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Leaving Highway 193 the road was decent as the local roads went. Mostly they were clay gravel from nearby Crowleys Ridge, the only economical material readily available. Sources for chat and crushed rock were close to a hundred miles away. Reggie Browning was accustomed to rough roads lately, sometimes no roads. This one was apparently maintained better than most, or not abused as much. Farm equipment was rough on roads. His '75 Chevy Scottsdale had slightly larger-than-stock tires and a couple of inches of added ground clearance but not as much as many of the local trucks. The absence of holes or washboarding made it a smoother ride. He turned at about a mile, because the road turned. A narrow dirt road continued straight, but his destination wasn't there. Another mile and the road dipped, close to ten feet, maybe more, over the distance of a couple hundred yards, before resuming its original elevation. He was close, and shortly saw the southeast corner marker. It was just a six-inch treated post, six feet or so high. A band of yellow paint about six inches wide marked the top. OK, about another mile to the north line. Brushy Lake was on a section of land in the north corner of Crane County. He was driving along the edge of that square mile. His destination was at the northeast corner. The road dipped again and this time stayed low for a while, rising again as he sighted the row of grain bins. Four old bins, tall but not as wide as newer ones. Weathered and faded but looking in good shape. About a hundred yards later the road ended. A short driveway led to an old house, in good shape for its age. Reggie knew it was over sixty years old. Two cars were in the garage, three more were parked on the large front lawn. There was room for more so he parked the Scotty and got out. A couple of people were in chairs on the front porch remained seated as he approached. One of them had a large cat on her lap, the other one was busy cleaning his pipe. Reggie sat down in the empty chair beside the woman with the cat. "Hiya, Chivas," he said. The cat gazed at him with perhaps a mild interest. Or none at all, with cats one never knows. "He gets lazier every day," the woman said. "Don't know what I'm gonna do with him." "He ain't even big enough to eat if things go south," the man said. "Reckon we ought to try to fatten'em up?" "Maybe it won't get that bad," Reggie replied. "How's things out here?" The cat woman was Miranda, the pipe guy was her husband William. Will to intimates. Miranda was a handsome forty-something, casually dressed in jeans and a khaki shirt with cowboy boots somewhere below fancy but not plain. Her shoulder-length black hair looked like she'd just been to the salon but he knew better. They went into town maybe once a week, but Miranda seldom looked like she spent all of her time fifteen miles out in the sticks. Unless she was wearing BDUs and patrolling the perimeter or feeding the chickens. That was mostly done by the help, but she and William a kept their fingers in everything on the square mile that made up their domain. Their four teenaged kids helped keep a family eye on things as well. "Been waitin' for you," Will said. "Thought you mighta got lost." "All those gravel roads look alike - I thought I might have to use the nav thing on my phone," Reggie replied, "but I got here. Phil said you wanted to show me some stuff, figured it's been three or four months, what is it? Anyhow, here I am." Philip Caldwell was the closest thing to a boss Reggie had. He was committed to winning, and working for Philip's outfit seemed the best place to do it. So far he hadn't been asked to do anything he found odius. "Sam Blackwell wants to get you input on some work," he'd said. "I'd like you to have a look, help where you can. And give me a rundown when you get back." It seemed as good a way to spend a few days as any other. The war was pretty much a stalemate for now, and had been for a while. The folks out in Texas hadn't laid out a plan so there was no need for him to be making any. "Time to get going," Miranda said to Chivas Regal. The big Persian-Siamese cat stretched lazily and hopped down. Will had been filling his pipe and lit it before he got up. "Come on in," said Miranda. She opened the door and held it for him. Will followed him in. The big room was paneled in oak, half-inch sheets cut from big trees from an old forest - a hundred acres or so of which was still standing - and cut at a nearby sawmill. The mill, long gone, had milled the wood for a lot of houses in the area. Will's grandfather had had the wood for this house milled there. The panels were two to three feet wide, deliberately cut in varying widths. The room would have been rather gloomy without the white ceiling. "Grab some seats," Miranda said. "Reggie, want something to drink? It's after noon, barely." "Yeah, guess I could use a snort." Miranda disappeared into the kitchen. Will took a draw on his pipe and looked at Reggie. Will was quite a bit older than Miranda, Reggie figured twenty years or close to it. "Ashtray there if you want to smoke," he said. Reggie didn't smoke indoors at home, but if Will was good with it... He took out a package of