The Grim Reaper Comes Calling

by Darrell Maloney

  As well as whatever food and provisions were left in the home when the parents decided they could take it no longer.

  Guns were as good as cash on barter days.

  Typically every Saturday morning at every city park.

  They could be traded for food, clothing, and medication. Even illicit drugs when they could be found.

  Kristy already had three handguns and an AR-15 rifle at home she’d found in death houses. And plenty of ammunition to boot.

  That was enough for her and her sister.

  Any additional weapons and ammo could be traded for fresh meat, or produce, or rice, corn or… pretty much anything.

  She placed the weapon in her backpack and headed for the kitchen.

  Chapter 45

  As Kristy rifled through the sad houses that families once called homes, she tried not to get her hopes up.

  Most of the houses that didn’t serve as tombs had been ransacked a dozen or more times.

  Few of them had anything of value left in them.

  Unless one knew where to look.

  And Kristy was getting quite good at finding food and other things of value.

  Those houses which did serve as the final resting place for their residents tended to have more food and valuables which could be traded for food.

  But sometimes it was obvious to her that the family had given up because they ran out of food and were too frightened to get out to look for more.

  It was far better, in her mind, to expect to find nothing. Far better than to take it for granted she’d hit the jackpot and then be crushed when she didn’t.

  It was much better, and more fun too, to expect nothing. Then everything she found was gravy; an unexpected surprise.

  The tell, the place which foretold whether a particular house would be a gold mine or a bust, was always the kitchen.

  If the family had given up because they ran out of food there would be absolutely nothing edible in the cupboards, and likely the whole house as well.

  If they committed suicide for any other reason; sickness, perhaps, or depression, there might well be something left behind she and Angela could eat.

  If that wasn’t the case, there was still a good chance they’d find something of value they could trade for food.

  Another dead giveaway that she was the first scavenger to enter the house: the kitchen was immaculate.

  The mother was obviously a fastidious housekeeper.

  The counters were not only free of clutter; they were free of dust as well.

  Looters, or scavengers as most of them preferred to be called, tended to go through houses like miniature tornados.

  Anything in the cupboards was unceremoniously raked out onto the counter with a forearm, then examined one piece at a time.

  Most of the canned goods were now past their expiration dates, but that wasn’t the only thing they looked at.

  It was common knowledge that most canned goods that didn’t hold highly acidic foods were safe to eat even a year or more after their expiration dates.

  As long as they weren’t dented or have a high water content which caused them to freeze over the winter and swell from the expanding water inside.

  Some acidic foods, like canned tomatoes and pineapples, were discarded outright. Few people trusted them not to be tainted, and as bad as being hungry was, food poisoning was much worse.

  Kristy could instantly tell when she walked into a house whether scavengers had already been there, because those kitchens would be a terrible mess.

  The counters would be piled high with anything and everything in the cupboards which might be edible; then determined not to be and left behind.

  The kitchen floor would be cluttered as well.

  Neither was the case at this particular house.

  She was the first person here.

  That would probably bode well for her.

  She held her breath and opened the first cupboard.

  A mouse scurried out, ran down her arm, and dropped to the floor.

  Kristy screamed.

  As tough as she was, she was terrified of a little gray mouse.

  She felt foolish, but she shouldn’t have.

  Many rough and tumble fully-grown men are afraid of mice and will actually run or climb a chair to get away from them.

  She quickly forgot about the tiny rodent when she saw the cupboard was fairly well stocked.

  She started pulling things down and placing them on the counter where she could examine them more closely.

  Boxed macaroni and cheese went right into her backpack. Since they were dry, the noodles wouldn’t go bad for years.

  They’d eventually develop an odd taste, not unlike cardboard. But as long as they didn’t get wet they were safe to eat.

  Kristy already knew that macaroni and cheese can be made without butter or milk, contrary to the instructions on the box.

  Both are perishable, and had pretty much disappeared from the face of the earth a couple of weeks after the blackout.

  Not to worry.

  A prepper neighbor dropped by to give them some tips before he evacuated to go to his bug-out location outside of town.

  “Forget the milk,” he said. “Forget the butter too. The box says you need a quarter cup of each. Substitute three eighths of a cup of vegetable oil, which has a very long shelf life and doesn’t have to be refrigerated.

  “It’ll look exactly the same and will taste very close. You’ll notice it’s just a tad bit more oily, but you get used to that pretty quickly”

  He gave them other tips as well. Like for example, it didn’t hurt tuna fish to be frozen all winter, and then thaw out in the spring… provided the tuna was a name brand.

  Name brand tuna has less water in the can and tends to swell much less when the can freezes.

  Store brands or discount brands, on the other hand, tend to contain considerably more water.

