Avalon: The Retreat (22 page)

People sometimes run into a person they immediately like, and a lifelong friendship is born; it was like that between Doctor Dan Crowley and Mike Reynolds. They each prepared to pay their tab at a restaurant where they had just finished a superb meal. It was a fare with almost anything imaginable served on the buffet. The huge variety of food extended down a long line of steam tables; it was laid out for big eaters and included something for everyone.

Mike frequented the eatery often and as it turned out, so did Dan. It was a bachelor’s gourmet delight; the cooking was very nearly like Mom used to make. Mike knew the owners on a friendly but casual basis, and he liked and respected both of them. As Mike and Dan waited in line to pay the cashier that afternoon, two young hoods muscled their way up to the front to the cash register… and guns came out from under their coats.

Mike’s instincts kicked in and in a flash, his arm lashed out and chopped the throat of one of them, who fell to the floor gurgling and grabbing at his esophagus, unable to breathe. Dan went down on a knee and began tending to the injured man. From hundreds of hours of split-second responses such as this one, the young doctor didn’t have to think about it; he just did what had to be done to save the man’s life.

Mike grabbed the other hood in a wrist lock, shoved the shotgun up toward the ceiling with his other hand, and grabbed the young man’s wrist. He came back on the wrist hard and heard it snap, and the crook let out a scream that could be heard outside the restaurant. Mike reached over and grabbed a handful of hair with one hand and the man’s crotch with the other and squeezed hard.

This was the bad guy’s initiation to the “hearts and mind technique” of street fighting. That is, wherever your balls go, your heart and mind will follow close behind. The miscreant went out the main door of the restaurant in a quick walk, guided by Mike and bent over at the waist as he was exited out onto the sidewalk. Once outside Mike began to royally beat the crap out of the worm.

The young robber was crying like a baby and begging Mike to stop, but Mike wanted to give the punk an attitude adjustment that he would reflect on for a long time. He grabbed handfuls of the guy’s skin and twisted his wrist about a hundred twenty degrees in one vicious pinch after another. He stomped his instep and all of the little bones in the foot were smashed into jelly. He grabbed the other wrist and bent it backward until the tendons stretched and became useless. Just as he was getting ready to poke both eyes out with a knife thrust using his stiffened fingers, Dan stepped up to him, reached out and grasped his arm, and asked him to stop.

Dan’s voice was calm and caught Mike off guard. He looked at Dan for a moment and he didn’t know why, but he stopped and let go of the miserable little scumbag. The young “bad ass” collapsed to the sidewalk and Mike reached over and pulled his nose ring out; it ripped away from the meat, leaving a nostril bleeding and a flap of ragged skin dangling on the end of his nose. The entire incident lasted a minute and a half at most.

Mike heard sirens coming down the street heading their way. Dan, said again in that calm voice,

“I’ve got the other guy breathing through a piece of a ball point pen housing that I inserted in a hole in his esophagus, and I’m going to have to do something for this one. If you don’t mind moving aside, he’s in shock and may die. They both need to get to a hospital. Where did you learn to fight like that?”

“I’ll be over in the park across the street,” Mike said rather casually and with a grin. “When you’re done with these pieces of crap, we’ll talk.”

Mike turned and walked over to the park and Dan went to work on the moaning and pleading man on the sidewalk. The owner came out and Dan asked him to bring out some ice. The man turned away and went back inside but didn’t return with the ice.

The police showed up and an ambulance soon followed. They loaded the two bad guys in the emergency vehicle and took them away en-route to the hospital.

Dan came across the street where Mike was sitting on a bench, watching him walk his way. The doctor sat down and placed the little bag he was carrying next to his feet. He turned to face Mike who was sitting on the edge of the bench with his legs and feet stretched out in front of him rather indifferently.

“They wanted to know who did that to those two.”

“What’d you tell them?”

“I said it was just some customer who was standing in line waiting to pay his bill like the rest of us when those two came barging in. When he was done with them he left the scene.”

