“I helped some folks along the way, but it wasn’t enough.” I shrugged. “It never is, I guess. Take those vitamins and give them to your kids. I imagine some are starting to show signs of scurvy from lack of vitamin C. I want to help out all I can, Mr. Sandifer. It won’t make up for all those poor dying people I had to step over to get home, but it’s a start.”
“You’re a good man, Lucas. I know what you mean. We’ve seen the remains left from those monsters, too. We’ve been hungry, for sure. Never that hungry. And please, call me Paul.”
Sensing it was time for me to go, I stood up slowly and shook the man’s hand again. “Thank you, Paul. But never forget something: you might think I’m a good man, but under it all, I’m just another kind of monster. Anything or anyone who threatens my family, I will make them suffer in ways that would make an angel cry. I’ve done it before, and I’m sure I’ll have to do it again. Be sure your men understand this fact.”
I saw Paul visibly gulp at my words. “Christ almighty kid. How old are you?”
“Does it matter? A man once told me I had a gift for violence. Never make me show it to you, Paul. Be a good neighbor, and you will think back on my visit in days down at the road and thank God for bringing me to your doorstep.”
And with that, I turned around and headed for the trees.
“How did you know you could trust us, Lucas? I mean, we could have been anybody.”
“You scouted us, Paul. And we scouted you. Six men, eight women, and seven kids. One of the ladies looked beat around, but that could have happened on the road. You’re short on .270-caliber for the hunting rifles but have about a hundred rounds of buckshot left for the shotguns. You’ve got plenty of extra ammo in .22 LR, but only the one rifle and a pistol chambered in that caliber.”
I turned back to Paul and caught the shocked look on his face. “I know your folks are tired and short on energy, but your sentries have to stay awake at night. Think about maybe doubling them up,” I said, not unkindly. “Like I said, we don’t mean any harm to your people. If we had, ya’ll would have been dead already.”
With that impeccable logic, I stepped behind the trunk of a particularly wide pin oak tree and disappeared into the forest. My steps weren’t silent, but they were a darn sight more quiet than when I left the ranch last time. Desperation is a wonderful incentive for progress.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Once the Greenville crew was confirmed as potentially friendly, Dad and Mike removed the lockdown provisions at the ranch and the clan filtered outside for more work, or as Mom called it, “enjoying more time outside.”
Because of our late start, Dad also pushed back the planned visits with our other neighbors until the next day. That pleased my mother, since she wanted to go with us to socialize with the ladies at the other homesteads. That I was going was a shock to me, but Dad explained that I would be the best source of outside news for the community. I worried about word getting around of my whereabouts, but Dad was right. I knew all these people, more or less, and we would have to rely on their discretion.
Which meant I was picking cucumbers like a fool for the rest of the day. That was okay, since I loved pickles, and Mom had a killer recipe she got from her mother when she was a girl.
That thought turned my musings to my grandparents on my mother’s side, and as I knelt in the dirt under a searing, late summer sun, I wondered how they were doing in this mess. Grandpa and Grandma Anderman had a little place over in southern Louisiana close to the Sabine River, a retirement home that backed up to a small creek. So, they had water, if they knew to boil or treat it. Other than that, I had no clue as to their status.
My mother hadn’t mentioned them, and I knew she would only bring them up when she wanted to discuss the issue. Mom wasn’t really on good terms with her parents, or the rest of her family for that matter, and I knew better than to ask at the moment. Let those sleeping dogs lie for the time being.
“How are you doing under the new slave labor rules?” Amy asked teasingly, breaking me out of my musings. She was carrying a bucket of water that took both hands to carry. A large enamel cup was attached to the wire of the handle by a frayed piece of string.
“What, are they different than the old rules? We always worked our tails off in the garden, before the lights went out. That’s why Paige and I did every extracurricular activity our school had to offer. The parents would let us do anything we wanted to better ourselves, so that’s why I took track and competed in the academic decathlon. To avoid working in the Garden of Doom.”
