Many years ago, Grandpa built an outdoor shooting range situated to the back of the property and erected a massive earthen berm to act as backstop. It was that berm, in fact, that got Dad thinking about what eventually evolved into our current earth-sheltered home.
Shooting is a perishable skill. Shooting with a weapon not sighted in to your specifications will often result in a miss at anything over spitting distance. This tidbit, often ignored by Hollywood, led to many fatal failures in a gunfight. These rifles, with the attached suppressors, would be our primary carry firearms around the ranch for patrolling or responding to an attack. Unless it was time to go loud, and at that point I was hauling out the CETME or something else in .308 for the knockdown power. Or the fully automatic M4s, which we would now hold in reserve.
Mike already had a crew from the Big House, as we always called Grandpa’s home, including Sierra and Miss Angelina, Alex’s sister and mother, but Mr. Sheldon was absent, no doubt manning the security station near the front gate. I also saw Miss Beth and her boys there. Mrs. Elkins carried another of the suppressed ARs while the Austin, age twelve and Travis, age ten, carried .22-caliber rifles fitted with the long tubes. I noted Sierra carried a short-barreled AR, while her mother was armed with a Ruger like the Elkins kids carried. Well, I knew Mrs. Stanton wasn’t a big fan of guns personally, so maybe that was why.
Mike and Dad took turns acting as range officers, one overseeing the safety aspects while the other worked with our less experienced shooters. We were using full protective rig, with earmuffs and eyepros, even though the suppressed rifles made for much reduced noise. The subsonic .22 ammo was especially quiet, and I swear I could hear the sound of the bolts cycling as the kids, along with Connie, Helena, and Mrs. Stanton, worked on basic marksmanship. Not too long, as even with Dad’s impressive ammunition stores, .22 subsonic wasn’t growing on trees.
Next came the rest of us, using the reloaded .223 rounds my dad made special for the suppressed ARs. That was crucial, since a lot of the commercially available subsonic rounds had a tendency to not cycle in semi-automatic use. We still suffered more than our usual number of stoppages, but overall I was impressed. We stopped periodically to gather up our brass, all of it, and stowed it in a bag used for that very purpose. Nobody would be making new brass for a while, and Dad could reload for the .223 rounds.
While Mike was working with Lori and Scott, Dad sidled up to me and gave me an assignment, if I was up to it. Seems he’d spotted movement in the woods behind our fence line. I hadn’t seen anything, but then Dad was good at this stuff.
“Grab your gear and fall back towards the house,” he directed. “Once you are over the hill, head out of a bearing ninety degrees left of the firing line and get down in Little Creek. You think you can make your way back up parallel and get eyes on who is watching in those woods?”
So. We had watchers in the woods. Sounded spooky. I nodded, just enough, and started packing up my gear bag.
“Luke? Don’t start shooting unless they make a hostile move. Then, you smoke ’em, boy. You got that?”
“Yeah, I got it.” And I did.
Seeing me preparing to leave, Amy safed her rifle and came over to where I was standing. She tried to look casual, but I’d gotten good at reading her body language.
“What’s up, hun?”
“Not much. Dad wanted me to head back early. He thought he spotted somebody in the woods, so he wants me on over watch.” I said all this softly, my lips barely moving, and Amy replied equally softly when she spoke. As mentioned before, we’d traveled together for long enough to rub off on each other. She knew about standing over watch.
“Be careful.”
“Always am,” I lied. Giving her a jaunty grin and a kiss on her forehead next to her still healing wound, I slung my bag and pretended to be headed back to the house without a care in the world. As I walked, I started thinking about what I would have to do next. Wishing I’d brought one of my hunting rifles or at least my scoped Ishapore, something that was a Scout Rifle before the term was coined, I decided to see how close I could get to the watchers to increase the likelihood of a first-shot hit. At least this rifle was quiet, anyway.
CHAPTER
NINE
“Anything?”
My Dad asked his question before my feet hit the first step up to the enclosed porch. He was sipping at a cup of something, probably hot tea, and had a shotgun across his lap. The tea was familiar, but the shotgun was new.
