“You’re right,” Phil said, feeling determined. “We have to protect this place at all costs, and to do that best, we need an early warning system to detect any possible threats. Come on, there’s plenty of wire and fishing line in the barn, and I’ve got a bunch more fireworks. For the rest of the day, we’re gonna rig up some tripwire systems around the perimeter and in the woods nearby.”
30
Jackson shoveled another mouthful of pork and beans into his mouth, chewing mechanically and staring at the fire. Black smoke billowed up from the fire, which was surrounded by old car tires, but the roof of the abandoned warehouse in which he and his gang were camped out was high, and the fire would have to burn for a long time before smoking the place out.
His jaw clicked every time he chewed, and it had been doing this ever since the Native American man had kicked him in the face, when he’d fought him and his cowboy friend back at the drugstore. Jackson had gotten used to the dull pain that throbbed in his jaw whenever he ate and had become accustomed to the lowered strength and mobility in his left arm after the cowboy had popped a .45 round into his shoulder. But what hadn’t lessened over the five or six weeks that had passed since that fateful evening in the drugstore was his hatred for these two men. Every time he tried to chew anything hard or tried to pick up something heavy with his left hand, he was reminded of how those two had defeated him. And defeat was not something that Jackson Miller could tolerate being reminded of. As he ate his pork and beans, he played out dark scenarios in his mind, in which he slowly dismembered the two of them, or poured acid over their faces, molten metal down their throats, raped the cowboy’s wife in front of him, and beheaded his teenage son while he was forced to watch…if only he’d succeeded in burning them all to death in that apartment building on E-Day, he thought, he’d still have a fully functional left arm and a jaw that didn’t click. More than anything, he wanted to find the cowboy and make him pay for what he’d done to him.
“Yo, Jackson,” one of his henchmen said, emerging from the thick darkness beyond the firelight, interrupting these sadistic thoughts. “We caught some stragglers.”
“So?” Jackson growled. “Take their shit, kill ‘em, keep any pretty women and girls for me…you know the fucking drill, numbskull. Fuck off, and don’t interrupt me when I’m eating again if you want to keep that stupid tongue of yours attached to your mouth.”
“Uh, yeah, man, trust me, I wouldn’t have interrupted you if it hadn’t been something big. And believe me, Jackson, this shit is big.”
“As big as the bunker on Judgment Day?” Jackson put down his plate of food and looked up at his henchman, a heavyset man who wore an eyepatch, after losing his eye in a street battle a few weeks ago. His interest was now piqued.
“Maybe. That’s why I came to call you before we interrogate the fuckers.”
Jackson and his goons referred to E-Day as Judgment Day, and the big find he was referring to was when he and his gang—formerly a street gang of drug dealers and auto thieves—had raided a government warehouse shortly after the madness had started in the city. Jackson and his gang had been well-placed to take advantage of the chaos in the city. They already had a large cache of illegal arms and were accustomed to fighting in the streets, with the disputes and gang wars they’d had with other drug pushers. After killing the soldiers who were protecting the government warehouse, they had discovered a secret underground bunker beneath the facility. In the bunker had been a large collection of vintage dirt bikes, a couple of vintage trucks, and Faraday cages in which there had been a number of electronic items protected from the EMP. Jackson and his gang had hit the jackpot, and it was because of what they’d found in that bunker that they’d been able to thrive during this period of anarchy, in which most other people were starving and dying on the streets.
“Bring ‘em here,” Jackson said, smiling malevolently. “I’ll get some of the branding irons nice and warm in the fire…” Jackson had taken some livestock branding irons from a farm they’d looted, and these items had turned out to be some of his favorites when it came to interrogating people and torturing information out of them. He stuck a few of the irons in the fire and watched them growing red hot, his smile broadening as the branding irons’ glow brightened.
When he heard footsteps approaching, he stood up, clipping his sword onto his belt. The Civil War-era cavalry saber was another looted item he was fond of using to get information out of people, and he enjoyed wearing it for its symbolic role. He felt like a true, powerful general with his sword on his hip, rather than simply a gang kingpin.
