Behind The Curve-The Farm | Book 3 | The Farm Craven Boyd (the reading list book .txt) 📖

“You flirtatious hussy,” Anna said as they drove down the road, having just left the farm store with Anna driving.

“What are you talking about? I just gave them a hug and a peck on the cheek like you did.”

“Oh, I saw you picked up on that, but I’m talking about showing that agent your butt while you got your ID out.”

“I was not showing him my butt!” Angelica said, her face turning red.

“If you weren’t doing it on purpose, then you got a natural talent. You were practically posing for him to give you a spanking!”

“I was not!” Angelica said, exasperated.

“Oh, well, that’s what it looked like to me,” Anna told her, grinning at her friend's discomfort. “For a foul-mouthed scrapper, you sure do get embarrassed about sex easily.”

“I do not!” Angel said, stamping her feet on the floor of the box truck.

“Just a little bit, girlfriend. I don’t get it, you’re a hottie. You married a hottie to boot, did you forget that you’re a woman, men hear your roar still?”

“Honestly…” Anna looked down, “I don’t feel very girly sometimes.”

“Oh my God… Is this why you’re a little bit like… insecure?”

“You know, I know you’re like one of the guys more than you’re one of the girls,” Angelica told her, “but I think I can't turn on the charm like…”

“Oh, I know. I was a model since my teenage years. I’m used to the attention. You seem to shy away from it. You’re a pretty lady Angelica, and today, I saw you use it to get your way. You had both of those guys asking for your autograph. Didn’t you notice that?”

“I noticed that,” Angelica said, “and Rob is going to kill me. I swear I didn’t mean to put my butt out there.”

Anna laughed some more while Angel plotted ways for her best friend to die mysteriously. That’s when Anna turned on the radio, and a song by Muse came on.

“They will not force us

They will stop degrading us

They will not control us

We will be victorious”

The ladies started singing along. It wasn’t their normal type of music, but ‘Uprising’ seemed an appropriate song for their slow burn apocalypse.

“Man, those two ladies are hot. If they were my wives, I’d never let them leave the house,” Travis told his buddy.

“I hear you, but dude, they’re like our parents’ age.”

“My Momma never looked like that.” Travis grinned.

“Hey, boys,” an ATF agent said, walking out the door.

“Did the ladies say when they’d be back?” the second agent asked.

“Uh, tomorrow, in the afternoon. After the market closes, I guess?” Trav said, helpfully.

“That works, thanks!” The agent didn’t even wait to walk away to make a phone call. “Confirmed sighting. She’ll be back tomorrow. Yup. You know the plan.”

Eight

Luis was tickled pink with the delivery. Harry and Rob had helped him bring the broken feeder out and set it up on the side of the pond, near one of the IBC totes. His plan had been to mix dried feed corn with the fish food they’d bought by the fifty-pound bags at the farm store, at a rate of ⅔ corn to ⅓ pond feed. The catfish had never really been fed since the group had bought the farm.

“Do you think they’ll eat this stuff?” Harry asked the two of them as they mixed the feed in the feeder.

“They should,” Rob told him, “you fish for them half the time with worms. What do you fish with the other half of the time?”

“Corn?” Luis offered after Harry hesitated.

“Yes,” Harry said, grinning. “It’s soft corn though, leftovers from dinner.”

“Well, this corn is the same. They won’t know the difference after a while. A lot of feed for fish and animals comes from corn.” Rob mussed his son’s hair while Ranger looked on.

“Dad, is corn like a superfood?”

“It’s in almost everything out there,” Rob said. “Nutritionally, I don’t know.”

“You know little man,” Luis told him, finishing filling the feeder top off, “that my ancestors and the Native Americans used corn, or maize, as a staple of their diet. What we have here at the farm would feed many tribes.”

“Is that why we’re growing so much corn, because we have tribes to feed?” Harry’s words came out, but neither man answered, they just looked at each other uneasily.

“Let’s see if this will work for us,” Luis said finally, and crawled down off the ladder.

Rob hit the manual cycle and the corn sprayed out in a thirty-degree arc, right over the water. The catfish immediately started boiling up to the surface, their tails and bodies kicking up mud as they fought for position, some coming right out of the water.

“Looks like they were hungry,” Rob told Luis. “This was a great idea.”

“We have to feed the fish, so the fish can feed our greens. They will make little fishes, and we eat the big ones.”

“Won’t we eat the small ones too?” Harry asked.

“I think we should start fishing for the medium sized ones for a while,” Rob told his son. “I’m not an expert on this, but I think too many little ones would choke out growth in the pond with new food. The big ones can keep the littlest ones in check.”

“How?” Harry asked.

Rob considered that. “They like catfish and hush puppies too!”

“Ewwwwww!”

Governor Christian was not having a good day. The news of what he’d done had barely made it out. He and his assistant had emailed everybody they could in the media. The story had gone out, but it’d fallen like a lead balloon. Nobody covered it for more than thirty seconds.

“Governor shoots government agent who threatened his family’s lives and safety.”

Even the conservative news media mega channel only gave it ten seconds, mostly on the chyron on the bottom of the screen. The pandemic and widespread riots across the country overwhelmed everything else.

“Sir,” Christian’s reverie was interrupted by his assistant’s intercom, “we have a pair of FBI agents