Quaranteam - North West Ch. 20

"I don't recognize the name Poole, but that might not mean anything," I sighed. "They sound like prime candidates for an idiot's array of backwoods redneck militia. Any chance of a forensic team checking the truck for other fingerprints?"

"Not for four months at least," Miriam said flatly.

"Alright. I'll see what I can do," I sighed.

"Harri... I've said it before, but I need to say it with some more emphasis.Be careful. And I mean that for you, but also notjust for you. Yesterday was too close a call and the other day when you got hit... If you die, Harri, the best-case scenario is messy. With a short enough timespan, we can do a very invasive process to re-partner your girls, but that will only ever work once. And those girls that love you will remember you, but that love will get-" she paused and took a breath. "The lab coats aren't exactly testing for this, and I'm reading it between the lines in the reports and talking to the couple of people it's happened to here in the state already so it's just me guessing at things. They'll remember loving you, but the re-partnering will rip the active feeling out of them. The vaccine doesn't make a woman love a man deeply, but it manipulates positive feelings to be stronger and I think part of that will deaden their memories of you. They wouldn't forget you, but they wouldn't feel that same love in those memories. And that's thebest-case scenario, because if you die and we can't get your body back here fast enough, we might not even be able to do the re-partnering and then the girls will be the first test subjects to find out what happens at the end of the line when there's no re-partnering available. We don'tknow what will happen yet, but it would be bad."

As I listened to Miriam my head lowered and I stared at my feet on the floor, absorbing what she was saying. Dead was dead, and I obviously would prefer to stay alive. But that other part... the idea of any of the girlsforgetting how they felt about me as I got replaced... If I were in a normal relationship with Erica and the world wasn't in the shitshow it was, and I died, I would want Erica to find someone else to make her happy but that didn't mean I would want her to forget me. To forget how we felt about each other. And if Miriam was reading between the lines, it could be even worse than that.

"OK," I said, a little hoarse. "I get it."

"Just be careful, and be decisive," Miriam said. "Don't take risks you don't need to, Harri."

I had to breathe in and out a couple of times to keep myself centred and let all of it brew inside my mind. "Thanks, Miriam," I finally said.

There was a moment where I could tell she wanted to say something else, though I couldn't be sure what. It could have been serious or a joke to try and cut the tension, and about any number of the crazy things going on. But she swallowed whatever it was. "Be safe," she repeated.

"You too," I said and we hung up.

"Fuck," I growled to the empty RV bedroom and let myself fall back onto the mattress.

Outbreak on the Rez. Hunting the raiders. Protecting myself and my girls. Security for the site.

I had a lot of plates spinning, and I was running out of hands to keep them steady. And each of them was important, and could mean life or death. I had to prioritize, buthow did I prioritize this?

The outbreak was the most pressing issue, but what could I do about it? I didn't have the vaccine to hand out. I could try and recreate the thing with Vanessa, but we still weren't sure what exactly had done that - it could have been something to do with Vanessa and nothing to do with Erica, Ivy and I.

And could I offer that to Kara?'Hey, I can maybe save your life but you need to be bonded to me, and to try to accomplish it we'll need to have an orgy and you need to drink mouthfuls of my other girlfriend's squirt.' And that still wouldn't fix the issue of offering Kara an out, or even her and her cousin and her neighbour, without helping the rest of the community.

I could offer it to her, if it was between that embarrassing offer or her dying. And I would if I had to. If she started to show symptoms, I would offer it - well, I would try to get a dose from Miriam first, but still.

There wasn't anything else I could do for them though. And as I sat there on the bed I knew I wasn't going to get any more sleep.

I had to take all of this one step at a time. Tackle the things I could deal with. The girls were safe for now. The site had some airmen deployed at the entrances, and a few more in the main camp when they weren't on duty. I couldn't do anything else for the Rez at the moment. That left my investigation and the raiders.

