Brutal Business: Book Three in the Mad Mick Series Read online

  Copyright © 2020 by Franklin Horton

  Cover by Deranged Doctor Design

  Editing by Felicia Sullivan

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Also by Franklin Horton

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Also by Franklin Horton

  The Borrowed World Series

  The Borrowed World

  Ashes of the Unspeakable

  Legion of Despair

  No Time For Mourning

  Valley of Vengeance

  Switched On

  The Ungovernable

  The Locker Nine Series

  Locker Nine

  Grace Under Fire

  Compound Fracture

  Blood Bought

  The Mad Mick Series

  The Mad Mick

  Masters of Mayhem

  Stand-Alone Novels

  Random Acts

  About the Author

  Franklin Horton lives and writes in the mountains of Southwestern Virginia. He is the author of several bestselling post-apocalyptic series. You can follow him on his website at franklinhorton.com.

  While you’re there please sign up for his mailing list for updates, event schedule, book recommendations, and discounts.

  1

  Ross County, Ohio

  Just north of Chillicothe, Ohio, Thomas pulled his truck up to the gate in the chain link fence and grinned. An ominous sign read: Looters Will Be Shot.

  “We’ll see about that.” He killed the engine, popped his door open, and stepped down. By the time his boots hit the gravel, more trucks just like the one he was driving fell in behind him. They were mostly military surplus M54A2 cargo trucks with few M35A2s thrown in. All ran multi-fuel engines capable of running on diesel, jet fuel, kerosene, home heating oil, and, in a pinch, even gasoline.

  The need for fuel was what brought this special convoy to the Buckeye Farm Supply. Rumor was they still had a decent supply of kerosene and home heating oil put back in case things got worse. Of course, that rumor was extracted under duress, what some people might call torture, but Thomas had no qualms about employing such means. Someone had to do it. Someone had to lead in the group. Someone had to find the next cache of fuel and keep the convoy rolling. That someone was him.

  Thomas left the line of trucks, a grin on his face, and walked toward the tall rolling gate. He studied the sturdy chain and the serious padlock. He also noted the bloodstains on the dry gravel beneath his feet. Rather than scaring him, he actually found that to be an encouraging sign. Somebody had something here they felt a need to protect.

  “Keep moving, soldier!” barked a voice from somewhere inside the farm supply.

  Thomas searched the windows and doors of the main structure. He didn’t see anything open, no heads sticking out. He decided he needed to keep them talking in order to get a better fix on the speaker.

  “We’re just searching for fuel,” Thomas said. He was trying to sound both official and innocent, a poor stranded soldier out there saving souls and keeping the peace.

  “Guess you haven’t heard but there’s a shortage,” the voice replied.

  The man was being a smartass and Thomas hated a smartass. Disrespect was one thing he would not tolerate. He’d worked hard to earn the respect he held and he wouldn’t let anyone talk to him that way without paying a price.

  “Yeah, we’ve heard about the shortage. We just want to take a look around. I’m certain you got something in there these vehicles can run on. Why don’t you come on out and open the gate?”

  “This official business?” the voice asked.

  Thomas detected a flicker of concern in the voice. The guy was a law-abiding citizen who didn’t want to do anything that might get him in trouble. “Official?” Thomas said. “What exactly do you mean by official?”

  “I mean, is this official Army business? Government business?” the voice asked. “You’re in Army trucks, wearing Army clothes. Figured you must be doing Army shit.”

  “Does it make a difference if this is official?” Thomas asked. “That help you make whatever decision you’re in there trying to make?”

  “Not really,” the voice replied. “Just like to know who we kill. Helps us know how deep we need to bury the bodies.”

  Thomas had to laugh at that. The balls on this one. He hoped the man’s laugh was a good one because it would most certainly be his last. As he was laughing, he was also searching, trying to find the man addressing him. Then there he was. A flicker of movement behind an enormous round bale of hay. Someone had turned several bales onto their flat end like giant soup cans and scattered them around the property, presumably to provide cover for situations like this one. In most cases, that bale would have protected the hidden man, at least for a little while.

  Thomas spoke into his radio. “Mingo, you listening?”

  “Yeah, T,” came the response.

  “See that hay bale with the white wrap around it? The one by the forklift?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Grenade launcher. Smoke that motherfucker,” Thomas whispered.

