The First Hours

by Christine Conaway

  Finally, back at the school parking lot, Tom saw some boys at Teagan’s car with the hood up, and he stomped on the gas pedal for a brief spirt and then the slammed the brakes to the floor. He flew out of the car as soon as it stopped.

  “Get away from that car. What do you boys think you’re doing?”

  “Oh, hey Sheriff. Nothing really. My dad said the older cars would run, but without a key, we can’t get it started.”

  Tom knew the boy who had addressed him. Mitch Bigelow. He was a year behind Teagan and one of the towns troubled youth. Broken home, a single mother who worked too much and spent little of her off time with her kids. Part-time father when he was out of jail. Mitch had a knack for finding trouble and Tom didn’t doubt that had they known how to hotwire the car it would be gone right now.

  “You boys know that auto theft is jail time?” Tom asked, addressing the group of boys fidgeting on the other side of the car.

  “No. you got this all wrong. I know the guy that owns this car, and he wouldn’t mind me borrowing it. Heck, he’d probably be glad I picked it up for him.” The good-ole-boy doing a friend a favor, tactic didn’t last long, when Mitch put the pieces together and began to back-peddle. “Shoot Sheriff, I was just making a joke. I know this is one of your cars. You might say I was doing you a favor by getting it started.”

  His golly-gee-whiz attitude reminded Tom of Barney Fife. He almost laughed because Mitch, with his punk haircut, skinny jeans rolled at the ankle and fake gold chains were as far from hometown Mayberry as picturing Barney with a fully loaded weapon.

  “You get on home now and see what you can do to help your families. I have the feeling they’re going to need you guys.” He stood with his hands resting on his slim hips until self-consciously the first boy took off at a run followed by the rest of them until only Mitch remained.

  His face wore a sneer, and his chin pointed at Tom, “That wasn’t necessary Sheriff. You didn’t have to embarrass me in front of my friends.”

  “I embarrassed you? Are you kidding me? How about I prevented you from committing a crime. Now, like I told you a minute ago, you better forget about this car and get on home.”

  Mitch looked from Tom’s car, where Carrie and Nancy sat waiting, back to Teagan’s car. A light seemed to go one inside the boy’s brain, “Say Sheriff, maybe you and I can make a deal. You can’t drive two cars, so maybe you let me borrow one of them until the power comes back on.”

  He grinned like he had thought of the perfect plan. Tom could almost picture it as Mitch rubbed his mental hands together.

  “How about you get on your high horse and head on home. Whether you know it or not, this isn’t going to end tomorrow or the next day and probably for a lot longer than that. Your family will need you to step up and be a man. Now, go home.”

  Tom shook his head in dread. He could tell from the way Mitch’s face turned red, the way he gathered himself up and swaggered toward Tom, leading with his chest that nothing good would come from this interaction. Tom backed up, wanting to avoid the conflict, and apparently, it was the wrong move to make. Tom’s action seemed to bolster whatever it was on Mitch’s mind.

  “I don’t have time for this,” Tom mumbled as he turned away. He wasn’t about to arrest the kid, and he sure didn’t want to lay his hands on him. Walking away was the best course of action. With the keys to Teagan’s car out, he unlocked the driver door.

  “Tom, behind you!” Carrie hollered, just as Tom felt the weight of Mitch hit him in the back. The kid’s arm came up around Tom’s throat with his other hand pinning it there and his legs wrapped around Tom’s waist. The blow pushed Tom off-balance. He slammed into the side of the car, knocking his head into the top of the door frame. The bump momentarily stunned him, his vision faded in and out.

  Tom was glad he’d left his firearm in the car because at that moment he would have been tempted to use it. He braced his hands against the car and tried to catch his breath until he realized that he couldn’t. Mitch’s arm had effectively cut off his intake of air. Before he could gather himself together to escape the hold, Tom understood he needed to do something fast, or he would be on the ground, out cold.