Merrimack cherry vanilla cigars and lit one. He'd been wanting a smoke since he left Jonesboro. Miranda brought a tray with three glasses of what looked like brandy and handed one to Reggie and one to Will before sitting in the third of the four chairs that surrounded the large circular glass cocktail table. On one side of the fireplace a large glass case, about three by four feet, held a collection of arrowheads. Will noticed his look. "Several old Indian sites here," he said. "Couple real close, one just out the back door about a hundred yards, other about quarter mile up the road. Dad picked those up, you still find them out there, when the field's been plowed and rained on." "I guess Philip wants a status report," said Miranda. "Has he got something planned?" "Nothing specific," Reggie replied. "But he doesn't tell me everything and I don't ask. He likes to be prepared." "Yeah. Well, so do we. It's a little late to run the perimeter, we can do that tomorrow. We've done some improvements here since you were here last. Way things are going, and what happened last winter, we figured some capacity upgrades were in order here." A large covered patio on the back of the house overlooked a grassy field that extended a couple of hundred yards. To the right was a cluster of small outbuildings, to the left were three small houses that hadn't been there on his last visit. "We started on them in February," Will said. "As soon as it was dry enough to work. Still had a snow and pretty cold, but we didn't want a crowd getting snowed in again." Reggie had dropped off Nathan Johnson just before winter arrived. Johnson had been locked up for over three years in a detention center with about five or six thousand other "insurrectionists". During a breakout at one of the facilities he had managed to stay escaped and hooked up with the resistance, who contacted their Alliance liaison and asked for help getting him to the rebel states. Reggie had met the extraction team in west Tennessee. They had picked Johnson up at a safe house in Bristol, Virginia and while waiting to get him across the state line the pursuers caught up with them. A shootout left three of them dead and several wounded. His liberators lost one but got him safely across the line. Reggie had driven him across the length of Tennessee and into Arkansas. A five hour drive gave them time to talk a lot, and on the way they learned of their own casualty. Johnson had been subdued the rest of the way, knowing what his freedom had cost his liberators. He dealt with it, and being able to use his experience to produce anti-regime propaganda helped. And leading the regime agents on wild-goose chases. They wanted him back badly, and his appearance in videos describing the experiences of the prisoners in the gulags as they were being called. He seemed like a good guy and Reggie was looking forward to seeing him again. He had spent the winter in a small house near where Will and Miranda lived. So had a dozen more guests who got stranded by snow and spent almost four weeks there. The electricity was off much of the time and resources had been strained. "These are all the same," Will said. "Two thousand square feet, four bedrooms with attached bath. Depending on how well they get along we can put a half dozen or more in each house. Each one has its own septic tank and water coming in from a new well. "We got crews of Mexicans to put in that one and two more. Waste disposal is a bigger problem than water or electricity, so there's a building out back with a couple of portapotties. And if it gets real primitive, we got this." They were behind the house they had been examining. The PortaPotty shelter had a large water tank beside it, Reggie guessed its capacity at a thousand gallons or more. Reggie pointed toward a small group of trees. Reggie followed him over to it. "Old-fashioned outhouses," Will said. "Have a look inside." Reggie obliged. He had seen one or two outhouses, this one was a little better. All treated lumber, a stack of toilet paper rolls, and a small sink bolted to the wall. "Nice," he said. "How does the plumbing work?" "It doesn't yet. For now we can bring in water for washing, if they ever have to be used. We'll probably put tanks here, like the portables. But we're prepared for the worst. There's four of these, and we hope to never have to use them." "Some people on the other side may need some before long," said Reggie. "I hear things are getting bad some places." "Yeah. Things breaking down faster than they can fix'em. Some of our people behind the lines hide out in the sticks, see what's goin' out there. There's some angry people over there, and scared. They get a little hungrier and when winter comes colder, the government's gonna have some problems." "Are there really enough to do any damage?" asked Reggie. "Well, they're maybe ten million scattered all over the countryside compared to concentrations of millions in the cities, the cities are the more immediate problem. So they don't have the resources to keep the millions of square miles of next to nothing under surveillance. They have to rely on informants - there's few of them and getting fewer - and getting lucky once in a while." "The cities were bad last winter," Miranda