“Oh, don’t pretend,” my sister chimed in from the next row over, and when she leaned over, I saw her face was coated in a layer of mixed sweat and dirt. “You know you really love this rural lifestyle, Lucas. Whereas for me, I am poor Cinderella, toiling away until my prince comes along to take me away from all this.”
I had to laugh at the way my sister managed her “stiff upper lip” delivery and a small sigh at the end. Still, I laughed harder than the joking deserved. Relief that my little sister might be emerging from her funk made me happier than I expected. Maybe we could be friends again, like we used to be. I was still determined to make the effort, anyway.
“Well, if you want,” Amy offered, “I’d be glad to take your place for a while. I don’t feel right, being limited to light duty while you guys suffer in this heat. And you, Luke, what are you doing out here, anyway? Didn’t Beth tell you to take it easy?”
I laughed again, then rose to my feet and leaned in for a kiss from my girl. Amy, suddenly bashful with my sister and all our friends watching, shifted back a step.
“Not in front of them,” she whispered, and everybody within a hundred feet heard her.
“Jeez, girl, it’s not like we haven’t seen you make out with your boy before,” Lori said with a snicker. She was two rows over, apparently wrestling with an uncooperative tomato vine as she spoke.
The garden had been added to after the lights went out, and Mom already maintained a staggered planting schedule to make sure fresh veggies were coming in ripe throughout most of the summer. That wasn’t something you could do up north, I knew, but our nearly semi-tropical climate here in this part of Texas gave us an extended growing season.
As a result, picking the garden’s bounty was an ongoing project, and what didn’t get eaten was promptly dried, pickled, or otherwise preserved for the winter. Because like they used to say in that HBO series I supposedly wasn’t old enough to watch, “Winter is coming.” Whatever. I preferred the books, anyway, even if the world ended before we found out what the hell was going to happen next. Plus, it is hard to think of winter when the day threatened to roast us in the late August blaze.
“I know, but Luke, your little sister is watching us. That’s just…creepy. No offense, Paige,” Amy said, suddenly sounding shy at the attention.
“Believe me, none taken. It is creepy, though. You can do so much better than my dorky brother, anyway,” she retorted.
“All right,” I said with a fake sigh. “Words hurt, guys. And I got permission from Ms. Beth to be out here, for a little while, at least. All the bending and stooping are supposed to be part of my physical therapy.”
My abdominal muscles were getting a workout, if that was the idea. Painfully, but Beth did tell me the incision was now fully healed and I could start flexing more to rebuild what was lost. Not just from the gunshot, but also the muscle tone that deteriorated due to my extended near starvation. No longer did I resemble a scarecrow, but I was still struggling to gain the weight back.
As we all took a break to sip at the cool water provided by Amy, the previous banter seemed forgotten. We were all too beaten down by the heat. The day was hot and muggy as afternoon carried on with no lessening of the temperature. August was like that in Texas. We would continue to experience days in the nineties all the way through September and on into nearly Halloween, and I was thinking that in normal times, I would have already started the dreaded football two-a-
days.
I was still dragging a bit from the lack of sleep, and a nap sounded wonderful after the tense meeting with the group from Greenville. I think everybody must have been listening in on the transmission, since I’d heard several people already paraphrase my parting line to Paul Sandifer.
“Ya’ll would be dead already,” was what my friends would say, the girls struggling to get their voices low enough to hit the proper menacing tone. Then they would giggle. Well, Alex, Paige, and Sierra did. Not Lori, nor Amy. They knew it wasn’t a threat, but a promise. But they still gave me shit about it. Even as the butt of the joking, I was glad to see the smiles all around.
“So what kind of a deal is your dad going to do with the new people?” Alex asked, his voice sputtering a little bit as he poured a trickle of water over his head to cool off a bit. His kinky dark hair was cut short, in an efficient style, but did little to protect his head from the sun. His sister, Sierra, by comparison, wore a wide-brimmed straw hat that was identical to what Amy and Paige wore. Lori got by with a green bandana she wore tied around her hair in what I thought I’d heard referred to as peasant style. I thought that was also a type of blouse, but what did I know?
