But now something rather ironic had occurred. The very chains that discouraged our largest enemies from attacking us only emboldened our smallest enemies. Detonating an EMP over America would at once sink the biggest economic power in the world and drag down everyone else with her. A perfect strategy that only a country like Iran or in this case North Korea could fully benefit from.
John swallowed hard. “How do you know this?”
“Some of the men in our… group… are former military. They tell me things may be down for months. Maybe longer. Which is why we’re here, to offer you and your people protection. In exchange for a small price, we can guarantee no one touches you. All we ask is a monthly donation of food and water. Say thirty percent of whatever you collect.”
“We don’t need protection,” John shot back.
“Everyone needs protection, friend.” Cain was grinning again, but only on half of his face.
“Besides,” John went on, “we don’t have enough food or water to spare. That’s why we were forced to turn away those refugees.”
“Yes, I saw you chase them off. Whatever became of them?” Cain asked.
“I’m sure you know perfectly well.”
“Believe me when I tell you thirty percent is a cheap price to pay for your safety.”
John gripped the pistol in his hand and Cain’s eyes narrowed as though he could see what was in John’s mind. “You shoot me and there’ll be a hundred men to take my place and none of them are nearly as kind or forgiving.”
“Is that all you wanted?” John asked coolly.
“I think it’s in your best interest to take our offer seriously. We’ll give you until first thing tomorrow. If you agree to our terms, hang a white bedsheet from this barricade. If we come around and there isn’t a white sheet, we’ll assume you’ve refused our generous offer.”
A black pickup drove into the intersection and Cain nodded, walked over to the truck, and got into the passenger seat before the truck drove away.
Chapter 26
“What do we do?” Al asked, visibly flustered.
The council had assembled in Patty Long’s dining room for their third and perhaps most important meeting yet.
“Thirty percent of our food each month,” Arnold said. “That’s unreasonable. We’ll starve to death.”
“What did you tell him?” Patty asked, sweeping back her wavy blonde hair.
John rubbed at the tension building at his temples. “I told him we didn’t need any protection. Then he suggested we think about it and made reference to the dozens if not hundreds of bodies lying on Pine Grove.”
“It’s a shakedown,” Curtis said. His nose was shaped like a bird’s beak and with his wide frantic eyes he was starting to act like one too. “I’ve read about this kinda stuff. It’s a racket.”
“There’s a very good chance we’re dealing with a gang of drug dealers or gangbangers,” John said, still picturing the skull tattoo on Cain’s face. “Can’t say yet how many of them there are, but they seem to be taking a page out of the mafia’s handbook. Back in the day, if you opened a restaurant in New York City a guy in a pinstriped suit would pay you a visit and offer you protection insurance. Thousand bucks a month, maybe more. If you said no, the next day your shop was firebombed.”
“They killed all those innocent people,” Susan said in disgust. “I think we should just give them what they want.”
Hearing that made John’s temperature spike. She was one of the council members who had voted to send those refugees to their deaths in the first place. Now she was advocating opening a Pandora’s box with men who would think nothing of killing them all. “Today they’re asking for thirty percent,” John said, directing his comments at Susan in particular. “A steep amount of resources by any measure. And what will we do when thirty percent becomes forty percent and then fifty percent? Haven’t any of you read your history? The Romans bribed barbarian hordes not to attack the empire and each time the barbarians returned demanding more money.”
“What do you propose?” Patty asked.
“If we pay them,” John said, “they’ll think we’re weak and keep taking until we starve to death. If we refuse, we run the risk of an all-out war. A war we may not win.”
Al was shaking his head. “So basically you’re asking if we prefer starving to death or being shot.”
“Not exactly,” John replied. “I’m saying that if we pay them, we’ll starve to death for sure. If we don’t, then there’s a chance we could prevail. It’ll mean at least doubling the number of deputies.”
“I thought you said we were low on guns as it was,” Arnold barked.
John nodded. “We are low. Although there’s enough now to arm thirty deputies, but many of them won’t have much more than pistols. Unfortunately, a few of those will be .22 caliber. But if we present ourselves as a hard enough target, it may encourage these guys to pick on someone else.”
“But with so many deputies,” Arnold countered, “it’ll rob manpower from food production and water purification.”
“We can take them from information and liaison,” John suggested. “With bandits ravaging Sequoyah Hills, I doubt very much we’ll find groups nearby to trade with anyhow.”
Al and Curtis didn’t seem pleased by the suggestion.
“Don’t worry, gentlemen, you’ll still have a place within the committee and once the current crisis passes then we can repopulate your teams.”
“My big concern is water,” Susan said, before John was even completely finished. “We’ve extracted the water from the pipes of nearly every house on the block. It won’t be another day or two before we need to send groups south to the Tennessee River, our only source of water. How on earth will that be possible if armed criminals are threatening us?”
She raised a valid concern. Just like medieval fortresses, maintaining a safe and continuous flow of water was a constant security challenge. “When that time comes,” John said, “we can organize armed escorts. Say five or more deputies armed with semi-autos.” The thought of offering the use of Betsy occurred to him, but the risk was too great. If he ever lost the Blazer, it would punch a major hole in his ability to bug out once the situation became untenable. “I think it’s important to remember we’re deciding between a bad option and one that’s even worse,” John told the committee. “These are bad men. If we stick together and everyone does their jobs, then we might just make it through this.”
There was one more thing John needed to tell them. It was the information Cain had given him about the EMP. Sure, there was no way to know whether Cain was telling the truth, but everything he’d said was in line with the research John had done years before.
“So we were attacked,” Arnold said.
John tapped his fingers in a somber rhythm. “Seems that way.”
“What does it mean for us then?” Al asked.
“Means the cavalry probably isn’t coming any time soon,” John told them. “If we’re going to get out of this mess, it’ll have to be by our own hand.”
Al and Curtis were eyeing Patty’s dining-room table, lost in the enormity of the situation.
Susan took a deep breath. “All in favor of rejecting Cain’s offer of protection raise your hand.”
The vote was nearly unanimous. Five hands went up. Only Curtis voted to accept. There would be no white sheet along the barricade as Cain had asked. Either way, the die was cast and the fate of Willow Creek about to be decided.
Chapter 27
There wasn’t going to be enough time before Cain’s deadline to train all of John’s new deputies. There were thirty in all now, not including John and Peter, and as he had told the committee, most of them had little more than a pistol. Their newly swelled ranks amounted to roughly thirty percent of Willow Creek’s population. No doubt the increase in defense would put a serious strain on their ability to gather the other necessities for sustaining life.