Still Surviving (Book 5): Dark Secrets: Read online

  “That’s bothered me too,” Jessica said. “They almost always work in a two man team.”

  “Could be something as simple as a shortage of manpower,” Curt said.

  “Wouldn’t be the first or last time that the US Military short sheeted a mission. The final directive… you will not fail. There’s no retreating, it’s a strategic withdrawal, etc. etc. etc.”

  Linda’s last words sounded slurred and I turned to look at her. She’d had her turn with the jar, but had she really drank a lot, or was she doing the polite sip and pass it on? Jessica caught me looking and her head tilted, a question on her lips going unheard. I shook my head and looked at the door. She gave me a nod, I’d tell her inside, later.

  “Sounds like we got a good part of a plan going,” Margie said. “Is Michael going to sit in communications for you?”

  “Yeah, we’ve already talked about it. He’s picked up on this stuff quick,” Linda answered.

  “Maybe too quick,” Jessica whispered to me, poking me in the side.

  She got me in the ribs, right on the tickle spot, and as I squirmed, I realized she might be more right than she knew. Everybody with eyes could see that both Jay and Michael were vying for her attention, and I was pretty sure Jessica was joking about that portion… But what if Michael was a ringer? What if he already knew about this stuff and was secretly working with the other side? He wasn’t core, the group Spider said I’d have a traitor in, but he’d have a good reason for wanting to knife me. I’d shot Linda right in the middle of a plate, and if he really was in love…

  “Goose step over your grave?” Linda asked.

  I looked down and my arms were broken out in goosebumps. I rubbed at them and then stood up, stretching as much as I could, my sore ankle taking the weight easily. I was healing up faster than I’d thought. If I hadn’t had to do a sprint, I probably wouldn’t even be feeling this sore.

  “Thinking paranoid thoughts,” I admitted.

  “Now what?” Jessica asked softly.

  “Your joke. That maybe Michael picked up the radio stuff too quickly. What if he’s a ringer?” My words made Linda look up sharply.

  “You don’t really think…” her words trailed off, “is this a feeling, or do you know something?”

  “Neither,” I admitted. “Like I said, it’s just a paranoid thought that popped into my head. I think he’s alright, and has been, it’s just… Spider’s words got to me. He knew things…” I shuddered and wished I had more to drink.

  “Don’t let that kind of thing ruin your sleep,” Sheriff Jackson said. “Some rabbit holes have no bottom.”

  “What are you thinking of doing while the fun is happening?” Linda asked me, changing the subject. “Resting up, I hope?”

  “Yeah, you’ve got to get off your ankle for a while,” Jessica said, poking me in the side again.

  “I was thinking about firing up one of the stills,” I admitted. “The Jesus juice seems to have calmed many a nerve, and we’re running low.”

  “Lower,” Jessica said. “You’ve got a few gallons left.”

  “And some uncut stuff in the storage,” I said softly.

  Curt and Sheriff Jackson were nodding, knowing what I was talking about.

  “I’d like to get our stocks refilled. We can use the spent grains… You know, rinse them, then cook with them or use it for bait for more pork—”

  “You don’t have to talk me into anything,” Les said, piping up for the first time that night.

  I remembered him sitting with us while Young’s team was here, but then I hadn’t seen or heard from him in a while. The paranoia in my brain felt like a fog, throwing a cloud over everything and everyone. Was Michael a double agent? Les? I chuckled to myself at my feeble attempt to get in a better mood. Dark humor wasn’t working on me today. It just made me more paranoid.

  8

  Linda and Jay set out a day after Young’s team. They had transport stashed a good ways away and had originally walked in. It wasn’t much, an old truck they’d taken from the motor pool, disabled and stashed. Linda and Jay had offered to take one of the homestead’s trucks to drop them off so they wouldn’t have to walk as much, plus Young still had a rung bell. They took them up on it and helped them get their truck started and then waited until they were gone and then came back for the night.

