The Blue Ridge Resistance
Read The Blue Ridge Resistance Online
Authors: Steven Bird
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Dystopian, #Post-Apocalyptic
The Blue Ridge Resistance
The New Homefront, Volume 3
By Steven C. Bird
The Blue Ridge Resistance: The New Homefront, Volume 3
Copyright 2015 by Steven C. Bird
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, copied, or shared without expressed consent and prior authorization from the author.
Written and published by Steven C. Bird at
Homefront Books
Edited by Sara Jones at
www.torchbeareredits.com
Illustrated by Keri Knutson at
www.alchemybookcovers.com
Kindle Edition (1.16.15a)
ISBN:
978-1-4951-3904-8
www.facebook.com/homefrontbooks
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: The Taming of the Ewes
Chapter 3: Meeting of the Minds
Chapter 4: The Burden of Blessings
Chapter 6: The Unexpected Visitor
Chapter 7: News from the North
Chapter 8: Prepping for the Move
Chapter 9: A Community Venture
Chapter 13: The Mounted Patrol
Chapter 18: Return of the Guardians
Chapter 22: Killing the Spider
Chapter 24: A Fork in the Road
Chapter 29: An Unbearable Loss
Chapter 32: A Tragedy Fulfilled
Chapter 37: Friendships through Fire
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarities to real events or persons, past or present, living or dead, is purely coincidental and are not intended by the author. Although this book is based on real places and some real events and trends, it is a work of fiction for entertainment purposes only. None of the activities in this book are intended to replace legal activities and your own good judgment.
Some items in this series have been changed from their actual likenesses to avoid any accidental sharing of Sensitive Security Information (SSI).
The replacement values serve the same narrative purpose without exposing any potential SSI.
To my loving wife and children, and all of my friends and colleagues that inspire me and believe in me.
As I continue with this series, the support I have received from family and friends has motivated me to press on and continue to write, which has become a true passion in my life. To be honest, I was the last person I would have expected to be a “novelist.” Although always a dreamer with a creative side, I’ve spent my life devoid of an outlet to channel my thoughts, love, fear, and imagination. When I first began writing
The Last Layover: The New Homefront, Volume 1
on my Android phone’s word processing app, I didn’t even take myself seriously as a potential author.
Along the way however, family, friends, coworkers, and now colleagues from within the industry, have motivated me to continue to improve and evolve as a writer, keeping sight of the real possibility that someday this could be my full time career and not just a side project.
I thank each and every one of you who have supported me, constructively critiqued me, and cheered me on during this journey.
Continued from - The Guardians: The New Homefront, Volume 2
Introduction
It was now spring, and after the Guardians’ victory over the Muncie gang, there had been relative peace for the confederacy of homesteads. Word of “The Guardians” and how they had dealt with criminal intruders in their area had spread throughout the surrounding region over the course of the winter. This had brought peace and stability to many of the surrounding counties as well. Due to the secret nature of the Guardians, with no one outside of the partnering homesteads ever having encountered them and lived to tell about it, their name grew into an urban legend. Any act of vigilante justice in the region was attributed to them, which, of course, kept the threat of swift and permanent justice on the mind of anyone who may have otherwise attempted to take advantage of the collapsed state of the nation, at least in East Tennessee.
During the winter, Mildred and her cattle were moved back to the Thomas farm, along with Haley, who was now considered by all to be her adopted daughter. In addition, Nate, Luke, and Rachel had volunteered to move in with her to help her run the farm. Judith moved in, as well, to help Mildred run her now growing household. This was also beneficial, as Evan and Molly’s Homefront had already been running at its maximum capacity. In addition, Nate’s experience on the Peterson farm, in New Mexico, during his journey to find Luke was a godsend for Mildred, as she was physically unable to tend to her cattle by herself after the loss of her dear husband, Ollie.
The political quagmire that had engulfed the nation after the initial attacks had festered into what seemed an inevitable civil war. The struggle for power between those loyal to the Constitution, and those loyal to the president, grew increasingly tense as he attempted to use the state of collapse as an opportunity to remake the United States into his dream of a central government controlled, socialist state.
