Age of Survival Series | Book 2 | Age of Panic

by Holden, J. J.

  “Damn it, Ed.” Grossman pushed his plate away and spent several seconds frowning and looking around the room. “I can’t argue with some of what you’ve said. About your untrained deputies and Prange’s troops. I’d like you to put more effort into making this detention more humane. I don’t want to have to micromanage you, which means I need you to start providing solutions instead of justifying problems.”

  “Look. Anything I come up with will take some time to put into place. Even if I were to just buck up and do what you tell me, and give the people in the basement potty passes. I’d want to make sure everybody with potential contact with them gets trained up to handle those walks safely. For themselves and the detainees both. And I don’t think this is really going to be a problem in a couple of days.”

  “What do you mean?” Grossman asked.

  “Carter says there’s consolidated detention available, in Black River Falls and down in Fort McCoy. When the convoy heads back that way, they can take anybody with.”

  Grossman shook his head, incredulous at what he was hearing. “You talking about just shipping our neighbors upriver?”

  “Only if they’re duly convicted. Or at least if we find cause to charge them and hold them until trial.”

  “That’s insane. I’m not going to sign off on anything like that.”

  “Really? What do you suggest we do, then? Sentence your brother to ten months in the records room for inciting a riot, give Neustadt’s punks twenty years to life in that over-glorified closet they’re in? You really need to shake yourself up here and look at the actual situation on the ground. We have never had the capacity in this town to hold prisoners.” Schuster looked around. There were a few people looking back at the table. “Sorry,” he said quietly to Grossman.

  The mayor chewed at one of his fingernails, hoping that people had only picked up on the sound of their disagreement, and none of the words. “This probably isn’t the place to have this conversation. I think this needs to go to the town board.”

  “Closed door or open door?” Schuster asked, narrowing his eyes.

  It was a clear taunt. Grossman knew it. The smart idea would be to discuss the matter in private, at least initially, to let the board and Schuster get their initial thoughts aired without exposing the rest of the town to the ugly side of the sausage works. Schuster also knew that the question of transporting peoples’ families and neighbors to government camps had enough gravity that Grossman simply would not want to discuss it in secret.

  And yet, the question was on the table, which meant it needed to be discussed.

  “Can I ask you to consider one more thing for me? Tom to Ed, not mayor to chief.” Grossman felt a little uncomfortable leaning on their long friendship in a political disagreement, but the subject suddenly facing him was just too big to not bring in everything he had.

  “You can ask, Tom.”

  “Is it even remotely feasible to set up our own detention here, something other than stolen rooms in the town hall basement, something that wouldn’t horrify us if we knew somebody we loved was going to be in them? We’ve got a few empty houses, see if we can get somebody to sell us one of their businesses. Hell, cordon off a wing of the school. Just get something where people have a bit of personal space, reasonable access to a bathroom, an actual bed, and where the guards can still be safe.” Grossman considered asking Schuster how he’d feel if his son had been busted for something and was looking at a trip upriver to a camp, but he knew that would push things way too far.

  “I don’t know if we could pull it off,” Schuster said. “It would take time, we’d need people with the right skills to do the renovations, people to do the grunt labor. All of them would want to be compensated for their time, and the town simply doesn’t have any resources to do that. Even if you could figure out how to get the work done, we’re going to have more people stepping out of line and needing to be locked down. The basement’s overcrowded as it is. I don’t even know where I’d put the next person that seriously breaks a law. For now, Carter and Prange have the best available solution.”

  Grossman bit back another urge to ask Schuster how he’d feel if it was his son. It wouldn’t have been a completely unfair question. For as much bad blood as there was between himself and Jerry, it was still blood. They were still kin. Schuster was sitting across the table from Grossman, saying that his brother should be blindly sent upriver.

  “I’m done with this conversation,” Grossman said, standing up and grabbing his plate. “We’ve got the hearings at nine. After that, I’ll convene the rest of the board to raise your concern, and we’ll vote on whether to have the discussion in a closed-door session or open.”

  “Fair enough,” Schuster said.

  Grossman was tempted to go down the hallway to the little hideout he had, in the supply closet of the science classroom. One of the teachers had set it up for him, but he’d been so busy over the past two days that he hadn’t even thought about his secret retreat.

  Just like when he’d woken up that morning, he was stressed out enough that the idea of just being still held no appeal. He was driven to move, to somehow be active.

  He went outside instead, and looked at the trucks. Four of the soldiers were walking toward them, carrying five-gallon jerry cans from the direction of one of the gas stations. Several more were lined up on the street.

  The trucks themselves were fascinating to him. He’d seen a couple of those old dinosaurs when he’d first enlisted, but they’d soon after cycled out of inventory. He had a vague memory of some Army directive in the mid-nineties putting a cutoff on the age of motor vehicles in the inventory. Those cargo trucks certainly would have been retired at that time.

