Age of Survival Series | Book 3 | Age of Revival

by Holden, J. J.

  Downstairs, he could hear people moving around quietly, trying not to wake anybody else in the house. Judging by the little gap in his window shutters, sunrise was still at least an hour off, so it wasn’t Chuck getting up to start breakfast. A glance at his watch showed it wasn’t shift change for the patrols, so it must have been Bill and Irene getting ready to go out hunting.

  Peter picked up his cane but didn’t need it to get down the stairs. His leg held, and he didn’t feel any pulling or pain on the healing wound.

  “Morning,” he said quietly, stepping into the kitchen.

  Bill and Irene greeted him around mouthfuls of overnight oats.

  “I’m thinking I’d like to sub in for one of you,” Peter said, scooping a bowl for himself out of the big mason jar that had been left out on the back porch overnight.

  “You sure?” Bill asked, pointing his spoon at Peter’s leg. “I know you’ve been feeling cooped up, so I just want to know you’re actually ready and not just stir crazy.”

  “I think it’s an acceptable risk. We’ll be close to the property and staying still.”

  “If we need to chase something down, will you be up for it?”

  Peter sighed and sat down. “I know we’re all the type to hold for a clean shot. I’ve never had to run after a deer, just track the blood trail at a walk.”

  Irene looked at Bill. “If it looks like it’ll be a hard trail to follow, send him back to get someone else to do it.”

  “I know we’re nervous about food, but I don’t think that would make any of us take a bad shot,” Peter said.

  “Yeah,” Bill said. “Too bad the stand won’t hold three, though.”

  Peter knew that for a fact. Even when he was younger, trying to share it with his father had been a tight fit. “It’s a crowd with two.”

  “Tell you what,” Irene said. “There’s a couple trees nearby that are an easy climb. I’ll get up in one of those.”

  Bill scraped the last spoonful of oats from his bowl. “All right. I’m game.”

  “Sure that’s the right word to use?” Irene asked with a cheeky grin.

  “Stuff it, lady. Finish up, you two, or we won’t be in place before sunup.”

  When they’d finished eating, all three clipped their sidearm holsters on. Irene selected a hunting rifle that had been fitted with a homemade silencer, while Bill and Peter went to the other weapon rack for a couple of compound bows.

  One of the few things that had been keeping Peter sane over the past two days had been the fact that his arm wound had healed up a lot faster than the leg, and that the motions required to draw a bow didn’t stress the injured muscle. Even so, he’d been practicing with one of the lighter bows. Since the day’s hunt was for deer, he selected a full size.

  On the walk out to the tree stand, Peter could almost forget that the whole world had been wrong for a month. He could pretend that the lingering soreness in his leg was the result of a hard hit on the gridiron, not a healing gunshot wound. He could sink into the sense that it was just a morning in the deer stand, like many other mornings he’d spent in his life.

  The rain of the past few days had left everything damp. In the cool morning, the air was heavy with a low-hanging fog that was thick enough in some hollows that they couldn’t see the ground through it, and it swallowed the sound of their footsteps. The wet forest floor had a rich, earthy scent that would mask his own.

  The tree stand was far enough into the woods to give Peter a chance to really let himself sink into the moment and leave all the cares and worries behind. The first sight of the boards bolted into the trunk of a big oak brought memories of so many beautiful moments to mind that he just stood there for a while listening to the few sounds of the pre-dawn forest that made it through the misty air.

  Waiting stationary not only gave him, Bill, and Irene a chance to feel out the sounds of the place, but gave the little chitter critters a chance to get used to their presence and go back to their usual activity as well.

  “Why don’t you go first,” Peter told Bill. He watched his companion climb the ladder of planks, watching and listening carefully for any shift or creak that would indicate a loose board. Any other day, he wouldn’t have worried about it, but with his leg still on the mend, he might not be able to manage a slip on the damp wood, and a fall to the ground could be a real problem.

