Dog Days of Summer (Damned of the 2/19th Book Four) - Finished

Inventorying the War Stocks

Dane's Chevron Station

Highway 12 West

Thurston County, Washington

United States of America

09 August, 1986

1845 Hours

        The light breeze made the grass growing in the cracks in the asphalt wave back and forth, a slight whistling noise coming from the Orange Crush in my hand as the wind played over the mouth of the bottle. I took the credit card I had flexed back and forth until I could rip it in half and threw the half at the nearly overgrown grill that led down into the storm drains. It clicked off the asphalt and spun on its edge until it dropped through the slots in the iron grate. I look a long drink off of the ice cold soda, a drag off the cigarette I held in the same hand, then skated the other one into the storm drain to follow it's other half. It was useless now, and I wasn't sure if it would be tracked or not yet. Most people wouldn't find their credit card purchases tracked, much less by an agency they'd barely heard of, but I knew for a fact that the purchases I'd just made would light up boards all across No Such Agency.

        I figured it didn't matter anyway. I swilled down the last of the cold soda and chucked the bottle against the wall so it shattered. It didn't matter much anyway, the damn bottle was thinner than I remembered and wouldn't work to make shape charges. Instead of inverting the glass, it would just blow to shit and spray glass shrapnel around. That was all right, I'd bought enough stuff to get the job done.

        Enough stuff to light up boards across anyone tracking me.

        Two generators in the two-kilowatt range. Seven gallons of bleach. Hotplates. Four pressure cookers. A pair of yogurt makers. Six bags of fertilizer. An acetlyne torch. A case of mothballs. Twenty bottles of Caro Corn Syrup. Fourty 12-volt batteries from a junkyard. Eight gallons of ammonia. Ball bearings by the pound. A fifty gallon drum of deisel fuel. A Craftsman tool set. Styrofoam peanuts. Ten boxes of Tide laundry detergent. Twelve gallons of floor wax. A soldering iron and a bunch of parts from Radio Shack. Two cases of Raid. Two cases of Gatorade. More fly strips. Two tanks of pesticide. A grinder and sawzall. One hundred bars of Dove soap. A bullet reloading press and supplies. Ten gallons of avaition fuel. More stuff, that by itself, was perfectly innocent. It was together that it read like someone's worst nightmare.

        I figured as soon as someone in the FBI or the NSA saw that shopping list they'd start shitting blue kittens. The Defense Intelligence Agency was probably trying to figure out what I was up to, buying all of that stuff in The World. If I'd bought it in Europe, they'd probably figure I was just teaching an Non-Conventional Warfare class to some brain dead idiot infantry or snake-eaters.

        But in The World?

        That shopping list stated I was going to war. Not just kick in the door and start shooting war, but war Special Weapons way. The idea of someone getting down and dirty like that probably had some guy in a suit sweating right then as he read the list of credit card purchases.

        Glendan and Harvey sat in Glendan's truck, which was loaded down until the leaf-springs groaned. The 1978 Chevy Pickup was three toned: rust, red, and Bondo. Both men had their rifles in the rack, keeping the one they'd grabbed for me company. They'd been garbaging down the Taco Bell I'd bought them to shut them the hell up about being hungry after the wrecking yard.

        I hadn't bothered buying any firearms. Sure, I could have picked up a pistol, rifle, or shotgun right quick, but if I purchased a firearm with anything but cash I'd have the Federal Marshall's breathing down my neck before I even got out of the parkinglot of the store. Especially since 15 minutes with a coat hanger and a file and I could turn more than about half of the rifles at Blackbird into fully automatic weapons.