5 Fort Reno

Reno Nevada was once the largest competitor to Las Vegas. Gambling came up in the city and it grew. That brought several unsavory sides with that growth along with some of the benefits. One of the benefits was that the city still stood.

When the bombs fell Las Vegas came down in the second wave of bombs. During the first wave, the city was looted. There were piles of cash and gold and other valuables that people felt the need to secure in preparation for harder times again.

Reno was less well known so the looters and violence. Everyone focused on Vegas first and Reno took the chance to pull back and ship the money out quickly. When the looters didn't find valuables they moved on. They burned buildings in retaliation, but they didn't create crime syndicates or get blown to bits afterward.

Because of this, after things settled down, the town finally got its due. The first real casino opened not long after the war started. The town declared its neutrality and became a trading post, to replace the den of money that Las Vegas had previously become.

When people realized this they started to build walls around buildings and parts of the city to protect its neutrality. And before long it became a fort in the desert. The brightly lit buildings were partially obscured by dark rock walls that reminded everyone that the glitz and glamour was still a facade.

Just as the news of the Dallas breakout was making its way to Reno a group of people sat around having lunch in an old warehouse on the outskirts of town. The building was just outside the walls, but close enough to it that people would think twice about hitting it.

The choice of the building was ironic because the people inside it normally looked for these kinds of weaknesses to exploit. They were Anthony Filoni's associates. They numbered less than a dozen and the inside of the building was stacked with crates of contraband weapons. This building was the legitimate face of their various enterprises.

Through here they gave their band the face of mercenaries. They advertised as private security, it was a fancy way to say men for hire. The term was coined in the early 20th century by men who wanted to rebrand the age-old profession.

They actually did provide security, but because of their specialties, they occasionally exploited other people's weaknesses as well. And if they played their cards right they could leverage that loss into a contract of "protection". It was easy to keep the robbers away if you were the robbers. They had enough clout in the protection game to make sure no one would mess with people under their protection.

The group of people lounged around a table covered in cold food and warm beer. They were trying their best to get comfortable after their meal. The problem was they were all antsy. Their time table for their latest business enterprise had been screwed by the disappearance of their boss.

They knew he had escaped, everyone knew he had escaped. It had been big news across all the newspapers. An assault on a jail was a risky maneuver no matter how you looked at it. They had all expected him to show up at home after 2 weeks of laying low.

When two weeks turned into three they assumed he was enjoying himself somewhere and lost track of time. Three weeks turned into five and they started to worry. Their boss was a man known for his excesses but when it came to the money he took care of business.

It was now six weeks since word of the breakout had filtered its way to their home. The job they had planned was different than their normal shakedowns. They were going to hit a corporate stockpile. The plan relied on timing if they wanted to have a chance of succeeding The longer they waited the less time they had to scout and pick the right time to hit.

They worried if they would be able to pull this off without him. They all knew the plan and could execute it without him. It just felt, wrong, to not include him. This was his mark, he had found this and he had pulled together the initial funds to get this all set up.

"I hope he knows what he is doing," one man muttered to himself quietly while the rest of them watched a television across the room. Old taped MMA fights were playing on repeat. They had watched them hundreds of times but they enjoyed the violence.

"The boss knows what he is doing. Besides if he isn't here we should be laying low. What if he was recaptured and we didn't hear about it?" The voice came from an older man slowly sipping at a beer.

This was the fight they had been having for a while now. Was he captured or had he just disappeared. If he has captured he wouldn't have gone down without a fight. If they had gotten him quietly did he turn on them? Honor was a rare thing among the criminal mind, but Anthony was known to have it. He considered himself the new age mobster, and so his word was his bond.

"We wait," Said the man everyone considered second in command. His name was Elrod and he looked like a man cut from a tree. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and had a physique that told tales of years of hard labor. "We can still make it before the road train leaves if we wait three more days."

This always started a fight. If they had been ratted out the money would make it easier to escape. They also knew their boss would wait for them.

Words turned into insults, which turned into bottles being thrown. Tempers flared among the men for the 37th time as the sitting around grated on them.

The fight was about to turn violent again when the door swung open. Guns were drawn instantly as their fighting instincts were still high. It was lucky for them that the oldest man among them, Risky, recognized the body in the doorway.

He threw his hands up and yelled at everyone else around him. "Put your goddamn guns down! Pudge is that you?"

He waited until the barrels dropped before he walked over to the door. Gun safety was important even in their line of work.

The fat man was gaunt, his face was covered in wrinkles and droops from malnutrition and disease. His once fat belly hung like a flap of skin and smelled. Risky turned his head out of reflex when the aroma of infection suddenly hit his nose.