His henchmen brought two people before him. They were a middle-aged couple, and their faces were purple and swollen from the beatings they’d already received at the hands of Jackson’s thugs. A look of surprise registered on Jackson’s coarse-featured face when the couple, whose hands were tied behind their backs, were shoved into the area of light around the fire. These people looked far healthier and well-fed than anyone he’d seen since before Judgment Day, and this immediately triggered a bunch of burning questions in his mind.
“What’s your name, friend?” he asked the man, speaking in a friendly tone and smiling at him. He always used this tactic, catching his victims off their guard with unexpected kindness and gentleness before abruptly switching to his true, far darker self.
The man looked sullenly up at Jackson through swollen, purple eyelids, and said nothing, his jaw tight with defiance.
Jackson grinned amicably and nodded. “All right,” he said, “you don’t feel like talkin’. That’s understandable. It looks like you’ve had a rough time with my boys. I apologize for their behavior. Sometimes they can get a lil’…carried away.” He slowly circled the prisoners, keeping his hands behind his back in a non-threatening way. “How about you, ma’am?” he said to the woman. “Feel like telling me your name? My name is Jackson, Jackson Miller.”
The woman stared at him with fear-bulging eyes. Her whole body was trembling with fear. She was a plain-looking woman, but every bit as healthy and well-fed as her husband, or boyfriend, or whoever this man was. She didn’t say anything and only whimpered wordlessly.
“Cat got your tongue too, ma’am?” Jackson said, nodding and smiling. “That’s okay, that’s okay. Don’t worry…it’s all gonna be okay.” He went and retrieved one of the branding irons from the fire. The branding end was glowing bright red. “You folk look like you may have worked on a farm, so I’m guessing you’ve seen one of these things before,” Jackson said softly. “You know what it’s for, don’t you?”
The man gulped slowly, and Jackson felt a thrill rush through him as he saw the fear in the man’s eyes. He was in his element now; he loved these interrogations. One way or another, these people would talk. They might be trying to act brave now, but they would eventually talk. They all did, in the end, when he was finished with them.
“Sir, is this woman your wife?” Jackson asked the man, standing in front of him with the glowing branding iron hanging loosely, almost casually from his right hand. “Your girlfriend, maybe, your lover?”
The man swallowed again and stared at the ground. Finally, he spoke. “She’s nobody, just someone I…met on the road.”
Jackson slowly circled the two of them again, smiling. “Just someone you met on the road, huh? Strange coincidence that both of you are so clean, healthy, nicely dressed, and well-fed in these…difficult times. Very strange, isn’t it? Are you sure she’s just nobody, just a stranger to you, friend?”
“She’s…nobody,” the man said, his voice cracking. It was painfully obvious that he was lying.
“Well then, friend,” Jackson said, stopping next to the woman. “If she ain’t nobody to you, then I guess it won’t mean nothing to you if I do…this.” He suddenly grabbed a fistful of the woman’s hair and whipped the branding iron up. Before she could even react, he pressed the red-hot branding end into her cheek.
The scream that erupted from her lips was unearthly, and the terrib
le volume of pain in that animalistic howl of agony was music to Jackson’s ears, even more so than the sizzle of burning flesh and the smell, disturbingly reminiscent of bacon, that wafted from her burning cheek as he pressed the branding iron in with more force.
“Debbie, no!” the man screamed hysterically, trying to charge over to her as she dropped to the ground, writhing and howling in sheer agony, smoke rising grotesquely from her burned cheek.
Jackson coolly sidestepped the clumsy charge and kicked the man’s legs out from under him, causing him to crash face-first into the debris-strewn concrete floor of the warehouse. The man lay there, groaning in pain, while Debbie continued to scream her lungs out a few feet from him.
