The Orphans (Book 6): Divided

by mike Evans

“Timmy, your cousin said that your grandpa had a truck; is that the only other thing around here that you can drive?”

  Timmy pointed to a steel building, laughing. “No, he has a couple things.”

  Shaun and the others followed. Shaun was hesitant; they’d had very little good experiences with large dark spaces. Visions of walking through a Home Depot definitely had not been forgotten, or Hammond getting torn apart in front of him, and how he’d gotten the honor of taking him out, rather than listening to his blood curdling screams echo through the building. Shaun brought his machine gun down off his shoulder, holding it up. “You guys spread those doors, Timmy you get back. Like, way back. The last thing I need on my consciousness is you being taken out in the first few hours you’ve been out of your little bunker.”

  Timmy nodded, taking four or five very large and dramatic steps back. Shaun realized by the smile on the boy’s face that there was a very strong chance that he’d gotten a much younger, smaller version of Greg to contend with. Shaun and Brady stood ready for anything to come out while Ben and Jay pulled the two doors apart. Shaun had the flashlight on the bottom of his rifle and was taking the gun back and forth, ready for anything.

  Other than a racoon and a few dozen pigeons in the rafters, nothing seemed to be in there. Shaun walked in slowly, making sure that they were good to go before even worrying about anything inside the building.

  Shaun motioned for them to come in and they finished opening the doors, flooding it with light. An ancient RV sat in the corner, not a spot of rust on it. Shaun saw the pickup that Talon had been talking about, and then thought of clowns pouring out of a car at the circus. They’d be exposed and have absolutely no place with which to put their newfound supplies, and with this much space, they’d be able to stop back by the Humvee and get all that had been forced to be left behind. “Hey, we can take the truck to get the gear we left. After that we come back and then head east in the RV we’ll never all fit in that truck.”

  “Don’t you think that is going to be up to Talon and Brandy?” Brady asked.

  “We can take one of them, there’s no reason that they’ll need two. At the very worst, they drive us to a town where we can be dropped off. We can find a car there, I’m sure,” Shaun said.

  Ben clasped at his heart. “Wait, are you finally looking at the upside of something, Mr. Fox? Our fearless leader who knows nothing good to ever say finally thinks it will all work out for the best?”

  Shaun turned around, walking back out of the giant structure. “Well, we either live or we die. I figure we have about a fifty-fifty chance. I’ll try not to blow any more gas lines if I have the chance, and I bet that’ll put us up just a little bit higher on the survival food chain. You guys see if you can find keys for those, or we can just ask Brandy and Talon if they have any idea where we would find them.”

  “Given they aren’t going to try shooting us when we bring up taking their shit, right?” Ben asked.

  “Exactly.”

  Ben whispered to Timmy, “You wouldn’t know where the keys to these are by any chance, would you, Timmy?”

  “Probably in the hole. Grandpa never was scared of having someone steal something.”

  “Why’s that?” Ben asked.

  “Because he always said that there’s a reason that people are allowed to have guns. He always told me if someone was dumb enough to try to steal from him, that he’d be right kind to go ahead and take the space and air they were wasting from Earth and help them quit wasting it.”

  “I don’t understand?” Ben replied.

  Timmy held up two fingers pointing them directly at Ben’s chest and yelled, “Kaboom!” holding up his two fingers and waving them in the air as he pretended to blow the smoke from his makeshift barrel. The little boy winked, turning around and laughing hysterically as he ran out of the giant Morton storage building.

  Shaun walked up to the house, not overly happy about catching the tail end of a conversation. He wasn’t sure who was for what, but could tell they were most definitely on different ends of the spectrum.

  “You don’t even know them, Talon. How in the hell can you trust them? What are you thinking?” Brandy asked.

  “What am I thinking? Are you serious? I don’t know, Brandy, maybe I’m thinking that these were the first guys that have stopped here in a year. On top of that, they seem to know more about these things than we do.”

  “Anyone not trapped in a basement would know more than us at this point, you idiot. What makes you want to leave this farm so badly?” She slammed her foot down in protest.

  “Because we don’t have anyone. Grandpa Pete is gone, grandma is gone, there’s nobody. If anyone was still alive for us they’d have come by now. We have a decent stockpile of what grandpa kept. If we can find somewhere safer, somewhere with real supplies, we can stay there. We only need to stay with the guys for as long as we want to. There’s nothing we need to do but move and find a place we like. Timmy needs to have somewhere safe, somewhere that he’s going to have a chance. He’s our responsibility now.”

  “That is bullshit! He’s my brother, so he’s my problem now. I know you’re the oldest, and that you are the oldest grandson, and whatever other bullshit you want to say, but it doesn’t mean you are in charge now.”

  “You want to stay here? How long do you think those canned goods are going to last? Another four or five months, then what? What do we do? Grandma made sure there wasn’t any pigs left to butcher, and the meat she had already went bad as well, I'm sure, shortly after the electricity went out. You can keep a ton of guns, but if they come from more than one direction the way they were calling them—groups, or hordes, whatever it was—I don’t want to go at this thing alone. We stick with them as long as we can, and as long as it makes sense. We can go anywhere you want, but I don’t think we should stay here. Either way, it seems like a smart idea to stay with them.”

