Chapter 20

If I had even the slightest doubt that our resident retired biologist would leap like a kangaroo for the chance of directly furthering his esoteric researches into the wonders of duckweed, those fears were put instantly to rest the moment I started discussing the tentative idea of a chain of ponds stretching across three former house lots. Overjoyed would be an understatement. He nodded his head and shook my hand a lot and expounded for at least half an hour on the wonders of aquaponics under I began considering the necessity of gnawing of my own arm, like a rabbit in a trap, in order to attempt an escape. I even wondered for a moment if Larry Collins would even strongly consider tearing down his own house just for the additional pond space, but he said the three full lots would be enough space and frighteningly enough, he had other plans for his house ... like tending to his own harem.

"You're dating my mother?" I exclaimed. Now I really had never seen that one coming!

"Well, Arlene thought she had something of an understanding with me, sneaking over a night or two a week for a booty call, and then your mother started catting also, scratching at my door. So we talked it all out and the women are going to share. They're moving their things over my place already."

While frightening, this did suggest some helpful possibilities. I decided that I'd needed to talk to Garry next, even if I had to drag him out of bed with Lori to do it.

I gave Mr. Collins (well, he was old enough to be my father, natural or step) a final handshake to seal the deal and offered him a half-million dollar budget to help get him started. He'd have the full planning details for me within about a week, and I hoped to have the demolition crews working by then as well. Lots of big external pond equipment would need to be ordered, but Larry thought that a local fish farm near Manor Downs was going out of business and that he could buy them out and move their equipment here. And probably poach a few of the soon to be unemployed expert staff. Good thinking there! I told him to give it a try and give Lori our HR officer a listing of any essential personnel that we would need to feed and house for the indefinite future.

Tracking down Garry actually wasn't too hard. He was in our kitchen with Lori, helping (or at least amusing) Kathy while she was fixing dinner. I grabbed his arm and a pair of beers and frog marched him outside so that we could talk in private.

"Garry, bud ... this is getting silly. We've got the space, more than enough for you and Lori to just move in here with us. You can even have the other guest upstairs bedroom on three or the bigger master one on the second floor, whichever she'd prefer. I'm sincere, and I really want this, and not because we're trading girlfriends and lovers back and forth like hits from a concealed whiskey flask. Say yes, or say that you'll ask Lori about the idea, and then I'll fill you in on my sinister ulterior motive."

Garry was intrigued and he gave me a bro-hug and agreed without reservation. Then I gave him the bizarre part of the plan.

"We're going to tear down all of the houses on the eastern lots here except for Larry Collin's one at the end, so that we can build the duckweed and fish farm. We'll buy out Teresa's and the empty place next door too. Anne-Marie's good with her place going down too. It's a done deal as soon as we can get the cash into DD's secret dummy corporation so that we can write some big checks. Now, that leaves your side of the street ... I think you can see where this topic is going!" He could.

I explained that Arlene's house was now about to be vacant and theoretically up for purchase/demolition, and really there was no particular reason to keep Garry's either. This only left Donna & Douglass Thomas. Since no one particularly liked them (other than Jason) this meant in theory that we could offer them a buy-out too and then be able to clear that entire western stretch of our subdivision as well for something else. I was thinking about a combination multistory office/canteen/living space for essential "upstairs' crew. Like Gabe and Kristin, and important new hires, like the pond boss for Collins's aqua-farm or the organic farming expert that would similarly manage the greenhouses. And shooters. Security was going to become another major issue around here very soon, but that particular meeting was for tomorrow.

In principle, Garry liked the idea and we called up Jason to kick the idea around of just building a massive long extension off of the front of our 'A-frame', so that both buildings connected via our front wooden deck porch. We'd make half of the downstairs a working office space and command center for all 'upstairs' village issues that did not concern the actual Secret Garden itself. The other half was going to be a commercial style kitchen/canteen area. We couldn't pretend to seat three to four hundred people here for meals, but maybe we could prepare them here and then roll them outside for ad hoc service elsewhere. Upstairs on the second floor, we planned eight compact but functional private apartment units for senior staff (like Jason, who was now willing to more or less live here now), and upstairs on the third top floor a cubical-like barracks area for accommodations for security staff other than our existing police.