“Now I’m gonna ask you again, friend,” Jackson said menacingly, dropping the branding iron and drawing his cavalry saber. “What’s your name, and where have you and your fat, healthy friends come from?” He held the sharp tip of the sword in front of the man’s eye, hovering the steel a mere sliver of an inch from his reddened eyeball. “You’d best tell me quick because I’m losing my patience, and when I lose my patience, I get nasty…real nasty. Now tell me your fucking name and where the fuck you came from because if you don’t, the next question I ask you is gonna be which of your goddamn eyeballs I should gouge out first.”
The man started weeping and shaking. “My name’s…Anthony,” he gasped. “I’ll tell you whatever else you wanna know, just please, please don’t hurt my wife again, please…”
Jackson smiled. They always cracked. Always. “That’s the spirit, friend,” he said, squatting down next to Anthony. He used the flat of the saber blade to force Anthony to look up into his eyes. “All right, Anthony, let’s start at the beginning, now, shall we? We’ve got a long night ahead of us, and you’re gonna do a lot of talking. Yeah, a lot of talking. Bill, hand me the other branding iron, would ya, and let’s get this party started.”
31
“How do you think Debbie and Anthony and their group are?” Alice asked, swirling her fork around her mashed potato in the manner she often did when preoccupied with worry.
Phil, sitting in his usual place at the head of the dining table, put his own fork down and shook his head, his face grim. “I pray every day that they find what they set out to find,” he said, “but I’ve got a bad feeling about ‘em, a bad feeling I just can’t shake.”
“Do you think they’ll come back here?” David asked from the bottom of the dining table, his mouth full of half-chewed steak.
“I hope they do,” Phil said, “but I hope that nobody else follows ‘em.”
In the days since Anthony’s group departed, everyone on the ranch had worked hard to prepare for a possible threat. They’d started by installing early detection systems: a complex set of tripwires all around the perimeter of the ranch that was hooked up to fireworks with basic chemical ignition systems Phil had put together. If anyone set off a tripwire, it would detonate an M-80 firework and launch one of his orange signal flares into the sky. These signals would be seen and heard from anywhere on the ranch.
Phil and his workers had also dug trenches in the woods around the ranch, and they had destroyed all the bridges over the rivers and creeks, so if anyone did come, they would have to come on foot and wouldn’t be able to get to the ranch with vehicles they could ram open the gates with.
They had also made contingency plans in the event that the perimeter did end up getting breached. Phil conducted emergency drills every day. Everyone was required to have a sidearm and two extra ammunition clips on them at all times, as well as keeping a bulletproof vest and a rifle nearby. They’d also filled sacks with dirt and rubble to create sandbags and had piled them up around the walls of the house and the barn to reinforce them in case they had to fall back and defend these places.
Even while sitting around the dinner table eating dinner, the family kept their AR-15s and bulletproof vests close at hand. As Phil liked to say, it was better to be safe than sorry. All three of them shot furtive glances over at the rifles as they talked, each praying that they wouldn’t have to use them.
Their conversation topic turned to lighter-hearted subject matter, but in the backs of their minds, all three of them kept thinking about the unknown fate of Anthony’s group.
The next day, everyone was up bright and early, but the day itself was gloomy, with dark, heavy clouds blotting out the sun. The rain started shortly after daybreak and only seemed to grow heavier as the morning went on. Phil and his workers put on ponchos and worked in the downpour; rain or shine, there were things that simply had to be done to keep food on the table.
Around late morning, the clouds coming over the distant mountaintops grew even darker, and there were flickers of lightning on the horizon. A storm was on its way. Phil moved around the ranch, encouraging everyone to work at double-time. As important as their respective jobs were, he didn’t want anyone getting struck by lightning when the storm did hit the ranch.
Soon the wind began to howl through the trees, and crashes of thunder boomed across the meadows and fields. After everyone had got the horses in the stables and the cattle under shelter, they all went to find shelter themselves.
Phil, David, Alice, and Wyatt stood around in the kitchen, having coffee, after just having come in from the storm. They were chatting about how welcome the rain was after a long, dry spell when there was a loud boom that sounded quite different from the other thunderclaps.