  Someone had taught Mitch the choke-hold, and Mitch was using it to his advantage. Tom’s vision began to fade while his fingers grasped Mitch’s arm, trying to pull it away. The kid’s skinny appearance was deceptively incorrect. He was strong and wiry. Tom tried ramming Mitch into the side of the car, but he felt himself stagger under the weight on his back and his reduced oxygen supply. Tom felt himself going down when suddenly he was on his knees with Nancy and Cassie leaning over him. Sitting up and coughing, Tom looked around to find Mitch stretched out beside him.

  “I couldn’t stand watching that. As much as I didn’t want to, I knocked him out. That kid is going to wake up, and no good will come from his actions. What do you want to do with him?”

  “Is he dead?” Nancy asked. She knelt beside Mitch and felt his neck for a pulse and watched for his chest to rise. “Never mind. He’s breathing. If Miss Carrie hadn’t hit him, I was going to.”

  “Thanks. That kid is stronger than he looks.” Tom massaged his throat. “We’ll put him in the car, and I’ll take him to his mother.” Tom looked at Teagan’s car. He saw the need to put it out of sight as soon as possible because Mitch wouldn’t be the only one to see the car as an easy mode of transportation. Once it became clear, there would be others who would want it, and others may know how to hotwire it.

  “Carrie, you and Nancy better take the car to my house and put it out back in the shed before someone else decides they need it more than we do. I’ll meet you back there after I deliver Mitch to his mother.”

  To be safe, Tom handcuffed Mitch’s hands behind him and dumped him in the back seat. He wasn’t going to take unnecessary chances of the kid jumping him again while he was driving, and to be honest, Tom didn’t think the next encounter with the kid would end so diplomatically.

  Tom was torn as to what to do. His job gave him the responsibility for the wellbeing of the people in town, but he felt a bigger obligation to his daughter and his friends. From everything he’d ever read on the subject, law enforcement would be a thing of the past. He was sure that other officers would feel the same as he did and put the safety and well- being of their families over and above the needs of the citizens or they would turn on those same citizens and see themselves as above the law. There would be no middle ground and Tom didn’t see any good coming from it.

  He suspected that Simon, his deputy, saw himself that way already. He had always been the one to push the envelope. Unnecessary force and pushing people to the limit just so he felt justified using that same force when sometimes a perpetrator could be talked down without manhandling them. Simon seemed to prefer his strong-arm tactics before everything. He’d once told Tom, “You have to crush them before they can react, not coddle them.”

  As Tom drove back to his house, he wondered if he’d done the right thing leaving Mitch behind. His mother’s first reaction to Tom’s explanation of why Mitch was being delivered in handcuffs had been to slap the boy alongside his head, and her lethal tongue lashing hadn’t done anything for the headache he was sure Mitch had. Tom saw the look of hate that Mitch had rewarded both Tom and his mother with, and Tom wondered how long it would be before someone else paid the price. The one single piece of insight Tom carried away from the confrontation was the way Mitch had softened when his younger siblings had gathered around him. Maybe Mitch would do right by them. Tom could only hope.

  As Tom left the mobile home park Mitch lived in, he was surprised to see people standing around talking and laughing it up. He wondered how many of them were prepared for the inevitable. He suspected they would run out of food and go looking to take what they needed from others. The bigger grocery stores held very little in the way of stock, and he wondered how long it would take before anyone realized there would be no more deliveries.

  He felt a twinge of conscie
nce that he didn’t take the time to inform them, but on further consideration, he could have started a stampede of their local grocery store. It was small, and Pete, the owner, only carried the smaller versions of the basics. He was a stop-gap provider, never meant to supply the town with the necessities. The shelves would empty in a day.

  Tom drove home with a heavy heart, but he had to think of Teagan, and no one else was going to go find her. He could only hope that she used her head and had listened when he’d talked about EMP’s and solar flares. Tom wasn’t sure which of the two were responsible for their circumstances, but he was sure how it would unfold. Once people understood there was no immediate help coming, and food ran short, chaos would reign. No parent would stand by and do nothing while their children starved, and he suspected that theft would be the chosen method of feeding them.