The idea was do-able, but getting it done fast would be tricky. Jason suggested using a lot of pre-fab to save time and scarce materials, and then if money was no object we could just keep throwing subcontractors at the job until we either ran out of money (absurdly unlikely) or time (unfortunately very likely). We were also going to need at least one additional (if not several more) external warehouses for secure storage as well. We just couldn't cram everything downstairs into the Secret Garden, or trucks would be unloading visibly into our backdoor nearly twenty-four hours a day in the months and weeks to come!

Again, we first needed the ability to write extremely large and scary checks, saving the rest of the cash for local minor purchases under ten thousand dollars each, to keep the IRS out of our business!

That was another problem we hoped to have solved by tomorrow! Now it time to go back to work on DD's old files!

Having access now to all of DD's most private and secret business documents was probably a lifesaver, and it certainly saved us hundreds if not thousands of hours of complicated sensitive research and even a good bit of duplication of effort. Kathy and I stayed up at least half of the night emptying out DD's desk and all of his filing cabinets and with Kathy's banking background we soon identified most of the documents that we'd really been hoping to find. The dead crime lord would have needed a relatively painless and simple way to funnel cash into his dummy corporation, and this either involved a bent local banker or contacts in Grand Cayman, where his primary secret offshore account seemed to be according to the records I finally located.

Actually I was quite amused at the name of his dummy operating corporation, Khazad-dûm, LLC. As for the name listed for the president of the corporation and primary account holder, it was Thorin III Stonehelm. A Tolkien character noted in the Lord of the Rings appendixes as the dwarf lord who later restored Moria, after the defeat of the Balrog. It was just so very typical of DD!

I'm sure his laptop had all sorts of this stuff, and electronic banking codes too, but his security was too tight to break. I toyed with the idea of giving it to a hardcore hacker to break into but then that would give a stranger with dubious legal moralities a major back door access into all of our future operations, not to mention the nineteen plus million dollars that DD's most recent account statement showed that he had parked safely there, or the additional twenty-odd million we wanted to quietly add. In the end, we just shoved his useless laptop into a drawer and gave up on it.

Consulting his records, it became apparent that DD had used a local crooked financial advisor to funnel cash to an equally bent savings and loan operation in Miami, which in turn wired the money (minus their handling fee) to a nicely secure and very private bank in the Caymans. We now had names, contact numbers and account numbers, and even enough information now to properly utilize them. We even thought momentarily about bypassing the local financial advisor and going straight to the crooked S&L in Miami, but in the end we just decided to keep everything 'business as usual'. Already it was going to be a little suspicious restarting old business connections after a three year break and we needed to make our business proposition sound as routine as possible.

Since everything depended upon us getting access to this account and converting our nearly worthless cash into our electronic account, we just couldn't delay or dither with alternatives for very long. Everything first depended upon this, so we canceled the majority of our officer's meeting on security that Monday morning except to authorize Kathy and I to start making the transaction to get the majority of this cash channeled off-shore into the corporate checking account. We then reviewed our script and with considerable reluctance made the phone call to DD's crooked financial advisor friend, who astonishingly was rather delighted to hear from us.

"Mr. Brown? Radagast Brown? Good morning, this is an old friend you haven't heard from in awhile, this is Mr. Stonehelm." Oh yes, I could hear the joy perking up in the advisor's voice. I guess business had been poor these last few years.

"Your voice sounds different Mr. Stonehelm, and I'd been given to understand that you had, well ... retired from business? Could I get your first name again? That might refresh my memory."

"Perhaps you are recalling my dear uncle Thorin, but sometimes he also went by the name of Thrór, would that be more familiar to you?"

