Above both boats, a distinctive orange flare streaked through the sky. Everyone stopped rowing and turned around to look behind them in surprise…and there, standing on the far shore with a flare gun in his right hand, his clothes torn, his body bloodied and black with smoke, was Phil.
Epilogue
Wyatt, breathing hard, wiped the sweat from his brow with his left sleeve and leaned his weight on the heavy felling ax.
“Sorry, I’d help chop these trees down if I could,” Phil said, “but you know that my mechanical hand isn’t quite strong enough for that.” Using his engineering expertise and some scrap wood, leather, and steel, Phil had designed a basic mechanical hand that he wore over the stump on his left wrist. It was handy enough to eat with or to hold the reins when he rode a horse but was not suitable for anything requiring heavy lifting or exertion.
“Don’t worry about it, Phil,” Wyatt said. “It’s a good workout, and I’m enjoying it.”
“Good work, brother,” Phil said. “We don’t need too much more timber to finish the barn anyway. You don’t need anyone else to help down here, do you?”
“Eddie and I will be fine,” Wyatt said. “And I asked David to help out here when he’s done fixing the chicken coop. We’ll see you around dinner time.”
“See you guys then.” Phil mounted his horse and trotted back to the farmhouse. While two of the horses had been killed in the battle, Phil was thankful that his favorite stallion had survived.
“How’s the tree felling going?” Alice asked when Phil walked into the house.
“Wyatt and Eddie are doing well. I think we’ll have enough timber to finish the barn by the end of the week.”
“And then everything will almost be back to how it was,” Alice said with a smile. “It’s hard to believe that we’ve done so much in three months. It almost feels like the battle didn’t happen, like it was just a nightmare.”
Thinking about the battle made Phil’s stump ache, and he got a phantom pain in the left hand that was no longer there. He still couldn’t believe he’d won the duel against Jackson. If the burning beam from the barn roof hadn’t fallen on his opponent, knocking him over and stunning him long enough for Phil to slam his bowie knife into his throat, he didn’t think he’d be here now. It was pure luck, of course, but Phil liked to think that the soul of the ranch had dropped the beam at that exact moment.
“It was a nightmare all right,” Phil said, “but it’s one we won’t ever have to live through again. When Wyatt and David went on that reconnaissance mission to the two towns last week and found ‘em totally deserted and empty of all people except the dead, I felt a lot more reassured. Now that Jackson and all his men are dead, nobody else knows about this place. We’re here on our own, secret and safe, and that’s how it’s gonna stay from now on. The battle wrecked a lot of our crops, but we’ve got more than enough canned food to get through the winter just fine, and by next spring, I’m pretty damn sure everything will have recovered.”
“Come here, Phil,” Alice said, smiling.
She and Phil hugged for a long time in silence, quietly joyful in the knowledge that they, their family and their friends were finally safe and sound, and would be for a very, very long time to come.
THE END
EMP Survival In A Powerless World | Book 19 | EMP Ranch Page 22
