“So you want me to put together a press gang?”
“Pretty much. Until Madison can get things moving, we’ve got to take care of the town. I need Captain Carter’s troops to keep providing security in town. If you can provide security for a work crew of detainees, we can provide some stability to hold people over while the state gets their distribution networks back online. I can even spare a couple soldiers to run your work crews out and back for their shifts.”
“You know, I’m a sworn law officer, as are my two original deputies and our intern,” Schuster said. “They were training up the people I deputized before you came along. I see no reason why I shouldn’t be in charge of security in my town, while you send your boys out to do some real work.”
“Because your town was about to implode when we showed up, so we had to assume law enforcement duties.”
“You know, you talked a good game when you came in, but I haven’t seen you back it up. Your troops aren’t disciplined, they don’t look very professional to me. A lot of them are lazy, quite frankly. And the way they went about kicking people around when they started hauling people in. I’m taking a lot of heat for that, because you convinced me to send my deputies out with your thugs. You want to know the best thing you could do for the security of my town? Get the hell out of it.”
Prange looked around. Two of his men were shadowing him and Schuster discreetly. They may not have been real soldiers, but they did know how to provide real quiet backup and support when a deal was going down. He was glad that they’d just naturally slipped into that mode without him having to tell them. “Things would be a lot worse for you if we weren’t here.”
“I don’t believe that anymore. Tom and I had our falling out, but if he were here, I’d be a hundred percent behind putting him back in office. Maybe I need to talk to the deputy mayor about moving you guys out of that office you’re using in the town hall. You were just supposed to be here for a couple days, using us as a base of operations to check out how the other communities nearby were doing. What happened to that?”
“You and your ineffective mayor couldn’t control your population. This is the biggest town in a ten-mile radius, and the way you were falling apart, we need to sit in here until the situation stabilizes. You’ve got to admit, things have been a lot more settled since we gently imposed a little bit of Martial Law.”
Schuster stopped walking. “Gently imposed? You’ve got to be kidding me. I think you need to turn law enforcement back over to me. Your mandate was to check on outlying communities and see what we needed. Well, we had a rough spot, but now we’re fine. What we need is food. You all need to move on down the road and not come back unless you’re driving a chuckwagon.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Prange said. “And I’d really advise you to ease up on your tone. If you aren’t willing to support us, we can replace you.”
“With who?” Schuster asked. “You been going behind my back, looking for some dupe you can put in my place? Who’s it going to be?”
Prange realized he had pushed too far. He didn’t have a good answer. “Just forget it. Let’s get back to where we started. Can I count on you to secure a work crew to bring in some fresh produce or not?”
“No, you can’t count on me. You’re going to have to find someone else to do the job.” Schuster turned to walk away.
“We’re not done here yet.” Prange reached out and grabbed the police chief by the shoulder.
Schuster spun around, then clumsily reached for his sidearm. Unfortunately for him, he was a rural cop whose territory was a quiet, sleepy town where a crime wave was having to issue an underage citation and a speeding ticket on the same night. Prange was much more accustomed to violence and had a much better set of reflexes. Before the police chief was able to get his gun out of his holster, Prange had his own piece planted in the man’s gut.
“Pretty quick with one of those,” Schuster said, slowly taking his hand off the grip of his pistol. “A lot quicker than I’d expect somebody who drives a desk to be.”
“How about if I tell you that I’m just a regular, everyday-carry kind of guy so I’ve practiced this a lot, and you just believe me?” Prange watched Schuster’s eyes. From the distance they were at, it was real easy to read the man. It was clear that the police chief did not believe what he’d just been told.
“What say I don’t believe you, and I think you need to pack your guys up and get the hell out of my town?”
“Come here. Walk with me,” Prange said, shifting so he and Schuster were side-by-side. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see his two men continuing to quietly shadow them, just standing in an intersection, acting as if they were shooting the breeze. Just up ahead was the home of one of the mayor’s cousins. When he and Carter had gone out looking for Grossman right after he disappeared, they’d gotten a lot of guff at that house. “You’re too smart to try and run, right?”
“Yeah,” Schuster said.
“Good. I’m going to just relieve you of this quick.” Prange slipped Schuster’s sidearm out of the holster. “Now, when we get up to this house here, just knock on the door. Don’t do anything stupid, and nobody gets hurt, okay?”
“Yeah. All right.”
Schuster started visibly sweating, but kept walking steady, up the sidewalk and onto the porch. He knocked on the door.
“Probably out on a work crew,” Schuster said when there was no answer. Prange prodded him with his pistol, and he knocked again.
Listening carefully, Prange could hear creaking inside the home. “Once more.” He wanted to check how close his shadows were but didn’t want to draw attention to them. Finally, the unmistakable sound of somebody walking toward the front door came from inside. “Smile.”
An older man holding a pistol at his side opened the door. Without hesitation, Prange shot Schuster in the ribs. Reflexively, the homeowner brought his weapon up, just in time to take a round from Schuster’s pistol in the chest. The shock caused the man to squeeze the trigger as the impact of the bullet threw him back.
