Age of Survival Series | Book 2 | Age of Panic

by Holden, J. J.

  “There’s just too much risk,” Irene said. “I wasn’t willing to look like a looter coming out of my own house. Just in case they’ve got orders to shoot on sight or something.”

  “Sneaking around at night would certainly increase the chances of that,” Peter said.

  Bill said, “Maybe we can keep a careful eye on things for another day, then see if it feels safe to talk to Grossman about coming down to pick some things up. He’s cool with Peter and Larry coming and going.”

  “He is. I don’t know if that guy from the State is putting the place on lock, though. Regardless. Let’s head back up.”

  When they returned to the homestead, they had twenty minutes to wait before approaching. One of the things Peter had found a couple days earlier while reading through some of his dad’s notes was a procedure for making an expected return to the property at night. Since the night guards knew Peter, Bill, and Irene would be coming, every hour they’d go to a specific area of the perimeter to wait for a signal. The number of minutes past the hour was based on the date.

  At the appointed time, Peter heard his mother and Sally walk up to the crossing point. He initiated the same series of tongue clicks that Bill and Irene had used when they met him coming back from town.

  After the exchange of signs and countersigns, Nancy said quietly, “Empty handed?”

  “Yeah. Too many patrols,” Irene said.

  “Nothing going on up here. Go ahead and get yourselves some rest,” Nancy told them, putting a hand on Peter’s shoulder as he passed. “Got a moment?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can you just walk with Sally and me for a bit longer? Since we still don’t know where the third man is, I’m just feeling really antsy out here tonight. Having you making a nighttime dash into town really ramped it up. I’d appreciate your presence for a while, if you could.”

  Peter looked at his watch. Shift change was coming up in just over eighty minutes. “I can patrol with you until the end of your shift.”

  “I hope I won’t need you that long. You haven’t slept at all since last night, have you?”

  “I actually caught a nap this afternoon,” Peter lied. “I knew I’d have a long night, so I just rolled with it when I started nodding off while reading one of Dad’s foraging books.” What had actually happened when he started feeling drowsy was that he got out of the comfortable office chair and paced the office while he studied.

  Nancy scoffed quietly, reminding Peter that he’d never been able to lie to her. She also didn’t try to send him to bed before the next patrol shift came on.

  By the time he got up to his room, Peter was finished. He collapsed into bed and was aware of nothing until he heard somebody tapping his door jamb. He opened his eyes to the thin light of early morning. Through the haze of his exhaustion, he could still tell it should have been darker in his room.

  “Bill stayed on an extra hour,” Sally said. “We’ve got you some coffee and a sandwich ready.”

  “Yeah. Thanks,” Peter said. At least, having fallen asleep in his clothes, he didn’t need to worry about getting dressed. He did make a stop by the bathroom, because his mouth was terribly sour, enough to make him self-conscious about how bad his breath might be.

  As he picked up his nearly empty tube of toothpaste, he wondered who else at the homestead was running low on that commodity. They’d laid up a supply for just such an occasion, but with six people living there instead of three, it was going to go faster than they’d planned for. Somewhere in the fuzz at the back of his head, he remembered seeing some recipes for how to make more in a survival situation, but he was tired enough that he wouldn’t have been able to say whether it had been two days or two years ago that he’d read it.

  Once he got downstairs, Peter thanked Bill profusely for giving him the extra hour of sleep. After throwing back his coffee, he threw on a gear vest and slung his rifle to join Larry on patrol.

  Irene was already up and moving around. She already had mud on her clothes, a shovel over her shoulder, and a couple sheets of paper in her hand. “I think we’ve got a perfect window of opportunity,” she said, pointing up to the sky. One thing about weather in the area was that it almost always moved from west to east. With the Meier property being on high ground on the east edge of a valley, they could usually get a good weather forecast for the next couple hours by just going upstairs and looking out the master bedroom windows. “If you think it’s safe to pull the patrols for a bit, we could use some more grunt labor.”

