Good Fences

by Boyd Craven III

  I could see it all over the monitor. At first glance I thought it was the tweakers coming back, but when they got close to the fence I could see Brandon Sanderson’s distinctive build. He was tall like me, but where I was wiry, he was more barrel chested. Brenda was called to watch through the window with her scope where she could also keep an eye on the monitor while Randy and I went to the gate.

  We walked out there, fully armed. I’d borrowed one of Randy’s spare tactical vests, and I kept it right by the kitchen table. It was a mini armory all on its own. Enough to hold six magazines, a small water bottle, a Ka-Bar I kept near the small of my back, sideways so I could pull it with my right hand and then it had basic first aid supplies in one of the dump pouches. There hadn’t been any trouble since the night they went and got the rest of the supplies from their house, so I wasn’t expecting any now.

  “How well do you know these guys?” Randy asked me as we walked.

  “They go to my church. I hired the four of them on to do the fence that last week before the EMP came down. Brandon could probably figure out what I was doing if he spent any time in the barn, but he kept his mouth shut and didn’t even bat an eye when I asked him to install the driveway gate.”

  “So he’s on the level?” Randy asked.

  “I think so. His wife is real sick. Cancer, I think, and him and his sons were hard workers. They’d show up here before I left for work and a lot of times left way after dinner time. I know they really needed the money… but half of the defenses here are from them.”

  “So you’re wanting to let them in?” Randy asked.

  I stopped walking, my jaw dropping.

  “We’ve been saying that we need more people. Lucy brought up all the livestock you have that you were going to send to the butcher… It’s not like we’re going to be hurting for food right away,” Randy admitted.

  “I thought you were worried about the time I wanted to run water to the neighbors at the subdivision? What’s changed?”

  “Nothing really,” Randy said and we started walking again.

  “How’s that any different?” I asked, trying not to be annoyed.

  “There’s 65 houses roughly in the subdivision. Most of them have at least three or four people including kids living in them. So that’s upwards of 240 mouths to start feeding and watering. It’s a math game. The ones who are still alive over there would soon want more than we could give them from over here. A small group like ours could easily defend ourselves if needed, but we don’t want to become the soup kitchen for everybody around here.”

  “Shit, you’re right Randy. I’m sorry, it’s just that the thought of kids over there, or even their parents suffering while we could probably help—“

  “There’s no probably,” Randy said interrupting me, “it’ll get us killed. You see how crazy some of those folks in that subdivision are. We haven’t even seen Landry or the kid since the morning after it happened… and he’s nuts. Lucy’s neighbor was nuts… What do you think’s going to happen when somebody’s little baby is crying because their stomach is empty and they’re hungry and thirsty?

  “Hopefully find them something to eat?” I said, knowing that was lame.

  Most people don’t know where their food comes from, nor how to produce, hunt or forage for it. The lawyer I’d dealt with at the fence line had said something similar. Why hunt when you could just kill off some of your own animals? You don’t need guns, he’d said… Sadly, I knew Randy was right, but I needed to hear it aloud from somebody else. To share my darkest thoughts so I didn’t bear my shame alone. I knew that was selfish, but it helped somehow.

  “We’ve talked about this. The first big die off is those on life support, the elderly or on medication,” he paused and saw the look on my face, “hey, we couldn’t have done anything for Mr. Matthews anyways, not unless you had a pacemaker that was shielded from an EMP and had a heart surgeon on standby.”

  “What you’re saying is that I’m buying my own trouble, aren’t I?” I asked.

  “Yep. Help those you know and trust and, a year from now, worry about the rest of the world,” Randy said.

  “That’s too much of an isolationist, lone wolf thing for me, man.” I told him after thinking about it.

  “Ok, maybe not a year, but those guys at the gate… We could really use some help around here and I’m guessing they didn’t come here to sell us Avon.”

