Read Online Against the Grain by Ian Daniels - Free Book Online

places were always safe and had food and were accepting of everyone right? Wrong. The few towns that didn’t close their borders off to non-locals, or people with no good reason to be there, were overrun like locusts through fields. Indignant outsiders demanded food, housing, medical care and all other manners of entitlements, whether the residents had them to give or not. More often than not, when the outsiders were not satisfied with the people they were attempting to beg from, or if they didn’t get more and more handed to them continually, they rebelled against everything and everyone near them until there was nothing left for anyone.
    After a while a military unit or two were freed up to check a couple of the outlying towns. When they showed up, the local cops thought they finally had the big guns to back them up. The power trips of the bad cops clashed with the few remaining good ones, and then with the rest of the town. The military presence never stayed though, and when they left, it seemed that a last false hope would go with them.  
    I had kept a low profile the whole time but once I saw that it was going to come to a head one way or another, I decided to become even more scarce. To my reckoning, until the city came to the same conclusions that I had, or at least until they were willing to hear those conclusions and actually try to do something about it, it was time to take a step back and scale down my little world even more. That was when I found myself living out in a half built house with no power.  
    I had quietly transferred belongings from my house in town to this place. Besides the travel trailer parked under cover, there was a roof overhead and siding on the house. It wasn’t completely plumbed or wired, and it was basically just a weatherproof skin around a concrete floored and wood framed space, but I had been building with self sufficiency in mind and had already transferred a lot of my “stuff’ here, so I knew I could make do.
    It had taken a couple of trips from the town house with my truck, and I had had to seal up some things that I just didn’t get to, hoping maybe I could go back and finish the move some day. So far, I had only gone back on foot. My out of town property was miles away from my friends and any other neighbors too, that in itself made it a better (and worse) choice. I couldn’t do it alone, I knew that, but there were definitely benefits of having my own place, now being a perfect example.
    Even being out of the way from anything and everything, I still took provisions to keep it hidden. I had dug a ditch through the driveway where it met the dirt road to blend in with the rest of the area. I continued the barbed wire fencing that was common in this area for people running livestock across the front of the property and replanted trees and bushes and rocks, all to make the driveway disappear as much as possible. You couldn’t see the house from the road by a long shot anyway, but I still wanted to avoid attracting any extra attention.
    Hiding from the random road hunters or anyone else that stumbled onto the house was a harder problem to solve, and I eventually concluded that the best answer was the hide in plain sight approach. I wasn’t there every second of the day and even if I was, I couldn’t stop everyone. It was only a matter of time before I knew my luck would run out. The best I could do to extend that time was to not make it any easier for others to find me. I tried to only burn in the fireplace late at night to keep the smell and sight of the smoke from giving me away. I was always very aware of any noise I made while working at the house, and I would go deeper into the woods with a suppressor in place to do any shooting.
    Walking inside, I lit a lantern and began to strip my pack and other gear and clothes off. I was at that point where you are so tired that your stomach hurts and your head is swimming. I pulled my guns and flashlight from my gear and set them