* * * * *

The truck had been sitting exactly where we'd left it. Instead of hiking out to the spot, I'd driven my police truck around to the freshly cut utility road the crew had been working on, and as I pulled up at the scene I had to take a moment to myself in the quiet of the cab. There was blood splatter on the vehicles - a little bit here or there, and a larger spray across the raider's truck since it had been sort of close to the fight.

With the bodies having been carted away, for the most part, the scavenger animals in the woods had done a little digging around where the blood had pooled on the ground, likely hoping to find some scraps, but not so much that I couldn't see where the action had happened.

It wasn't actually my own close call, or my part in killing the raiders, that bothered me. Part of me still regretted that Kyla had been forced into killing again, but that wasn't even it. What made me pause was the vision of the five construction crew members pummeling the raider. It had been a hard death, and now I knew that one of the others had been his brother, and he'd died knowing they wereboth getting killed.

Sliding out of my truck, I took a moment to try and just absorb the sounds and smells of the forest. Out here, without the cut crew for the utility road working, I was as far from any workers as I was likely to get on my old family land. I could almost pretend to feel normal. Shaking my head, I opened my eyes and went to the raider truck.

It was an old piece of shit, but it was a Toyota so it was the kind of old piece of shit that could run for ages and go through a ton of abuse. I'd seen plenty of worse-off-looking Toyota trucks being put to use overseas by civilians, terrorist cells and everyone in between. Hell, I'd seen plenty of them with heavy machine guns mounted to the bed to make 'technicals' that could somehow still drive over rocky desert terrain. The license plate hadn't gotten anything for Miriam, so I needed to look for anything else that might be of use.

I started in the back bed of the truck - the raiders had grabbed a bunch of the cutting crew's tools, which I was able to quickly sort out and put over near the excavator for them to reclaim. The back of the truck was otherwise empty other than some old filth and dead leaves that tended to pile up in corners if someone wasn't diligent about being clean - one of the many little things about living in a heavily forested region, and entirely unremarkable.

Leaves and filth weren't going to tell me anything, so I went to check the cab. The back seat had a layer of garbage on the floor, stomped down by boots, and I quickly pulled it out hoping to find something interesting. Generic coffee cups, fast food wrappers from the most popular chains and the packaging from a brick of plastic water bottles didn't give me any smoking guns. And not a single receipt that might have told me where these guys frequented. Even a McDonald's receipt could have told me where they had been on a specific day at a specific time.

The front diver's side didn't give me much more of anything. The door had a couple of badly scratched-up CDs in the pocket. One was a bootleg mix of popular country rock songs, and another was the first Taylor Swift album. The centre console revealed some more CDs in better condition, some pocket change, several empty packs of cigarettes and a couple of cheap BIC lighters. The passenger side had more trash on the floor, similar to the back, but this was where I found the receipts I'd been looking for. Not every receipt was the same, but I was able to quickly start putting together a mental image of their haunts - not that it actually told me much right away. A few of the oldest receipts were from before the previous owner was supposed to have died, but the more recent ones were scattered all over the region and crossing county lines. Mishawaka, Banks, Vemonia, even all the way up north to Clatskanie closer to the Washington state line. Whoever was using this truck had been travelling in the last couple of months and tracking those movements was going to take a whole fucking murder board of work and significant time. I bundled all the receipts that I could find and set them aside.

I struck paydirt with the glovebox, pulling out a revolver in a leather holster. It was a basic Ruger of some sort, worn and old but it had all the serial numbers still on it. A quick check showed me it was loaded. It really wasn't that strange a thing to find for a backwoods truck - it wasn't about to stop a bear in its tracks, but it could be used in most wildlife-related situations to at least hurt and scare something off, and was a decent little self-defence piece. Sure, folks in Portland and some of the other cities would have scoffed or been shocked at the need for such a casual carry in the truck, or they would have before the pandemic, but in the backwoods you never knew when you might need to even just make a loud bang to spook an angry deer, a bobcat or a wolf.

With luck, and some work calling around, it might be possible to track who owned the firearm. It was old but notthat old, and firearm sales still needed to be tracked at individual gun stores. I could start with the nearby vendors and circle out from there.