  Brandy walked back and forth before she opened her mouth. Then she saw Shaun standing there, trying to not look like he was overhearing anything they were saying. “How long have you been standing there?” she demanded.

  “I was just going to ask you if you guys think that RV would run good? It looks like it’s been in there for quite a few years. You guys do whatever you want to, but I really would like to take that RV. Supplies aren’t something you pass up. If you don’t want to go with us, that is at the very least something you need to know. Every toilet paper roll, every can of non-expired food, bottled water, every bullet. You don’t leave it if you don’t have to. We had to pass on a shit ton of stuff in the last town we were in, and then we accidently—or I accidentally—blew the town up, or we’d have figured out a way to go back and get it.”

  Brandy ran her hands through her hair, trying to burn the sentence out of her head about him blowing an entire town up. “You really think you know what you are doing? I mean you aren’t going to get everyone killed? Timmy is eight, he doesn’t deserve any of this.”

  “Life isn’t fair, and this thing is like cancer. No one is safe, and it doesn’t take long for it to catch up to you. You will lose people, hopefully not each other. Just make sure that when you do, you get somewhere safe before you let your heart break. You need to be able to deal with hell and push forward, or hell will catch up to you. I’ll do my best to keep you three alive. I’ll try not to do anything too stupid. But it is what it is in the end, and I’m sorry for that, but there’s little, if anything, I can do besides that.”

  Talon was walking back and forth. He looked like he still had plenty in him for their debate, which to Shaun, looked like it’d been going on since he had gone outside to look in the shed. “Hey, Brandy, at least he isn’t too full of shit. I think I’d rather not go with him and stay here, or go off on our own if he told us it’s going to be nothing but a tea party on the open road with nothing to fear. You know what I mean?”

  She looked around the small house that she’d been coming to for as long as she had memories to remember. “Y
es, I understand what you are saying. I’m not sure that it makes me feel one bit better though.”

  “That isn’t my strong point, Brandy. I tell it how it is. That way if something bad happens I don’t have to deal with someone pissed off that things didn’t go right. So, about the RV—am I good to try starting it, maybe pull it out and let it run for a few minutes? I’d say confidently that gas has been in there for the last year, what do you think? I don’t know how long it takes to expire.”

  “You aren’t that funny,” Talon replied. “Go ahead and start it. Keys should be in it. Pull it out, leave it running, it’ll do it good. More than likely my grandpa will have extra gas somewhere, and fresh oil we can put in it. Won’t take us long to get that stuff done. I’d rather make sure everything is as fresh as we can get it before heading off to god knows where. Might not be another gas or oil station that we find for quite a while that has accessible fuel.”

  “Sounds like a solid plan to me. You guys coming with, I take it?” Shaun inquired.

  Talon looked to Brandy, who reluctantly shrugged her shoulders. “Let us pack some stuff up before we leave,” Brandy said reluctantly.

  “Take your time, I want to make sure we don’t leave anything behind. Everything we can find useful needs to go with us. We won’t be coming back here, at least probably not for a very long time. It is hard to say.”

  Brandy walked off, worried about what Timmy would be getting into. Shaun went to sit down, but a hand gripped around his bicep, yanking him back up. “You better know what you are doing, Shaun,” Talon threatened. “I’m not kidding. If anything happens, anything at all to my family, you’re dead. I shit you not.”

  “If you are that worried, stay here. Leave when it isn’t going to work out for you. You said you had enough to try to get through winter. Do you three want to leave when the weather is nice and not snowing, or would it be better to do it when the weather is at its worst? Maybe wait until there’s snow, and you are out of food, and you have no choice but to try to leave or die. I can say pretty confidently that isn’t how you want this thing to go. Really, think about it; is the point that you start starving the time that you’d like to try to make your decisions, or do you want to do it while you are of sound mind and body?”

  “I get it, Fox. Were you this uptight before all this shit happened?”

  “Nah, but it’s funny how the dead taking everyone and thing you care about away from you can leave you just a bit bitter,” Shaun said. “I’m sure you lost parents, uncles… but you probably didn’t have to put them out of their misery. I know I was the one that said we don’t talk about the past. But when you have your dad right in front of you and turning, that will leave a horrible taste in your mouth.”

  “I can see that. So, let me ask this, Shaun: where are we going next?”

  “I thought that there would be a lot of people headed east. It started here in Iowa. I’d say those on the coast would have had more time to figure out what was happening before it hit the fan.”

  “Before what hit the fan?”

  “The shit. Before the shit hit the fan, Talon. I still have hopes that just because the government fell, it doesn’t mean that everything else did. There could be walls built, or houses on the water, hell, ships, navy ships, yachts—who the hell knows. If anyone got reports of what was happening, they would have been half stupid to have gone back to shore on purpose.”

  “So, what if there are people out there? They aren’t going to come back for you unless they want to kill you or something.”

