After the Fall (Book 2): Catherine's Tale (Part 1)

by David E. Nees

  “You were. He involved you.”

  “No!” she shouted.

  “It’s something you’ll have to accept. Your life has changed now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You must think about your son now. Jim caused this, and he’s gone. Now there is only your son to think about. You want to save him, don’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “Good,” Leo said. He stood up, shook the blanket out and draped it over Donna’s shoulders. “You belong to me now. I control the fate of your son and I control your fate. Do you understand?”

  She shook her head. He could see her incomprehension, and the growing terror behind it.

  “You will. The first thing is to accept your new role and learn to do what I say. If you obey me, you’ll get to see your son. He’ll be well taken care of, and you’ll have a relationship with him. Don’t obey me, and you won’t see your son and he won’t be so well taken care of.”

  He watched as her body began to shudder violently, and then she sagged against the bindings and began to cry.

  The next day Leo got word that Joe wanted to see him, so he walked over to his boss’s office in the bank building. He wasn’t impressed by all the glitter, and, in fact, he was uncomfortable in the upscale surroundings. He couldn’t shake the feeling that they were exposed downtown. He preferred the comfortable back room of the old bar and strip club. It was familiar territory and always full of men he could count on. It was their turf. This place felt foreign to him.

  But a lot had changed since the attack, including his boss’s profile. Joe was now the Director of Resources, whatever the hell that meant. All Leo knew was that his boss controlled the town. And Leo made sure Joe had the muscle to keep control.

  “What you want, boss?” he asked as he came in.

  Joe turned to him. “What’d you find out from that engineer?”

  “There’s something going on. Some kind of resistance. We got a couple of names, but he died before we could get more out of him. We’re looking for them now.”

  “You haven’t rounded them up?”

  “They’ve gone underground. I guess they figured they’d be exposed after Jim disappeared. We’ll find them.”

  “So what’s this resistance?”

  “A small group of technicians who want more freedom, more say in how things run. Just what you guessed.”

  “Ungrateful bastards.” Joe spat the words out, his face in a scowl.

  “We’ll find ‘em. We’ll eliminate them and the rest will fall in line.”

  Joe was silent a moment. When he spoke again, his face had cleared. “The local thugs are bothersome enough, but they’re almost useful.”

  Leo knew Joe wasn’t talking about his own men. There were independent criminals in town, not controlled by Joe. Some were homegrown; others had filtered in through the porous barriers. They preyed on everyone, stealing clothes, ration cards, whatever they needed. Most of them were armed with knives, but a few had guns. Joe never had a good word for them. Leo looked at him. “How so?”

  “They make people want the protection we provide. It’s useful to have them around mugging people, making them want more security.”

  Leo smiled. Joe had an interesting take on things.

  “So what else do you want?” he asked.

  “What about the man’s family?”

  “Taken care of. We have the son at the school you set up for orphans. The mother—I’ll take care of her. She’ll behave with her son held hostage.”

  Joe changed the subject. “I want to round up more firepower. I want to raid the armory in Taylorsville.”

  Immediately after the attack, Joe had started grabbing all the assets he could reach. He had raided regional warehouses, stripping them of food, medicine and clothing. As soon as his gang had managed to get some older cars and trucks running, he had set out to collect all the gas and diesel supplies in the area. His men would work their way along the partially clogged roads until they came to a tanker truck. They would hook the trailer to their own tractor and haul it back to town. Anyone getting in their way had been quickly and brutally dealt with.

  One of the things Joe had done first was to raid the local National Guard armory. It had been defended by a few guardsmen, who felt it was their duty to remain on station and protect the weapons and ammunition. Joe met with them and managed to convince them to let him help to secure the munitions for the defense of the city. After they agreed, he had made sure that they would never tell anyone about his takeover. The weapons from that armory had helped him to raid two others that were located south of Hickory, just off Route 321.

  Leo frowned at Joe’s order. “That’s a lot of work, Taylorsville’s not that close, and it could be pretty well defended.”

