Tertiary Effects Series | Book 3 | Bite of Frost

by Allen, William

  We were going to be performing sentry duty for a solid ten hours, which meant I would want that extra canteen. Pat and Mike rode me constantly about switching to the camelback hydration system, but I hated the way the rubber tube tasted in my mouth. Instead I used the one-quart stainless steel canteens and made sure to tape up the chains connecting the cap to the canteen. No ‘tink, tink, tink,’ as I moved, and the water in the canteens didn’t slosh, either.

  All of us our here on the farms got a huge bonus to experience by having Pat, Mike, Sally and Wil around. They all had different levels of combat experience prior to Rockfall, and they each brought their own hard-won lessons with them. Some profound, and others, just practical. I was paying particular attention to everything practical this morning, and I was beginning to think my passing chest pain might possibly be a premonition instead.

  Some of it was just little things, like we learned buttons good, and velcro bad, in the World According to Pat. Snaps and zippers may fail, but ‘fucking velcro’, as Pat called it, would give away your position 100% of the time if you had enemies close by. Use d-clips where possible, and always tape up your metal on the clips.

  Other lessons learned made me take the time to repack my pack yet again. Removing a small survival stove and fuel cubes, I filled up the space with more loaded magazines for my rifle. Six, thirty round magazines in exchange for a way to keep warm out in the cold seemed like a pretty good trade. Patrolling meant I would be going in and out of buildings, and the temperature had not dropped down to lethal levels for outside, and I’d yet to be in a shootout or gunfight where I had ended up having too much ammunition.

  When I finished, I ambled into the kitchen to find Marta eating a breakfast of oatmeal and Tang.

  “Seriously? Tang? How can you stand the taste?”

  “It’s not so bad once you get used to it,” Marta retorted, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it. Tang was an orange-flavored powdered drink, and it had zero fruit content. Marta’s mom, Beatrice, got her hooked on the stuff as a child, and she was still an sad addict to Tang after all these years.

  Mike was sitting there as well, buttering a piece of toast, and he gave me a once over as I took my chair.

  “You want some company?” Mike asked with a cocked eyebrow.

  “No,” I retorted with a shake of my head.

  “You think you’re getting the jitters because of the plan to meet Sally’s friend?” Mike added, and I had to concede that was a possibility. This was a break in our routine, and I hated deviating from the normal procedure.

  Just then, Sally came strolling into the kitchen, pulling her brown coveralls up over a pair of thermals and acting as if she hadn’t a care in the world. She got a mug of coffee and slid into one of the chairs as she regarded me carefully.

  “You okay?” She asked casually, but I could see her eyes dart to Mike and Marta as she asked the question.

  “Just some pre-mission jitters,” I replied, trying to downplay my nerves.

  “Bryan has a bad feeling about this,” Mike added. “May be nothing, but…”

  “Okay then,” Sally said easily, accepting of my uneasiness. “I’ll make sure and pack more ammo. Bryan, you have a bad feeling about the meet with Judith, or later, at the hospital?”

  “Not sure,” I replied, then wrinkled my brow as I thought about the question. “Hospital, I think. You don’t think I’m crazy, do you?”

  “Nope. Like I said, I’ll make sure I have more ammo.”

  “Bryan, take this with you, too,” Mike added, and he headed over to the mudroom and grabbed the Kel Tec KSG along with a double bandolier of shells and dropped them on the table with a thump.

  “Seriously? I already clank when I take a step,” I protested.

  Mark gave me a hard look, then nodded in his wife’s direction.

  “Yeah. You know the plan. If the hospital gets hit, fort up with as many as you can in the inner exam room. Man the door. And you’re just carrying that for Marta, anyway.”

  Marta gave me a smirk and I knew I was just going to be playing pack mule for my sister-in-law.

  “Let’s get this show on the road,” I announced when I saw Sally finishing up her coffee. She was kitted out with one of the new Colt ARs, but no shotgun in deference to her nearly healed shoulder.

  “Are we really all going to crowd into that Datsun of yours?” Marta asked, her sneaky grin telling me she was plotting something.