Schuster was on the ground moaning weakly. Prange looked around the room. If there was anybody else in the house, he didn’t see them, and he hadn’t heard anybody inside fleeing from one of the adjoining rooms.
“Help me!” Prange shouted, dropping to his knees beside Schuster. “Somebody help!” He didn’t see townsfolk outside but did catch sight of a curtain closing in a house across the street. “I need help here!” he yelled again. As his two shadows came running, he clamped his hand over Schuster’s mouth and nose to make sure he wouldn’t be able to tell anybody what had really happened.
19
“Tom. There’s something you need to know about right away.”
“What’s up?”
Cathy Berkman stepped into the dank, wet-smelling supply room for the town’s water treatment plant. She handed him a travel mug of coffee that was terribly weak, but still hot. “There’s new trouble. Prange and Schuster supposedly went over to your cousin’s place, and there was a brief exchange of gunfire.”
Grossman just about choked on the coffee. “That sound’s weird. What’s really going on?”
“A few people came in to give statements, but there’s not much consistency. We heard anything from one shot to seven. You know how it goes. The most reliable account we have came from somebody across the street. She saw Prange and Schuster go up to the house. They knocked on the door, somebody opened up and fired, Schuster went down, and then Prange fired into the house.”
“How is everybody?”
“Your cousin and Schuster were both killed. Prange came out all right.”
Grossman felt a fierce rage rising within him. His cousin Ron wasn’t the first person in Bowman to be killed since the Event, but he was family, somebody he’d been raised with since childhood. Not only that, but the deaths earlier had been somehow impersonal to him. They were folks that had come out on the wrong end of a situation that had suddenly gone bad. A part of him
had compartmentalized them the way he had to the soldiers under his command that had died during the Gulf War. He did not care any less about them, but in Grossman’s mind, they fell into this big, nebulous sense of things that just happen as the world goes on.
If Ron had died within seconds of Prange—whoever and whatever he was—showing up, that was motivated by the active, ill intent of an evil person. He was also convinced that it was no accident that Prange had somehow come out unscathed when the other two people had perished.
“Is he trying to draw me out?”
“I don’t know that I can answer that,” Berkman said. “I have no idea what his intentions or motivations are.”
“What’s the situation like in town? Prange’s been promoting that he, Carter, and Schuster together were going to bring order and stability. Now the only one of our own in that trio is dead.”
“It’s tense out there, but static. Prange and Carter have declared a full curfew until tomorrow morning, and are out and visible, showing force. Seems to have everybody stepping back for a while.”
“It’s the psychology of riot control,” Grossman said. “It’s how a handful of cops in a line can stand down hundreds of people. The mob knows they can take them, but they also know that the first twenty or fifty people to step forward are going down. Until you get those fifty volunteers, or the press is hard enough to make the choice for the guys in front, it’s a stalemate.”
“That’s pretty much what it feels like out there.”
“How’d you get out, then?” Grossman asked.
“I told them that we should send all the kids in the messenger net home, and that I’d make sure the message got out to the guys here and at the other places on the outskirts of town.”
“Smart.”
“Yeah. That’s why you keep me around.”
“I think it’s time to act. I’m assuming there’s nothing going on that requires me to act right this second.”
“There isn’t,” Berkman said. “But I can’t loiter, in case anybody’s watching me. It shouldn’t take long for me to come out here and tell the two guys working to head for home before I move onto my next stop.”
“Right. You move on. I’ll get a plan together and written up for distribution. Think you can get somebody to sneak up the back way in two hours or so?”
“Maybe. I’ll try.”
“Okay. Any word on Thorssen, by the way?” Grossman asked.
“Not yet. He’s supposed to leave a message at the dead drop if he got up to the Meier place, but the curfew blew my chance to check it.”
“Got it. I’ll have to plan without counting on any of them. If nothing else, tell people to sit tight and not make any waves. If we can somehow get things together, tell them to listen for three shots, two, then three, at six tonight. If that happens, they should put their red bands on, and we’ll do what’s got to be done.”
“Okay, I’ll do what I can,” Berkman said. “And I’m very sorry about Ron and the chief. I know that despite what’s happened over the last week or so, you two were friends for a very long time.”
Grossman nodded. After Berkman left, he gave himself a couple minutes to let some memories wash over him while he listened to the two plant workers finish up the work they’d been doing and leave. Once he was alone in the building, without the presence of other human beings, he grabbed some paper and went to one of the rooms with a window. Since he’d been in hiding, he’d been trying to lay out plans for the best way to dislodge Prange’s band of thugs based on the info he’d been receiving about where they were staying, how they were moving around town, and what equipment they had.
Overall, he had a decent intelligence picture to work from, coupled with his own intensive first-hand knowledge of the town he lived in. Another thing that might work for him was the sudden death of Schuster. His previous brainstorming had assumed Schuster’s men would generally throw in with Prange if there was a concerted effort to free the town. The whole situation at Ron’s place rang so false to him that he could imagine it raising doubts with the police as well.