said. "It should be entertaining." "Yeah," said Will, "they had some small disturbances. Food distribution wasn't up to the former standards, and it got nasty a few times. Add in power outages for days at a time, guys in Detroit said they had over a thousand troops in there, several casualties. Cordoned off some areas and herded people into them, just made them angrier but they didn't have to shoot too many to settle them down." Reggie had heard the same about Philadelphia, and hadn't wasted any time thinking about it. Millions of people who had never worked a day in their lives and had been fed, clothed and housed by the labor of others and got angry when it ended. "The ones in Memphis acted up some," said Miranda. "And they were better off, just didn't like being inconvenienced. Further up the river in East St. Louis they were on the Illinois side, and them hungry and in the dark, it got ugly." The Memphis utilities infrastructure had been a joke for decades, he knew. Like Detroit. Well, they got what they voted for. He'd been through East St. Louis once and that was enough. The Tennessee governor had sent the National Guard to maintain order, and a fair-sized private security force protected its the neighborhoods of its employers. There had been a couple of incidents early on, but the locals got the message quickly. "We've got time to go see Nathan if you want," Miranda said. "We told him you were coming. I'll see if he's up for it." "Sounds good," Reggie replied. Miranda took out her phone and called, spoke briefly. "He's good for any time," she reported. "We can take one of the electric mules." The mules were four-seat side-by-side that looked home-built. "They are," Will said when he inquired. "We built a couple to use around here close, they battery's good for about five or six hours the way we use them. Want to drive?" "Sure," replied Reggie. It was like driving an electric golf cart, with four wheel drive and more ground clearance. Will and Miranda got in the front passenger seat and Miranda got in the back. "Take a left out of the drive," said Will. "A few hundred yards on the right." The only thing at that location was an old barn, the lower part of which was constructed of concrete blocks. The top looked weathered but in good shape. "Cypress," Will said. "Barn's been here probably sixty years or better. Lasts forever, some folks tear down old barns and use the lumber to build houses. Must be some kind of foundation there, not but one little crack, around on the back." An early Dodge Dakota and what looked like a World War II jeep were parked in front. "Vietnam anyway," Will replied to his comment. "Maybe Korea. There's about a dozen here, Nathan's girlfriend drives it. He drives the Dakota." "He's already got a girlfriend?" asked Reggie. "Nice kid, one of Jake McKnight's clan. You remember him." "Your mechanical genius." "He is that. Built the mules, whatever we need he can do it. Jennifer is his grand-niece, one of his brother's kids' daughter. We took Nathan up to get a vehicle and she took a shine to him. She helped him get set up and showed him around, now she's up here all the time." Jennifer was a twenty-something, Reggie guessed, not tall but a little over average. Willowy, long ash blonde hair. Pretty too, but not too pretty. Country girl. "Hi guys," she greeted them. "Who's our guest?" "This is Reggie," said Nathan. "He drove me here from Virginia when they broke me out." "Thanks Reggie," Jennifer said. "That was quite an operation." "I had the easy part," said Reggie. "It was an easy drive, they had a couple of escorts and the THP kept an eye on us all the way. Only possible trouble spot was Memphis, and that's pretty much under control these days." "You're looking good," Reggie said to Nathan. "Hope you feel as good." "I do, thanks," Nathan replied. "Jen's helped a lot. Come on in." The interior of the barn had been converted into a spacious and comfortable-looking living quarters. They sat down in a group of chairs arount a cocktail table. "Can I get ya'll something?" Jennifer asked. "Nathan was about to have a beer. We've got a well-stocked bar, being in the business." A small warehouse on the estate had a considerable supply of liquor and tobacco, some of it imported through Mexico and some domestically produced. Since most whiskey was produced in Alliance states not much was getting out, except to supply the growing black market, and bribes. Same with tobacco, as south of the border imports had to pass through Alliance territory. That black market was fed by stashes like Will's. "House is fine," Will replied. "Let me help you," said Miranda. She followed Jennifer into the adjoining room. "How's the work going?" Will asked Nathan. "Pretty well," Nathan replied. "The videos we shot a couple of weeks ago are spreading, they're even on the regime news. Branded as disinformation of course. The book is finished, Jen is helping me edit and proof it." "Can't wait to read it," Reggie said. "Even though I know it won't be pleasant." Jennifer and Miranda reappeared, each carrying a small tray with drinks. "Peach brandy from Holleman," said Jennifer. "Handy since we're practically neighbors." Among the properties owned by Holleman Farms was a large vineyard