Age of Survival Series | Book 2 | Age of Panic

by Holden, J. J.

  “I understand the concerns that have been presented,” Grossman said, “and I will recuse myself from this matter. I’d like to confer with Mister Prange and the town board to select an alternate magistrate in my stead. The four accused will remain in custody until we can reconvene the initial hearing. We will announce the new time as soon as we have set it.”

  There was some commotion in response to Grossman’s announcement, but at a manageable level. Prange and Carter wasted no time in getting themselves out of the school theater ahead of the rest of the town. Any worries they had about people trying to bend their ears on the walk back to the town hall were dispelled when they got to the doors of the building and saw a heavy, nearly sideways rain falling.

  Neither man had expected the skies to open up while they were in the hearing, so they sprinted the half block, and still arrived soaked to the bone. Once they got inside, Prange immediately noticed a familiar face, playing dress-up in an Army uniform like the rest of his crew. It was a short, quiet farm kid that had been living on his own as a runaway since he was twelve. The cartel had picked him up a few years ago and relied on him as their eyes and ears around their assorted rural operations. All his years roughing it had given him the ability to move through the countryside silently and without a trace.

  The day Prange’s crew had been sent out from Black River Falls, the kid had been dispatched to spend a couple of days putting some eyes on Fort McCoy. Prange gestured for the kid to follow him and Carter out behind the building, quick.

  “Got news?” Prange asked as soon as they stepped outside the building. At least the back of the building was sheltered from the stiff wind, so the rain wasn’t as it had been on the walk over.

  “Yeah. Bosses say keep on keepin’ on. The fort is pretty chaotic. Near as I could tell, there is no organization to speak of. Nobody seems to know or respect anybody else, so I’m guessing most of the troops arrived piecemeal instead of as organized units. Not a lot of anything useful going on. Any groups that seem organized are either trying to keep the fort itself locked down or have been sent east. Madison and Milwaukee, I’d guess.”

  “How are things going down at Black River?” Carter asked the kid.

  “Bosses are taking their time but getting things done. They already had a couple cops and dudes on the city council on the take from running the trade. Using more carrot than stick to get more on board.”

  “Any news from the other crews?” Prange asked.

  “Nope. Bosses ain’t worried about the guys up farther north. Your old turf, y’know? They’re concerned about how things are with the crew running east. Don’t know why, just that somehow, they’ve heard just enough that they think something’s gone terribly wrong. Probably send me out there when I get back from here.”

  Prange was relieved to hear that the local management was confident that he’d left his territory in the north woods in good shape. He’d left it in the hands of his money guy, who was quietly capable and very cautious. He also wasn’t surprised that the eastern crew was a source of concern. The man the cartel had put in charge of that crew was just a bully and a petty tyrant. He was great at getting short-term results, but for anything that needed planning beyond the reach of his fist, he was useless.

  “How are things between the towns?” Prange asked the kid. “I know of a couple little pockets of survivalists in the immediate area here. What’s the situation elsewhere?”

  “Pretty much the same. I’ve crossed some land owned by serious SHTF types, but most of them seem content to just hole up and hold what they got. There’s farms out there where it looks like people have gathered together. Some look like they’d hold up against a raid, others wouldn’t last a hot minute. The little towns are a mixed bag. Some got it together, others seem to have already fallen apart and emptied out.”

  “Get a chance to scout around here much?” Carter asked.

  “Nah. My instructions were to get word to you and back fast, not poke about.”

  “Any word on when you’ll be back this way?” Prange asked.

  “Nope. Prolly depends on what I find with the east crew. Here’s the rest of the info the bosses wanted me to send your way,” the kid said, reaching under his poncho and pulling a thin sheaf of folded paper out of a pocket.

  Prange gave one curt nod. “Thanks. Let us take a look at this, and we’ll get something for you to take back. In the meantime, I think it’s about an hour to lunch or so.”

  The kid looked at his wrist, where he wore an old-fashioned, hand-wound watch. “As long as I’m back out by evening. Want at least a couple hours of daylight to start the trip.”

  “Sounds good. Let’s get out of this,” Prange said. While he and Carter went up to the office they’d taken over, he scanned over the papers he’d just received. There wasn’t a ton of information, and he was a fast reader.

  He handed them over to Carter without comment. When his partner finished, he looked up and said, “I think it’s go time.”

  “Why don’t you find a way to occupy the mayor while I have a chat with the top cop downstairs.”

  “On it,” Carter said, and they parted ways.

  Minutes later, Prange found Schuster in his office. “We need to talk.”

  “About what?” Schuster asked, taking off his reading glasses and covering up whatever he had been writing.

  “Your mayor. He’s effectively lost control of the town, during a serious state of emergency.”

  “I don’t know if I’d go that far. He could be doing better, and we had a real hot moment a couple days ago, but he’s managing to get things reset. I still think his approach is way too soft, but he may be able to spin this around and use it to get people to work together better.”

