Fail State, page 9
part #2 of End of Days Series
"Yeah, the meeting," Rausch grunted. "You reckon they can get me some more diesel for my tow truck. I'm burning through it like a motherfucker hauling wrecks back and forth to build that stupid wall."
Jonas smiled wryly.
"I just take the notes, Brad. But I can talk with Howard Wetsman before the meeting. Or maybe Natalie Bochenski. She’s in charge of resourcing."
Rausch nodded. The promise was enough for him. Jonas Murdoch always delivered.
The car lot was much bigger than you'd imagine if you could only see the front of Rausch's place. He had room enough for at least two dozen vehicles inside. The place was about half full now, and most of the cars didn't look like they needed to be in a smash repair shop.
"You picked up anything good since that Toyota?" Jonas said, seeing the answer for himself.
"Yeah, we found a Mazda CX 5 about 20 miles north of here yesterday. Three quarters of a tank full. Just pulled over by the side of the road, driver's door open. No sign of the occupant. Even had some tinned food and Doritos on the back seat."
“Still fresh in the bag," Chad Moffat said as he came up. "Three bags of Doritos, man. Flaming hot nacho too. Who walks away from that?"
Jonas could see the vehicle a short distance away, parked nose-in next to a late-model Jeep Cherokee. The Jeep was pockmarked with bullet holes and a dark brown splash of dried blood obscured the driver’s side of the windshield. Jonas walked over to inspect the Mazda while Rausch chained up the main gate again.
"Nobody with half a brain," Jonas said to Chad, answering his question. It had been rhetorical, but Chad probably didn't know what ‘rhetorical’ meant, so Jonas answered it anyway. "What do you think happened to them?" he called back over his shoulder.
Having chained and padlocked the main gate, Brad Rausch shrugged as he joined them.
"Dunno," he said. "Maybe they walked into the woods to take a shit and couldn't find their way back. You don't know these forests, you can get lost in a couple of steps."
"Grizzly bear could’ve taken them too," Moffat said.
Jonas instinctively dismissed most things the giant ‘roid ape said, but he caught himself in this instance.
"You reckon so?” he asked Rausch.
The mechanic shrugged again, open to the suggestion.
"Got all the big meat eaters up here. Maybe not so close to the city, but you get a little north, closer to the Canadian reserves and sure, you got your grizzly bears, your black bears, mountain lions, packs of wolves. They could all take a man. But I didn't see no sign of that. Pretty sure whoever it was, the dumbass just walked into the woods for a shit and they're still out there somewhere."
“Finding it with so much gas was a score,” Jonas nodded. “Everyone’s running low, or running out.”
"Three quarters of a tank," Rausch said, patting the hood of the Mazda as if it was a prize stallion. "But yeah. This is a good vehicle for a long road trip. Tiptop mileage. We should add it to the manifest. I can take the Jeep into town, and a couple of other beaters I pulled in off the side of the tourist route to close up the gaps in the wall near Red Man's Creek. That's if the Committee can see their way to finding me some gas and diesel.”
"Leave it to me," Jonas assured him. “What's the range on the CX 5?”
Rausch shrugged. It was his standby answer to most questions.
"Depends. About twenty-five maybe twenty-six miles a gallon in the city. Not that anybody’s driving in the city no more, unless it’s in a fucking tank or something. Thirty-five, thirty-six out on the freeway. But some places your freeway’s gonna be a fucking parking lot."
"Yeah," Jonas conceded. "We’re gonna need that gas."
He checked his watch.
7:35 AM.
"You getting much of anything on your radio?" he asked. It was real reason he’d come.
The mechanic’s face darkened.
"Nothing good," he said. “You might as well listen for yourself."