“It sounds to me like you told them the truth.”

Dan looked at this man with a sense of awe and admiration for what he just did to those two and how quickly he laid them out and rendered them a couple of piles of squirming, begging, and whimpering lumps of mutilated flesh. He was also a little afraid. This guy was dangerous.

“I’ve never seen anyone fight like that. It was amazing; you had them both down so quickly I could hardly believe it. You also pretty much ruined them; they’ll never be the same. The one outside will have to go through intensive therapy to learn how to walk again, the very least that will happen is a series of intense and complicated orthopedic surgeries to mend his wrists and foot, and the other fellow with the crushed windpipe may not live. It’s certain he will need reconstructive surgery at best and intensive physical therapy just to be able to talk when it’s all done.”

He stared at Mike who was just staring off into the nothingness that was the other side of the street past the park. Dan waited and Mike finally spoke, slowly and calmly.

“I hate people who prey on others. They opened the door to what just happened to them when they decided to take up guns and steal from people. I don’t care if they live or die. I intensely dislike anyone who threatens innocent people with guns, whether they intend to use them or not. I especially hate to have to resort to heavy exercise just after a good meal. To answer your question, I was in the Navy for ten years and I learned a thing or two about self-defense while I was serving my country. My name is Mike Reynolds.”

He stuck out his hand, and Dan took it in a warm shake. It was firm and belied great strength. Dan said, “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mister Reynolds, my name is Dan Crowley. I’m a Medical Doctor, and if there is anything I can ever do for you, just let me know.”

He took out a card and handed it to Mike, who took one of his own out and gave it to Dan. It read, Mike Reynolds, Deputy Sheriff, and it had Mike’s phone and beeper numbers on it. He said, “You never know, Doc, I may be able to do something for you some day.”

Dan looked at him for a moment and said as sincerely as he could, “You just did. You may well have saved my life.”

In a few days they met again and started riding together. The Survival topic didn’t come up for awhile, but they shared a love of dirt biking off the beaten path and camping out. One day Dan asked Mike what he thought about the situation with the U.S., the economy, and the constant wars America was getting involved in, and Mike was honest about his answer when he replied,

“Dan, just between you, me, and the fencepost, we are in for some serious happenings down the road and I think it’s going to get ugly. I’ve been thinking lately about finding a piece of land, something out and away toward the mountains to make myself a retreat. Maybe a place to stock some food, guns, and ammo and build a bunker to hole up in if the proverbial top blows off the powder keg.”

“I can attest to the fact that you sure know how to handle yourself in a fight,” Dan said. “You never did tell me where it was that you learned how to fight like that.”

Mike smiled and said, “If I tell you, I’ll have to kill you later. Hoooraaah!”

He was laughing, but the outburst startled Dan and he flinched.

In the weeks that followed, they both stayed busy with their jobs and Dan began his Residency at the County Hospital. Mike took a job at the Defensive Training School and was appointed managing Director of the Curriculum. Four months later, they were riding in new territory, found Avalon, and formed a partnership that endured as well as their friendship.

It appeared to be an assumed deal that they were going to be grouped up together right from the start. Both men trusted the other implicitly, and they had an immediate and tremendous respect for each other. As the search began for partners in the retreat, they began hauling goodies up to Avalon.

They were always cautious about ensuring they were never followed, and Mike had set up indicators right from the start that would identify if anyone came up there while they were gone. He placed small threads that could be broken by someone walking or riding their route. When they came back sometimes a few of them were broken, but it was invariably done by animals.

There were occasional tracks at or near the spot, but there were never threads broken where a person had walked in a continuous line, which would have been a strong indicator that Avalon was visited by someone other than them. Mike showed Dan how to find the small details that would verify if intruders had encroached the area.

