Fail State, page 6
part #2 of End of Days Series
“Over there,” Roxy said, pointing out an elderly man in blue overalls, walking up her side of the street past the Old Stagecoach Inn. Tammy eased the Olds up next to him and Roxy wound her window down. The old fellow doffed his straw hat.
“Morning ladies.”
“Good morning, sir?” Roxarne said. “Do you know where the Williams farm is? We’re looking for my friend’s brother.”
The man grinned.
“Is she really your friend, or something else,” the man grinned.
“Oh for fucks sake,” Tammy muttered under her breath, but before she could say anything or drive on the old guy replaced his hat and went on.
“Not that I care. It’s a free country is what I say. Folks can marry who they want, I told that asshole on the phone. Course it was a recorded message, so nobody was listening. But I knew their game. They were all into the push polling for that Portman asshole. I’m a Sherrod Brown man, m’self…”
“Sir!” Roxy cut him off.
“Yes ma’am. Can I help you? My word that is a whole litter of little ones you got in back…”
“Sir, we’re looking for my friend’s brother. Mike Kolchar. He works on the Williams farm.”
“The soy bean place,” he nodded. “I know them. Ha!” he actually slapped his thigh when he laughed. “They went all in on Trump, you know. And he fucked them good with his damn tariffs as a thank you.”
The man shook his head and spat a tobacco brown hawker onto the ground; it landed a polite distance away. Tammy was certain he was about to launch into a long history of the soy bean farmers and the former president but instead he pointed down the street.
“Follow Rochester Road south, go a mile and on the right you’ll find your farm.”
Roxy answered. “Thank you so much, sir.”
The old coot grinned, his eyes crinkled. “Anything for a pair of pretty ladies. I hope you find your brother. And happiness. Everyone deserves happiness. Except…”
Tammy floored the accelerator and they peeled away.
She felt giddy with relief.
This nightmare would be over, and soon. There would be shelter, food. They could maybe take a bath or at least a shower, stretch out, and they’d be among family and friends. She hadn’t seen Mike for a couple of years. Not since the kids were tiny, but he texted her every now and then. Usually memes and shit. But he was always saying to come visit. He moved around a bit, from trailer to apartment and once into a house. But she always knew to find him through the farm. He was a foreman there. For the first time in what seemed forever, Tammy felt like everything would turn out OK. She found the Rochester road without a problem, and turned south. She watched her speedometer to see when a mile had passed, but that wasn’t necessary.
The Williams farm was big.
And it wasn’t a farm. It was a goddamn soybean factory, and…
And it was pretty obviously closed.
The car got real quiet.
No one lived there. They could all see that. This place was all shiny steel boxes and silos and warehouses. With nothing like a charming old clapboard farmhouse, or even a barracks for some poor Mexican workers to sleep in.
Tammy pulled the car over to the side of the road.
“Is this uncle Mike’s farm?” Wynona asked.
“Uh, yeah,” Tammy said.
“Where’s Uncle Mike?” Bobby Jr said.
“Not here,” Rox answered, but she was mostly talking to herself.
Tammy turned the keys, stepped out of the car, and squinted into the fierce morning sun.
Nothing going on behind the gates. No sign of life.
Wind whistled between the silos. Sun glinted off the green John Deere robot tractors. Mikey had told her they knew where to go because satellites told them.
Apparently the satellites had told these ones to crash into a barn, and a silo, and in one case to tip itself ass over tit into a fucking ditch.
“Well, shit.” Roxy kicked at the rich Ohio dirt.
Tammy wanted to cry.
“You got any ideas, Rox?”
It took her a moment or two before she replied.
“I got some family around Elkins. I think.”
“You figure they’d have us?”
“They’re family. That matters.”
It hadn’t mattered to her brother, Tammy thought bitterly.
But she caught herself by the scruff of the neck.
They had no time for that shit.
