Last Stand: Patriots (Book 2)
Read Last Stand: Patriots (Book 2) Online
Authors: William H. Weber
Last Stand:
Patriots
Copyright © 2014 William H. Weber
Cover design by Keri Knutson
Edited by RJ Locksley
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
For my wife—your strength is an inspiration. And to Gary Stevens, whose expertise on amateur radio operation proved invaluable in the creation of this book. He was also kind enough to read through an early draft of the manuscript and let me know where I’d gone astray. Any technical errors are mine and mine alone. I’d also like to offer a hearty thank you to Damian Brindle, Justin Aeschliman and PJ @ prepper-resources.com for reading over an early draft of the manuscript and providing such incredibly useful feedback.
Last Stand: Patriots
Three months after the EMP cripples the
United States, John Mack and his family find their peaceful new existence shattered when a tyrant seizes control of the nearby town of Oneida. Charles Augustus Morgan is a presidential envoy, sent to restore law and order to the area. But his first order of business is to demand the confiscation of all firearms from the local population. Morgan’s offer is as ugly as the man himself: disarm or die.
When John and his family get caught in the middle, the threat jeopardizes everything they’ve struggled to rebuild.
Soon John encounters a group of Patriots who’ve sworn to stand against Morgan’s growing despotism. But John will learn that nothing in this new post-EMP America is what it seems—and that the deadliest threats are often the ones you didn’t see coming.
“Here’s something I never understood,”
Brandon said to John as they stood on a rise overlooking Stanley Lake. “What do you call more than one goose?”
“Geese,” John replied
, not entirely sure where this was going.
“Okay
, fine. Then what do you call more than one moose? Meese?” Brandon slapped his leg and let out a burst of laughter. The fourteen-year-old’s voice was changing, sometimes making him sound like a goose himself.
John tightened the cord around the
slip knot he’d made. “Something tells me you aren’t taking this very seriously.”
The smile on
Brandon’s face faded. John hadn’t intended to scold the boy, but sometimes his stare could be intimidating, even when he didn’t intend for it to be.
The two of them had set out from the
cabins over an hour ago on a rather unusual hunting expedition. They were searching for geese and it had become clear from the start that young Brandon didn’t understand why. The goal was to bring back one or more. That was the reason they’d driven in John’s 1978 Blazer and brought the truck up to within fifty yards of Stanley Lake. At their feet was the wooden cage John had built yesterday to transport whatever they managed to capture.
“It’s just that I thought we had plenty of food at the camp,”
Brandon said.
“Food’s not really why we’re here.
At least, it isn’t the main reason. It took us about four months, but we’re down to the last of the batteries and candles are getting harder and harder to come by. Won’t be much longer before we won’t have any light once the sun goes down.”
“
So you wanna use feathers instead?”
John smil
ed as a cool breeze blew off the lake and washed over him. A family of geese were over by the water’s edge and he watched them sunning themselves as he answered Brandon’s question. “The animal fat is what we’re after, Brandon. Diane and your mom will turn the lard into lamp oil by boiling it down with water and filtering it a handful of times to remove the impurities. Course it won’t burn as clean as whale oil, but this part of Tennessee is a bit short on whales.”
“
Yeah, I see what you mean.”
“If we
get desperate enough, we could always use other animal fats—possum, raccoon and so on—but the oil made from those guys tends to kick up far too much smoke. And apart from eating the geese, we can also keep ’em around the property for an extra layer of defense.”
Brandon
nearly fell on the ground laughing.
“Sounds rather
ridiculous, doesn’t it?” John said. “Can’t say that I blame you. I thought the same thing myself the first time I heard someone make the suggestion. Turns out their use goes back to ancient Rome. But there’s a real simple way for you to find out whether I’m pulling your leg or not.” John glanced down at the wooden cage. “Head over by the water and grab that mother goose by the neck and drop her in the crate.”
Brandon
didn’t look so sure anymore.
“Go on,” John said, shooing him away. “Let’s see what you got.”
Like many teenagers his age, Brandon was eager to prove himself and something in John’s challenge must have lit a fire in his belly.
Brandon
licked his lips, rolled up the sleeves of his shirt and slipped his hands into a pair of work gloves he’d brought.
