“And if you keep collecting rainwater every time it rains all year around, it’ll help the city tremendously.”
A woman in the crowd was skeptical.
“Will eight trash cans full of water really make a difference?”
“Just your eight trash cans? No. But we’re going to do the same thing on every street until we can’t find any more gutter or trash cans. And then we’ll figure out another plan.
“And when every street is doing their part to reduce their water needs, then it’ll start making a difference. And if we do have a drought this summer, this just might make the difference between saving our crops or starving to death.”
The Chief spent that afternoon hammering rain gutter sections onto four of the houses on the street. Assisted by the man who appeared to be the block leader, and two other men, they made quick work of the project.
In the end, each of the four houses had shiny new gutters, sparkling in the sunlight, and two trash cans, one on each front corner of the house, standing by to catch water from the first rain.
“Okay, Chief. That’s done. What else can we do?”
“The rain in the spring comes in torrents. You already know that, I’m sure. It may rain so heavily that the trash cans become full, and the water starts overflowing.
“If that happens, it would be helpful if you could have your people use buckets and water pitchers to move some of the water to other storage vessels. The bathtubs in your abandoned houses, for example. That way, as the water in the trash cans gets used for crops, the excess water from the tubs could be transferred back to the trash cans for later use.
“Also, the water board told me they saw a lot of people overwatering their crops last season. They wanted me to spread the word that any time we have a significant rainfall, we can take a few days off from watering the crops. They said don’t start watering them again until the leaves start to droop.”
“Okay. You have my word. We’ll do our share. And we’ll try to spread the word to our friends on the other streets.”
The man reached out his hand to Chief Martinez and said, “Thank you, Chief. My name is John Luna. You probably don’t remember me, do you?”
Martinez was slightly taken aback.
“Well, I thought you looked familiar, but I’m sorry. I don’t remember you. Should I?”
“Years ago, when you were a beat cop, you arrested me for dealing drugs on a street corner not far from here. For years I hated you and swore my revenge on you and on the system that sent me away. I joined a gang, and I’m still a member to this day.”
“Should I worry?”
“No. Most of my gang brothers are dead now. Some killed by wars with rivals. Some killed by the plague or suicide. There are only a few of us left. And we’ve mellowed. We spend our time helping our homies now. Trying to keep what’s left of our families alive.”
“That’s how I spend my days too, John. In that way, we are the same. Perhaps it’s best we put the past in the past and leave it there. What happened then was part of a whole world that doesn’t exist anymore. We’re better off focusing on the here and now. That’s tough enough without renewing old grudges from long ago.
The man nodded his head in agreement.
But then the chief went one step further.
“I can only imagine the hatred you felt for me for putting you in jail. I hope your heart is strong enough to understand it was nothing personal. Perhaps one day we can consider ourselves friends. For now I’d settle for knowing that we are both soldiers on the same side of the war. And that we’re fighting for the same thing. So those who are left can have an easier and safer time of it.”
Luna held his hand out again, and Martinez took it.
“Agreed.”
-38-
The very next day Chief Martinez had another light day on his calendar, so he made a second trip to the Home Depot. This time he took two of his lieutenants with him. They returned to the same neighborhood, this time two streets farther south.
And they made some more new friends.
The following day each of the lieutenants went out with one of their sergeants.
Within a week, every patrol car in the SAPD fleet was involved in the project.
It created some ridiculous situations, of course. On the rare occasions when an officer had to arrest someone, the perp had to share the back seat with trash can lids. And the neighborhood kids took to yelling out “Uncle Jed and Jethro!” whenever one of the loaded cars passed them on the streets.
That part puzzled Scott, because he seriously doubted any of the kids had ever seen an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies. He supposed their parents had put them up to it, but it didn’t matter. It was all in good fun.
Whatever animosity that still persisted between the policemen and civilians evaporated with the project. The survivors, whatever they once felt about the police force, now saw the beat cops as saviors. The considered them men who were much more interested in helping them than in arresting them.
There weren’t enough pieces of rain gutters or garbage cans in the city of San Antonio to provide for all the neighborhood streets. But those streets which didn’t get the rain collection system were enthused enough by the project to find other ways to participate. Two by fours were cannibalized from abandoned houses and hammered onto rooftops to help channel rainwater to the corners of the houses.
Bathtubs were hauled out of the same abandoned houses and placed on the corners of the houses to catch the water falling from the roof.
Ingenuity was indeed the mother of invention. At least on the desperate streets of San Antonio.
The project brought something to do for the survivors, and that was important for a society which no longer had video games to play or televisions to watch. The best course of action for staying warm in the winter months was to keep moving.
But Chief Martinez’ project helped in another way as well. A way he’d never intended.