Jonas and Chad followed Rausch back into the office. It was much darker than it had been the first time Jonas was here. The plywood sheeting Rausch had fixed over the windows blocked out all natural light. He pulled a string hanging from the ceiling to turn on a single naked lightbulb as they entered the front office. The same racks of tired pornography and dusty, overpriced automotive parts sat undisturbed, but all of the foodstuffs were gone. All the Twinkies and chewing gum had been requisitioned by the Emergency Committee. Rausch had gladly given them up as his contribution ‘to the common good.’ Some of them, anyway. A much larger consignment of the energy dense protein mix was secured within the cells of Sheriff Muller’s county jail, but Jonas had managed to siphon off at least two boxes for himself and his people.
He had people now. These two useful idiots. Tomi Yates and a few of her girlfriends. And a handful of guys like Dale Juntii, the ex-marine, and Leo Vaulk, who had the security contracts for both the Farmers Mutual S&L and the local Wells Fargo branch.
Rausch unlocked the storeroom, flicked on another light, and waved them through. They were all big men, and it was crowded in there. The freezer, a sizeable commercial unit, hummed quietly in one corner, drawing power from the diesel generator outside. Three cardboard boxes of high-energy protein bars and two extra-large tubs of protein powder sat on top of the freezer. Rausch had boxes of chocolate bars, corn chips, cigarettes and soft drink stacked up against one wall. The Emergency Committee might have requisitioned his supplies, same as they had with every other business in town, but with Jonas checking the inventory and making sure Selectwoman Bochenski was too distracted to notice, it’d been a simple matter to hold back at least a quarter of the stock. Having run riot through Amazon’s much more closely controlled stock management system, the jury-rigged efforts of Silverton’s Emergency Committee were not hard to subvert.
Rausch had even given up all the ice creams and frozen pizza pockets and microwave burritos from his front-of-house freezer. But only Jonas, and now Chad, knew about his other stash.
Oh, and Tomi Yates.
Can’t forget her, Jonas reminded himself, already regretting the moment of weakness that had led him to give her that protein bar earlier. He’d already got laid. Three times. What the fuck was he thinking?
A small table took up one corner, surrounded by the hidden boxes of contraband food. An old-fashioned radio unit sat on top of it. Jonas had assumed it was CB radio when Rausch first showed it to him, but the mechanic had laughed at the idea.
"In these hills?" he scoffed. "Nah, I wouldn’t pick up nothing but the hum from the fucking freezer. No this is a sweet little bitch I got me a couple of years ago to listen into the state troopers and the Highway Patrol, looking for work."
He'd gone on then, at tedious length, about radio frequency spectrum and wireless experimentation and a whole bunch of eye-glazing shit and Jonas had realised that Brad Rausch was a ham radio nerd the same way Mikey Summers was a lycra-fag bicycle nerd. Chad pulled a couple of cookies-n-cream flavoured protein slabs from an already open box, handing them around for breakfast as Rausch played with his radio set. His expression was grimly concentrated but also peaceful, almost sublime. He was in his happy place, even if his happy place was in the middle of a full-on balls-out apocalyptic meltdown.
"Listen up," Rausch said. “I been monitoring these guys since yesterday.”
He adjusted a couple of dials on the unit and sat back. Jonas frowned as he listened to what sounded like a conversation between military personnel. Or maybe hardcore taxi drivers.
"Delta Six, this is One-one."
They couldn't hear the response.
Rausch said quietly. “This’ll be the skip that we're hearing. It's low power and in the clear."
Jonas had no idea what he meant and focused instead on the radio.
The voice spoke again.
"Six, we lost our key."
“What am I supposed to be listening to?” Jonas asked.
“Dude lost his key,” Chad chuckled. “I fucking hate that.”
“Quiet,” Rausch said. “Just listen. Pretty much everything the army does is in FH or FH-M mode on a SINCGARS radio. FH, or Frequency Hop, literally skips the freq 111 times per second. And the only way the radios can talk to one another is by having a ‘key,’ or a set pattern issued by some higher up that lets the radios synch up. It's an amazing system, really.”
Jonas and Chad exchanged a look.
The transmission faded, the mechanic turned up the volume and the voice came back.
"Be advised, we have secured the OBJ. One Foxtrot Kilo, we'll bring him back in the truck when we Charlie Mike."
