Albert sipped a rewarmed cup of coffee and listened, detached from the realities being described, not because he didn't care but because he had expected it for a long time. He wasn't surprised, except maybe by the accuracy of his own forecast. He had long ago isolated himself from regular, daily life so he was facing no sudden estrangement from society or anything else. What he hadn't considered was how he would react to the intruders that would inevitably end up at his door. Even people he knew could lose their inhibitions pretty quickly in the face of starvation or freezing to death. He would be particularly vulnerable, sitting up here like the king of the mountain with a whirring generator and a freezer full of beef. How long would it last if he started giving it away? What would he do with those who wouldn't take no for an answer? Could he say no?
He took his coffee into the living room and sat down at his computer. Beside it was another monitor divided into six squares, each of which received CCTV feed from a separate camera. Bolivia was moving around in the barn, restless and waiting for grain and to be milked. The goats were quietly chewing, lost in thought. The driveway was blown over, but there were no fresh tracks. The north field showed no movement. He surveyed the house 360 degrees and saw a large buck standing under a pine. He watched several of the dogs try to sneak up on it but it was gone before he could blink. The two cameras hidden in the woods were blurry from snow, but there were no human-like forms caught between the dark, bare trees.
The wind was still harsh, but it had tired a bit overnight. Ludwig loved the snow and snuffled through it at a full gallop, stopping occasionally to point and twitch his ears. He sat down and stared at the north slope. Albert stopped too and tried to see what had caught the dog's attention but it was no use. He saw nothing, heard nothing except the light tune of the wind. A chow mongrel appeared around the barn and strutted over, wagging. She was young and foolish and walked right up to Ludwig and sniffed at him. He turned on her with a ferocious snarl and pinned her to the ground. She stopped struggling as he checked her out and got up very slowly after he released her. She was golden brown and had a big mane like a lion. When she barked he saw the almost completely blue tongue.
"Don't mess with that boy," Albert said, roughing her neck. She jumped up and he rubbed her face. Ludwig watched this for a moment and then turned back to watching the distant forest. He had done the same thing when they had stopped to investigate the abandoned rig on Highway 61. He could hear something. Albert felt anxious for a moment, afraid the big dog might take off to investigate, overconfident and too curious.
"C'mon," he said and they all went into the barn.
Bolivia bellowed immediately and dunked her head in the grain trough.
"Sorry," he said. "Been drinking again."
He settled under the cow and went through the routine and soon the thick, foaming milk was hissing into the pail.
"Things are not looking too good," he told the old nanny. She stared at him, her slit eyes watching for the slightest indication that she should fly. In spite of their years together, she was still a bit reserved and took a few seconds to admit him to her space.
"They're blowing shit up," he said.
She belched and looked away, as if to say, 'Why tell me? What can I do about it?'
He checked the water lines and satisfied they were holding, took the pail of fresh milk back to the house. He let it sit in the mudroom while he made another pot of coffee and listened to the radio some more.
A Homeland Security official was answering a reporter's question when an explosion could be heard in the distance. There was some confusion and a marbling of different conversations made it impossible to tell what was happening.
There was more confusion and the live feed was cut and some desk jockey in Washington or New York came back on the air trying to fill the dead space with the usual meaningless babble.
Albert went back to the computer and brought up CNN.
"We're getting the first reports right here that a bomb has detonated near the Washington Monument. It was…it was…a…car bomb…a taxi exploded…"
The outside camera broke in on the announcer and showed a plume of smoke rising near the great obelisk. Sirens and emergency vehicles were racing towards the scene.
Albert surfed the usual anti-government political sites and found several of them shut down. They didn't seriously believe shutting down public sites was going to interfere with communications among militia groups or terror cells! Or did they? Who knew what they believed anymore. For government employees it's mostly just a big shuffle to see how far up the food chain you can get. The job is just the vehicle, the public just an unfortunate nuisance. Slide them over to someone else, misdirect them, lose them in the maze. They'll eventually give up or die but at least they will be someone else's problem.
The Christmas decorations around Washington, primly trimmed to reflect only generic seasonal cheer and good wishes twinkled through the rising column of smoke around the monument.
Then they switched from that back to a news conference with Homeland Security.
A spokesman looking a little strained tilted his head to hear a question and then there was, strangely, a moment of silence.
"Uh…yes…we believe this is a domestic issue…at this time there is no indication of any foreign involvement…we have been monitoring various groups…”
And then he stopped because he realized he had gone too far and the questions rained down on him like incoming.
"You mean the government had advance warning? What did the government know and when did they know it…"
Albert checked his email and found a FedEx notice that a package would be delivered this afternoon. It was replacement parts for his backhoe. You bet. He frowned and deleted everything else. He heard the generator cough.
The screen blinked but a UPS kept the system running while the generator wound up. The lights dimmed momentarily and blinked but did not go out. He heard the refrigerators and the freezer choke and then resume purring. He walked to the window and saw the black feather of smoke coming out of the generator shed chimney. He turned his computer off and went back to the kitchen. He turned the volume on the radio up high and started working on Bolivia's three gallon offering.