  Unless some National Guard units had managed to hold onto theirs, or maybe when the vehicles had been retired, some had been mothballed instead of being sold off as surplus or scrap. If he hadn’t been standing there looking at the trucks, trying to be unobtrusive in a shady corner outside the school building, he probably wouldn’t have been paying as much attention to the soldiers around them as he was. They all wore Wisconsin National Guard shoulder patches, but even for Guardsmen, they seemed not right in some way. Maybe it was because he expected people traveling with a liaison officer to have a little more spit and polish, be more professional, a little sharper.

  He watched one of the men light up a smoke, not five feet from the line of gas cans. Back in his days as a tanker, lighting up that close to fuel cans would have merited way more than a boot in the ass. A private would have found himself on the ground pushing a hole to China, then being hauled in front of the CO for an Article 15. Grossman couldn’t actually be bothered to step up and straighten the kid out, though. What he really wanted at that moment was to go ask the kid if he could bum a smoke.

  8

  Of all the things his father hadn’t kept duplicates of in the Faraday box in the basement, at that moment Peter was most upset about the night-vision optics. The family had two scopes and one pair of goggles, all of which had been stored in the basement on the shelves with their hunting and survival gear.

  One thing he’d never thought of before the Event, but which had become abundantly clear afterward, was just how much artificial light there had been in the world, even outside of population centers. In the past, Peter had been down in Bowman late at night. It wasn’t a big town by any definition, but there had always been light. You always knew where the streets and sidewalks were; even out where there were no more streetlights, there were porch lights or a bit of a glow bleeding through a window from somebody up late watching TV or on their computer. On the hill north of the school, the red beacon on top of the water tower had always been there as a landmark.

  Without power, and with people hoarding their precious supplies of candles or white gas, Bowman under a new moon was incredibly dark. It made it impossible for him and Irene to look up the main road from outside of town and see if anything was moving.

  “Is this a terrible idea?” Irene
asked. Peter put down his binoculars.

  From his trip into town the day before, to check out the military vehicles that he’d seen in the area, Peter had learned that a nighttime curfew had been put in place, certainly enforced by deputies patrolling at night. He felt it was safest to assume that the soldiers that had arrived on those trucks were also going to be up. At the very least, he was sure they’d be keeping a constant guard on their precious vehicles.

  “Coming down to look wasn’t a terrible idea. Going any farther in than we are might be.”

  With the arrival of the newcomers in town, the Roths and Williamses wanted to make another couple of runs down to check their houses once more for things they wanted to bring back up to the homestead. The discussion had gone on for quite a while, about whether to do so during the day or at night.

  In the end, they had decided to try both. Bill and Sally had come down earlier, with Nancy hiding out in the woods watching, so she could bring news back up to the homestead in case of trouble. They’d come back up empty handed. There wasn’t anything they could really put their fingers on, but they had a gut feeling that they’d never be let out of town with full backpacks. Even watching from a distance, the deputies and soldiers seemed to spend a lot of time approaching people as they moved about their business. Bill and Sally hadn’t even gone into town. After having been away for a few days, they didn’t want to risk having somebody who knew them ask what they’d been up to.

  Now, Peter, Irene, and Bill were making a second, stealthy attempt well after dark.

  “What time is it?” Bill asked, for the fifth time since they got to their lookout point where the woods ended at the edge of town.

  Peter glanced at his watch. In the deep darkness, the luminous hands and digits stood out bright and clear. “It’s still quarter after two.”

  “Well. We going to do this?” Irene asked Peter.

  “Yeah. You know your part, right, Bill?”

  “If I pick up on you guys running, I’ll throw a road flare to your left, see if that draws the attention of any pursuit. You guys veer to the right of where it lands. That should aim you toward me so we can regroup and make our way back up.”

  Peter nodded and then put a hand on Irene’s shoulder. “Just remember, real slow, real quiet. First sign of trouble, we bolt.”

  “Got it,” Irene said, handing her rifle to Bill. Peter reluctantly did the same. That was another hard decision they’d all had to make about coming down to town. They had weighed the pros and cons of carrying weapons into town now that the military was there. If they were stopped at all, even if whatever stories they told held up and they were left to continue on their way, they suspected that any firearms they had were likely to be confiscated. Even though the Roths and Peter all had valid concealed-carry permits, they didn’t know if anybody with authority in the town had decided to toss the Second Amendment out.

  “Don’t do anything stupid, all right?” Bill said. “There’s nothing in the house that’s worth your lives.”

  Peter and Irene stepped out from the cover of the woods and looked around, getting their bearings before heading toward town.

  As they walked, they looked and listened into the darkness, waiting for something to happen. Peter was getting really tired of that drill. He’d spent part of every single night since the Event carefully picking his steps and staring into the night, praying that nothing would disrupt the low chatter of the night creatures and the gentle whistle of the wind.

  He thought back to a description of war as long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. Peter didn’t think of himself and his family and friends as being at war, but it still seemed to be an apt description of what their lives could become. The boredom was already there at night—their days were still full of activity as they kept working on the homestead and planning for their future. And they’d already had their moments of terror, the two times that men had come onto their property with weapons and ill intent.

