Defiance (The Defending Home Series Book 1) Read online

  Dale grinned. “So can I.”

  Chapter 9

  They arrived home a short time later to find a water tanker and a sedan in their driveway. Dale jumped out at once, Mossberg in hand. Shane and the others were close behind him. Over by the house, Brooke and Colton were shouting at two men. Inside, he could hear Duke, barking his head off.

  One of the strangers was dressed in a brown suit, holding a clipboard. The other was clad in blue coveralls.

  “This better not be what I think it is,” Dale growled as he got to within a few yards.

  Both men spun to face him, the color draining from their faces when they saw the shotgun in his hands.

  The city worker swallowed hard and checked his clipboard. “Mr. Hardy?”

  “You have thirty seconds to get off my land,” Dale said, making the shotgun’s rack sing.

  “We’ve been ordered to pull five thousand gallons from your well.”

  Colton stepped forward. “Only thing that’s gonna get pulled are your eyes out of your skull,” his nephew shot back.

  “Calm down,” Dale ordered him. The kid was getting too excited. He needed to leave the job of intimidation to Dale.

  Brooke wrapped her arms around her cousin and coaxed him back a few steps. Shane went over to help.

  “Listen,” the guy in the blue coveralls said. He was a touch overweight, his belly making him look six months pregnant. “Neither of us wanna do this, but we got an order from the mayor himself.”

  Dale stepped forward. “I don’t care if the president sent you. No one’s taking a drop of water from my well.”

  “It’s only a few thousand gallons,” the bureaucrat clutching the clipboard started to say.

  “Maybe at first, but soon you’ll need five thousand more and then ten. And before you know it, you’ll be squeezing me for every drop I have.”

  Clipboard opened his mouth to say something, but Dale shut him down.

  “The answer’s no. Either of you try one more rebuttal and my shotgun will be the one talking.”

  Red-faced, the two men scurried back to their vehicles.

  Shane and Colton moved the pickup trucks out of the way so they could back up. Dale followed them to the end of the driveway, cradling the Mossberg with both hands. Not so much because he expected to use it, but because he wanted its smooth, deadly surface to be the last thing they saw before driving away.

  •••

  After the men had left, they set about storing the supplies they’d gathered from Shane’s place. Dale led Walter and Ann into the house to show them around. With two floors and four bedrooms upstairs, there would be just enough room for everyone.

  They came to a door off the kitchen. Dale opened it and switched on the low-watt bulb overhead, revealing a set of stairs leading downward.

  A look of astonishment formed on Walter’s weathered face. “You’ve got a basement?”

  Dale laughed. It was a reaction he’d seen before. Few knew that basements were a rare commodity in Arizona. Most developers avoided them because of the soil and the depth requirements. But when the old house had burned down, Dale had made sure the new one would be equipped with a place for long-term storage.

  They descended the steps, Colton, Shane and Brooke close behind, each of them carrying sacks of beans, rice and other supplies.

  The left-hand wall was lined with wooden shelves filled with stored food.

  “I didn’t plan on gathering so much,” he told them. “But the shelves were deep and I guess I hated seeing them so empty.” He went to the opposite wall and pulled a string from the ceiling, illuminating a work bench. Some tools hung from hooks, while others were stored in plastic containers, giving his handyman area a somewhat improvised, but clean look. About half of the hooks were empty.

  “This is where you can store all the extra weapons and ammo,” Dale told him.

  “You have quite a setup here,” Walter said.

  Colton set down a bag of rice on the lowest shelf and let out a cackle of laughter. “Just wait.”

  Out behind the house, Dale brought Walter to the crops he was growing—long rows of carrots, potatoes, peas, lettuce and tomatoes. The vegetables stopped before a modest barn where Dale stored a backhoe that wasn’t quite working as well as his reserve of gasoline, which he kept in a fifty-gallon tank. In the coming weeks he would add some stabilizer to ensure it lasted until the situation improved.

