by A. American
Jess covered her head as the gunfire crackled around her, a now all-too-familiar sound that caused her to shake uncontrollably. Mary crawled over to her, hugging the ground.
“What’s going on?” Mary asked, fear in her eyes.
All Jess could do was lay there with the side of her head pressed into the sand. She was too scared to even speak.
The security elements’ radios were full of shouts and calls. Then the camp siren began its long wail, adding to the din. Just when Jess thought it would never stop, the gunfire ceased. Humvees and ATVs were racing all over the camp as the sound of the siren began to wind down. Shortly after, the security officers jumped to their feet and ordered everyone up. They began herding the work detail back toward the housing area.
The camp was a hornet’s nest of activity. Once they were back at their tent, they were ordered to lock down, which consisted of sitting on their bunks in silence. To most of the women in the tent, the idea of sitting in silence after witnessing such violence was a joke. As soon as the door shut, they were all moving around, offering their theories and breaking into their respective cliques.
Jess was sitting on her bunk with her arms wrapped around her knees, her face tucked into them. She was trying to calm down, shaken by the memories of the last time she had heard a firefight. Mary leaned over, smiling.
“Hey, girl, it’s okay! We’re safe now.”
Jess forced a smile in return.
“Hey. I counted twenty-seven today; that’s the most yet,” Mary whispered to Jess. Mary had been trying to count the number of government personnel working in the camp. It was something to do to pass the time. Until today, she had identified twenty-three.
“I wonder how many people actually work here?” Mary asked, seemingly to the air. Jess knew she was trying to get her to talk, but she just wasn’t interested.
Mary continued chatting. “Get this. Apparently the shooting was from people outside the camp. Rebels.”
Outside of the camp? Jess couldn’t believe it, even though her work detail was by the perimeter, and the noise was coming from that direction, the thought of being attacked by outsiders seemed unbelievable. The camp was supposed to be a safe place—and now people were shooting at it? She couldn’t take any more. Pulling her wool blanket up, she rolled over and closed her eyes.
Chapter 2
Since I was in the lead, everyone followed me into my driveway. I drove around the house and stopped outside my workshop.
Thad jumped out of the buggy he was in and rushed over to me. “That had to be Jess! It was, wasn’t it?”
“Man, it sure looked like her. It had to be.”
Sarge was in earshot. “Who, Annie? Was Annie in that camp?”
“It sure looked like her, Sarge,” Thad replied.
“Why in the hell are you still calling her that, anyway?” I asked, rolling my eyes at Sarge’s nickname for her.
“I’ll call her whatever I want!” The old man snorted. “I just wish we could have confirmed whether it was her or not. If them assholes hadn’t started shooting we may have been able to.”
The guys all gathered around as a lively discussion about Jess began. Jeff interrupted with, “Wait, wait. Who the hell’s Jess?” All the guys stopped talking and looked at me expectantly. I gave him the elevator version: how I met her back when all of this chaos started, how she wouldn’t leave me alone until I agreed to let her walk with me. Thad chimed in about how she and I met him, and how she took to calling him the black Incredible Hulk. Together we told him about the family we tried to help, and Thad told about the shooting where I was injured. Once Jeff was up to speed, the talk moved back to her being in the camp. Sarge wanted to go get her, but knew it would be foolish to even consider.
“How’d she look?” Sarge asked.
Thad looked at me, and we both gave a little shrug. “Looked okay to me,” I said.
“Yeah, she looked all right. She was working, filling sandbags, from what I saw,” Thad said.
Sarge nodded his head. “That’s good. Anyone hurts that girl, I’ll kill ’em deader than shit.”
While he was stewing, I ducked into the shop.
“What the hell you doin’?” he called out as I crawled around under the shelves.
Spinning around on my knees, I held up a bottle of whiskey. The old grouch smiled, executed a perfect about-face and stepped out the door. I followed him out, twisting the top off the bottle as I did. I turned the bottle up and took a long pull on it. After what had just happened at the camp, I needed a drink. We stood around by the shop and passed the bottle. It wasn’t long before my daughters Little Bit and Taylor came out. They were slightly more at ease around Sarge and his crew now.
Sarge saw Little Bit coming toward us and knelt down, holding the bottle out. “Want a sip?”
She screwed her face up. “Eeww, no, that stuff’s gross.”
Sarge smiled and looked at me, then back to her. “An’ how do you know that?”
“’Cause it’s whiskey. I know what that is.”
Sarge smiled and patted her head as he stood up. Taylor grabbed my arm, laying her head against my arm. I looked over at her and asked if she was okay. She said she was fine, but I know her too well. Something was eating at her. She eventually got up and went into the shop and started to nose around the shelves of supplies. Sarge watched her as she went in, then jerked his head, indicating we should all walk away from the supplies for a bit.
“You guys know that after what went down today that staying here is a bad idea, right?” Sarge said quietly.
“Maybe, but they don’t know it was us,” Danny said.
“How many other people around here got wagons like those?” Sarge said, pointing to the buggies sitting in front of the shop. “You can bet yer ass they know who was out there, and they will be coming for us.”