  They had three trailer parks, two of which were less than a dozen units, and two small apartment complexes of government-assisted housing. The thing that bothered Tom the most, was the greater portion of their populace, were low-income residents. Seniors and a mix of lower-income and single-parent households. He didn’t know how they were going to survive unless they banded together and helped each other. The seniors held valuable information if the younger generation chose to make use of their knowledge.

  If it hadn’t been for Teagan running off to the coast, Tom could have been instrumental in amalgamating the two groups, but until she was home and safe he had to make her his priority.

  Tom’s house sat on the outskirts of town, just a short distance past the city limits. The older two story home sat in the middle of his ten acres. The drive was gated with a row of pine trees separating the property from the road. The pasture in front had been cross fenced by the previous owner and Tom had always planned on adding a cow and calf and some horses to complete the setting, but the opportunity had never materialized, or he’d been too busy. Now, with Teagan going off to school it never would, but then he remembered, she wouldn’t be leaving after all, and horses and cows would be worth their weight in gold.

  Carrie had closed the drapes and put the car out of sight. He had no doubt that at some time someone, probably Mitch or someone with the same mindset would come looking. He needed to secure everything he didn’t want to be stolen.

  With the sun sitting low on the horizon, Tom knew he needed to work quickly and get on the road and silently worked through the steps he needed to take before he could leave. He had a fifty-gallon gas tank behind the barn that had recently been filled and needed to drain it into portable cans and hide what he wasn’t going to take with him. Tom wondered if locking the car in the shed was an intelligent idea after all. It wouldn’t require much effort to break into it. He would hate to return and find the car gone. An idea that had been brewing in his subconscious raised its head and Tom nodded, but he needed help.

  At the back of his property were the remains of a house that had fallen into ruins years before. All the remained was the rock foundation and the indent where the cellar had once been. Blackberry vines had covered it until Tom had exposed it the previous spring. With that in mind, Tom backed up to the back porch.

  Carrie opened the door before he had the chance to unlock it, “Is everything okay? Did you get Mitch home without any more trouble?”

  He told her what had transpired while he pulled on his insulated coveralls. Zipping the front closed he asked Carrie to get the flashlights from the bottom cabinet drawer.

  “Will they work? I thought anything electric wouldn’t work,” she said as she pulled two of them out. She held them up as if they were trophies.

  Tom searched through the top shelf of the coat closet and pulled out several pair of thick leather gloves and slapped them together to soften the leather. “We don’t really know what will and what won’t work. I don’t think anyone really knows until we try it. It’s not like we’ve had anything like this to gauge it by. They didn’t have electronics or even flashlights the last time we had a CME, but it did fry the telegraph lines and I guess it gave the telegraph operators that were active, a jolt.”

  He didn’t want to get into the logistics about the only known CME of any substance to hit the earth at least in recorded history. He thought he remembered other minor ones being talked about on the news but couldn’t be sure and as far as he knew nothing major had come of them.

  “Tom? Are you okay?”

  Tom blinked and grinned, “Sorry. I was lost in my thoughts. I need you girls too,” Tom turned back to the closet and brought out a couple of his winter jackets, and tossed them to Carrie, “Put these on and come help me.”

  Carrie flicked the flashlights on one at a time and held both up in triumph, “They do work.” She stared at the heavy lined jackets, “won’t they be too warm?”

  “Maybe a little but they’ll help to protect you.” He walked out the back door leaving Nancy and Carrie to stare at each other puzzled expressions on both their faces.

  “We’re burning daylight,” He called, “and bring the flashlights.”

  Carrie shrugged at Nancy, “I guess we’ll find out.” She handed one of the jackets to Nancy, “Put this on.”

  Nancy raised her eyebrows and took the jacket. She wore a look of revulsion as she held the coat away from her, “Really? Why? It’s not even cold outside.”

  “You know what? I don’t think you should be questioning anything Tom asks you to do. He needs help to do whatever he has on his mind, and the help he has available is us? Now, you can make up your mind right now to be a part of this family or not, but I won’t have you asking why or how come or saying no if it’s something you’re capable of doing. We’re all in this together unless you have somewhere else to go.” Eyebrows raised in question, Carrie waited for Nancy to answer.

