Copyright © 2018 by Franklin Horton
Cover by Deranged Doctor Design
Editing by Felicia Sullivan
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Created with Vellum
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Epilogue
Also by Franklin Horton
Bonus Content
Random Acts - Chapter One
Acknowledgments
This book is dedicated to the people that make books happen. To the readers, the writers, the friends, and the family.
Writers, particularly this one, are a contrary bunch. It takes a patient and supportive tribe to keep them on track and productive. Thanks for your comments and encouragement. Thanks for the reviews you leave on Amazon and for the stories you share.
In particular I’d like to thank my author buddies Steven Bird and Chris Weatherman, with whom I’ve spent many hours over many drinks discussing writing, guns, and the decline of Western civilization. One day we actually need to write the ridiculous books we’ve brainstormed on those late nights.
I’d like to thank Kevin Pierce, the narrator of all my audiobooks, for his professionalism, his wisdom, and for what we’ve done together.
I’d like to thank esteemed gun writer Van Harl for his encouragement and Henry Rifles for their technical support.
I’d like to thank my good friend “Richard” for the hundreds of hours of inspiring conversation and correspondence that helped me to distill this book to its essence. I appreciate the friendship and support.
Finally, thanks to the Mad Mick himself. You know who you are and I hope I’ve done you proud.
1
It was early fall and the nights were becoming cool in the mountains. Eleven tired women walked through dew-soaked grass, their wet feet cold nearly to the point of numbness. It was a small blessing. Beyond the grassy field lay the steep trail of jagged shale leading to the grow houses. That shale sliced at their bare feet like razors.
The men who accompanied them, their kidnappers, did not give them shoes, hoping bare feet would slow the women if they tried to escape. The women did not know what they’d do when winter came. They expected they’d still be working but would they be given shoes? They were certain the men would come up with something to keep them occupied. Better they be given some useful labor than to be left at the mercy of bored men, for there was indeed no mercy at the hands of bored men.
The women were escorted by a team of two heavily-armed men. Each carried an AR-15 and wore a handgun. Enough people had been shot at the camp that the women knew the presence of the armed guards was not an idle threat. They would not hesitate to shoot if they had to.
Kellen was at the head of the line, walking behind a guard they called Buster. She couldn’t help but notice that Buster allowed his rifle to dangle freely from its sling as he mumbled curses and furiously scratched his body with both hands. Kellen saw redness and an oozing rash creeping up the back of Buster’s neck. The same rash covered both his arms and she could only assume it covered the rest of his body. His misery brought a smile to her face.
For three weeks, Kellen and her crew had discreetly collected poison ivy and poison oak during their work at the grow houses. During their bathroom breaks, they wrapped sandwich baggies around their hands, grabbing handfuls of poison ivy leaves and then folding the baggie down to encapsulate the leaves like a doctor peeling exam gloves from their hands. Before the terror attacks came and the country fell apart, one of the women in the camp had supplemented her income by selling essential oils. With a basic understanding of the chemistry behind extracting oils, they’d come up with a plan to extract urushiol, the chemical irritant present in the plants, by boiling it.
Kellen turned to the woman behind her in line and made some pointless comment, using the ruse to check out the guard behind them. She was pleased to find him in distress also, clawing at his neck with his fingernails, trying to find some relief to the rash clearly overtaking his body. The only thing these men were concerned with was their personal suffering. It was fair justice for them, considering the suffering they doled out on a regular basis.
After the women had extracted a quantity of the oil, they began adding it to the laundry. They were required to wash the men’s clothing several times a week, doing the washing in tubs and drying the clothes on a clothesline. Over the course of two weeks they had hit nearly every man’s underwear and t-shirts with the oil. Now they were beginning to see signs of progress. The women knew the oil would not be debilitating, but at least hoped the itching would be distracting. This was the very moment when Kellen would find out if that was so.
She tightened her grip on the hoe she was carrying and threw a quick glance behind her. The rear guard was staring off in discomfort as he shoved a hand into his pants to dig at his blistered and chafing crotch. Kellen coughed, the signal for the women to prepare to fight. The women readied themselves, gripping their weapons and hardening their resolve.
At the rear of the line, the woman immediately in front of the guard drove the handle of her hoe into the guard’s already irritated groin. He doubled over in pain, gasping for breath. Following through with the movement she’d practiced hundreds of times, the woman spun the implement around and used both hands to bring the sharp end of the hoe down on the man’s head. He dropped like a rock.
The man at the head of the line turned lazily to see what was going on, his rifle dangling as he scratched and scraped at the inflamed skin beneath his shirt. Kellen was already in full swing, aiming at his head like it was a fleshy piñata. He barely had time to register surprise before the thick hoe handle connected and there was a crack like a home run being knocked from the park. The guard nose-dived into the hard dirt.