"Indeed it would, and I would be delighted to assist his nephew in any way that I could."

"That would be most helpful as we're reconsolidating several portions of our late uncle's estate and we know that he most highly valued your investment strategy advice. Particularly concerning an acquaintance in Miami that you shared that I believe most regularly provided him with access to excellent international investment opportunities."

"Yes, a very valued friend and international accounts portfolio advisor! I believe he provided your uncle with some excellent advice concerning some Caribbean growth funds, and I'm certain I could help reconnect you for my usual advisory percentage."

"I believe uncle was happy to provide you with your usual five points on the investment advice, and that would be a satisfactory future arrangement for us as well, as we hope to rely upon your advice with regularity, as our uncle had done."

That sunk the hook in deep. Mr. Brown (another alias from Tolkien) not only needed our 5% 'finders fee' to make the proper reintroduction to the willing banker in Florida, but he was also counting a lot of future chickens that hadn't hatched yet. He wanted, even needed our future business, and he was delighted to resume business as usual without asking any untoward questions.

The rest of the arrangements were easily made. In the past DD had used a private plane service to take him and Mr. Brown to Miami two or three times a year. He never traveled alone either, but always had an associate or two with him for the trip. A bodyguard for sure and also maybe some plaything. In this case today, it was still easy for Mr. Stonehelm to once again call this private charter service and schedule a private flight out of Austin leaving at noon today, for four passengers ... and a large gym bag secretly stuffed full of cash. We then called back Mr. Brown to inform him that we'd like a meeting at the usual place for noon, scheduled to last until late evening. Again this was quite customary with past practices and he readily agreed. With little or no variation from the past routine we hoped to avoid any unpleasantness's or stresses.

I put on my best suit and darkest shades and Garry did the same. He was going to be my muscle for the trip, obviously packing and always lurking in the background. Kathy also put on her best banking suit and looked every bit the part of my head financial advisor. With her banking knowledge she could tell me instantly if anything in Miami went off-script or the bent bankers there tried to pull a fast one on us. Hopefully, that fellow there needed my 10% fee to make the illegal offshore wire transfer as much as Mr. Brown did!

We weren't too disappointed. While the cabin air was scented with the musky odor of greed for our entire plane flight to Miami, and also during our private meeting with the S&L manager there, the transfer went off without a hitch. Kathy could check and verify nearly instantly that the funds had been received at the Cayman bank, transferred into the first (more public) of DD's accounts there. Then immediately afterwards, Kathy logged into this account with her laptop and performed a balance transfer into a second, more secret account. Everyone got their percentage cut, $550k to Mr. Brown and 10% to the banker, but our twenty-two and a half million was now right where we wanted it, secure and safe.

For additional security, in case our transfer had been traced or hacked while at the bank, on the way back to the airport we stopped at a local Starbucks to transfer the account balance yet one more time, this time into Khazad-dûm, LLC's primary operations account. Our criminal money laundering now done, we enjoyed the evening plane flight back home without any further incidents. Mr. Brown was all primed for helping us again very soon in the future, but I sincerely hoped that we'd never meet the weasel again!

Including DD's prior nineteen million balance, we now had just over forty-one million dollars to spend in the next three months, not to mention about 2.3 million still left in petty cash at home ... and probably another ten million in sweet silver and glittering gold! Like Brewster's Millions, it was going to be both tricky and exhausting to spend every last dime of it before doomsday, but if paper money was likely to become worthless, at least you could wipe your ass with it, which is more than you can with ones and zeros in a computer! Most of the monetary wealth of the entire world was going to disappear with a snap crackle and pop once the flare hit and the computers all died. It was up to us now to use our money wisely, for the benefit of my unborn daughter and the generations yet to come!

Kathy had earlier arranged for the Cayman bank to send us another big book of checks (DD seemed to be down to just four in his checkbook), and we wasted astonishingly little time writing some big fat ones! First it was time to clear out our cul-de-sac and get the new construction going.

