He didn’t notice the man sitting in the driver’s seat of a brown truck he was approaching.
Didn’t even notice the truck for that matter.
In the truck, Marcus was much more attentive.
He’d already had eyes on Ronald. He’d picked up Ronald in the distance when he rounded the corner a full block away.
He’d already noticed that Ronald still had his rifle slung across his back.
That was a good thing, because if Marcus missed with his first shot, he’d have time to take a second.
He’d also locked eyes on Ronald’s overstuffed backpack, and pondered what it might be overstuffed with.
In the new world there were a lot of uncertainties.
One never knew, for example, how much longer he’d live. For lives were snuffed out all the time with little or no warning at all.
One seldom knew where his or her next meal was coming from, for the world was now full of human vultures who hunted their meals from day to day.
There were, however, some things in the new world which were common knowledge and constants.
Nobody in the city carried clothing with them anymore.
On the highways, between cities, nomads carried clothing with them for they traveled great distances.
Such people typically had several packs, which they usually pushed around on baby strollers or in stolen shopping carts.
People in the cities, though, packed light.
They seldom carried clothes, for clothes took up space in their packs.
Space which would otherwise hold food or water or other more valuable items.
No, in Marcus’ estimation, the man approaching him wouldn’t waste space in his backpack for clothing.
Or a book, for that matter.
If that man’s backpack was full to the point of being stuffed, surely it would hold food. Maybe even gold or jewelry.
Marcus reckoned the man left his clothes at home and looted a house. Or maybe he robbed somebody at gunpoint.
In any even, the man probably thought he scored big; that it was his lucky day.
Actually, as Marcus saw it, any luck to be had on this particular day was all his.
As Ronald got closer and closer to the brown truck, Marcus ducked down to minimize his profile and sprawled across the truck’s floor.
He assumed the prone position, knowing it was the most reliable for most shooters.
He tried to relax, and he waited.
Chapter 33
Ronald walked past the truck, as he did almost every day when he’d gone on his scavenging or hunting missions.
Early on, just after the blackout, he crawled into the back to see if it contained anything he could use.
He wasn’t the first, or the last.
As he recalled, he rifled through a dozen already-opened boxes and finally found a pair of shoes he thought little Robert might be able to wear.
They were a size too small, though, and Robert threw them over his back fence into a neighbor’s yard.
On this particular day he had no idea that on the other side of a thin sheet metal panel a man he’d never met was waiting to assassinate him.
He kept walking.
He walked past the end of the truck, and didn’t even turn to look at the open door.
Had he done so, he might have seen the assassin, might have seen the gun, in time to jump for cover and get his own weapon out.
But he didn’t.
There was simply no reason to.
Not only had he once looted the truck, he’d looked into the back door a dozen other times while walking past.
He couldn’t imagine it changed much.
But it had.
Marcus held his eye against his scope and waited for the walker to come into view, then adjusted his barrel to raise the muzzle up ever so slightly.
Until his crosshairs were centered on the back of the walker’s head.
He gently, almost tenderly, squeezed the trigger.
Ronald’s head exploded.
His body crumpled forward.
What was left of his face, and there wasn’t much, hit the ground hard.
But that didn’t matter. He didn’t feel it.
The body hadn’t even settled and Marcus was out the door, dragging his bad leg behind him as fast as he could.
The rifle was still slung over Ronald’s shoulder.
Marcus grabbed his wrist and lifted his arm, then pulled the rifle off of it.
He set it next to the body and then rolled Ronald over.
He quickly checked his pockets and found and removed the AR-15 magazines. Then he removed the web belt and threw it around his own waist.
Lastly, he removed the backpack from Ronald’s back and unzipped it, stuffing the magazines into it and closing it again.
He was surprised by how light the backpack was.
Whether it was full of food, water or precious metals, a full pack should be much heavier.
But he could worry about that later.
Right now he had to go.
He reslung his own rifle, then slung Ronald’s rifle over the same shoulder.
The backpack went over the other shoulder and he was on the move.
Several people heard the shot, but nobody came running anymore.
Nobody would find the body for several hours.
It would be a man who lived in the house next door to where the body had fallen.
He would drag the body into his back yard and bury it in a shallow grave.
Not because it was the Christian thing to do, and not because he was necessarily a nice man.
But rather because he didn’t want the stench of the decaying body to smell up the neighborhood for several weeks.
The police would never be called, for there was no way to contact them.
The coroner would never pick up the body, for they had no means to do so.
A year and a half after the world went dark, everybody knew the drill.
It fell to the residents, those few left alive, to clean up after the bad guys.
