An Unwelcome Homecoming

by Darrell Maloney

  That meant she had two men on her “kill list.”

  She smiled and thought, “Damn. I’d better get started soon, before it grows even bigger.”

  One of the things she thought she’d do to help her solve Melissa’s murder was to take the girl’s diary home and read it. She wasn’t a nosy girl by nature, but she thought it might provide some clues.

  And she didn’t think Melissa would mind, under the circumstances.

  As bad as her own rape was, Kristy survived. She couldn’t even imagine the horror Melissa must have felt. Both were savagely raped and beaten. One watched the other die, knowing she was next.

  Neither deserved what they got, and both deserved vengeance.

  Now, as much to get her mind off her possible pregnancy as anything else, she opened Melissa’s diary and poured herself into it.

  The first entry was almost three years before, when the world was normal. It reflected the carefree thoughts of a typical teenage girl who didn’t have to worry about where her next meal would come from or whether bad men would break into her home and murder her.

  December 12: OMG, I’m so beyond cloud nine today. Jason not only looked at me, he said hello to me. It happened in the hallway between third and fourth period. What a perfect smile, what a perfect face, he’s just totally perfect. And I, of course, was a doofus. I was so surprised I just stood there with my mouth open and drooled. He’ll probably never say hello to me again and tell his friends I’m an idiot. God, I sure hope not.

  That was the Melissa that Kristy remembered. She always had a crush on this boy or that boy, usually football or basketball players. And as much as Kristy encouraged her to approach them, to let them know about her feelings, she was always hesitant to do so.

  He was terribly tongue tied and terribly embarrassed when she talked to boys, and Kristy tried her best to help her overcome her shyness.

  “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” Kristy once told her.

  “If I don’t talk to them they won’t know I’m a jackass,” she countered.

  “Oh, you’re not a jackass, Melissa. Maybe a stubborn old mule. But certainly not a jackass.”

  A couple of pages later Kristy saw her own name for the first time.

  January 12: I hate school. Some dummy stepped on my foot in the hallway and kept right on going. No “excuse me,” no “can I call you an ambulance,” nothing. People are so careless and my foot still hurts. On the plus side, I made a new friend today. Her name is Kristy and she seems very nice. And she’s going to McNarry High next year, just like me : -)

  Chapter 43

  At that moment Kristy heard a loud crash and put the diary aside.

  Now mind you, she didn’t move very fast these days. She moved slightly faster than grass grows but not quite as fast as paint dries. But it’s all in the effort and the intent, and she would have felt bad if she hadn’t gone to help.

  One painful step at a time she made it from the room she’d been using to the room Angie shared with Amy.

  And there, there was a sight to behold.

  Dave Spear, during the three years he’d spent stocking the basement for his Armageddon, had amassed a considerable amount of drinking water.

  Rather than fill one room from floor to ceiling, he lined the outer walls with the stuff. One single layer, stacked sideways, all the way to the ceiling.

  It made each of the rooms look smaller and indeed each one was. But he’d had logic in mind when he did it.

  First of all, the water helped insulate the basement from the cold. For just like snow on a roof makes a house warmer by acting as insulation, so did Dave’s water barrier protect the basement from the extremely cold ground.

  Secondly, it helped Dave keep a secret.

  And they were learning that Dave had a lot of secrets.

  Now, having said that, let’s go back to the incredible sight before Kristy’s eyes… and why she couldn’t help but break into laughter.

  It seemed that Robert, for reasons known only to him, tried to climb to the top of one of the water stacks.

  A stack of cases of water, no matter who stacked them or how well stacked they are, isn’t sturdy enough to take the weight of an eight year old boy.

  When Robert was almost to the top, the stack collapsed, sending him flying.

  Further, the plastic covering on cases of drinking water isn’t strong enough to hold the case together when, say, a little boy sends said cases crashing to the floor.

  Robert wasn’t the only thing sent sprawling when the water came down with him. Several of the cases tore open and water bottles went flying. They were everywhere.

  As Kristy stumbled into the room, Robert was still sprawled out on the floor, trying to figure out how his plan to climb to the top of Water Mountain could fail so miserably.

  Amy, hands on hips and with the tone of a mother rather than a sister, was chastising him. “I hope you know you’re cleaning up this mess, ‘cause I sure ain’t!”

  Angela, finding the whole thing funny but not wanting to embarrass the boy any more than he already was, offered her support.

  “It’s a good thing plastic bottles bounce instead of break. I’ll help you pick them all up, Robert.”

  Amy said, “What on earth were you trying to do, bonehead?”

  “I was trying to make my way into your closet.”

  “What? That’s insane. We don’t have a closet!”

  He worked himself up into a seated position before answering.

  “Yes you do. Now who’s the bonehead, you bonehead?”

  As proof, he pointed to the gap between the stacks of water.

  The gap created when the stack he was climbing on came tumbling down like Humpty Dumpty.

  There, clearly visible beyond the gap, was the open doorway of a closet they didn’t even know existed.