  Peter looked to the west. Even at ground level, he could see a tower of cloud reaching up into an otherwise clear blue sky. They had a good one coming in. “Yeah. You could have made the call, and you should have had someone get me up on time.”

  She shook her head. “You’d have been useless without the extra sleep. Besides, I didn’t notice this until just a bit ago.”

  “Go ahead and put Larry to work. Let me take a couple laps to make sure I feel good about our surroundings, and I’ll throw in with you.”

  “Only if you feel it’s safe to not put any eyes outward,” Irene said. “Personally, I’d rather we not be working blind, especially if we’re going to be making noise.”

  Peter considered that, and knew she had a point. He could already hear people cutting and hauling wood. If they were going to try and work hard and fast, the chances of them making enough noise to draw attention went up quite a bit. “Okay,” he said. “It’s early in the day, and I suspect that once the weather hits, we’ll pull back in?”

  “We’ll shift to quieter work.”

  “I think the long-term gain of getting camouflaged is worth the short-term risk of having reduced guard for a bit. I’m still giving you Larry, but I’ll keep roving.”

  “Fair enough,” Irene said. “Been dry and humid for a while. If we’ve got a good soaking rain on its way, now’s the perfect time to transplant some shrubs and ground cover over to where we’ve busted up the driveway.”

  Part of the plan for the homestead was to try and erase the existing driveway as much as possible. The trees and brush between the house and the road were mature enough to screen the dwelling from the view of passing vehicles, but the driveway itself made an unmistakable cut through that soft barrier. Over the past couple days, everybody had put in some time at the strenuous labor of taking a pickaxe to the packed-gravel drive and hauling fallen trees and large limbs over. The purpose was to make the drive completely inaccessible to vehicle traffic and a huge, noisy inconvenience to anybody approaching on foot. Another part of Irene’s plan was to transplant living greenery over there to make it look like the driveway had been long abandoned, instead of in regular use just a couple weeks earlier.

  By the time Peter had completed his second circuit of the property, he was feeling tense and jumpy. It had been a calculated risk to go down to just one patrol for a couple hours so Irene would have the extra pair of hands, but he felt extraordinarily vulnerable walking the perimeter solo. He was sure that part of it was contagious anxiety from his mother. Of course, she was also right. Of the three men that had come on the property the first day, Peter knew that one was in the ground just a couple hundred feet from where he was standing, and one was in jail down in Bowman. The third man, the one that the others had called Rocky, was still at large. Peter still remembered how hot Rocky’s temper had been running, how obsessed the man was with the idea that the Meier family might have a working vehicle so he could get home. There was an irrationality to the stranger that Peter couldn’t trust.

  He looked up at the sky. The tower of cloud was now looming over the tree line and the air had gone dead still. A righteous storm was bearing down on them.

  9

  After breakfast at the school cafeteria, Prange and Carter went out for a walk. They had the office but didn’t feel they had quite the privacy they needed there for some business.

  “Is it time to make our move yet?” Carter asked, stepping along the sidewalk next to Prange.

 
; “Not yet,” Prange said. “That guy we hauled in last night, the one all shot up, he’s got info on what’s going on around here. I want a chance to have a chat with him. I just want to know what the general situation in the area is. Last info we got about how things are south of Black River was three days ago now.”

  “You still counting on getting a message sometime today?”

  “Assuming the messenger doesn’t get turned around as bad as we did getting here. I’d also like to find out how things are looking up in Eau Claire and Minneapolis. One useful bit I got from the mayor is that they’ve had nobody come from that direction. No refugees or anything.”

  “What is it, forty-some miles to Eau Claire?” Carter asked.

  “Yeah. Over a hundred, plus the Mississippi to cross, to get here from the Twin Cities. That river is an easy-to-control choke point, so I’m not surprised that nobody’s made it here from there.”