John unslung
a pellet gun he was carrying and leaned it against the crate. The AR, however, would remain on his shoulder, along with his trusted S&W M&P .40 Pro which he kept nestled in his Blackhawk Serpa drop-leg holster.
Back at the camp,
his son Gregory had wanted more than anything to join them. Telling him that he’d have to stay behind had been tough for John, especially when the look of disappointment on his son’s face had edged toward tears. There was something John needed to talk to Brandon about. A conversation he would be having with Gregory soon enough. But all that would come later. Right now, John was curious who was about to win: Brandon or the goose.
I
t didn’t take more than thirty seconds before Brandon came charging back in John’s direction, a goose hot on his heels.
“This thing is crazy!”
Brandon shouted, terrified. “Shoot it before it gets me.”
The sight of the boy running from a hissing bird
required everything John could muster to keep from falling over with laughter.
A second later
, Brandon sped past him, the goose gaining with every step, his beady little eyes fixed on Brandon. In a flash of movement, John snatched the bird by the neck, scooped him up with his other hand and dropped him into the wooden cage. Then he slammed the lid, trapping him against an echo of wild and angry cries.
Brandon
was ten feet away, bent over, his hands on his knees as he tried to catch his breath.
“
Excellent job luring it,” John offered with a wink.
“
My pleasure.”
Grinning, John surveyed the beast
. “Not exactly a Rottweiler, although not a horrible substitute under the circumstances.” He handed the pellet gun to Brandon.
“What’s this for?”
The boy was looking at the goose, probably wondering whether John wanted him to shoot him.
“Lunch,” John replied. “Go find us a
couple squirrels and I’ll show you how to cook ’em.”
While
Brandon was gone, John made a quick search of the surrounding area and gathered up the items he’d need to start a fire. He began to clear a patch of ground by scraping away the loose debris and wild grass. Then he gathered stones and set them in a small circle.
There were three main stages to building a fire outdoors.
The first was tinder. Birch bark was his personal favorite given how plentiful it was. A lesser-known alternative was coal fungus, a black clump found on dead trees. Next John got some kindling to help feed the flame. In this case, he opted for thin dead branches. The final stage was the larger pieces of wood designed to keep the fire going for as long as it was fed. He fashioned the kindling into a teepee structure and placed the tinder inside. Using a flint rod and striker, John made sure to move the flint rather than the striker so it didn’t catch on the tinder and pull it away with each attempt. Within a matter of minutes the fire was going.
Rather than a large flame, the goal here was to create glowing embers. As he waited for the pieces of wood to burn down, he made a spit to roast the meat once it arrived.
By the time Brandon returned with two dead squirrels, the embers were just about ready.
The boy
laid the squirrels on the ground at John’s feet, beaming with pride.
“Got
’em each on the first shot,” he volunteered, clearly proud of himself.
.22 rifles and pellet guns were some of the most overlooked items in a prepper
’s arsenal. Neither had serious stopping power, this was true, but each came with their own set of advantages. A well-placed shot from the .22 was still enough to kill a man or small game. Having one also increased the amount of ammunition you could keep on hand, since .22 rounds were much smaller than .223 or .30-06.
The
1200 fps pellet gun was mainly for stealth. Wasn’t any sense making a racket to kill a squirrel when you could accomplish the same from a much quieter method. With resources becoming more and more scarce, you never knew who might be nearby listening. A pellet gun also featured a similar advantage to the .22, namely the increased amount of ammo one could have on hand.
Lifting
the squirrel by the tail, John removed his Ka-Bar Becker BK9. The nine-and-a-quarter-inch length of the blade was overkill, but it was all he had at the moment. He began by slicing through the back of the tail, being careful not to cut all the way through the hide. Next he stepped on the creature’s bushy tail and pulled until the hide rolled off like a tiny fur sweater. Brandon looked on with disgust.
“I hope you’re paying attention,” John told him. “
’Cause you’re doing the next one.”
After the squirr
el was cleaned and gutted, Brandon did his best to emulate John’s technique. These were things he’d already taught his own children during many a camping trip in the past and it was important that Brandon learn the kinds of skills that might save him from starvation one day. Normally, as part of this process, John would have kept the guts to use as bait, but that wasn’t in the cards for today and so he tossed the remains into the woods. The hides he would keep, however, since furs could always be put to a variety of uses.
