Free State Of Dodge Page 2

  He eased the door to its halfway point and saw his mother standing on the other side of the screen door with her hands on her hips, looking up from her five feet four inches to his six feet one inch with a look of disgust on her face. Not wanting her to think he was overly paranoid, he decided not to mention the knife he had brought to his own front door for protection during daylight hours and left it in his pocket under the tail of his untucked shirt. Before he could say anything, she howled, “Jackson Everett Pike!”

  He almost instinctively cringed, briefly flashing back to childhood, when he had received plenty of tongue-lashings and ass bustin’s. He wasn’t ashamed to be afraid of his mother. Though short, she could still strike fear into the hearts of grown men and had brought some of them almost to tears. He realized he needed to say something to break the tension, so, being a sarcastic jackass and a sucker for punishment, he mockingly grabbed his hips and yelled back, “Denise Charlene Stevens Pike!”

  He had hoped the mention of her forbidden middle name would embarrass some of the anger out of her, but instead it made the fire in her eyes grow stronger. With no foreseeable option left, he simply dropped his head to stare down at his socked feet and asked in a defeated voice, “What did I do, Mama?”

  He opened the screen door for her and gestured to her to enter while she explained his crime. Apparently she was upset over the small American flag he had turned upside down and placed on top of the post of one of the iron gates leading to the driveway on their property. He relaxed now, realizing he had not committed an irreversible, heinous act and that this situation could have been solved with a mere phone call rather than a visit with her fiery wrath. Hell, it wouldn’t have bothered him if she had just turned the flag over herself without asking him.

  He explained to her how the upside-down flag was his personal protest of the government’s new gun laws and confessed that he believed the country was in dire straits.

  “That may be so,” she began with conviction, “but that marks you as a dissenter, and the wrong people could see that.”

  Throughout Jackson’s life, he had always known his mother had conservative values, but until this moment he had always assumed she was moderate compared to him and his father (who generally shared most of the same political beliefs). Now he instantly saw his mother in a new light—not as a moderate, sitting on the fence and caving to any liberal demands of social progress, but as a true American clinging to guns and religion. With this new revelation, he looked her in the eye, nodded an okay and, having not walked far from the front door since she had entered, turned and stepped into his Wellington boots and walked out the door to the gate where the flag in question rested.

  He reached the post where the flag had been fixed, pulled it toward himself as he simultaneously turned the small flag post right side up, and set it back in its former position. That was probably the smallest detail he had ever gotten chewed out for but also the easiest to solve.

  After completing his task, he turned and began to walk back to his house, not following the curving chert driveway but staying on the footpath from his front door to the gate. There was no official footpath, but since he walked from his front door to the mailbox nearly every day, you could see a beaten trail in the grass if you knew what to look for.

  Since it was one of his days off, he wasn’t in any sort of hurry. Almost at the exact halfway point of the near-football-field length between the gate and his house (he knew the distance because he had measured it painstakingly with a tape measure), he stopped to watch one of his father’s large Charolais cows. It was reaching its head up to wrap its tongue around and pull an apple from the short crabapple tree growing at one of the many corners of the fence that divided the shared ten-acre yard. This was where his father’s three chicken houses had been in the vast, seventy-acre expanse of open grassland, muddy ponds, and scattered woods that made up the pasture. Watching this bovine reaching for a precious apple was amusing for some reason, and it made Jackson smile and wonder what apples tasted like to cows.

  As Jackson’s smile faded, he started his walk back to the house with an easy pace. Suddenly the screen door flung open, revealing his mother with a look of horror on her face. “Shit!” He grumbled to himself, wondering what he could be in trouble for this time. Even though he was a good distance away, the intrusion into the silence of his walk had startled him, and he was almost offended by it. After a few short seconds of seeing his mother’s face, he could see fear in her eyes, and he knew he had not done anything to piss her off but that she needed him for something.

  He had already quickened his pace to a jog before she hollered, “Jackson! Hurry!”