“Shit,” Wyatt grunted. “I don’t think that was thunder…”
“Davey, run upstairs and look out the window, see if you can see anything!” Phil said, his voice low with urgency.
David raced up the stairs and yelled down the words that none of them were hoping to hear. “There’s an orange flare in the sky, dad! Someone’s set off the tripwires!”
“Where?” Phil yelled.
“From the direction of the main gate!”
Phil hung his head for a moment, massaging his temples with his hands. It was happening. He quickly forced the despair and fear out of his mind and took charge of the situation. “Wyatt, grab your rifle and put on a bulletproof vest. Alice, you tell everyone else that we’ve got company. Get into defensive positions, and tell everyone to get their walkie talkies out. I’ll take one with me.” Phil had saved a couple of walkie talkies in one of his Faraday cages; he knew they’d come in handy sometime.
“What should I do, Dad?” David asked, running back down the stairs.
“You know what you’re supposed to do, son,” Phil said. “Cover the drive with your rifle from the attic window.”
“Can’t I come—”
“No, you can’t,” Phil said firmly. “Up in the attic with your rifle, Davey. Now.”
David looked disappointed, but he did what his father told him. Once Wyatt and Phil had their bulletproof vests on, Phil kissed Alice goodbye, and then they slung their rifles over their shoulders and headed outside.
Phil kept two dirt bikes—David’s old Yamaha and an even older bike from the 60s—just outside the farmhouse in case he needed to get anywhere in a hurry. He and Wyatt hopped onto the dirt bikes, kicked them to life, and then, with their hearts thumping in their chests, they raced through the driving rain to the main gate.
When they got within sight of it, fear blasted through each man. It was worse than anything they could have imagined, for there was a huge mob outside the gate. Phil estimated that there were at least fifty people there, possibly more…and it was plain to see that all of them were armed.
When Phil got closer, his alarm grew more intense, for he recognized the man standing at the head of the mob: the huge, tattooed man he’d fought in the drugstore, the man who had almost burned them all to death in Alice’s apartment building. He wished now that he’d executed the bastard when he’d had the chance. When Jackson saw him and Wyatt riding up to the gate on their bikes, he beamed out a broad, smug grin at them.
“Well, well, look who it is, the cowboy and the injun,” Jackson said. He
was holding his cavalry saber in his right hand, but he had an AK-47 slung over his shoulder and a pistol on each of his hips. “I was hoping to run into you two again.”
Phil and Wyatt pulled up to a stop a couple of yards from the gate and stayed on their bikes, leaving the motors running. Sheets of rain beat down from the heavens, drenching everyone and soaking them all to the bone.
“There’s nothing for you and your friends here,” Phil said coolly. “You’d best leave.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, cowboy,” Jackson said, his grin broadening. “There’s everything we need here. See, friend, we’re getting real hungry out here, and a little bird told me that there’s plenty of food beyond these gates.”
“Not for you,” Phil said. “There are plenty more of us here, and we’re all armed and well-trained.”
“I’m not here to talk to you or negotiate, motherfucker,” Jackson snarled, his grin disappearing in an instant. “I’m here to tell you that this fucking place is mine now. The rest of my army—yes, motherfucker, my army—will be here at sundown. And when they get here, you’re fucked, all of you. I’m a fair man, though, and even though I’d like to skin you alive, nice and slow, like, I’ll give you fucks the chance to leave peacefully. If you and whoever else is on this ranch leaves before sundown, you get to live. If you choose to stay, though…” He smiled again, picked up a backpack from the ground, and tossed it over the gate to Phil. “It’s a little gift from me to you. Don’t be rude and open it in front of me now Go on, take it back to your house and have a little look-see at what’s inside.”
“You aren’t taking this ranch,” Phil growled. “I don’t care how many of you there are…you’re not taking this ranch.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Wyatt said. “There’s no point in talking to these assholes.”
EMP Survival In A Powerless World | Book 19 | EMP Ranch Page 17