And she wasn’t being fair anyway. After all, she had just lit out from Dillonvale with two families in tow and a pocket full of stolen cash. Mikey hadn’t known they were coming and who knew what shit he had to deal with when the Chinese messed up those satellite tractors.
“Mom, where’s Uncle Mikey?” Wynona asked, sounding as though she was about to lose it.
Tammy pressed her lips together, and pulled the child to her. Wynona buried her face in Tammy’s stomach.
Tammy looked at Roxy; she squared her shoulders.
“We need a map.”
It was a long way from North Georgetown, Ohio, to Elkins, West Virginia.
7
Moral jeopardy
“It wasn’t an ambush,” Rick said, from his vantage point at the edge of the small plateau while he scanned the Canaan Valley with his binoculars. Nomi sat next to him, as quiet and still as a stone dog in a temple. “Wouldn’t have been any warning shot if they’d meant to ambush us,” Rick went on, mostly to himself.
“Suppose not,” James conceded, as he turned the grilling racks over the coals of the campfire. Five gutted river trout dripped natural oil onto the coals, spitting and fizzing and throwing off small bright tongues of flame. Late afternoon, September in the Canaan Valley was still warm, even balmy, but the heat would leak out of the day soon enough and they would have to smother the fire before nightfall. It wasn’t safe.
The first night they were there, the day they’d turned back from the roadblocks on Routes 50 and 24, bandits attacked another campsite on the far side of the valley. Rick had been adamant that they not let their fire burn through the night, in spite of the chill which came on with darkness. The former soldier was right. They counted more than a dozen lines of tracer rounds snaking in on the small, flickering point of light, five miles away. The industrial clatter of weapons fire reached them a few seconds later. Camp fires all over the Valley had winked out in the next few minutes.
As James tended to the fish grilling over the coals, Mel Baker walked back from the tail gate of the Sierra, where she had been fussing over her contribution to their meal.
“I made a salad. Last of the greens I’m afraid,” she said. “Sorry they’re a bit limp.”
“Trout’s pretty much done,” James said, careful not to burn himself as he lifted the grilling rack away from the fire pit. A few last drops of fish oil dripped into the coals, flaring as they ignited. The rich heady smoke set his stomach to growling and his mouth watered at the promise of food. It helped to think about the small things, the real things, that he could actually deal with. Like cooking their dinner.
There was a tree stump in the middle of the small clearing where they had set up camp. The ghost of a red spruce giant. The pamphlet and tourist map they’d taken from the abandoned visitor centre at the entrance to the park said the entire valley had once been so densely forested with red spruce that sunlight did not reach the ground for thousands of years. Those ancient forests were gone now, logged out before the early years of the twentieth century, and replaced by a thinner covering of replanted conifers, heathland marshes, cotton grass and ferns. Canadian blueberries grew in abundance around the edge of the clearing amid starflower and marigold blossoms. It was, everything else aside, a beautiful place to rest and share a meal with friends.
The old stump in the centre of the campsite had obviously been used for many years as picnic spot, overlooking a hundred foot drop into the wetlands and headwaters of the Blackwater River. Hundreds of people had carved their initials into the smooth, flattened disc of knee-high tree trunk, and a few smaller logs circled it, as rudimentary seating. Mel had already laid out paper plates, cups, a bottle of water and a six pack of beer from the cooler in the SUV.
“Come get your supper, Rick,” Mel said, adjusting the pistol at her hip as she took a seat on one of the logs.
“Where’s Michelle?” James asked as he laid the smoking fish down on a paper plate. The last couple of days, he found himself getting nervous whenever he couldn’t see her, and the anxiety was getting worse. It was the sort of thing that might once have occasioned months of expensive counselling. Not so much now, though.
“Gone to the loo,” Mel stage-whispered in her theatrically British accent. She gestured over her shoulder to where Michelle Nguyen was indeed emerging from the bushes, cleaning her hands with a medicated wet wipe. Michelle too, wore a side arm. She wore it so comfortably that James wondered if she had ever been more than a simple analyst for the National Security Council.
