The farmer didn’t know what to make of Abel’s jargon. He couldn’t decipher what the man meant.
“Ah, I don’t follow you,” murmured Harland. “The grain’s on fire. You said yourself the Guard is going to pull out of here tomorrow with nothing.”
“That’s right, Harland.” Abel stood up and paced by the farmer. He went over to a heavy wooden crate and shoved it under one of the fermentation tanks, below a cleanout door.
For the first time, the Swede took a good look at the interior space around him. Huge steel tanks towered over him.
Abel revolved to face the farmer seated on the cold floor. “Tomorrow, the Guard will be gone, but the grain is most assuredly not gone, Harland.”
Abel nodded to his companions and pointed to Harland. He gestured to have them pick the farmer up off the floor and deposit him before the wooden crate. Max and Oleg grabbed the farmer’s arms and hoisted him to his feet.
“What are you doing with me?” Harland protested loudly and lashed out with one arm. Max caught the flying appendage and expertly yanked it behind Harland’s back and pushed upward causing the man some pain.
“Sorry, Mr. Sven,” Max apologized, “I’ll let you free in a minute.”
Max and Oleg pushed the farmer to the edge of the crate and pinned him there. Abel focused on the Sweetly citizen and brought his face close to that of the farmer.
“Harland, what you did in Sweetly tonight doesn’t matter.”
“All of it matters,” screamed Harland. “What the hell could you freaks possibly know, eh?”
“What matters,” Abel uttered, “is this!”
The man from Independency village wrapped both hands about a steel lever on the cleanout trap at the base of the huge fermentation tank. He pulled back, straining.
Teeth clenched, Abel instructed, “I need you to watch, Harland. You need to see this.”
Abel pitched his full weight back and yanked the lever on the door. It sprung free and the door burst open. A landslide of yellow color cascaded before Harland, rattling down into the crate. In seconds the wooden vessel filled to the top and a dome of gold built up before the opening. Soon the brightly-colored material stopped moving and the room pitched to silence.
Max let Harland’s arm go; the farmer did not notice. Harland placed both hands on the gold nuggets of corn before him. He seemed fixed in trance, jaw slack, scarcely breathing.
Harland studied Abel, eyeing him coldly for five seconds. “You moved it here?”
“Moved it, yes.”
Harland scanned the hulking fermentation vessels around him.
“You filled these tanks? Harland nodded at the rows of mammoth containers.
“Many of them. There are two rooms, twenty tanks in all.
“I’ll be damned.”
“We figure we moved a good percentage of the corn that remained in the silos. We moved some soybeans, too.”
“You did all that?” Harland huffed as if suffering anaphylaxis.
“The three of us, Harland. Others helped with the logistics. We used a vacuum pump and lots of pipe. That’s all. It did the job.”
Harland turned away from the golden kernels and shuffled across the room. He leaned back against one of the fermentation tanks, facial muscles drooping, head bobbing low.
“You know something, Mr. Whittemore?”
“What’s that?”
“I have no love for you, no love for your kind.”
Abel cocked his head.
“I could have shot you down when you came at my door some weeks ago. If it came down to keeping the grain for my neighbors, I’d’a shot you as soon as look at you.”
Abel was straightforward in his response. “I came to your door, farmer, to tell you what we were planning to do here. You needed to know that there was no need to confront anybody. Not at all.”
“I was afraid we’d be fighting on two fronts,” Harland admitted, “fighting you people and the Guard.”
“If you had given me the chance to speak my mind, the Guard would be leaving here tomorrow with a fraction of what they thought they’d haul out. The elevators would still be intact, and no one would have been hurt.”
Harland waxed pensive, sensing that Abel wanted something from him. The farmer knew he was in no position, a prisoner in the dark tank room, to cut a deal with the three men around him.
“What is it you want, Whittemore? You’ve got the corn here. What else do you want from me?”
“What do I want? You mean, ‘what do we want?’ That’s what you mean.”
“People need this grain, mister,” Harland hissed.
“That’s right, Harland,” Abel shot back forcefully. “Any and everyone remaining in this valley needs the grain, needs it for months, even years to come.”
“Without it, people are going to die,” Harland ripped.
“They are going to die with it, too, if other things aren’t done.”
“Other things? What other things?”
“You’ll see for yourself, Harland, tonight.”
“See what?”
“Never mind now. We’ve got a long trip ahead of us.”
“What do you mean, we?” The Swede’s voice warbled, betraying rising apprehension.
“You, Harland, and the three of us.”
“I’m not going anywhere!” Harland protested.
“Oh, yes, you are, about a dozen miles, farmer.”
Chapter One Hundred-Nine
Sleep deprivation accentuated pain flaring from a score of points throughout Harland’s body. His mouth and esophagus burned; cramps ran the length of his intestines. His skin folded like thick dry leather about him and crusty fissures inhabited the skin at every joint. The throbbing from the blow to the head was not the worst of it.
Hours sitting in freezing darkness, straddling the centerline of an open canoe, were torture. Fore and aft, younger men pulled hard on paddles through the night, churning up swirling foam on the ebony surface of Big Stone Lake. Harland imagined himself a prisoner of war, a hostage being spirited away by night from loved ones by terrorists bent on breaking him down mentally and physically.
The climb uphill from the lake on a rough lane carved into the bluffs had brought the farmer to the brink of delirium. He couldn’t recall when he had slept enough to feel rested or eaten anything substantial. Sound sleep had been impossible through the nights the National Guard was in town. He calculated he must have been awake for a greater part of sixty hours.
Spirited along by the men who had piloted the canoe, Harland crested the bluffs overlooking Big Stone Lake just as the first scouts of gray dawn light infiltrated the frigid air. Roofline angles loomed out of the night. A few were brightly lit. Harland could make little sense of all he was seeing. Mental acuity had eroded, lost to the trauma of the last hours.
Hustling, always moving, the men who flanked Harland brought him to the community center kitchen. Electric lights stabbed into his eyes, fully dilated by hours of travel in darkness. A chair was produced and Harland lowered into it. He put his head down on a table, giving in to nervous exhaustion.
“Mr. Sven, are you hungry?” a woman’s voice asked. “We have some food for you. You need to eat.”
The new arrival raised his head off the table. A female in her mid-sixties placed several plates before him, food on each. One platter offered a square of corn bread and a small slab of dark, dried jerky. The other plate, larger than the first, carried a similar square of corn bread, but also a heap of salad greens, baked beans, a small wedge of cheese, and what appeared to be a small fillet of some sort of white fish. A thin melon slice filled out the dish.
Abel arrived with a glass of water and a glass of milk. He placed the water with the plate holding the lean fixings and the glass of milk with the plate brimming with many different foods.