“Yeah. Looked like two, maybe three, but they were glassing with binoculars. Not rifle scopes. Looked pretty ragged. Didn’t approach the fence though. All I saw were shotguns.”
Dad digested this and stroked his beard. All the time he’d been in the Marines, my father had kept a clean-shaven appearance. Once out, he let his beard grow to mountain man proportions, then Mom put her foot down and he settled for a bushy goatee. Compromise, he called it.
“How close did you get?”
“Close enough to tell they haven’t bathed in a while. Not grungy, but sparing with the water. And awful skinny.”
Dad gave me a closer look with those comments. I shrugged. “They never knew I was there. Took my time, and eased up with the wind to my face. They looked more scared, or concerned at least, than threatening.”
Dad nodded to himself. “Sounds like those squatters who moved in at the Skillman place then. There’s been somebody living there these last few weeks, anyway. Mike and I both wanted to go scout them but were worried about leaving the home place uncovered.”
I got that. Usually proactive, Dad had been forced by the lack of trained manpower to stick close to home since the lights went out. Mr. Ike and Uncle Billy were coming along and would be good in a fight, but moving around in the dark to scout out the other side was not something most people could do without tipping somebody off.
Dad had been in infantry for most of his career as a Marine, but back in his youth, he’d qualified and been selected for training as a scout sniper. He’d endured ten weeks of training at the Scout Sniper Basic Course at Camp Pendleton and had graduated near the top of his training class.
Some graduates went off into the specialized scout sniper and recon teams, or went further and entered the realm of the MARSOC or Force Recon Marines. But not my father. Instead, he had gone back to his old unit after earning this latest “merit badge.” He never said why, but I suspected it was because Mom was pregnant with Paige at the time. I had no recall of this, of course, since I was still in diapers. But Dad did comment later that those recon and scout sniper guys stayed constantly deployed.
So, at one time, Dad had the skills to maybe carry out a covert scouting mission to check the new residents at the old Skillman place. No one had lived there in years, and I wondered if the roof was still up on the old, ramshackle house. The last time I’d been by while hiking, I noticed the roof was getting the swaybacked look that threatened rotten timbers.
“I’ll go with you,” I said.
“You are still recovering from your wound, and besides, you’re not that stealthy in the woods. I know, because I’ve tried to train you, remember?”
“I’m better now.”
Dad gave me that disbelieving look he used when I said my room was clean or that I’d already finished my chores when clearly I hadn’t. “Better how? Your gut, or your two left feet in the woods?”
I almost laughed at that. I might not have been ninja-like in the dark before, but I wasn’t herd-of-elephants bad, either. “Both. Remember, I survived by being small and quiet and sticking to the woods as much as possible. I’m almost two weeks past the surgery, and besides, that pain makes me go slower. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. You taught me that.”
Dad nodded. Not agreeing, but in a way that made me think he was taking it under advisement. “All right. But you know that saying is bullshit. Slow is slow. Period. Smooth is fast. Anyway, we also need to get with Buddy and Ronnie and see what Gaddis has gotten up to in the last week or so
.”
“So you’ve been keeping up with them?”
“Yeah. I check in every week or so with our nearest neighbors. I helped where I could and offered advice. We were too shorthanded here to do more than that. To tell the truth, since Pop…was killed, we’ve been staying close to home. We need to remedy that now. Sounds like we may need all the friends we can get.”
“Strength in numbers,” I said in agreement. Buddy Farrell was an old dairy farmer, finally driven out of business by the huge corporate farms and a spike in feed prices. Being thrifty, he managed to hold on to his acreage and switched to raising hay instead. I’d helped out over there a few times and remembered they had a couple dozen chickens and some hogs.
“Especially since Buddy’s family has been gathering at their place. Last time I checked, he’s got all his boys back but one. His oldest, Lee, was still missing.”
“Where was he?”
“Out in Odessa,” Dad intoned, like he was saying the man was trapped on the moon. “He was working at one of the refineries out that way.”