Kellen rushed forward and stripped the forward guard of his rifle. She straightened, switched off the safety, and fired a single round into the air. The shot echoed and reverberated, filling the valley and rolling across the mist-covered lake. Another woman rushed by Kellen and removed the guard’s handgun from a black nylon holster. Other women took the guns from the rear guard. One of them, clearly harboring a grudge for some indiscretion, paused long enough to repeatedly bash the downed man in the head with the buttstock of the rifle. If he was not dead, he would likely be impaired by a lifelong brain injury.
At the sound of the gunshot, women throughout the camp mobilized and fell into the plan they’d been hatching for weeks. They turned on their blistered and oozing abductors. Women with knives rushed from the kitchen, slashing at guards and plunging their butcher knives deep into the bellies of the men who had taken them from their homes. The laundresses weaponized the cudgels with whic
h they stirred the tubs of soaking laundry. The women of the gardens rose to brandish their hoes and pointy trowels.
The men of the camp did not stand idly by and allow this to happen. The armed men had a distinct advantage and they used it, whipping up their rifles and snapping off shots, trying to drop the army of wailing banshees streaking through the camp toward their freedom. In the infirmary, a kidnapped nurse had worked for two weeks to treat the unidentified rash that was debilitating the men of the camp. Of course, she hadn’t worked too hard at easing their pain since she was in on the scheme. The vile-smelling unguents that she so diligently applied to the worst of the cases was actually not a medicine at all, but a solution of animal feces and petroleum jelly that encouraged infection.
At the sound of the gunshot, the nurse took up a scalpel and went to check on her first patient. He lay in a cot separated from the others by an old bed sheet draped over a string. When he opened his eyes and smiled at his angel of mercy, she plunged the scalpel into his neck and twisted it, boring a wound from which he would be unable to staunch the flow of blood. She worked quickly to dispatch her other two patients, both of them sleeping peacefully.
After the way in which she’d been treated in the camp, she had no remorse for their misery and deaths. With her work complete, she grabbed a hidden pack containing bottled water and rations she had stolen from those designated for her patients. She threw it over her shoulder and ran from the building. She made it only fifty yards before she was spotted. When she failed to comply with an order to halt, a guard shot her in the back. She died in the wet field, tiny seeds from the tall grass clinging to her damp pink cheeks.
Kellen and the other armed women from her work party streamed back into camp. They hoped to find a full-fledged revolt underway with all of the brutal men dead or dying. Instead, they found more fallen women than men. In fact, the fighting appeared to be mostly over. Men were no longer shooting, but standing around looking at the bodies of dead women and trying to figure out what the hell had happened.
This changed things. There were women who needed to be freed but could they even get to them? Kellen and her accomplices conferred. They could open fire at the assembled men but more men were pouring onto the grounds now. They had neither enough weapons nor ammunition to drop all of them.
And what would happen if they opened fire and gave away their position? The men would surely mount horses and chase them deep into the hills where they would be killed, or worse. If they were going to get away, they had to leave now. Those women who didn’t get away would have to find another opportunity.
Kellen was uncomfortable having to make decisions for a group of people. "What do we do?” she hissed.
"We shouldn't go together," one of the women spoke up. "We'll leave a track like a herd of cattle."
Kellen nodded vigorously. "You’re right. Two groups?”
She looked around the group and found nodding heads, scared faces.
"They're talking on their radios," one of the women said. "When they can’t reach our guards, they’ll come looking for us."
"Then let's go," Kellen said. "Enough talk. Let’s get what gear we can off the two guards, then we split up and disappear.”
The women ran back to their fallen escorts, falling upon the unconscious and injured men like a flock of buzzards. Each of the two groups took one man’s pack. They turned out the guards’ pockets and took lighters, knives, and anything else they found. There were quick hugs and whispered encouragement, then the groups split off. Each ran as fast as their bare feet would carry them over the sharp paths of rotting shale and limestone.
Bryan was asleep when the first shot was fired. He’d stayed up too late and drank too much last night. Gunshots themselves were not that unusual. Sometimes the men dropped deer to add variety to the meals or fired to deter pesky bears. When the shots continued it became clear something more was going on. Bryan’s foggy mind immediately raced to invasion, a result of his persistent fear that someone would try to steal what he was building here.