With the exception of Larry Collin's house at the corner, and ours of course, every other house in our little subdivision was purchased (mostly at a bargain price). The vacant house next door went for a song. The owner was desperate that they couldn't rent the place and offered us a 'buy it now' for about a quarter of the former appraised value. Teresa quickly agreed to a slightly higher percentage amount (30%), as she wanted the cash quick. She was off to visit her old friend in New York, supposedly just for a brief visit and then she was going to return to Austin, but we never saw her again. Arlene demanded (and received) a sum that was about sixty percent of the county appraisal (probably full current market value). She might be a little crazy, but when it came to money the wily old senior was no fool! Lastly, the Thomas's played even more hardball demanding full appraisal value, plus an additional fifty grand for unspecified improvements. They had us over a barrel and we both knew it, so we paid up with a smile to be rid of them. This was money probably better spent on other things, but this last purchase cleared the entire western side of our cul-de-sac for the new construction. They packed off and were gone within a week and not even Jason really missed them. Garry and Anne-Marie gave up their houses pro bono, and even laughed and drank champagne when the demolition crews arrived to start their work a few short days later.

The last full dumpster of wreckage hadn't left our street before the building contractors were ready installing plumbing and utility PVC's before the new office/canteen/dormitory building foundation was laid. We were paying for priority speedy installation and in a construction market that still had certain material shortages, but interstate transport was running slightly better this month than it had when Jason was restoring my house. Jason wouldn't quite promise that this building would be done in time, but it would be 'close enough' he assured us. Worst case, we could cobble together the last 10% of the work ourselves once the lights went out and the nearest grocery store for most survivors became your former next door neighbor.

So what, it was only money, just ones and zeros in a bank that wouldn't even exist anymore after Christmas time!

On the eastern side of the street, soon also bulldozer smooth and with another fresh deep water well drilled into the aquifer below, trucks and assemblers for the grand aquaponics fish farm complex began to arrive daily. For good measure, the entire property from the end of the sidewalk right-of-way to the edges of the hill behind us to the east, a giant series of greenhouses were quickly erected encasing this entire stretch of property. Protection for the fish against the freezes of winter (tilapia are tropical in origin) and better shelter against other elements. A big central Texas windstorm might be alright for the wind farm, but it might not be good for our large external tanks.

Already too, Lumpy's crew, with virtually every installer he had, was erecting the first three windmill towers. The big one upon the largest hill in my backyard, the next one on the hill by the fish farm that would power the Secret garden below. The third hill, the smallest was behind where the Thomas house was, hosted the last of the smaller 25-kWh windmill units. Lump said he'd ordered another six of these, all that the manufacturer had completed on hand and ready for immediate delivery, and promised to be on a boat from Europe within a week. He wasn't sure that he could get the poles for these up on other nearby hills in the village in time, but at least we'd have them for the future. And hopefully the spare parts too.

Technically, I didn't own the land of any of those other nearby hills either. That was going to be an issue for the new Mayor of Ranger Heights Village. With all of the evil land grabbing that I was doing, I was going to have some serious explaining to do to my would-be voters.

Down on the sandy flatland below, behind our big hill to the north, the first elements of the future solar farm were slowly being set up, and on the wide vacant cliff side grounds to the east the surveying markers were being planted for five long rows of interconnected greenhouses, ideal for semi-commercial farming. The rest of the open flat undeveloped property to the northern sides was receiving a few dump truck loads of top soil, for future open-air farming. It would never become good agricultural soil, but adding about six inches of decent topsoil (and a wooden enclosure around it to prevent rain runoff and erosion) should make it functional ... if a bit rocky.

Along the cliffline near where the greenhouses were being constructed, we made our first priority the assembly a trio of quick and dirty mostly prefab'ed concrete and steel warehouses in a row. These completely blocked the view of the cliff hidden entrance to the Secret Garden, and now the electronic doorway opened up inside the central warehouse structure, unseen from outside. Now we could drive delivery trucks right up to these warehouses and unload inside, preserving the hidden entrance to the Secret Garden. Three warehouses likely wouldn't be enough, but we left some enough open ground here to stack up a long row of shipping containers, if needed. We'd need them.