“What do you think we should do?” Thad asked.
“It’s not what I think, it’s what’s got to be done. We need to un-ass this place. It’s time to go,” Sarge said flatly.
Danny and I shared a look. It was obvious to everyone that we weren’t on board with the idea.
“Look, guys, I agree with him. If we stay here, people are going to die,” Mike said.
“I agree,” Ted added.
“I personally don’t care what we do, as long as it keeps my ass alive,” Jeff said.
I looked at my house and property, then back at Danny. “I don’t want to leave. As bad as things are right now, at least my family has their home.”
“I know you don’t. Hell, a lot of people have lost everything recently.” Sarge paused and looked at Thad. “If you want to keep them alive, we need to get them out of here.”
“You’ve already got one daughter with a bullet wound, Morg. I know you don’t want to see it happen again,” Doc said.
“How about this,” Danny said. “We start moving some stuff out to the cabins, pre-positioning some supplies, and if things go south we can haul ass out of here with the rest of what we may need.”
This would be no small feat. The cabins were seventeen miles away on the Alexander Run. With only the Suburban and the buggies, it would take several trips and quite a bit of time to get done, which added to the urgency. If Sarge was correct and they did make a move on us here, we’d never get out with what we needed if we hesitated. Plus the sooner we started this and had people stationed on the river, the smaller the chance of someone else moving into the cabins. I started to change my mind on the matter.
It was agreed that we should start moving some stuff out as a precaution. Reggie said he wanted to take the pigs, which led to a discussion about how to pen them up. He said he had a solar-powered hot-wire rig. Sarge said we could use that and pen them up against the creek, using it as a natural barrier.
The next issue was how to secure what we took out there. Sarge st
arted going over a head count and how we could split everyone up, but he was forgetting some people.
“Don’t forget about Mel and the girls, plus Bobbie,” I said.
Sarge paused for a moment. “Can they use weapons?”
“Bobbie can,” Danny said.
“Mel, Taylor and Lee Ann can,” I said.
“I can too!”
We looked back to see Little Bit standing there. Her comment got a giggle out of everyone.
“I bet you can,” Ted said with a smile, shaking his head.
“I can. My daddy taught me.”
“So there are thirteen of us, then. All right.” Sarge laughed.
The plan we came up with would send Jeff and Mike out to the cabins. With only two of them, it would be tough to maintain a constant watch, but we hoped that being so far out in the woods would cut down on the number of potential intruders. In addition to keeping an eye on things, they would start on some of the projects we would need in place should we have to bug out. Sarge wanted us to do an inventory of everything we had that could be useful to take. With so many people, it was sure to be a substantial pile of supplies.
Sarge said he would take watch down at the barricade, and Thad volunteered to go with him. We all agreed to meet in the morning. Once everyone was gone, I went inside. Mel was just walking out of the bedroom, rubbing the sleep from her face.
“When did you get back?”
“Not long ago. How was your nap?”
“Good. I feel great. You hungry?”
“Of course,” I answered as I headed for the living room to check on Lee Ann.
She was still on the couch, as she had been when I left, listening to music on the iPad and drawing. She looked up as I came in and stretched her arms out, the universal sign for a hug. Sitting down on the edge of the couch, I gave her a hug and she pulled the earbuds out. I asked how her leg was, and she said it was feeling better and asked if she could go outside for a while to take a short walk. Danny had come across a crutch from somewhere, and Lee Ann was using it to get around. I told her she could but to be careful and take her sisters with her. She started to hobble toward the back door. With her gone, I went in to talk to Mel about the plan to start moving some supplies out to the cabins. She couldn’t remember where the cabins were located, even though we had seen them before when we kayaked down the run.
“What are they like?”
“Primitive.”
“How primitive?”
“They’re just plywood, really, but they’re solid and will make a decent place should we need to go to them.”
“Well, I hope we don’t have to go to them.”
“Me too, but it’s better safe than sorry. And after what happened today, we may have to.”
“Why? What’d you guys do?”
“I’ll tell you later,” I said as I headed for the back door. I didn’t want to scare her right now. The girls were outside throwing a Frisbee around, with Lee Ann leaning on her crutch, catching the tosses that passed within arm’s reach. It was nice to see them hanging out together, actually doing something besides bickering.
I stepped outside and intercepted the Frisbee from Little Bit, then threw it, tousling her hair as I continued to the edge of our property. It’d been a couple of days since I’d seen my neighbor Howard, which was unusual. I decided to go check on him; the last time I saw him he didn’t look so good. I headed for his place, nervous about what I was going to find.
There was no answer to my knock so I tried again and waited. It was obvious no one was coming, and I couldn’t hear any movement in the house, so I opened the door and called out. There was no reply, only a smell that assaulted my nostrils. Pulling a bandanna from my pocket, I covered my nose and ventured in. I found Howard lying still in his chair, a viscous discharge dripping from the dressing on his leg. His wife was on the couch across from his chair, slumped over with a syringe in her hand. It was just as Doc predicted—they were too proud to ask for help, and now they had reached their end. No wonder he had left them a bottle of morphine. In this new world, sometimes an option that you normally wouldn’t entertain was the only way out for folks in dire straits.