  I laughed at that. Sure enough, when we got close the Sandersons were pulling that hand built cart so the rear of it could face the fence. I saw a woman, curled on her side, obviously in a lot of pain.

  “Brandon, what’s going on?” I asked, worried.

  “I was hoping… I mean… You were always so good to us, that last weeks’ worth of work made it so I could get Kristy’s medicine and make the bills. Now nothing works and I don’t know what to do. Me and the boys would be willing to do work, cut firewood or whatever it is if we could stay here for a little bit until things calmed down?”

  We talked at the gate for about five minutes and then let them in. I offered to help push the cart, but the sons all politely declined. I never knew their names and made a mental note to find out without looking like an ass later on. Their story came out in a rush, and it was pretty bad.

  A week ago, the prisons had been opened up. It was either let the prisoners loose or figure out a way to keep them in food and water. With less and less people showing up, they just threw the switches to manually unlock all cells and ran for their lives as the inmates tried to catch up and rain down their wrath upon them. All of it was told in a hurry by Brandon, whose neighbor had been a turnkey at the prison. He was one of the last men out, with the two slower ones behind him becoming cannon fodder to the angry population.

  With services going out and no hope of quick relief, the guards did what they could with their dwindling staff and everyone got their bare essentials done on every day, but every single prisoner was kept in their cell. No outside time, no socializing in the cafeteria, just the same bars they slept in every night. Most of them resented it and once they were set loose, well… it wasn’t pretty.

  His neighbor had gotten home and started packing. He filled in Brandon and told him to get out of there, but Brandon didn’t think it was as bad as the guy was saying. Three nights later, the inmates joined up. Black Panthers working with the Aryan Nation, with the only holdouts being the Muslim population. Those guys faded out of sight quick. They had started going house to house, neighborhood to neighborhood.

  They knew that the cops wouldn’t be coming, and if FEMA or the military hadn’t done anything in close to two weeks, that they’d be home free for quite a while. When Brandon’s house had been attacked, the four men were ready and the inmates had threatened from the cover of a car in the road that they’d be back later on that night.

  They loaded up Kristy and all the food they could and started walking. I’d seen Kristy was on the cart, but the boxes and bags around her must have been their supplies and food. I readily agreed to let them in and immediately had no clue where I wanted to put them.

  “How’s Kristy doing?” I asked Brandon, not sure if she could hear me through the fog of pain.

  “She’s been out of her medicine, can’t really eat without throwing up.”

  “Cancer?” Randy asked softly.

  The Sandersons nodded, none of them dry eyed.

  “Let’s get some food going and we’ll figure this out.”

  “So we can stay for now?” Brandon asked.

  “Yeah, we just have to figure out where to get you situated is all.” I told him.

  Five people, I suppose I could let them have the barn, or they could have floor space wherever they wanted… then it hit me. The hunting cabin. It was too far off the house for somebody to run there in an emergency, but it was close enough that maybe…. Hey, I had the big tractor that Mr. Matthews had given me. That could move it down close!

  “Randy?”

  “Yeah, Brian.”
/>   “Want to help me move that single wide I was going to use as a hunting shack?” I asked him.

  “Good idea! By the house?”

  “How about between the house and the barn? If we get the rest of the stuff out of your truck some night, we can hook it up to the water so they could do dishes and have a shower. Just… no bathroom. I don’t know how to hook it into the septic.”

  “I do, I’m a plumber, remember?” Randy said, bumping me with his shoulder.

  “Oh yeah… Well?”

  “I think it’s a good idea. If Frank, Kristen, Ken and the Docs do show up, we’re going to need more room anyways.” Frank told me.

  All we had to do was figure out if we really had enough food and figure out how to sneak into the subdivision and unload Randy’s truck without people seeing us. More and more people had been walking out to the fence, especially when the pigs and goats were out. It had worried me, but the folks were starting to look worn down.

