Fortress Farm Trilogy: Volumes 1, 2 & 3 (Fortress Farm Series)

by G. R. Carter

  Finally, Mayor Rosenberg was half-pulled, half-carried forward to the wall. Colonel Walsh looked in the Mayor’s hollow eyes. No understanding of what was happening. He held no pity for her. She murdered someone under his command, and this was justice.

  Walsh pulled his .45 and announced, “I find you guilty of capital murder, and you are condemned to death.” The weapon cracked and the Mayor fell to the ground, a single entry and exit wound through each temple.

  Before the echo stopped, Walsh shouted: “Citizens! You have seen justice done on your behalf. Please return home and prepare your families for a difficult time. We will do what we can to help, but please remember there are few of us and many of you. We have removed some bandits who wanted to cheat you, but you are still responsible for helping yourselves. Please make your way to your nearest food distribution center, where you will be given more information. Thank you for your cooperation,” Walsh concluded.

  Walsh pivoted on one heel, striding to his command Humvee. As he climbed into the passenger seat, Walsh looked over at his personal bodyguard and driver and muttered: “At least the Afghans had the guts to shout something about God before we put them down. I’ve never seen such a passive response to facing death.”

  *****

  The tires of Colonel Walsh’s command Humvee whirred down the brick streets leading to Illinois University’s campus. Under the shade of hundred-year-old trees he could already see families headed out of their homes and towards food distribution centers. No one seemed in a panic yet; just moms and dads trying to herd their children, getting them to walk quickly without running off. These must have been the go-getters who left the courthouse early, or maybe the civilians too stubborn to heed Walsh's summons.

  Pulling up to the Student Union, Walsh was pleased to see the campus courtyard filling up in front of the stage set up outside the front entrance. The beautiful park-like setting stood shaded by oaks and maples planted generations ago. Wide sidewalks criss-crossed the grassy areas where college students played and sunned themselves in happier times.

  Might have to dig those concrete sidewalks out. This area would be perfect for secure gardens and could be easily secured by filling in the passages between those massive brick buildings that make up the edges of the campus quad, Walsh thought.

  The provost was finishing up the final part of her speech as Walsh's driver pulled up about fifty yards away. The engine shut off and he tried to get a gauge of the mood of the crowd. As expected, several were shouting and pumping their fists in defiance, but an equal number seemed to be listening intently to the message. Those will be my first recruits. As the provost gave her final instructions, the gathered students clumped into two distinct groups. The group that seemed most interested in what the administration offered headed towards the young lieutenant that Walsh put in charge of the campus food storage.

  The other group seethed like a mad bull looking for something to charge. As a precaution, Walsh had positioned snipers in upper-story windows in buildings around the courtyard before the assembly started. Orders to selectively remove any ringleaders causing too much trouble turned out not to be necessary, much to his relief. The group of malcontents appeared satisfied to blow off some steam by strutting and yelling. After sensing no will for a riot, a few at the back of that crowd began urging others to consider the food and safety available from the National Guard station. The students didn’t realize that Walsh planted some of his female troops in the group, posing as students. He hoped the women would calm some of the young men and provide an example to the younger female students to take his deal. Many still marched from the assembly area towards living quarters, unconvinced to join up with the authorities. But a surprisingly large percentage of those initially unhappy reconsidered and took the safe bet.

  Student protesters aren’t what they used to be. Too soft. Still, we can shape most of these to do what’s necessary, Walsh thought.

  Walsh assumed many more would have a change of heart over the next couple of days, especially the female students. Campus security was nonexistent outside of the safe zone. Without any protection and with food running scarce, the area beyond his control was about to descend into chaos. Whatever alcohol and drugs were available off-campus would fuel a nightmare of rape and pillage, engulfing those with no interest in joining willingly. He truly hoped most would escape the consequences of their delay.

  Walsh and the provost agreed the on-campus dorms on the east side were best for their new recruits. These buildings provided the best defense against any mob action and were closest to his base if support was needed. To ensure calm and discourage any attempts to break in from the unsecured areas, he stationed a squad of men and two of his precious heavy weapon Humvees.

  Confident that his men had the campus situation in hand, his driver took him to each food distribution center to make sure security was squared away. He knew it would be, but his men needed to see leadership more than they needed direction. Even trained veterans felt lonely in remote outposts, especially with the limited radio service his techs provided thus far. Emotions would be running sky-high with the sight of American citizens desperate and starving. The sight of their commanders let them know they were a key part of future plans.

  Until he could get some kind of reliable communication system working, he would have to ride the circuit like this on a daily basis. Each day a different route; even zombies could pick up patterns. Satisfied with the progress his sector commanders were making, they headed back to base.

  Been a long day, and there’s a very difficult conversation to have with the major's wife.

  The entire base was like a family in close quarters; she would know what happened by now. But he needed to talk to her and let her know what her husband’s sacrifice accomplished for them. There would be a memorial service, and a chance for him to mourn this first casualty of a new society. He would figure a way to honor his friend, to truly immortalize him in some way. Perhaps he would name their first division of new troops after him. Only the best of the best will do. I’ll have to think of that soon.

