A Rocky Demise Read online

  A Rocky

  Demise

  Pete Thorsen

  Released on Kindle & in Print

  October 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher/author, except that brief selections may be quoted or copied for non-profit use without permission, provided that full credit is given. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely accidental.

  Chapter 1

  “Matt, I have a job for you if you want it.”

  It was Jacob White, a contractor who often hired me for odd jobs. He had often asked to hire me on fulltime but had stopped bugging me now. He knows I will only work for cash. On what most would call ‘under-the-table jobs.’

  “Why wouldn’t I want it?”

  “Because I won’t pay you anything as far as cash but you can salvage all the stuff from the job site. There is an older solar array with all the wiring and stuff. I guess it all works but the panels are about eight years old. Actually, the whole system is about eight years old.

  “I already had someone offer me $400 cash for the system if I take it down and drop it at his place. But I figure it would cost me about that to pay you to do the work, so if you want, you can do the job and have that guy pay you the $400. Your choice. But I know you were looking for some panels.”

  “OK. Sounds good to me. When do you want me to do the job?”

  “Swing by my place Monday morning, about seven, and you can follow me over to the place. I will have a crew working there anyway.”

  “Great. See you Monday. Thanks, Jake.”

  Jake was a good guy. Sometimes when jobs were too small he would just have the people deal directly with me. Sometimes, if he was in a jam and needed work done, he would hire me for cash. But I knew he didn’t like doing that. He would also call me about salvage items that were available at one of his job sites that I could pick up for free if I wanted.

  I only ever work for cash. No checks. Only cold, hard cash. No social security numbers, no ten-ninety-nine forms at the end of year. Just cash that Uncle Sam knows nothing about. That is always the deal.

  I had told Jake I was looking for solar panels. I had been looking for well over a couple of years now. I am just too cheap to just go out and buy some and I just don’t have enough money. I have no electric at my place. Well, I do, but only when I run my generator. Regular electric power is not available here, which—indirectly—is why I live here. I might as well tell you the whole story behind my choice of property.

  Several things happened all around the same time. The real estate market in the United States crashed and prices in most parts of the nation dropped dramatically. And I got out of the military. And I was looking for a place to live.

  I found a place off by itself with nothing on it. Well, almost nothing. It had the remains of some kind of building foundation with short walls still standing. It was from some time ago.

  I walked all over the small piece of property. The foundation intrigued me. It made no sense yet someone in the past had gone through the effort to make that foundation and, at one point, there had been a building on that foundation because there was a little evidence of it still left here. I would guess a wildfire had gone through and burned it all down, but that was just a guess. Or the owners just moved away or perhaps died. Who knows at this point?

  But why build here with no water or anything special about the land? It was only seven acres with a dry creek bed running through a corner of it. Like almost all creeks in Arizona it was dry most of the year with the only real exception being during and just after a big rain. Then it might run for a short while.

  So, I was curious and walked around and looked at every inch of the property. Until I found that old, dug well not too far from the creek. It was well covered but it was still there. When I got that cover off I tossed in a rock and heard a splash from below. I then recovered the well and did my best to hide it even better than it had been. Then I went to dicker on the price of the land.

  The land had been for sale well over a year and they had already dropped the price twice, so I knew they wanted to sell. I offered half of the current price they were now asking. They came back with a counter offer that I ignored for almost a month. I made another offer but I only came up five hundred dollars and this time I told them that was it. They could either say yes or no. Three days later they said yes and I bought the place. It took a big chunk of the money I had saved.

  I moved in a travel trailer that was old enough to be called a classic if it had been in good shape. This trailer was not in very good shape, so it was called junk. I then rented a small track hoe which I used to put in my own septic system.

  By that time I had uncovered the old dug well and knew some stuff about it. It was thirty-five feet deep but it had fifteen feet of standing water in it. It had been dug through some surface dirt and then a lot of solid rock it looked like. At least what I could see of it anyway. Salvaging this well would make or break the place for me. But I had a plan.

  I rented a gas-powered pump and tried to empty the well. I was able to drop the level of the water some but was unable to empty the well, even with the big rental pump which threw a whole lot of water. That is exactly what I had hoped would be the case. That meant the well was good and should last. While trying to pump the well dry I moved the suction line around and around and tried to stir up as much debris as I could so more of it could be pumped out to help clean it up some. After all, I would hopefully be using it for my drinking water so I needed it cleaned up. For all I knew the people that had lived here in the past might have dug this well and died from drinking its water!