  “You do it. I want all the firepower I can collect.”

  “You think it’s worth the fight? We could lose a bunch of men.”

  “We could.” Joe paused, his expression grim. He stared into space for a moment, then he looked at Leo. “It’s every city for itself now. If we have more weapons, the other towns’ll have to do what we say. We’re going to get them under my control.” He pointed his finger at Leo. “You know the bosses in Charlotte always had our back. We paid for that by giving them a cut on what we made. So where are they now? We haven’t heard from them and we’re not sending them anything. We’re cut off, on our own. We need to organize the region. Who knows what’s happening outside our area? We got to be ready when outside authorities show up.”

  Leo felt a grin creep over his face.

  “And when you go, keep on the lookout for any coal trains. We can use it for smelting metal. I don’t know how it works, but you gotta have a hot fire. One son of a bitch says he can make cars run without gas if he has a supply of coal.”

  “Run a car on coal?” Leo echoed incredulously.

  “No, he makes methane from the coal and runs the car on that. There’s some smart fuckers here in town. Which is also the problem. We got to keep those engineers and scientists under our control.”

  Leo nodded. If this was the way the world was going to work now, Joe seemed to be ready for it.

  Chapter 8

  In the two weeks that led up to the trek to Hillsboro, the farms in the valley were a bustle of activity. The grain harvest was in, both the winter wheat and the early barley plantings. Almost everyone worked together on the threshing and winnowing, with the farmers moving from one farm to another by turns. Then they loaded the grain onto farm wagons drawn by pickup trucks and took it to Clifton Forge. They scoured the valley and every inch of Clifton Forge for sacks with which to bag the newly ground flour and corn meal.

  Everyone put in long hours. Lieutenant Cameron was there to help, along with six others from his platoon who had volunteered to come to the valley with him, including Sergeant Gibbs and Specialist Tommy Wilkes. They spent a whole week there, working from dawn to dusk and then sleeping in tents in Anne and Jason’s front yard. Catherine was overjoyed to have her fiancé there to work beside her. Sarah did her share as well, while keeping up a flirtatious relationship with Tommy Wilkes under the watchful eye of her mother. Sarah had met him when the army had shown up the year before, just before her baby brother was born.

  The soldiers would also provide extra security for the trip to Hillsboro, and along with the familiar Humvee, they had also brought a big troop truck to help transport everyone. It had taken them only a day’s drive to reach the valley, but the slower pace dictated by the heavy farm wagons would mean a return journey of a day and a half. In addition to the milled grains, the wagons would be carrying loads of beets, spring onions, and the cucumbers and peppers that had gotten an early start in the cold frames.

  Tom Walsh stopped by to see Jason five days before the departure date. He was sweaty and dusty from loading a wagon for another mill run. “You sure you want me to do the negotiating when we get to town?” was the first thing he said.

  Jason smiled. “I think you�
�ll be the best. Besides, the valley voted for you, so you’re stuck with the job.”

  After a moment, Tom smiled back. “So if I screw up, it’ll be my fault and I’ll hear about it all summer.”

  “We’ll try not to be too hard on you. But I want Catherine to join you. She’s tough and thinks on her feet, and she’s had a lot to do with keeping the valley organized since the Big Jacks battle. You remember how she helped Claire Nolan this past winter. The poor woman was slipping into a state of depression, lamenting her husband’s death in the Big Jacks battle. She wasn’t taking care of herself—eating or sleeping right.” Tom nodded. Jason went on, “Catherine spent many days sitting and talking with her, reading to her, cleaning the house and generally helping Claire put herself back together. Catherine was selfless with her time.”

  Jason smiled at the memory. “Catherine showed a real sense of duty and loyalty to the valley.”

  “That she did,” Tom replied.

  “And she can help you keep your cool,” Jason added.

  The two men settled themselves into the chairs on the porch with glasses of mint flavored water in their rough hands. Jason turned to Tom with a more serious look on his face. “There is one complication. The city wants to impose a tax on our transactions.”

