Against the Grain by Ian Daniels Read Free Book Online Page A

mouth shut, I just kept on going.  

Chapter 6
     
    I elected to hike the four and a half miles back to my place all that night instead of making a camp and extending it out. I might have been exhausted, but I wanted to get it over with. Plus it was a nice night with a good moon that showed plenty of light to walk by. My path took me through the heart of the woods north of the Harris’s houses, and it was treacherous in all the right spots if you didn’t know where you were going. Fortunately, I had done this a lot. I tried not to go by the same path too often so as to create a trail, although there were a few spots that it was unavoidable. There was only one area narrow enough to jump the little creek to keep your feet dry, and you had to drop through the bit of a canyon at just the right point or otherwise be redirected for an extra couple of miles around. I knew the way well and from the time I had spent back here in these woods, I also knew that there were no other occupied houses for miles and miles all around. A hunter would have to really be lost to make it all the way out here, no matter where they had started from. That’s what I always hoped anyway.
    My walk that night gave me time to reflect on what I had heard Megan and Breanne discussing. I usually tried not to over think the part I was playing, but now it was fresh in my mind. Unintentionally, I had developed a certain persona around the others. Part of it was scripted for show, and part of it was just born out of the differences between me and nearly everyone else living there.  
    I tried to keep them in the dark about the grizzly things I had had to do in the last couple years, but not so much as to let them naively believe it was safe beyond just a few miles from their front doors. None of them needed to hear the gory details from behind the gun sights, some things couldn’t be hidden though, and the rest was apparently guessed at.  
    Coincidentally, a bit of a legend had grown up around me. And perhaps I did start to play into it that a bit too, for a good reason. While I had found a balance in my life with the world, I seemed to be an exception. During the height of the economic crumble and then the harsh winter after it all really had fallen apart, there was little to no hope. There had been plenty of panic, lots of suicides, and many people took it as a freeing of the burdens of laws and morals… which all meant that the good people who were left were rapidly losing everything they had ever known, including hope. People needed hope to continue on living, it was their underlying purpose. Hope for a better car, better salary, better relationship, or nowadays, a better crop of food.  
    The truth was that I wasn’t that special or different than anyone else. I had never served in the military, I wasn’t some civilian contractor and I never wanted to be a cop, I had just been plugged in. With camping and shooting there was a natural connection to some survival related discussions and unlike most of the other basement dwellers who read and talked too much, I had put what I was doing and hearing together, and tried things out.  
    Clint Fenner had been very similar to me, in our interests anyway. We both lived out of town most of our lives. We camped, hunted, and shot at a few competitions together and we were traveling partners for the instructional classes that we attended… and we were friends. It all had just fallen into place with us.  
    He had been around longer than I had, and he had a dream, or maybe more accurately a nightmare, of what would be needed to be done if things ever did go south in our country. A country tearing itself apart was not unheard of; it was just usually on a smaller scale. A full blown civil war, revolution or invasion was not logistically ever going to happen to us, but a slide into decline, into third world hardships and general lawlessness driven by desperation, he and I both knew that was a very real possibility.