“Probably going to work out a security deal like we talked about, and get some of them over here helping with the canning and stuff,” I said, stifling a yawn. “They are not starving yet, but pretty close. This will help everybody, I think. We can pay them in fresh food, I’m thinking. We don’t have enough surplus to feed a town like Center, not for long, but we can help out around this area.”
“But do you trust them?” Amy asked, her face serious.
“Yeah, as much as I can, anyway. I think Mr. Sandifer, I mean Paul, is solid, but the other guys? Don’t know yet. Maybe we can bring them along slowly and build some trust. That’s the main reason for my threat. The carrot and the stick, really.”
“And using a real carrot,” Lori blurted out, laughing as she said it.
“Yep. And beets, and cucumbers. And some rabbit and squirrel, if I can get enough time to get my traps out.”
“Please, sweetie, no more rabbit,” Amy said softly. She didn’t want to complain but believe me, I knew what she meant. We survived on what I could catch and the greens we gathered, but the diet left us too short on necessary fats. Which was why we were starving.
“Not for us, at least not right now. For the new folks. And maybe some chickens, too. Ms. Angelina said she has been scaling up the size of the chicken operation. She’s got nearly half the flock sitting on eggs again,” I said, giving my girl a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder before I turned back to my half full basket and the long row of cucumbers left to sort.
The “Miss” thing would probably have upset folks not raised—or at least not indoctrinated—into Southern ways. I picked up on it as soon as we moved to Texas permanently and assimilated pretty quickly. That was just how you referred to close family friends. Ms. Beth, or Miss Angelina. Or Mr. Mike. Or at least, I should properly refer to Mike and Ike that way, but neither one seemed to like the practice, so I just limited myself to the ladies. Alex, I always noticed, did the same, but usually not Paige or Sierra. Maybe it was a girl thing, but they still simply said sir and ma’am and used the proper last names.
All thoughts of Southern manners went flying out the window when I heard the unmistakable chatter of automatic rifle fire flare up in the distance. It was close, but not right on top of us. That was all I could tell, as I hit the ground and took Amy with me. My rifle barrel, slung across my back for ease of stooping, came around and smacked me in the side of the face. I barely noticed the impact as more than a nuisance as I saw the others clustered in the garden drop down as well.
Listening more carefully, I cupped my hands to my ears and tried to pinpoint the source of the shooting. Over the chatter of rapid fire, I could make out another, slower, booming.
Just then, the side door of the house burst open and I saw my father come boiling out of the doorway with Uncle Billy in tow. They were still buckling up their magazine carriers as they made a beeline for the gardens. And us.
“It’s got to be Gaddis,” my dad announced, and I could tell he was probably correct. One old man, no matter how stubborn, couldn’t hold off that kind of firepower for long. We would need to act, and quickly.
“Tell me what to do,” I said to my father, and I felt Amy stiffen next to me. Despite our best efforts, it seems the troubles of the world had followed us to the ranch.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
The sound of the shot went unnoticed over the tumult of the six men busy unloading their rifles in the general direction of Mr. Williams’s hay barn. The results, however, certainly drew attention away from the splintered wooden structure as the attacker furthest from our position suddenly stopped firing and fell over on his side. Unmoving. I watched it from my scope and reported, “Hit.”
That was the signal, and the armored Humvee broke from the cover of the trees at the edge of the drive and came barreling up on the five remaining attackers. Then Uncle Billy’s rifle spoke again, and then there were four left.
Uncle Billy wasn’t a sniper. He was a good shot with his tricked-out Springfield M1A, but my dad had him beat, hands down, in the long-distance shooting department. Not an issue this day, as we’d set up a little under three hundred yards from these attackers. Chipshot. Heck, I could have probably made the shots with my suppressed M4. Unfortunately, with our shortage of trained manpower, we needed our two trained Marines in the Humvee with their grenade-launcher-equipped rifles if necessary. As it turned out, they weren’t needed.
