to keep an open mind.”
“Still, I don’t believe how good it feels to just hear from somebody that’s not from within two miles of here. I got so spoiled for a while there, being able to just pop online and chat with somebody in Australia or India or wherever.”
“I hear you,” Peter said. “Let me run up and let Bill and your mom know, then we can fill in the folks on patrol.”
Dinner that night was early, and nothing special. Even though everybody at the household assumed the next English-language transmission wouldn’t be for a while yet, Chuck had a hard time not perking up at any noise that might have come from the radio. Not only that, just having gotten news from the outside world had him distracted and unfocused.
By the time it was time to eat, everybody had an opinion. They decided that the best option would be to take thirty minutes up in the attic, where Bill and Irene could keep their watch on the property so they could pull the patrols in, too.
“Sounds like somebody in Europe at least has access to a serious amount of power and some news,” Irene said over her shoulder, keeping her eyes peeled on her half of the property.
“A lot of information sharing, too,” Peter said. “A ton more than we’ve had. I mean, we can maybe guess Prange’s folks have infiltrated some sort of functioning government in Black River, but that’s it. Still no solid word from Eau Claire, nothing from Fort McCoy, Madison, La Crosse.”
“Europe’s got a lot higher population density than we do here. Everybody and everything is close together,” Nancy said. “You can easily visit four countries in an afternoon.”
“What do you make of the broadcaster saying he’s keeping his transmissions short for safety?” Larry asked.
“Sounds troubling,” Nancy said. “It implies he’s worried about being triangulated, so maybe there are other entities out there with functioning radio equipment. Maybe he feels he’s being actively sought out, maybe he just wants to stay off the radar of anything with too much power, while still letting people know what all is happening.”
“Sounds like he’s part of a decent network of people that have pieces of the puzzle,” Peter said. “I know that Thorssen was online chatting when we got hit and was able to figure out that the US was hit in stages over several seconds. He
hadn’t said anything about any indicators of cyberweapons, though.”
“Yeah. That’s pretty spooky,” Chuck said. “That, and it sounds like the whole thing, worldwide, played out over just a few minutes?”
“Yep. Everything in the world changed, just like that,” Irene said. “Poof…”
Nobody spoke for a while.
“I think my takeaway from the transmission, if we can trust its veracity, is that we’re living in the new normal,” Peter said. “We haven’t seen any sign of state or federal government functioning here, and I’d like to think we were better prepared than most to be able to take a hit like this.”
“Well, it also means that no other governments appear to be functioning either,” Bill said. “So we don’t have to worry about any of them coming over to step into the vacuum here any time soon.”
“Small consolation,” Chuck said.
“I’d rather take my chances with a new American government rebuilding itself from the towns up than the Chinese or Rooskies coming over,” Nancy said.
“Assuming we do rebuild over here,” Sally said. She’d been so silent, tucked into a corner, that everybody had almost forgotten she was there. “Think we’ll ever go back to one big country, or do you suppose this will just make it really clear how different so many parts of it were? Let’s say we manage to put together some sort of upper Midwest thing that works. Think we’re going to let California or New York just come strolling on over and upset all that?”
“I don’t even want to think about what Cali or New York look like right now. Especially not the big cities,” Larry said, visibly shuddering.
“Hey. Got something,” Bill said, waving people over. “Coming up from town, two on bicycles. Red cloth on the arm and ankle, correct sides.” After the battle to retake the town, Grossman had let people know that anybody on official duty for him would still wear the red bands, but on the opposite arm and leg than they had during the fight. He’d hoped it would make it a little harder for Carter to disguise his men.
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