The homesteaders had yet to be touched by this political struggle directly, with the exception, of course, of the absence of government and the shattered national infrastructure, but they feared it was only a matter of time before their beloved isolation in the hills of East Tennessee was disrupted by an outside force. They monitored the outside world closely via their HAM radio stations and met regularly to discuss anything they felt might affect them in the future. In a sense, they had become their own local government.
Chapter 1: The Taming of the Ewes
After the dust settled from the struggles of the previous fall, Evan acquired a small flock of Katahdin sheep from a man in Del Rio. He could no longer care for them, as he was setting out on a journey to southern Alabama. He was heading out to link up with surviving family members who had been running a farm and had sent word that they needed his help keeping the place going. Without fuel and other resources, farming had returned to the labor-intensive endeavor where a large family was once again an asset, as it had been throughout human history prior to the technological advances of the twentieth century.
Evan traded the man a bicycle, a lever action .30-30 rifle, and a box of two hundred rounds of ammunition for his journey, in exchange for twelve ewes and four rams. The flock was comprised of a fairly well-mixed gene pool with unrelated rams and several families of ewes. This would give them a good start in regards to breeding, in order to grow the flock. They knew at some point, however, they would need to find some outside blood to keep the flock genetically diverse enough for the long term.
Over the course of the winter, Evan was amazed at the lack of trust his sheep, especially the ewes, had for humans. “That’s a healthy fear to have,” he would often joke. He quickly learned that one does not simply put his hands on a ewe without confining her first. He hoped they would eventually warm up to him to make life a bit easier, but alas, they did not. The rams, on the other hand, being much bolder than the ewes, had no problem interfacing with humans. During his short tenure as a shepherd thus far, he learned how to work around their skittish behavior and began to feel quite comfortable with his flock.
He was also pleased that nine of his ewes were pregnant, and that all of pregnancies made it through the winter and would be having their spring lambs any day. Considering this, he spent a lot of time watching the flock, trying to be ready when they started to give birth, so that the lambs could be immediately cared for in order to better ensure their survival. He saw this as worthy of his time, rather than having them hidden off in the bushes somewhere, unprotected from predators. The survival of his flock could one day mean the survival of his family in the world they now occupied.
Coyotes, feral dogs, and even the occasional mountain lion had become a big problem in the area. This meant that keeping livestock in a rural area near the woods and forests required a lot of attention. Evan didn’t mind; he much preferred four-legged predators over the two-legged ones he used to have to contend with on a much too frequent basis.
Today, Evan was dutifully watching his flock from a hunting tree stand with an accurized DMR style AR-15. With a Designated Marksman Rifle (DMR), as the military referred to an accurized twenty inch barreled M16 with a magnified optic, he could address any predator situations that may arise at long-range, as well as having the magazine capacity of an AR type rifle in the event he had other problems to contend with.
He had been in that particular stand for several hours and was becoming restless when he saw something dart through the tall grass, just beyond his flock, as he glassed the area with his binoculars.
He scanned the area, trying to find the target again, when out of the tall weeds, a large coyote sprinted for his flock. The sheep immediately began to panic and run in all directions as the coyote went for one of the pregnant ewes. Evan dropped his binoculars to their strap and quickly shouldered his rifle, zooming in on the altercation with his magnified riflescope. Just as the coyote jumped on the back of the pregnant ewe, Evan focused on the rear hindquarter of the predator in order to avoid accidentally hitting his own sheep; he then let one of his hand-loaded, 69-grain boat tail, hollow-point rounds fly. The high-speed 5.56mm round instantly knocked the attacking coyote off the back of the panicking sheep.
Since the beginning of the collapse, they had been utilizing those very tree stands for security. It had become standard practice to be rigged up to a climbing rope, with a rappelling harness on, when anyone was in one of the stands. On this occasion, just like many that had come before, this practice proved itself to be immensely valuable. Evan quickly rappelled out of the tree, hit the ground running, and sprinted for the downed animal. He knew he had hit the coyote and knocked it off of the sheep, but a wounded predator could still be a threat to him or the other sheep if it was not put down hard. He came upon the tall grass where he lost sight of it from a distance and found the offending coyote dragging its hind legs while whimpering and trying to escape. Evan did not have any personal ill will towards the coyote. They were indeed a threat to his livestock, but as he often joked, a coyote was just a dog being a dog, and he was just a shepherd being a shepherd. In an act of mercy, Evan pulled his .45ACP pistol from its holster and ended the coyote’s suffering with a well-placed shot to the head.