Standing in the cupola of the Humvee, Scott laid down short, controlled bursts from the M240B, chewing up three of the raiders as they tried to bring their weapons to bear. Then another shot from Uncle Billy and the last attacker was down. Using the spotting scope, I checked the scene. Four of the six were visible, and very dead. For the other two, one was entirely obscured by the bulk of their trucks, but the other lay with a bloody arm and part of his torso exposed.
“Firing,” I announced, and placed two insurance rounds into the side of the partially visible form. Yep, I hit right at my point of aim. Good to know, at least.
“Hold up for five,” my father called over the radio. Possibly an unnecessary warning, as we’d discussed the plan briefly before rolling, but that was why my father was a senior noncommissioned officer in the United States Marines. In the heat of battle, my dad preached; folks forgot shit, and he would make those warnings regularly to make sure all of his men came home alive.
Before the five minutes were up, we all heard the call coming from the top of the bullet-riddled hay barn, and I had to suppress a chuckle.
“Lordy, hallelujah, the Marines have landed! We are all saved,” came the booming cry.
“Screw you, old man. We can just turn around and go home!” was my father’s witty rejoinder.
“Nah, you came all this way, sonny, you might as well stick around and help clean up the mess you made.”
That was Gaddis Williams for you. He was an ornery old coot, as my Grandpa liked to say. I always thought it took one to know one, but I kept my opinion to myself. Grandpa was known to throw a boot your way if he thought you were sassing him. Pretty good aim, too.
After we made sure all of the dead men were really, thoroughly dead, I started gathering up the dropped weapons and pocket litter from the half dozen dead men. Don’t judge. This was not me being strictly in salvage mode. I was wearing rubber kitchen gloves, and Dad wanted to know if we could figure out anything about this group, since they all were impolite enough to get killed and leave us without any prisoners to interrogate. All six men were Hispanic, at least by their features, and looked sun hardened and far too skinny.
I didn’t find any hand-drawn map to their secret camp, but I did discover all six men were armed with identical M-16 rifles. Old and service worn, but a quick check showed the barrels were dirty but free of pitting. The side plates on the rif
les were scratched and difficult to read in the late afternoon sun, but I thought I could make out one phrase: Ejército Mexicano.
“What are you doing?”
Scott was ambling over in my direction while my father and Mike were engaged in an animated discussion with Mr. Williams involving property rights, transportation issues, and the proper use of dead bodies in a compost pile. Or at least, those are the parts I overheard. Scott and Uncle Billy were providing over watch while the wrangle continued.
“Just trying to figure out where these guys are from. They look Hispanic to you? Or am I just profiling? I can’t always tell.”
“Are you kidding?” Scott asked, his voice a little high and uncertain.
“What’s wrong, man?” I asked, rising from a crouch to stand next to the older teen.
“I just smoked these guys and nobody is saying anything about it. I mean, I’ve had to shoot people before, but man, this is just like another day at the office for you guys.”
“That’s because we’ve let ourselves get hardened to it,” came my father’s voice over my shoulder. “Mike and I saw plenty of scenes like this in places I can’t even pronounce, and you just get used to it. Not exactly getting comfortable with the killing, Scott, but you can’t let the things you see get to you.”
“You, too, Luke?” Scott asked. HE didn’t sound conflicted or all torn up about gunning these assholes down, just kind of confused by our reaction, and maybe his own.
I shrugged. “Sorry, buddy. I see these guys and all I can think is, ‘oh, well, this is just another Tuesday.’ If these were innocent people, or God forbid any of our folks, we wouldn’t be so casual about it, but yeah. They tried to kill our neighbor and lost.”
“That’s about the size of it,” my father continued. “And Gaddis is finally coming around to see reason. You checked their trucks yet? And by the way, it is Wednesday, Lucas my boy.”
“No sir. Just finished up processing the bodies. Looks like Mexican Army gear. At least, that’s what I get from the markers on the rifles.” I replied, and held out the rifle in my hands to Dad.
Walking in the Rain (Book 4): Dark Sky Thunder Page 8