  Dave had removed the closet door, as well as the door frame, and had turned the closet into a secret storage room.

  Inside the closet were shelves which contained several items, though they were too hard to see in the darkness cast by the remaining stacks of water.

  Amy said, “Hold on, I’ll get a flashlight.”

  One of the many survivalist tools Dave stocked in the basement were several flashlights. They survived the EMPs because they were underground in a plywood-lined metal trunk, as were ninety six rechargeable batteries and two six-port battery chargers.

  Amy was back in a flash, squeezing her skinny body through the gap and into the closet.

  “Holy crap,” she yelled back. “Guns and ammunition and candy bars!”

  She returned with a handful of giant Hershey’s bars. The one pound kind most retailers only sell at Christmas time.

  Robert immediately held out his hand for one.

  Amy turned her body so they were just out of his reach.

  “Hey, go get your own, there’s lots more of them.”

  Robert needed no more prompting. He grabbed the flashlight out of her hand and dove into the closet himself.

  The closet held a rather odd assortment of items. Besides the candy, there was another plywood-lined metal trunk containing more flashlights and batteries. There were several cartons of cigarettes, shrink wrapped in heavy plastic. Several zip-locked bags marked “trail mix” and several others marked “beef jerky.”

  There were boxes of ammunition and four more handguns.

  Twelve bottles of Jack Daniel’s whiskey.

  Four bottles of Cuervo tequila.

  One at a time, each of the kids went into the closet with the flashlight and marveled at its contents.

  Each of them came out with at least one of the candy bars. Because, hey, they were Hershey bars.

  All were puzzling about why the stash was there and why it was hidden the way it was.

  But Angela, the last one in and out, solved the mystery.

  She’s the only one who happened to glance down at her feet while in the closet, and therefore the only one who noticed a small yellow sticky
note which had fallen off of something once upon a time.

  She picked it up and read it. It said, “Store these in one of the bartering closets.”

  Chapter 44

  It turned out that in the several years Dave and Sarah Anna Spear were preppers, they’d thought of pretty much everything.

  They knew there would come a time when people would leave their houses and barter things they had for things they needed.

  This was a stash of things they set aside for that purpose.

  And they buried them behind a wall of water to discourage themselves from using any of it before the time came to barter it.

  All four of them pigged out on chocolate candy that evening.

  Amy told Robert, “You remember Momma used to tell us all the time that if we ate too much candy we’d get a stomach ache?”

  “Yeah. So what?”

  “She must have been eating the wrong kind of candy. I’m so full I can’t eat another bite. And I feel just fine.”

  Kristy excused herself to go to Big Stinky to use the restroom and came back in a totally different mood.

  From across the room she caught the eye of her sister Angela, who was sprawled across a sea of water bottles and finishing off the last of her second chocolate bar.

  When she looked at Kristy, Kristy smiled broadly and gave her a thumbs up.

  It took a moment for Angela to translate her sister’s message. But when she did she got all kinds of excited.

  Her face brightened and she sprang from her spot, kicking bottles out of the way to get to the doorway without breaking any of them.

  Kristy backed up into the hallway and Angie followed her.

  Angie said, “Does that mean what I think it means?”

  “Yes,” Kristy replied, “I’m not pregnant after all.”

  The others would notice that Angie and Kristy were incredibly happy for the rest of the day.

  “On cloud nine” kind of happy.

  They would never find out why they were so happy, but would assume it was the chocolate they ate.

  In the aftermath of Robert’s discovery several things happened.

  Because of his discovery, and his fixing the stench in Big Stinky, he was accepted as a contributing member of the group. He was no longer regarded as just a little kid and was recognized as someone worth keeping.

  They needed a new name for Big Stinky, since it wasn’t stinky any more. They decided, that from now to forever, it would be called “Not Stinky.”

  Because… hey, they’re kids, okay?

  The others, happy they were able to gorge themselves on chocolate, helped him pick up the bottles strewn all over the room and restack them.

  Angie, while picking up bottles next to Robert, reached for one at the same time Robert did. Their hands touched by accident.

  And that was all it took for Angie to develop a little girl crush to match his crush for her.

  Neither would tell the other for quite some time, but it gave both of them someone to dream about each night when they fell asleep.

  They checked the other two bedrooms and the dining room, and discovered that each had closets full of bartering materials.

  Kristy was driven to ask, “I wonder where they got all the money for this stuff? From looking at the rest of the house and the neighborhood in general, they didn’t strike me as particularly rich.”

  Truth was, the Spears weren’t rich. They were a middle class family living in a middle class neighborhood.

  What they were, though, was dedicated.

  To their prepping efforts, that is.

  Four years before the blackout Dave took a part-time job at a cabinet shop.

  They didn’t really need the money. He already had a full-time job, and Sarah was working as a teacher.

  But like many preppers, their style of living just didn’t leave much money at the end of the day for prepping supplies and food stores.

  That’s where the part-time job came in.

  Dave made a promise to Sarah that every dollar of the checks he received for working sixteen hours a week building cabinets would be devoted to their prepping project.