  By the time he reached the door, she had retreated to the couch to watch the TV (which she had unmuted). As he entered and realized his mother was not in any danger, his jaw unclenched, and his muscles relaxed. With a question mark on his face, he walked around to face the TV and stood by his recliner.

  The only thing he picked up from the broadcast was that a group had infiltrated the Capitol building and that shots had been fired. He looked to his mother with a stupefied expression and opened his mouth to ask what was going on as she blurted out, “Hollis! I hope he’s OK.” She pulled out her smart phone and began dialing without taking her eyes off the TV. She was apparently talking about Jackson’s seventeen-year-old cousin, Denise’s oldest sister’s son.

  Jackson and Hollis had never been extraordinarily close (considering the decade of years between them), but they were close enough that they had been on hunting trips together several times and even had nicknames for each other. Jackson wasn’t Jack, Sonny, Stonewall, or even Pike to anyone he knew. If you lived within the confines of his world, if anyone ever mentioned Jackson, you knew to whom they were referring. Jackson was sure his namesake was General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, but he could not be positive whether his father was named after the president of the Confederate States of America (Jefferson Davis) or the founding father and second president of the United States (Thomas Jefferson). He was sure he had asked and received the correct answer more than once in his life; he just never remembered the answer. His grandfather, Robert Edward Lee “Uncle Bob” Pike, had been named after a Confederate hero, so Jackson decided his father’s namesake was obviously Davis. Between the two cousins, they were Jacky and Holly, even though Jackson grinned every time he called his cousin by that name. Hollis grudgingly accepted the nickname after realizing it was only fair, since he had given Jackson one. The two agreed to forever keep the nicknames a secret between them and never to use them in front of anyone else.

  Jackson snapped back to reality and tried to pretend he wasn’t a little bit worried. “I’m sure he’s fine, Mama. Just call Janet and see if she knows what’s going on,” he said, reminding his mother that she could call his aunt even though he knew that was what she was doing. He sat down on the arm of his chair and leaned in to listen to the news alerts on TV, distantly hearing his mother start a phone conversation with his aunt and stand to go find a quiet room, leaving Jackson alone with the TV.

  The newscaster was reporting over flashes of video of the scene in the Capitol building that were obviously taken from C-SPAN cameras, and Jackson could not tell if audio accompanied the recordings because of the reporter’s continuous, frantic ramblings. From the video Jackson could see a large man with sandy-blond hair with an assault weapon in his hand step up to the podium and begin to pull a paper from his pocket. Jackson had never professed to be a decent lip reader, so he had no idea what the man was saying. As the feed shot back and forth from the nervous anchor to the recorded footage to the scene that had just unfolded in DC, the reporter claimed there were only six reported deaths, including the four gunmen. I hope Hollis wasn’t one of them. According to reports, Secret Service or some type of government SWAT team had ended the situation before it escalated.

  Still glued to the TV, Jackson didn’t pay attention to his mother bursting into the room, until she triumphantly proclaime
d, “Hollis is okay! He’s talking to a trauma counselor or something right now.” She was breathing a little heavily from the short sprint from wherever she had been on the phone, which made Jackson turn to look at her and realize she was starting to show her age. He didn’t speak; he just nodded his head and turned back to the TV.

  His mother had always accused him and his father of being able to carry on a conversation without speaking. She said they could live their entire lives just nodding their heads, grunting, and pointing and never have to utter a single word. Jackson never was much of a talker, so he honestly would enjoy a world of mutes.

  They both watched the TV for a while longer, but with their personal senses of panic lifted. Denise decided it was time to go to “the big house.” Jackson didn’t really know why he had given it that name. It wasn’t exceptionally large; he had just started calling his parents’ house that when he had moved out into his current residence six years ago. With a hug and a promise to visit again soon, she was out the door with a loud bang from the screen door shutting behind her. He always found it funny when she mentioned she was going to “visit again,” because he always thought of their two houses as a single unit. He didn’t really consider it a traditional visit when you had to walk only a few hundred yards to reach either house. He switched off the TV, stepped to the front door to lock it, and turned to take the short walk to the garage door.

