Tertiary Effects Series | Book 3 | Bite of Frost Read online

  BITE OF FROST

  BOOK THREE

  OF

  TERTIARY EFFECTS

  BY

  WILLIAM ALLEN

  Copyright July 2020

  All Rights Reserved

  This story is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales, or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.

  Copyright July 2020 William Allen

  Other Books by William Allen

  Tertiary Effects Series

  Rockfall

  Storm Warning

  Bite of Frost

  Walking in the Rain

  Surviving the Fall

  Home Fires Burning

  Hard Rain Falling

  Dark Sky Thunder

  Firestorm (by M.C. Allen)

  Lines in Shadow

  Midnight Skills

  Hunger Driven

  Fight the Hunger

  Battered Walls (forthcoming)

  *With Thomas A. Watson and MC Allen

  Stolen Liberty

  Behind the Curtain

  Chaos Reigns

  Pirate’s Tale (forthcoming)

  *With Thomas A. Watson

  Dark Titan

  Warzone

  Dedication

  As always, this book is dedicated to my family. This one I owe especially to my darling wife, who has endured much during the production of this book. She has taught me many lessons, including how to live in a quarantine world while still remaining close, and holding on to those things most important.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The first snow of the year served to freak out the citizens of Albany County more than any of the other weather phenomena up to that point. Hurricane Debbie was a disaster, and her little brother Javier just piled on the damage, but something about the surprise of unseasonal snow set off a panic. Part of it might have been due to the rising levels of violence already creeping into the area, and part of it, I knew, was due to the nature of the white stuff itself. In short, this part of the country just didn’t have much experience with snow, and it was messing with people’s perception of reality.

  Oh, once a year we might get a light skiff, a half inch that disappeared like dew dissipating with the rising sun, but nothing that stuck. Frost we got plenty of, as well as the occasional patches of ice, but none of the locals had experience dealing with snow drifts. Not in recent memory, anyway. This snow didn’t stick around long, either, but it was only the last week in August and people were spooked. I’d seen snow in August before, but I’d been in Juneau for a job at the time.

  That memory reminded me that I didn’t want to think about how bad this winter would be for those individuals who survived in the interior of Alaska. I knew the coastal cities and towns had been scoured clean by the tsunami, but Anchorage was hundreds of miles from the coast. I refused to speculate how anybody was going to live through this winter without the usual resupply from the Lower Forty-Eight.

  On the farm, we mainly stayed close to the home place for the week following Major Carstairs visit. I couldn’t think of him as Andy anymore, not after he’d been brought back out of retirement. His knowing presence, and that bit of parting news, still had me up late at night with my siblings as we tried to plan for a way forward. Three more meteors coming, and six months to somehow get ready for something that made all our preparations look like children building a stick fortress in the woods. The best we could come up with was to continue as we had been, building up our stores of supplies and making the properties more defensible in the meantime.

  At least the endless rain seemed to have abated for just a bit, though the low hanging cloud cover and lack of sunlight felt somehow worse than just enduring the showers. Temperatures ranged from the high thirties to the mid fifties, and everyone on the farm seemed to be dealing with a cold or allergies. Runny noses and fits of sneezing ran through the community, but fortunately, no one popped up with a high fever or coughing, and Marta kept a close eye on the progression while not busy at the hospital or sleeping. This was flu season, and this year’s influenza outbreak had already started making the rounds. Rumor Central on the HAM stations was the CDC was working with some of the surviving pharmaceutical companies to come up with a more potent flu vaccine this year. If so, they were months behind and not even the official news sites had an estimated time of arrival for anything of the sort.

  Madelyn and Cecelia just seemed to fit themselves seamlessly into our group, though I knew there were questions from Beatrice, Charles and Mary about where these newcomers came from, Marta actually came up with the best cover story, which we all adopted.

  She’d explained to her mom that the two young women were escapees from the displaced persons center in Jasper, plucked from the school after Cece had been attacked by someone on the inside. The unspoken part of the story, that the attacker had been part of the guard force, meant the two women needed to be kept hidden for the time being. I would have preferred the truth, of course, but so far, none of the three adults knew about our clandestine visit to the Sheriff’s house, or our earlier elimination of the three deputies who triggered the action. Charles had been the only one of the three at the main house at the time when the deputies had shown up, and we’d made sure he was otherwise occupied when Pat and Mike had made the bodies disappear. That methane reactor turned out to be good for more than disposing of animal manure after all, but I wasn’t looking forward to cleaning up the tank.

  I didn’t like lying about the two Department of Agriculture agents. As a lawyer, some might think lying was part and parcel with my job, but they would be sadly mistaken. I might slant the facts to show my client in the light most favorable, but that isn’t the same thing at all. My position regarding intentional falsehoods was not about morality, exactly. Lies simply had a way of coming back to bite you in the ass, so when forced to lie, I tried to stick as close to the truth as possible. Marta’s story fit that criteria nicely, and that was probably why I liked it so much. Maddy and Cece didn’t complain, since we’d been very direct with the both of them regarding what our group had risked in helping them.