Lately he had been bringing most of the raw milk to an Amish farmer on the next County Road with triplet newborn calves whose delivery had killed their mother. Jacob Hershberger gratefully accepted the donation, which allowed him to bottle feed the baby bulls. His only other choices would have been to butcher them for veal or hope someone had spare milk in the Amish community and there was nothing available at the moment. Albert had done some business with him over the years, mostly buying rough-cut poplar and pine boards and the first year he bought a side from him. He offered the milk and Jacob nodded silently and when he brought the first gallons, the farmer presented him with the going rate for raw milk of one dollar per. Albert thought about it for a moment and then took the money. It was the right thing to do for all concerned. Albert had met most of the Amish on the Line and they knew him by sight if not by name. There were Beacheys and Petershwims and Yoders and Lambrights and Troyers. He knew most of the names from the conversations around the mill when he bought lumber or ran into them at the Farm Co-op.
Albert turned the rest of the milk into cheese and drank some. He gave Ludwig a bowl of milk in the mornings. But he had kept milking Bolivia after selling off her calf without really understanding how much milk would flow. He collected five to six gallons a day between the morning and evening milkings and had decided he would stop milking her in the evenings after the New Year. Now he wasn't so sure. Maybe people could use the milk. It was an odd idea for Albert. He was not ungenerous or cruel; he just didn't know who he was thinking about. He didn't socialize with Provost, or anyone else for that matter. Maybe he could tell the mayor he had all this milk and people could come and get it.
He finished filtering the milk, which was still slightly warm and poured it into a large kettle. The Gem cook stove had burned d
own to a grey bed of ash studded with a few rubies so he loaded it with the split maple and oak and walnut neatly piled up beside it and adjusted the draft. Even in summer, he used this stove for cooking. He didn't own a microwave or a coffee maker or any other electric appliances except for a computer and several radios. He stood by the kettle with a thermometer and watched it until the temperature climbed to ninety degrees and he moved it in it's water bath off the burner. There it would simmer for half an hour.
He had pulled the Gem out of a collapsed barn he took apart for the lumber. It was a Victorian beauty he had carefully brought back to life over one winter. He had relined the firebox, which had rotted out and brought the enamel back to a shine. When he lit it up the first time he was amazed at the volume of heat that spread through the house. In the summer he mostly cooked outside but the stove was warm probably three hundred and fifty days a year.
Every week he made five or six pounds of cheddar cheese, consuming less than half that over the same period. He had almost fifty wheels curing in a cold room. Sometimes he wanted to give the cheese away to people, but he couldn't figure out a way to do it and he was afraid they might not appreciate it and he would feel like a fool. Harlan had taken some occasionally but he did not like cheese very much. Albert had stacks of root crops in the cellar as well. There were carrots and potatoes buried in dirt on shelves. He had some turnips and beets. There were bags of dried apples and pears collected from the feral trees around his fields and there were crab apples in syrup and jars of tomatoes and beans and peppers. In November he had killed a pair of does, one with a bow and later another with his Remington.
The venison had been cooled and hung and brined and then trimmed and frozen. Along with the quarter he had butchered, Albert had enough meat for several years. His food supply was starting to runneth over.
He added the mesophyllic culture and checked the temperature and then let it sit for a while longer.
The radio broke in: "Air Transportation Safety officials have confirmed that A UPS 747 that had been cleared for landing at Louisville's Standiford Field Airport crashed a few moments ago after an explosion blew out part of the cargo bay. The crew of four are all believed to have died in the crash. There are also unconfirmed accounts that a FedEx airliner en route from Paris has reported an explosion in the cargo bay and that aircraft is attempting to land in the Atlantic Ocean. Navy and merchants ships are rushing to the last reported position. We go now to-"
Then the feed died.
Of course. They don't check every piece of cargo. What would it take to blow a hole in the side of a plane at forty thousand feet? Albert considered the packaging and the possibility of the bomb being surrounded entirely by other cargo. Okay. So, twenty five pounds of ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel pressed into a sealed, stainless steel canister, outfitted with either a timer or a pressure switch would probably break the plane wide open. Smuggle the bomb into someone else's cargo or maybe have someone in place to put it on the pallet after any scanning. If the dogs come through, they won't smell it anyway and it can't be detected by typical bomb sniffers. Besides, cargo planes don't quite get the attention of passenger liners. It's one thing to blow up a crew and a million dollars worth of junk and another to kill four hundred people. They are hitting all the soft transportation targets. They are going to shut down the economy, the food supply, basic communications. They won't even bother with the high value targets where all the soldiers and tanks and secret agents are going to be waiting. They are going to shut the country down and then watch the government destroy itself. If it's spread out enough among enough cells, two or three-man cells, they could operate for days, even weeks before anyone gets caught. And when they do, so what? These guys have stayed hidden this long so they are smart enough to make it pretty difficult to find anyone who knows the entire picture.
"I'll bet they've got people blowing up local shit just about everywhere," he said to Ludwig. The dog's eyes moved and he seemed to understand.
