After The Virus (Book 2): Homesteading

by Archer, Simon

  Once everything from the feed store was loaded, we set off again. This time I headed straight for the main road.

  “Does Bruce even know how to ride a horse?” Angie asked.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “I mean, he’s from way out in the boonies in Arizona, so maybe?”

  “That’s statist,” she said flatly.

  “What?” I asked, glancing over at her.

  “Statist,” she replied. “You know. Prejudiced against a state.”

  “What the hell, Angie?” I exclaimed. “I’m not prejudiced against Arizona.”

  “But here you are assuming that someone from Arizona would know how to ride a horse,” she explained. “Seriously.”

  “You have got to be kidding me,” I grumbled.

  That broke the straight face, and she started to giggle while I just shook my head in mock disgust. Angie had a strange sense of humor, even for a Marine.

  I ignored her as she cackled away in the passenger seat, trying to focus and remain alert to my surroundings a bit more than I had. It was a lot like the trick where I closed my eyes and listened, only I had to keep my eyes open and moving, registering everything that might be out of the ordinary.

  Maybe I’d been a civvie too long, and this whole “quiet apocalypse” just made it seem easy. We could just drive or walk or even ride a horse to one of the many stores, break in, and take what we wanted. Sure, it wasn’t specifically fresh food, but we didn’t really have to work for it.

  We still had a long way to go, but at least we seemed to have the know-how to handle the problems this brave new world threw at us.

  I glanced sidelong at Angie, who still giggled off and on as she watched out the truck windows while I drove. She was really good backup on these runs, better than Jackie, who had a distractible streak. I hadn’t really spent any time in the field with Estelle, so I really didn’t know what to expect. The doctor knew her stuff inside and out and was good with kids.

  “So,” I wondered aloud. “Where could we find homeschooling stuff around here?”

  “You know better than I would,” she replied. “But if I remember correctly, there’s a teacher supply shop, and a bookstore not too terribly far from the CDC. Maybe check it out while you’re there.”

  “I’ll do that,” I said. “Thanks for the heads-up.”

  Angie grinned back at me as I slowed the truck and turned into the empty parking lot of the Newnan Walmart.

  “What do we need from here?” she asked.

  “Stuff for us,” I replied. “Toilet paper, paper towels, maybe some clothes and household supplies. It’s been long enough that the rats and bugs should hopefully have retreated, and stuff in plastic ought to be safe.”

  “Jackie told me the story about how you two found the place after a couple of days without power,” she observed. “I’m not so sure I want to experience that first hand.”

  “It’ll be fine,” I said with a dismissive tone, waving one hand vaguely as I braked to a stop in front of the closed sliding doors.

  “We’ll see about that,” she said dryly as we got out, put on our headlamps, and walked over to the door.

  Unlike some of the smaller stores, Walmart was almost impossible to secure. I’d done my best with a drill and some zip ties, and they were still in place when we came to a halt. Without really thinking about it, I pulled out my multitool and used it to clip the tie open. The doors recoiled a little from each other, and we pried them the rest of the way open and headed into the cool interior.

  With the massively high ceilings of the warehouse-like structure, I rather suspected that it would never actually get hot inside the store. Unfortunately, it still smelled, but not quite the same way it had when Jackie and I came through originally.

  “Ew,” Angie commented, wrinkling her nose. “What a wonderful smell we’ve discovered.”

  “Perhaps I erred,” I said, looking around. Things skittered faintly outside the light of our headlamps. “I guess I underestimated how much food was packed into this place.”

  “Maybe we can skirt the edge of the store to get to what we want?” she suggested.

  “Not the paper goods,” I said. “All of that’s right smack dab in the middle of the market.”

  “Great,” she grumbled. “Well, let’s get her done, then.”

  I chuckled a little, and we plunged ahead into the dark. Our footsteps took on an ominous echo as we moved deeper into the cavernous space, passing aisles still loaded with goods. The scratching and scrabbling grew louder, but nothing appeared in the light of our headlamps.