He then turned and began to look for the sheep that had been in the grasp of the coyote. He walked the fence line in the direction he thought the sheep had traveled. He followed a faint blood trail to a peach tree that was consumed by vines and weeds, making the type of cover that his sheep generally loved to shade in on a hot, sunny day. He found the young ewe hidden in the foliage, bleeding from several lacerations on her back made by the coyote’s teeth and claws. After some wrangling, he managed to get a hold of her and pull her from the weeds. He threw her over his back with her front legs over his right shoulder and her hind legs over his left. He then hiked back to the house with the injured sheep continuously calling out a distress-filled
baah
.
As he approached the house, Molly, who had just been out in the chicken coup collecting eggs, heard the
baah,
and saw Evan walking towards the house from a distance. She set down her basket of eggs and ran out to meet him. “What’s wrong with the sheep?” she asked in a distressed voice.
“A coyote jumped her,” he replied. “I popped it, but where there is one, there are more. I guess we need to stay extra-vigilant, with baby lambs on the way. If a coyote is watching when a ewe is giving birth, we will lose two at once.”
“Bring her into the barn,” Molly said. “We can confine her in one of the horse stalls that we’re not using until she gives birth. I’ll also give her some antibiotics for her wounds and try to stay on top of it. The last thing she needs is an infection with a lamb to bear and feed.”
Evan and Molly had stocked up on livestock medication prior to the collapse as one of their preps. Drugs, such as antibiotics for livestock, are generally the same as those for humans, except without the inflated price and the need for a prescription.
“You know, maybe we need to put all of the pregnant ewes in the barn until after the lambs are born, just in case,” Evan said after thinking more about the threat his flock faced.
“Probably not a bad idea,” she said. “We can always feed them hay and a little grain to get them by.”
“Yep, let’s do it then,” he said as he picked the ewe up to carry her to the barn. “I’ll take the livestock trailer out to the pasture with the tractor and round them up. This is one of the times I wish we had enough fencing to reach from there all the way to here. It sure would make moving them easier.”
“Yes, in a perfect world,” she said as she walked along to the barn with him.
As the two of them took the injured sheep into the barn, Griff came out of the house and flagged him down.
“What’s up?” Evan asked.
“The group wants to have a meeting,” said Griff. “They were asking if someone here could make it to the Murphy place tomorrow at noon.”
“The Murphy place, huh?” Evan replied. “That’s odd. I wonder what they have up their sleeves.”
“I’m not sure,” Griff said. “It does make one curious though. Anyway, I’m on watch tomorrow. If you and Jason want to go, I’ll hold down the fort.”
“That sounds good. Is someone from the Thomas farm going?” Evan asked.
“I’ll find out. Judy is on the radio talking to Daryl Moses now,” said Griff as he turned to go back inside.
“Okay, let me put this ewe in the barn for Molly and I’ll be right in,” Evan said as he turned and continued into the barn.
After getting the injured ewe set up in one of the stalls, Evan joined the others inside the house. He met them down in the basement where the CB radio base station and HAM radios were located. “So what’s the deal?” Evan asked as they all gathered around the radio.
Judy, who had replaced Judith as the Homefront’s communications person, replied, “Daryl didn’t give much detail. He just asked that we bring someone from the Thomas farm with us as well so that all properties are represented. I’ve already contacted them. Nate said he would be able to go. He said just stop by on your way, and he will ride along.”
“Hmmm, I wonder why the Murphy place,” Evan thought aloud. “Well, we will find out tomorrow, I guess. Where is Jason?” he asked.
“He’s in the woods teaching the boys a few things about hunting,” answered Sarah.
Evan just smiled and said, “Do me a favor. When you see him, tell him about the meeting and that I’d like him to go along.”
“Sure thing,” Sarah replied.
As Evan walked back outside to finish dealing with his flock, he couldn’t help but be concerned about the nature of Daryl’s request. Life had been so peaceful over the past several months that he always felt as if the peace was too good to be true and that it would all be shattered at any time. Was this it? Was something about to be brought to light that would interrupt their peaceful bliss?