No Time For Mourning: Book Four in The Borrowed World Series

by Franklin Horton

  Charlotte dropped to her knees and fished under the bed. She came out with a pair of flip-flops. She stood, scuffed one onto each foot, then stood in front of Randi as if presenting herself for inspection. She even looked Randi in the face.

  Randi patted the bed beside her. “Sit down here.”

  Charlotte obeyed, folding her hands in her lap and staring at them.

  Randi put an arm around her. “Your dad and I are going to find you some medication. An anti-depressant. It will help you get through this. If we can find enough, you can take it for a couple of months and we’ll see what happens. That’s it—a couple of months. This is all on you. You have to pull yourself out of this.”

  Charlotte remained silent.

  “Honestly, Charlotte, what you’re doing is not fair to your family. It’s not fair to your children. If you can’t pull yourself out of this, the best thing you can do for everyone is to go off into the woods somewhere and pull the damn plug on this life. At least then your family and your children can get on with their own lives instead of everything having to center around you. Seriously, you’re just wasting everyone’s time and energy.”

  This got Charlotte’s attention. She raised her eyes to Randi’s. There was neither anger nor judgment. She was simply processing Randi’s words.

  “Give it two weeks. If you still can’t find your way back, you come tell me. I will give you the pills to do it with because I can’t stand to see what you’re doing to those kids. Nothing personal. I would rather watch you die than have to watch those kids die inside. Do we have a deal?”

  Randi waited. “I need a nod or something.”

  Charlotte finally nodded.

  Randi stood. “Then get your ass up. We’re going to go watch those kids play in the creek.”

  Panic flashed in Charlotte’s eyes and she opened her mouth to say something. Randi reached down and gently stroked Charlotte’s hair. She leaned over and whispered into Charlotte’s ear. “The creek is a long damn way to drag you, but try me and I’ll do it. Your dad means a lot to me. I will not let you tear his family apart.”

  Chapter 30

  Tommy

  Another trick that Tommy picked up from a striking coal miner was the construction of jack rocks. In Virginia, as in many other states who saw labor disputes, it was illegal to possess these ancient weapons. It was said that ninjas had once used the weapon, known as a caltrop, to deter pursuers. In modern times, it was used to flatten the tires of non-union coal trucks or of state police vehicles.

  Though larger in size, it was identical in function to the jack rock used by children. No matter how it landed, there was always a point sticking up. For cars, striking miners would construct them of 16- or 20-penny nails. To stop a coal truck, they’d make them of railroad spikes. Men would gather in garages deep in the mountains and manufacture them during the coal strikes. They would drink beer or homemade liquor and tell hunting stories. They set up workstations with one man gathering the parts, one man welding, and other men sharpening the finished product. They were extremely effective, and illegal. To be caught with one meant a trip to jail.

  In his father’s barn, Tommy found a coffee can of 20 penny nails and had been inspired. He remembered purchasing the oversized spikes to build a horse shed out of sawmill lumber. While he didn’t have a welder, there was a propane torch and some brazing rod in the barn. He made a jig out of some rocks on the ground to hold the nails in place while be joined them together.

  He worked there for hours, brazing until the torch ran out of gas. He’d been able to make over thirty jack rocks. He held one up to the sky and touched a finger to the point. He suddenly felt the long nights catching up with him. He gathered the fruits of his labor and retreated to the dairy for a nap. It was still too bright outside to do anything right now.

  Tommy’s nap was fitful. He could not determine if it was the cold, hard substrate of his bed, or the nightmares of his dead parents. He lay there in a state somewhere between sleep and wakefulness for a long time, unable to tell if he were awake, asleep, or dead. Then with a start, he sat bolt upright. He was in total blackness. He held his hand up in front of his face and could not see it.

  No light shone through the cracks around the door. He felt around for his flashlight, then used that to find his pistol. He pushed open the door, stepping out of the cool building into the warm night. The stars were brilliant. His wristwatch had burned in the fire but he thought it was late. Late enough, anyway. He gathered a jar of meat chunks for the dogs and a few items of hardware from the barn, then set out through the woods.

