Arks of America Page 12

  “That’s a hard one. Something tells me you reached a breaking point.”

  “I guess I did. Last night we had what had to be the tenth meeting at the empty firehouse near the school. I asked them to bring one car per household and be ready for some huge news.”

  Jeff leaned in. “Really? That would have gotten me curious.”

  “I asked Luke, one of my neighbors and a coworker, to get everyone settled in. He agreed to go through some of the standard BS and make excuses for me being a few minutes late. After I saw most of the cars crammed into the parking lot and an adjacent field, I parked my own truck in the lot and walked back down the road to the bottom of Highway 1793 and dropped some trees over the road with my chainsaw. It was a spot a little before the road that went through a section with cliffs and woods on both sides. There was no way to get around the blockade. Then I walked back up to where 1793 intersects with a road that goes by Creasy Mahan Park just past the subdivision’s entrances, before the old firehouse, and dropped a few more trees over the road there too.”

  “Smart move, though I’m guessing many of them didn’t see it that way,” Jeff said, fully enjoying the story now.

  “I told them I had one big piece of news and one request, knowing many of them might see it as a demand. I said they could call the law and file an official complaint once police started responding again. Then I told them about the trees I dropped to block us all in there, and if one limb on those trees got cut or moved, I’d find the son of a bitch who did it and make him shovel rocks and dirt over the road ten feet tall at gunpoint.”

  Hardly able to contain his mirth, Jeff said, “Damn, Vince, you don’t play around!”

  “They threatened me. I even thought a few of them might charge me. Honestly, I don’t know what I would have done if they had. I just stood there and didn’t say a word. Then Luke said they should listen to my request, and they could debate after. I told them by that night I expected to see a roster of every able-bodied man inside the barriers between the ages of twenty and sixty to patrol the main roads, the car lot at the old fire house outside the barriers, and homes within the barricades in groups of two in two-hour shifts. I didn’t expect all the men to have guns and said they could carry a walkie talkie or a whistle if they preferred. Those men who owned weapons were welcome to carry them. They should also create a rapid response team for emergencies,” Vince explained, losing himself in the reverie…

  Vince stepped off the chair, and the crowd erupted in chaos. People screamed and yelled and shook their fists.

  “How dare he?” a woman shouted.

  A man yelled, “You can’t get away with this!”

  Vince stood there a few moments. Luke was trying to talk to him, but he couldn’t hear what he was saying over the bedlam.

  After a while, the crowd started to quiet, and one man yelled, “Who cares about your patrol? You won’t know who joins or not. We don’t have to follow your orders.”

  “You’re taking a big chance if you don’t participate,” Vince said calmly. “You’re banking on the fact that, number one, I won’t find out, and number two, society will get back on track soon and you’ll have policemen to help protect you from me.”

  “Big talk,” the blustery man said.

  “You’re right. I don’t normally talk this way or make threats. Most of the time I don’t care what happens to you and your neighbors. But I will not stand by and see another home invasion, rape, or murder when I know damn well how to stop it. Yes, it’s big talk, and I can back it up. Anyone is welcome to try me if they want. Although, before you get angry and do something you’ll regret, you need to think about this… If you don’t participate in defending this community, you’re tacitly condoning the thefts, rapes, murders, and beatings of your neighbors. All you have to give to show that you don’t condone it is a few hours of your time every few days. Is that truly so much to ask? If I wasn’t the one asking and someone else had brought this up in a better way, would you still be pushing back?”

  Vince got the impression they were starting to think, and that was good. “I know you hate me right now. However, this wasn’t going to happen if I didn’t do it this way. When you calm down, you’ll realize that. Most homes still have power. We can share food on a volunteer basis. There are still some places to get food out in the country. I’ll help with that. This will make us safer for the time being. As soon as the authorities get control of the city, I’ll personally clean up the trees and then you can file charges against me.”

  The room erupted into a cacophony of voices all speaking at once, although this time they spoke more to each other and in less threatening tones.

  When Vince headed toward the door, a woman up front stood. “Surely you don’t expect my boys to man the blockade? They’re kids and still in school.”

  “Of course we won’t make children pull patrol. Why would you worry we would make them join the neighborhood patrol?” Vince asked her.

  “You said anyone over twenty, and they are twenty-two and twenty-five. They’re only boys in school. They still live at home with me while they go to college.”

  After a brief flash of anger, Vince shook his head at the absurdity of it. Finally, without saying a word, he walked out, motioning for Luke to follow him.

  “Luke, I’m going to get out of here and check on a project down in Carrollton. I suspect it will be easier to get everyone calmed down if I’m gone.”

  “Okay, but you are coming back, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I’ll be back tonight. It might be late, though. My dogs are outside in the yard to protect the house. They won’t leave the yard. The invisible fence is powered with solar panels and should still be hot just in case. Will you do me a favor and check on them and my house periodically?”