  “A tax? That’s crazy,” Tom exclaimed. “How’d you hear about this?”

  “Kevin told me yesterday. He’s tried to talk Frank Mason out of the idea but it didn’t work.”

  “Why don’t they just negotiate an exchange that favors them? That makes more sense.”

  “Kevin seems to think they want to establish their authority, their ability to tax people and transactions in the area, even outside the city.”

  “Sounds pretty stupid to me. We’re just getting something going and they want to screw it up.”

  “Isn’t that what government usually does?” Jason responded.

  Tom shook his head. “We’re still going, though?”

  “We can’t stop now. If we have to give them their pound of flesh and if it isn’t too hateful, we should probably do it.”

  “From the man who says he can’t negotiate, that’s some compromise.”

  “Just trying to be practical.”

  The Jessup and Early clans showed up at the farm three days before departure. This time they came in greater numbers, twenty-four rugged looking men and women in all. They had carried their goods on their backs, through the woods and over the ridges from the north. They brought skins, fur pelts, smoked game meat, and wild food and herbs from the forest—fiddleheads, cattail tubers, wood sorrel, spring beauty, and ramps; along with scallions and sassafras roots and wintergreen. The forest would provide many more offerings as the summer advanced.

  The air was full of enthusiasm, the activity hectic. The Jessups and Earlys set up camp all around Anne and Jason’s farm, their tents and tarpaulins spread out in a haphazard fashion through the apple orchard along the edge of the woods, in noticeable contrast to the neat row of military tents in front of the house. They pitched in to help load the wagons. The valley residents were buzzing about the possibilities this trip would bring, and those who were going were excited at the chance to mingle with the people in town after two years of isolation. Anne needed to stay close to home to tend baby Adam, so she made most of her contribution by cooking for the workers outside. In the final forty-eight hours, some of the other women joined her to allow the rest to work non-stop.

  In the midst of the frenzy of preparation, Jason took Clayton Jessup aside.

  “I want to let you know about a possible situation in town. Lieutenant Cameron told me that the town has decided to tax our barter exchanges.”

  The lanky mountain man looked at him in some confusion. “Tax the trading? We dealin’ with the town, ain’t we? We agree on a trade and we do it. I don’t understand.”

  “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me either, but the town seems to think that it’s the same as buying and selling and they get to tax all transactions.”

  “But we making a deal with the city,” Clayton repeated.

  “Right, but that’s what they want to do. In any case, I think we should go and see what’s up. It may not be so bad. We all need to make this trade work. There’s things the city has that we need.”

  Clayton nodded. His response was short, as Jason expected. “We see how it goes. If we don’t like it, we don’t trade.”

  The day of the trip to Hillsboro dawned clear and cool, but with the promise of more warmth. It was late May, and the weather in the mountain valley could not have been better. The fields and the forest were fresh and green; the air was crisp and filled with the fertile odors of spring. It was a day of promise, lifting the spirits of the valley residents as they walked down to Anne and Jason’s farm to gather for the trip to town.

  The convoy vehicles had been assembled in the yard. The two large farm wagons with towering sides, the largest wagons in the valley, sat side by side, hitched to the pickup trucks that would tow them. A third pickup was parked at the edge of the front yard next to the huge troop truck. People milled about in the front yard and on the porch, talking excitedly, or busied themselves finding places for their personal bags. With the large contingent of Jessups and Earlys, buckskins outnumbered valley clothing by more than two to one. Most of the clans would ride in the troop truck, but three had chosen to climb into pickup beds and settle themselves among their packs of trade goods.

  “I feel like we’re going on a special holiday with this trip. I know it’s all about business, but it almost feels like a vacation,” Anne remarked to Jason as they walked through the yard, checking the loads. There was little to worry about. The packing teams had placed each sack carefully and had painstakingly tied tarps across the loads to protect the precious cargo during the bumpy ride.