  And water, we all know, expands when it freezes. More water makes it more likely the can will expand, exposing the metal beneath the protective plastic layer and tainting the tuna.

  Not a good thing.

  Spam or similar canned meats, on the other hand, have a very long shelf life and an extremely small amount of water. A Spam-type meat product can be frozen every winter for four or five consecutive years and still is perfectly fine to eat once it thaws.

  That was good, because directly behind the four boxes of macaroni and cheese Kristy pulled from the cupboard, she pulled out three cans of Spam and two cans of Armour canned meat.

  This was an above average day, despite the hideous smell.

  Chapter 46

  It made no sense to Kristy why this family committed suicide.

  They were close to being out of food, but weren’t quite there yet. From what she could tell there was enough to sustain them for several more days.

  She supposed they’d seen the writing on the wall.

  They knew the end was near, apparently. They knew they were almost of provisions and thought it better to go at a time of their choosing instead of running out completely and slowly starving to death.

  It was all so senseless, so needless.

  And so sad.

  Kristy knew there was food out there. It was getting harder and harder to find, but it was there.

  They’d grown a garden that spring, using seeds she’d found in someone’s garage while searching for food. It had rained a lot that spring, way more than usual. They’d gathered up every vessel they could find which would hold water, and were able to capture over a hundred gallons.

  The vessels were emptied into the bathtub and added to with each rainfall and became their primary source of drinking water as well as irrigation for their garden.

  When they started out they didn’t know beans about growing beans, or anything else for that matter.

  But they carefully read the instructions on the seed packets and tended their garden with care. And a good portion of their food supply that spring and summer were
things they grew themselves.

  It was fall now, and winter would soon make their lives miserable once again. But they’d set fresh seeds aside that they took from the vegetables they grew. They had plenty of seeds for the next year’s crop, with enough extras to do a second planting should bad weather destroy the first.

  “You could have done the same thing too, you bastards!” she said aloud.

  She’d tried her luck at snaring squirrels in their back yard. It was an older neighborhood, covered with huge oak and pecan trees. Squirrels were plentiful and a valuable food source. So were the pecans, for that matter.

  Kristy learned that one of the two secrets to snaring squirrels was to simply watch the little boogers. Squirrels are creatures of habit, like man, and tend to do the same things and go the same places day after day.

  She learned that by spending an hour under a particular tree, just watching, she’d see which branches the squirrels ran back and forth on, and which ones they avoided.

  Once she knew where to set the snares she climbed the tree and placed them in places she knew they’d traverse.

  Of course, when she climbed the tree she’d spook them and they’d scatter.

  But they’d be back after an hour or two, running back and forth along those same tree branches. And the snares would be there waiting for them.

  The second secret to the process was setting the snares properly.

  Snaring the bushy-tailed rodent is a simple concept.

  The snare itself is merely a piece of wire, fashioned into a noose. It’s set on the branch in such a way that when the squirrel comes along he’ll run through the noose, which will then tighten quickly around his neck.

  Once he feels the noose tighten he panics, but there’s little he can do. He can’t go back, because… well, because squirrels cannot move backwards (not even on flat ground).

  Since he can’t move backwards he tries to run away from whatever has entangled him.

  A squirrel isn’t very smart, you see, and he doesn’t realize that by running he’s going to tighten the wire noose around his neck and speed his own death even more.

  Kristy’s early efforts often failed not because she set her snares in the right place, but at the wrong angle. The squirrels ran past them instead of through them.

  Or she didn’t secure the snare well enough to the tree and the squirrel ran off with it. When that happened, the squirrel would die eventually. The snare was typically tight enough around his head to keep from falling off, and would slowly strangle him.

  Or, the wire he dragged behind him would catch on something and tighten the noose or break his neck and kill him quicker.

  If Kristy was around to see him ensnared she might be able to see him scamper away, and actually see where he got hung up.

  If she were luckier than the squirrel was that day the wire might be tight enough around his neck to deprive him of oxygen and he might drop out of the tree and at her feet.

  More often than not, though, he’d run through the higher branches until the wire he was dragging behind him got hung up on one of the branches and stopped him cold.

  Then he’d hang from the branch like a cattle rustler in the old west, swaying gently in the breeze, hidden high in the tree and providing a feast for ants and birds.

  Winter was coming, and once it passed Kristy’s goal was to become even better at snaring squirrels. She planned to bring Angela along each time so she could start learning the art.

  Once that was mastered, they’d start fashioning traps and start setting them out in the fields behind their house.

  The way Kristy saw it each new method of gathering food they mastered and added to their toolbox was another tool they’d use to survive. With each new tool it would become easier.

  And soon they’d not only be surviving, they’d be thriving.

  She thought of this family, gone forever and turning into dust and bones and wondered why they couldn’t have done exactly the same thing.

  She finally decided they were too frightened or timid to leave their house.