The hunting rifle, which James preferred over any handgun, leaned against the side of the tree stump. A Ruger bolt-action thirty-aught-six, it was familiar to him from his family’s homestead in Montana. Unfamiliar though, was the feeling of a vertiginous plunge into moral jeopardy he suffered at the thought of having to use it on another human being. He’d only ever shot vermin and range predators on his family’s ranch. James had been a good shot, even on horseback, when it had meant protecting a new born calf from a coyote, or his mother’s chickens from a wild cat, but in spite of all that’d happened this last week or so, he was still not sure he could pull the trigger on a man.
He bought the Ruger at the same place he got the two baby Glocks for Melissa and Michelle, and hundreds of reloads for everyone, including Rick. A gun shop in Clarksburg, just off the 270 at the start of their westward journey.
Paid a bruising mark up over the sticker price too.
As things fell apart in the cities, demand was peaking in the personal protection market and James had dropped a solid wedge of his remaining cash on the rifle. Apart from his facility with camp cooking, and a safe haven with his parents at the far end of their journey, he worried that he had nothing to offer their little caravan besides money. The world had very little need of an investment advisor right now. Anyone with a functioning brain stem could see that weapons, ammunition, food and defensible shelter were the only growth stocks worth holding.
He sat down just as Michelle arrived. She took a place next to him on the log, squeezing his arm and smiling ‘thanks’ for cooking the fish. Her culinary skills did not extend far beyond having programmed her iPhone with voice-activated shortcuts for her favorite Uber Eats deliveries. A talent that was well past its use-by-date. Rick joined them at the tree stump, his face a relief map of worry lines. He muttered a command to Nomi who ran off into the woods. She would bark up a storm if anyone approached the campsite down the overgrown fire trail, or through the surrounding forest.
James more or less knew what Rick was going to say before he said it.
“Still don’t know if we should move on or hunker down,” he said.
He’d been having this debate with himself, and the others, for the last week.
Mostly with himself though.
“Haven’t heard any gunfire for a while,” James offered. “And that was just a couple of shots. Probably somebody hunting game. There’s plenty of deer down the valley.”
“He’s right, sweetie,” Mel said. “Whoever shot up that other camp, I reckon they moved on.”
Rick forked a whole trout onto his plate and looked to Michelle. The threat analyst.
She shrugged.
“Small unit militia tactics are not my thing. But Mel is right about the data points. We haven’t heard a gun battle in days. Just random shots. People hunting for food. But if you think we should move now, we’ll move. Your call.”
Rick picked at his food, his brow furrowed.
“I just don’t know,” he said. “This was a good spot to lay up. We can cover all the movement through the valley. The fire trail is the only way up here and it’s easily defended, but… I just… don’t know.”
James felt his friend’s unease. It was not far removed from his own anxiety about whether he could ever shoot somebody. With Rick, that wasn’t in question. The day James O’Donnell had met Rick Boreham, Rick had killed five men who’d attacked the Harris Teeter in Darnestown. And God only knew how many more he’d put under during multiple tours of Afghanistan and Iraq. But James saw his own disquiet reflected in Rick’s eyes.
He was worried he wouldn’t be able to keep them safe. They had been lucky in a way, getting caught up in that armed robbery back in Darnestown. It had rubbed their noses in the brute reality of what was happening. Of what was going to happen. It was why Rick and Mel had joined James and Michelle on the long drive to Montana, to the ranch where James had grown up. They could be safe there while things shook themselves out. But now James, like Rick, was beginning to wonder if they would ever make it.
A gentle breeze wafted up from the valley floor, rustling the undergrowth on the steep-sided plateau and bending the tips of the fir and replanted spruce trees that crowded in around the campsite. James’ forearms puckered into gooseflesh at the slight chill. They had been hiding in the Canaan for a week and he was still getting used to the micro climate. Even at the end of summer the wetlands seemed to hold tight to a memory of some winter long passed. The night of the gun battle on the other side of the valley, the mercury had dropped into the low thirties and they had all shivered under their blankets.