  “I imagine this is the way people felt on market day, even in the Middle Ages,” Jason replied, smiling. He was looking forward to this first trade as a start to a better life for everyone. The disturbing news he had received from Cameron couldn’t dampen his spirits.

  “I talked to Kevin,” he said. “We can take Adam to the hospital to get him checked by the nurses. Kevin seems to think there may be some baby vaccines left.”

  “That would be good. Childhood diseases are going to be coming back in a big way if someone doesn’t start making vaccines again soon.”

  “Modern medicine is one thing we’re going to miss more and more. It worries me as well.”

  Jason watched with amusement at the soldiers’ awkwardness with the leather-clad mountain folk as they helped them climb into the troop truck with their personal belongings. Catherine had already joined her beau, Kevin, as he directed the loading. Sarah had come out of the farmhouse and quickly made a beeline for Tommy Wilkes. She made no secret of considering him her boyfriend, and Jason knew that Tommy enthusiastically supported the idea. Both girls were happy to have their suitors around, and. the trip to Hillsboro would give them some time together without the exhausting work of the last two weeks.

  The farm convoy set out late in the morning. Catherine got to ride in the Humvee with Kevin, Tommy, and Sergeant Rodney Gibbs. Sergeant Gibbs offered her the front passenger seat, next to Kevin who was driving. He and Tommy sat in the back to keep a watchful eye out during the trip. Sarah, much to her frustration, had to ride with Jason and her mother in the truck towing the leading wagon.

  A half hour after they passed out of the mouth of the valley and into the more open land along the Pickering River, they saw a faded, rusty pickup truck, its worn paint now barely visible after decades in the sun, with a trailer hitched to it on the side of the highway next to a lonely mailbox. The pickup was not like the scattering of cars and trucks that littered the country road, burned out by the pulse and long abandoned. It looked ancient, far older than any of the others, but it still worked.

  Five grinning people were standing next to it waiting for them. They were from the two farms out here that owed a debt to the
people of the valley for stopping Big Jacks’ gang. If not for his sudden defeat, Big Jacks would have moved up the river and destroyed them. The convoy stopped, greetings were happily exchanged, the soldiers were introduced, and then the convoy pulled away with its new addition and a trailer-load of milled grain and spring potatoes.

  That night they camped in the empty parking lot of a deserted gas station off the highway. Gibbs set up lookouts for the night, one on the roof of the gas station and another at a vantage point behind the lot. The soldiers would stand watches by twos, changing every three hours. Jason was surprised to see some of the clansmen collecting their weapons and some of their packs and gathering in a cluster away from the rest of the group. He noticed Cameron and Gibbs standing and watching this development intently. Then Clayton separated from the men and walked back to Jason. Cameron came over to join them, and Clayton told both of the men that they would be setting up outpost watches of their own.

  “Better to see the enemy before he gets to the camp,” Clayton said by way of explanation. “You hear us call out or fire, you know someone is coming. You get ready.”

  “You better let us know when you’re coming back in, so we don’t shoot you,” Jason said.

  “We be coming in when it’s morning. You see us.” With that, Clayton and the men melted into the surrounding fields.

  The night passed quietly. In the morning, after some tea and dried meat, the convoy set out. They would arrive in Hillsboro by noon.

  Chapter 9

  Hillsboro was making a holiday of the trading day. The meeting area had been set up in a downtown parking lot, and a limited group of people had been invited to enjoy the spectacle. The city leaders had arranged a barbecue to provide a festive meal for everyone. They had had to divert several work parties for over a week to hunt down the wild pigs, but it would be worth it for the public relations effect. The city didn’t want the effect limited to the people who could fit into the available space set up for the trade, so all the food centers in town were offering barbecue for the citizens in honor of the special day, setting up outdoor seating on the streets outside or in adjacent parking lots and parks. Games had been arranged for the children, both on the fringe of the meeting area and at all the centers, and with the food being free—no ration cards needed to be punched—a large attendance was guaranteed.