“A Foxtrot Kilo is a friendly KIA,” Rausch whispered, as though imparting a terrible secret. “One of their guys got shot. Probably defending a food warehouse. They been talking about it.”
Jonas leaned forward, straining to hear these snatches of chatter from the outside world. He would admit, it was strangely compelling. The radio crackled again. The speaker sounded as if he was calling from the bottom of a well.
"...fuck was I supposed to do, Six? We were taking fire! Fucking assholes. We’re trying to feed them and they lit us up.”
That got his attention.
“So what, people are shooting at the army now?” he said. “Where is this?”
“Seattle,” Rausch said without hesitation. Army secured a couple of wholesaler food depots. They were running relief, like in Africa or some shit. Handing out food and stuff from the back of trucks.”
As usual, they didn't hear a response. Rausch lit a stale cigarette, he drew in, and blue smoke curled from his nostrils. The radio crackled one final time.
"Yeah, we got it all. The trucks are full. Exfil to base, time now."
Jonas scratched his head. “What’s he talking about? Are they taking stuff back with them? Supplies? More men?”
"One-one out."
The transmission faded, the radio went dead. Rausch shrugged.
“I picked up the first skip late yesterday. Been listening to shit go bad, like real bad. But I can’t say how exactly, only hearing one side of it.”
“Shit’s been bad for two weeks now,” Chad said, sounding almost offended that Rausch had only just noticed.
Jonas straightened his back. A couple of discs cracked loudly in the confined space.
“Brad, I know we’re looking at bugging out in a month or so, when the food’s nearly gone, but I reckon you might want to get the vehicles ready to go as soon as you can.”
Rausch made a ‘How come?’ face.
“If it’s desperate enough down in the city that civilians are willing to get into it with the army, and the army is pulling pack to barracks…”
“Fort Lewis probably,” Rausch suppled.
“Whatevs,” Jonas said. “But let’s say they’ve either given up on holding the city together, or more likely they got orders to just save what they can of their own shit. We’re gonna start seeing big numbers coming up the range again. It’s tapered off the last few days. Lot of people are already dead. But these new ones won’t be like the first waves of refugees. These’ll be the survivor types. Type of motherfuckers aren’t frightened of throwing down with heavily armed soldiers.”
“I get you,” Rausch nodded.
“Yeah,” Jonas mused. “I wonder if anyone else will?”
12
The Headreach Cut Off
Everybody moved at the same time. Karl had insisted they practice. Jodi ran to the stern, scooping her son up and hurrying him away below decks. Damo punched the starter motor into life and fed revs into the Reef’s powerful engines. Twin fantails of water erupted from the water line at the rear of the vessel and Lasseter's Reef lurched forward, throwing everybody a little off balance. Damo hunched over the controls, every muscle in his back feeling as though it might spasm. He was exposed, directly in the line of fire.
Ellie and Karl grabbed two shotguns from the wheelhouse and hurried to the transom, each of them crouching out of sight. Damo swore as he heard the first crackling reports of gunfire. He turned to quickly look over his shoulder and swore again when he saw the other vessel driving directly at them throwing off dirty great bow waves as it gained on them. Three men lay on the forward deck, all of them firing rifles. Bullets cracked and whispered past. A few rounds struck home, chewing through fibreglass, shattering a running light, and ricocheting of metalwork.
The lake was in turmoil. Dozens of watercraft suddenly on the move, like frightened beasts on the African veldt, all trying to flee the sudden predator. He heard a few answering shots, but not from Ellie or Karl. They remained hunkered down low, as Karl had taught them. The shotguns they carried were excellent weapons. Damo could afford the best. But they were not good at range, and neither Ellie nor Karl were firing from a stable platform.
He pulled the wheel around to the left, and then to the right.
"Port and starboard, fuckwit," Damo cursed to himself. "You're on a boat now. It's port and fucking starboard."
Either way, he knew not to run in a straight line. Every turn, every random tack, every unpredictable move made it harder for the gunmen to get a line on the Reef.