  So timid and frightened they chose to die instead.

  So stupid, and such a waste…

  Chapter 47

  Kristy continued through the house, looking in all the usual places. Not for love, as the old song says, but for hidden food.

  She’d become something of an expert in the year and a half the world was cast in darkness.

  In the beginning she did what most of the others did and only searched in the kitchen. If there was nothing in the kitchen to eat, she went elsewhere.

  Then she learned a little bit about human nature.

  And she learned that people tended to stash edibles in the oddest of places.

  Like a desk drawer, when one was hard at work on a research paper for a college class and had a sudden and overpowering urge for beef jerky.

  Or a dresser drawer in the master bedroom, where a wife on a diet stashed several candy bars mixed in with her bras and underwear. Apparently she thought he wouldn’t find them there.

  But the husband did the same thing, stashing several bags of potato chips on a high shelf in the garage.

  Kids, especially, were experts at hiding food.

  Just the week before she was looking through a little boy’s bedroom and found several things in his toy box: an unopened bag of jumbo marshmallows, a mostly-full box of Graham crackers and several Hershey bars.

  She supposed he was a big fan of s’mores and liked to eat them late at night after everyone went to bed.

  She knew the little boy who occupied this room decorated in Spiderman likely couldn’t build a campfire here while his parents were sleeping.

  But Kristy loved s’mores herself.

  And she reckoned that an unmelted s’more was much better than no s’more at all.

  Kristy had a habit of hitting the kitchen first in a death house. That part was just common sense.

  But where most other people would search the kitchen and then beat feet to rid themselves of the horrible stench, she didn’t stop there.

  She went to every room in the house and searched every nook and cranny.

  She was in the corner house on Maple a full two hours and it paid off quite well for her.

  After she finished gathering everything, she had enough food to easily fill up a grocery store shopping cart.

  She also had two boxes of bullets to match the handgun, An AK-47 hidden in a closet, gold and silver jewelry and coins, and two bottles of prescription pills which were highly sought after by drug users.

  So sought after that they’d trade anything they owned for them.

  It was a great haul.

  She filled up her backpack, but was smart enough not to put all the valuables inside.

  That was so she didn’t lose everything if she were held up at gunpoint, her backpack taken. That had happened three times in the past and she learned her lesson.

  Once the pack was full, she started lugging the excess food and supplies to… the little girl’s bedroom, of all places.

  That might sound illogical, but was actually another lesson she’d learned in recent months.

  A little girl’s bedroom was a great place to hide excess food until she could come back for it.

  It was a place nobody ever looked.

  The girl’s bed was unmade.

  And that was good, because she’d have torn everything off of it anyway.

  She put the comforter and sheets and three pillows aside.

  Then she flipped the mattress away.

  It was the box spring where she’d focus her attention.

  She left the box spring in its place, but only after flipping it over.

  A standard box spring has a wooden frame but is largely empty on the inside. It has plenty of space where things can be hidden, as long as one is careful to distribute the weight evenly so it doesn’t sag.

  Upside down, the felt liner cut away, it’s a great place to discretely store… well, anything, actu
ally.

  Kristy pulled out her pocketknife and cut away the thin felt lining, then stashed it inside the box spring.

  To have just cast it aside on the bedroom floor would have been providing a clue for the next scavenger to come along.

  Over the course of the next twenty minutes she transferred all the food and other things she couldn’t fit in her backpack into the box spring.

  Then she placed the mattress back on top of it and made the bed.

  The comforter covered both the mattress and the box spring and anyone coming into the room would be unable to tell the box spring was upside down and contained enough food to sustain two people for at least two weeks.

  She’d come back at her leisure every couple of days until she spirited it all away, one backpack at a time.

  Her primary job finished, Kristy set about trying to satisfy her own curiosity.

  In the corner of this little girl’s room was a tiny desk.

  It was constructed of wood, with gingerbread trim and painted a bright pink.

  It wasn’t the kind of desk one would find in a retail store. Rather, it was the kind of desk a loving daddy would make for his little princess.

  And that deepened the mystery of how this family died.

  She tried to envision the man downstairs cutting and shaping and fashioning this desk for his little girl as she watched in rapt anticipation of the finished product with rounded and excited eyes.

  Perhaps he even let her help him, cutting this and hammering that, teaching her the basics of carpentry as they went.

  Was it possible he was a loving and doting father… before he became a murderer and took the same little girl’s life?

  The two things… being a loving father and being a murderer… seemed mutual exclusive. It just didn’t seem possible one man could be both.

  When she went through the tiny desk looking for candy bars or potato chips or anything else which would provide calories for her sister and herself, Kristy had seen a stack of what appeared to be school papers.

  They were written on lined paper of the type grade schools use for children who are novices at printing.