  Anyway, we made a point of working on projects around the immediate area and close to home, including the installation of the wind turbine and battery bank at the old Bonner farmhouse. Improving the power situation at our second location meant not only could we have Charles and Mary living there in one of the bedrooms, but we could also shift Sally and Billy over there as well. The house only had three bedrooms, but there was a fourth room that served as an office and could easily be converted into another bedroom, but we couldn’t decide on who might make the best use of it.

  Actually, that wasn’t true. Ideally, we could have shifted either the two newest members over there, but Pat and I both worried about having our largest security risks living with two people who didn’t know their true story. It wasn’t that we didn’t trust Mary and Charles, and they were family, or at least Mary was my cousin and we’d always treated Charles like family, but since they had not committed to living here for the long-term, some of us worried about them blabbing about some of our secrets. Like the hidden caches in the woods, or our part in killing the sheriff and nearly a dozen of his lackeys. Maybe we could bring them in once Charles gave up his stated desire to go back to his old job, but I was skeptical. Maybe once he gave us some signal that he considered this
more than a waystation on the way back to civilization, we might consider letting him in on some of our deeper secrets.

  As for Beatrice, we just didn’t know if the woman could keep a secret. Period. She wasn’t in the same league as my old secretary Barbara, but Marta gave us a clear warning early on that her mother had a tendency to spout off when she might do better to remain silent. So sorry, but for the moment, she would remain in the same category as the children.

  The other people we could transfer to that fourth bedroom were Nancy and Lisa. They could move out of the barracks and share a room over at Bonner, thus freeing up some space in the main house. I’d internally resisted the urge to make the suggestion, for my own selfish reasons, but finally caved in and mentioned the availability in one of our open meetings after Sunday lunch. Fortunately, Nancy was the one to shoot down the option, claiming it would be unfair to Lisa to isolate her from her new friends and might interfere with her continuing school work. I knew I had a stupid grin on my face after her pronouncement, but no one mentioned it, at least, to my face.

  We’d even started leveling out the location Mike had finally selected for extracting coal from a small deposit he’d located on the Bonner property. Situated about two hundred yards from the site of the second greenhouse, still being completed, the seam of lignite, or brown, coal became visible above ground in part due to soil erosion. Not considered economical for commercial use and having a low carbon content, this coal would nevertheless be used as a fuel source for properly designed combustion systems. As Mike said, not ideal, but beat the heck out of burning pine logs all the time. If the winter lasted long enough, I knew we would have some way to heat our homes.

  Mike was a godsend for these types of things. As kids, I’d often teased him about being Mr. Wizard when it came to anything science-related, and now he was showing us that side in spades. He claimed he was just following my offhand recommendation from our site inspection about looking for other useful materials. He staked out a parcel of land on the back side of the small stand of trees on the new property that was close enough to the new greenhouse that we could build a small shed for drying the coal, then using it to burn in the small stoves we could knock together in our workshop. With this in mind, we finished up the greenhouse at a rapid pace and started on the small shed, using pieces of scrap lumber from other projects. As an added benefit, if we set up the baffles correctly on the coal-burning stoves, we could vent a little extra carbon dioxide into the greenhouse.

  Burning this dirty coal would require placement of carbon monoxide detectors, Mike duly cautioned, but the new plants could derive accelerated growth from the process. I knew he would be tinkering with the process in the coming months. For now, we had installed a small wood burner to keep the temperature up when Beatrice and the kids worked on transplanting seedlings to the proper pots while Mike, Nancy and I puttered with creating a drip watering arrangement in place of the normal spray system, which would require electricity. Someone would still need to check the stove periodically and add wood, but Mary quickly volunteered to handle this chore, claiming it was the least she could do to ensure lettuce and radishes for salads on a steady basis.

  The setup might not have been ideal, since it was a trek from the Bonner place, but we wanted somewhere out of sight of the road and I was confident that even in dead winter, the evergreens would conceal the location. Poking around, Mike had even found an old dirt bike trail that led through the middle of the overgrown acreage, making access by foot much easier.

  I made time to spend a few minutes with Nancy during this busy time, as she was also working a split schedule of sorts with the Co-Op. Their office somehow managed to lay hands on more transformers, a few at a time, and she was working twenty hours per week guaranteed, with more time, and money, as the need arose. I didn’t inquire as to her rate of pay, but she seemed satisfied with the arrangement and honestly, it wasn’t like there was much to spend it on these days.