He scrambled out of bed, disoriented and wobbly. He didn't know whether to go for a rifle, his clothes, or try to make an escape into the hills. He had a plan for that, with gear cached in a waterproof blue barrel. Then it occurred to him he should probably go for his radio. He turned it off at night because he didn’t want to be bothered with the chatter of sentries and early morning work crews. He picked up the black Motorola from his nightstand, turned it on, and listened for a moment, hoping to glean some insight. Men were barking at each other, shouting instructions across the radio to each other. He couldn’t make heads or tails of it. After a few moments of this he became frustrated and hit the transmit button.
"Everybody just shut the fuck up. What the hell is going on?"
The radio traffic fell silent. Everyone on the channel knew who the irate voice belonged to and no one wanted to deliver the bad news. Bryan assumed they were trying to outwait each other, to see who drew the short straw and had to start talking.
"Jefferson, this is Top Cat. It looks like we had a little escape attempt."
Jefferson was the radio call sign Bryan had assigned to himself. It originated with his obsession with Thomas Jefferson, the founding father and gentleman farmer after whom he modeled himself. Top Cat was the farm manager.
"Top Cat, you said attempt. Am I to take it their effort to escape was unsuccessful?”
There was enough of a delay that Jefferson knew he was not going to like the answer.
"I don't have a full count yet but I'd say I've at least got twelve to fifteen escapees. Maybe a dozen or more dead. There are several unaccounted for."
"What about our people? Did we lose anybody?"
"I got six not responding to their radios," Top Cat replied. "I would assume those are either dead or in pursuit of escapees. I’ve got men out there trying to run down those six right now and figure out why they’re not answering."
Bryan looked for something to throw but the only thing convenient was the radio and he needed that. "Dammit! Get a team on horseback after those escapees. And listen, I know the men are going to be pissed off but I don’t want those women harmed. If anyone leaves one of the women unable to work, they've got to cover all their duties. Is that clear?"
"Do you want me on the search party?" Top Cat asked.
"No,” Bryan snapped. “I want you and Lester in my office in fifteen minutes. I want a full report on what you know."
"Got it," Top Cat replied, his voice sagging, indicating how little he relished that meeting.
Bryan’s radio clattered onto his nightstand and he flopped backward on the bed. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and sighed heavily. The burden of being a landowner in hostile times was weighing on him. There was more work needed done than he had people to perform it.
They had a marijuana crop to harvest. They had poppy seeds that would soon be ready for harvesting opium. This first batch of opium would be traded and sold in its unrefined form but Bryan had hopes that by next year, if the world didn’t get back to normal, he might be able to produce heroin. He had a rough idea of how to do it and was going to spend the winter reading up on the process.
They also had food crops that need to be preserved and firewood that needed to be processed for the winter. There were literally hundreds of jobs needing to be done and, without fuel and electrical power, they all required manpower to accomplish. Nothing was easy anymore. Counting both his voluntary and involuntary workforce, Douthat Farms had over one hundred mouths to feed. That number was regretfully smaller now thanks to the dead bodies currently scattered around the property.
Bryan Padowicz had been a history professor at a small liberal arts college in central Virginia. He was in his late-forties, his thick beard and hipster man-bun beginning to show traces of gray. The collapse of the nation had both disrupted and inconvenienced Bryan. His summer days usually revolved around the same routine. He would smoke some pot and then hang out in Main Street coffeehouses, phil
osophizing and trying to impress young female students. Most evenings there was a party somewhere, and those also provided him with an ample opportunity to dazzle young women with his wit and intellect.
While Bryan certainly had the trappings of a socialist professor, and often pretended to be one, it was just for show. He was purely a capitalist. He’d been growing marijuana since his own college days and had gotten damn good at it. While he told folks he had installed solar panels and rain barrels on his quaint Victorian home to help the environment, he actually used his solar array to provide unmonitored water and electricity to his basement grow rooms.
Since liberal arts professors were paid a paltry sum, the marijuana operation helped him live the lifestyle he felt he deserved. He did not deal with ounces and quarter-ounces of pot as he had in his college days. He only dealt in pounds and quarter-pounds, and the proceeds from that allowed him to travel when the mood struck him. It allowed him to buy expensive pieces of art from obscure galleries. Always having top-notch pot also provided him with yet another way to meet and woo young women.
As a history professor, Bryan had enough experience with collapsing civilizations to read the writing on the wall. After the terror attacks rocked the nation, he knew it was going to take a while for the United States to get back on its feet. It was a small attack but well-planned. The terrorists had hit just the right spots in the infrastructure that they swept the legs right out from under modern society. There was a domino effect, technically called a cascading systems failure, which caused other systems to fail as a result of losing fuel, power, and communications. Now they were little more than pioneers living among the useless trappings of modern society.
The Mad Mick: Book One of The Mad Mick Series Page 1