  As much as the soldiers in town were a source of anxiety and uncertainty, they also brought with them a little glimmer of hope, that stability and the benefits of civilization might return. They just might be on the leading edge of normalcy pushing against the chaos.

  Maybe, Peter thought. He suspected the transition between the current world and the next would not be as abrupt as the Event had been, but he did not for one moment fool himself into believing it was going to be easy.

  “Let’s pull off the road here,” Irene said. Peter couldn’t tell what landmark she’d picked out of the featureless blackness all around them. He just had to trust that she knew where she was.

  Fortunately, Irene had found a place where the drainage ditch running beside the road sloped gently, and they were able to silently navigate it, coming back up the far side close enough to a chain-link fence that Peter could actually make it out in the darkness.

  “Birch Street.” Irene crouched down and pointed. “At the end of this stretch of backyards, there’s a little spot of fallow land. We can turn right there and go up Porter. We’ll have maybe half a block where we’re walking along the street, and then we cut in between a couple of houses to a stretch of unfenced yards. We’ll only have to hop one fence to get to my house.”

  “You think taking the streets that far is safe?”

  “Yeah.” Irene touched the fence next to her, shaking it just enough to make a little bit of noise. “Unless you think you can hop about six of these silently. Too many of my neighbors have dogs, and if you get one going, the whole block’s going to open up.”

  “All right. You take the lead.”

  The passage behind the first row of backyards was smooth. Peter noted that the hours she’d spent on night patrol had given both Irene and himself the ability to move quietly at a steady pace, despite not being able to see the ground at their feet. Things were a bit less quiet when they hit the small patch of fallow ground. The grass was longer and matted, their footing less certain.

  “There,” Peter said, putting a hand on Irene’s arm and pointing up the road. The red cherry of a cigarette stood out sharply, but unable to see anything else for reference, he couldn’t guess how far away the smoker might be.

  “Let’s just wait it out,” Irene said. “Hopefully, he’ll move on soon.”

  Unfortunately, just as the distant glow disappeared, the sound of voices started drifting in from the left, Peter assumed from the direction of Irene and Larry’s house.

  “Another pair?” she asked him.

  Peter held his breath for a couple seconds. “Yeah. At least two voices.”

  “At least these two are making noise. Want to go for it when they get past the intersection?”

  “Sure,” Peter said, tracking the sound of the conversation. When the patrol hit the intersection, less than a hundred feet away, they didn’t keep going. The men stopped walking, and soon after, a small, yellow flame illuminated a tiny spot of the darkness.

  “Light ’em up and get moving,” Irene hissed under her breath as two cigarettes flared up. Unfortunately, the men seemed content to loiter at the corner.

  A couple blocks farther into town, a dog started barking. As Irene had predicted, Peter heard several more start making noise. The two smokers Peter and Irene were watching turned. Seeing a possible opportunity to finally make a move, Peter shifted position. “Ready?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Irene said.

  From further into town, where the dogs were making a racket, a whistle sounded three quick blasts. The patrol at the intersection turned again, one of the men taking a fresh drag off his smoke.

  Peter let out a frustrated breath, guessing the whistle was a signal from another patrol indicating they didn’t need help. “Sounds like they’ve got communication of some sort worked out.”

  “And all the neighborhood dogs in town are going to be keyed up now.”

  “Abandon?”

  Peter’s eyes had finally adjusted to the darkness enough that he saw Irene nod. “Yea
h. Let’s go,” she said.

  He turned and took two steps. The third caught on a tangle of grass and he stumbled. Not enough to fall flat on his face, but enough that his boot scuffed audibly when he caught himself. He froze, unable to decide whether to hold still, hit the ground, or take off at a sprint.

  “We got their attention,” Irene said.

  “Are they coming?”

  “Not yet.”

  Peter swallowed hard. “If they do, we run for it.”

  “They’re holding…”

  Peter was sure the patrol could hear his heart beating. He wanted to shift his weight to set up for a sprint, but didn’t want to risk even that much sound, or risk upsetting his footing again.

  “Hold…” Irene said. “They’re not looking at us anymore, but they’re also not moving on.”

  “Okay.” Peter concentrated on letting the tension out of his muscles. He slowly turned his head toward the intersection. One of the men took a deep drag off his cigarette, the red ember brightening considerably, then flicked it away. Both men started walking. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Several minutes later, the wall of trees that screened the route back up to the homestead loomed into view. Irene made three quick clicks with her tongue, as if trying to catch the attention of a dog. Bill replied with three clicks of his own, so they could locate his position. Irene made two clicks in response, which let Bill know everything was all right with her and Peter. Finally, Bill answered with four, to confirm he was also good.

  “You’re back quick,” Bill said quietly.

  “Thank God for smokers,” Irene said.

  “Smokers and jokers,” Peter said. “We saw at least two patrols moving around, and they’ve got whistles to signal each other across the town.”