It was difficult hiding the pile from Sara. When she asked him about it Harley said that he was working on another handy project. That’s what she called all his construction projects around the house. She viewed them as a time occupier and a hobby, something akin to model ship building; nice to look at when finished but essentially useless.
He put the book down and searched for one more thing in the trunk. He found it at the bottom, wrapped in an old tea shirt. He folded the shirt open and the gold crucifix gleamed up at him. It was his grandfather’s and it’s been hidden in the box for thirty years. He felt that now was as good a time as any to take it out, even though being seen with it meant being brought up on sanctions. Harley wasn’t sure if there was anything out there to believe in, but if there was, he decided he was going to need all the help he could get tonight.
He placed the crucifix around his neck, along with the medal of valor and went into the kitchen. He glanced up at the wall clock. He just had enough time to finish this last task before he needed to get to work.
He pulled a piece of paper and pen from a drawer and sat down at the table. He smoothed out the paper in front of him and at the top of the page wrote, “The last will and testament of Harley Jacobs”.
Chapter 5
The pickup bounced along the unpaved road, hitting every rock and crater. Ancil had driven this route hundreds of times, but this was the first time he decided to bring Harley with him. They had been driving for an hour and a half with no stopping. Harley asked several times if they could stop, but Ancil told him they had to keep going on because there wasn’t anywhere to stop for miles.
He understood his grandson wanting to get out. It was stifling in the pickup with no air conditioning and the breeze coming in from outside was stale and humid. A twangy country song about a cheating woman was playing on the radio. The reception was bad this far out of town and most of the lyrics were buried under static. The whole situation was one that couldn’t have been pleasant for a nine year old.
“Where are we going?” Harley asked.
“We’re going to visit some people. Good friends of mine. I’d like you to meet them”
“What are we going to do?”
“Nothing much, just talk. I haven’t seen them in a while. It’d be nice to catch up.” Ancil slowed the pickup down and turned right onto what looked like an abandoned road leading nowhere. They were headed into the woods, down a narrow path.
“Why didn’t you bring Dad and Mom with us?”
“They don’t know the Delany’s.”
“Neither do I”, Harley said, with a touch of attitude.
Ancil sighed and turned off the radio. “The reason they’re not here is because this meeting isn’t for them”.
“What do you mean? What meeting?”
“Technically, I shouldn’t even call it a meeting,” Ancil said, “that would insinuate a group of people getting together to plan something out. This is more like an information discussion between likeminded individuals with a common purpose and I’m afraid it’s not the type of get together that would be welcomed by your parents. I can only imagine what they would say if they knew I was taking you to this thing.”
The trip did feel like they were hiding something when Ancil suggested he take Harley to see the sand flats on the edge of town. He said he used to play in those flats when he was a kid and catch lizards. He wanted Harley to see the flats first hand before it was built over and developed into shopping malls.
“What kind of purpose?” Harley asked.
“Well, that’s a little complicated to get into right now. It has to do with what we discussed the other day in the backyard”.
“You mean about the committee people?” Harley asked.
“Yes.”
“You want to stop them?”
Ancil didn’t respond right away. He starred ahead for a long while thinking over the best way to approach this subject with Harley. He didn’t want to expose him to too much, but at the same time he felt that he was old enough to know what was going on and why they were driving to the meeting in the first place.
“We’re getting together today with a few people who feel just as strongly about preserving our way of life as I do. A lot has changed in the world since before you were born; politically and geographically. The war in the Mid-East created repercussions not only in our government but throughout the world as well. Nations have fallen; many others are on the brink.
“The European financial market has collapsed, throwing them into a state of economic depression not seen since the Second World War. All that global instability has led to fear and panic in our own government. That fear has allowed certain people to infiltrate high sectors of the government and manipulate things in their favor. And what’s good for the few is never good for the many.”
“But how can the government be against its own people? Aren’t they supposed to help and protect us?” Harley asked.
“Governments are made up of people, Harley, and people are corrupted very easily. It’s happened all throughout history. Give someone a platform to speak to an audience and people will listen, feeding the fervor. It’s why dictatorships rise to power so easy in economically ravaged countries where the people have nowhere better to turn. They cling to the first person who can give them hope, no matter how bad it will be for them.
“We’ve been able to avoid that scenario for the past 250 years, but I don’t know how long that can last for, not with things the way they are”.
Ancil turned left onto another path and a house could be seen in the distance. The house was small and looked like something out of one of Harley’s history books.
“This is it,” Ancil said as he pulled up in front of the house. Three other cars were parked in the dirt driveway. He put the car in park and they stepped out.
It was cooler under the shade of the trees as they made their way to the front door. Ancil knocked twice and a voice answered from behind it.
“Password,” the man said. The voice was low, almost a whisper.
“Just open the damn door, Lee,” Ancil said.
The door bolt unlocked and it opened to reveal a middle aged man in glasses and a red tank top. He was laughing as he let Ancil in.