  “Everything’s sturdy,” Bill said from the top.

  “Let me get in position next,” Irene said from the base of a younger maple that was trying to make it in a small clearing left where a much larger tree had fallen years earlier. “Here.” She dropped the clip from her rifle and cleared the chamber before handing it to Peter. With a wiry agility that Peter had never had, even as a young child, she squirreled her way up to a stable fork about fifteen feet up and lowered a length of paracord.

  Peter tied the stock to the cord and waited until she had the weapon back in her hands and loaded before he carefully climbed the tree stand. After he got settled into position in the stand, he nudged Bill and pointed out into the distance. “When you can see more than five feet, you’ll see a birch that leans slightly left. Just to the right of that and about twenty feet farther on is the bait pile.”

  From there, all that was left to do was wait. The night-shift insects, frogs, and little pocket mammals turned in as the day shift checked in. Squirrels started chattering, birds announced themselves, rabbits began hopping around. Slowly, the leaning birch came into view, and Peter heard the first tentative steps of a deer approaching. Bill nudged him with an elbow and touched his ear, to show that he had picked it up as well.

  Both men shifted position and nocked arrows. While he stared out into the grayness beyond the birch, Peter heard another sound, right below himself. He looked down, and there was a good-sized buck a couple feet from the base of the tree, almost looking right at him. With an arrow already in place and his bow lowered while he’d been waiting to sight the deer at the bait pile, Peter realized he could probably get away with drawing without spooking the animal. Anything more, and he was sure it would detect him and bolt. Just tapping his boot against Bill’s would probably create enough movement to scare the deer away.

  Peter straightened his left arm slowly and shifted it just a bit to bring it in line with the deer, then pulled back with the right. Unfortunately, just before he hit the break point, the tension caused a sudden and painful muscle twinge. He knew he didn’t have enough pull to score a clean kill or at least a serious wound if he were to just let the arrow go. Reluctantly, he gritted his teeth and eased the tension off.

  When Bill’s bow released right next to him, the crack out of nowhere caused Peter to startle. The deer below him picked up the noise and it leapt sideways, bounding off into the woods. Peter turned his eyes to the bait pile just in time to see a small doe collapse to her front knees, then fall onto her side.

  “A big guy had snuck right up on us, but I couldn’t get a shot or alert you. Maybe twenty pounds on the one you got, and a decent rack.”

  “Damn,” Bill said, glancing at the ground below them, then back at the downed doe. “Probably got a better chance of processing this one without waste, though.”

  Peter tucked his arrow back into its quiver and started to climb down from the stand. Bill was a good hunter, but he was a town dweller who had always sent his game out to be processed. He was probably thinking that without reliable weather forecasting, there was no way to know if weather cool enough to preserve meat was coming soon.

  On the other hand, the Meiers had always processed their own. They had a lot of salt on hand, everything needed to make and cure sausage, and plenty of options for smoking. He opted to not point any of this out.

  Irene kept her watch from the maple while Bill and Peter checked out the doe. The arrow had struck true, a clean shot through the chest. Bill waved Irene to come on down, and between them, they found a good, stout fallen branch they could truss the deer to for the walk back to the house.

&nbs
p; When they were in the process of field stripping it on a tarp out at the edge of the property, near the tree where they customarily hung their deer to age, Nancy came out and smoothly stepped into the process. Where most people discarded all the offal, she kept a lot of it, since it was nutritionally dense and added good texture and flavor.

  Once the animal was cleaned and hung for a bit of aging, they took turns at cleaning up before getting on with the rest of the day. The walk out to the tree stand and back hadn’t aggravated his leg anymore, so Peter decided to keep his run down into Bowman on the schedule.

  He and Larry decided to partner up again, which was the typical town run. Peter considered taking the bicycles, since they’d be the easiest on his leg for the trip down. However, the trip back was always a hard ride, since it was almost all uphill, and his morning exercises told him that the pedaling action was still off the table for a while yet. He felt confident that he’d at least be able to keep a good jog and run for short distances if he needed to.