  “Maybe the situation in Eau Claire is like Black River Falls. The folks trying to get out just aren’t prepared for a long trek, so they’re going out a few miles and either getting themselves killed by doing something stupid or deciding to just go back home.”

  “Maybe. Or the people are finding little towns like this one that will take them in, for now, so there’s no reason to travel this far.”

  Carter nodded. “Could be.”

  The two men kept quiet as they passed two of the town’s deputies. After they were well out of earshot again, Prange asked, “Do you think our boys have tightened up enough to play soldier convincingly?”

  “So far,” Carter said. “Most of the veterans in town served a long time ago, and all of our guys are young. I think they just write off any lapses as being a symptom of the new Millennial Army. Too many stress cards and not enough discipline. The fact that the boys have actually been keeping their shit together and staying out of trouble so far has done more to help the charade, I think.”

  “We’ve only been here for a day. I don’t know how long it’ll be before they start acting up.”

  “Not long. I mean, these are the guys we’ve been able to rely on to stay off the product, but they’re still mostly boys in their early twenties.”

  “Well. Keep reminding them that we need to sell this for a little while longer. If we can pull this off, we’ll be living like kings. Anybody jacks it up and blows our cover, we’re back on the road.”

  “The lesson of those two dipshits last Friday is still holding.”

  Prange nodded. Carter had taught the crew a very graphic lesson about the importance of doing what they’re told and keeping on the right side of the locals. The man had picked up some very unsettling skills while he’d worked for the cartel down south of the border.

  Prange eyed Carter. “Let’s just hope it doesn’t need to be repeated.”

  Carter shook his head. “It will be. I could probably narrow it down to one of maybe three guys that’s going to volunteer to help me reinforce the chain of command, if you’re interested.”

  “I’d rather you do what you need to do to avoid that instead,” Prange said with a shudder.

  “I’ll do my part. It’s up to them to do theirs.”

  Prange wasn’t sure whether Carter was looking forward to having to reimpose discipline or not. The man was not overtly cruel, and he didn’t seem to have the need to rule by fear and terror that he’d seen on so many other men in the business. But when he’d put the knives to the two toughs that had stepped out of line, to make an example of them, he’d had no hesitation in getting started, and certainly made no effort to take care of the job quickly.

  “Anyway,” Carter said. “That’s neither here nor there. If one of the boys acts up, I’ll deal with it. It would help a lot, across the board, if you and I had an idea of when we throw the switch.”

  Prange frowned and kicked at a stone on the sidewalk. He knew Carter was right, but he wasn’t ready to act yet. There were just too many things he didn’t know yet. He was mad at himself for feeling so paralyzed by having gone three full days without any knowledge of what was going on just fifty or sixty miles away.

  The problem was, Fort McCoy was within that radius. If the federal government still existed in any form, it was likely that any attempt they would make to reassert control in the area was likely to start from there. If the state government reconstituted enough to try and bring itself back online, they might also use the base to stage any National Guard troops they were mobilizing, plus any other law enforcement they were militarizing.

  If they could get vehicles up and running at McCoy, they could get to Bowman within a couple of hours. With the only forms of long-distance communication these days being hand-delivered by people with almost no running vehicles, that threat could be on top of them long before they’d even know it existed.

  Communication. The lack of it was putting more stress on Prange than he had ever imagined it would. For the decade he’d been working for the cartel, he’d spent most of his time working independently in remote areas. First in Utah, then Nevada, and finally up in northern Wisconsin. His bosses laid out their expectations and trusted him to get the job done. He didn’t need them micromanaging him, and as long as the proper amount of cash flowed up to them and the DEA wasn’t following its scent, they were happy to leave him be. But any time that he’d needed to contact people, up the food chain or down, he’d been able to whip out his phone and talk. If somebody needed him, they could find him, anytime, anywhere.