While the Secret Garden could hold a lot of supplies underground, it was more important that we save this storage for EMP sensitive hardware and equipment and not just fill it to overflowing with food. Amy was the boss here. She wanted to keep our secret safe and secure, at least until after the lights went out, and this meant that only we the officers could move items in or out, secretly ... and usually only in the early hours of the morning. Almost everything else that we now ordered needed to stay upstairs, and probably for the duration.

We needed more space that I could count for tons of prime soil for the greenhouses, all of the fertilizer we could snag without alarming Homeland Security, and parts and more parts for assembling ... and repairing the solar farm in the decade or two to come. Not to mention tools, clothing and food, food and more food! Dirt and even fertilizer, weren't EMP sensitive and we bought enough of both to supply a dozen big box garden stores and just stacked the sacks up outside willy-nilly. Everything else we tried to find a roof for and the three warehouses began to fill up fast.

We weren't buying just one of anything! If we needed four of something, then Amy, Kathy or I wrote a check to buy eight. If we needed two dozen, then we bought a gross. It didn't really matter what it was for, the odds were that next year, we wouldn't be able to buy it anymore.

For the most part, these warehouses were for the inorganic stuff. Strictly materials and hardware ... and nothing electronic. We'd need some of that sort of stuff too, and the storerooms of the Secret Garden would be the place to keep it, especially power tools and big appliances. UPS, USPS and FedEx were all making daily deliveries and we were starting to know our delivery guys names and even the names of their kids. Good guys, each of them; Lori tentatively wrote a couple of their names down on a slowly growing list of people that we thought might be worthwhile survivors post-apocalypse.

We found our pond boss fairly quickly, a guy who had been the former head technician at the former fish farm whose hardware we'd bought at their going out of business sale. Then almost immediately afterwards we located and hired a woman with extensive greenhouse expertise who would become our organic gardening guru. Better still, she and her husband were both 'preppers', convinced themselves that the world was coming to a messy end, just as we also predicted. We found them via a personal advertisement placed at a kook website catering to Texas survivalists. Truthfully, reading their message forums was extremely educational and gave me a few ideas that we'd all overlooked.

At first thought, I would have anticipated that finding medievalist roleplayers, like the SCA would have helped us locate many of the sort of outdated specialist skills that we now needed, but for the most part we found these sorts of folks to be fairly egotistical and relatively difficult to hire. In fact, we soon tended to have far better results recruiting other regional preppers and survivalists types via the internet. Sure, some of them were a bit crazy, even by our standards, but they also tended to get the big picture of our goals much better and with a little screening we could even find a couple of dozen very useful people that seemed to be able to follow basic rules and instructions. This score or so of so-called 'crazed survivalists' actually tended to get along and create less trouble than the meager handful of SCA prima donnas we ended up with.

We'd covered fairly exhaustively how we'd be able to grow enough of our own food to feed a small community of up to 400 souls. In theory, this would pretty much cover all of the convenient bits of Ranger Height Village. Our neighbors next door at Ranger Meadows Village were going to be shit out of luck, but I did have Garry assigned to the task of gaining some sort of census list of their residents. He slightly knew the mayor over there to our west and if possible, I wanted to cherry pick a few of them that had skills that we would be needing in the years to come. A doctor for certain, hopefully two. Plus a few RN's and even a couple of extra LVN's as well, not to mention anyone who'd worked in trauma or an emergency room before. Ideally, I also wanted someone with the old time skill of how to rewire an electric motor (or build them from scratch), and even a hardcore electrician or two that could cut (or rewire) telco or electrical utility wires.