  They were at the far range of what we could transmit on, and the airwaves seemed to be a little clearer. I had two barrels of mash that had been fermenting in the paddock next to the shine room and had gotten the still up and running. I had my ankle kicked up, Raider at my side. Yaeger kept walking in and out of the room, and for a time, I had a large group of kids watching from the open stall’s doorway. When they left, it was a group of teens and adults.

  I started making my first round of cuts when Marshall walked in, looking a little hopeful.

  “Hey Wes,” he said quietly.

  “Hey Marshall!” I said, motioning to him to have a seat next to me.

  “Do you mind if I watch?” he asked.

  “Not at all. Actually, when I saw you, I was thinking about the first day we met.”

  Marshall turned red in the face at that.

  “It’s ok Marshall,” I told him, “you live and learn.”

  “So… what are you doing right now?” he asked, pointing at the empty jars lined up.

  “Well, I’m doing the first round of cuts. I’m running it at a lower temp right now so I can pull off the bad stuff. Then when it’s gone, I can up the temps some and then start waiting for the rest of the nasties to come out.”

  “How can you tell?” Marshall asked me.

  “I’ve done this so much I pretty much can tell just by looking at how much has come out, but there’s a trick to it. You got to smell it,” I said switching jars out, and handing him the one that the distillate had started collecting in.

  “Phew! That smells like that nail stuff the ladies use,” Marshall said.

  “Acetone smell? Yeah, those nasties we pull off, right off the front. Fusil oils too,” I told him. “Then toss all these foreshots, blend together the hearts with some of the heads and some folks do it with the tails too, but I generally don’t.”

  “So now what?” he asked as I poured the first jar into the one that was down there collecting.

  “Now, we wait,” I said simply.

  Marshall was nodding off as I finished the hearts run and put the jars down to collect the rest. We’d talked softly, sometimes with a little bit of an audience who was curious. Some of the ladies we’d rescued from Spider’s men had wandered in the doorway, a kid in tow. More than a few had murmured to their kids that what we were doing was part of our cultural past. I grinned at that and waved to the younger ones. The teens were a little too interested, so I gave them a head shake, and made a mental note to have somebody help me take stuff into the house so nobody got into the jars before they were proofed down. That’d be a good way of getting alcohol poisoning.

  “Marshall?” Erica asked, coming into the stall.

  “Yes ma’am?” he asked her, a smile on his face.

  “I was wondering…” she paused and looked at me, “if you’d like to go on a walk with me?”

  “Sure thing. Hey Wes, remember a while back, I asked if you had a hat I could borrow?”

  “Yeah, you need one?” I said, grinning my fool head off.

  Marshall stood up and pulled a baseball cap out of his back pocket. I don’t know where he’d found it, but he’d folded it in half neatly. The bill was creased heavily, but he straightened it out, putting it on his head.

  “Naw, I found one,” he said slightly red in the face.

  “What is it with the hat?” Erica asked him.

  “Tickle fights,” Marshall whispered to her.

  She giggled, and quickly pulled on his arm and I watched them go. Diesel came lumbering in followed by Jessica, a second later. The big dog flopped on the ground next to Raider, sniffing at him. Jessica turned to look at the departi
ng couple.

  “Going for a walk?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I told her with a grin.

  “You almost done there?”

  “Twenty minutes or so?” I told her. “You need me?”

  “Yeah, my mom checked in. Nothing urgent, but I told her I’d get you on the radio when I could. Need a hand with anything?” she asked.

  “Yeah, a hand carrying some jars in before some of our more nefarious teenagers poison themselves with uncut shine. Don’t want to leave them untended. Had a few looky loos.”

  “Is that official hillbilly speak? Looky loos?”

  I stepped in close, kissing her deeply as my arms went around her waist.

  “I thought you had to hang a hat up before tickle fights?” Mary’s voice came out of the doorway.

  “No tickle fighting for us,” Jessica said pushing herself back, a little breathless, her eyes never leaving mine.

  “Uncle Wes, that jar’s starting to overfill,” Mary said softly.