Later, when they were eating, Brandon wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He had something on his mind and so John asked him what it was.
“The lights have been off for a while now,” he said.
John nodded. “Going on five months, I’d say.”
“When do you think they’re gonna come back on?”
He figured it was the need for oil lamps that had prompted Brandon’s question. In the beginning, his own family had asked him nearly every day as though John somehow had the magic answer as to when things would return to normal. He’d told them he didn’t know, and that was exactly what he told Brandon now.
The kid grew pensive.
“You’re worried things might never go back to how they were, is that it?”
“No,”
Brandon said, shaking his head. He was clutching a squirrel leg between two fingers as though it were a chicken wing. “I guess I’m worried mostly about what it’ll mean when things do.”
It was a
simple, but startling question from a young man, the answer to which John hadn’t spent much time dwelling on. What would there be to go back to? That was what Brandon was really asking.
In the years leading up to the EMP, John and
his wife Diane had slowly begun rebuilding everything they’d lost during the financial crisis. Their 401k, which had taken a serious beating, was starting to show signs of life. But in the modern age of electronic banking, what was money besides little ones and zeros in a computer server somewhere? It wasn’t backed by the gold in Fort Knox anymore. The truth was, the minute that bomb detonated in the atmosphere, the country’s entire financial sector had been completely wiped out. The $63,000 in savings they’d managed to scrape together was now little more than a memory. And the house they’d owned on Willow Creek Drive? They’d be lucky to return and find that it was still standing. The Applebys’ situation was even more dire given the way their house had disintegrated into a heaping pile of ash.
John worked the tough squirrel meat between his teeth and
struggled to swallow it down. “Chances are better than none there won’t be a thing left for us when the lights finally come back on,” he said. “My guess is the population’s already been cut by at least half. On those rare occasions when I take Betsy on a scavenging trip down near the interstate, I see more and more bodies piling up along the shoulder of the highway. All these months later, people are still trying to escape the city. Like us, they thought they could weather the storm and when they realized they couldn’t it was too late.”
Brandon
wasn’t eating anymore, although his jaw hung open as though he was getting ready to. Or maybe it was shock over what John was saying. There were tears forming at the corners of the boy’s eyes and this brought John to the entire reason he’d taken Brandon along in the first place. The kid needed to toughen up.
“I never did get around to tell
ing you,” John began, “how proud I was of the way you helped defend the cabin when Cain attacked. I know your dad was too. Taking a man’s life isn’t to be taken lightly. Whether you like it or not, you became a man that day. Not because you pulled a trigger, but because you chose to stand up and fight when others might have curled into a ball. I know fourteen isn’t all that old, but times have changed.”
Brandon
blinked away the tears.
“
You understand what I’m saying?” John asked and Brandon nodded.
“Those dead you saw along the interstate,” the boy
said. “You think they were from Knoxville?”
“Most likely. Why?”
“I was just wondering why the army wasn’t there to help any of them.”
It was a good point. By and large, John and the others had opted to l
ie low and stay out of sight, but even so, they hadn’t seen a single sign of the military.
“I suspect a bunch of them might have gone home to protect their families,” John said.
“That’s what I figured too,” Brandon replied, although John could sense the doubt in his voice.
Surely there was a reason they hadn’t seen so much as a single Nation
al Guardsman since bugging out of Knoxville and the possibilities only magnified John’s growing sense of unease.
The goose was squawking again and the sound snapped John out of his
reverie. “All right, let’s get this stuff loaded up and get back to camp.” He opened the back hatch and they both slid the caged goose inside, along with the pellet gun.
Once in the driver’s seat, John set the AR between his seat and the consol
e, the way he always did when driving. They left the lake and started out along the narrow gravel path which led through the forest. Branches scratched the sides of the truck as the goose in the back began kicking up a racket.
They cleared the path and came to the road. John slowed down and checked both sides of the road
, first left and then right. It was an old driving habit that never went away, all these months later.
That was w
hen he caught sight of Brandon staring off straight ahead. John followed his gaze and spotted thick fingers of smoke rising from a nearby hill.
“Think it’s a forest fire?”
Brandon asked.
John hit the gas without answering. The smoke wasn’t from a forest fire at all. It was coming from their camp.