Well, if the owners of the stores were still alive and willing to go to the effort.

Under the revolver was the old, tattered owner's manual for the truck. No insurance documents that I could find, though I doubted the raiders were insurance kind of people on a regular day. A couple of empty and crumpled water bottles in the passenger side door rounded out my search.

I took a picture of the revolver with the serial numbers clearly visible and sent it to Miriam, then got back in my truck, rolled down the windows and turned it off again. I pulled out the little notebook I'd brought with me and made notes about my search, then flipped to a new page, opened up the maps app on my phone and started searching for firearms shops and dealers, scribbling down their locations and phone numbers.

I had some phone calls to make once the rest of the world was more likely to be awake, but I could get as much other work done as I could.

* * * * *

I got a few bites on the call-out to the work crews and spent a couple of hours jumping from crew to crew gathering descriptions of tattoos, facial hair, scars and particularly identifying items of clothing. Nothing stood out as someone I could recognize from around town, but I bundled it all up into a report and shot it off to the State Troopers and Miriam just in case they could run the descriptions through the criminal databases.

Not that I was going to hold my breath on that - the Staties were still stretched way thin, and Miriam couldn't detail too many people to help with this. She had an entire operation to run.

Where Icould get some help was right there on the site though. When I checked in with Vanessa - who had punched me in the arm for sending her the photo of me and Sexy Susan the sex doll while she was just about to start work - she'd immediately been able to grab a few of her new, untrained labourer women to start making calls for me. I left them with the serial number, make and model for the revolver and the list of shops I'd started putting together. The first dozen or so shops they managed to reach had been dead ends, but about half the calls weren't even being picked up. I left them to it with a script that should at least get the owners to check their records unofficially.

Unless, of course, the owners were part of the same militia group the raiders were from. That possibility had darkened my mind, too.

Not having any good updates for Kara, I had texted her that I was still working on things to try and keep her spirits up, and got a brief update that they were locked up tight.

That drilled out the leads I had immediately from the raid. Other than running down the receipt locations and dates, at least, but that wasn't going to get me anywhere fast. There was one more outside thread that I could pull on first.

"You're going to be careful," Erica ordered me.

I was driving and had her on speaker, though it was only from my phone. "Of course I am," I said. "I've got my bulletproof vest on under my shirt, and I borrowed an unmarked truck from the pool on the site."

"Oh, great," she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. "The redneck assholes won'timmediately know that you're a cop."

"That's Sheriff to you, missy," I said.

"And that's Wifey to you, Sheriff," she retorted.

"I'm going to be careful," I said.

"Good," Erica agreed. "And when you're done there, you're coming here. You need to make sure your immunity is up."

"I'll head home first to change and shower," I said. "If I do pick anything up there I don't want to bring it with me."

"OK, babe," Erica sighed. "Call me when you're done though, yeah? I need to know you're safe."

"I will," I promised.

She made a kiss sound into the phone and then hung up.

I checked the map on my phone and sighed. Here was as good as anywhere. I pulled off the side of the highway and put the truck in park. If I was going to be careful, I needed to scout the location before I just drove up, and if I parked too close to the driveway someone might take notice.

I was in for a hike.

Soon the truck was locked and I was climbing up through the brush at the side of the road, my hunting rifle slung over my shoulder and a camo hunting jacket giving me a bit of cover as I started my trek. The early part of my hike was actually pretty peaceful as I didn't have much to worry about, but after a mile I started checking my GPS a bit more often and another mile in I slowed my pace as I started to really focus.

The soft crunch of my boots on the forest floor, and the sounds of nearby birds, were my only company until I hit the first tripwire.

It wasn't exactly a professional job, but the bent branch with the sharpened stakes would still have fucked me up.

"Someone's been reading some really stupid websites," I grunted to myself. I grabbed a stick and, standing away from the danger zone, I triggered the tripwire. The branch swung around and actually broke under its own weight.