The first member accepted into the group was Bobby Larson. He was not a degreed Civil Engineer but was as competent as any might be. He had worked on large construction projects from the time he left high school. Dams, roads, bridges, and parking lots were some of his accomplishments. At first he “drove a shovel” as he referred to it, which meant that he worked with a pick and shovel as a laborer, and then he progressed to driving a backhoe and later a bulldozer. He eventually became a surveyor’s helper and took some classes at a community college in the evenings. A few intense math classes later, he took over the surveying with a small crew of his own.

As the years progressed, Bobby kept moving up and doing what he needed to do, and he became a valuable addition to every construction crew he ever worked with. Mike and Dan met him at a competitive shooting meet one weekend and they talked. After doing a background check on Bobby, Mike invited him to go riding with them and camp out at Avalon.

Bobby was overcome with amazement, as was everyone who first saw the ranch. They offered him a membership and cabin at the going price of $50,000, plus $100 a month for the many on-going expenses to run the retreat, and he immediately accepted. A short time later they signed the articles and Bobby was officially a member.

Bobby was married once when he was a young man, but it didn’t last and he never remarried He did have a girlfriend that he was very close to, but after he joined the Avalon group she broke up with him, saying that the group was a bunch of wackos and probably homosexuals since it was only guys. Bobby was down about it for awhile but eventually got over it.

Mike and Dan strung piano wire throughout the surrounding woods on all sides of the retreat where there were bare spots in the forest that could allow motorcycles to get through unhampered. They set the wire at throat height when sitting on a standard dirt bike to help keep trespassers away. They mapped out a lot of booby traps on either side of the wires, set them up, and kept a state and Geodesic map with the positions plotted with GPS readings.

Each trap was flagged on the map with a code. PS was pungi stakes. P designated pit filled with impaling poles. DF meant dead fall and so forth. None of the traps were active in that there were covers over the foot holes where the pungi stakes were; the large tiger pits were also covered and none of the snares and whips were loaded with triggers.

There were two reasons they did not activate the traps. First, if a hunter or some other person was up in the woods and was impaled by a spiked trap, an investigation would ensue and they didn’t need that. Second, there was no reason to have them active until the rocket was launched. They were built and mapped and could be fully set in a few days.

Avalon looked like an irregular and large cross from the air. The top was the large meadow area surrounded by trees and mountains. From tree line to tree line, the upper meadow was about two miles wide by four miles long. Coming back from the meadow toward the main building and the cabins, it jutted out at a ninety degree angle left and right, which was an open area of about eight thousand feet long by a mile wide. The bottom post of the cross was the long road that traveled through the fir trees to the abandoned railhead. It was nearly as straight as an arrow and a hundred fifty feet wide.

Throughout those areas, to the left and right, above and below, and in the thick trees, were booby traps with some mechanism that would incapacitate the bad guys. It took months to get them ready and now that the breakdown of society and civilization had come about, Roger, Mike, and Sam had set all the traps and man killers. As they were working on them, Harlan Herrera helped plant and or build them.

There was a plan in place to take down eight tall firs to fall across the road out toward the old rail bed. They were ringed with Det Cord, had shaped charges in a notch specifically cut for the TNT, and made for a homemade “shaped charge” fastened in place. The shaped charges were made from old champagne bottle bottoms with a concave area in them. Those hollows were filled with a homemade TNT, rigged with a detonator, and would be fired by the motorcycle battery kept in the hidden bunker. Once ignited, the explosions would bring the trees down to block the road to any vehicles except motorcycles that might get around them or people could walk through and over. But it would be easier to go around the blocked road by sidestepping the big trees or come in by horseback.

If the bad guys moved off the road to the right or left, they would find that it was heavily booby trapped. There were all sorts of niceties that would either take off a foot because some of them were old fashioned bear traps, some were smaller traps, and some were devices that would sit down inside a hole and, when a foot and leg came down on them, would collapse down into the hole where spikes waited for the foot. The force of the foot going down would close the two sides on either side of the legs with a jaw-like apparatus imbedding twenty penny nails into a leg. Getting it off would take some doing because they were staked to the ground and had short cables attached to them.