Albert poured the rennet into the mix and then left the pot again. It had to sit for a while, now, undisturbed until it turned to curd. He would take the curd out and cut it up and hang it in a cheesecloth sack for a while and then put it in the cylindrical cheese press. He'd adjust the pressure over time and then leave it sit for a few months.
Panic had set in so quickly after those first explosions yesterday morning it was hard to fathom. The stores in the big cities must have emptied in hours - minutes! Then the president hightailing it and the guard showing up on the streets like that kind of cinched the deal for your average urbanite. People realized there was nothing coming in with the trucks shut down. They'd be stuck in those apartment buildings with no food and pretty soon no water-
"Shit," he exclaimed. "They're not going to go after the water supply; they're going to blow the sewage plants!"
They'll be under guarded and probably written off as an unlikely target. They will blow the pumps in the secondary phase of the treatment process and the entire system will back up within...minutes, hours at the most. They'll have to shut off the incoming to prevent all that shit from spilling out into the world and the sewers will back up. Every building in the city will have shit running through it within a couple of hours! They don't have to poison the water supply and build dirty bombs and take over the computers. It's the damn bodily functions that are the weak point in this blind paranoid giant with its head stuck up a beehive. Shit. That's what it's going to come down to. Shit.
"Shit, shit, shit," he repeated.
Now you've got a city like Chicago buried under a foot of snow, twenty below zero and lake winds coming in at thirty knots. There's no food, there's no water and shit is pouring out of the windows of the Trump Tower and running in rivulets down Wabash Avenue.
He picked up the telephone on a chance but there was no dial tone. His computer was still operating. If the NET was still functioning, he could send a message to the FBI or Homeland Security. He could tell them about his theories on the sewage treatment plants. He could explain that he had long ago predicted that someone would target the trucking industry and probably do it in the middle of the winter, too, in order to exacerbate the effects. He could-
"Jesus," he breathed. "Jesus H. Christ. Are you really that stupid?"
The lights blinked again and his generator shut down and allowed the grid to take up where it left off. The radio came back on the severe weather warning klaxon blaring.
"This is an emergency broadcast. Do not adjust your radio or television set. Public broadcasting has been temporarily suspended as a result of the current emergency.
"All citizens are urged to stay in their homes. A state of Martial Law has been declared by President Obama. This means that National Guard troops and Regular Army have been given temporary authority to detain and arrest anyone interfering with public order.
"A dusk to dawn curfew has been ordered for all of the United States mainland, excepting Alaska, effective at sundown today. Only emergency workers and those specifically authorized may be outside of their homes or safe haven after sundown. All others are subject to immediate arrest. You can be held for up to ninety days without charges by statutory authorities. No one except those designated by the authorities may carry a firearm or weapon of any sort in public. All state legislation permitting the carrying and transportation of firearms has been temporarily suspended..."
And on and on it went. It was just as the tin foil hats had always predicted. They would take the first chance they got to grab guns and start locking people up in their homes. Then the house-to-house searches would begin. By now they had probably arrested everyone on their threat lists and were frying their collective nuts in a FEMA camp someplace outside of a major city near a railroad track. Take a lesson from the Germans: The best way to get rid of bodies is to burn them. Scatter the ashes and then say, 'Joe Who?'
The announcement ended and the station was returned to NPR. The mouthpiece was flustered, obviously reacting to something and
trying to fill the air space at the same time, her sage contralto humming through a recap of the government's announcement before she broke for a regular news report. It was eleven a.m.
"Transportation Safety officials have confirmed that seven cargo planes belonging to FedEx and UPS have crashed after explosions occurred in their cargo bays. So far there have been no survivors among the various crews. The federal government has grounded all air transport in a reprise of the panic of nine eleven, more than thirteen years ago now, that signaled the beginning of the war on terror that has come back to the United States today.
"There are also reports filtering in from around the country of packages exploding in parcel delivery trucks and postal sorting centers. All postal communication has been shut down and numerous vans have been abandoned by drivers on city streets and loading docks throughout the country..."
Albert turned the radio off and sat at his kitchen table and watched the steam rising slowly from his cheese kettle. He had considered driving into town with some of his stores, maybe turn it over to someone in charge of food distribution. Provost was no different from anywhere else in the country. Trucks replenished the grocery shelves three or four times a week and after the last two days, he doubted if there was a loaf of bread left anywhere. The balance of the county was farmland, but there were very few farmers left. New houses had been built on hundreds of three- and four-acre lots, but those people shopped for a living too. Most of them didn't even grow a garden and hardly anyone put up preserves or kept a root cellar. They might have a week's supply of canned soup and a few boxes of macaroni and cheese and three dozen Pop Tarts, but they would be stranded just like the rest, unable to do anything for themselves after only a few days. Many would have a generator to run their lights, but couldn't pump water and probably not enough fuel to last more than a day or two. If the propane truck didn't get through, they'd be without heat inside of a month. They'd have enough bundled wood to light a fire for effect once in a while and no more.
As Wind in Dry Grass Page 5
