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intimidated at all upon their first meeting.
    They’d tried a few practical jokes and ambushes that Everett had no trouble boomeranging back on them. But that was all right. Kerri was lucky to have them, and they were tolerable enough.
    The access road to their place was narrow and over grown, with lines of Mayten trees to both sides. Everett crept the car through the tunnel of overhanging willow branches, toward the brothers’ home.
    Rick and Norm’s house was a sprawling , weather darkened one story cabin that had never been painted. Its roof was in such disrepair, Everett envisioned the brothers doing a juggling routine with pots and pans to catch the leaks when it rained.
    If they di dn’t seem to care much about their house’s exterior condition, the interior was bursting with expensive, useless crap, and their vehicles betrayed the money they had to burn from their farming endeavors.
    Rick had a huge green Ram truck in the driveway with jacked up over sized tires on custom rims. It was 4 WD, and the truck didn’t have door handles; he needed a remote on his key ring just to get in and out.
    Norm was devoted to his blue restored 1957 Land Rover I 107 pickup, smaller but much more elegant than it’s over sized cousin. It was an electric, running off an array of batteries rather than serving the Arab Oil Moguls. He had a bumper sticker on his rear fender reading ‘Death to the Petro Traitors.’
    Norm also had a big array of halogen lights on top of the cab, facing backwards. He enjoyed blasting them in the eyes of anyone driving behind him at night rude enough to shine their high beams up his ass.
    T he brothers owned all the latest and top flight in hunting gear: halogen spots for jack lighting and ‘out of season’ work, matching Weatherby Mark V hunting rifles with Leupold scopes, GPS locators, the whole shebang.
    They made a big deal about being off the grid, all their electricity coming from solar panels on the rotting roof of their house. They’d tried to talk Everett into going that route, but Everett wasn’t sure it was desirable for PG&E to tell the Man he might be running an indoor grow operation. Didn’t need CAMP or the DEA kicking in his family’s door even if they were clean; it would disturb Kerri and Raymond.
    The brothers also had a well equipped workshop stocked with a full array of machine tools, specialized for weapons modification and gun smithing. Rick and Norm’s water came from a well and, in addition to a septic tank for their sanitary needs, they’d let slip that they had another big plastic tank buried somewhere on the property for a fallout shelter. If civilization collapsed, the brothers had announced their intention on more than one occasion to retreat a step or three, then come out as warlords when American society finished its death gurgle.
    Everett figured they had other caches scattered around the property. But they didn’t ask where Everett had all his Bay Area money buried and he didn’t ask if they had access to, say, an RPG or an M 60 machine gun. Just like down in the East Bay, people up in the piney woods minded their business.
    It was only after Everett parked the Escort that the brothers’ lazy if fecund pack of hunting dogs vomited forth from whatever shady nooks they’d been taking their afternoon siesta in. They swirled around the car baying protest at Everett’s intrusion on their nap time.
    Norm appeared in the doorway with a smoking bong in his hand. Norm was a tall, strapping example of the lumberjack genetics that prevailed in Northern California. Although in his forties, he couldn’t get past the bygone days of his sexual peak: his brown hair was cut in a late 70s style waved pageboy, his bolo string tie had a gold Playboy bunny clasp and his jeans were tight enough that you’d see the wrinkles in Norm’s scrotum if you cared to aim a glance at that portion of his anatomy.
    Norm made his haphazard way to the Escort , favoring a few of the dozen odd