  “Maybe there’s an island that is safe, some place that we take others to while those that can fight are able to clear the country of those stupid things,” Shaun said.

  Talon walked to the kitchen, filling up the largest canning pot of his grandmas he could find with water, he wanted nothing more than boil it over an open fire and wash himself. “You know that I haven’t gotten a chance to clean myself properly with warm water for, like, a year? I’m sure everyone would like a turn in the bathroom before we head out in a few days.”

  “I’d love a warm bath. It feels like it has been a year, but it hasn’t. I don’t know if you checked that water, but there’s a good chance it’s still cold as hell. You got any intentions of actually making that water hot?”

  “Yep, that’s why you and I are going to make a fire. Once that’s done, we are going to heat up some disgusting ham in a jar and some corn, and whatever else we want to have. I suspect at some point maybe we can find something that isn’t canned.”

  “You can have one of the MREs. I’m sure that we would love to have whatever it is you have been growing sick of the last year, and you guys can have some of our rations. Seem fair?”

  “Sure, anything not jarred sounds good. Do me a favor—get all the guns and ammo down from the attic, Shaun, and you and I can clean everything once over before we leave. How many days do you want to stay here before we head east?”

  “Two days, three tops. I just want to let everyone get stuff ready. If there’s anything in that shed that we can use to put on that RV to reinforce the sides, I think that would be pretty smart. If we leave it as it is, we might have some issues when the dead try to put their hands through whatever it is made of.”

  “I’m sure we can find something. Grandpa Pete had a ton of sheet metal that he just kept for the sake of it. He always thought it’d come in handy if there were ever a slew of pigs born that needed a temp house until he was able to sell them. We could bolt it to the tops and sides. I don’t know how well it’ll work, but I figure we could at least try it. He has chicken wire we could put across the windows to keep their hands out.”

  “Those things could rip apart barbed wire; probably won’t do so much good.”

  “How about if they try to take off the wire, we stick a barrel up to their head and squeeze one off. No brains, no problems, right? Isn’t that what you told me?” Talon questioned.

  “Yeah, I guess, something like that. It isn’t as easy as you think, but I’m pretty sure once we have to deal with our first horde that you will get the point. It doesn’t always go as planned, I promise that. The best laid plans are just God’s way of reminding us how much control we have.”

  Chapter 6

  Brandy and Timmy spent the next two days getting every ounce of edible food from the house that they could and packed in anything that would fit in the RV. Shaun took Ben and Talon to the Humvee, where they stripped it of every weapon, bullet, and supply it had that he thought could be deemed useful.

  When they drove by the fried horde, and Talon got his first chance to see them in masses, he could only shake his head. “We would never have lasted a year if we would have tried going to town for supplies. How the hell is anyone still alive? I mean, how haven’t these things killed every last thing on Earth?”

  “I don’t know,” Ben replied. “In my opinion… it’s better than the alternative of being dead—or worse… being one of those.”

  The boys had made the crudest armor for the RV that their less-than-skilled hands knew how to. Talon had known how to use some of his grandpa’s tools. They’d taken their time, trying the best that they could to cut the sheet metal to fit to the RV’s body.

  Shaun had mentioned that one serious concern was that they were taking something that worked, and how they were probably adding hundreds upon hundreds of pounds to it, and how it could tip if the moment presented itself. When no one seemed to get the gist of his point, he’d gone on further to mention they needed to have gas, and that gas needed to last. Talon had shown him that they had a small reserve of gas on the farm. With a small amount of ingenuity and a lot of luck, they’d found a way to attach the gas can on a propane tank hauler that his grandpa Pete had. They’d pumped the tires with an old bike pump, thinking that they’d never get the air pressure needed, but eventually they had.

  The small group stared at the ugliest RV known to man, now covered with rusty sheet metal on the sides and tops, with chicken wire across
the windshield. Shaun had had too many issues with the dead trying to fight their way in through the window. He knew that the pain of the barbed wire would do nothing to stop them, but that, at the very least, it would buy them the time with which they needed to try to find a way to deter them. When Talon had tried to inquire what he meant by deter, he’d pointed to his skull and pulled the trigger.

  In less than four days, they’d accomplished everything that they needed to try to make the trip east. Each of them seeming to have different expectations as to what they were expecting to see, who they would find, and if they would part ways. The rest of the boys had gotten more time with their rifles, and with the added time to work out, had gotten in even stronger shape. They’d found sunscreen to help Brandy, Talon, and Timmy; their natural redhead hair and fair skin tone was not something they had to deal with themselves, and they knew that they’d burn; especially with as little sun as they had been able to get the last year.

  They locked up the house right before they left, leaving a sign that said, “empty nothing to take.” The crew drove east, not straining the engine and taking it easy. Shaun had let Talon drive, wanting to know who he could trust behind the wheel. They’d taken it out a few times before to try to get the hang of the extra weight. They’d almost tipped it twice driving it around a corner, trying to see how much difference the armor plating had made to the side. The first time they thought they were going over, they’d decided they’d go to hell and back if it meant they didn’t need to speed in the RV, for the outcome would be disastrous.