  * * *

  We temporarily hooked up the trailer from the garden hose, the same way I’d done to the house. Since the driveway and turnaround by the barn was compacted gravel by the barn we were able to jack up the house, move things around and lower it on my big collection of blocks. I tried to fire up the Kubota, but it was as dead as I thought it would be. Still, I could scavenge the hydraulic parts, fittings and implements off it. Otherwise, it would remain where it was for now, a toy Spencer and the kids could play with until I needed the room.

  Right away, the Sanderson boys went to work, constructing bunk beds for inside the mostly empty trailer. They used up some of my scrap wood pile and then went through all the lumber left over from renovation projects. They’d overheard that there could be more people, so they didn’t even bother leaving the living room as a living room. They built five sets of bunk beds, but we had no mattresses for them.

  Which also made me think of Mr. Matthews and my inheritance. I still didn’t know what he had in the footlocker, or any idea of what he was going to finish telling me about in his note. I wanted to head over there one day, but with the Sandersons’ arrival, I didn’t want to leave until everyone was settled in. Almost immediately the boys had asked if they could expand the garden, and I explained that the tiller I had on the Kubota wouldn’t mount up to the old tractor Mr. Matthews had given me.

  They did some digging and found a shaft extension somewhere in my father’s piles of junk and, like magic, it suddenly was good to go. They hooked it up to the PTO and headed out towards my garden. I had about half a tank of diesel, but I also knew Mr. Matthews had a triple container tank in what he called his tank farm. He used it to keep his tractors topped off, and probably the semi that I hadn’t known he had. There was a lot of stuff there, and I really should have done more immediately, but I’d spent the last week reading my dad’s old foxfire books and one on country living. It was a tabletop book, easily 15x15. It was all reprinted articles and how-to’s. In it, there were plans on all kinds of things.

  What I’d really wanted to learn was how to butcher and smoke a hog, and then move on to goats. They had plans inside the book for building all kinds of smokers, smoke shacks and how to butcher animals, plus about half an inch of the book dedicated to foraging for food, medicine and vitamins. I just needed to figure out a way to start storing things for the long term, or we were going to have to throw away the food like the stuff I’d finally been forced to clean out of the fridge and freezer… well, it had gone to Ruby and the rest of the hogs, but I didn’t want to waste any more.

  “What do you think about something like this?” I showed Brandon one morning.

  “Do you have any chicken wire?”

  Oh boy, did I.

  He began cutting down saplings about two to three inches around, and then trimming all the limbs off until he had a dozen poles. He put six of the poles into the ground with the help of Steven, Bret and Brandon Jr. They’d used a post hole digger to get about three feet deep and put the poles in the ground. They cut off the poles at eight feet, so there was easily five feet in the height. Once they were set, they dug two more holes, one in the middle of the outer framework and one on the backside.

  The hole in the back was kept as small as possible, probably two feet away from the one in the middle of the new structure. I watched in interest, trying to guess what they were doing. The hole in the middle was widened up until you could fit a five gallon bucket into it then they dug from the big hole until they reached the smaller one outside. Poles were cut and fitted again, secured with nails to make cross beams on each end and two of them that flared into an A shape, the open end by the door. Then they laid poles the other direction on top of that. It was probably overkill, but it looked sturdy enough and when I shook the structure, it didn’t budge.

  Shelves were formed that way, and chicken wire was stretched over them. They were tacked into place and the boys went scavenging in my trash pile in the barn’s loft and came back with an old piece of cloth canvas my father had used to cover his car with back when I was a kid. Brandon Jr. came back with an old screen from a storm window and dropped it on the ground, where the smaller hole was outside.

  “You going to tell me how all this is supposed to work?” I asked them.

  “When I figure it out, I’ll let you know!” Brandon said, frustrating me.

  Randy had already figured things out, but I was still scratching my head on the two connected holes until they built a small fire.

  “Can I borrow a big cast iron pot?” Brandon asked.