Everyone except Rick of course. He’d taken himself off into the dark of the woods, patrolling the approaches to their hideout until dawn.
He would do so again tonight, while the other three rotated watch at the camp.
“Good fish, James,” Rick said.
He set aside the last fillet for Nomi. They had five heavy bags of kibble in the Sierra, but they had to manage her food stores as keenly as their own. Pretty much every place they’d stopped on the first part of their long drive, panic buying had emptied the shelves. And James knew better more than anyone that those shelves were not about to fill up again. He’d been the guy in Washington, warning everybody what was about to go down.
“Lot of streams on my parents’ ranch,” he said as he chased a small tomato around the paper plate. “My dad and I would fish most weekends we got the chance.”
Rick nodded and grunted, and nobody else spoke for a while. Nobody needed to say the obvious. James’s parents might be fishing those streams out of need by now.
There was no way to know. Michelle’s satellite phone was down. Or maybe, the satellites themselves. The phone worked just fine, but she said it was like the sky itself was empty.
James was just beginning to feel the weight of the silence around the tree stump when Rick spoke up again.
“You shouldn’t stray too far out into the valley,” he said. “It’s not safe down there.”
“We need the food,” James said. “Once we get moving again, our supplies won’t last until Montana. ”
“You won’t need the food if somebody puts a bullet in your back or cuts your throat,” Rick said sharply.
“Baby,” Mel said quietly. “Take it easy. I went with him. Michelle watched the camp with Nomi while you got your head down. We weren’t gone long, and we were both armed.”
She unshipped her Glock. Laid it next to the paper plate with limp salad greens and slightly burned trout. When she spoke the words came out in a deep bass, a caricature of Rick’s accent.
“It’s an ugly little pug,” she said, recalling his demo at the gun shop in Clarksburg. “But it’s the right size for a little lady’s smaller hand, and you cannot beat it for reliability. You lady folk squeeze this here trigger with even your weak little lady fingers and it’ll put a round exactly where you’re pointing, even if it’s wet, muddy or whatever.”
Rick closed his eyes and exhaled, as though blowing on scalding hot soup to cool it. He started laughing.
“I’m sorry,” he said, when he got himself back under control. “I just worry is all.”
“Worry about what’s coming when we get back on the road,” Michelle said. “This place is quiet. Out there…” she gestured vaguely with her beer at the wider world, “it’ll be getting medieval by now.”
“Bad enough last week,” James agreed. “Those folks at Aurora, they weren’t expecting any outside help. And Dryfork looked liked they didn’t want any.”
Rick nodded. He’d finished most of his meal in a few bites. He started to pick through Nomi’s fillet, looking for stray bones.
“We’re going to have to go around them,” he said as he worked. “Around them and all the hundreds of other little places that walled themselves off in time.”
“Places like that aren’t the problem,” Michelle said. “Our problem is getting through ten million refugees in Ohio, and another ten million out of Chicago. And staying ahead of the thirty or forty million who made it out of the cities back east.”
That brought the silence again.
It always did when the conversation circled back here.
The fall of the cities.
8
A big hit off the chemtrail bong
Brad Rausch’s smash repair business lay well beyond the crude but effective fortifications securing the far end the town. Rausch had opted to remain in place, however, insisting that he could easily defend his ‘compound’ and that it provided the town with a listening post in the woods to the northwest. Jonas didn’t think the auto mechanic was being entirely bullheaded about it. The big waves of refugees had hit the ramparts from the direction of the city, where the blacktop curved away into the forest before switching back on itself multiple times as the road to Seattle descended from the foothills of the Cascades. Coming from the other direction, from the high slopes of the wilderness, the town’s defenders received almost no human traffic after the first couple of days. Nonetheless, Jonas also recognised within Rausch a jaw-jutting, obstinate nature that had led him to exile himself from the town’s polite society in the first place.
