The Work Of The Dead: A Post Apocalyptic Prepper Fiction Series (Aftermath Survival Book 1)

by Ron Foster

  Trader banks and currency exchanges did not coin money, nor did they print any "official" national currency. However, physical bullion banks set up by the traders could print bills of credit in exchange for specie or precious metal deposits. These notes would bear the issuing bank's name and entitle the bearer to the note's face value in gold or silver upon presentation to the trader approved bank. Trader bank notes were a form of representative money; they were not gold or silver, but they represented it. Several times a year the bigger as well as the lesser traders and some customers put the word out that they wanted to cash in there notes in exchange for metal. A precious cargo escort service was then retained that would be contracted to do the delivery and paper and metal exchange. Secrecy and security as to the nature of the vehicle, it’s time of arrival and it’s route taken was of course highly classified and closely guarded information but some folks were masters at trying to deceive or out guess would be robbers and existed only to perform this service. While some folks offered to guard or transport high value items as their mainstay business, others just occasionally picked up a small shipment here and there as a sideline to their regular trading.

  This book is about among other things, just that sort of delivery business and the man in back of some of it. Believe it or not the old coot even had him some business cards printed up on a surviving computer and printer he ran off his trucks 12v battery system through an inverter. Here is a slightly enlarged picture of it for you to ponder and speculate on.

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  2

  MY CHOSEN WAY IS THE HIGHWAY

  Samuel Johnson was alleged to have once said that “The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.” Dixon considered this saying sagely while eying a somewhat bedraggled man and woman who were desperately inquiring about arranging a work for food situation at the impromptu trading post they had just begun to set up not far from the local community church that they had arrived at yesterday.

  There would be absolutely, positively NO parking on church property for Dixon and his crew and this fact was made loudly apparent to everyone even though they had been kindly invited to do so by its deacon. They had all learned a hard lesson not long ago that by doing so you always gave something up or ended up giving something away. Might just be only your bargaining position that you sacrificed, because it seemed folks gathered together on mutual expectations of charity and acted different at churches, or it could end up being that your safety and security was somehow affected because it was their common ground to make up the ground rules about and enforce, etc. For Dixon it sufficed that many, many reasons existed for his band of traders to pick an alternate spot of land out close by and temporarily claim it for their own. Dixon always hoped he was wiser today than could be said about him yesterday and he had survived this long by learning from experience and not bending his camp rules.

  That newly arrived couple had probably walked for themselves a pretty long and chilly springtime mile or two in order to show up here this early in the morning. Landon had been assigned to put the word out to the crossroads and the surrounding neighborhoods to be here at this location on this appointed day, but the time prescribed on the posters was 10 -3 if you wanted to trade. Landon was their scout; they sent him up ahead like old traveling carnivals used to in order to announce their arrival at certain times of the year. It was a few weeks before official spring was coming due to this southern land and Dixon had vegetable seeds to sell as well as a few other necessary goods to trade and barter for.

  There used to be something about the South that said charm, hospitality and courtesy but you didn’t see much of that going on anymore. That couple over there looked about as rundown and starved as you could get. The idea of getting any kind of work out of them didn’t seem possible at the moment without thinking that they might fall out from the effort and exertion.

  “Hell you would have to go to all the trouble of feeding them most likely first and then have to fuel them up with enough strong black coffee to even keep them on their feet long enough to gather up firewood for the cook fire to feed them.” Dixon mused sighing while setting up an old hospital green military folding table at the back of the bus. He had seen far too much of this kind of misery and want and it always pained him immensely.

  “Y’all come on over here for a minute and listen to this proposition I got for ya. I believe that I might just have you something to do for me in exchange for some chow if you want to do a chore for it. Come stand over here with me up wind away from the smoke of that fire and chat. What I am proposing is that you can eat a bite first and then go gather me up some stump lighter from that dead pine tree over there. I got an axe and a saw to lend you for about an hour or so’s work.” Dixon stated eying the bedraggled pair and trying to gauge their strengths and merits better.

  “If it’s all the same to you mister, we would rather go ahead and get the work out of the way and done first and then rest awhile by your fire if it’s alright with you after eating. How much fat lighter wood you want us to gather up in exchange?” The man replied while the woman looked ravenous and grumbled at her mate that she was wishing they could eat first and then go do the work.

  “You all go on over there by the fire and warm up first; it’s awful nippy out here this morning. That tree stump will keep until you at least have some coffee and eat a biscuit first, you can have you a good breakfast later. Shouldn’t be too hard of work on you all, I already went over there yesterday and kicked at it a time or two and it’s rotten all the way down to the hard pine resin, ought to be a couple nice big bucketfuls of sticks to gather from it, I reckon. Now I want it split op and cut no more than 8-12 inches long, ok?” Dixon said directing them towards the designated big council fire area for trading away from the roped off private area of his camp. The number 1 rule of the camp to be observed religiously was no civilians past the ropes for security’s sake that separated the private areas from the trade areas.