  Jackson’s house rested on the side of a short hill. At one time most of the pastureland in the area had been fields used to raise crops of cotton or corn, which were irrigated using steadily rising rows of terraces. The garage was built into the side of the terrace, and the heavy, hydraulically lifted door opened to a chert driveway that turned sharply to the right then to the right again after a few dozen yards, and up the terrace to join the main road leading to the main gate of the pasture and on to County Road 77.

  Opening the door and walking down the short flight of stairs, he noticed the sudden change in temperature. It was always cooler down here, and it seemed to wake him up more than a cup of coffee every day. He loved to feel the coolness radiate off the concrete.

  He flipped the light switch on the wall at the bottom of the stairs, and the three rows of florescent tubes that reached almost from one end of the garage to the other flickered to life and illuminated the room. His eyes quickly adjusted to the harsh white light, and he followed his intended path around his antique truck. When he had been planning to buy the vehicle, his father had automatically insisted he get an older model without electronic points in the motor. Jackson’s father subscribed to the belief that there would be an electromagnetic pulse within the next few years that would bring modern society to an abrupt halt (whether by a man-made nuclear weapon or an unstoppable solar flare). Jackson did not subscribe to this school of thought, even though it was a disastrous possibility, but rather that the government would collapse for any of a number of reasons, and they had to prepare to be self-reliant. Their opinions differed in ways, but both beliefs met at that point: prepare. Jackson decided if there was an EMP, he would not want to be discovered with a working vehicle, at least not for a long time. He liked the fact that his truck was sturdy and tested; that it ran on diesel was also a plus. The truck wasn’t the most aesthetically pleasing vehicle he had ever owned, but a full tank could get him to Texas (if he ever had a reason to go to Texas), the truck was unbelievably cheap, and Jackson loved cheap things even more than expensive things.

  As he thought about his trusty companion of a vehicle, with its thick tires and faded-green paint job, he moved around it to the wall opposite from the stairs, pushing a large, empty wooden spool (that he used as a makeshift table to work on small projects) to one side, and then he rolled the six-foot-tall metal tool cabinet (on wheels) to the other side. Stepping forward, he placed his hand on one of the cement-gray bricks that made up his garage, reached his fingers into a notch in the brick, and pulled, opening a camouflaged door that was unnoticeable to most, especially with the tool cabinet that hugged that space of the wall. Actually this façade wasn’t brick at all but a metal door with a modified handle. Covered with layers of rough, gray plaster to simulate the look of the rest of the room, it appeared to be nothing more to the untrained eye. Within this hidden door lay an unremarkable, solid-metal locked door. Jackson fumbled his key ring out of his Wranglers and unlocked all three industrial locks with separate keys. He turned the knob, pushing the door in and simultaneously reaching in to flip the light switch. This was his bunker, his panic room, his Batcave, his vault, and fewer than five people had ever been in this room. This was the one place Jackson could go if he felt threatened, either physically or by the weather.

  The room was about twelve by twelve, had a high ceiling, and consisted of the same concrete floor and cement-block walls as the rest of the garage. On one wall of his bunker were shelves lined with “just in case” foodstuffs: dehydrated eggs, powdered milk and juice, boxes of MREs, canned foods, and other foods with long-lasting shelf lives. To the left of the door were tall metal bookcases holding a Bible, a few entertaining novels, a dictionary, several survival guides, and a lot of room for later deposits. A section of the rear wall was lined with gun cabinets. The remaining wall and any other free space in the room contained gear, tools, and anything Jackson thought might be useful in a worst-case scenario. Skinning knives, huge boxes of matches, stacks of camouflage netting, and dozens of boxes of light sticks filled the space. The most recent (and most noticeable) addition to his various gear was a stack of folding army cots and a spool of razor wire he had bought at a discount from the military surplus store in Huntsville.

