Rebel Radio Read online

  “No problem. Just call back on this channel if you need to brainstorm or talk or—“

  “Blake,” a new voice came out of the radio, cutting him off, “Thanks for the tip also, it’s something… Oops, my lady says I just walked all over your transmission. Thanks,” a male voice said.

  Three more voices spoke up, calling in from across the country one by one thanking Blake.

  “Hey world, what do you think of the name, Guerilla Radio for a regularly scheduled broadcast on tips and help? An old school radio version of the internet or Wikipedia?” Patty said.

  “Rebel Radio,” I said immediately, not knowing why.

  There was a smattering of agreement from all over the country as people checked in. I smiled, feeling good for the first time in ages. My sore and battered body lulled me into a half doze. I remembered to turn off the radio, but sleep wasn’t far away. I needed…

  Chapter Two

  Don –

  My mouth was dry and my lips were chapped from constantly rubbing them. My hands were starting to shake as I wondered for the hundredth time if I should go to one of my backup locations and get some booze out. It wasn’t dehydration I was fighting off, it was the DT’s. I’d let them catch me once after the power went off when I tried to dry myself out. It was horrible. I was sick constantly; crying, puking sick. I finally caved and downed half a fifth of vodka and the shakes subsided and I regained some sort of resemblance of normalcy. Now, I just drink enough to keep the shakes away, but I reasoned that every day if I cut back a little I could eventually quit. Then I drank even more.

  I was cutting through a ritzy portion of Charlotte, about a day’s walk from my main camp, looking for more liquor and anything else to make my miserable life easier. A hundred times a day I tried to figure out how I could just let the lights go out forever on my miserable existence. A couple times I even felt the rope against my neck as I considered stepping off the stool, but I never did it. I wanted to, but I could never take that last step. I don’t know why, but every time I resigned myself to die, I found myself alive.

  The booze helped me sleep. Nothing else seemed to work. If I slept even halfway sober, nightmares would overtake me and then I’d get drunk to stop the shakes, but those were more caused by grief and loss rather than withdrawal symptoms. It was a weird existence that was only interrupted by the biker gang that Reno led. I’d run across him in his old life as a building inspector and Reno never forgot when I denied their permit at the clubhouse. It was obvious that they had built a dozen apartments upstairs of the old bar and the building wasn’t zoned for occupancy.

  I’d run across him a week after the power went out, and I still sported sore ribs and some scars from the beating I took as they exacted their revenge. I’d been out trying to buy supplies and booze, but nobody would have taken my card anyways. Since that moment, I’d kept myself hidden away as much as I could, tying on a bender once in a while. That’s what led me out to this side of Charlotte; I was looking for more booze to add to my stash. I was too scared to go dry suddenly and it was that fear that had me moving in the daylight when I usually moved at night.

  Only Reno’s club, the Devil Dogs MC, other than the soldiers, had any sort of transportation. A lot of his crew were ex-cops and ex-military, and all of them were acting like thugs and mercenaries. The soldiers never had a chance. I had been drunk the day NATO rolled into town, and I locked myself into my hidey hole and got even more drunk. Somehow, locking myself in for a week worked out for me, because when I came out again, everyone was gone or dead. Mostly gone.

  A lot of things were left behind, and one of the places I was fixing to loot, the golf course, I was hoping had been overlooked. Before I fell into a tequila bottle, I used to golf here and I knew the bar was fully stocked. I was hoping that it was mostly untouched. Most of the liquor stores and grocery stores had been stripped bare, but restaurants that also served alcohol had been an ok place to find booze. They were obvious to me, but maybe not to those who were left. Granted, the people that were left in Charlotte were assholes and degenerates who’d rather slit your throat and kill you as much as help you. I didn’t have a lot of faith left in the populace at large and, with no way to communicate or get news, I was pretty out of touch.