  Larry insisted on watching Peter take a jog first, though, to be sure it wasn’t a terrible idea.

  “Your speed isn’t bad, but I can tell your endurance is way down,” Larry said after Peter got back. “But I’ve seen you reach into your reserves when you need it. If you are sure you’re good for this, I’m good.”

  “I’m sure. Let’s go.”

  The two made it to town a bit before lunch time. After a stop through Larry’s house to pick up some more odds and ends, they went over to the school cafeteria. Tom Grossman was expecting them and came over to join them at their table.

  “You might have been interested in this morning’s town meeting,” the mayor said as he set his tray down. He put a large, folded piece of paper in the middle of the table.

  Peter was glad for the excuse to set his sandwich aside. He knew there were good cooks working the cafeteria, but up at the homestead, they had higher-quality ingredients going into their meals. He unfolded the paper, revealing a hand-drawn map of Bowman and the area immediately around it. Large sections of it were outlined in different colors.

  He immediately looked for his property, and saw it was sharply in red. There was a big area south of the highway lightly hashed in red without clear borders that roughly corresponded to the other homestead his had been communicating with. There were also green lines on the map, and some blue.

  “These no-go areas?” Peter asked, tapping some of the red areas, including his own.

  “Yeah,” Grossman said. “Places where we know there are property owners onsite. We figure we’ll just stay out of them entirely.”

  “Green?” Larry asked.

  “Land owned by Bowman residents, where we have explicit permission to harvest or hunt. Blue are places we’ve been already where we haven’t encountered any other people. We’ve annexed those to the town, and prepared receipts for the owners if we end up in contact.”

  “These plots here, with the heavier red border and crosshatching?” Peter asked.

  “Places we know for sure we’re going to be confronted. Either because somebody has been shot at out there, or we’ve had communication with the owners, and they’ve made their stance clear.”

  Peter borrowed a pencil from Grossman and extended the border of the indistinct red area south of his property all the way up to the highway and west to Tackhill road. “We’re in touch with these guys, and know they’re claiming out this far at least. We’re going to meet up with them on Sunday here in town to talk more.”

  “Looks like they’ve staked a big claim,” Grossman said.

  “Sounds like they’re several families that have banded together, so this might pretty much cover their collective land ownership. They may have also annexed some adjoining or connecting plots. I don’t know for sure. Our conversations, both ways, have been very sparing in hard details.”

  “Good that you’re all practicing solid OPSEC, but frustrating as well for anybody trying to plan around it.”

  Larry said, “One of the things on the table when we meet up is how to communicate more directly than message dead drops. Something we’ve been thinking about in regard to you, too.”

  “Yeah. We might have something there, though. Mark had some old Army field phones in a storage case in the back of the firehouse. Got two of them online, and we’ve set them up between him and Davis’s office. We’ve been wondering if we might be able to set up a telegraph system of some sort. I’ve been trying to get people to donate phone wire, CAT 5 cable, speaker wire. Anything that can carry current without a lot of resistance to see how much coverage we might be able to put together. Don’t know if it’ll work, but that’s what we’re trying first.”

  Peter nodded. “We’d considered that as well, with the other folks we’re in touch with. We’ve got some solar up at the house, so we could power it. But we have nowhere near enough wire to cover the distance, and even if we did, would our solar provide enough power to give us the range we need?”

  “That’s exactly where we’re at, too,” Grossman said. “So, if you guys have any other ideas, I’d say run with them, since I’ve got people here trying to work out a telegraph solution.”

  Peter took another bite of his sandwich and set it aside. “It’s kind of good to see how much of this map is covered with red,” he said. “I don’t know how exactly to put it into words. Maybe just a feeling of security that my family here”—he gestured to include Larry—“isn’t the only one that made some effort to sustain themselves through something like this. Just knowing other people put in the work to be able to button up for a while and do what they needed to do.”