  Mingo popped up from the bed of Thomas’s truck and fired a shot from his M203 grenade launcher. Thomas ducked behind the hood of his truck just in case fragments came flying his way. The round embedded itself in the hay bale before exploding. Strands of burning hay floated down on the scene like a snowstorm in Hell. The emerging cloud of smoke gave Thomas a slight tactical advantag
e that he didn’t want to waste. He needed to get his crew moving before it cleared.

  “First Team, go!”

  Thomas swung out from behind the truck with a set of bolt cutters he kept on the floorboard. He ran to the gate and cut the chain. Mingo laid down cover fire over their heads. They didn’t know if there was anyone else alive in there but they had to assume there was and that they were ready to fire back.

  When the chain was cut, Thomas leaned his shoulder into the heavy steel gate and pushed it along the rollers. First Team, his breaching team, rushed through the opening he created. Someone inside the main building broke out a window and fired a few wild shots at them. Mingo, in concert with some of First Team, opened up on the window and the shooting soon stopped. They’d neutralized the threat.

  There was a crash and the sound of splintering wood as First Team laid a boot to the storefront and smashed the antique door into kindling.

  “Go! Go! Go!” the team leader yelled, rushing his stacked team inside. He fell smoothly into line behind them and they began clearing the main building.

  “Second Team, go!” Thomas said into his microphone. There was no sign of stress in his voice. No rush. This was everyday business for them. Routine.

  A second fire team sprinted through the gate, weapons raised. They rushed around the back of the building and into the yard where farm supplies were stored. There were stacks of gates, cattle feeders, water tanks, and every manner of livestock fencing. The team split up and set about securing the various other structures on the property. More shots came from inside the store building. They were single, precise, kill shots. Indications the team had found folks hiding and dealt with them.

  They were executions.

  Thomas removed a fire extinguisher from a bracket on the side of his truck. He walked casually to the smoldering remains of the hay bale and blasted it with a prolonged, powdery burst from the extinguisher. When the device ran dry, he tossed it to the side. The densely-packed hay had shaped the grenade’s blast in a peculiar manner and he spotted the remains of the man he’d been talking with through the gate. He looked like a giant ice cream scoop had come down from the sky and taken a scoop from his top half. He was all hay, blood, and powdered fire retardant, like some psycho’s version of a powdered jelly donut.

  “Damn, bro,” Thomas muttered, shaking his head at the corpse. “You should have run.”

  “Inside clear,” came the transmission from First Team’s leader.

  “Second Team?” Thomas asked.

  “Perimeter secure.”

  Thomas turned away from the wrecked body and beckoned toward the men remaining in the trucks. The passenger in his truck scooted to the driver’s seat, started the engine, and eased through the gate, heading behind the building. The rest of the caravan was made up of similar vehicles, though some pulled trailers. The final vehicle was an M49A2C fuel tanker and perhaps their most important piece of gear.

  When the last truck passed by him, Thomas dragged the gate closed and set the chain back in place. With the vehicles concealed around back and the gate chained, the place would appear unchanged from the road. While they didn’t exactly depend on stealth, why invite trouble? Yet if trouble did come they were more than equipped to handle it.

  Thomas stalked around the building, headed for the yard area and taking in the remaining inventory around him. Most of this farming shit meant nothing to him. As far as he was concerned, cows were for eating, not for babysitting. He didn’t give a damn how you kept, fenced, or medicated one. All he cared about was how you cooked them. Preferably with a slight char to the outside and medium rare on the inside.

  He spoke into his radio. “Second Team, gate is closed. Get a couple of concealed sentries on the front and make sure the perimeter is tight. Lawdog? Mundo? You with me?”

  “Yeah, T?” Lawdog replied.

  “You got someone checking tanks?”

  “Roger that, T. Already on it.”

  “Then you and Mundo get inside and start hitting the books. Get me a list of those bulk fuel customers and where the fuck they live. We don’t roll again until the trucks and tanker are full.”

  “On it,” Lawdog replied.

  Lawdog and Mundo were his most computer literate men. They had a little Honda generator and a long extension cord. If the records were computerized, they’d boot the machines and find a way in. If there was anything petroleum-based and combustible in the area, they’d find it.

  “Where’s my taco truck?” Thomas called.