  Many of the local stores remained closed in the wake of the latest hurricane, and more were closing their doors or working reduced hours as the sporadic arrival of replacement merchandise meant their stock remained low and several had been reducing the size of their floorspace to make the lack less noticeable. This was an old trick I knew from working retail in my college days, and some stores were better than others at rearranging their shopping areas to encompass less space and make the shelves and gondolas look less empty. I’d planned to hit the grocery store in the next few days, but Nancy had warned us that the last time she’d visited, the selection looked pretty sparse.

  The sale of Mike and Marta’s house in Fort Worth went through during this time, confirming our thoughts that the real estate agent already had a buyer lined up for a quick profit. Contrary to my earlier thoughts, Marta seemed very pleased by the transaction, though we didn’t have a chance to talk about it in private for a couple of days.

  CHAPTER TWO

  With the unlamented demise of Sheriff Landshire and most of his crew, I’d entered my name into the rotation for driving security into Jasper. I admitted I’d been avoiding the man and his deputies, and with good reason. After all, I had inadvertently interfered in at least one of his plans when I’d gunned down three of his hoodlum auxiliaries when they attempted to kidnap the niece of one of his political opponents. With a new regime in charge at the Sheriff’s Department in New Albany, I figured this was a chance for me to get out and gather some additional intel about the bigger picture in our area.

  So on the appointed day, I dragged my butt out of my warm cot when it was still dark outside, drank a cup of coffee and ate a piece of dried toast while my sister-in-law got ready for work. Alternating with Wade’s family, the trip required someone from our farm to escort the two ladies every other day. Marta chafed at the need, but Mike was adamant that the two nurses would travel with at least one extra shooter, and her mother was almost as determined, worried about her daughter going out in the increasingly perilous country. Even the heavily censored national media grudgingly reported on the growing unrest in the largest cities, as hijackings and riots disrupted the fragile web of replenishment necessary to keep the surviving population centers fed and entertained. Little if anything was said about flyover country, but the violence spread from the cities like rippling waves radiating from a stone thrown into a pond.

  We would be taking my old Datsun pickup this morning, as the cab was large enough, barely, to fit three adults across the bench seat. Despite the dated appearance, I knew the truck was in tiptop mechanical condition and the engine only sipped at the fuel instead of gulping it down like some of our other options. With the rationing in effect, fuel efficiency became sexy again. I did make sure and transfer the highly visible hospital placard from Marta’s dashboard before we left to pick up Dorothy, as the travel restrictions across counties had been reinstated. The placard also allowed us to pick up additional fuel over our allotment with the deal worked out between the hospital and the state, so we wanted to make sure and fill up our extra gas cans at Harry’s on the way out of town.

  The trip to Jasper went without incident, and Dorothy napped most of the trip while Marta drove. I sat with a shotgun in my lap, scanning the otherwise empty road with an obvious intensity that made Marta a tad uncomfortable.

  “You know something I don’t?” Marta finally asked. “We make this trip every work day, and so far, no problems.”

  “I just know there are bad people out there,” I replied, trying to interject some life into my voice. “Just getting the lay of the land is all.”

  “You’ve driven this route a hundred times over the years,” Marta retorted in exasperation. “What’s different today?”

  “Nothing,” I replied, carefully explaining my reasoning. “But one day, we are going to have trouble on the road. Matter of time. I may have traveled this route many times, but never with an eye towards ambush.”

  Marta had nothing to say to that, and she lapsed into silence for the rest of the t
rip. For me, I was thinking about our exit from Fort Worth. I imagined those little gangster asshats had their stooges watching the roads for Mike’s truck. Their gang’s leadership must have thought we’d found the stash they were hunting for in the storage rooms, and they were looking to recover the loot. The gang members had chosen poorly, and their members consequently paid the butcher’s bill.

  Now, though, I wondered how long this road would remain open. Professional hijackers, opportunistic thieves or desperate refugees would move into the area at some point and make road travel become even more of a crapshoot, and only well-armed and armored convoys would be making these runs. At that point, I found myself agreeing with Pat. We needed to find a way to cut off these trips and stay closer to home. We could conceivably mount a guard on the section of road near our home, but out here, our options were limited.

  I kept my conclusions to myself, but I resolved to discuss them with Marta, and probably Dorothy, at a more opportune time. If nothing else, I would put a bug in Wade’s ear. For now, I resolved to watch the roads and be prepared to deliver an overwhelming response to any threat offered. The idea of spotters on the road, lookouts for bandits, made my skin crawl.

  Dropping off the ladies at the front of the hospital proved easy enough, as did parking in the reserved lot used by the staff. I also figured out how security worked for the lot, and what I needed to do to pull my weight there. I elected to stay with the truck until noontime approached, providing guard service while I waited for Marta’s lunchtime to roll around. The reserved lot was packed to overflowing with cars and trucks, but the proximity adjacent to the ER entrance for the hospital and the eight foot metal link fence, what we used to call a hurricane fence, demonstrated why everyone who worked at the hospital insisted on parking here.