  I cursed, and spun. Jessica had that effect on me. One kiss and I forgot what I was doing. I loved this woman.

  9

  “Silent Hunter, this is ‘Lil Momma,” Linda’s voice came out of the handset we’d taken into the house.

  “Hey ‘Lil Momma, you got Silent and Girl Scout here,” I replied.

  “Checking in. I think we’ve found one of the towers with jamming equipment,” Linda said. “We’re watching from afar. There’s a generator underneath the tower and a few men who look like they’ve been camped there for a while.”

  “What do you think?” I asked Jessica.

  “Momma,” Jessica said into the handset, “how are you getting signal to us if it’s a jammer?”

  “Generator isn’t running. Figure KGR has them turn it off so they can get signal out. If they start it back up, I might not get to finish this talk.”

  I thought about Jess saying it was no rush, but really, we were just lucky at this point.

  “Are you in a safe location to monitor?” I asked.

  “About as safe as can be,” Linda said, her voice quiet over the radio. “We’ve been sitting here an hour observing. Here’s the GPS coordinates.”

  She read them off, and Jessica wrote them down furiously, her brow furrowed.

  “That’s the direction you said Young’s team was heading in,” I said.

  “They had to have drove right past this,” Jay’s voice broke in over the radio. “I’ve got hinky feeling about things.”

  “Could this be a trap?” Jessica asked.

  “I don’t know…” Jay said. “I’m worried I haven’t seen a roving patrol though. The KGR is supposed to be full of pros, but with all the conscripts…”

  He let the words hang there. The lack of patrol and only three folks at the gen set made it look like a nice fat target… but it could also be a trap… or it could be that discipline was slipping, or that… I shook my head.

  “What do you think, Girl Scout?” Linda asked.

  “It might be nice if we took that equipment and brought it back here,” Jessica said after a moment. “See what Archangel can do with it?”

  “Would it give us the same capabilities as the KGR?” I asked her.

  “Possibly, and the rest of the communications gear that has been bolted to this tower would greatly upgrade what we’ve got at the homestead…”

  “Do you need re-enforcements?” I asked her.

  “No, you keep your foot up and your knuckles on ice,” Linda said, making me look at my bruised hands. “We’ll sit tight and observe until after dark.”

  “You know Girl Scout and I can be on the road, or come in hard with Rolling Thunder,” I said thinking of the nickname Curt had given the APC.

  “The spotters at the edge of our territory would call that in. It’d leave the appearance that the homestead is helpless. Might provoke an attack.”

  “Maybe we should think about that another way,” I said softly.

  “You mean… oh, I got it. You know, Girl Scout, you picked the right man. That’s devious.”

  Jessica was grinning, but shaking her head.

  “…and his legend grows…” Jay’s voice crackled out of the radio.

  “Oh, eat a bag of di—”

  A smack to the back of the head had me wincing, and Grandma was staring at me with a stern face, one hand pointing to the couch where Mary was reading to herself.

  “Have they heard from my mommy?” Mary asked, looking up.

  I held up one finger. “Any sign or word from Angry Princess?” I asked over the chuckles, hoping my transmission went through.

  “Negative,” Linda said. “Not sure she’d know to be on this channel. We’re encrypted too. She wasn’t around when we changed codes last two times.”

  “Mary was asking,” Jessica said, breaking in.

  “Tell her we’ll be home before too long,” Linda said. “We’re going to bed down to watch and make sure there aren’t watchers, watching the watched, looking for folks, looking for the lookers.”

  “Um… ok?”

  “We’ll report back in later on. We’re going to wait and see if these guys get relieved, and see if we can hit them or not,” Jay said. “Jaybird and ‘Lil Momma out until after the action. Don’t want to get DF’d.”

  “Over ‘n out,” Jessica said, then turned down the volume on the radio.

  “I heard,” Mary said, going back to her book.

  “What was that idea you had?” Jessica asked. “The devious plan?”

  “Let’s go for a walk,” I said. “Mary, want to play checkers when we get back?”