  “You know,” Angie whispered. “I’m not sure which is worse, the noises, or the fact that we can’t see what’s causing them.”

  “It is pretty creepy, isn’t it?” I asked. “Everything is so empty. I noticed it pretty early on. Thing is, have you noticed how much clearer the air seems?”

  She nodded, a shadow in the dimness.

  “Not in here, though,” Angie observed. “I smell piss and animals and mildew… Hopefully, what we want isn’t a nest or something.”

  “Yeah,” I grumbled. “Pretty much all the grocery stores lured in vermin with the produce and meat once the refrigeration failed. I guess I should have expected that.”

  “No biggie,” she said. “Let’s just move fast.”

  “Agreed.”

  At the paper aisle, we finally saw our first rat. It raised up on its hind legs in the middle of the aisle, peered at us with glittering, beady eyes, then scampered under the shelving. Angie edged behind me.

  “Do we really need to get stuff here?” she asked.

  I glanced back at her.

  “Are you afraid of rats?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she answered in a small voice.

  “Hey,” I said with a sincere smile. “It’s okay. Wait here with the carts, and I’ll bring stuff to you. Cool?”

  Angie nodded and gave me a look of sheer relief. That she was actually afraid of the rodents kind of caught me by surprise, but everyone had their quirks. At least she didn’t have any real issues with other critters, as far as I knew.

  I left her guarding the carts and moved carefully down the aisle, starting with big packs of paper towels. Some of them had obviously been gnawed open, and I fancied I saw glittering eyes and furry, bewhiskered faces staring at me from behind the tattered packages. Ignoring my instinct to retreat, I grabbed a large pack that looked whole, shook it to make sure nothing ran for cover, then gave it a quick inspection before doing the same with its neighbor. That made two that didn’t seem to be tainted, so I ran them back to the carts.

  We couldn’t load that many of the big packages of paper towels into the wire and plastic grocery carts, but we did get as many of them, and big packs of toilet paper, as we could. I saw a few more rats, but they scattered from my light and seemed to want as little to do with me as I did with them. For the moment, we had an unspoken detente while I gathered paper goods and shuttled them to the overloaded carts and Angie, the guardian.

  It wasn’t long before we left Ratland behind and headed for personal hygiene and pharmaceuticals. There we loaded up with soap, shampoo, razors, shaving cream, first aid stuff like bandages and antiseptics, cold and flu medicine, analgesics, and NSAIDs.

  “Hey,” Angie spoke up while I struggled to pack as much into the cart as I could. “I’m going to go grab some stuff for us girls. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  I looked over at her and nodded. We were getting low on various feminine products, although I had overheard them talking about moving to cloth pads or cups. Sure, there were a lot of immature guys in the service that giggled at stuff like that or wouldn’t buy the goods for their wives or girlfriends, but I’d never been bothered. If she’d asked, I’d have joined her, but she wanted to take care of gathering that stuff, so I just went about the business of finishing to load this cart.

  By the time she came back, I was rummaging around in the pharmacy.

  “You know,” I said, hearing her footst
eps and the rattly wheel of her cart. “I really wish Estelle was here to tell me what of this stuff we actually need.”

  “Certainly not Viagra,” Angie teased.

  “At least not yet,” I joked. “You and Jackie are going to wear me out, though.”

  “Yeah, right,” she snorted. “I don’t believe that any further than I can throw your truck.”

  “At least you aren’t accusing me of compensating with that thing,” I threw back.

  “Because I know you aren’t,” she said and grinned, her teeth shining in the dim light. “So, what do we want to do with the drugs?”

  “Let’s see if we can bag and load them,” I replied. “I don’t think you want to come back here any more than I do.”

  “Probably less, actually,” she said. “Though… do you have bags in the truck, or do you have to run over to the market section and get some?”

  “Well, shit,” I complained. “Okay, run this stuff out to the truck, and I’ll go get some garbage bags.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said with another bright grin.