  “Well, we could take Mike’s truck, I guess,” I responded, but Marta shook her head. Then I thought I might have an idea what she was doing when she did what I always thought of as ‘her worst fake pout’. I call it that because everybody, except Mike, could tell from half a mile away that she was faking it. Not Mike, though, and he fell for it every time.

  “No, we can’t. They still have it at the dealership,” Marta complained with a huff, and there was the lower lip, stuck out like a four-year old.

  “Still at the dealership? Seriously?” I asked, stunned. I did a quick count and realized nearly two weeks had passed since the dealership took in Mike’s truck for repairs.

  “They had to order in another seal after the last one came in damaged,” Mike growled. “They still tried to send me home with it like that.”

  “I hope you didn’t kill anybody over it,” I commented, and Marta gave me a shocked look at my cavalier attitude.

  “No, but the parts manager might still be walking with a limp,” Mike replied, and he didn’t sound like he was kidding, either.

  Actually, I knew all about the mix-up, and Mike hadn’t done anything more than cuss about it, since the mechanics at the dealership were doing the best they could with parts being hard to find. I just hadn’t realized the drama had been stretched out for this long.

  “Well, we can take the farm truck,” I volunteered, just to get a scowl from Marta and Sally.

  “That thing gets, like, five miles to the gallon,” Marta complained, which was a gross exaggeration. Ten mpg at the worst, and that was towing a load.

  “The heater doesn’t work in that hunk of junk,” Marta whined, and I saw Mike getting more and more agitated.

  “We could take…” Sally started, then stopped when she realized Marta was waving her off. Sally didn’t know we were just doing it to wind up Mike, but a good teammate knows when to take the ‘better part of valor’ route.

  “Oh, alright, I’ll go start the Datsun and get it warmed up,” Mike finally volunteered, and I decided to let him know we’d been yanking his chain.

  “Would you? Really? Oh, thank you so much. I really didn’t want to have to ask your wife to go warm up the truck,” I gushed, and with that, I blew apart Marta’s little plan to mess with Mike.

  “Oh, now I see,” Mike teased, realizing what we were doing. “Am I wearing a ‘kick me’ sign on my back?”

  Sally realized the two were joking, with me egging them both on, and burst out in laughter.

  “All three of you are terrible,” she grumped, but in good humor. “I thought you were really sniping at each other, not just teasing.”

  “Oh, no, if we were really sniping, there’d be blood on the floor,” Mike explained. “Like when we were kids and Bryan shot me in the back of the head with a b-b gun.”

  “Man, if he’s bringing out that story,” I protested, “I’ll go warm up the Datsun myself. At least that way I won’t have to listen to the whining.”

  As I turned and headed for the mudroom, I heard scuffling as Nancy and Cece removed their boots in the cold.

  “Wait, did I hear that right?” Nancy asked, emerging from the unheated annex, “Bryan, did you shoot your poor little brother in the head with a b-b gun?”

  “Uh, maybeeeeeee,” I replied hesitantly, before hurriedly adding, “but nobody could ever prove it.”

  I heard Nancy and Cece chuckling as they headed to the kitchen and I realized my earlier premonition of disaster had faded into the background, and I wondered if my brother had engineered the whole thin
g. If so, he’d succeeded admirably. I was still apprehensive, but no longer on the verge of hyperventilating. We would still keep our heads on a swivel, but now I felt more in control. It was an illusion, and even I realized this fact, but sometimes that little white lie you told yourself was what you needed to get you through the day.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  We drove in relative silence, the road noise our only accompaniment as Marta and I watched the fading shadows in the dim glow of dawn as the little Datsun rattled down the highway. I was driving, and like Mike warned me, Marta cradled the little shotgun like a new puppy. I would only be holding it for her in the hospital. I stayed tense the entire first leg of the route, still wary after being fired on so recently for committing the sin of driving on a public road.

  I finally had broken down and accepted one of the Colt M4s set up for automatic firing just to have the capability in the event of another ambush. I’d spent the time to true in the Trijicon sights and I was comfortable out to three hundred yards, even though most of my engagements were at much closer range.