  The base was a hub of activity as they turned up the concrete driveway. Heavily armed guards opened the gate with a salute and a wave past transport trucks loaded with supplies. Most of the food would remain here, with just enough taken out to the distribution centers to pacify the new arrivals. Refugees possessing skill sets they were looking for would be brought here on base for training and assignment. Eventually, there would no longer be food in the distribution centers.

  Those too dumb or slow to get there in time might just keep right on walking, hopefully never to come back.

  Chapter Eleven – The Pullback

  Shelby County

  One Month after the Great Reset

  Tan-colored dust billowed in a plume behind Sheriff Clark Olsen’s old truck as he barreled down the county line road that connected the county seat with the outer townships of his jurisdiction. A deputy’s panicked message alerted him to a burning farm belonging to Patrick and Susan Watson, a family that had been living in the area since the county was founded. Their expansive brick house came into view, with dark black smoke still wafting overhead.

  As Olsen skidded into the driveway, he could tell his worst fears were realized. He could clearly see one broken body laying half in and half out of the garage door. Jumping out of the truck, he ran around the back of the house, only to see that the front façade was all that remained of the structure. Misty-eyed, he turned to head for the machine shed in back. The door had been busted open and Olsen noticed buckshot holes around the doorway. Drying blood pooled on the concrete below. Someone managed to get a shot off at the intruders, which didn’t surprise the sheriff at all. This family had seen sons and daughters in service from the Civil War all the way to America’s most recent Middle East misadventure. This family would have fought till the end.

  Against all hope, the end was what he found. Stepping into the machine shed confirmed his worst fear. A middle aged woman
and man lay in the neatly finished area set up as the farmer’s personal office. Decorations from tractor companies mixed into pictures of adventures with family and friends over every square inch of wall. Thin paper photos holding memories of those dearest witnessed the end of a proud family.

  The man had been shot in the chest, and the woman in the back. Clark assumed that Patrick caught a bullet as he charged up to whoever was breaking in. Apparently Susan had been shot in the back while comforting him in his final moments. Suddenly he remembered the two beautiful young Watson daughters living here…he’d spend the rest of the week in another fruitless search for them.

  Olsen walked out of the shed and looked around at the surrounding landscape. He tried to figure out where the bandits who did this came from. Suddenly he felt as though a thousand eyes were staring at him from behind the tall grass and weeds. In the short time since the modern world ground to a halt, brush already began to encroach on the neatly manicured farm fields. Too much cover for anyone or anything wishing to sneak up on unsuspecting victims.

  This was the third farm in the last week that he’d been too late to help. Desperate searches for missing children cost him valuable time trying to help the rest of the farms work together to build up their defenses. Time he would have gladly spent if he had found so much as a clue as to their whereabouts.

  What can we do? Olsen thought. How am I going to catch these guys popping up from the drainage ditches when I have just a handful of deputies to track them down?

  Tears turned to rage for Olsen now. This is how anarchy starts. And the sheriff of this little backwater county in the middle of flyover country wasn’t going to let it happen.

  *****

  “Clark, how do you propose we fortify ourselves? I don’t even know what that means.” Gordon Steinbrink, the Mayor of Strasburg, asked as he sat amongst his peers. Mayors of several small municipalities in and around the area sat around a dusty conference table in the Shelby County courthouse. Scattered coffee cups and plates told the story of another working breakfast, standard practice now when each waking moment counted.

  Everyone in attendance was referring to their arrangement as the Okaw Valley Self Defense Cooperative. Dropping the Shelby name helped integrate some of the towns sitting outside of the county borders. Okaw Valley was a local Indian term and held resonance for the entire area. Town borders didn’t matter much anymore; populations fluctuated over the years until the long slow decline of rural communities began about five decades ago. But each community tried to retain some sense of identity by keeping grade schools inside each city limits. The common high school had been built in the last twenty years, and ended up being a much larger facility than was practical for a single small town in the middle of the Midwest.

  This meeting of the mayors and Sheriff Olsen occurred nearly every morning since the darkness, or as they began to call it, the Great Reset. These small-town leaders tried desperately to get a hold on what this new world meant for people. After speaking with Sheriff Olsen and Phil Hamilton when they returned from their trip to Decatur, everyone had been trying to formulate a plan to combine public assets into secure pantries in each community. After Sheriff Olsen’s report this morning, security was now in the forefront, also.

  Sheriff Olsen looked at these four men who agreed to serve in what was a thankless job even in simpler times. Now the life and death of their townspeople rested on their decisions. Not everyone was cut out for crisis, but these men were doing as well as could be expected.

  The sheriff replied to the mayor’s question with the thoughtful look he carried nowadays.

  “Gordon, I’m not sure what our next steps are, that’s why I brought it up. I thought as a group we might be able to come up with something.”

  The office door opened and Phil stepped in. “I think I’ve got it, Sheriff,” Phil said.

  Phil handed some drawings to everyone in the room. On the papers were hand-drawn sketches that resembled a collection of squares and circles, arranged in what appeared to be a rough plan for a castle.