  “My understanding is that he’s done nothing at all about the price gouging happening in town, that it’s still going on, even after your little ‘hot moment.’”

  “Now that it’s come in the open that we’ll be prosecuting the Dollar King for it, I think the rest of the shops will come into line.”

  Prange noticed that Schuster didn’t have much heart in what he was saying. It felt like he was parroting somebody else’s words more out of loyalty than out of any belief in them.

  “Thing is, we’ve studied social breakdowns at the office,” Prange said. “There’s a predictable pattern to weak leadership that I think you’re falling into here. There’s an initial crisis, a reset of civility, and then a catastrophic breakdown. The first crisis breaks down bonds of trust and interpersonal relationships between people. No matter what kind of face people put on in the aftermath, damage has been done. They get suspicious of each other, protective of themselves.”

  Schuster didn’t say anything.

  “Everybody puts on a good face,” Prange continued. “I can see you doing it.” He paused again to let that sink in a bit. “Hard feelings start to simmer, just waiting for a new spark, and then everything explodes. You lost just a few people in the first outbreak of violence. Are you prepared to see ten percent of the town lying dead in your ambulance bay? Twenty percent?” He knew he was spouting pure bull, but it was clear Schuster was buying it.

  “I don’t see how upsetting things any more will help,” Schuster said.

  “Look. You’ve survived one outbreak of violence, probably caused by people getting their first real sense that genuine scarcity is setting in. You’ve still got your food station at the school going, but what happens when the school runs out of food and people will need to rely on what they’ve got saved up themselves?”

  “Well, we’re hoping that you all will be able to help with that,” Schuster said.

  “We hope to. But we’ve got a lot of people to take care of. Things are going to be thin for a while, even after we get distribution back online. The more solid leadership in this town is, the more effective we’ll be in taking care of you. You’re going to need more solid leadership than Grossman can provide.”

  “What are you proposing?” Schuster asked
, suspicion creeping into his voice.

  Prange knew better than to offer Schuster the job. The cop wasn’t the kind of guy that would take an offer like that at face value. He’d immediately assume he was being manipulated—never mind that’s exactly what Prange was doing, he just wasn’t going to do it that way. Prange also knew that he wasn’t the kind that would let himself be drawn into working for the cartel easily, by bribery or threat. He’d need somebody more pliable sitting in the mayor’s seat.

  “The mayor’s failure to prosecute obvious violations of the law constitutes criminal negligence in and of itself,” Prange said. “I would recommend taking him into custody now, having the other two on the board manage the town in the interim, and holding new elections. Right now, the best thing to do is give the people a chance to feel like they have some control over their situation.”

  Schuster frowned, stroking the stubble on his chin, then started to slowly nod his head.

  10

  “With all due respect, the hearing really went off the rails,” Cathy Berkman said, sitting next to Tom Grossman in the high school theater as most of the people who’d attended the hearing were filing out.

  Grossman leaned heavily on his cane as he stood up from his seat. “You’re telling me. I want to try and catch up with Prange, quick. We definitely need to speak.”

  “He cut out right away.”

  Grossman scanned the room. The man from the State was no longer there. “Damn it.” Even more frustrating, he found himself penned in by six other people. Two were offering their unwavering support for him as mayor. Three were trying to get on his case about why he hadn’t busted any of the shop owners, now that they knew there were actual laws on the books about it. The last person was the sister of one of the men killed out in front of Dollar King. She was snarling at him in a low voice about how he was personally responsible for the death of her brother.

  He slumped back down into his seat and turned all of his attention on the woman who’d lost her brother. “I’m so terribly sorry,” he tried to say. “I honestly hadn’t known there was a law like that. Nothing like this has ever come up before.”

  Even as the words left his mouth, he realized how weak they sounded. It was true—in all of the emergencies the town had faced before, he’d never had any problem with any of the town’s businesses jacking up prices or trying to take advantage of the situation. Rather, they’d always been generous and open-handed. Even Pat Neustadt at Dollar King was always right there for the town, pushing food and goods out the door as fast as she could. The town had never given him reason to investigate that particular body of law.

  The woman’s vehemence silenced the others crowded around him. Grossman composed his thoughts while letting her speak her piece. When she paused for breath, he said, “I should have come down on people sooner. Ignorance of the law on my part is no excuse.”

  “You’re damn right, it isn’t,” she said. “Oscar would still be alive if it wasn’t for you.”

  “I can’t bring him back, but I am committed to bringing justice to the ones that killed him.”

  “Start with yourself,” the woman said. “Just march your own self over to your jail and let your brother and his friends out.”

  Grossman was sure the woman in front of him was way too young to have known Jerry when he lived in town. Word must have traveled quickly. He started to wonder how many people were suddenly privy to his own family business, then shook off the distraction. He had something much more important to deal with.