  When we reached the cutoff for the Sutcliffe place, just a few miles shy of the Jasper city limits but still well out in the country, I followed Wade as he idled down the overgrown path until both vehicles were out of sight of the highway. My neighbor halted his truck short of a rough wooden fence made up of chainsaw-planed stakes laid out over a crisscross pattern of trimmed tree trunks. When Wade killed his truck, I followed suit and waited for Marta to slide over into the driver’s side of my little pickup before I exited and adjusted my sling to carry my rifle over my shoulder. I saw Wade start to get out, then crawl back into his truck as Sally eased out instead. They had Dorothy sitting in the middle, I saw. Well, she was the shortest of the three, after all.

  “Know what that is?” Sally inquired as she wondered over to join me in front of Wade’s truck.

  I studied the crude structure, my mind pulling the components together as my ears strained to pick up the sounds of the forest around us. The trees lining the driveway looked to be mature evergreens, with the more common pines mixed with cedar and a few I placed as junipers. I strained my ears for sounds of the forest, but other than the faint breeze, I heard none of the usual bird calls. Maybe it was the cold, and maybe it was something else.

  “An abattis, I believe,” I replied confidently. As a history buff, I knew quite a bit about older style defensive works. “Nicely done. You think we should stay here, or try to get over the logs?”

  “Definitely stay here,” Sally counseled. “Wade’s truck isn’t exactly stealthy, and if Judith still lives here, she will had heard our approach. No, we stay here and wait. Just like civilized folk.”

  Just as Sally finished speaking, I heard the frozen grass rattling just a few yards past on the other side of the irregular walls of the abattis, and I realized we were under watch where we stood. Sally took that as he cue to step up and make introductions.

  “Judith, if you are out there, just know we are coming here as friends,” Sally announced, her voice projecting a bit in the cold silence.

  I heard a second rustling, and I knew then that if this was still Judith’s place, she wasn’t out here alone.

  “Is that you Sally?”

  “Yeah, it’s me,” Sally confided. “I asked Bryan to check in on you guys, but we got sidetracked after I got shot. That’s why I’m here later than I planned. Are you guys okay?”

  “We’re fine, Sally,” came the reply. “Why’d you think to check on us?”

  Sally didn’t hesitate with her answer.

  “Because this early winter, Jude, it’s just the start. Things are just going to get worse before they get better. I wanted to make sure you and your family were all okay. Did Kate make it here with her husband and their kids? And is everything still good with Alice?”

  “Wow, you just said a mouthful. That your man you got with you? Bryan?” Judith replied, a playful lilt to her voice despite the serious tone of the meeting. I also noticed how she side-stepped the questions.

  “Sheesh. I wish. Yes, this is Bryan, but he’s hooked up with a newer model,” Sally teased self-deprecatingly. “We’re living out at his place, me and Billy, that is. He’s made a pact with his neighbors, and taken in a lot of strays, like us. He’s good people, Judith. They all are. Better family than blood.”

  I heard more light rustling, and a shape stepped out of the tall brush behind the wooden barrier, rifle cradled in her arm but ready. An M-14, I thought idly. She was tall for a woman, maybe Nancy’s height, and even in the baggy hunting clothes, she looked trim and fit. Her even, tanned features were lightly seamed with laugh lines, and I pegged her at about my age, maybe a little more. Like with Shawn Tyler, it was harder to judge a person’s age in recent days. Too much stress, I guessed.

  “I never thought I’d see you wearing a uniform again, Sally, even if that jacket seems to fit you nicely,” Judith observed, indicating the Sheriff’s Department heavy coats the two of us wore. “What’s up with that?”

  “We’re reserve deputies over in Albany County, ma’am,” I answered, after Sally let the question hang for a few seconds. I guessed that was her way to draw me into the conversation. I decided to forge ahead. “My name’s Bryan Hardin. I used to have a practice over in New Albany until the flooding took out my office. Anyway, after somebody killed off the old sheriff and a bunch of his corrupt cronies, the new sheriff approached some of us to help out. We volunteered to be on call for work in the areas of the county being underserved by the department. Mostly, we work with our counterparts over here in Jasper and assist with guarding the hospital. That’s where we’re heading after this.”