  I had the golf course on my right side and I cringed when I realized I would have to either walk on that side of the road in the open, or start going through the yards and hedges of the houses that lined the left side of the road across from it. It was an easy thing to do but I hated all of those doors and windows at my back. I knew I didn’t have enough time to check every house on my left with the remaining daylight, so I ignored the overgrown lawns, the houses with the doors and windows gaping open with trash everywhere.

  Those who were left had made it a veritable hellhole compared to the million dollar houses and mini McMansions with the manicured lawns that there used to be. Sadly, I knew most of the people who had lived in these houses and darkly wondered if any of them were behind closed windows in the dark, checking my progress with a scoped gun. I shuddered and moved as quickly as I could, until I was across the street from the parking lot, full of dead cars that lead to the clubhouse. With any luck, I’d be sipping martinis in a few minutes and not filled with holes caused by gunshots from nervous survivors.

  My shoes were the loudest sound, crunching over the gravel of the parking lot, and I went from car to car in cover, much like I’d seen the cops do on television, hoping I wasn’t making myself a target. I needed a shot of booze and was pissed that I’d only brought half a pint from one of my safe houses on this excursion. It was literally a half constructed house that I’d started to stash supplies in, just in case Reno and his guys ever found out where my main camp was.

  Seeing the coast clear, I ran to the front door and tried to look inside. I cupped my hands around my eyes and tried to see into the darkened room beyond, but couldn’t make out anybody. Just an empty room with a bar at the back end. Everything was pretty neat and tidy and my hopes soared. Maybe I would find some food as well as booze. The door was locked when I tried it and, for half a second, I considered using the hammer I brought along as protection for knocking the pane of glass out and letting myself in.

  If I did that, then anybody walking by might think somebody was inside or had been. Was that a good thing? Would it be something new and different that caused people to investigate? I decided to go around to the back to the large patio overlooking the greens. I was depressed with how overgrown the lawns were. Sometimes only the flag sticking out of the hole showed me where the putting greens were compared to the fairways. It was depressing me, right up until I found an unlocked door leading into the kitchen.

  The room was surprisingly clean considering when the blast went off that took out the power. I would have thought the bar and grill in the restaurant side would have been going full swing on a Friday night, but it looked unused. I didn’t dare open the big refrigerators; I’d learned my lesson a long time ago how soon food turns nasty and foul. Instead, I worked my way past the stainless steel appliances and through some swinging double doors, stopping dead and marveling at the glorious sight to my right.

  “Oh momma, thank you,” I muttered to myself and almost ran to the bar, my hands picking up first one bottle of booze and then another.

  “Oh baby, this I needed.”

  I undid the cap of a bottle of Jack Daniels and drank deeply. The sickly sweet flavor of the Tennessee whiskey flooded my senses and I could actually taste the smoky flavor from being aged before my taste buds were seared senseless from half a bottle. I capped it and staggered as blessed numbness soothed my brain and my thoughts slowed. I could already feel the fire in my stomach and I smiled for the first time that day.

  I looked around. There must have been over 100 bottles on the bar of various flavors and kinds, and cases and cases of liquor underneath the front of the bar on the bottom shelves underneath the ones that held the dusty but clean glasses. One box was shoddier looki
ng than the others, and I pulled it out and set it up on the old redwood bar. It was full of bar snacks, pretzels and bags of peanuts. I left that up there and smiled.

  My backpack was mostly empty but I needed to move all the booze; there was no way I was going to leave it all behind. It was a year’s worth, probably much much more. I packed half a dozen full bottles of scotch, vodka and whiskey into my backpack in case I had to abandon things quickly, and went looking for keys.

  Most golf courses, I found in my life as a building inspector, had things separated. The private and public areas. Private areas of the course were the back offices, inside the kitchens and then the tool/equipment shed. Usually the managers had a set of keys to everything in case the head of maintenance or the groundskeeper lost his, so I went in search of them. I found the office easily, having been inside it a time or two, but I hadn’t remembered which particular one until I found the frosted glass covering the inside of the door.

