FORSAKEN: THE SYSTEMIC SERIES (2 page)

But even with all this, Jake realized that they needed to find a different way – a
better
way – of sustaining themselves in this new world.  Making these raids was time consuming and dangerous, and they often didn’t result in enough goods to make their efforts worthwhile.  And while Jake and Ava had grown their small army of mercenaries to over a dozen men now, it was still far below the number they needed to take on some of the big-time players in the city.  And turnover in their organization was high.  They’d already lost the guys they’d brought with him from Memphis, not that Jake considered them much of a loss. 

It wasn’t that Jake was afraid of taking the risk with such raids.  Just the opposite in fact; he liked the challenge, and he would never back down from a fight.  But in a sense, Jake was lazy.  He wanted to find a way for business to come to him rather than having to go out and find it all the time.  Jake however, wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.  In this one aspect though, he was cognizant enough to recognize this shortcoming.  And while he wasn’t willing to admit his ignorance in front of his men, he knew how to work around it.  Ava’s brains and planning abilities were integral to helping him prepare most of their operations.  He knew that she was smarter than he was; but he was stronger, and that helped him keep her in her place.  Still, while her intellect was beneficial to him and his operation, it also worried him, and her business acumen was something that he would never have.  So Jake had to achieve the delicate balancing act of keeping Ava close enough to use as a tool when he needed her, but not so close that she threatened his position at the top of their burgeoning organization’s hierarchy.

Jake rose slowly from his position upon the cold, hard floor, wobbling a little bit as he did so from the after effects of last night’s binge.  He squinted to focus and then blinked hard several times to clear away the fuzz.  Ava sat smoking her cigarette, continuing to watch out the window, unperturbed by Jake’s awakening.

Jake ambled over and pulled a nearby folding chair over to the table, taking a seat beside Ava.  She immediately got a waft of stink – a mixture of body odor, alcohol, cigarettes, and morning breath.  She took another deep drag of her own cigarette in an effort to cover the stench. 

It didn’t work.

“Morning, babe,” Jake said, taking a glance out the window.  He saw nothing so interesting that it would capture his attention like it did Ava’s. Two men were walking past – one blonde, one dark haired – that was all.

Jake and his crew had set up shop in one of the city’s old watershed management pump stations.  The building was built solidly and it made for the perfect little fortress.  It was a rectangular, two-story brick structure, with a much smaller pinnacle third floor directly in the center of the building that had an exit to an open rooftop.  It reminded Jake of a tinier and much uglier US Capitol Building. 

The lower floor of the pump station was devoted largely to housing the equipment and machinery that had been used to pump a portion of the city’s water supply.  There was also a small office that Jake and Ava had quickly commandeered as their private headquarters.  In addition to these areas there were several empty storage rooms and a nasty old bathroom.  The spaces were extremely dark and had to be lit by generators since the first floor was devoid of windows. 

The second floor was comprised of a large room in the center of the building that – judging from the number of desks they’d found in it – had likely been used for administration purposes.  This was the room in which they now sat and that they had converted to their lounge area.  There were also several more individual offices at each end of the structure and a separate room with various control panels affixed to its walls. 

The third floor appeared to have been mostly built for show and only housed one completely empty room and a stairway that led to its rooftop.  The only purpose for the stairway seemed to have been to access the flagpole that sat atop the building, now devoid of flag.

The building sat on a one-acre plot which comprised an entire city block.  The plot was surrounded on three sides by empty lots.  Jake liked this because it gave him a good view of any approaching intruders and long-distance lines of sight for his armed guards.  A city street ran in front of the building, across from which was a row of abandoned homes, most of which had been built during the 1960s and 70s. 

There was only one entrance to the pump station located in the front center of the first floor and for which there was a single large steel door.  Jake liked the lack of windows on the first floor which reduced possible points of entry.  Meanwhile, the plethora of windows on the second floor provided him and his men with a variety of firing points should they be attacked. 

The pump station was surrounded by a 25-foot perimeter of dead grass and gravel which was ringed by an eight-foot tall chain-link fence topped with razor wire.

As an added precaution, Jake had positioned machinegun emplacements atop the small third-floor flagpole rooftop, which were manned at all times.  He had also mounted security cameras at each corner, as well as at the main entrance of the building that linked to television monitors inside and that were powered by generators on the first floor.  One such monitor was mounted in their lounge, above the card table at which he and Ava now sat, one was positioned just inside the first-floor entry door, and another was located in their private office downstairs.

Overall, Jake was pretty pleased with his little fortress, but he knew there was always room for improvement.  He’d seen some of the compounds of the bigger players in town and he was envious.  Their Scarfacesque mansions came complete with huge swimming pools, gated front entrances, attack dogs, and enough armed guards to fill a school bus.  Still, he had to start somewhere, and Jake knew that it was only a matter of time before his own operation rivaled those of these current masters of the universe. 

The way he’d heard it, there were three main operations in town that ran things.  They were known as “The Three Families” around the Atlanta metro area.  These families – also known as “XYZ” or “the Big Three” – controlled the core of Atlanta’s post-flu economy.  The X Family controlled the majority of the area’s fuel supply.  After the flu, the nation’s refineries of course shut down.  Without refineries, this in turn meant no new supply of gasoline.  Therefore, the X Family had taken over most of the local gas stations that had any remaining fuel in them after the flu had run its course.  Once they got these stations back up and running, powered by generators, they sent their minions crawling across the city in search of additional fuel with which to supply them.  They siphoned from old cars, poured out paltry ounces from lawn mowers, trickled the remnants from weed eaters and leaf blowers, and generally stole whatever amount of fuel they could lay their hands on.  Some of the family’s minions were even learning the art of bootlegging, creating their own super-hard alcohol so strong that it could be used for drinking, driving, or a combination thereof.