The thing was, he didn’t know for sure which way they’d go. He had to admit that it was smart of Prange to get rid of Schuster at Ron’s house. It made for one hell of a compelling narrative he could put out there—the cousin of the exiled mayor taking a pot shot at one of his enemies.
Grossman decided to pencil into his plans instructions for people to offer the police a chance to lay down their arms and back off whenever they encountered them. With their loyalty being a complete unknown, there was no way he was going to fold them into his forces on the fly.
From down the hall, he heard a door open. There shouldn’t have been anybody coming into the building right then, and if it were one of his people, they would have tapped out a passcode on the wall as soon as they were inside. The plant building was not a very big place. Even with him having settled into the office farthest from the front door, it would take only seconds for somebody to round the corner and have a clear view down the hallway. Grossman stood up and grabbed the stack of papers off the desk. It was that or the cane—he didn’t have time to take both.
There was a back door out of the building, but if Prange or Carter had been watching Berkman and had sent people to the treatment plant to get him, it was best to assume they were covering it. That left only the secret back way. Next to the office he’d been in was a door into a mechanical room. There were narrow access corridors to reach the machinery for the settling ponds, with access hatches up to the surface at the end of each of them. The room had an oppressive stench that was equal parts oil, grease, pond scum, and sewage. It was also pitch dark. If he hadn’t practiced navigating it, he never would have been able to find the corridor he needed.
He was almost to the hatch when somebody opened the door into the room. A very faint glow reached him, either an old flashlight or a gas lantern, he presumed. Grossman drew his pistol and aimed it at the end of the corridor. There was nowhere for him to hide. If it was a flashlight, they’d have him dead to rights if they shone it at him. If it were a lantern, he suspected he’d have a little better luck.
There were at least two people in the room talking quietly. His heart froze when he heard a snippet of their conversation. “…left his cane. He’s gotta be in this place somewhere…”
Better the cane than his plans, he thought, holding the sheaf of papers he’d grabbed. As quietly as possible, not even daring to breathe, he sidestepped farther down the corridor until he hit the ladder, not that it would do him any good. It was made of lightweight iron, rickety and noisy. Even putting the lightest bit of weight on it made noise. If he could get up it silently, the second he opened the hatch at the top, light would come flooding in. It was the farthest he could get from the other people in the room.
“There. Where do these go?” one of the voices asked.
“Got me. Never been in here before.”
“Place reeks. Let’s check it and get out.”
Grossman held his pistol straight out, toward the faint glow at the end of the corridor.
“Think he’d be able to make it down one of these?”
“Could be. Dude’s got to have epic hide-and-seek skills to keep outta sight in a place with like five streets.”
Grossman realized he’d made a tactical error in ducking all the way back into the corridor as the light came closer.
“Come on out, Gimpman!” one of the men shouted. “You come out quiet, we don’t have to drag your dead ass out. We’ll even get you your walking stick if you make this easy.”
Grossman shut one eye and squinted the other. It was dark enough in the corridor that the night sights on the pistol were sharp and clear. The problem was that the corridor was narrow enough that he’d only have a shot on one of the men in the room. The other would be able to run. “Unless…” he whispered to himself as the glow got progressively brighter. It was a diffuse light, not a sharp beam.
It was still almost painfully bright
as it passed the tank at the end of his corridor and came directly into view. Grossman aimed directly at it and fired. The lantern shattered and went flying as somebody shouted in pain. He used the sound as aural camouflage to climb the ladder and push the hatch open. He’d chosen that corridor specifically, because it came out just past a small pumphouse, and wasn’t visible from the main building of the plant.
It was fifty yards down to the river. Grossman took it at a backward crawl, keeping an eye out for anybody that might have been behind the building, or if anybody had been able to raise an alarm. Nothing seemed to be moving as he hit the low berm that kept the settling ponds separate from the river. Slipping along the bottom edge of the berm, he made it to a stand of trees that would shield him from view as he went over the top.
As he rolled over the edge and down toward the fast-moving river, he wondered whether it would be best to stay close to town, or just follow the river even farther down. If he were to disappear entirely, would Prange waste enough effort continuing to search for a man that was no longer there?
The problem was that by leaving his cane, he implicated the two men that had been working at the plant and Cathy Berkman in hiding him. He didn’t want to think of what Prange might do to get information from them. There was no way he was going to abandon the people that had been sheltering him.
The riverbank was littered with deadwood that had washed downstream and snagged on low-hanging branches. Grossman located a limb that had a reasonably straight branch sticking out almost straight from it. With the little saw blade on his multi-tool, he cut a couple inches above and below the joint to make a T-shape, then trimmed the branch to the right length to work as a cane.
One unexpected benefit of the few days of sedentary exile in the bowels of the water treatment plant was that he’d laid off the knee. He was able to move through the woods at a reasonable clip and with the pain staying below the level of constant distraction it had previously risen to.
Age of Survival Series | Book 2 | Age of Panic Page 17
