“Just because I can’t get any faster right now, doesn’t mean I’ve topped out.” Anna looked at her husband defiantly, challenging him to say otherwise with her look.
“I didn’t say overall, I just meant right now. You’re tense, you’re angry and you know you do your best when you’re loose and relaxed.”
“Fast is smooth, smooth is fast,” Anna said, taking a deep breath, then letting it out slowly. She repeated it a few times, then put her ear protection on again and stepped to the line.
At the signal, she drew and started shooting. Steven tried to keep a straight face as she rained thunder at the range she and Angel had made. When she was done, he hit stop at the stopwatch and started walking back to the Kawasaki Mule, the farm’s side by side. Anna dropped the mag, racked the slide to make sure it was empty, then holstered it and followed him.
“Hey, how did I do?” Anna asked.
Steven fired up the UTV, not looking at her.
“Steven!” She stomped her foot, knowing that would get his attention.
He looked at her, with a sad look in his eyes. He started to shake his head, then tossed her the stopwatch. Anna looked at it in shock. She had beat her best time by three tenths of a second. Looking up to flip him off, she ate his dust as he spun the wheels, cackling and trying to get away. She gave chase and jumped onto the back, catching the roof with her hands for balance.
“You chucklehead,” she shouted, using one hand to push her hearing protection out of the way.
“There is one more thing you are,” Steven called over her shoulder, “and that’s contrary. When somebody tells you that you can’t do something, you do it.”
“This is my personal best. I’ve never shot that good, even in a tournament.”
“You never will, either.”
“You’re so getting your ass stomped when we pull over,” Anna yelled, but she was trying hard not to laugh and cry at the same time.
Six
Rob and Dante took turns driving the corn head while the other ran the farm’s dump truck. The dump bed of course had been pressure washed and scrubbed ahead of time. The reason was pretty simple: the farm was going to hedge their bets that some of the feed stock might end up for human consumption. Once they filled the grain silos, the rest would be bagged and stored on pallets. Only some of it would be stored above ground in the ‘workshop’.
Rob had called the store a few days back to ask if they had any empty pallets they wanted to sell, along with putting in an order for a thousand sacks for grain. Rob was shooting from the hip, but that would let them store almost 50,000 pounds of corn, soybean, and wheat. Rob thought he should have tripled the amounts of bags, but he asked what they had on hand and what they could get for tomorrow. Anna had volunteered to go pick things up with the farm’s cube van since she was already friendly with the store’s manager.
“Pull forward more,” Rob said into the radio.
“Ok, let me know when,” Dante said back, the dump truck pulling forward more so the discharge from the corn head was dumping in the rear more.
“Right there. Hold it until the end of the row.”
“Copy. Are we taking this load to the silos?” Dante asked.
“Yes,” Rob said, watching the gauges. He was going to teach Angel and Anna how to run the equipment next. He figured Steven and Luis had enough time in heavy machinery that they could watch it done once and be good to go. The ladies picked up on things quickly and Angelica already knew some of this. Harry wasn’t too far behind the grownups, but he couldn’t reach the pedals.
Thinking of the families who had taken in the Littles, Rob had to smile. Before he’d gotten the job as their farm boss/ranch manager, he’d been doing odd jobs to make ends meet. There had been little to no money in their savings, his truck had needed major work, and taking care of his mother had made him stressed out. If he had to be doing it all alone, without the group's support, he wasn’t sure he could have made it.
There are two kinds of toughness, Rob thought, there’s physical toughness and mental toughness. Rob knew he was tough physically, but when he thought of how he might react if Angel, Harry, and his mother were subjected to dwindling food supplies, no money and being stuck in the same boat as the other 80% of the country, he cringed. He would do anything, absolutely anything, to make sure his family was taken care of.
That was why the farm as a whole had decided to sit on their commodities and expend them within the community, instead of sending them to the feds. If the rest of the collapse happened quickly, there would be thousands in just this rural area who would be hungry and desperate for food. Without something of value to trade for, food being one of them, things might very quickly descend into lawlessness. Even if they played everything correctly, it still may happen. That got Rob thinking of security. If things got any worse, they simply didn’t have enough people to protect the farm.
“Dante, go to channel 67,” he said, then turned the knob on his radio.
“What’s up?” Dante asked.
“If things get any worse, you know we don’t have enough people to protect this place, don’t you?”
“That’s been keeping me up at night. We’ve been fortunate that the shitheads who did try to come at us thought the front gate was the best place to do it. If we had guys try it the way Sullivan or those kids did, we’d be caught with our pants down. Even the extra motion detectors back there leave big gaps, and we get a ton of