The Y Family controlled the Underground where much of the city’s commerce took place.  They weren’t in the business of owning the actual supplies that were traded there so much as controlling the traders themselves.  The Y Family took a cut of all the transactions not just at the Underground, but at any other markets in the metro area.  In return, they provided safe environments – relatively speaking in the post-apocalyptic world – where merchants and consumers could conduct their trade.  The Y Family also offered personal and business security for traders willing to pay them for these additional privatized services.  For those who didn’t, well, they were on their own.  And these were the ones upon which Jake and Ava had so far been concentrating their efforts.

Meanwhile, the Z Family dealt in sex.  Early on, the heads of this family had recognized that without a central government there to hamper the sex trade, it could grow into what it had always wanted to be – an accepted and exceptionally lucrative industry.  The Z Family had quickly swooped in after the flu had passed and begun to organize and advertise what remained of commerce in sex.  In turn, the industry had actually become about the only portion of the free-trade market that was now well-regulated.  The family ensured that any sexual transaction that was undertaken within their jurisdiction was both safe and fair for all parties involved.  In the process, their madams and the ladies working for them were making out like bandits, and their clients were getting a service that was sorely needed in a world where many husbands, wives, and significant others had been claimed by the flu or other post-flu hazards. 

After a time, the Z Family had even branched out into male brothels, finding that many of the ladies of the day were just as hungry to feed their sexual appetites as the men were.  The family also had a hand in the medical services industry, since they’d quickly realized that their prostitutes – mostly in an effort to safeguard their own health and wellbeing – were often quite adept at pinpointing health issues in their clients.  And with the ranks of doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals having been decimated by the effects of the flu, medical services were in high demand and extremely valuable.  It was not unusual to find someone who had worked in the medial profession – often in a lesser-trained but still knowledgeable position within the industry such as an assistant or nurse practitioner – attached to a brothel or even working as one of the prostitutes so that clients could be serviced in multiple ways during their visit.  The prospects of some great sex often worked wonders to make a nasty tooth extraction or stitching a wound just a bit more bearable. 

The Three Families were run by an odd combination of former businessmen and criminals, and each family had a hierarchy just like any other well-structured organization.  There was a top-ranking official who served as the operational figurehead and who oversaw the planning and activities involved in the management of the family’s short as well as long-term objectives.  Then there were directors who governed their own individual aspect of the organization – things like security, transportation, accounting, operations, and even human resources.  These men and women had assistants, with managers under them, and supervisors beneath them, and so on down the line to the soldiers and peons who carried out the more menial activities and dirty work. 

The heads of the Three Families met once a month to discuss operations, air grievances, and deal with conflicts or operational overlap.  And up to this point, things had been working out very well for all three of the main players.  They had the overall situation well organized, they had crushed any opposition, and they had managed to keep problems between the organizations to a minimum.  And all three were quite content – at least at this somewhat early juncture in their expansion efforts – with the way things had been progressing. For the remaining citizens of Atlanta, it appeared that the Three Families were as close to any sort of, if not law, at least order, they were going to get.

However, with the Three Families being intricately involved in so much of Atlanta’s commerce, it meant that Jake had to be extremely careful when picking targets for his raids.  Should he miscalculate and hit one of the family-controlled or protected supply dumps, he could very well find himself at their mercy, of which there was very little for those who took from the families without paying.

If Jake ever wanted to insert himself into Atlanta’s local market, he had to ensure that he tread carefully until his own organization was large enough to take on – or at least defend against – the families. In the meantime, he was content to utilize Ava – and what he was quickly finding was her apparent knowledge of or intuition regarding business and organizational management – to help him navigate the treacherous path of expanding his operation in Atlanta. 

Chapter 3

That night, we dosed both Paul and dad up on medicine. We gave them antibiotics in addition to the cough and cold medicine they had already been taking.  My theory on the subject was that they both had pneumonia and the antibiotics that we had available might help to keep the worst of it at bay if we started administering them immediately, although I had no way of proving my theory correct. 

Claire tended to agree, but like me, she couldn’t be sure.

Whether we were right or wrong, it didn’t matter.  All that mattered was that we kept them medicated, fed, and found them a place where they could sleep indoors, and preferably in comfortable beds – not in a dusty barn or outside in the cold – for at least a few days.

That night, we let Paul stretch out and sleep in the relative comfort the pickup truck’s cab.  Thankfully, the front interior of the pickup was one long vinyl-covered seat rather two seats divided by a center console.  His mother slept sitting upright in the passenger seat with him, her lap used as the boy’s pillow.  She refused to be separated from him after he’d collapsed earlier in the day, and no one could blame her.

The rest of us huddled together under blankets in the back bed of the pickup or in the sole remaining tent that we’d set up nearby.  Temperatures hovered in the mid-50s, which made the night tolerable; however, after our previous stint at the farmhouse – brief though it was – the loss of comfortable beds and warm bedding made roughing it outside again tough to endure. 

Almost all of us – except for Sharron and the kids – were up at or before dawn and ready to get on the road.  We had everything packed up and strapped to the trailer behind the pickup just as the sun was making its appearance on the horizon.  I think everyone was ready to find a place they could call home again.  Even Cashmere, the family cat, seemed antsy to get moving and hopped up into the front of the pickup as soon as I opened the door.