  Next to the barn were a series of enclosures where he kept various animals—two milking goats, ten chickens and a hog. Each group had a small roofed structure where they could escape the oppressive Arizona heat and cool themselves in the shade. His mini-homestead had proved far more productive than he had anticipated. It had begun as a project Julie had suggested. Since they had the well and a productive garden, it only made sense to reduce as many trips to the grocery store as they could.

  Each of his goats produced about ten pounds of milk a day for nearly ninety percent of the year. They’d opted against getting a cow, since the extra five or six gallons of milk a day might go to waste.

  Walter glanced over at the chicken coop, watching the spirited birds run about the enclosure. The animals got excited whenever Dale got close, believing it was feeding time.

  “I can’t tell you what I woulda given during the war for fresh egg,” the old man said. His eyes looked pained from the troubling memory. He blinked and set a hand on the wire fence. “Where did you serve, Dale?”

  Dale was surprised by the question. “In the military? I didn’t. Started working in a small local factory sticking labels on beer bottles when I was a teenager. Wasn’t much money, but it kept me out of trouble.”

  “My apologies for making assumptions,” Walter said. The skin beneath his chin hung like a wet sheet drying on the clothesline. “It’s just, the way you handled yourself back there―”

  “I know my way around a gun or two,” Dale admitted, trying to make sure he didn’t sound boastful. He wasn’t a former Green Beret, although Julie used to sometimes tell him he acted like one.

  “I may not look like much anymore,” Walter said, his hand clenched around the chicken wire support beam. “But I was known in my platoon as something of a crack shot.” He lifted his hand and both men watched it tremble. “Those days are long gone, I’m afraid. If you’d accept some instruction from an old man, I’d be happy to show you a thing or two.”

  Dale smiled warmly. “That’d be great.” He didn’t want to insult Walter after making such a kind offer, but Dale was perfectly happy with his shotgun. Sure, she didn’t have the range or accuracy of a scoped rifle, but when she got in close enough, she could tear a room to shreds.

  Walter pointed toward the pumphouse and the windmill which rose twenty feet into the air next to it.

  “I guess this was what all that fuss was about.”

  “In large part,” Dale said. “Although the five-hundred-gallon rain barrel on the other side of the house does help with watering the crops.” This part of southern Arizona only got about a dozen inches of rain a year. For most folks, it was a smattering of moisture they let soak into the parched earth. For Dale, it was reason enough to set up a simple collection system.

  He fished a set of keys from his pocket, wiggling the right one out, and opened the door to the surprisingly spacious pumphouse. The air inside was searing hot and felt heavy going down. Wiping a hand across his forehead, slick with sweat, he showed Walter the well hole, along with the two pumps he used to pull water from the ground. A submersible and a piston pump.

  “No hand pump?”

  Dale shook his head. “Wells in Arizona are normally too deep for them to work.”

  To the right sat a thousand-gallon cistern armed with float switches designed to shut the pumps off once the water in the tank reached a certain level.

  On the left of the pumphouse was where Dale kept four large twenty-four-volt battery banks and the inverter. To the untrained eye, this area was nothing but a mess of wires, but to D
ale it all made perfect sense.

  Walter glanced around. “You sure got a great setup here.” Dale knew the old man wasn’t only talking about the pumphouse, but everything he’d shown him. “Your crops and livestock put food on your table,” Walter continued. “Your well puts water in your glass and the windmill and solar panels give enough power to keep the lights on. But all of this also makes you a target.”

  “Trust me, I know,” Dale replied, telling Walter about the three armed men he’d shot trying to break in and steal what was his.