  “There’s a lot of people around you that think the same way,” Larry said. “Maybe some of them would be open to trade or, like the folks we’re talking to, are looking to have each other on some sort of analog speed dial in case we get another visit by people like Prange and Carter.”

  “Yeah, about that,” Grossman said. “My courier made it up a couple days ago to tell you that Prange’s uninjured guy managed to escape, right?”

  “We got the word. I take it there’s been no luck in finding him?” Peter asked.

  “None, unfortunately. We suspect this guy saw Prange and the one injured guy we took alive right after the big fight. We’ve kept them segregated since then, so he doesn’t have any new information, but he did see Prange alive.”

  “Any information is good information,” Larry said. “We’ve been putting extra attention on the highway because of that and let the folks south of the highway know in our last message to them. Hopefully, they’ll get word direct to you if they notice anything.”

  “That would be best,” Grossman said. “Sorry to cut this short, guys, but I’ve got other folks to see yet today.”

  10

  Hank Carter had spent six hours over two days working on the boss. They had originally forbidden him outright from going back to Bowman, even though they had one of their own men who’d seen Prange alive.

  His first impressions of the whole situation seemed to have been correct. After Nevada, Prange was out of favor, and only kept around because he was profitable. Bowman was his second screwup on an important job, so he was being written off.

  “We don’t throw good money after bad, Hank,” the boss had told him. “Why would we throw good lives after bad?” The boss was one of those guys that was just ugly enough to be handsome in a weird way, with a long, horsey face, eyes too close together, and a permanent frown. It was probably the intensity of being pinned by those eyes when he stared somebody down that made the strange proportions seem compelling instead of unpleasant.

  “He’s not bad,” Carter had argued. “Ambitious, yes, but not bad. Let’s bring him back, give him the kind of job he’s good at, like to keep all this farming and food processing running. This is his sweet spot. We get him on that side of the above-board business, he’ll shake profit out of places you didn’t know existed.”

  “There are no jobs right now that are routine. Ever
ything we do from here into the foreseeable future is cutting new turf, finding new ways. Prange is great at doing a defined job. He’s poison to anything that requires creativity or flexibility. He’s cost us enough. I’m not spending anything else on him. I’m pissing on his grave.”

  The next day, Carter came in with a new approach. The boss was already tired of the conversation before Carter ever opened his mouth, but he gave him a few minutes.

  “Prange knows a lot about our plans,” Carter said.

  “And now the town’s cops know. What are they going to do with that knowledge? Anything they could possibly do to hurt us?”

  “Anything past Bowman is an information black hole. We don’t know if there’s any functioning authority in Eau Claire or the Twin Cities that might start moving this way. They get Prange and we’re right on the defensive if we contact them.”

  “Too late,” the boss said.

  “Not really. Prange is careful with information, and Bowman doesn’t have anybody that knows how to do a proper interrogation. It’s Mayberry PD out there.”

  “But they have figured out we’re not above board, and that we’re settled in here at Black River. Damage has been done. No need to mitigate it.”

  “We can mitigate it. We take that town right off the map.”

  The boss laughed, loud and long. “So, you’re finally admitting what this is really about. You don’t give a shit about Prange, but those hayseeds out there in some little town, they bloodied your nose and you want to go burn the place down.”

  Carter knew he couldn’t argue that he desperately wanted to reduce the town to smoldering ashes. But he did actually want to get Prange back. “Why not both? Get our man back and put him to work somewhere he can’t mess anything up, and we cover our tracks out that way.”

  “How many men you think you’ll need to do this? Judging by how bad you all got your asses kicked last time, I suppose you want twice that many. Three times? Maybe I should just give you every guy we’ve got. Leave all our work here fully in the hands of the locals, and trust they’ll not notice the places we skim our cream off and just keep working without any carrots or sticks?”