And another poor soul went to meet his maker from an unmarked grave.
Monica heard the shot, but didn’t think much of it.
She was looking out the back window of the Spear house, listening for Ronald to come back and pound on the front door to be let in.
While she waited she watched Amy and Robert chase one of the rabbits in the back yard.
Not to kill and eat it, as anybody else in town would do with any rabbit they caught.
No, they wanted to make friends with it. To pet it if it would allow them to.
They hadn’t had a pet in well over a year, when their father declared their mutt Arnold too costly to feed and butchered him.
The kids refused to eat the dog, as did Monica.
That was fine with Ronald.
He was actually hoping that would be the case.
And he was happy to eat the whole dog himself.
Oddly enough, although they were outside when their father was killed, neither child heard the shot.
These days shots were common.
In fact, one seldom went a whole day without hearing a shot or two.
Sometimes several.
Those which came in clusters around sunset… the “killing hour”… were almost always mass suicides.
Most of the others were either someone being robbed or someone defending himself against robbers.
Sometimes the bad guys won, sometimes the good guys.
In this case it was debatable, for many would say Ronald was at least as bad as the man who shot him down in cold blood.
Chapter 34
By late afternoon Monica was getting worried.
By sundown she knew he wasn’t coming back.
The mission he went on should have taken him no more than an hour and a half, tops.
She used to worry about him when he was going out to rob people.
He lied to her. He told her he never hurt anybody.
But she knew better.
He frequently came back just a few minutes after she heard a gunshot.
And the loot he robbed frequently had fresh blood on it.
Sometimes brain matter.
Now, Monica wasn’t the smartest woman in the world.
But she knew someone couldn’t leave brain matter all over a backpack, mixed with a good amount of blood, and live to see another day.
She never called him on it.
She felt bad about that.
But she knew challenging him on his contention he didn’t kill his victims wouldn’t stop him from doing so.
It would only enrage him.
And increase the possibility she’d be his next victim.
She was so happy when they’d found the Spear house and took possession of it.
She’d no longer have to feel guilty about him gunning people down in cold blood.
Or so she thought.
One of two things happened to Ronald.
Either he finally decided to make good on his threat to leave her and the kids, or one of his victims got the upper hand and shot him first.
On the face of it, the first might be the most logical explanation.
That would explain the goodbye kiss from a man who’d left her dozens of times since the world went dark and never kissed her once.
But that didn’t make sense.
He finally found his nirvana.
He finally had a place so well stocked he wouldn’t have to leave it for years.
He wouldn’t walk away from it. He just wouldn’t.
The other option, that he was dead, was much more likely.
And that put her in a world of hurt.
After it grew dark outside even the children knew something was wrong.
They sat together in the corner, watching their mother as she lay coughing in an easy chair, trying not to vomit.
Finally she chose the words she wanted to share with them.
“I’m afraid your father’s not coming back.
“I don’t know if it’s because someone shot him, or because he doesn’t want to be a part of our family anymore.
“But I’m afraid it’s just us now.
“I need for the two of you to be strong.”
Amy said nothing.
Robert seemed to have something to say, but hesitated.
They waited.
There seemed to be no hurry.
Finally little seven year old Robert, who’d always been the most cowed by the brutality of his father and his ways, surprised them both.
“To hell with him,” he started. “We don’t need him. We never needed him. All he did was make the rest of us miserable.”
Amy was just a tad bit shocked, though she shouldn’t have been.
The fact was the vitriol was the longest string of words Robert had spoken at any one time in months.
It was as though he’d let the anger build within him until he found a perfect time to let it out.
Amy, for her part, was proud of her little brother.
He could have chosen that moment to cry for the loss of his father or to bemoan the fact he was now the de facto “man of the family.”
He chose neither.
Instead he chose to voice what all three of them were feeling, and it came from his heart.
Amy backed him up by saying, “He’s right, Mom.
“Now where do we go from here?”
“Now,” her mother answered, “we carry on.
“Your father thought the most dangerous time for us here was at night.
“I think he was probably right.
“We’ll continue to split the watch.
“It’s already dark outside. You two need to get to bed.
“I’ll take first watch.
“I’ll wake you up at two in the morning.
“You can help each other stay awake and listen for noises. If you hear anything, wake me up immediately and I’ll make a decision on what to do.”
“What’ll we do in the daytime, Mama?”
“In the daytime we’ll stay mostly in the house. There’s no reason to leave, really. When we need fresh air we’ll sit on the back patio or you two can play in the back yard.
“You’ll have to be quiet, though.