  Nancy’s eyes watered, her chin dropped to her chest, “I’m sorry. I don’t,” she mumbled. “I didn’t mean I wouldn’t help though.”

  Carrie dropped her arm over Nancy’s shoulders and tugged her toward the door, “Don’t worry about it. You have to understand that Tom’s main concern is to find Teagan. I’m not sure what he wants help with, but it must be important if he is delaying his leaving.”

  They found Tom coming out of the shed with a shovel, rake and a hand saw. He paused when he saw them and laughed, “Guess those are a little too big for the two of you, but they’ll sure enough protect you.”

  Carrie pulled the front of her jacket away from her body and looked down at it, “Oh. I didn’t realize they were bulletproof.”

  Tom sobered immediately. He looked up at the sky. The sun had finally dropped behind the hills, and full dark would be on them soon. Had he given it some thought he would have waited until it had. The house blocked them from any prying eyes from the road, but there was another house sitting away from the highway like he was. His neighbors to the west would have a clear view if they chose to be watching right then. He didn’t know the neighbors all that well, and they had never attended the town hall meetings. He had met the son two years before when he’d come to mend the fence between the two properties. He’d seemed like a nice enough fella but hadn’t talked about his parents that much other than to say his father had some medical issues, but Tom couldn’t remember more than that. The son was going to run a couple pair of cows and calves on their 10 acres. He’d brought them out, dropped them off and Tom hadn’t seen him again. The two cows still roamed their fields, but only one had a calf at her side. He knew they raised chickens, because a stand sat at the end of their drive and sometimes, he could drop two dollars in the can and help himself to a dozen eggs. He hadn’t stopped lately as the eggs-for-sale sign had disappeared.

  Carrie waved her hand in front of Tom’s face, “Hello…earth to Tom.”

  He blinked and saw it was dark. He didn’t think he’d been that lost in his thoughts, but maybe. “Sorry. I was thinking about something.”

  “We saw that,” Carrie laughed and shared a conspiratorial glance with Nancy. “We thought we’d lost
you for a minute there.”

  The saw in one hand and the shovel and rake in the other, Tom began to walk. Carrie and Nancy followed still unsure what he needed them for.

  When Tom tripped over something, Carrie asked, “Should I turn the light on?”

  “No,” he said his voice displaying a hint of panic, “just watch that tree root.” They followed him in silence through the knee-high grass until they came to a darker shadow in front of them where Tom dropped the implements on the ground.

  “Are we doing some moonlight digging for lost treasure?”

  Nancy stifled a laugh as did Carrie.

  “Nope. We’re going to bury some treasure as soon as I get these blackberry vines out of the way.” He picked the rake up and began to rearrange the prickly berry vines. Using the rake, Tom spread the bushes out until he asked for Carrie to turn the light on briefly.

  She flashed it, and Tom let out a groan. They weren’t sure if it was a grunt of satisfaction or dismay. When he continued dragging the long vines away, Carrie assumed that’s all he’d needed. She caught a brief glimpse of rocks or a rock wall of some sort in the short time the light had been on.

  “Tom? Would you mind telling us what we’re supposed to be doing?”

  Tom startled as if he’d forgotten they were there and stood up, the rake held loose in his hand, “You two have to be the quietest women I know. I forgot you were here.”

  He pulled the gloves from his back pocket and handed each woman a pair, “I’m going to have to cut some of the bigger vines, and you two are going to pull them out of my way. Don’t take them too far because we’re going to re-use them.”

  As Tom cut, while the two pulled them to one side, opening a pathway into the clearing on the inside of the blackberry vines.

  Carrie stepped into the enclosed area. She saw a wall of darkness all around them. “I feel like we just entered the secret garden. What is this place?”

  “Can we turn the lights on?” Nancy’s voice was barely a whisper as if she too felt the sanctity of the place. The wall of dark surrounded them with the black velvet sky, a fingernail moon and diamonds close enough to reach up and touch, just above their heads. “Wow, I didn’t realize they were so…close,” she added.