From then on I slowed down even more. I spotted three more tripwires made with the same trick, plus some basic snares sized for small game and a couple of bigger ones that must have been intended for larger game like deer, or people. I bypassed the most obvious ones and tripped a few more of the basic ones while noting the surroundings so I could remember a safe way out before pressing on.

I almost fucked up when I spotted the trail cam. It was a basic one, camo patterned and tied to a tree. In the dark, I would have probably walked right by it without noticing. As it was, the cam had definitely got me on video. The good news was that, after I took it down and pried it open, I found it was only recording and not broadcasting. I took out the memory card and batteries, erased the internal memory, and put it right back where it had been.

The next camera wasn't so easy to deal with, but I spotted it early because I reached the treeline. It, and several more like it, was mounted to a pole and had wires running back towards the main building of the little compound ahead of me.

The Golden Beaver bar looked like it had been a decent-sized hunting cabin at some point back in the 1980s. It had one main building, two stories, and was made of thick logs. The windows were shuttered and someone had reinforced them with sheet metal on the first floor. There were also a couple of outbuildings around the back, one of them an old doublewide trailer and another a small barn. Tarps had been erected and tied down between the buildings now, and someone had started farming chickens in the space as the birds pecked away at the ground, protected by a couple layers of a chickenwire fence. The front of the building was packed with almost a dozen cars and trucks, and someone had erected what looked like an attempt at a log palisade gate at the throat of the driveway but had given up halfway through.

I quietly skulked around the edges of the property, staying back from the treeline to keep out of the view of the security cameras. I scoped out the buildings and parking lot with my rifle. The place wasn't exactly a hopping busy bar, but there were definitely people inside and at one point a guy with a beard reaching halfway down his gut stumbled out the front, strutted to the side of the porch and unzipped, taking a piss off the end.

I circled back around the property, scanning the other side. They didn't have any guards posted, including in the upper windows of the building, but I did spot a cache of big red fuel containers and propane tanks set back from the main house, so they weren't complete idiots.

Part of me regretted the time wasted even bothering with scouting - there wasn't any sign of the raw materials stolen from the site, and none of the trucks in the parking lot had been shot up so whoever Kyla and I had hit wasn't here. That being said, the truck could have been dumped and the perpetrators were here after all.

Hell, the guys from the shootout at Mary's could be here, even if the raiders weren't.

It wasn't a complete waste. I knew that even if they were halfhearted, the men who were congregating herewere doing shady shit. The traps in the woods were an important clue as to which way they were leaning.

I backtracked back out the way I had come. Whoever came out to eventually check their traps would be suspicious about several of them being triggered, but that wasn't likely to happen until at least tomorrow and gave me time to follow through with the second half of my plan. The hike out, once I was away from the Golden Beaver 'danger zone,' was pleasant again and I popped out of the woods about a third of a mile from my truck and trudged my way back up to it. A year ago I would have been passed by cars and trucks on that little stretch of highway - now I didn't see a solitary car.

After a quick text to Erica to let her know I was checking in and safe, I stowed my jacket and rifle and got back in the truck. The drive up to the Golden Beaver was a lot faster than the hike.

At the mouth of the driveway up to the bar, I found that their little club had erected a second sign next to the one that was stencilled with the same symbol as from the matchbook Barry had given me before. The new sign was a laminated printout nailed onto a wooden backing, and I pulled over to read it before heading up.

"Jesus Christ," I grunted under my breath. It was a declaration of independence from the 'sham governance of thieves, conmen and cheaters.' There was a bunch of mumbo jumbo bullshit under it that I didn't bother reading because it was all the same drivel that the Sovereign Citizens always spouted off.

The driveway was a winding mess of gravel and dirt filled with potholes, and I could just guess at the reasoning the lazy assholes had for not fixing it. Up at the top, I got a fresh look at the unfinished palisade gate and drove right through and into the parking lot, pulling up at the end of the rough 'row' of vehicles and making sure to back in so that I could manage a quick getaway if needed. I parked, got out, and walked up to the main doors of the bar without a single person stopping me.