  Next I used a rental dump box trailer to haul clean sand and dump it into the well. First though I had dropped a one and one-quarter-inch steel pipe down to the bottom with a three foot sand point on the bottom of the pipe that would screen the water. Using the trailer I dumped load after load into the well until I had it filled up completely and even mounded up on top a little to account for any settling that would likely happen.

  As long as I had the track hoe I dug a trench from the well to the travel trailer and left it open. After returning all the equipment to the rental shop I dumped some chlorine into the new well pipe then hooked an electric pump up to the pipe.

  I let the chlorine sit in the well pipe for a day and a half before starting the generator and, after priming the pump, I started pumping out the well water. I let that pump go wide open for three hours, pumping out that chlorine water while I was doing other work around the place. As long as the generator was running anyway I was able to freely use power tools.

  Before stopping the pump I smelled the discharge water to make sure I had pumped all the chlorine out. Then I procured a water sample to have tested. Two weeks later I got the test results back and the water was fine to drink. The arsenic level was somewhat high but still within specs for safe drinking. This was way better than I expected.

  I now had a good well with clean, safe water. I had filled it with sand because I could think of no way to totally seal up the top of well. With the well solidly full of sand there was nothing that could drop or fall into my drinking water supply to contaminate it. The many feet of sand would act as a filter for any surface water that would trickle down there after rainstorms, and the mounded top would make any surface water run off to the sides anyway. The well system cost me very little. Under five hundred dollars including the rental equipment and the pipe, point, and pump.

  The county did not
know about the well. Actually, it was likely no one knew about that well but me. So I had my own place with seven acres of land with its own well and new sewer system and the cheap make-shift house on it. Everything was paid for free and clear. And I had no neighbors for a long ways around.

  Perfect.

  The place was exactly what I had wanted. I have to admit that I had had my doubts that I would ever find a piece of property that would fit my criteria at a price I could afford. Real estate price crash or not. For one thing, private land was not readily available here in Arizona because most of the state was public land.

  And, I wanted several acres of land which made it even more difficult to find. Much of the private land that was available lay in cities and towns. I had to drive a fair distance just to get to the nearby small town to shop and hopefully work. But I considered the drive well worth the seclusion that I could enjoy on my own piece of land.

  No barking dogs in the distance. No nosey neighbors. No cars, trucks, or motorcycles roaring past my house at all hours of the day and night.

  Just me and the natural wild critters found here. The worst thing was listening to the coyotes howl and I can certainly live with that.

  Chapter 2

  It is best that I have no neighbors and that I live by myself. I am an angry man. I think that I have plenty to be angry about. I fought for my country in far away lands and I paid a dear, personal price for that service. But those idiots in Washington are doing their level best to undo any slight gains that the military has made to keep us safe here at home.

  I went where I was ordered. And once there I was told to kill the Muslims I found. We were at war with these Muslims after they had killed just shy of three thousand innocent, non-combatant Americans on 9/11.

  Those Muslims had committed an act of war and our Congress had basically declared war on them when both Houses almost unanimously passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force on September 14, just five days after the Muslims’ vicious attack on us on that fateful day.

  It was a long time later that I joined up and was sent to kill more Muslims, but there were still many left for me to kill. And they had not stopped trying (and succeeding) to kill us either. There had been several deadly Islamic attacks against the United States before and after 9/11, but that day had obviously been the big turning point for us. Though we apparently learned nothing from that fateful experience.

  The war was very costly for the United States in both lives and treasure. Between Iraq and Afghanistan, way over six thousand American troops were killed, and many times that number were wounded. Many of those injured were very grievously wounded.

  After returning from the war a large number of the veterans could not deal with the after effects of war and they committed suicide. Most people have no idea just how big the number of suicides really is, and that number is still going up every single day. If you count the military personnel that commit suicide after they return to America (and I certainly think you should), then the number of military lives this war has cost the United States is huge, with very little (if any) gain to the people of America.

  Plus, there is the huge financial cost to the United States for this seemingly endless war. We are still fighting these Muslims and they are still fighting us both here on our own soil and half way around the world on their soil. I don’t think anyone can accurately sum the financial cost of this war. If anyone could, the amount would be staggering. And again, the war and its costs are apparently never ending. We are talking trillions of dollars, with a ‘T’. Just more money added to the national debt by all members of Congress.

  Many times our government has called the vicious attacks that the Muslims do on our soil ‘lone wolf’ attacks. Or they try to call them by other names too. But no matter what you call them, it is all part of the same war. They are at war with us and they are killing us.

  Oh, we are killing them also, but I think there is a big difference.