  “Sure, Vince, but I don’t think they’ll do your patrol idea. What will you do if you come back and they don’t? Surely, you’re not going to drag them out of their homes and beat them up. That’s rather barbaric, isn’t it?” Luke was clearly stressed out and a little incredulous.

  “Rape and murder is barbaric,” Vince retorted. “Bullying someone into patrolling their neighborhood to prevent those rapes, murders, and thefts is merely an annoyance they can recover from.”

  “What will you do if they don’t participate?” Luke pressed.

  “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. I’d be tempted to leave them to their own fates, although that’s not how I’m wired.” Impatient to leave, Vince asked, “Would you do me one more favor?”

  “Sure.”

  “Print off a roster with sign-up slots for three overlapping two-man patrols in two-hour segments for the next week. Either circulate it yourself or get a volunteer to do it. Add in a special patrol for the vehicle area near the old firehouse. We’ll need to plan for a ready response team for those trained in firearms.”

  “What if no one signs up?”

  “Then when I get back, I’ll circulate it myself, and you better believe I’ll get some volunteers.”

  Right then, two men walked out of the hall and volunteered for the patrol. They were neighbors of the family that had been brutalized, and both men had teenage daughters.

  “There’s your start,” Vince said to Luke. “When you and these men go door to door, you’ll fill up your roster faster than you expect.”

  With that, Vince walked to his truck and drove off. A little music and a forty-five-minute drive to the country was exactly what he needed.

  A quote from a paper he’d written in college kept churning through his mind that fit this situation. It was Horace who said, “Your own safety is at stake when your neighbor’s house is ablaze.”

  << Liz >>

  Liz had a whirlwind of activities going on around her. She was very busy most days and would often remind herself when she got stressed out that being this busy was much better than the alternative. Raised in a hard-working blue-collar farming family, she’d been taught to value hard work. Some of her family was skep
tical when she announced she was going into acting. It took seeing how steadily she worked and seeing her face on TV and in movies that convinced them what she was doing might actually work out. Her family didn’t want her “going all Hollywood,” as her grandmother put it.

  Her assistant was helping her pack for several trips. “Do I need this much?” Liz exclaimed. “I feel like an elderly matron stuffing steamer trunks for a trans-Atlantic Ocean voyage.”

  “Liz, you have a lot packed into the next several weeks. You may not be back here for a while,” Carol said patiently. “Better to have all this and not need it then need it and not have it. Besides, I’ll be there to make sure it all gets where it needs to go. I’ll get it unpacked and ready for you.”

  The first leg of her trip was to Nevada to wrap up filming on a movie she was starring in. While most of the rework had been done on a back lot in Hollywood, it would require about two weeks in the Lake Tahoe area to finish up.

  “Don’t forget to pack your fun clothes too, Carol. I promised you and the others we would stay an extra week for fun at the casinos and on the lake. I already told John to let the producer know we were going to do that and charge it all back to the studio. The weather is supposed to be good enough to get in some boating and lay out for some rays. I’m sure we can find a few good dance clubs in Reno.”

  “Fun,” Carol said enthusiastically. “Why not remind the studio from time to time how good they have it with you, to keep them on their toes? You could be more of a diva if you chose. You’ve always been very professional, and you’re not known as a difficult star. They should be more than happy to indulge you in an occasional extravagance.”

  “After Reno, you and others will fly back to Los Angeles for some downtime and to plan for some other upcoming work. I’ll fly on to Colorado for a private follow-up meeting with Dave Cavanaugh. I want some one-on-one time to get to know him better. I also wanted to see the South Park location he bragged about. His face lit up when he spoke of it.”

  “That sounds fun. It should be gorgeous.”

  “I’m interested to see how onerous the personal activities contribution would be. I don’t mind a little hard work. I enjoy getting my hands dirty sometimes. I only want to be sure I won’t be required to spend three months a year doing menial tasks while some member of the press could waltz in and snap pictures of me carrying table scraps or cleaning a toilet. I don’t want the headache of defending a story that could run saying Liz Pendleton joined some prepper commune or doomsday cult in the mountains.”

  “I agree. He wouldn’t get you into something like that, though, would he?”

  “It should be fine. I’ll feel better after I check it out, though. When I’m done there, I’ll slip into Kentucky and spend some time with my family on the farm. I miss Grandma Jean and my nieces and nephews. I love the downtime and taking walks, riding horses, and even helping with the farm. The time at home and doing those things, being among family and friends, kind of puts what I do for a living in perspective as a bit silly in the grand scheme of life.”

  “I guess,” Carol said speculatively.

  “It does for me. The perspective makes the work more fun during the high points and more tolerable during the low points after I go back to the rat race.”

  ***

  After some time back in Los Angeles, Liz would spend five months on location in Chicago doing a made for TV miniseries. Her agent convinced her it was a great role that fit her perfectly, and it would be a shame to turn it down. John’s enthusiasm had been contagious, and she’d gotten excited about it and signed the deal. Somewhere between there and here, the excitement had waned.