  Grumbling under my breath, I play-stomped off and then threaded my way through the aisles to the grocery section. Just for giggles, I swung through jewelry and pocketed a few pieces I thought might look cute on Jackie, as well as a couple for Angie.

  I paused after that, staring at the shadowed displays. What did Estelle like? She didn’t wear anything aside from what looked to be simple stud earrings and maybe a necklace. I picked a couple of things that I thought she might like, mostly just guessing, then headed onward.

  At least the plastics section seemed to be further away from the rodent colony, so I didn’t have to fight a rat for a box of thirty-eight-gallon garbage bags. I probably wouldn’t need them all, but we definitely could use them at the house, at least while supplies lasted. With that in mind, I gathered up four of the biggest boxes they had and high-tailed it back towards the pharmacy.

  Angie wasn’t back by the time I returned, so I just went ahead and pulled out one of the big bags, and started shoveling plastic bottles from the shelves into it. By the time she rolled back up with both carts, I had a pretty good head start.

  “Sorry about that,” she said. “The truck’s about full.”

  “I probably should have brought the trailer,” I observed, then shrugged. “Well, we can do that when we run this load back to the farm.”

  “Think we can get Jackie away from her new boyfriend long enough to help?” Angie asked, smirking.

  I gave her a sharp look, saw the teasing glint in her eyes, and shrugged.

  “I think he’s less concerned with his new surroundings than she is,” I said. “She’ll help.”

  “I know,” Angie said as she grabbed a garbage bag to join me in stripping the pharmacy shelves of, well, everything. “I just have to grouse. She’s got this talent for dealing with animals, and I really don’t have much more than…” Her voice trailed off, and she shrugged.

  “Honestly,” I said. “I trust you both implicitly, but I think I’d rather have you by my side or covering my ass if we ever end up in a fight with other people. Jackie can hunt and deal with animals, but she almost got killed when we went after Hunter, and I haven’t had time to work with her.”

  “I could do that,” she suggested. “I didn’t know you wanted to get her trained up.”

  “It might be best,” I said. “At least she can shoot. It’s shooting at a person that she has a hard time with.”

  “That’s probably not everything,” Angie said. “Jackie’s a sweetheart, and she still has nightmares about that incident.”

  “I thought so,” I mused. “She hasn’t talked about it to me, though.”

  “Of course she wouldn’t,” the dark-haired woman said, smiling faintly. “She craves your approval, or hadn’t you noticed?”

  “I think you both do,” I told her, “and I have certainly noticed.”

  Angie huffed and let out a sigh, then slid over and put her arms around me. I returned the hug, nosing into her hair, and stayed silent for a long moment.

  “You’re right,” she finally admitted. “We both do, because we love you, you big goof.”

  “I love you too,” I answered. “Both of you.”

  “We know,” she said softly. “Both of us.”

  Without pulling back from the hug, Angie tilted her face up to look at me.

  “So,” she asked seriously. “Have you talked to Estelle, yet?”

  “I did this morning,” I replied. “We’re going to talk more when we go to the CDC, so don’t worry. I’m fairly sure everything will work out just fine.”

  “Good,” she said. Then she wriggled a little, and we moved apart. “Now, let’s get all this stuff taken care of so we can head home, unload, and take care of round two before dark.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  13

  All joking aside, it wasn’t hard at all to get Jackie out of the Roberts’ place to help unload our haul. Everything we intended for the CDC group got set aside to be reloaded once we’d finished the second run of the day.

  “How’s he doing?” I asked her.

  “Sleeping, mostly,” Jackie replied. “I slipped some painkillers into his food, partly to keep him from being too restless. He is eating and drinking, though, and kind of surprisingly not growly.”

  The young woman’s face brightened. “He even let me pet him.”

  “Be careful,” Angie added her two cents. “I can’t imagine he’s too happy with you.”

  Jackie shook her head.

  “He seems to know that we helped him,” she asserted. “He’s really smart.”