  The moon was bright enough that he didn’t need the light at all. The trail had become familiar enough to him that he walked it as much from memory as from sight. When he reached the Cross house he settled into a recess of moon shadow and regarded the house. He wondered if anyone had been bitten by the presents he left. He couldn’t hold back his smile. His hate for that family was the greatest passion he’d known in his life.

  Satisfied that no one was awake, he approached the house. The dogs came to him, wagging their tails and sniffing at his hands. He opened the jar and hand-fed each of them several chunks, then stuffed the jar back in his pack. He went to the front porch. He knew from watching the house that the steps creaked and groaned so he didn’t use them. The porch had no rails so he scooted up onto it, then crawled to the front door.

  He pulled a sharp awl from his back pocket and pressed it against the soft wood of the door jamb. When he had a hole started, he removed a screw eye from his pocket and threaded it into the hole. When it became hard to turn, he put the awl through the eye and used that to apply leverage to the eye. He did the same thing on the opposite door jamb and then ran a piece of high-tensile fence wire through the eyes, putting several twists on each end to secure it.

  He scooted back from the door and removed a folded towel from his pack. Inside were the jack rocks. He arranged them in a cluster in front of the door, in front of his trip wire. He shoved the towel back into his pack, and then crept from the porch. The dogs were waiting on him and he emptied the jar onto the ground for them. He made two piles to hopefully keep them from snarling and fighting with each other.

  He shouldered his pack and began to creep away from the porch. He heard a sound, a muffled thud he’d heard before but couldn’t place. He turned back to the house, his hand on his pistol, and squinted, unable to see anything unusual in the moonlight. He heard the sound again.

  It was above him.

  He looked up in time to see a shape teetering on the edge of the roof, then dropping. He tried to move. He was not fast enough. It landed on him, knocking him to the ground. He hit his head on the ground hard and was stunned.

  “Momma!” a voice screamed in his face.

  It was Lisa Cross. He wanted to punch her, to fight, though his brain had been scrambled by the impact and he couldn’t form a thought. A light clicked on between them and there she was, hovering over him, a pistol leveled at his face.

  “Don’t you fucking move,” she snarled. “Momma!”

  The front door opened and Oma Cross called out. “I’m coming! Hold on!”

  A flashlight clicked on in the house, then came bobbing back toward the door. There was a cry of surprise and the light went flying when Oma’s feet hit the tripwire. Oma’s scream as she went down was abruptly cut off.

  “Momma?” Lisa said again, this time with concern. She played her light across the porch and sucked in a breath when the light caught her mother. Oma lay on her belly in the cluster of jack rocks. She was attempting to get up. As she raised her face from the porch, they could both see a spike buried in the center of her forehead, another in her eye. Her mouth gaped but she was unable to speak. Each time she attempted to get up, her head sagged against the porch again. With each sag, the spike was pounded deeper into her brain.

  Lisa turned back to Tommy. He grinned through his pain. She lashed out at him with the pistol and all went dark.

  Chapter 3
1

  The Valley

  Baxter chose a flat pasture beside a creek to set up their fallback camp. There was something about the site that drew him in. His group was not the first to feel that way. The same pasture had been a seasonal hunting camp for Native Americans for thousands of years. Where those tribes built wigwams, his group arranged modern campers. The purpose of both groups was similar—a desire to find a place with good water, plentiful food, and safety.

  One of the Humvees pulled a generator mounted onto a trailer, while another pulled a trailer-mounted fuel tank. When those were positioned and unhooked, the group of men started raising a long white tent. With a table and chairs under it, it would serve as the command center, conference room, and dining hall.