“Can’t be too sure now a days,” Lee Delany said, “lotta spies running around these woods.” He took a look at Harley. “Who’s this?”
“This is my grandson, Harley,” Ancil replied. “I wanted him to see what was going on here today.”
“I didn’t realize we were recruiting kids.” Lee said. His expression revealed he was not happy about Harley’s presence.
“He’s old enough to know what’s happening. And besides, we can use younger people.”
“I don’t want anything of what we talk about here to get out.”
“You don’t have to worry about that, he understands. He’s a smart kid.”
“And what about his parents?”
“They don’t know where he is. They just think I took him out for the day to show him how to catch lizards. We’re fine.”
Lee studied Harley over again, rubbing the stubble on his chin. “Alright, go grab yourself a soda from the fridge kid and have a seat.”
Ancil nudged Harley over to the kitchen where Ruth Delany was speaking with another woman. Ruth smiled at Harley and showed him over to the refrigerator, handing him a Coca-Cola.
There were a few others in the house, all about the same age. They nodded at Ancil as he entered.
“This is all who came?” Ancil said to Lee as they moved into the living room. An air conditioner rattled in one of the windows. It was powered by a generator on the side of the house. The whole house was powered by generators. It was off the grid.
Lee took out a self-rolled cigarette and lit it. “What do you expect? No one wants get involved. No one wants to get their hands dirty.”
“This isn’t enough. They’ve got thousands of signatures already, political backing, who knows how many judges in thei
r pocket.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Lee shot back. “We have no means of communication. We can’t get the word out. They’ve got people checking the mail and the phone lines. We can only pass word through the church and that’s not yielding too many prospects right now.”
“What about the libraries?” Ancil asked.
Lee snorted a laugh at Ancil and took a long drag off his cigarette. “Nobody’s at the library anymore. They’re dead.”
Ancil surveyed the room: only two other couples were at the meeting. That made eight people, and that was if you counted Harley. Barely enough to have a baseball team let alone a militia.
“Let’s just get started then,” Ancil said.
Ruth went over to the couch and Harley sat next to her, his can of coke in his hands.
Ancil continued, “Okay everyone, thank you for coming over today and for the Delany’s for hosting this get together. I just want to-“
“What are we doing here, Jacobs?” Earl Henderson called out. He was there with his wife Theresa. Earl was a farmer who owned twenty acres of land that he was currently struggling to keep up with since the government subsidy program was abolished. He would end up losing the farm within the year.
“We’re here to talk about what I believe is a concern for everyone in this room,” Ancil said. “You’re all aware of it, we’ve been seeing it every day for a long time now and it’s only going to get worse. I’m talking about the Ellis project.”
“You mean the Elysia project”, Lee broke in. “I heard that’s what they’re calling it now. Sounds like some foreign bullshit to me.”
“What’s to talk about?” Earl said. “They got the support of the local authorities. I see them knocking down houses and building the tracks for that damn thing already.”
“Yeah, so do I. Just the other day I saw em` knock down Eddie Fletcher’s place, the one over by the river,” Allen Keyes said. “That place was in his family for eighty years and they just took it right out from under him. Eminent domain or some nonsense.”
Allen was a mechanic whose business was hanging on by a thread. He couldn’t keep up with the new electric cars that rarely broke down. The younger kids didn’t want to buy gas cars anymore and his clientele was dying out along with his business. “What’s preventing them from doing it to anyone of us?” he said.
“That’s why we wanted you here today, to figure out a way to stop them,” Ancil said.
“There’s no stopping them. It’s just a matter of time,” Earl said. He sat back on the couch with his arms folded and his legs spread out in front of him.
“So you’d rather just do nothing and count off the days till they come for your home? Or your kids. And you know it’s going to happen,” Ancil said to him. Earl didn’t have a response to that. He just sat there quiet, his eyes focused on the floor.
“They feed off the young. They manipulate them to follow their cause.” Ancil looked at Harley as he said this. Harley was looking up at his grandfather intently, never taking his eyes away. Whatever part of Ancil that regretted taking him here today was gone. The boy needed to hear this.
“I hate to break it to you,” Lee broke in, “but this is all going to happen within the next year probably, not years. We wake up each morning and hear more and more trucks in the woods, clearing trees. Soon this will be all gone. All sacrificed for their project”.
“So, what’s your plan?” Allen said.
“First of all we can’t get anything done without numbers,” Ancil said. “We need people to get involved. We need you to spread the word, okay. We need people willing to take the chances. We need people who are going to stand out in front of their homes and block them from setting foot on our property.”
“Sure, and probably get killed doing it,” Allen replied back. His wife, Charlotte, took his hand.
“Honey,” she said as she gestured over to Harley on the couch. Allen ignored her.
“No, it seems like you invited us here today to try and recruit us all to die in your crusade,” he said, eyeing Ancil and Lee as he did. “Well, I have a family, I have kids and I’m not going to put their lives in jeopardy to fight some war you have no chance of winning anyway. Come on Charlotte, let’s go.”