  “Sure,” I said, going inside and finding the one my mom used to make stews.

  I hadn’t used it much, and hopefully whatever they were going to do wouldn’t ruin it. I doubted it would, people had been cooking over cast iron for so long… When I got back out there, there were three pieces of re-rod that had been laid across the big hole and they nodded when they saw the oversized pot.

  “Perfect, now let’s see if it’ll work,” Brandon said, putting two scoops of sawdust into the pot that was placed over the makeshift grate.

  “What about the other hole?” I asked, noting the smoke coming up from the one outside.

  “I don’t know if this will be the most efficient way, but I’m hoping it does… Ahhh see!”

  Little streamers of smoke started rising out of the pot as the sawdust from the bunk construction first turned brown and then combusted a moment or two later.

  “Wow that went quick. That won’t work if we’re trying to slow smoke something will it?” I asked.

  “I know what he’s doing,” Brenda interjected, walking up with Lucy. “He’s making this like a water smoker. There’s going to be some heat inside here, but most of the smoke is going to come from wood chips soaked in water then added to the pan there. The outer hole is to feed oxygen to the fire on the bottom.”

  “Exactly. And I think as long as no hot sparks go flying up, this canvas tarp will be pretty safe to use,” Brandon said.

  We all agreed, and soon we’d wrapped it up with the canvas, nailing it on in three spots. It didn’t have to be super tight, but we didn’t want to get flies in there while we were starting things out with food for the first time. The flap for the door was an unsecured piece. You pulled it over, hung the top on a trim nail Brandon had put in, and the bottom was held in place by a large rock. You could feed the fire from only once spot which kind of sucked, but when we ran it for the first time without food in it, I could tell that it wasn’t going to get too hot and cook not smoke the food.

  The Sanderson boys had re-tilled up a large garden and when they were done they checked on their mother. I hadn’t seen her upright since she came to the farm, but I’d stopped in to tell her hello on one of her good days. She looked pale and drawn. I wished there was something I could do, but I knew it wasn’t up to me.

  “Hey Brian,” Lucy called after I’d high fived the guys, “Come here a minute.”

  I walked over, all smiles.

  “Spencer has missed you terrib
ly this week. He thinks you’re mad at him,” she told me, her face serious.

  “I’m not mad at him!” I said, confused, “he’s been playing with the twins nonstop and I’ve been—“

  “You’ve been busy trying to set things up so we can all live. I know. But he misses you and… I miss you too.”

  Brenda had been walking back at that moment and she stopped and gave me a look and turned and walked the other way.

  “You know, you’re right. Let me go make friends with my buddy again and you and I can figure things out. I’m sorry if I’ve been ignoring you two.”

  “Good, he’s in the bedroom, pretending to be talking on the radio.”

  “It’s not hooked up though, is it?” I asked, sure I’d unhooked it last time I’d used it.

  I hadn’t used it often, really only to see whether the emergency broadcast had changed any. I put my AR up high on my dresser and headed into Lucy’s room. Little changes I hadn’t noticed previously were apparent. Lucy had hung her clothes in the closet and her makeup was sitting on my mother’s small desk where she used to get ready for work in the morning. Spencer had a trunk inside there. It was open and there were toys spilling out of it, compliments of the attic and what they’d brought back last time.

  “Come in good buddy, over, Rodger Dodger.” Spence said into a dead handset microphone.

  “Hey buddy,” I said flopping down on the bed sideways so I could see him.

  Slowly, he reached out and put the microphone on my father’s desk and slid off the stool.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to play the radio,” he said, tears starting to form, “I promise I’ll be a good boy.”

  Shit, that I wasn’t expecting. I was the one who’d gone in feeling guilty and the little guy thought it was something he’d done wrong. It wasn’t, I’d just gotten excited and caught up in getting projects done that I thought were necessary for our survival. But I realized right then that without friends, family and a reason to live, survival wasn’t enough. Not by itself.