  Baxter had brought a dozen of his most trusted employees, with the exception of Valentine, who was running the show back at Glenwall in his absence. While he was certainly open to bringing more folks in the future, he couldn’t pull all of his resources out of Glenwall yet without angering the folks paying the bills. He was an Emergency Manager and he’d been trained in disaster preparedness, but he wasn’t really a survivalist. He was more of a bureaucrat than anything else. The one thing his training had prepared him for was to identify what resources were critical early in the disaster and to cabbage them for his own purposes.

  It had been good fortune that he’d ended up partnering with the folks of Glenwall. In the early stages of the disaster, he’d been at a public meeting and one of the residents of the golf course community had been in attendance. As Baxter was griping about a lack of operational facilities with adequate space, the man mentioned setting up at Glenwall. It became clear pretty quickly that it was to be a reciprocal agreement. One of those “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” deals. That was fine with Baxter. He had no family and no resources.

  Once at Glenwall, he quickly set up strategic planning meetings with the Board of Directors of the golf course and found that he had tremendous resources on tap. One of those resources was money. Not only did these folks have overstuffed bank accounts, most of them kept lots of cash on hand for impulse purchases, travel, wagers, or whatever else the rich needed cash for.

  In private meetings with those few very select, very powerful residents that were on the board, Baxter’s training and their resources allowed them to hammer out a mutually beneficial arrangement. A man who owned a chain of grocery stores had five tractor-trailer loads of food brought in from one of his distribution centers and secured at the clubhouse. A man who owned several coal mines had two fuel tankers of diesel fuel brought in from one of his mine sites. A man in construction had brought in several sets of very powerful tower lights that operated off internal generators, and Baxter had access to several military surplus generators he’d obtained for the county. He brought them to Glenwall and was able to run power to the clubhouse so they could operate a central kitchen with meals for Glenwall residents.

  Aware that lights, food, and fuel would make Glenwall a target, Baxter quickly pointed out that the group would need security beyond what the golf course normally provided. Baxter had been able to find a group of men with no families who were willing to come live in the maintenance facility at the golf course and provide security in exchange for food. Several of them were deputies who’d walked off the job. Others came from the county maintenance staff. A few more were regular folks Baxter knew from the local gun range where he shot skeet occasionally.

  As far as the Board of Directors at Glenwall knew, Baxter and his crew were gone on a recon mission searching for more supplies. He’d left half of his security force, which would keep the residents from worrying about his absence. They didn’t even have to take the campers from the golf course. They were county property, and had been stored at a county maintenance facility. In the years following Hurricane Katrina, FEMA campers had been easy for local government to obtain for a fraction of their original cost. Baxter had made sure that Wallace County had picked up a few of the nicer ones, though he’d never expected he’d be living in one.

  Baxter had imagined living a cushy life at the golf course community, holding a position of respect while this disaster played out. He figured that they’d have a few rough days and then things would start to get back to normal. During that time, he would gain credibility for keeping a cool head in a disaster. After a couple of weeks, he began to worry that this was a true cascading systems failure event. He’d read about them, assuming it was only a theoretical model. If that was the case, the model was proving accurate.

  If the model continued to play out, being there in the middle of a small town on the interstate was a no-win scenario. Resources in town were already drying up, violence was increasing, the interstate would bring gangs and looters, and those remaining in town would have a much harder time surviving than those who got themselves out of town and found a secure location to hole up in. Baxter could see the writing on the wall and had been trying to think of such a place when Don and Hodge showed up. The more they talked, the more certain he was that he’d found his place.

  He hadn’t planned on doing much more than taking note of this location until the two cattle thieves mentioned that residents had blown up one of the roads leading into the valley. That forced his hand. His plan now was to develop this location into a fallback site fully stocked with supplies. He would leave a skeleton crew of men here. Part of their job would be to make sure the road into this end of the valley didn’t get cut off. The rest of them would return to Glenwall with a load of cattle and never mention this valley. When the time came that they had to leave Glenwall for their own safety, they would pack up under cover of darkness and head to the valley.