  “Shooting a man’s not as easy as they make out in the movies,” Walter told him. “There’s a lot more to the act than pulling back on a curved hunk of steel. Most folks need a reason to live. Probably about as much as they need a reason to kill. I remember one particularly cold fall night in 1950, we were given orders to march into North Korea. Our platoon came upon a village, mostly women and children. The ground was thick with clay-like mud that kept trying to suck your boots off your foot with every step. An old man, probably about the age I am now, came at us with an old rifle from World War One. Shot a private in the face who was standing right beside me. Dropped him dead before he could blink an eye. Our sarge was right next to the old man and tackled him to the ground. Our interpreter came up and asked why he’d attacked us when we were here to liberate them. Know what he said? ‘I attacked you because you’re on my land.’ You see, he didn’t even own it—the state did—but none of that seemed to make a bit of difference. There’s an almost spiritual connection between a man and the land he calls his own. It’s worth dying for. Maybe because it’s the only thing that lasts forever.”

  Chapter 10

  Walter’s words were still buzzing in Dale’s ears when he found Colton over by the coop, feeding the chickens. Most of the ten hens were there to produce eggs, the others he’d use for meat when needed. Some mistakenly believed hens wouldn’t lay anything unless a rooster was present.

  “I don’t get why there’s a bath in there,” Colton said, sowing grain into the enclosure. “That so they can clean themselves or something?”

  He was referring to the shallow two-by-three-foot mortar mixing tub on the ground. The bottom was lined with adobe fire bricks and filled with a few inches of water. The chickens didn’t appreciate standing in water, but as the bricks sucked in the moisture, it offered them a cool surface to rest on.

  Dale smiled at Colton’s comment. “It’s actually an inexpensive way of keeping them cool. The Arizona summers aren’t only hard on us. They’re just as hard on the animals.”

  “I appreciate you keeping your word today,” Colton said.

  For a moment, Dale was puzzled until he remembered their trip to the house.

  “I’m glad you found what you were looking for.”

  “It wasn’t just the pictures of my mom,” Colton said.

  “You wanted a reminder of your father as well,” Dale realized, reading between the lines.

  “Yeah, I wanted something from back when they were together. When they were happy.” Colton reached into the feeding bucket and stopped. “What I also wanted to say was sorry for losing my cool earlier.”

  Dale quietly watched the chickens prance around the enclosure. Then at last he said, “You know your dad, Zach, had a real problem with his temper. Impulse control was what the doctors called it, but he was a hothead and that’s mostly what got him locked away. You’re a good kid, Colton. I’d hate to see you follow in your old man’s footsteps.”

  “He wasn’t all bad,” Colton said defensively.

  His father might not have been perfect, but now that his mother was gone, his father was the only biological parent he had left.

  “I didn’t mean that. I’m sure he had a few good qualities. I know he’d have done anything for you and maybe that’s why robbing banks seemed like a good idea. He wanted to make sure you had the kind of future he’d been denied.”

  “By going to school.”

  “Yeah, that was part of it.”

  “Guess it looks like that won’t happen now.”

  “You never know,” Dale said, trying to sound hopeful, but having a hard time believing it himself.

  Dale patted his nephew’s shoulder and started to walk away.

  “He’s gonna get out someday soon,” Colton said, the desperation in his voice clinging like sap to a tree.

  For everyone’s sake, I sure hope not, Dale thought, but didn’t say.

  Chapter 11

  Zach

  Zach Baird woke up in a large white room, thinking about his son and wondering whether the boy was dead.

  He struggled to figure out where he was and why he was here. He remembered sitting in his tiny cell at Florence Supermax Prison, AKA the Alcatraz of the Rockies, when a corrections officer named Jim―white dude, shaved head with a three-hundred-pound body that made him resemble a giant Mr. Potato Head―had burst in to perform a random search. Jim’s complexion was all wrong, pale and splotchy. He’d sounded as sick as he looked, coughing like a madman. By then, news had already spread that a swine flu variant was devastating the eastern states. But could what Zach had seen on the news reports in the communal games room have really traveled so fast in so little time?

  A day later, the power had started to flicker and the warden had ordered that the generators be turned on. But brownouts weren’t their only problems. Most of the guards and prison employees had failed to show up for work. It seemed they were either dead, sick or staying home to protect their families.