It gave the survivors a renewed hope. A hope that as the plague ran its course and the neighborhoods bonded, that they’d work together to help one another. That was much better than competing with one another for the meager food that was available.
They no longer saw themselves as competitors. It made much more sense for them to work as a team to make sure there was enough food for everyone.
-39-
It was just a matter of time before the band of brothers started talking about the future. For awhile now, they’d been afraid to. Because they still weren’t sure there even was a future.
But lately, rumors had been flying that the plague was starting to dissipate. They could even see it for themselves, to a limited degree. The quarantine section of the hospital was down to two floors now, and one of them was only half full.
FEMA was reporting similar stories from other cites, and the CDC was saying that they expected to announce in the spring that the plague had run its course.
“We won’t do that until we have a full thirty day period with no new cases being reported. But things are looking good, and we expect that to happen by March or April.”
“Oh, great!” Scott teased to Joyce over the radio. “That means I’ll be home just in time for planting season. My back hurts already.”
The four men had developed a habit of sitting around a card table every Friday night. It was the evening before their only day off, and had evolved into a combination poker or spades night, and a night where they could drink a bit and relax.
Toward the end of such nights, their tongues usually started to loosen a bit. That’s when they sometimes opened up about their personal lives.
It was at one of these Friday night sessions a couple of weeks before that Scott learned the details of Robbie’s wife Keeley’s death.
She’d been seven months pregnant and something was terribly wrong. She’d been in a car accident a few days before, when an idiot sending a text message ran a stop sign and hit her broadside.
The paramedics at the s
cene said she was shaken but appeared to be okay. They said in light of the situation she should see her doctor, though. Just to be sure.
Keeley couldn’t get an appointment that day or the following day. She settled on one for the morning of the third day after the accident. She felt fine, after all, so she wasn’t in that big of a hurry.
Robbie was off duty that day and got up to take her. He loved seeing his daughter on the ultrasound monitor. The last time he’d gone along, a month before, he insisted the baby was waving at him with her tiny fingers. Keeley had said his face glowed, and that he’d be an awesome daddy.
Shortly after they left the house that morning, Keeley started to have horrific cramps. She’d never been in labor before. She thought for sure that’s what it was.
Robbie told the others how she’d pleaded with the baby.
“Oh, God, don’t come now. It’s too early. You have to stay in there.”
Then, in the middle of Highway 90, miles from either home or the nearest hospital, the car suddenly died.
As did every other vehicle around them.
He tried both of their cell phones, and neither of them worked.
Then she started bleeding profusely.
Robbie, the big tough cop who never panicked in even the most dire of circumstances, freaked out. This was his wife, and his baby. These types of things were supposed to happen to other people. Not to them.
He tried to put his limited first aid skills to use. If the blood had been coming from an arm or a leg, he’d have applied direct pressure to the wound, or at the pressure point above it. If necessary, he’d have applied a tourniquet.
But the blood wasn’t coming from a limb. It was coming from inside of her.
He didn’t know what to do. He tried using direct pressure on one of the most tender places on her body, until she cried out.
“Baby, you’re hurting me.”
And the blood kept flowing anyway.
He pulled her out of the car onto the concrete highway outside.
He apologized for the hard concrete, and found a small pillow to place under her head. He put a blanket over her to keep her warm and prevent her from going into shock. He elevated her feet, hoping it would increase the blood flow to her brain. At the same time he knew it would also increase the blood flow to the wound, where the blood continued to pour out.
He panicked. He knew that this, whatever it was, was beyond his limited capabilities.
There were others around, out of their cars, trying to figure out why nothing seemed to be working.
He found himself begging total strangers.
“Please, call 911. Get someone out here. My wife… she’s dying!”
He seemed to know, even then, that the situation was beyond hope.
Because no one could call. No one had any medical expertise.
No one could help them.
“I’m going for help, Sugar. You hang on.”
He brushed his fingers across her tear stained cheek as he said the last words he’d ever tell her. And then he left her there, holding the hand of a sympathetic old woman who’d stopped to help but couldn’t.
Robbie had run for a mile, he said. Maybe two. Stopping anyone and everyone he thought might be able to help.
But most of the others, caught up in their own problems of the moment, brushed him off or tried to avoid him.
Desperate, not knowing what to do, he ran back to Keeley, who lay dead.
Someone, perhaps the old woman, had the decency to cover her face.
Robbie had knelt beside her and cried, and begged her to forgive him, for letting her die alone.
The blackout had happened in late morning. At some point, day turned into night, and then into day again, before Robbie finally left her side.
He knew by then that the world had changed. It would never be the same again. There would be no ambulance to come and whisk away the body of his young wife. No morgue, no autopsy, no funeral.
He took a shovel from the back of a landscaping truck a few vehicles back on the now deserted highway. Forty yards off the highway, in a shaded area he thought might bring Keeley some peace, he buried her body in a shallow grave.