“Just because we haven’t heard any noise from the houses around us doesn’t necessarily mean they’re unoccupied.
“They might be trying to hide in plain sight as we’re doing.
“They might not have as much as we have in the way of provisions.
“And if they hear us over here they might try to overpower us and take what we have.
“Now go along, you two, and get upstairs to bed. Take your flashlights with you, but be sure you turn them off when you climb into bed to conserve the batteries.”
The tiny pair scooted off to the stairs, and she stopped them halfway up.
“You two don’t mourn your father. Whether he’s run off or he’s dead, Robert’s right about him.
“We don’t need the son of a bitch.”
Once the kids were out of sight Monica’s tough exterior quickly evaporated.
She collapsed in the chair and fought hard to keep from passing out.
She’d stay as strong as she could for as long as she could for her children’s sake.
Truth was, though, she was in a pitiful state.
Chapter 35
Beth tried her best to control her excitement.
Oklahoma was as flat as a pancake, as was the west Texas prairie before it.
Kansas started out flat too.
But the closer they got to the Ely area the more the landscape changed.
For the three previous days it was looking more and more like the low-rolling forests and farmlands Beth remembered her Aunt Karen’s home to be.
She knew instinctively they were getting closer.
She told her father when they were thirty miles from Ely, “From now on, I’m going to breathe a big whiff of air every hour. When I can smell my mom’s perfume I’ll know we’re right around the corner.”
Dave just smiled.
It was a rather silly thing for Beth to say.
But then again, despite all she’d been through of late she was still an eight year old girl.
It was still in her nature to be a bit silly from time to time.
He was glad the world hadn’t hardened her to the point she put all her childhood traits and habits behind her.
The landscape was looking familiar to Dave as well.
He estimated, at their current rate of travel, they’d be back at the Dykes brothers’ bunker late the next afternoon.
Perhaps early evening.
He was keeping that from Beth, though.
He told Beth not to expect to be there before the “day after next.”
Part of his reasoning was he didn’t want his daughter to ask him every half hour, “Are we there yet?” like she once did when they went on long car trips together.
Mostly, though, it was because while the world had yet to taint his baby girl, it had changed Dave.
It had made him less optimistic than he once was.
Less likely to take things for granted.
More cautious.
And maybe just a little bit paranoid.
He’d always had a sense of foreboding that bad things might be amiss.
In the Corps that sense served him well. It kept him from walking headlong into occasional ambushes.
In this case, it told him he shouldn’t take for granted that everything at the bunker was as he’d left it.
He certainly hoped it was, for he was battle weary and just wanted to get his family back together again.
He prayed for that very thing every morning before he put his head down to sleep, and again every evening when he awakened.
But at the same time, he wasn’t going to make any assumptions.
Those who made assumptions in the new world were suckers who often got surpris
ed.
And often got killed.
He’d go in hoping for the best and expecting the worst.
As they rode along at the thundering pace of a couple of miles an hour or so, he and Sal had a lot of time to talk and get to know one another.
Now that Sal had his medication his shakes had gone away. So had his double vision and dizzy spells, and he actually got the sense he might survive the trip after all.
His return to Kansas was melancholy for a couple of reasons.
First, because he was convinced, despite Dave’s protestations to the contrary, that Sarah would be so enraged at his having taken Beth some months before that she’d banish him from their lives.
And he loved Beth as much as any grandfather ever loved a child; that thought terrified him.
Second, because driving through this part of the country a second time brought back memories he hadn’t expected to encounter.
Many of them were very pleasant memories, for when he came through here the first time his beloved Nellie was still alive and by his side.
At one point they passed a sign which said:
LITTLE MISSOURI RIVER
As they crossed over the bridge just past the sign Dave remarked, “This looks a lot smaller than I expected the Missouri River to be.
Sal said nothing.
Dave thought the old man simply hadn’t heard him, and repeated his comment.
“I expected the mighty Missouri River to be a lot bigger than this.”
Sal still ignored him, and appeared to be deep in thought.
Dave let it go for a couple of minutes.
They traversed the bridge and pulled the rig over to a rest area on the other side.
Dave parked it under a big shade tree and pulled up the brake.
“Did I say something wrong, Sal? If I did I apologize.”
“Oh, no, my friend. You said nothing wrong. It’s just that…”
He swallowed hard before continuing.
“This is where I last heard my Nellie laughing.”
He looked directly at Dave, and Dave could see for the first time his friend had tears in his eyes.
He elaborated, “Nellie was a shell of her former self. The Alzheimer’s and dementia took its toll in her last years.
“Most of the time she just stared straight ahead and said nothing.
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