Fail State, page 3
part #2 of End of Days Series
It was the day the Chinese had collapsed the banking system. Or maybe the Russians, or even the ragheads.
Nobody really knew and it didn’t really matter.
All that mattered was that Jonas was no longer on the run from the consequences of his bad temper and worse choices back in Seattle. He was burrowed in tight here in Silverton. His input and assistance eagerly sought out, just because he beat the shit out of a beaner. And of course Tomi Yates, the hottest bitch in Silverton, had decided she could do with his input and assistance too, most fucking agreeably in the form of the pussy-pounding pillow meal he’d just fed her from both ends.
“You don’t want to hang out with me baby?” Tomi asked, half an hour later.
“Sweetheart, I just hung out with you three times,” Jonas grinned as he got dressed by the bed. “I’m gonna need my breakfast if you want me to hang out some more.”
He saw the way her eyes went a little wider at the mention of food.
“You going to the meeting with the town Committee?” she asked, as innocently as a platinum blonde cock sponge could.
Not so fucking much, in other words.
“Sheriff Dave asked if I would. Darren O’Shannassy too. Because your bad boy right here is a straight shooter, respected on both sides of the aisle.”
Tomi shook her head, causing a couple of silver tinted ringlets to sway in front of her eyes.
“Man, I don’t know how you do it, playing referee at those meetings. Those two totally hate on each other.”
Jonas smiled.
“Bringing people together, sweetie. That’s what I’m all about.”
“Can you bring me some food back?” she asked, getting to the nub of it. “I know they got food at those meetings. Everyone says so.”
Jonas was tempted to make a joke about a little starvation being good for her figure. She was looking fucking sculpted since Big Al’s ran out of curly fries, and like everyone else in town, she’d had to work on the barricades. But he kept a lid on it. Even with a ditz like Tomi he had a role to play. Jonas pulled on his jeans and tucked in the black tee shirt he’d worn for three days in a row. She was gonna bitch about that, any time now, and he was gonna tell her to wash it for him if it was such a big deal. And while she was at it, she could do the rest of his shit too. But he would keep it cool for moment. She wasn’t that hungry yet.
“I’ll see what I can do, baby. If there’s anything to grab, I’ll get some for you. Here,” he said reaching into the back pocket of the jeans. “Don’t tell anyone I gave you this.”
Her eyes went wide for real this time, sparkling with anticipation.
He tossed her a protein bar. A good one too. A big ass choc-fudge mofo from Musashi.
“You get this from your gym guy?” she asked, tearing the wrapper open and taking a bite.
He’d never seen anybody enjoy a protein slab so much. They all tasted like brown ass to him, with a double coating of more ass.
“Yeah, Chad kept a few back for me. Our secret, okay?”
She nodded, her mouth too full of keto-friendly whey protein isolate and sugar free cocoa mass to speak.
Jonas assessed he was taking a risk, letting her in on that deal. There was always a chance Tomi would go straight to the source, and dump him for Chad Moffat. Except that Moffat was one of your true Bros-B4-Hoes retards—like, seriously, dude had a tattoo and everything—and Jonas was the only reason Moffat was safely inside the fortified wall that secured Silverton from the outside world. They’d been ready to run his ass off when he rolled up to the Cascade Gate in his ridiculous fucking douche-wagon, this dusty white Jeep covered in picture of The Chad Himself, and motivational brainfarts for his personal training business.
‘Your workout is Chad’s warm up.’
‘Unless you puke, faint or die, Chad has failed.’
And Jonas’s personal fave… ‘Zumba? Bitch, please, I LIFT!’
That one made him smile because Zumba cucks always fapped on about how hard it was, but that was just the pain of human dignity leaving the body.
He left Tomi to finish her contraband breakfast, promising he’d catch up with her later after the meeting and then doing his turn on the guard roster. All of the able-bodied men in town, from County Comptroller Howard Wetsman down to the lovable town drunk Colin McFarland had to pull at least one rotation a day on the barricades. More than half were armed from a cache of weapons assembled in the first days after the true extent of the emergency became obvious, and the President signed an Executive Order authorising duly-elected municipal governments to ’take all necessary measures’ to secure their towns and cities. The remainder of the sentinels in Silverton, however, had to make do with axe handles from O'Shannassy’s hardware business, baseball bats from the sports department of the small local high school and, in McFarland’s case, with a truly ferocious temper made worse by enforced abstinence.
Even the dwindling store of alcohol was rationed, because empty calories were still calories.
Jonas strapped on his pistol. He could carry it openly now. Hell, it wasn’t even a choice. The town’s Emergency Committee had passed an Ordnance requiring all able-bodied residents and ‘authorised visitors’ to go armed ‘in service of the common defence at all times’.
"Later," he threw back over his shoulder as he pulled the door to the cabin closed behind him. Tomi would have her own assigned chores and responsibilities to get to, but she wasn't so stupid as to turn up smelling of bootleg chocolate. Jonas walked the short distance from the tourist cabins behind Al's bar and diner, his boots crunching on the gravel path as he breathed deeply of the fresh autumnal air. The first week of September had not been kind to many people anywhere, but Jonas Murdoch considered himself blessed. Even as he turned left out of the driveway and walked up Main Street, taking in the sight of dozens of labourers working away at the freshly planted vegetable gardens on the town common, he had to suppress a smirk at how well things had turned out for him. A little over a week ago he’d been a fugitive from the law. Now he was the law.