  “Yes!” she said jumping up, pumping a fist in the air up and down.

  “I’ll get it set up,” Grandma said. “You two won’t be talking too long, will you?” she asked, a smirk on her face.

  “No, planning a mass murder on a war crimes scale won’t take me long to explain,” I said softly.

  Both Jessica and Grandma flinched.

  It’d taken some time to convince two of the dogs to mind, but we left Raider and Diesel back at the homestead. Jessica had put on our camo, gotten our long guns which, in all honestly, were never more than a few feet from us unless we were in the house, and then we walked up the hill and across the street. I went slowly, walking quietly.

  Running the shine hadn’t taken all day, but rewiring some of the solar so I could run the pumps had taken me a half an hour, and I hadn’t wanted to fire everything up while folks were sleeping in the morning. Now? It was late afternoon.

  I swatted at a mosquito and watched Yaeger move ahead of us, nearly a silent ghost himself. Jessica had switched to hand signals with him. I knew she was getting impatient, and the second time she rubbed her hands on her arms, I noticed that she had goosebumps.

  “You ok?” I asked her.

  “It’s just that… I’ve started thinking about how much things have changed. How folks have had to adapt and change themselves.”

  “I know,” I said softly, wondering if she was thinking the same thing I was.

  “Here’s a good spot,” she said softly and gave a low whistle, then used one finger and made a large circle overhead while looking at Yaeger.

  He disappeared into the bushes, just as silent as before. I hunkered down and sat down on the leaf litter. Jessica joined me, then leaned into me. We could still see the homestead down the hill, but we’d gone in the direction of the Crater of Diamonds, off the main trail we’d used to come and go. We also could see the road in both directions for a couple hundred yards, between the trees and brush.

  “Mass Murder…” Jessica said, by the way of opening.

  “I had a thought while we were talking to your mom,” I said softly.

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “Every time we’ve gone against Spider directly, he’s been one step ahead of us. He’s trapped us in what we thought were traps, with one exception… when we booby trapped his caches.”

  “You thinking of going after more of
them?” Jessica asked.

  “Well yeah, eventually. But what if what we did looked like a trap, and when he went to trap us back, he finds himself in an even worse trap?”

  “How do we do that?” Jessica asked.

  “Wait, I’m not quite done,” I said to her. “Just when they realize they’ve been boxed in, we really spring the big trap and kill most of the fighting men, conscripts and all?”

  “What about the innocents?” Jessica asked.

  “I think I’ve found a way to harm as few as possible. I’d love if nobody got hurt, but I’ve been thinking about what you said. Every day, he’s killing, torturing and raping folks. He’s trading slaves, drugging people, probably brainwashing others.”

  “So how do you minimize innocents losing their lives?” Jessica asked.

  “Remember when I told Spider that I would poison the water, drop gas on them, blah blah blah?”

  “There you go with that hillbilly speak again,” Jessica said quietly, but a serious look covered her features.

  I looked to my left as I realized Yaeger had made a complete circle around us, on patrol. Jessica repeated the gesture, and he kept going.

  “It wouldn’t take much. Some glyphosate or pesticides in the water supply. It’d make them sicker than a dog, but only the very old or the very, very young would be at risk…” I said quietly, hating that thought.

  “Which they don’t keep. Last word is they’re shooting older folks and trading the youngest kids…”

  “Right. So, I’d cause everyone to have a milk of magnesia moment… well, more like a few days until they figured out it wasn’t dysentery and filtered the water better. Actually, causing everyone to get sick might actually trigger an outbreak like that… but it’ll take Spider thirty-seconds to blame me.”

  “Because you told him you would do it, if he kept provoking us.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “He’d be forced to react. We take the APC for a drive, like we’re moving in on the edges of his territory. He’d either go for that or the homestead, but I’m guessing he’d go for the homestead if he thinks most of us are attacking elsewhere. That’s when we know he’s got the fighting men separated from his civilians. That’s when we gas them.”