  That lack of communication and knowledge about his surroundings just sucked up all his confidence. Every plan he came up with to do anything felt like it was a jumble of half-baked, bad ideas held together with dental floss and electrical tape. Just the simple drive into Bowman the day before, using outdated maps and with the signs all pulled up, had shown him how hard the simplest things could suddenly become.

  Carter cleared his throat. “Like I said…”

  Prange sighed. “Tell you what. They keep going on about this hearing they’re supposed to have for everybody involved in that riot the other day. Let’s get the temperature of the town after that, see where the fault lines lie.”

  “I can live with that. In fact, I should probably find the best-looking guys we’ve got and offer them to the police chief to help pull security for it.”

  “Good idea.”

  Two hours later, they were sitting in the school theater, way in the back. Prange had decided to keep a very low-key presence, hoping to observe the natural interactions of the townsfolk instead of influencing them with his presence. The town’s deputy mayor served as the prosecution. It appeared one of the lawyers in town had been pressed into service as a public defender.

  The first part of the hearing, for the owner of Dollar King and the three men that had been holed up in the store with her, went very quickly and with surprisingly little argument. The four put up a half-hearted defense that they were defending themselves against a clearly hostile mob, and that there was no proof at all of who had fired first. Prange was initially puzzled by this, until he started studying the faces of the other people in the theater. They were eerily quiet, and when Prange looked into their eyes, he could see a tremendous sense of betrayal. There was a slow-simmering burn of anger. He realized that the four did not feel safe being released into the town, preferring to take their chances in the makeshift jail. One of them even locked eyes with Prange, silently pleading.

  He realized the man looking at him was deathly afraid of what justice might be dealt out on the street.

  Prange shifted his attention to Tom Grossman next. The mayor seemed to know which way the wind was blowing, too. He seemed happy to let things play out with the defense half-stepping to keep the four in custody pending a trial at some later date.

  The other four were a different matter. They included Tom Grossman’s brother and some other folks that had never been the mayor’s friends. Their defense was much more spirited. They also hammered hard on the fact that nobody could say definitely who had shot
first. Prange noticed that Jerry Grossman had a peculiar way of talking about it. He said things like, “We can’t prove the first shots came from inside the store,” or, “Nobody can positively swear we were fired upon first.” From his seat, Prange could tell the mayor saw right through the rhetorical trick, but it was working on the rest of the town.

  Beyond that, they pushed hard on the fact that Dollar King’s prices met the definition of price gouging during an emergency under Wisconsin law. The prosecution tried to argue that fact didn’t justify starting a riot.

  “We didn’t riot,” Frank Miller countered. “We showed up to express our displeasure at both the business practices and the lack of any stomach on the part of the mayor to enforce the laws against them!” He paused for a chorus of support from the observers, then went on, “It was only after shots were fired that I and my friends here lost our tempers and started speaking in more heated terms.”

  Prange admired that last bit, the careful wording to suggest that the shots came first from inside the store. Miller went on to insist that he and his co-accused had not been carrying weapons when they went to the store.

  It was clear, from where he was sitting, that the mayor was in a tough position. Miller and Jerry Grossman had both managed to turn the hearing into a referendum on his leadership. With the mayor himself serving as magistrate for the proceedings, he was very clearly in a no-win situation.

  Suddenly, a man in the theater stood up and pointed directly at Prange. “What about him? He’s impartial.”

  “What?” Grossman asked.

  The man glanced at Grossman. “Conflict of interest. With all due respect, Mr. Mayor, you can’t be judge of these people that are on trial essentially for protesting against your inaction. We need an impartial judge here.”

  Before Prange could respond, the whole theater erupted in noise. He couldn’t follow any of it to get a sense of who was in favor or opposed to the idea. He was happy that everybody was willing to just stand at their seat and shout instead of rushing anybody else or throwing fists. After several minutes, it was Schuster that managed to get people calmed down. In the tenuous silence that followed, Grossman stood up.