Damo had one advantage. He'd been here for a week and a half. He knew the waters. Driving hard for a channel he knew to be bounded by a sandbank, he tried to forget about the bullets flying at him from behind, concentrating instead on not running aground or ramming into one of the slower smaller vessels scattering all over the Tract.
There was still no answering fire from Kyle or Ellie, but that was all good. They would just be wasting ammunition at this point, and letting the pirates know that the Reef was defended.
Fucking pirates!
Hard to believe except for everything that'd happened the last week or so. And it wasn't as though he'd never dealt with anything like this before. Mining for copper and gold, especially in some of the places he'd worked, was a dangerous, maverick industry, with few rules or constraints beyond those imposed by the ultimate law: profit and loss. He'd never had to run from pirates before, but he'd dealt with bandits, militia, warlords and mercenaries all over Africa. It was why he could afford a boat like the Lasseter's Reef.
Jodi reappeared from below, holding his pistol.
"They're going to catch us," she cried out over the noise of the engine.
"That's the idea," Damo said. "You should take that below. Look after Maxi. Shoot anyone who comes through the door and looks like they need it."
Jodi shook her head in vigorous denial. They'd already had this conversation. Many times. She insisted she couldn't hurt anybody like that, and when she got very upset at Damo for gently suggesting she might have to, just to protect Max, he let it drop. She had Ellie of course. And Damo knew for a sure thing that Ellie Jabbarah could put a man down so he never got up again. But he also suspected that if it came down to it, Jodi Sarjanen would do whatever it took to protect her kid, too.
"Hold on then, Jodes,” he shouted as he threw the wheel around to negotiate the curve of the sandbank he hoped was there.
He gritted his teeth as he felt the keel scrape over soft bottom, then exhaled when they made deep water on the other side.
"They still coming straight at us?" He shouted.
"Yes,” Jodi called back.
"Good."
But the manoeuvre didn't work. He had hoped the pursuing craft would bottom out on the sandbank. It didn't. There was a titanic THUMP as they struck the sand bar, but they had enough speed to clear it anyway, crashing down on the far side with a hollow, liquid boom.
"Fuck me purple," Damo roared in frustration. He'd really fucking hoped that would end the chase. But now these cunts had gained a few more yards and would soon draw level with the Reef in the long curving channel that led away into the more difficult narrows of the Headreach Cut Off.
The men had stopped firing now. But that wasn't necessarily a good thing. They'd seen Jodi and it was possible they wanted to take her captive. Two of them had climbed to their feet and were getting ready to throw grappling hooks.
"You better give me that roscoe then, Jodes, and get yourself down below. It's about to get a little fuckin' sporty up here, mate," Damo said. He cut back power to the engine, losing speed and returning to a more predictable course.
"Hand me that towel too, would you?" he said to Jodi, who had not returned below decks or handed over his gun. She was staring wide-eyed at the jet boat which had closed to within a few feet of the Reef. Karl and Ellie remained crouched out of sight, clutching tightly to their weapons.
"Jodi, the towel. I can't reach it."
"Sorry," she said, grabbing the white cloth.
It was more grey than white. But it would do in a pinch. He took it and waved it over his head where the men could see. A white flag. Surrender.
They cheered. The pair with the grappling hooks launched them and they landed on the back of Damo's boat with a teeth rattling crash. Funny to think that just two weeks ago he'd have been really bloody upset at the damage to his paintwork. He felt nothing about it now. They were close enough for him to make out individual faces and details.
They looked hard.
Again, Damian Moloney had worked in some of the worst places in the world. He was used to dealing with hard men. He recognised them when he saw them. And he knew that if you were going to cross them you did it fast and you make sure they couldn't come back at you. Ever.
The man at the wheel of the pursuit boat gestured to him to shut down his engines. Instead he idled them, and the Reef slowed, starting to drift. It was enough. The two men hauling them in with the grappling hooks were joined by two more, both of them packing what looked like military weapons. The sort of thing that could hose down Damo’s boat with hundreds of rounds in a couple of seconds. He could feel Jody's terror coming off her in waves.