“I still go back there sometimes when I’m in the area. I pick some of the nearby wildflowers and lay them on the grave, and apologize to her for not saving her.
“The doctors at St. Mary’s have told me since that there was nothing I could have done. That something inside of her, probably weakened from the accident, just broke free during one of her cramps. They said that immediate surgery was the only thing that could have stopped the hemorrhaging. That there was nothing I could do.
“But they weren’t there. They didn’t see the helplessness in her eyes. She was looking for me to save her and the baby. She was relying on me to stop the bleeding. And I just didn’t know how.
“I let Keeley down. And I let little Haley down. I used to think it was so cool that Haley waved at me during that ultrasound. I thought she was saying hello to her daddy. And now, since then, I’ve had nightmares about it. Now I wonder if she was waving goodbye. That she somehow knew.”
The card playing had stopped by that time. Even before Robbie’s words, the mood had turned somber. John wanted to stop Robbie a couple of times, but didn’t. He had the sense that Robbie’s words were somehow therapeutic for him. That he needed to get them out.
There was little that John and Scott could do for their friend, other than comfort him.
Scott saw the irony in it, and suspected that John did too. They both wanted desperately to stop the pain. To make their friend feel better. To make everything whole again. But there was absolutely nothing they could do but provide a temporary comfort.
And they felt the same hopelessness and helplessness that Robbie himself felt all those months before.
As for Randy, he curled up in a ball in the corner of the room, hearing Robbie’s words but thinking his own unknown thoughts. Randy had his own demons he was fighting. He had his own tragic story to tell. But he was a much more private person than Robbie. So his tale of woe would go unsaid on this night.
All that John and Scott knew was that Randy had a family before the blackout happened. A lovely wife named Cinda and twin boys. Something had happened to them. Something terrible. Scott found himself wondering if that was what made Randy the way he was now. Aloof, distant, introspective.
He and John had actually talked about it themselves at an earlier time. Perhaps at one time Randy was vibrant and alive, and enjoyed people. Perhaps it was the tragedy of losing his family that turned him surly and uncaring. Perhaps he no longer cared for people because he associated love and caring with loss and pain.
In any event, they assumed that someday he’d tell his story. But not until he was ready, and they wouldn’t push him.
They would comfort Robbie now, and let him know that they were there for him and loved him. Not in the same way women love each other. They wouldn’t hold him and rub his shoulders and do the things one woman does for another to ease pain.
Instead, they’d be there to hear his words when he felt like talking, and give him his space when he needed it. They’d go out of their way to do things for him, like providing his meals and doing his chores, until he was back on his game. Perhaps it wasn’t as effective as the way women helped each other through difficult times, but it was all they had to give him.
None of it worked, of course. Despite all of their efforts to bring back the happy Robbie, they all finally passed out that night as miserable as he was.
-40-
The same night that Robbie finally opened up about Keeley’s death, Tony Pike and Kevin returned to the compound for round two.
At least they tried. They never made it that far.
They returned with six other men. They’d decided on that number because they thought that eight men would be sufficient to take the compound by force, without having to share the women or the booty with too many others.
And t
ruthfully, there were a couple of Kevin’s friends that Tony just didn’t like. He’d agreed to let them come because he knew they were brutal, and would take no prisoners other than the women.
But they were other alpha males, and eventually Tony knew they’d challenge his authority. And that just wouldn’t do.
Ideally, they would become the first casualties of Tony’s little war. And if they made it to the end, Tony might take them out himself. A preventive strike to avoid a coup later on.
Their plan was simple. Go back to the ranch house, retrieve the ladder, and scale that high wall. Then find the men and children and kill them, and make the women their slaves.
And they were fully prepared to drag that damn mesquite tree out of the way again if they needed to.
But here they were, back at the ranch house, groping around in the darkness for the ladder that was no longer there.
“Screw it,” Tony finally announced. “The front of the house was outside the high fence. We’ll just beat down the damn front door and go in that way. And they’ll pay a heavy price for taking our damn ladder.”
Not that he was planning on showing them any mercy anyway.
After they gave up on the ladder, they made their way across Tom’s hay field to the downed mesquite tree they’d dragged out of the way during their previous visit.
They were aggravated to find it had been pulled back to its original location, back in line with the other mesquites.
Moreover, the clothesline they’d used to tie the bundles of branches together was now gone.
Tony sent one of the new troops back to the ranch house.
“There are some clothesline poles in the yard behind the house. Cut one of the lines off of them and bring it back.”
The rest of the group waited and stewed for a full twenty minutes before the man returned.
“I found the poles. But all the lines were already cut, and were gone.”
Rise From The Ashes: The Rebirth of San Antonio (Countdown to Armageddon Book 3) Page 15
