Hell's Encore: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller (This Dark Age Book 2)

by John L. Monk

  Not wanting to bother them any further, they left and shut the door.

  “That should hold them,” he said.

  The farmhouse itself was more depressing than anyplace Jack had seen. Dead people ripped apart by cockroaches, and maybe even by the birds themselves. Totally gross.

  “We gotta clean out the house,” Jack said with a grimace.

  Lisa looked alarmed. “Why?”

  “Someone has to stay here to feed the chickens, and to run the heater if it gets too cold.”

  “Why can’t we drive here every day and check on them?”

  Jack considered the idea, then shook his head. “I’d feel better if someone was here. There’s only fifteen birds. We can’t just let them have chicks and hope they raise them. We need a responsible volunteer. Someone mature.” He grimaced. “Then we have to convince the sucker to come live here—Cockroach Hell—instead of in the cabins with their friends.”

  “You mean with the other cabbages,” she said with a grin.

  “I’m trying not to say that anymore,” he said. “But yeah—them.”

  Lisa pursed her lips and nodded slowly. “All right, then. I’ll do it.”

  Jack blinked in surprise. “Really? Why?”

  She shrugged. “It’s too cramped back at the cabins, and honestly, I could use the alone time. I have a lot of reading to do.” She laughed lightly. “And I wouldn’t trust those cabbages to take care of a rock garden, let alone living animals.”

  6

  Jack finally had a look at the two other locations his hunters had found. More Leghorns and mixed breeds, and only one still had a rooster—an absolute must if they hoped to breed them.

  The flock without a rooster was in a sorry state, indeed. Skinny, listless, and mite infested. After thoroughly cleaning out their coop, Jack closed himself inside and spent the afternoon cornering the twelve remaining birds and treating them. Following the instructions in one of the books, he rubbed cooking oil on their legs and feet, and rubbed their feathers with a special delousing powder he’d found at the vet’s.

  Rather than immediately hook up a generator to the first farmhouse with the Rhode Island Reds, he had Lisa install one at the farm with the now deloused birds, figuring they needed it sooner. He trusted the book when it said the Reds could handle the cold.

  The third flock—which had a healthy rooster—was found at an occupied farmhouse managed by a thirteen-year-old boy named Randy who led a small group of younger kids. They didn’t only have chickens—they also had five horses and a small herd of goats of both sexes, one of which was a baby. The horses were all mares, but Jack wasn’t as concerned about horses right now.

  Randy’s group hadn’t killed any of their animals because they considered them pets. Instead, he’d scavenged root cellars at the neighboring farms for almost a year, traveling by horseback. Like the Dragsters, they’d discovered a grain silo of their own, but fed the grain to the animals. When Jack asked if they ever ate it, Randy had said, “Are you kidding? That’s gross.”

  Jack took Randy aside before he left. “I want to help you guys. I can send people here. Supplies, too. But you have to join us first. What you have will belong to us, and what we have will be yours.”

  Randy nodded, grinning ear-to-ear and looking a bit dazed. “That’s so awesome. Thank you. Thank you.”

  Jack smiled back. “I have a friend named Brad. He’s big and strong and can help with the load. He’ll bring some different food tomorrow. There’s not a lot of protein in root cellars.”

  “We got a deer a few times,” Randy said, “but didn’t seem right to eat some and leave the rest.”

  Randy and the others’ skin appeared a sickly shade of yellow, and when he smiled his gums looked red and puffy.

  “We’ll show you how to preserve it,” Jack said. “Do you like liver? Kidneys, that sort of thing?”

  The boy pulled a face. “Heck no.”

  Jack nodded. “We’ll send vitamins.”

  On the fourth day of The Great Chicken Hunt, as some were calling it, Jack ran outside to witness a happy sight: Steve, Will, and a kid named Joey had finally returned from their scouting. All the other teams had returned each day, but these three had been gone for more than thirty-six hours.

  They’d arrived on foot, having walked all the way back from a trek down 81 South. A daunting journey—about forty miles in near-freezing temperatures. Each night, they’d been forced to break into houses and burn furniture for warmth.