  “Yes, I heard something about that on the local news radio,” Judith admitted. “That’s got to be a dangerous job, Mr. Hardin.”

  “Just driving to town can be dangerous these days. Since Wade’s wife and my sister-in-law both work at that hospital though, we figure it is worth the hazard. Lot of people around here depending on the place.”

  I heard Sally snicker at my comment about the dangers of the road, but I was sure Judith understood. I found myself impressed by Judith’s calm demeanor, and I wondered just how invested she was with her current residence.

  “I can see that. Not much else in the way of healthcare around these days.”

  Taking a look at the growing daylight worming in through the cover of the overhanging tree limbs, I decided we’d taken up enough of this woman’s time, and we still needed to deliver our passengers.

  “We can’t stay longer, I’m sorry to say, but I am happy to make your acquaintance. I was wondering, though, if you noticed any increased activity on the roads lately?”

  My question was purely a shot in the dark. A throwaway question that simply popped into my head as I thought about what Sally said about her friend. She was a Marine, and she had spent some time deployed overseas in some of the same bad places as my brother Mike. This close to the highway, I could imagine Judith and her people spent at least some effort monitoring the goings on in the area, for self-defense if nothing else.

  “Not as much National Guard traffic as there was back when the hurricanes hit, and before most of those units deployed to the southwest,” Judith volunteered after taking a few seconds to ponder the question. “Seen some of those new boys and girls riding in some old five tons, part of that reorganized State Guard, and they seemed to have been working convoy duty. I don’t imagine you are talking about that kind of traffic, though were you, Mr. Hardin?”

  “Please, call me Bryan,” I replied politely. “And I think you know what I meant. Like those highwaymen that waylaid grocery trucks over in our neck of the woods.”

  Judith nodded, and I could tell from her expression she knew exactly what I was talking about.

  “Seen a few pickup trucks hauling more than their fair share of passengers in back. Usually all male, and armed up like they were going off to tangle with somebody. Don’t see them often, and when we do, this place go
es on lockdown until we determine they are headed on down the road.”

  Taking care to move slowly and deliberately, aware I probably still had a set of crosshairs centered on me, I dug one of my business cards out of a vest pocket and took a single step forward. Using one of the sharpened stakes jutting out from the abattis, I affixed the small rectangle of cardboard to the tip of the spear and stepped back.

  “That’s got my contact information. I’m learning e-mail is getting to be practically useless, but the phone number is good, and I jotted down a couple of frequencies we monitor if you have any kind of a radio transmitter. If you need help, or even a place to stay, we should get the message.”

  Judith cut her eyes to the card, then gave me a polite nod as Sally and I turned to leave the clearing and resume our trip.

  “How can you make that kind of offer, counselor? I mean, a place to sleep on a couch is one thing, but if we did show up, our presence might mean more mouths to feed. There might even be more of us here than Sally knows about.”

  I could have kept my mouth shut, but something in her voice told me this wasn’t an idle question, or an effort to penetrate our security.

  “Heck, Ms. Sutcliffe, we raise cattle out on our little farm, keep a few chickens and grow some corn. Not a big old ranch, but high quality, grain fed beef. If you know the right suppliers, you can even order in your own supply of organic grains for cattle and horse feed. That means we order our sweet corn, oats and barley by the ton, not the pound.” I gave her a cheeky grin as I concluded with, “Nobody even notices ten tons of grains when you order it for a farm. We might get tired of oatmeal after awhile, though.”

  Judith gave a decidedly unladylike snort at my explanation. Then she gave me a hard look.

  “Did you have advanced warning about the meteorite before it hit? Is that why you were so prepared?” Her question hit me like a snake striking, and in that split-second, I decided again to give her the truth.

  “We had zero advanced warning, but we heard about it a few hours after impact. My brother’s friend from his Army days gave us a heads up,” I admitted. I decided to keep Bart’s name out of it. “My brother and sister weren’t Doomsday Preppers by any stretch, but we made some plans and played the What If? game.” I then paused, before delivering my punchline, “I always figured it would be a financial collapse. Or zombies.”