  The council fire ring in the woods as an assembly area for important meetings and just general sitting about the fire has always been the original grouping of mankind.

  The traders had piled up selected sizes of wood into what was basically considered by all as an organized bonfire symbolic of having a meeting. Scouts and woodsmen have always called them council fires.

  This formed a trader’s council of sorts to parlay at and greet potential customers from, but it was also designed to act as sort of a backwoods food court for their armored traveling and trading bus. The armored bus itself acted as sort of the anchor store and security office in a mall and anybody that wanted to setup their own trading stand in the vicinity for free was obliged to do it along the periphery of the food court franchise that was known by all belonged to Dixon.

  Since there was only one large fire allowed in the center of it, that meant the trade wagon could sell meals in the center and other traders could not use it for cooking purposes without permission. The fire was laid out on top of a cross-ditch so that coals could be raked out of the main fire and a series of pots could be heated or used for cooking a distance away from the roaring council fire in its center.

  A garden hoe worked out pretty good for this sort of thing for construction and to move coals around or a fold up entrenching tool was often employed to accomplish the same task. You just made sure that your trench was built narrower than your pots.

  The bus cook who was named Snowden was adept at also using different depths of the trenches to control the heat on his pots. Coals could also be shoveled out to make warming or cooking stands away from the fire if need be.

  Often time’s coals could just be shoveled out of the main fire and two logs to contain the embers were moved closer to the trader’s tents if they had a mind to fix their own meals.

  The cooking setup in the food court varied in size according to the number of people present and what they managed to trade for or shoot for the pot. Sometimes when you were lucky you could get a whole com
munity to chip in money and goods to buy a whole cow if one could be found. That’s when Snowdoun or Cookie, as he was sometimes referred to, would let his culinary arts shine. That man was a wizard at cooking regular BBQ, but give him one of those giant beef roasts you used to see the uniformed chef carving in one of those post apocalypse fine restaurants at Sunday brunch and you would think you had died and went to heaven!

  I mean that sucker was some kind of good and people would come from miles around just to smell it cooking! The fact was that he always managed to coax and cook the meat to a rare state of tender perfection no matter how scrawny the cow was an art in and of itself and he was wildly acclaimed for doing it with a flair. What made his roast also extra special was that he always supplied and made his secret recipe of fresh mouthwatering garden raised horseradish sauce to go with it.

  Today was not the day for looking forward to such luxuries though. There weren’t enough people living around here to even think about gathering up any money for a community purchase let alone the fact that trying to find someone willing to sell a cow in these backwoods parts was most likely a foregone conclusion.

  Cattle ranchers were funny people, well the ones still left around living close to Dixon’s trade routes were anyway. See these ranchers kind of felt like they were living under a constant state of siege and that concept wasn’t very far from wrong at all. See since the grid went down you had just about everybody and their brother coming around asking for a handout. The ranchers weren’t thinking about giving away nicely what few cows they were trying to raise and most people didn’t have enough money to convince them to butcher one these days. People then came to their doors mad that they wouldn’t share; everyone seemed to be starving and demanding which soon turned into everyone trying to rustle their steers or burn their farmhouses down for sometime now. Made them kind of ornery and a bit trigger happy to say the least. There is even a cattle mafia I have heard demanding protection money and extorting meat for services operating in some areas.

  A lot of the big farms lost just about all their livestock to the executive emergency powers acts and other federal related confiscations and all the smaller farms were busy hiding livestock and arming kin folk to guard the small herds they had left just to eat on and survive. So finding an extra beast to bring to a feast was troublesome, to say the least.

  When the dollar doesn’t mean anything any more, there is not a hell of a whole lot of incentive for cattleman to try to raise more cows than they need for their own use or for them to take a risk trying or saying that they had some to sell some cows off in regular trade. That’s where Dixon came in, he had access to something pretty much as rare as a cow these days and that was a good old small batch moonshine still. Pure distilled unadulterated white lightening. Hell it was so high proof you could just about run your car on it. Dixon likes to say it’ll make yer liver quiver and yer bladder splatter.

  He also had himself an almost Barnum and Bailey knack for marketing. Talking folks into selling cows and having barbecues was a whole lot easier if there was some liquor involved and particularly so if you handed out free samples first before negotiating or closing the deal. That seemed to loosen up tongues and pocket books quicker and made him some good extra cash once in awhile.

  Dixon had found himself an old project bus somebody had been converting and had parked it on his property to get around to fixing up one day as a food truck before the poo hit the fan. He talked his mechanic neighbor into helping him get parts and try and get it running on occasional weekends by giving him a little extra money and lots of sudsy libations.

  He also paid his neighbor who was a welder into sort of armor plating the thing with scrap sheet iron and help get it running again off and on before the crap had hit the fan as well as after so it was natural they finally had seen the thing get done to fruition one day. Thus the “battle bus” as they jokingly referred to it was born.