  Jack pulled Steve and Will aside. “How’d you lose your car?”

  “Remember that girl, Cassie?” Steve said. “Had a big crush on Carter?”

  “What about her?”

  “It was her and the others—the ones who left after Carter got his. You won’t believe it …”

  Steve said they’d been taking side roads and exits as they went along, looking for telltale barns and tractors, when they noticed they were being followed by two cars. They kept driving on 81, hoping to ditch them, but the cars kept following. They took a random exit to lose them in the backroads, then ran into a roadblock and couldn’t turn around.

  Steve said, “We got out with our hands up and they shot over our heads.”

  “To scare us,” Will said.

  “I don’t know if Cassie was in charge,” Steve said, “but she acted like it. They took our guns away—and my coat! It was freezing out, but she didn’t care. She just laughed.”

  Jack nodded. “How many were there?”

  “About ten,” Will said, and Steve agreed.

  “Are they still using pistols, or do they have rifles now?”

  “Pistols,” Steve said. “Like in the movies.”

  Jack was about to ask more questions when Molly stormed over and shushed him. “He almost died out there! Can’t you see he’s tired?”

  “More hungry than tired,” Steve said, throwing a lazy arm around her.

  Jack apologized, and the couple left for the comfortable warmth of the cabin.

  The next day, it got warmer—back to the lower forties—and the wind picked up. Every time the weather changed, Jack grew more anxious. Virginia wasn’t known for heavy snow like the western states, but it wasn’t unheard of. Seemed like every year since he was little there was at least some snow. Those were fun times. Snowmen and snow boulders with his dad. When the roads cleared, Jack would make snow forts in the twins’ neighborhood and have snowball wars with other kids.

  At Lisa’s request, Tony and Larry went scavenging for more generators. They returned with two more units, snagged from a hardware store.

  While Lisa wired one to the cockroach house, and from there to the occupied coop, Jack directed the Dragsters to help provision the farmhouses with fuel cars.

  Most tanks had plugs on the bottom for easy dumping. Failing that, they could be drilled and dumped repeatedly. It was the Dragsters who’d first started plugging the holes with wine stoppers. Pop the little plug in and push down the metal lever and the rubber would expand against the sides, creating a perfect seal.

  On the coldest days, the chicken sitters would run the generators to keep the coops warm. Eventually, before next winter, he’d add insulation and come up with other ways to heat them that didn’t rely on electricity. Greg thought maybe they could pipe in hot smoke, like a radiator. When Lisa said it would clog with soot and that they should use water—like an actual radiator—Greg told her to shush and make him a snack, and Lisa twisted his arm until he screamed Uncle!

  Stores of beef, grain, and jars of preserves from Freida’s dwindling cellar would keep the volunteers fed for the next three to four months of cold weather. Small caliber rifles would be used for varmint hunting. And because living in a house cut off from their friends would be lonely and boring, they’d each have books to read up on chickens and other farm animals.

  There were chores they had to do: keep the coops clean, and do perimeter checks every day to ensure predators couldn’t climb inside. He also told them to be careful—
that there was a hostile group out there with a grudge against them. If anyone arrived who didn’t know the signal—two long blasts on the horn followed by three short ones—they were to arm themselves and shoot to kill.

  “But only in self-defense,” Molly said with a troubled frown.

  Jack nodded. “Of course.”

  Only kids who were willing to kill were accepted as volunteers.

  The sky was a dome of pure, heavy grayness the day Lisa was set to depart.

  “You think it’ll come to that?” she said. “More killing?”

  “Probably not,” Jack said. “Hope not. I’d be happier if you took someone with you. Olivia, maybe. I can pick up the slack with the little kids. Or Greg can, actually.” They shared a quick, teasing smile. “Besides, I need to mend things with Molly. She’s still mad at me for the whole Steve thing. Wasn’t my fault he got ambushed like that.”

  “Doesn’t matter if it’s your fault,” Lisa said.

  Jack snorted. “Women.”

  She socked him hard in the arm. He rubbed it gingerly, feigning a hurt expression so she wouldn’t know how much he loved it.

