Chapter 1

I’m Adam North, and I’m a paranoid, gun nut, wacko. That’s what my ex-girlfriend said as she threw her last suitcase into the back seat of her car, just before she drove off, never to be seen again. I think that she was being a bit unfair; after all, the marines would not have taken me if I was a wacko. As for the paranoid, gun nut charge, well, for a marine rifleman in Afghanistan, those were survival characteristics. Perhaps the circumstances were a bit different in West Virginia, but still, its best to be on the safe side. After all, just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.

Maybe I should explain how I got to this point, and why I don’t trust people or fate to do well by me. It started when I was twelve. Mom was a teacher at the school in town about eight miles down a dirt road from our farm, and dad worked construction some and farmed some, and drank a lot. It’s an exaggeration to call our collection of steep hills, cliffs, woods, and rocks a farm, but I loved it. I would camp, hunt, trap, and fish every weekend and all summer with my dad. We did have a few acres for a big garden, but in no way was it a commercial farm. In the summer of my twelfth year, it all went to hell. My mother and father had not been getting along for several years due to his drinking and lack of any effort to, as my mom would say, better himself. One day he said he was going to town for beer, stormed out of the house, and we never saw or heard from him again.

Mom said that we were better off without him, as that was one less mouth to feed, but I felt deserted and betrayed. For the next few years things went along as usual for mom and me, but she had grown a bit distant and we drifted apart. Later in life I realized that I was physically growing into a copy of my dad. By seventeen I was 6’2”, 220 pounds, blond and blue. I reminded her of what she called the biggest mistake of her life.

I did ok in school but had no desire to go to college. I had arranged with the marine recruiter to report for basic training after graduation. Then things went to hell again. Just before graduation, the principle, the school nurse, and the sheriff pulled me out of my last period class. Mom had been killed supervising the elementary kids as they boarded their busses. It turned out that a rich drunk from NY City, who had purchased several worn out farms in the area to create an estate, had lost control of his car and pinned mom against a bus. He also injured several kids, but mom was the only one to die.

We found out that he had several other drunken driving convictions in New York, and was driving without a license. His fancy lawyers couldn’t keep him out of jail this time, and my lawyer raped him in the settlement to keep him out of civil court. After my lawyer and the various government bloodsuckers got their shares, I ended up with almost seven million dollars. I put my money in safe investments and arranged with the county to keep the taxes up on the farm while I was in the corps, and then reported to basic.