on Crowleys Ridge. The family was in its seventh or eighth generation in the area, depending on whether the current youngest had produced any offspring. Nominally a local Reggie was familiar with their product. The peaches came from orchards owned by them. They distributed glasses and sat down. "I was telling Reggie and Will about the book," said Nathan. "We should be ready to distribute a few copies for review in the next two weeks," Jennifer said. "When they've read it and given any feedback we'll look at any revisions or corrections." "Nathan said the videos were getting some notice," said Reggie. "It'll be interesting to see what kind of reaction the book gets." "All the resistance sites are eagerly waiting," Jennifer said. "We're looking at having some copies printed - trade paperback size - and send them out to the resistance cells." "Give the enemy more work to do," Will said. "Confiscating and burning them." Laughs all around. They did try to round up any printed material and dispose of it, as if the few thousand pamphlets, all of which were merely printed versions of the digital content being read by hundreds of thousands, millions actually - were making much of a difference. No, it was the symbol. The physical object a reminder to them of their impotence. Of course, the printed item sometimes found its way into the hands of some who weren't resisting, yet. Reggie knew a lot of people were just keeping their heads down and hoping it would be over soon. Each day a few more of them finally admitted to themselves that it wouldn't. "Reggie may want to take a few on his next trip," said Will. "He likes to poke the bear." "At least they aren't executing people yet," said Reggie. "But they may not be far from it. And in the gulags they've killed plenty." "That's part of the book," said Nathan. "Chapter and verse. How much good it will do... anyway, they deserve to have their story told." "We've been talking about doing a regular live show," said Jennifer. "We an set up here, have some of the resistance cells that are able to have regular sessions. Those that are willing, I know it's risky." "There are some that are pretty good at evasion," Reggie said, "and would like to get in on it. It will give the regime some more wild geese to chase." The regime's best efforts had not been able to shut town the resistance. The communications infrastructure couldn't be completely controlled without breaking it, and the resistance - with some help from the Republic and the Alliance - was able to communicate with both and among themselves. "They don't have much to chase with," said Reggie. "They got lucky when I went to pick you up, Nathan. If one of their agents hadn't gotten his orders wrong and showed up at the wrong place at the wrong time they'd never have known where to find you." Nathan was silent. He's a sensitive type, Reggie thought. Argenta cell lost a man, he's feeling guilt. Natural. "Any way I can help," Nathan said. "The people I left behind are going to be there until this is over." "Every day brings the end a little closer," said Will. "Sometimes it doesn't seem like it, but they're losing ground steadily, and never getting any back." "What brings you out here?" asked Nathan. "Our head shed back in Amarillo said Will might want me to take a look-see at something he's working on," Reggied replied. "I haven't gotten around to asking what it is, he'll probably tell me when he's ready." "No rush," said Will. "Reg hasn't had a tour of the farm, figured I'd show him around first." "It's a big place," Nathan said. "I haven't seen that much of it." "Want to go along?" asked Miranda. "No, maybe I'll be caught up soon and can take some time off." "How safe is he here?" Reggie asked when they were back at the house. "I suspect even as thin as the regime's resources are spread if they could find out where he is they might like to do something about him." "Yeah," Will replied. "If they could find him. Especially since they lost three of their goons when we extracted him. But if they manage to trace him we're keeping an eye on him 24/7. There's a Sabretooth platoon here, rotates every two weeks. Up on that mound about a half a click away is an observation post. They have this sector covered, manned by a six-man squad. They see anything unauthorized approaching that barn they'll deal with it." "I guess he keeps the doors locked," said Reggie. "Yeah, he's cautious. And that place has been hardened, be tough to crack. It also has an underground escape route. Not that he would need it - I can have another fifty to sixty men over there quickly if needed. But the Sabres are more than enough. "We have time to get down to the south end and back before dark. Want to go?" "Sure." At the south end a house and several outbuildings occupied a fenced area of several acres. "Bill Peterson lives here," Will said. "He usually has a girlfriend with him. Whether it's always the same one I don't know. He keeps an eye out here, monitors the sensors and cameras. Infiltration is a real threat. Anything head this way should be detected before it gets here but if it does we'll know it." Bill Peterson was about Reggie's age, lanky with a generous mustache
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