  He walked across the room to the shortest gun cabinet in the row, dropped to one knee, and began to unlock the cabinet with a key on the ring he was still holding. This was the fourth gun cabinet in the line. He always kept a revolver by his bed, but any trip off of the farm (even on days when he worked) required the ability to throw out more lead (even though lead bullets were becoming harder to find since the national lead-bullet ban was approaching its deadline).

  He opened the locker door and pulled out a G19, a Velcro ankle holster, and two full clips for the already-loaded gun and inserted them into their places in the holster. Still on one knee, he shut the cabinet door, pulled up his pant leg with the other hand, and strapped the holster around his ankle. He locked the pistol into place in the holster, straightened his jeans down around his boot, stood, and turned around to make his way to the door.

  After flipping a light switch as he exited the room, he shut the door and checked the locks to make sure they were secure, closed his fake door, and placed the tool cabinet and empty spool in their original places, rendering the entrance to his bunker once again an unnoticeable space in his garage. Today was the day, he had decided, to buy another firearm. There was nothing special about today; he had just saved money out of his paychecks and randomly chose an off day to go to the pawnshop. Having no reason to go back upstairs (since all of the doors were locked), he opened the door to his truck, pressed the button on the hydraulic garage door’s remote (which he had taped to the bottom of the steering column), and climbed into the driver’s seat as the doors screeched opened. He shifted into drive, pulled forward, and made his way down the long, twisting driveway and onto County Road 77. Jackson opened the gate, drove through it, exited his vehicle again to close it as he did every time he left the property, and climbed back into his truck to make the three-mile journey to the metropolis of Dodge.

  CHAPTER 2

  July 5

  JACKSON EASED HIS old truck onto the poorly maintained County Road 77 from his driveway. This road had seemed to run on into infinity when he was a child, starting from the other side of the highway and snaking past his house and all the way around the world, but it actually was only about seven miles long. Instead of heading to the highway, he turned the opposite direction, toward the winding back roads of Dodge, Alabama. The town was called “a wide spot in the road,” even by locals, a
nd was home to nothing more spectacular than a large school campus, a gas station, and a locally owned grocery store. Snaking the twisting back roads was actually faster than driving to reach the three-mile strip of highway, playfully called Downtown, where the only businesses of Dodge had congregated.

  His truck came to rest at the town’s sole traffic light, which had been installed just a few years back at the intersection of Highway 75 and Nazareth Road. On its installment the population of Dodge had considered the light a status symbol, proof that Dodge was an incorporated town, and even now it was referred to simply as “the red light.” Though there were rarely any vehicles on the highway—or traveling anywhere, for that matter—because of fuel shortages and inflated gas prices, the traffic light still went through its automatic cycle of colors.

  Looking left, he began to think of the city that lay twelve miles northeast, Maryton, which all the locals knew as Marton. He had plenty of time to think, since it took four forevers for this light to change. As he waited he fumbled for his cell phone and realized it was still plugged in on his nightstand. “Shit,” he mumbled. He had planned to call his best friend since childhood, Redstone, to fill him in on the situation in DC. The redhead was a police officer and the closest thing to an actual sheriff the town had. I’ll just call him later, he thought. He’s probably asleep in his police truck anyway.

  He almost cursed again when he glanced at his wrist to check the time; he had not worn a wristwatch since middle school. Why is this light still functional? There’s probably a better way to spend tax money than to power obsolete red lights. Well, it wasn’t totally obsolete, considering the few random privately owned eighteen-wheelers, FEMA trucks, and military vehicles that came through the town. Actually, he thought that could be why it was still running and why it was green for the highway most of the time. Then the idea came to him that it could be using a small solar panel and retrieved most of its energy from the sun. The words solar panel turned his mind to thoughts of his father’s house, with its many solar panels, and how his father always talked about how he would never be without electricity, but Jackson had never considered renovating his own house for solar power—not because either of them was or was not environmentally friendly but because Jackson had decided in the event that the power grid did collapse, he could survive comfortably without electricity.