  It was an ugly redneck built and junkyard engineered thing but it was Dixon’s and Dixon and crew loved the old rust bucket. It had started its life out in 1946 as a prison bus but except for the chassis everything else was pretty much replaced with junk yard scrounged or modern replaced parts and engine. Wilbur was the one that had hand painted the sign on the side of it and misspelled “Emporium”. He had asked Dixon what one was and Dixon had replied “that’s a store that sells rare things.” So Wilbur had gotten confused on the spelling and made it a RARE-IUM. Dixon kind of liked that name once he got used to it and besides there was no changing it anyway once it got painted on with surplus navy marine paint.

  While traveling through dangerous regions and protecting ones butt there are few better options to provide security and comfort than armoring a bus. An armored bus or van can easily withstand an ambush or attack, that and it turned out cool as hell.

  At first that was its primary function, a mobile fortress used to go out looking for food and fuel or to be employed as an escape vehicle should a large roving gang start taking over their area. But after a bit of a run in with an out of town cattle landowner, it became more like a warlike diplomatic emissary of sorts in the guise of a roach coach restaurant.

  You see there was a fellah from the city that had leased acreage not far from Dixon’s house on one of the dirt highway access roads he used frequently that had about fifty head of cattle grazing on it. Now it wasn’t not long at all after the power grid went down that a lot of folks remembered those cows being over there and they began to wonder about their disposition and such as something for them to eat and most had in mind to eat for free. Like I said the owner lived out of town and the guy that lived on the acreage next to the place at first said he didn’t have anything to do with them cows so it wasn’t long until someone shot a cow and then by bad luck or fate the owner turned up about the same time.

  The owner’s first inclination was to protect his property of course and take a shot at someone to end what he considered thievery. Well, it all ended up that a catastrophe was barely averted by everyone because he missed his shot and then eventually both sides had the good sense to stand down this time, otherwise both sides would of probably wound up dead.

  Well that cow herd’s owner basically made that road from then on pretty much impassable while trying to guard his cows and we in the neighborhood sort of felt like he should have been thinking of sharing or selling to us rather than with the city folks or whatever it was he had plans to do with all that meat, so folks tried talking and reasoning with him some more.

  He didn’t see it quite that way but eventually he came around to our way of thinking when we showed up in that damn bus offering to pay for a BBQ. The owner attended the BBQ and I guess he got the message to help thy neighbor before thy armored bus owning neighbors came visiting again and helped themselves to the lightly guarded bounty and so an uneasy alliance was formed. Didn’t last but a month or so though and all those cows just up and disappeared one night. Guess the owner had enough of us foxes guarding his chicken house and he moved them off somewhere safer. Anyway, from then on Dixon decided that if he got himself a few beef steaks once in awhile playing peace keeper and livestock guard why not try to do it again and thus a business was born of sorts.

  Starting the business out was the biggest problem because nobody had any cash and if you did have extra cash there wasn’t anywhere to spend it anyway but Dixon was resourceful. He had vegetable seeds prepped and the ability to get more by saving seeds so he had himself a tangible asset he thought he could maybe trade. People listened pretty well when you said that you had seeds or plants for trade these days. Being a vegetable and medicinal herb seeds man was a pretty good gig to be into these days to make a buck, especially if you were the only one around in that profession that most people knew. Your herbal advice and seed commodity for sale was invaluable so your stay and prestige in the community was pretty much assured if you could avoid the petty jealousies and survival politics.

  Armored buses weigh considerably more than ordinary buses
. As a result, they use up more fuel, are prone to mechanical breakdowns, have very high maintenance costs and wear out faster. Taking on and sort of hiring his mechanically inclined neighbors as partners in an adventure was the logical thing to do. One or both of them were usually riding along acting sort of like a ships engineer to maintain the sometimes temperamental motor when Dixon had a bus run scheduled. Wilbur had stayed home to tend to his family and farm this trip so Brock was filling in as both driver and mechanic on this trip.

  Brock and Snowdoun were hanging out next to a big coffee pot by the council fire and Dixon shouted over to them to feed the strangers and then show them where the tools were at. The newcomers Bruce and Tracy walked over and introduced themselves before gratefully accepting a Styrofoam cup of steaming coffee and a trail biscuit to munch on.

  “Sorry I don’t have a hot biscuit for you ready just yet. All we got is these day old cold soda biscuits that I made yesterday to chew on until these others get done.” Snowdoun declared indicating the two Dutch ovens placed directly on the coals.

  “These are great as is! Why I cant even remember the last time I even had a biscuit period!” Bruce declared and Tracy agreed mumbling with a mouth full of crumbs.

  “Cookie here missed his calling; he would have been a great chuck wagon cook back in the day ‘cause I swear he can make a biscuit out of anything.” Brock said as Snowdoun beamed and sparkled at the praise.

  Dixon after seeing everyone would be occupied for awhile knocked on the backdoor of the bus and Emma let him inside.