He stood up and made his way to the door. Ancil called out to him. “If you walk out that door, you can consider yourself one of them.”
Allen stopped and turned to face Ancil. “What’re you saying?”
“I’m saying no matter how much you try, you can’t turn your back on this thing. You can leave now, bury your head in the sand and nothing may happen to you. But what are you going to do when they knock on your door, or maybe they won’t even knock. Maybe they just come in the middle of the night and force themselves in, dragging your family out, kicking and screaming. What will you do then?” Allen stood silent in the doorway. His hand slid off the doorknob just as all the energy he had from a moment before seemed to slide off him.
Ancil continued, “You think if you play ball they’ll leave you alone? The fact is Al, we have nothing they want. They only want to get rid of everything we built and stand for. You want to help your family, preserve your legacy and your children’s future? This is how you do it. Now’s the time to choose which side you’re going to be on.”
Allen looked back over to his wife, who was still over by the couch. She held her hand out to him and pleaded with her eyes for him to accept it. To accept them. He took her hand and sat back down. He looked up at Ancil and said, “We’re going to need weapons.”
“Weapons we have,” Lee said.
“I never fired a gun in my life,” Theresa said.
“It’s nothing to be afraid of,” Ruth assured her. “I was nervous at first too, but after Lee showed me, I got the hang of it.”
Ancil spoke to Earl and Allen, “Do any of you have military training?”
“Four tours in Iran,” Earl said with pride. Ancil looked at Allen. “Four F”, he said, “but I used to go hunting with my father every weekend.”
“That’s fine,” Ancil said. “Lee and Ruth will show Theresa and Charlotte and anyone else who needs it.
“What’s to train?” Earl said. “You just point it at what you want to die and then pull the trigger.”
“Do you have to be so graphic about it?” his wife asked.
“Graphic? Honey, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen a gun that didn’t fire when you pulled the trigger. And if someone happened to be in front of that trigger when it’s pulled, you’re damn sure that someone better go down or I’ll want me money back.” This garnered a slight chuckle from everyone except Theresa.
“What about him?” Allen asked, gesturing towards Harley.
“He’ll learn like everyone else,” Ancil said. “He’s a part of this now, unless he doesn’t want to be. If that’s the case then he’ll have to decide now.”
They all looked at Harley, waiting for a response. He appeared more like a child than ever with all those eyes on him. Harley looked to his grandfather for guidance, but only received steel eyes in return. He had to make this decision himself.
“I want to stay,” Harley said. His voice was barely able above a whisper as he tried to amass the courage to sound determined.
A paper thin smile etched itself on Ancil’s face. “Good. Now all that is needed is-“
A heavy knock at the door stopped Ancil in mid-sentence. Every head in the room snapped to the doorway as another loud knock pounded on it.
“Open up! This is the county Sheriff,” a booming voice yelled from behind the door. “Open the door immediately or we will open it for you.”
Chapter 6
Maxon waited in the office of the Director of Wrecking with the crew docket in his hand. When he accepted his docket and looked over the crew list for the night, he regretted it immediately. The computer had put Bruce Lennox on his crew and Maxon knew that was going to be a problem.
Bruce was the nephew of the Chief of Upgrades and
Structural Advancement and that proved to be his only needed qualification to be placed in the wrecking department. He served under Maxon on a few other wrecks that year and they all ended with Bruce attempting to hijack the job and run at it solo. He was arrogant, consistently disobeyed protocol and a danger to others on the crew. Maxon needed him off that night’s wreck.
The door slid open and the director walked in and sat behind the desk. When he sat the chair immediately started to massage his neck. He groaned with pleasure and closed his eyes. Maxon watched him, unsure of what to do. He was about to speak when the director opened one eye.
“And why is it I find you in my office for the second time tonight?” he said.
“Well, director Hayes, it’s about tonight’s wreck,” Maxon said.
“What about it?” he said. “You have your protocol, don’t you”?
Donovan Hayes was an impatient man who didn’t respond well to small talk or non-essential conversation. He expected that if you had your orders there was nothing else to talk about.
“I have Lennox on my crew tonight. I don’t think that’s a wise choice given his past behavior and the nature of tonight’s wreck,” Maxon said.
Donovan sat up in his chair and the massaging stopped. “The crew lists are spit out by the central computer. We have no control over who gets picked or not.”
“I realize that, but I feel in this case we really must make a correction.”
“A correction?” Donovan asked as he eyed Maxon with a suspicious look. “You’re questioning the system?”
“No sir, I’m just asking if a request can be put in and a new list be created.”
“Max, these lists are generated by very sophisticated algorithms that neither of us understands. It knows what is needed on any given day for any given job. If we go about messing with its X’s and O’s we can cause the entire system to malfunction. Then where would we be?”
Maxon didn’t give an answer, not sure about what to say.
The Midnight Stand (The Elysia Saga Book 1) Page 3