  Moreover, Chicago wasn’t the best place to be right now with the utilities failures, union strikes, and soaring crime rate. While crime was rampant in all major U.S. cities, Chicago appeared to be leading the pack, with murders per capita the highest in the nation. Knowing she would be well protected, Liz figured it would probably be fine; still, it was one more thing that took the joy out of this particular project.

  The utilities failures, riots, and police shootings had been going on for a while, never failing to cause a problem that somehow extended the shooting schedule. Liz was glad she didn’t have any international travel planned. With the new airport security in place and the upgraded terrorist alerts prompted by more frequent bombings in Europe, she would have been uncomfortable travelling outside the country.

  She rarely believed the news anymore. She was interested in current events in the U.S. and overseas but rarely bothered to turn on the TV or read online news anymore. The stories that were supposed to be news could have shared the same writing team as her movies. When she watched, it was purely for the entertainment value. Sometimes, though, she couldn’t help getting caught up in it. When a story pandered to her way of thinking, she read it avidly. When a story didn’t, she called it fake news. It didn’t take many cycles of that to make her cynical to the entire process. Sometimes she doubted any of the news was true. Knowing most mainstream news media came through a few finite sources, she hated the thought of being manipulated, so just turned it off and tuned it out.

  << Dave >>

  “Dave, hi. It’s Jeff.”

  “Good afternoon, Jeff.”

  “Hey. Things are going great here at the Carrollton site, but you were right about Vince. He turned down the job offer, although I could swear he wanted to accept.”

  “I didn’t think he’d take it. I needed you to ask, though, and find out for sure.” Dave sighed. “I genuinely need him to be a part of this. I know it’s his pride speaking. What are your thoughts, Jeff? You spoke with him face to face.”

  “I think he truly wants to join on a full-time basis. He probably would except for two things.”

  Dave’s curiosity piqued. “What’s that?”

  “First, to be honest, because you’re his uncle.” Few people held the confidence and trust with Dave to tell him something like that. “You’re right, that’s pride. He doesn’t want people thinking he owes his success to influence because of his last name.”

  “I get that.” Dave sighed. “I may need to talk to him. What’s number two?”

  “More pride, just of a different sort. While I don’t think he has a tremendous amount of love for his job, I do think he’s proud of what he does there. He will have a hard time leaving until he feels he has it whipped.”

  “Hell!” Dave snorted. “You don’t whip a job like that. You endure it.”

  “Yeah. That’s the pride coming out. He hasn’t decided he can’t whip it yet. He’s still trying to win. Every small success he has convinces him a win is right around the corner.”

  Dave saw enough of himself in Vince to understand his feelings. “Keep in touch. Anything you need down there, you’ve got carte blanche.”

  “Thanks, boss, we’re good here. This is no South Park, but it’s gorgeous in a whole other way. You’ll be proud of what we have here.”

  “Thanks again. I look forward to seeing it in person.”

  Dave hung up with a chortle on the inside. He was as proud of his nephew as if he was his own son. It didn’t matter that they went months or even years with minimal contact. When they did speak or get to spend some time together, it was like they had just been around each other yesterday. While he would have preferred to get Vince fully on board, the company would always be there for him. Dave was sure that if push came to shove and he asked personally, Vince would join. He would rather Vince came on his own rather than be coerced.

  ***

  After the Southern California investors party, Dave had more planned. Others would be easier, because the people were more in his comfort zone. He had already lined up a good deal of the money he needed. Many of the people liked to meet him and would invest because his name was on it and his money invested too. Dave wanted investors who truly understood his vision and wanted to be a part of it. Very few of the enormously wealthy were interested in the personal services part of the contract. Th
ey could become difficult when the returns didn’t happen as fast as they wanted. Those people he politely detoured to another opportunity with faster returns.

  Dave considered Liz Pendleton’s upcoming visit, wondering again if it was the right thing to allow her to come to South Park. Liz was a hard person to turn down. In addition to being beautiful, she was very intelligent and possessed a sincerity about her that came through in her roles on film. That gave her an honesty in her performances that most people in Hollywood had lost.

  Dave had to laugh at himself. Even an old man could be drawn in by a beautiful woman. He needed to decide how much of the cached supplies and facilities he should show her in the various expanded old mines of the South Park location. Did she only want the charm of a small-town retreat high in the mountains, or was she ready for the whole shebang? Could she handle seeing how truly prepared he planned to be? Would the sight of the cadre of Special Forces men and women training in the mountains alarm her? Dave sighed and decided he would play it by ear. He had a good feeling about her, and he was known to be a superb judge of people.

  He also admitted to himself some concern for her safety on this trip. Liz usually flew commercial, and while there were no recent threats toward airplanes in the U.S., a friend had forwarded him part of a leaked intelligence briefing. Although it was vague and incomplete, it was still enough to make him fearful for Liz and glad he normally flew private jets.