  A man carrying a three-foot long pipe wrench gestured to a particular truck in the sea of similar vehicles. Thomas didn’t acknowledge the gesture but jogged off in that direction. Shootah and Buddha Boy were in charge of the food and they were searching for a good spot to set up the camp kitchen.

  “Y’all find something good to throw on that fire,” Thomas said. “I could eat the tires off one of these trucks.”

  “We saw a couple of cows while we were sitting there at the gate,” Buddha Boy said. “They kept turning into steaks and burgers right before my eyes, like in one of those old cartoons.”

  “Then make it happen,” Thomas said. “We’re burning daylight.”

  Someone had opened a back door to the main building and Thomas headed in that direction. There was a covered back porch and loading dock area piled with more farming shit. While Thomas stood there studying the various shrink-wrapped pallets, a roll-up door rattled open on the dock. Men from First Team began slinging bodies off the dock and onto the ground.

  Thomas watched with detached interest. He didn’t really care who they killed or how many. What interested him was their appearance. He was trying to figure out if the men they’d killed were owners and employees of the company or if they were men who’d just been occupying the place. From the bibbed overalls and goofy trucker hats, he figured these men owned the joint. They were at least locals.

  “Hey, Jawbone,” Thomas called, speaking to a short, muscular man. He was dressed the same as Thomas, in the uniforms they’d all been issued by the Army.

  “Wassup?”

  “There’s got to be some wheelbarrows or carts around this place. Get a couple of guys and haul these dead fuckers out of here.”

  “Where to, T?”

  “I don’t give a damn as long as I don’t have to see or smell them.”

  Jawbone scratched his head and scanned the yard.

  Thomas spotted a nested stack of wheelbarrows beneath an open shed. “There,” he said.

  Jawbone looked but didn’t immediately see them.

  “There,” Thomas repeated. “Right. Fucking. There.” He jabbed with his finger.

  “Oh yeah,” Jawbone said, heading off in that direction.

  “Dense motherfucker,” Thomas mumbled. He heard men approaching and saw it was Lawdog and Mundo with their tiny red generator.

  Lawdog stopped at the pallet of stacked plastic sacks. He tore open a section of the plastic wrap and scanned the label, tracing it with his finger until a smile split his face.

  “What?” Thomas asked.

  “This is the good stuff,” Lawdog said. “The kind of fertilizer you can blow things up with. Oklahoma City bombing level stuff.”

  Thomas stared at it. “That right?”

  Lawdog nodded.

  “You know how to do it?”

  “Oh, hell yeah.”

  “Good to know,” Thomas replied. “But right now we need fuel more so get your ass in that building and find us some.”

  “You got it, T,” Lawdog said, following Mundo inside.

  Thomas brought up the rear and entered the dark expanse of the farm supply. While old country stores had faded into obscurity, replaced by convenience stores with their bright lights and relative uniformity, farm supply stores carried that atmosphere of bygone days. Inside, the narrow planks of the oak floor creaked as Thomas walked. The ceiling was tinplate, with the fine detail obscured by multiple layers of dingy paint. There was a smell that was somewhere
between a barn and a hardware store, consisting of oil, wood, smoke, and grains.

  “This place is big,” Thomas said to no one in particular. Besides Lawdog and Mundo, several other men with specific areas of expertise were moving through the aisles, searching for supplies. “We push some of this shit out of the way, we can sleep in here.”

  “There’s a woodstove too,” Flaco called from the far side of the room. “Already got a fire going and everything.”

  “Let’s keep it going,” Thomas said. “Gonna cool off fast in here with all these doors open. It would be nice to sleep someplace warm for a change.” He wandered to the front window. The single-layer glass provided no insulation and was as cool as the outside air. Thomas could feel the cold on his face.

  “We entertaining tonight?” Flaco asked, his tone implying he was definitely hoping for it.

  “Naw,” Thomas replied. He enjoyed entertaining as much as the next guy but they had work to do. “We learn the lay of the land first. These farmers might have neighbors who wanna pay us a visit for punching their buddies’ tickets. Possibly tomorrow.”

  “Roger that, T.” Flaco picked up a green can from one of the merchandise displays and held it up for Thomas to see. “Look at this shit. Bag Balm. Who the hell would buy something like this?”