Evidence of the change lay all around him. The toilers in those freshly dug fields. The raw, roughhewn timbers, cut from the dense forest surrounding Silverton and still oozing dark brown sap, lashed and nailed together into the motte and bailey style fortifications guarding the eastern and western ends of the village, the only two points accessible by road. He took in the riflemen stationed at high points along Main Street, mostly atop the rooflines of the taller buildings like the county hall, and the former telegraph offices, lately occupied by a homewares and knick-knack store. Darren O’Shannassy’s grocery business was shuttered, with extreme prejudice, but not from lack of produce to sell. As the major food store in Silverton it had been designated a top priority for protective security, second only in importance and resourcing to the effort to plant and harvest a winter crop on the town common, where rows of fast-growing green beans, radishes and turnips had been planted from seed stock gathered by Jacques Loubert, high school science teacher and keen amateur gardener.
Lachie Saunders, proprietor of Silverton’s only licensed marijuana dispensary and wholesale grow-shop had given over all of the space in his greenhouse to kale and lettuce, and was supervising the construction of five more, much larger glass hothouses to grow as much of a winter crop as possible.
He and Loubert were supposed to address the town’s Emergency Committee about hydroponics later that morning.
Jonas shivered in the early morning chill as he hurried up Main Street, nodding here and there to anybody who recognised him and waved. His heroics in saving Al Barrett had not been forgotten, but they were not exactly the news of the day any more. That would be the completion of the barricade on the northern side of town, where Brad Rausch had towed the last car into place to close up the wall protecting the playing fields between the town centre and the forested slopes climbing away to the first peaks of the High Cascades.
Those fields were the first to be planted out, on the order of the Emergency Committee, and armed guards patrolled the boundary between the precious, newly turned furrows and the woods from which two scavenging parties had already appeared, armed with their own considerable arsenal, and driven by the hunger of people fleeing a city in full collapse. Joe Wolfenden’s small militia team was out there somewhere, aggressively patrolling against new incursions. The plunging slopes on the southern side of town were also patrolled, but the difficult geography there largely defended itself.
It was a hell of a turn around from the tiny tourist village Jonas had rolled into a week and a half earlier. Silverton was more of an armed and armoured hamlet now, and he smiled to himself to think that he was in large part responsible for the change.
And for all the bodies piled up outside the ramparts.
4
More Deliverance than Salem’s Lot
Route 24 was open for all of forty-seven minutes; as long as it took to drive south from Aurora to the next chokepoint at Dryfork. In that time they passed through open farmland, national forest and three small settlements, each larger than the one before and none of them sealed off to outsiders.
“Jesus Christ it’s like Salem’s Lot,” Michelle said as they hit the edge of the first village, a cluster of mean, slumping hovels gathered around a crossroads a few minutes after the turn off.
“More like Roanoke,” James remarked, and he was pretty sure only Michelle got the reference.
He gave the gas a nudge, speeding them through the half dozen shanties hunkered down by the side of the road. They saw no sign of movement or even of habitation.
“Spooky,” Mel said from the back seat.
“Well people are spooked I guess,” James said. “Those folks in Aurora. I know the type. I grew up with them.”
Michelle leaned through the gap between the two front seats.
“I don’t know that you did, James. They weren’t a bunch of mouth-breathing Team Jesus retards.”
Mel snorted. Rick said nothing. But James protested, “Hey. Come on.”
“You know what I mean,” Michelle countered. “If those assholes back there were thumping the Good Book it was the prosperity gospel, not the old testament. Can you turn on the radio? I want to try find out what this Executive Order’s about. You cool with that Rick?”
The hadn’t bothered with any news broadcasts since leaving Maryland. The signal to noise ratio was low, and Rick found the media’s hysterics upsetting.
“As long as it’s not batshit crazy, I can deal,” he said, turning on the radio.
Instantly the cabin of the Sierra filled with static, and Rick punched in the next preset channel. James concentrated on driving. It took four tries to find a news radio broadcast, WXKX out of Clarksburg, but they were hosting talkback. It was not going well.
“Oh man, this is a Youtube comment thread come to life,” Michelle complained. “Turn it off. I’m gonna try call the mothership.”
She alone had a working cell. Not an iPhone or Android like the rest of them, but a satellite phone, issued to her by the NSC when she evacuated DC. Michelle had orders to check in on a schedule, but so far she’d made only one call and it had gone through to a recorded message telling her there was no change in status and she was to check back in twenty-four hours.
“You got a signal?” James asked.
He was a T-Mobile customer. Rick and Mel were both Verizon. None of them had a single bar of connection. As best he knew it wasn’t just because they were deep in the boonies. Michelle said the cell networks were such juicy, high value targets they would have been a priority for the Chinese and Russians in the opening moves of any hybrid conflict. She was hooked into a military grade network and the only sure way to take it down was with anti-satellite missiles.