  They are almost always killing innocents and not killing so many of our military. While we are only allowed to kill those that are actively fighting us. I think it is a lot easier to kill innocent people that have no idea that they are in harm’s way. Also, in our country, when the Muslims attack us it is always (or almost always) in ‘gun-free zones’ where honest Americans cannot carry a gun with which to protect themselves or those around them. But of course, to those that wish to do us harm, the ‘gun-free zones’ only mean that they are completely safe from return fire.

  And so we fight and kill these Muslims while those in Washington are simultaneously importing Muslims by the thousands. Actually not thousands—because it is millions. This has been going on for thirty years or more—taking in refugees or just actively bringing Muslim immigrants into our country.

  Some of these people are very likely great, honest, hard-working, peaceful people that cause no real harm to our country and might instead at some point even be called assets to our country. But some are also the so-called ‘radical’ Muslims that only desire to kill as many of us ‘infidels’ as they possibly can.

  They want to kill all of us and they want to bring the United States to its knees by any possible method they can. To them, none of us are innocents, whether we are a seventy-year-old grandmother or a one-year-old infant.

  So it is common knowledge that at least a percentage of the Muslim ‘immigrants’ want nothing else in life than to kill us all. And there is absolutely no way to tell the good ones from the bad ones. So why does our government keep bringing them here when they know this?

  And at the same time they are sending American troops to far away lands to kill them over there? And why is the President at his intelligence meetings every few days or so giving approval to launch drone missile strikes to kill one or a dozen of the Muslims in their homes at the same time he is allowing more and more of them to come over here to live? It makes no sense whatever.

  There are now hundreds of thousands of Muslims living here in America. No, there are really many millions of them here now. Many or most or possibly even almost all are likely great people.

  But there is also a percentage of them that want nothing else but to kill every single one of the infidel Americans. That’s all of us, because we are all infidels. That is their sole goal in life—just to kill all of us. And there is no way to stop all of them from (at the very least) killing some of us.

  I know this to be a solid fact. I also know that there is nothing I can do about that fact. So that is one reason that I bought this place of mine here in the middle of nowhere, with no neighbors, so I can hopefully live out my life here in peace. After all, isn’t that what most people (at least Americans) want from life? To just live in peace? You would think that would be what everyone in the whole world would want.

  But that is not so.

  Chapter 3

  So thanks to Jacob it sounds like I might finally be getting some solar panels. My place has come a long way since I first moved here six or seven years ago now. The old travel trailer is still sitting in the same spot but now I also have a newly-built house.

  Well, the house is not quite complete yet, but I am living in it now. I would like to say that I built the whole thing myself but, while I did most of the work it takes more than one guy to build an entire house. So, sometimes I had to hire helpers while building it. And sometimes I needed someone with special skills for some parts to be finished correctly.

  Building was a slow process because I could only build as I got more money. First came the cement work for the foundation and floor (with a basement area which is very rare in this area), then I gradually built the house walls. These outside walls are made with a clay mix block that are sixteen inches square so the walls are all sixteen inches thick. Those blocks are made locally and (through some finagling) I was able do some work for that company to pay for most of the block in a sort of bartering deal. I like to barter because it keeps the government out of the picture and always seems to save me money.

&n
bsp; The house roof is metal and that was a very big expense that I had to save up to purchase and it took me some time to get enough money for it.

  I built the two heavy entrance doors myself. I have my own home-made forge and I built the massive door hinges myself also. I have personally made or built as much as I could for the house. I work for some cash money and I also get a small amount every month from the government.

  I think the government owes me. So I get everything I can from the government. My cellphone is free from the government because of my low income. I get food stamps from the government because of that same low income. My medical needs are covered by the government through the local VA hospital.

  I have no monthly bills because I have no electric power. I have to occasionally buy propane and pay my truck license and insurance and pay the property taxes. I pay no income tax either—to either the state or the federal government. So even though the government gives me my food and my phone and a little spending money every month, I still do not think that is enough. The government took something from me and can never give it back. So now I take everything I can from the government, every chance I get.

  While there have been many changes here at my place some things have not changed. Like the power only being available when I run the noisy generator. I have wanted a solar power system ever since I bought the place. But I have waited, and now on Monday it looks like I will finally get a system. Hopefully. And the cost of this system is finally within my reach.

  When Monday rolled around I met Jake at his place and followed him out to the site. They were currently going to be building a cement wall that was both decorative and effective around the large yard.

  Jake explained that when the wall was done they would be adding a second story to the house. That was why the solar panels were coming off. The owner said that as long as they had to be removed anyway he would just replace them with new ones. Expensive for him but good for me. A quick look around the place and it seemed like he could certainly afford it.