  “Is he really that smart?” I asked. Sure, the coywolf had settled down quickly once Jackie and I defended him, and he’d been surprisingly docile ever since. Maybe she had figured out how to assert herself as the dominant in that relationship.

  “He is,” Jackie said. “I think I can train him, but I do need to figure out how to get the other dogs to accept him. Goldeneye might submit to me, but I don’t think he’ll roll over for any of them.”

  “Dealing with him and our pack is on you,” I said with a shrug. “They’re all more likely to listen to you, anyway.”

  “I can do my best,” she said. “It’s pretty hard getting them to do something they don’t want to do, even if they do like me.”

  “What do you call facing Goldeneye down in front of his whole damn pack, then?” I blurted out.

  Jackie blushed and looked down at her shoes.

  “It felt like it would work, and I got the body language right.”

  “So, you guessed?” Angie asked.

  “Yeah,” Jackie said in a small voice. “I knew Henry had my back.”

  I just reached up and rubbed the bridge of my nose. Jackie really gave me a headache sometimes. She trusted me pretty much implicitly, and I knew it. Still, though, if I was just a little slower or a little less attentive, she could get in all sorts of trouble.

  “Okay,” I admitted. “It worked, so I can’t get pissed, but please be careful. I don’t think you expected the rest of his pack to jump him when you startled him.”

  She shook her head.

  “I thought they’d run like the coyotes did. It didn’t occur to me that dogs would be that unpredictable.” Jackie admitted. “I thought they’d be more afraid of me.”

  “Even feral dogs are used to people,” Angie said.

  “I know,” the other woman admitted. “I just didn’t think about it. My mind was focused on how to deal with Goldeneye.”

  “Okay, both of you are in on that?” Angie demanded, looking from me, to Jackie, and back. “Who decided to name the damn coywolf after a James Bond movie?”

  I snickered.

  “I did it,” I said. “I saw his eyes, and it just popped right into my head.”

  “I ran with it,” Jackie added. “I don’t think Henry expected me to.”

  “I didn’t.”

  Angie shook her head.


  “Seriously, there’s no taking you two anywhere.” Then she focused on me. “Now that we’re unloaded, shouldn’t we head out again and get the rest of that shit Bruce wanted? Seriously, do they not have building supply shops in Atlanta?”

  “He said they looked for this stuff,” I answered. “I guess prefab steel buildings aren’t as big a thing in the city.”

  “Guess not…”

  “Well,” Jackie said. “See you guys later. I’ll keep an eye out for you coming back.”

  I swept the young woman into a hug and kissed her deeply. She wrapped her arms around me and returned it while Angie made mock-gagging sounds.

  Jackie smiled up to me when I finally came up for air.

  “What was that for?” she asked.

  “Seemed like a good idea,” I replied, then let her go.

  She turned and eyed Angie.

  “You’re one to talk,” the blonde woman said. “I know what you’re like in the bedroom.”

  “How about what you’re like?” Angie demanded, grinning.

  “Ladies,” I interrupted. “How about we table this discussion for later so we can get today’s shopping done before dark?”

  “Sure,” Jackie chirped and bounced back, shooting me a wink.

  “Of course,” Angie agreed, a broad grin plastered across her features.

  I checked the trailer while Angie got back into the cab, then went to settle back behind the steering wheel.

  “Round two,” I said. “Fight.”

  Angie laughed while I started the Silverado and swung it around and up the driveway. “So we’re after prefab sheds?” she asked. “Why?”

  “Something Bruce wants to do,” I replied, shrugging. “He doesn’t explain anything unless you dig for gold, so sometimes I just smile and nod.”

  “Maybe he just likes making you run errands,” she suggested.

  “Making us run errands,” I grumbled. “It is an idea, though. We’ve got space for some of these prefabs of our own, and we need to get back to building everything we’ll need for the future.”

  “Well, we have power,” she said.

  “Even that may not last,” I replied. “We can do a lot with everything we’ve scrounged up and put together, but we’re missing some really important things.”