  I almost felt bad when the door was locked, and I pulled the hammer from the side loop on my shorts and broke out the bottom right corner of the glass. Two seconds of fumbling had the door unlocked and I went in. The office had been remodeled since I’d been in it years before. The golf club’s president must have been a sailor of sorts. Pictures of a man on the bow of a small sailboat adorned the pictures and the paneling had been redone in teak with brass accents everywhere; the picture frames, the desk’s edges.

  On a corkboard behind the desk, notes and papers were pinned up. Those I ignored, but the hooks on the bottom of the frame had what I was looking for. Keys. Not knowing which ones I’d need, I took all three rings and headed out. I knew where the maintenance and equipment sheds were. Hopefully I’d find a wheelbarrow to start moving my find. I left the office, smiling. This wasn’t going to be that bad of a day. I decided to leave the way I came in so I wouldn’t have to find the right key, but as I was going out the door, I tripped on the threshold, falling flat. I barely got my palms up before my head hit. Luckily I‘d saved my backpack from falling, but the weight from the bottles did nothing to make me feel warm and fuzzy when they slammed into me.

  I cursed and brushed the grit off and looked at the gravel imbedded into my bloody palm. I wiped the grit out of the wounds and squeezed them, letting the blood flow a bit and then began walking towards the large pole barn. It had large roll up doors on either end, and a side entrance with a regular sized entryway door. That’s the one I was planning on going through, knowing the roll up doors would be on an opener and dead.

  I got to the door and wiped the blood off my palm again before I began trying keys out. I swayed a moment, my head fuzzy. I missed the key slot in the handle and smiled for no reason as the alcohol started to mellow me out. Half a bottle would normally barely affect me, but I’d been going light lately, only drinking enough to keep myself from shaking. Drinking half of it was a little bit overboard, but I didn’t care. I was celebrating.

  I got the door open sometime through the second set of keys. The heat and darkness was overwhelming. The heat was almost enough to knock the wind out of me but, standing in the doorway, the 90 degree heat outside felt like air conditioning. I got a lighter out and lit the Zippo and walked around. I had to vent the place; the heat and the smell of fumes was terrible. I walked to the side wall where the roll up door was and found the opener. I pulled the bypass cord and rolled the door up slowly, mindful of my earlier fears.

  Even though I was solidly drunk again, I still had my wits enough to be careful. The door I opened faced the back of the building facing the golf course. I stepped outside and into the shadow of the building to cool down and, after a few minutes, I went back inside. The open doors let in enough light that I could make out the row after row of golf carts and lawn equipment. I was looking for a wheelbarrow or garden cart, so I walked down the rows past those until I came almost to the end. There was an old golf cart that somebody had been restoring, as evidenced by the cardboard boxes and Styrofoam pieces scattered.

  No way. The thing looked old enough that maybe the EMP hadn’t killed it, but that would just be too much luck and I didn’t believe in that kind of luck.

  “It’s going to bug me forever,” I muttered, “if I don’t at least check it out.”

  Talking to myself had become a habit and, without anybody around to keep me entertained, I did it quite a bit when I wasn’t feeling down and depressed.

  “Oh wow.” I noticed the keys were in the ignition switch under the driver’s seat.

  I sat for a moment and held down the brake and tried the ignition. I didn’t hear a starter so I looked around and saw an ignition button by the steering column in the dash. I pressed that and I could barely hear the motor fire to life. It was quiet, almost quiet enough that even in the oppressive silence it was hard to hear.

  “I take it back, I do believe in luck.” I turned off the ignition and got out of the golf cart.

  This was a game changer. Something that could literally make the difference of life or death. A quick and quiet mode of transportation. I was tempted to leave then, but if I found this treasure, what else awaited me? I went through the rest of the stalls where the golf carts were and found another two of these bad ass carts in various states of repair. None were complete, not unless you called the first one I found.

  I reasoned with myself as to why they would have antique carts they were rebuilding when I found it. It wasn’t a wheelbarrow like I’d hoped to find. It wasn’t a garden cart with a good handle and drop down sides, but a small four foot by eight foot trailer. The truly golden thing about it was that it would hitch up to the old gas golf cart I found.