I did the math in my head. Had to be five hundred miles or more. I liked Lee and silently wished him well as we moved on to discuss the status of our other neighbors. As I learned, he and Billy had made contact with the Farrells, our nearest neighbors to the south, and Mr. Gaddis Williams, our neighbor to the north side. Unlike the Farrells, Mr. Williams was all alone on his property and had taken extreme measures to ensure his safety.
“He looted his own house?” I asked, surprised but not greatly by this revelation. Mr. Williams was a wily old fellow, a blacksmith and welder who ran a small repair shop in town as well as taking on some small farm equipment projects out at his place.
“Yep. After the second time his place got hit by a gang of looters, he decided he couldn’t keep burying that many bodies. He is an old man, after all.”
I laughed at that last little bit. Mr. Gaddis might be in his late sixties, but I wouldn’t want to arm wrestle him. Years of wrestling with steel plate and wielding a hammer at his forge gave him biceps and shoulders a body builder would envy.
“So he trashed the place a bit, scattering garbage out in the yard and breaking out some windows on the house. Then he took every scrap of food and every useful item he had left and moved into that root cellar he has next to the smithy.”
I nodded at the old man’s ingenuity. Most folks would take one look at the wrecked place and keep on going. For anybody who nosed around too much, he use the camouflaged door to the cellar as a spider trap and snipe anybody who came too close.
“But he’s there all by himself? I don’t have to ask if you invited him to stay with you, but why did he turn you down?”
“Pride. He’s like Pop that way. So connected to his place, he can’t leave it. Plus, he has hopes his kids might show up one day.”
Yes, I could see that. Mr. Williams was stubborn enough to try the patience of a mule, my grandfather always said. “You going to keep on him, Dad? He can’t continue that way long term, you know.”
“I know. That pigheaded old fart knows it too. He’ll move in here when he gets tired of eating his own cooking.”
We talked a bit more about other neighbors known to me. Some were still making it, and others were either missing in the night or dead. Dad was said he was hoping the ones who turned up missing had moved out under the cover of darkness.
We tentatively decided to go see about our near neighbors tomorrow, after the scouting trip at the old Skillman place. Then Dad veered slightly off topic. “We picked teams while you were gone,” he said.
I shrugged before answering. “For what? Volleyball? Chinese checkers?”
“Don’t be such a smartass,” my father replied without heat. “Roving patrols inside the fence and a reaction force. You got picked. And so did Amy. There’s an assignment sheet posted in the house and at the guard post.”
I sighed. Amy was a capable rifleman, or riflewoman. Still, the thought made me cringe. She was dedicated to pulling her weight around the ranch, and doing so without complaint. “Please don’t let her start until that head wound heals. She’s in more pain than she lets on about. And I really don’t want her in danger. Not again. Not ever, if we could swing it.”
Dad shook his head. “You know how I felt about women in combat. Bad for morale, overall. When they get hit, it can affect how the others in the unit react. Sexist to say, but it is the truth. I don’t want to use them, but Amy and Lori are just about ready and they insisted. But you are right. She can’t start until later.”
“Shoot. Let me talk to Amy. She’s only fourteen, as Mom is always reminding me. She doesn’t need to go out on patrol. Let me do double shifts instead.”
Dad held up his hands in mock surrender before replying. “Yes, and she will be fifteen next week. And I’m not the one giving you crap over that either. She’s way more mature than any other young lady I’ve ever met at that age. And I’m so fucking tired of the world making our kids turn into adults over night.”
I nodded, and decided to ask for the favor I’d been hesitant to request. “Can you please talk to Mom? About Amy? I know she just wants the best for me, but giving Amy the cold shoulder is not helping. Can’t she understand? Amy is who I want to spend the rest of my life with, for as long as I have it.”
The look on my father’s face was hard to place: a mixture of pain, and anger, and things I couldn’t possibly understand. Except maybe, now I could. “Your mother is still struggling with this new normal, Lucas. Sure, she was all for moving here and raising you kids in the country, and Lord knows she loved Pops, but…she’s just not adapting well to the changed circumstances. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but you’ve seen enough to realize the truth. She tries to put the shootings and all the killing, out of her mind, and she believes that this is only a transitional period. That things will stabilize and get better before long.”