  With everything set up and with arrangements made for the crew that was remaining behind, Baxter called the rest of his men together and addressed them. “I don’t mean to keep repeating myself, but it’s critical that you don’t go back and talk about what we’re doing here. I’m setting this place up for the safety of all of us. If you tell anyone about it, you’re compromising that safety. I take that so seriously that you only get one chance. You violate my trust, you’re out. You can’t live at Glenwall and you can’t come here. You’ll have to go back to your old life, whatever that was.”

  They nodded, looking at each other, assessing who might be the weak link in the arrangement. While Baxter was pausing for dramatic effect, the sound of singing unrolled down the road toward them. Baxter stared. The group spread apart a little and took a firmer grip on their weapons.

  “I’ll be damned,” Baxter said. “It’s the partner of the gentleman we left lying dead in the road. The local cattle thief.”

  Sure enough, Hodge was walking toward them with a step somewhere around the juncture of stroll and stagger. He walked directly to the gated pasture, let himself in, and approached the group.

  “Evening, gentlemen,” Hodge said.

  Baxter nodded at him. “I take it you must live close by?”

  Hodge nodded. “Yattaway.” He gestured with his head.

  “Where’s your partner?” Baxter asked, wondering if he had seen Don flattened in the road.

  “Fired me,” Hodge replied. He was wobbly, his eyes not focusing well.

  “That’s a shame,” Baxter said. He noticed a plastic bottle in Hodge’s hand. “What is that?”

  Hodge raised the bottle awkwardly. “Rubbing alcohol. All I got.” Even drunk, Hodge wasn’t going to mention his Lysol concentrate lest these men get ideas of stealing it from him. The Lysol was for real emergencies.

  “That stuff will kill you,” Baxter commented.

  “It’s why I’m here. Got any more of that good shit?”

  Baxter shook his head. “We can get our own cattle now,” he said. “Not sure we need you anymore. No offense.”

  Hodge stared at him. “So you’re simply moving in and taking what you want? That the way this works?”

  “I think so,” Baxter said. “The cattle didn’t belong to you either. We’ve got a
s much right to steal them as you do.”

  Hodge shrugged. He wasn’t sure he agreed with that logic. What could he do about it, though? He mumbled something indecipherable and started to amble off.

  One of Baxter’s men came forward and said something to Baxter, who nodded emphatically. “Sir?” Baxter called after the drunk man. “Sir?”

  Hodge stopped in an awkward, lurching maneuver. “What?” he asked, not even turning.

  “We are in need of a decent storage facility,” Baxter said. “Someplace clean, dry, and close to here. Like a shop building or barn with a concrete floor.”

  Hodge didn’t reply for several moments.

  “Sir?” Baxter prodded.

  “Thinking.”

  Baxter didn’t ask him again.

  “What’s in it for me?” he finally asked.

  “I’ll be coming back this way the day after tomorrow,” Baxter said. “I’ll bring you another bottle of the good stuff if you have the information I asked for.”

  Hodge lurched back into motion and continued on his way. “I’ll have you a place.”

  As he staggered off, Hodge thought that getting liquor for information would be the easiest booze he’d ever earned. He wondered if other people might trade booze for information. With his part in the cattle operation done, he needed a new way to supplement his drunkenness.

  Chapter 32

  Tommy

  Pain woke Tommy. Nearly everything hurt. He expected that he would be tied up but he wasn’t. He looked around. Enough light was coming in through the cracks that he could tell he was on the floor of the Cross’s outhouse. He sat up and pushed against the door. It wouldn’t budge. He pushed again, harder this time, and it still wouldn’t move. He cursed against the pain and confusion.

  He climbed up onto the toilet seat, making sure the lid was closed in case his bucket of snakes was still in there, and looked through a crack. A band of yellow was running completely around the outhouse. At first he was confused, then he could see it was one of those heavy ratchet straps that truck drivers used to fasten their loads down. Tommy reached for his pocket. He could cut the strap with his knife and be out of there in no time.