  “So, what do you plan to do out there?” he said.

  “Lots of reading, and not only about chickens. Chemistry, engineering … anatomy.” She grunted in frustration. “A billion tons of medical stuff. You’re worried about chickens, but I’m worried about wisdom teeth and tetanus and how to make our own antibiotics.”

  Jack was impressed. “You can actually do all that?”

  She stared at him, mouth agape. “Are you kidding? Heck no! That’s the point. I still have to learn the basics. Hard to do that with you and Greg bothering me every five minutes.” Softening her tone, she added, “I’ll be fine. So will your dumb chickens. If we get chicks, I’ll move them to the house and keep them warm, like at Freida’s. I bet there’s special stuff for that in the barn. Remember those cages?”

  Jack shrugged noncommittally. He wanted to tell her she couldn’t go, but all that would do was earn him a fat lip. It couldn’t be healthy being there alone. Everyplace else had at least three volunteers. He’d almost suggested Randy stay with her, because of his animal knowledge, then held off at the last minute—out of sheer jealousy. The kid was a regular cowboy, with a horse and everything. Everyone knew girls loved horses and cowboys.

  I totally gotta up my game.

  “I’ll check on you every day,” Jack said. “Provided the roads are clear. You could get stuck there, you know …”

  She waved him off. “Just make sure you do the signal. I don’t want to shoot you.”

  “The way you shoot?”

  Lisa socked him in the arm again. When he rubbed it this time, it was more serious. She always hit hard, putting more force into it than strictly necessary, as if proving a point known only to her.

  “I need to go while it’s still light out,” she said as he stared at her, unsure whether to smile or pretend she’d broken his arm.

  “I’ll be by when I can with enough food to last the winter,” Jack said. “Take care tonight.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  She graced him with a reassuring smile, got in her car—packed high with books, a little food, and her favorite pillow—and then left.

  7

  Lisa’s first order of business was dragging the bodies of the dead family outside using the blankets they’d died in. Four adults. Their faces wore perpetual smiles through exposed bone, the flesh of their sickeningly light bodies consumed by the biggest roach infestation she’d ever seen or heard of.

  The one room the chickens hadn’t penetrated was coated with cockroach bodies—up the walls and along the ceilings, but thickest on the floor. The freeze had killed most of them, though apparently not all. Whenever she moved, shiny brown bodies would burrow down into the ankle-high covering of bugs.

  Everything in her balked at the idea of staying in that house. But she couldn’t spend the winter in a car or a tent with no heat. Only little girls were afraid of bugs, she told herself. She could do this. She would do this.

  “So nasty,” she hissed through a towel wrapped around her mouth. Even the Big Timber outhouse didn’t smell this bad.

  Lisa spent half the day dragging every piece of furniture outside. If it was too big, she cut it into pieces with a saw. Afterward, she tapped some gas from a fuel car and lit the filthy mess on fire. Watching the tainted clutter belching smoke into the sky, she allowed a triumphant smile. Even the chickens seemed excited … but maybe she was projecting.

  After leaving the door open to the now empty house so the birds could feast on any bugs that crept into view, she took a drive to the nearby town of Berryville. The Berryville Walmart—long since looted of food and useless TVs—yielded a variety of bug bombs with pictures of dead roaches on the labels. She also grabbed brand-new sheet sets and comforters, boxes of toothpaste, bars of soap and shampoo, a few boxes of trash bags, mops, buckets, floor cleaners, an inflatable mattress, and various types of brooms. And a set of dumbbells so she could work out. She hadn’t worked out in ages and wanted to get back into it.

  She still had room in the car, so she added twenty gallons of bottled water. The house had that cave out back with the pipe, and she hoped to get the pump running again. If she couldn’t make it work, she’d have to carry water every day.

  She forced a reluctant grin. Good exercise.

  Lisa topped off her haul with two space heaters and five extension cords—a safeguard in case something happened to the built-in heaters. The generator had a bank of standard outlets, so the setup would work.