I shook my head. Mom hadn’t been directly ugly to Amy, but the disapproval was there. Subtle, but Amy was a smart woman. And now this admission from my father just rocked me to my core. “Is she being intentionally dense? Or is it delayed shock? Shit is not getting better any time soon. Pull the truck around front. I’ll show her the pile of bodies we saw, driving around Jefferson. Or we can take a road trip up to Daingerfield. There’s a crew of fucking cannibal bandits preying on travelers set up right on the road!”
As I spoke, I felt my irrational anger rise like a wave of hot blood. After everything I’d seen and done, the idea that someone as intelligent as my mother was not getting the idea just pulled my trigger.
“Son,” my dad said, keeping his voice carefully calm, “you’re not going to be able to get anything from your mother speaking that way. And I won’t tolerate that kind of language or tone in my house.”
I knew he was right. Applying the brakes, I reined in my emotion. Shutting it off, like turning the handle on a spigot, and then I was myself again. I gulped in a deep, shuddering breath. And my emotions were back in the bottle.
“That’s better. Hell, it is amazing how you can do that. You weren’t faking, either, were you?” my dad announced, his interest apparently piqued by my control.
“No, sir. And I’m sorry. I can do better. I’ve learned how to not let myself feel things and how to basically shut down my emotions if I need to. For a while, anyway. I shouldn’t have lost my temper, Dad. But my God, how can she really think that?”
My father didn’t answer. Instead, he rose from his chair and walked out into the yard. I followed and stopped with him under an old oak tree not far from the front porch.
“I guess it is her way of coping. By being the optimist all the time. I’m gloomy enough for the two of us most times. Except, sometimes I’m afraid I’m not paranoid enough. There really are people out to get me, us now, and one mistake can be fatal.”
Again, Dad was being more open with me than he ever felt comfortable doing in the past. Sharing things he probably wouldn’t even say to Billy, his
own brother. I wondered if he talked to Grandpa this way. Or maybe Mike.
“I’m here to help now, Dad. And I can do this thing tonight. We can scout the squatters together and take care of whatever needs doing. Hell, I’ve killed so many people already, what’s a few more?” I said the last bit like a grim joke, but my father didn’t laugh.
“You really mean that?” Dad asked, cutting his eye in my direction to gauge my reaction.
“If they are the wrong sort to live in our neighborhood, then yes. I’ll not go walking around here worried there’s a target on my back. But we will be sure first. I almost made a mistake with some travelers at the Keller place, shooting before I knew the score. And it would have been a tragic mistake. But, if they present a danger, I’ll kill every one of them myself.”
I met Dad’s gaze with my own hard eyes and he gave an almost imperceptible nod. We both knew the score. Dad might be in the dark on the bigger-picture aspects of the collapse, but he knew the ground-level results. I wondered just how many times he’d swept the woods alone, desperate to protect our family.
“All right. Go grab something to eat and hit the rack. We’ll gear up at 0200 and slip out the front gate. Loop around and take a peek in on our new neighbors.”
I nodded and turned to head into the house.
“Lucas, from where I’m standing, you’ve got a great future with Amy. She’s smart and loyal and has a sense of humor. Don’t let her get away. I’ll have a talk with your mom. I also suggest if you are serious, you need to put a ring on that girl’s finger.”
“Yes, sir.”
Well, that was one in my corner, I reasoned. My dad didn’t play games or try to mess with your head. What you saw with him was the surface, but it went all the way down. If that makes any sense. He wouldn’t have given Amy that ringing endorsement without meaning it.
Now I just needed to convince my mother that Amy would make a wonderful daughter-in-law someday and currently was a valuable contributor in her own right. Jeez, why did the apocalypse have to be so hard?
Walking in the Rain (Book 4): Dark Sky Thunder Page 6