Sure the local grid around us was going down to stay, but our survivalists had the blessing of our wind farm ... and we needed to make our own circuit accordingly finite in range ... and keep it going thereafter. And a blacksmith ... probably unfortunately some hardcore SCA roleplaying geek like the craftsman who'd forged DD's axe, but if we were now going to have to live under mostly 19^th century conditions, it would be nice to find some artisans with those appropriate skills.

Where the hell do you find a barrel maker these days anyway? Answer, find a disgruntled journeyman from a local central Texas winery that's been stiffed for a pay raise two years in a row with a very unhappy wife. I offered him a 25% pay raise (and ten grand in cash) and he quit the winery on the spot. They ended up sharing the rental house across the street with our organic farmers and lo and behold a week later they were wild and crazy swingers like the rest of us. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than to be good!

If our new world society was going to be reformed based upon our particular morals, the next generation was going to be one crazy bunch of sexually liberated swingers. Our growing host of employees realized that most of their bosses had the morals of a tomcat, but no one seemed to care. Make love and build a better tomorrow seemed to be the growing sentiment, and I parroted this attitude ... but in my heart I knew that we'd be making war soon enough. Defensive of course.

I reminded Lori almost daily that at the top of my priority list of future recruits for our new village was a few good shooters. Ex-military, Army or Marines preferably, but if they were squids or junior birdmen I didn't much care if they could shoot at what they were aiming at ... and wouldn't get sentimental or squeamish when the berserker raiders showed up with machetes wanting to chop us all up into stewpot sized portions. We'd already inked in as future residents our gun club friends, some of which were already living here, and the rest we were sure would move into some of the many empty houses in the village.

As original constructed, Ranger heights Village included 179 homes (now less six) and overall, the village had a 30% unoccupied rate (53 houses), not counting houses that had been put to rent and moving quietly we were already starting to put friends or friends of friends into a few of them. This also have us currently a village population of 328. Not everyone would stay, either before or even after the EOTW, and Lori and I figured that we could safely recruit about fifty more future residents with critical 'A' and 'B' level skills, and even offer them a place for a significant other to join them. This we figured would get us safely to our target ceiling population of about four hundred. A figure that we'd calculated that we could keep fed and hopefully secure.

Security, or Safety Needs, was the second biggest and next most important of the hierarchy of needs, and frankly our Secret Garden council of officers spent more time over this issue than any other. It seemed to dominate every morning meeting for weeks!

We were going to need shooters, everyone agreed. Some minimally trained armed guards at the very least! Our friendly local gun shop owner James Torrence (an unfortunate resident of Ranger Meadows) was already ordering and stockpiling weapons and ammo for us. Sometimes we could pay in cash, otherwise Khazad-dûm, LLC was writing big corporate checks. We were buying some of everything really in all sizes and calibers but grudgingly we decided to establish a standard of sorts using 7.62/ .308 NATO for war, and .22 caliber for peacetime training. We were buying crates of M-1's and AK's (decent ones) and pistols galore but mostly Glocks. James was buds with the local Glock regional salesman and could get our orders near the top of the delivery list. We'd have at least a hundred by Thanksgiving, and they delivered.

Then we went nuts buying Ruger 10/22 Stainless All-Weather .22 Rifles, two hundred of them total! More 10/22's have been produced than any other rifle in the world and there is a reason. It's ALL about survivalism. Look, when the EOTW hits you're going to want a small and extremely accurate rifle like the Ruger 10/22 for put some sort of meat on your dinner plate. Squirrels, jack rabbits, birds or roaming packs of feral dogs, the 10/22 is quiet, effective, and you can shoot all damn day for what it'd cost you to buy a 6-pack of beer. Chechen rebels successfully used .22 rifles for sniping purposes against Russian troops in urban settings. The urban setting consisted of narrow streets and close buildings allowing these "snipers" to get exceptionally close to their targets and the .22 became a very effective and accurate man killer. This was a weapon perfect for untrained civilians and youths; excellent for hunting and also adequate in an emergency self-defense situation.