  “Phil, I appreciate the idea of building forts, but I think I’m a little short of massive stone blocks right now.” The voice was that of the Mayor of Hampshire, feeling the cynicism that came from exhaustion.

  “I appreciate it’s a little outside the box, but we actually do have the materials on hand,” Phil replied. “Anna talked to Susan Albright when they were setting up the school shelter at St. Paul’s Church. Susan’s husband Mike runs...well, ran the concrete plant down in Windsor. It dawned on her that all those concrete box drains, culverts and pipes could provide protection for Clark’s deputies. When she brought the idea to me, she was thinking about a way to put them around the churches and schools. I think we could use them to put around some of the larger farms, too.”

  “But that would take thousands of pieces, Phil.” Sheriff Olsen looked up from over the drawing in his hand. “You’re talking about thousands of feet of concrete just for one farm.”

  “That’s right,” Phil agreed. “But we can put them in at intervals, and then use the old bulldozers that still work to fill in the gaps with dirt and rocks. So the wall might include a culvert or box drain every fifty or a hundred feet. That would give cover to riflemen and they could move from station to station without exposure. If nothing else, it would look darned impressive to any of these gangs coming out of the ditches.”

  “Does he have enough concrete finished?” Mayor James Anderson of Tower Hill spoke.

  “Short answer: no. He’s got enough for several of the farms and schools and that's it. But he also has a lot of raw materials on hand. The company that owned the plant shut it down a few months ago. Same situation as the Greenstem refinery. Not enough profit in building real things anymore. These owners just locked the doors and left, so there are several months of materials on site. Mike Albright says there’s also enough material sitting at a port along the river to build up the whole county.”

  “What would be the test locations to try this out?” Anderson asked.

  “There’s an old grain elevator a couple of miles from my farm. On that site, there are three concrete grain silos. We use it for extra storage during harvest. I want to turn it into our first fortress,” Phil told the group.

  “I don’t understand, Phil. Why not reinforce Schoolhouse Hill first?” Sheriff Olsen asked, referring to the Hamilton family’s home farm. “Whatever you learn there, you can use on the others.”

  “I think we’re going to have to get people out of the shelters in town and out to the farms as soon as possible, Clark. Anna is really concerned about contagious diseases that seem to thrive in close quarters like we have at the schools and churches. They’re trying really hard to keep the sanitation and nutrition up to par, but we’re dealing with less than ideal conditions there. So we need to get people out of town and into the country. To do that, we’re going to need space to house a lot of people.

  “Most farms aren’t set up to handle extra people. The house might hold ten or fifteen people and it would be hard to hold out against a big bandit raid. What I’ve got in mind is something like an old castle. Now in the past, those castles had a big tower in the middle. It provided great visibility to see bad guys coming, and if attacked and surrounded everyone could go in there and be safe. See what I mean?

  “We’ve got these big concrete grain silos all over the county. Five or six stories tall, some a lot bigger than that even. From the top you can see for miles! The walls are reinforced concrete several feet thick, and they could withstand anything short of tank cannon or heavy artillery,” Phil said, watching the men nodding in agreement.

  “My thought is that we’ll pour resources into fortifying these, and then build dirt and concrete walls around them. People can farm the surrounding fields during the day, and then come in behind the walls at night for safety. We’ll keep the towers staffed with lookouts, and should be able to see any bandits coming for miles. The lookouts will sound the alarm, and get t
he workers safely in from the fields. Or fight them from the walls, whatever is best,” Phil concluded.

  The faces around him were a mixture of disbelief and excitement. Phil could see each man at the table taking a mental inventory of all the big towers he remembered seeing dot the Midwestern landscape. If those could be turned into fortresses, people could safely go about rebuilding civilization. More importantly, they could farm in peace and start rebuilding the food supply. Phil had been working with local farmers to find any stored grain that could be spared as food. Also, the farmers had agreed to plant crops that could be used as food without processing. Soybeans would be the staple crop; they could be easily converted to protein or the biofuel needed to run their generators. But that was a plan for the future and immediate food remained the primary concern.

  “Phil, I think I can speak for everyone here in saying that this is an amazing idea. I don’t know how to explain the hope I’m feeling in my heart right now. Can we really pull this off?” Mayor Anderson asked.

  “Well, can I have each town loan me their public works employees and equipment?” Phil asked. “We won’t be replacing any roads or bridges soon, so I was thinking if we got every bulldozer, track hoe and bucket loader we could find, we could be working on as many as four projects at once. Because even with these fortress farms, we’ll still need to be fortifying the school shelters and fortifying the Churches.”

  “Materials, though,” Sheriff Olsen interjected, “you’ll be out of materials within a few weeks.”

  “We’re going to need an expedition to that port to get the materials Albright was talking about,” Phil agreed.

  “I guess that’s where I’m supposed to volunteer, right?” Olsen laughed and checked his old windup pocket watch. “I’ll have a couple of my deputies start recruiting volunteers to go on this quest. Whatever heavy trucks still running will need to be ‘volunteered’ as well.”