Pudge nodded and fell into the doorway. It had taken every skill he had to make it here. The others rushed into the open door frame and picked him up. They carried him to the couch and began to pull his shirt off. They handed him a bottle of whiskey and pulled a bottle of moonshine as an antiseptic.

For several hours they poured over him. Each of them received basic medical training and several had more intense training. When they were out in the field the ability to save a life was just as important as taking one. It was one of the idiosyncrasies of their boss. He was compassionate in the weirdest ways.

Risky finally looked over at Elrod who gave a single nod of approval. They had done as much as they could without a full field hospital.

The next morning Pudge woke up a cot in the back of the warehouse. Everyone was asleep except for Elrod who was sipping a coffee while cleaning a gun. It was his nervous habit.

"Welcome back," Elrod didn't even look up from his work. "What happened?"

Pudge used his elbow to get himself upright. He winced as he felt stitches pull on his gut. He looked down and saw a white bandage taped across his stomach. He rubbed his head as he felt the hangover coming on.

"Where is the boss?" Pudge croaked through cracked dry lips. De-hydration was his biggest enemy now.

"No clue. You are the first to make it back." Elrod finally put down the part he was cleaning. He put a drop of oil on it and watched it spread across the part with satisfaction.

Pudge told the story of the breakout and their trip across the border. He described in detail everything that happened right up to him getting shot. He described falling down into the tree line and hearing Anthony go into a rage. He described the noises that came next as Anthony took out his anger on the gang leader and the poor driver.

The story continued as Pudge described the sounds of Anthony digging through the brush looking for his body and then the sounds of the two gang members being tossed into the same brush.

The last thing he remembered was the sound of the van firing up and driving away.

That was when he blacked out. When he woke up he crawled up the hill and made it to a nearby farmhouse. There he told a story about being hijacked on the highway while trying to make it home.

The farmers gave him enough antibiotics to make it away from their farm. They didn't trust him but word hadn't made it yet that there was a jail-break just across the border.

The rest of the story was about him stealing horses or hitchhiking across Kansas and Colorado to finally make it home.

He expected the warehouse to be empty when he got here. He was certain his boss thought he was dead. Honestly, he expected to die multiple times on the trip. It was a sheer stubborn determination that forced him to get up each day and keep walking.

With the story over Elrod sighed and took a sip of his cooling coffee. He grimaced at the cold bitter taste and put it back down. "Any longer and you would have died. The 22 slug got slowed down by that fat ass stomach of yours and lodged in your liver. You should live if you don't stress it. You are not coming with us. So you don't know where the boss is either."

They looked at each other. The fact that he was missing was more of a problem than him being dead. Money could be made again elsewhere, but Anthony knew everything. If he was captured, it put them all at risk. Elrod knew this, hell everyone knew it but they didn't have the balls to admit it.

Pudge coughed and took a sip of water from the glass next to him. He had refilled it twice and was still thirsty. "What do you think?"

Risky walked over around this time. He had woken up to the voices and listened quietly. Pudge may be known for many things but lying wasn't one of them. If the boss drove off alive it meant he drove off alive.

"We go find him. There are only so many places he could go." The old man rubbed his hands together to warm them up. "He would come after us and if he is captured, we have to rescue him or silence him."

The other two men looked at him. They knew it was true but they didn't want to try and turn on him. They felt a bond of brotherhood. This kind of action was meant for when you were absolutely sure you had secrets that had to be kept. And they had secrets. Anthony was better than most at resisting torture but with law and order what it was, humanitarian questioning wasn't the norm anymore.

"So what do you suggest then old man?" Elrod started to reassemble the gun. He did his best thinking when working.

"We head east. There are only so many places he could be hiding. We use the honest face of our business and go 'Bounty Hunting'. That way it looks legitimate." The old man shrugged as he leaned against a wall.

Pudge coughed as he choked down more water. "What about me?"

"You lay low here." Elrod didn't even look up. "You are going to be our ears. We will have to use the radios on this one."

Pudge knew what that meant. Normally they stayed radio silent. Radios were a luxury now that the world's cell system was down. Radio comms operated on old bandwidth and could be intercepted. It also meant that they intended to be in the field. It meant that he wanted others to know they were looking.

When a hunter went looking for weak prey they looked for the animal that didn't know they were coming. A hunter never looked for another animal out hunting, its senses were already sharpened and made keen by its own desire to eat. This signal would give the warning to anyone else who might try to take advantage of them, they were already out for a fight.

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