  It was a pain in Dave’s neck occasionally, for there were a lot of Saturday mornings he’d rather stay in bed than get up and go to the shop.

  And there were many times they had to reschedule things so that Dave could go in on Tuesday and Thursday evenings.

  But when the stuff hit the fan and ninety five percent of San Antonio was unprepared, Dave and Sarah were.

  And Dave decided it was all worth it.

  The only problem was, they were more than a hundred miles away and wouldn’t be home for three or four more months.

  When they did return home, they’d find that their house wasn’t unoccupied, like they’d left it.

  And that would be a problem.

  Chapter 45

  In Blanco, Dave drove a quad runner into the forest, dragging a homemade sled behind him.

  The quad runner was loaned to him by a man named Scott Hammer, who was doing a bang-up business modifying such machines so they’d run again.

  Before the blackout Scott was a master welder and sheet metal fabricator, able to fashion pretty much anything out of anything.

  The machine Dave was currently using was a quad runner frame, on which was mounted the pull-start engine from a garden tiller.

  And it worked just as well as if it was manufactured that way.

  The sled was also something Scott threw together in a couple of hours, using a piece of sheet metal attached to a wooden frame.

  It was nothing fancy. None of Scott’s work was. Some of his creations looked so ridiculous they could have stepped right of a children’s story book.

  But they were well built and very functional.

  And in the end, that counted much more than the design or the cosmetics.

  A few minutes later he found a tall fir tree. It was about ninety percent dead, yet not so rotten it wouldn’t burn.

  Ten minutes later he felled the tree, using his trusty chainsaw.

  Twenty minutes after that he finished shaving all the branches off it, leaving him what was essentially a fifty foot long fireplace log.

  Trouble was, he didn’t know anyone who had a fifty foot wide fireplace.

  “Darn it,” he said to himself. “I guess I’ll have to cut it into pieces.”

  That part of the process took a little over an hour, since he had to give his chain saw a break to rest occasionally.

  Each time the chain saw rested he took his axe and wedge and cut each twelve inch wood round into six pieces.

  They were a bit smaller than he liked them, but small enough for an eighty pound widow to add to her fireplace without straining herself.

  Another thirty minutes loading the wood on the sled, ten minutes to tie down the load, and a twenty minute drive to Widow Wagner’s house.

  He was tired and took a short break. Sarah, if she were there, would give him a hard time about getting old. She’d say, “You had your break on the drive back, you big sissy. What happened to the man of steel I married?”

  He’d take a dozen pieces inside to fill up the rack next to Mrs. Wagner’s fireplace and stack the rest on her back porch.

  As usual, she would have a couple of chocolate chip cookies and a cup of slightly stale but very hot coffee waiting for him.

  He’d thank her profusely but tell her she was making him fat.

  She’d tell him to shut up and eat and that he wasn’t fat and he sounded like an old woman, going on and on about his weight.

  Once he was done he’d knock on the door and tell her he was headed out and she’d tell him he wasn’t going anywhere before he hugged her goodbye.

  She’d tell him once again how he reminded her of her lost son and he’d say he was way too old to be her son and that if he wasn’t already married he’d be bringing her flowers and trying to court her.

  That would make her day and she’d gossip with the other widows on
widow’s row about this nice young man and they’d wonder as a group how they ever got by without him.

  Dave, as he was leaving Widow Wagner’s house, would check his watch and see that it was well past one in the afternoon. His day was half over already.

  He’d run over to Red’s, where he’d refill the fuel tanks on both the four wheeler and the chainsaw, and fill his stomach with whatever they’d had for lunch.

  And then he’d be back at it.

  For that was one of the two runs he’d scheduled for the day.

  He’d repeat the whole process and take the second load to Mrs. Torres, another feisty widow who always insisted on making fresh buttered corn tortillas when he came to call.

  He’d never tell Widow Wagner, but he preferred the tortillas to the cookies.

  Chapter 46

  Dave repeated more or less the same process, every day he wasn’t hunting or fishing with his friend Woody.

  Every day except Sunday, that is. On Sundays he spent mornings and evenings in church with his family, and the afternoons doing other things with them.

  On what he called his “lumberjack days” he didn’t always cut and deliver wood for widows Wagner and Torres. He started those days by driving the quad runner through the yards of widows’ row and peeking at each house’s wood piles.

  The two houses with the least amounts of firewood would get his two loads of wood for that day.

  Winter was almost half over now, and he was well-settled into his new routine.

  The time was ripe for somebody to come along and throw a wrench into it.

  That wrench came flying on a Thursday afternoon as he was unloading wood for his second run customer, Miss Handy.

  Miss Handy wasn’t really a widow, though she lived on widows’ row. She was in her eighties now and found it very difficult to move around. She was still sound of mind though, sharp as a tack. And she was one of the town’s greatest treasures.

  Everyone knew Miss Handy, for she’d taught at the Blanco grade school for almost sixty years. Nearly anyone in Blanco who was younger than fifty had been her student, and she still knew every one of them by name.