The saddest part about standing in Howard’s house looking at his bloated body was what I was thinking: I had two more graves to dig. It seemed like this was an almost-daily routine at this point. But it was getting late, and I wasn’t about to start digging in the dark. I left the house—one more day certainly wasn’t going to make a difference to them.
Once back inside my house, I told Mel I was going to Reggie’s house to talk to him for a minute. She asked why and I told her about Howard. While she was certainly sorry to hear, Mel didn’t know them very well and so the impact was minimal—just another death. She said she wanted to go to Reggie’s too, just to get out of the house, which sounded like a good plan to me. She called the girls inside and told Taylor we’d be back shortly. Taylor asked if she could make popcorn—it was becoming a rare treat, but after witnessing the gruesome events next door, I felt like I wanted to give my girls whatever bit of happiness I could. Lee Ann wanted to watch a movie and Little Bit started going through the DVDs. With the girls settled, we headed out.
Mel climbed on the Polaris, wrapping her arms around me. As I pulled through the gate, I tooted the horn at Thad and Sarge, who both waved.
Jeff was splitting wood by the front door.
“Hey, man, where’s Reggie?”
Jeff pulled his gloves off. “Out back, I think. Hi, Mel.”
“Hey, Jeff, thanks for splitting some wood for us.”
Jeff laughed. “Oh yeah, no problem. You did bring a hot dinner, right?”
I laughed at that one and we started around the house to find Reggie. He was at the barn cutting up a palm heart, throwing the pieces to the pigs.
“Hey, Morg.” He nodded his head toward Mel. “Mel, you trust this clown to drive you around?”
“Yeah, I do now. Doesn’t happen too often these days,” Mel replied.
“I guess not. What’s up?”
I told him about Howard and his wife. I didn’t even have to tell him we needed to dig graves.
“I’ll bring the tractor over in the morning,” he said, sighing a bit as he said it.
“Thanks, man; it makes it a lot easier. When are you guys going to start moving stuff?”
“Tomorrow. The old man is making a list of what he wants to take first.”
When I asked what kind of stuff was on the list, he laughed and answered, “Weird shit. PVC pipe, the gabions from the barricade, empty buckets, garden tools, fence, rolls of wire.” The thing that really topped the list was that Sarge wanted him to go around and check every abandoned house for a water filter, and if there was one he wanted the purple stuff inside it.
“Potassium permanganate has lots of uses,” I said.
“Like what?” Mel asked me.
“Water purification for one, explosives for another.”
Reggie laughed. “Let me guess which one he wants it for.”
“Sounds like lots of work to me. Guess we’re going to be a little busy.”
“Yeah, guess so.”
We said our good-byes and headed out. Mel said she wanted to go to Danny and Bobbie’s house, which was just down the road a bit. When we pulled up, Danny and Bobbie were sitting on the porch. They walked out to us and we chatted across the fence for a while. Neither of the ladies were thrilled at the prospect of having to leave. They understood the logic behind it but hoped it wouldn’t happen. Danny and I agreed with them on both accounts.
Danny said he was going through his seed collection and thinking about trying to start some plants. I didn’t have a lot of seeds, but I did have a few stray packs, enough to get a garden going. We’d always planted tomatoes, cucumber, squash, zucchini, green beans, peppers and onions. Between Danny and me
we should be able to put out a decent garden. Mel suggested we use the egg crates we keep on top of the fridge to start the seeds in; we could set them out in front of the sliding glass door to give them plenty of light and keep them from the cold.
We left them and headed back home. The difference in the neighborhood between now and six months ago was very apparent. It was now a virtual ghost town. Riding back toward home, none of the houses had any sign of life.
“All the houses seem empty. Where is everyone?” Mel asked over my shoulder.
“I guess they all left. I know some of them went to that camp at the old bombing range; maybe all of them did.”
She didn’t say anything else, just tightened her grip around me. As we approached our gate I could see Sarge and Thad down at the barricade. Mel asked to be let off so she could start dinner, and after she hopped off, I headed down to see them.
“What’s up?” I asked as I coasted to a stop.
Sarge leaned back and said, “We need to figure out who’s gonna relieve us. We’ve got to keep this thing manned.”
“I can come back later. Danny would probably come too.”
“Sounds good. You an’ him be here at twenty hundred; I’ll have some of the boys relieve you guys later tonight. Keep yer eyes open, bring yer NVGs and keep an eye out. Them bastards are prolly gonna try somethin’ soon enough.”
“You think so?” I asked.
“I think we need to plan on it,” Thad added.
“If they do, we need to be ready. Go tell Danny to stop by Reggie’s place to pick up some radios I’ve got. We’ll keep one here from now on. If anything happens, whoever is here will call for help an’ we’ll come a-runnin’,” Sarge said.
“Sounds good to me. I’ll go tell him. We can charge the radios at my place,” I replied.
“Good. On that note, you need to start thinking about what it’s going to take to get that solar power system moved. We’ll need it at the new location.”