  Before leaving, she took a routine tour of the pharmacy in search of antibiotics and painkillers, but it had already been looted. Undaunted, she wrote down the names of some of the other drugs to look up later in her drug book. Never knew what might come in handy.

  Back at the farmhouse, Lisa set off a bug bomb in every room. The directions said to let it soak for four hours, but she gave it an extra two to be sure, then went to inspect. Sure enough, none of the bugs on the floor were moving.

  It wasn’t a huge house, but it wasn’t small, either. It took an hour to sweep the mountain of bugs off the floor, walls, and ceiling into garbage bags, which she burned outside in the now smoldering fire. As an afterthought, she realized she should have scooped the dead ones out first, then fed them to the chickens. Now they were covered in poison.

  “Just let it go,” Lisa said.

  Easier said than done. It nagged at her—such wastefulness at a time when they needed to take every advantage offered. Tomorrow, when Jack brought the food, she’d divide it up in daily allotments for both the birds and herself, so as not to waste any.

  The ground-level floors were all hardwood. Lisa started there and saved the upstairs mess for last. After opening the windows so she could breathe, she swept the floor clean of dust and loose chicken poop. For the caked-up stuff, she hauled in buckets of water from the stream and spiked them heavily with pine-scented floor cleaner. She scrubbed lightly at first. When all that did was nothing at all, she soaked the mop completely and splashed water everywhere in big, sloppy passes, then let it set for ten minutes. After that, the poop came right up.

  Lisa emptied the dirty water in the toilet to drain, dumping bucket after bucket before she felt satisfied with the main floor.

  By now, her light was definitely fading. Though exhausted, she still had chickens to check on and a generator to run. The temperature outside was barely above freezing. Protected from the wind and packed in like that, the birds would probably be fine, but she wanted to test it now, before the weather got colder.

  Her emergence from the house revealed a startling scene: four cars parked on the road near the now-open gate. A boy and a girl stood near it pointing at the house, oblivious to her presence in the shadow of the covered patio.

  Quickly, Lisa exited out the back gate, then slipped around to her car. She opened the door and grabbed her rifle off the back seat. Glancing at the still-bur
ning fire, she cursed herself for an idiot. The day hadn’t been windy, and the oily black smoke snaking into the sky was a beacon to anyone who felt like driving by.

  She rested her rifle on the hood and peered through the 2x red dot scope at the vehicles. They were all in the cars now, cruising slowly up the main drive. She wondered if these were the same ex-Dragsters that had waylaid Steve and stolen all his stuff. A second later, she had her answer. One of the cars looked conspicuously like Steve’s yellow Mustang.

  Her rifle had a full, thirty-round magazine, and she didn’t have a spare handy. There were boxes of ammo still in the car, but it would take too long to reload. Every shot would have to count.

  The lead car stopped, the doors opened, and several kids filed out carrying pistols. Steve said the thieves had taken their ARs. Maybe they didn’t like the additional weight. Or the size. Or they didn’t appreciate the usefulness of a long gun at medium range. Lisa sure did. She was a terrible shot with a pistol, and only an adequate shot at best with the AR.

  She counted two girls and two boys—one of them wearing Steve’s orange coat—as they emerged from the Mustang. Of the girls, Lisa recognized one almost immediately: Cassie, Carter’s ex-girlfriend. Weeks ago, she’d sworn to kill Lisa, and now it appeared she was trying to make good on that threat.

  The other two cars pulled up and their occupants got out. Also armed with pistols. Eleven kids that she could see.

  A boy pointed at the lone chicken standing in the yard and yelled, “Drumsticks!” He shot at the bird and missed. The others laughed, and one of them fired at the now fleeing bird. He also missed, and then it was gone. Cassie didn’t laugh. Her face was screwed up in an ugly scowl as she angrily barked out orders nobody seemed to be listening to.

  While they were preoccupied, Lisa edged down behind her car and crawled underneath, inching forward with the rifle in front of her like the marines she’d seen in recruitment commercials before the Sickness. The kids on the other side of their cars were mostly protected. Which was fine. She racked the slide, aimed, and fired at Cassie.