  “See, even god looks out for old drunks,” I said gratefully and pulled it into the main aisle way, to make things easier to hitch it to the cart.

  It was a lot easier than I thought and, when I backed the cart out and got it close, it was like they were made for each other. I fired up the golf cart and drove both it and the trailer out of the barn, turning it off once I cleared the roll up doors. I pulled the door down and then went out the side door, locking everything up behind me. With any luck, I could come back and loot another cart and stash it after finishing the rebuild and taking any and all tools I could.

  Lord knows, I left everything I owned when the bank foreclosed.

  * * *

  Almost everything fit into the cargo space of the cart and the trailer from the clubhouse. At least, everything I wanted to take. I put most of the booze in the trailer and loaded the cart with food that I’d found in the kitchen. Egg noodles, beans, rice, flour and everything canned I could. A literal treasure trove of food and booze. I could live off this for months if not years if I wasn’t a pig about things. I waited until dusk to leave. I didn’t want to use the single headlamp, it’d give away my position if the quiet motor didn’t. By this time, Reno and the gang would be bedded down or partying or doing stuff with the girls they had caught… The last thought left me sick to my stomach, but what was I to do? There were over twenty of them in the club and I was just a single guy.

  I had the trailer and cart packed dangerously heavy but had planned on going slow. At most, I expected a twenty minute drive to my first safe house. After that, I’d refuel and wait for another day or two to move the rest to my home base. I grinned; finding the home base years ago, I never knew what I’d lucked into until the day the power went out. I started the ignition and immediately turned it off when gunfire filled the night.

  * * *

  I waited a long while afterwards. I heard the Harleys fire up and move off. They had either made another raid, or Reno’s gang and the Angels were fighting again. The Devil Dogs were still the biggest and meanest MC left in the area. I decided not to get stuck in that mess and drove the full trailer back to the barn and parked it inside. My buzz had started to wear off and I hated that. I debated sleeping in the barn with the rest of the booze, but it was a few times hotter there than it was inside the clubhouse. I found myself in the locker rooms and m
ade myself a small spot in one of the shower stalls, the tiled floors cool enough to allow me to sleep. I killed the rest of the Jack Daniels waiting for the sandman.

  * * *

  It was the next night and I’d eaten a few bags of snacks I’d looted from the bar. I had the cart ready to go and took off as slow as I could, expecting the motor to echo with sound. I was lucky, it had a new muffler on it and it was quieter than most mopeds, even fully loaded. I drove down the coastal road, a risk because I knew Reno’s gang patrolled the area, but it would cut miles off of my route and I could save half a day of worry if I was lucky.

  From the previous night, I knew the bikes went the opposite direction, so I felt pretty safe. I’d been dodging him most of the summer and pretty successfully too. The ride through the McMansions was tense, but I made it. Something in a backyard caught my attention as I was fixing to turn. It was a hammock, something I’d been wanting for my home base for forever. It would be a thousand more times comfortable than the army cot I was used to sleeping on. I noted the address, took a hit from a bottle of tequila I’d stashed up front with me, and kept on going.

  It took me three uncomfortable minutes to crawl through the narrow window of my safe house, pull the release on the garage door opener and pull the cart and trailer inside. I closed the garage door, put the release back in place so the roll up door was essentially locked and placed a black piece of cardboard in front of the window I used to climb in. I made sure the lock between the garage and house was locked before I let myself relax a bit. It was a close thing, but I managed to get it all done before my nerves had me hitting the bottle again.

  I’d gathered a few five gallons of gas, and I unloaded those first and then filled the cart. It took less than a gallon, which surprised me, as I had been pulling a heavy load of at least a thousand pounds. I really had to remember to keep this cart road worthy! I went to the shelf and found my little hobo heater I’d made out of an old coffee can. I hadn’t gathered stick for fuel like I had before, but I had a different idea.