  “You are fully justified in being angry with me,” he said. “I can only give you my most sincere sympathy and apology at your loss. If I could go back and do things differently, I would do so.” Beside him, he heard Berkman sharply inhale. She must have known where he was going next and wanted to stop him. “I should have acted differently. All I can do now is hold the memory of what happened in front of me to keep me from making the same mistake again.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “We have to meet up with Prange about your recusal,” Berkman said, tapping Grossman’s forearm.

  “Please forgive me,” Grossman said to the woman again. “But I do need to speak with them as soon as possible. I do want to make sure justice is served to all parties. If that includes me, I am prepared to accept that.”

  “It better include you,” the woman said to Grossman’s back as Berkman helped him to his feet and walked out of the theater with him. One of the town’s regular deputies and one of Prange’s men were guarding the door to the backstage area and kept anyone else from following.

  “You shouldn’t have admitted guilt,” Berkman said.

  “I couldn’t just hide behind politically expedient yammer, either,” Grossman said. “Thing is, I gambled, and I lost. We all lost.”

  Berkman shook her head. “Well, some could argue that you’ve effectively admitted guilt.”

  “I took responsibility. There’s a difference.”

  “To you, maybe. Others will see it differently.”

  “I’ll have to hope they’re not on my jury.” Grossman cocked his head to listen to something. It was the sound of a hard rain falling on the school’s roof. “Maybe this will calm some tempers,” he said.

  “I doubt it. Do you want me to send somebody to grab your raincoat?”

  “No,” Grossman said. “Maybe I’ll hold here for a few, see if the rain shows any sign of letting up.”

  “I’m going to go against what I just told you and take some responsibility myself.”

  “How so?”

  “I knew about the law all along. Part of my general business law classes when I got my degree.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything to me?” Grossman asked.

  “It didn’t seem immediately relevant for the first day or so, since all the stores just shuttered up anyway. By the time they opened, you and Schuster were already getting into it with each other about whether to just go and seize the stores and their inventories. I felt you had the better approach, and I guess I didn’t want to give Schuster any opening to convince people to go his way. If he knew there were laws against what they were doing, I felt like he’d have used that as an excuse to get really heavy handed.”

  “You could have told me privately. Why didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know. I think I just wanted to give them a chance to come about and do the right thing. That’s why I took the lead on going out and trying to negotiate with them. I hoped that if I could come in with a soft touch, we wouldn’t have to crack down on anybody.”

  “Like me, you gambled and you lost?”

  “Yeah. And it looks like keeping that information from you has put you in a lot of trouble. I’m sorry.”

  Grossman shook his head. “You didn’t intend to cause harm. Besides, those FEMA and Homeland Security conferences I attended never covered anything like that either. Sanitation, crowd control, emergency medicine, sure. How to deal with opportunistic shopkeepers, not so much. They must have assumed it just went without saying.”

  “But I’m just as much at fault as you are for the people that were killed and hurt. There are so many ways I could have done things differently.”

  “At the end of the day, the decisions I made were mine. Even without a law to back me up, I should have been much more assertive with the shop owners. I should have been leading instead of suggesting. The ultimate responsibility is on me, not you.”

  “I can’t just watch you go down,” Berkman said.

  “You don’t have to. If I have to take the fall for this, keep doing your job, but do it better. Anyway, I could really use a walk before I go deal with Prange. Can you give me a few to put my thoughts in order?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  Poking his head back into the theater, he didn’t see the deputy that had been watching the door, but the soldier was a couple yards away, talking to someone. “Specialist,” Grossman said, trying to get the soldier’s attention. He repeated himself a couple more t
imes, before the soldier noticed other people turning toward the mayor.

  “Could you do me a quick favor? There are usually a couple of umbrellas on the coat rack outside the main doors. Grab one for me?”

  “Yes, sir,” the soldier said, trotting off.

  When he came back, carrying an umbrella, Grossman verified that he had been addressing him by the correct rank.

  Grossman took a roundabout way out of the school, coming out a little-used back door. The wind was whipping up fiercely and the rain was coming down heavy. Barely ten steps out, his light pants and dress shirt were pretty well soaked through, but he resisted the urge to give up on his walk and go back to his office. He found himself wandering in the direction of his house, and decided to just keep going since there were warm, dry clothes there.

  On the way, he passed another patrol. Like the pair that had been guarding the door to the theater, it was one of Schuster’s men, one of Prange’s. Grossman had no memory of either the chief or Prange discussing with him the idea of pairing up deputies and troops. The last formal conversation he’d had with the men from the State was that they were going to use Bowman as a staging base for a couple of days to survey the other towns in the area.

  Just after the patrol had passed him, Grossman realized something else didn’t quite seem right. “Hey, soldier,” he said, turning around.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “You want to take off those Air Force mittens?”

  “Sir?” the soldier asked.

  Grossman patted the front pockets of his pants. The soldier showed no sign of comprehension at all.

  “Get your damn hands out of your pockets.”

  There was a noticeable delay while the soldier processed the information before he took his hands out of his pockets. “Sorry, sir,” he said.

  “Don’t sweat it. It’s been a rough couple weeks on all of us.”