  Soon, large numbers of the inmates started to get sick. Rumors circulated that there weren’t enough provisions being delivered to the prison anymore, a suspicion which was backed up when meal rations were cut in half. Then came an announcement that prisoners would be confined to their cells until further notice.

  In retaliation, men banged on the thick metal doors which sealed them off from the outside world, demanding to be set free. For most, freedom meant an hour in the courtyard or the games room. The thought of being deprived was too much to take. But Zach knew well enough that was nothing more than a single flawed character trait: weakness. These men had come to the supermax as wild creatures only to be transformed into domesticated zoo animals. On the outside they’d run drug empires and killed anyone who dared cross them. In here, their blood pressure started to rise whenever chocolate pudding was taken off the menu.

  Then the following morning, two things happened. The first was that the lights died for good. The second was that Zach began feeling odd. It had started the night before with a tiny scratch in the back of his throat. By sunup, it had morphed into a fever and a bout of debilitating stomach cramps. He’d had the flu before, but this was like nothing he’d ever experienced. After he’d agonized in pain for what felt like an eternity, two men in space suits had entered his cell, placed him on a gurney and carried him off.

  Even in his delirious state of mind, Zach knew perfectly well that his next destination was the Florence Medical Center. The prison infirmary had twenty beds and there was little doubt that at the moment each and every one of those was accounted for. On those rare occasions when they experienced an overflow, the inmates would be sent to the medical center. It sounded like a strange thing for inmates to know about, but if there was one thing convicts did, it was study the system whenever they could, searching for a crack large enough to fit through.

  But soon enough, Zach realized that he had been wrong. They weren’t going to the medical center. Hell, they weren’t even going to the St Thomas Moore Hospital, five miles to the west. They were heading for the Canon Ridge High School and a giant white tent erected over what had once been the football field.

  A flurry of men and women in space suits flowed in and out. Red letters stenciled on the backs of their suits read FEMA. Handcuffed to his gurney now, Zach was wheeled inside. Rows and rows of beds stretched in a series of impossibly long lines. Nearly all of them were filled. It was then, the breath wheezing in and out of his chest, that he understood the
full gravity of the situation. Much like the fever ravaging his body, the world was quickly burning up. Within a few more weeks there would be nothing left.

  Awake now and rubbing his eyes, Zach remembered where he was. And in spite of the whiteness all around him, it wasn’t heaven. No, Zach knew perfectly well the day his ticket came up there was another, much darker place reserved for him. Looking about him, he became aware that a number of the beds were vacant. Also absent was the army of folks in hazmat suits shuffling back and forth. The place was deathly quiet.

  He drew in a lungful of oxygen and felt his nose twitch. There was a downright nasty odor floating through the air. In the cot next to him, a morbidly obese man lay sleeping. Zach swung his legs over the edge, his nose buried into the crook of his elbow.

  Even his breathing, which had been such a challenge when they’d wheeled him in, was flowing smoothly in and out of his lungs. He clapped his free hand to his forehead, surprised at how cool it felt to the touch.

  With that, he rose on a pair of shaky legs, reaching out for an IV stand to brace himself.

  With this new, higher angle, the world around him was starting to look much different. He saw there wasn’t only less activity within the medical tent, there was no activity. Turning to the fat man lying next to him, he made another realization. The guy wasn’t sleeping—he was dead, his face purple and swollen, along with the rest of his bloated corpse.

  Zach staggered out of the tent, still wearing his hospital gown, wondering why he of all people had been spared. A debate was ping-ponging back and forth inside his head. Wrappers from discarded medical supplies rolled across his bare feet, nudged indifferently by the wind.

  A few feet away, an ambulance sat parked with its doors open. He approached, somehow expecting the warden’s booming voice to stop him dead in his tracks. This was all a test to see if Zach was stupid enough to escape from prison with only eight months left before his parole hearing. But the warden’s voice never came.