“Hang on,” Michelle said, as she keyed in a long PIN.
They sped past a red brick church with a steep roof and a single spire. The terrain here was rumpled, and wooded hills piled up on both sides, creating a long valley, its southern reaches overlooked by the white cross of the old church.
Melissa leaned forward to join in the conversation, while Michelle played with the phone.
“For what it’s worth they looked like normal punters to me. Back in Aurora, I mean,” she said. “Not crazy survivalist wank-badgers or nothing. Just peeps and fam, yeah? They was proper vexed, but that Sheriff had them in line.”
James frowned, thinking it through.
“Good for them, but not for us if this starts happening everywhere,” he said, checking his mirrors.
“What do you mean?” Mel asked. “We can drive most of the way through to your parents’ place can’t we? With just one or two stops for gas?”
James slowed to make the turn as the road swung hard right to go around a small lake. It was green and thick with reeds. The Sierra chugged through a rolling landscape of tilled fields and started climbing into a long stretch of heavily forested hill country. There were no farm houses now. No pasture or cleared paddocks ploughed into regimented squares and straight lines. It was all wilderness again. They did pass a few cars and pick-ups going in the other direction. Local people in working vehicles, James reckoned. Faded trim. Dusty tires. Rusty panel work. He’d seen a lot of that back home, too.
Michelle announced that she had a signal, but she couldn’t get through to anyone on the other end.
“Nada,” she said after punching more numbers into the handset. She powered down and put the sat phone away in its case.
“We’ve got enough gas to get us maybe three quarters of the way there,” James explained, returning to Mel’s question. “And I think we’ll be able to get more. To be honest, we passed enough abandoned vehicles back in Maryland that even if we couldn’t buy gas, we could probably siphon some from a stalled car. There’ll be some real traffic up ahead for sure, with people trying to get out of Chicago in particular, but we can go cross country in this bad boy if we have to.”
He made a fist and banged affectionately on the dash.
“But?” Rick said, almost as though he knew what James was thinking.
“But, yeah, if we have to divert or backtrack or go miles out of our way every time we hit some place like Aurora, and if there’s like hundreds of them between here and Montana…”
He trailed off.
“Thousands,” Rick said. “There’ll be thousands of them, if this situation doesn’t get better.”
“Yeah,” James said. “Thousands of road blocks and detours. And millions of people on the move. Out of the cities.”
They would run out of gas a long time before they cleared the midwest. Probably before they made it out of Ohio.
They hit the next village after another twenty minutes. A place called Thomas. Population 586 according to the signpost outside the town limits. The sort of backwater where they rolled up the sidewalk at sundown, James thought. It was an old coal town and the state highway doubled as the main street. A roadblock cut off through-traffic, but this time deputies in bright yellow vests waved them onto a side street. A detour took them and two other cars onto an unsealed gravel track that wound around the back of the local school before rejoining Route 24 near the empty parking lot of a craft brewery. Nobody said much of anything as they rolled through the back streets. There were plenty of people out on the streets here, and they stared at the brand new Sierra as James followed a straggling line of bright orange witches hats, marking the designated route through and out of town.
His eyes swept over the townspeople, most of whom appeared to be carrying stuff somewhere. Some were obviously returning to their homes from grocery shopping, but many seemed to be hauling household items like pieces of furniture or electrical goods. Unlike in Aurora, nobody here was armed, which was reassuring. They weren’t about to get carjacked.
“Maybe they’d let us buy some beer,” Rick said, nodding at the tall silver silos of the Mountain State Brewing Company up ahead. James pulled up at the intersection with Route 24, but if they had any ideas of picking up a few growlers for the road, the bright red plastic barriers blocking access to the microbrewery were enough to discourage them. Another law man leaned up against the hood of his cruiser at the crossroads, waving the traffic through.
He returned James’s wave with a curt nod, but he did not smile.
“Nah, it’s not Salem’s Lot, darlin,” Mel Baker said to Michelle. “It’s Deliverance.”
Two minutes further on and another cop waved them past the town of Davis, a bigger settlement, maybe twice the size of the little coal town, but no more inclined to welcome visitors.
“At least they let us through,” Mel said.
“Hurried us through, more like it,” James added, but mostly to himself.
They tried the radio again at the top of the hour, finally catching a news break as they skirted the edge of a state recreation area. NewsRadio 1170 out of Wheeling, West Virginia.
“Chaos in Washington,” the announcer said breathlessly, “With mixed signals from the Pentagon and the White House in response to the sneak attack now definitively blamed on China, which continues to deny responsibility, while pressing ahead with military action in South East Asia.”
James glanced over at Rick.
“You okay with this, buddy?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” the former Ranger said. “Leave it on.”
Most of the headline story went back and forth between White House surrogates and the Pentagon, who seemed to be at cross purposes with each other. There was no word from the President, hunkered down in a secure and secret location, but a spokeswoman insisted he had ordered US forces to secure the home front, while the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had assured allies in the Pacific and Europe that America would meet its enemies in the field.
