HARD ROAD: Heaven Bound

by Terry McDonald

  “I’ve got a pistol for you. The safety’s set. You ever use a pistol before?”

  “We used to have one.”

  “Can I trust you not to shoot me with it?” Jake asked, before passing it to him.

  “I’m not going to shoot you.”

  “I’ll hold you to that. Remember, do not use it if you can run away, but if you have to use it, aim for the chest. You got it?”

  “Got it,” Al replied, checking the safety himself before slipping it into the pocket of his trousers.

  “We’re going to walk straight to the woods behind the house,” Jake said. “Try to walk so we don’t leave a trail.”

  Beth let Janie slide from her hip to stand, and took one of the bags from Jake.

  “She’s awake enough to walk. Allen, grab the other bag. If anything happens, Mister Jake might need both his hands.”

  They reached the woods, and he led them a few hundred feet deeper.

  “You girls keep quiet. Al and I are going back to the field to make sure no one is following us. If you hear any shooting, you two head straight away from here. Go a couple of miles and find a place to hide and wait. We’ll find you.”

  Jake slid his pack from his shoulders and led Al back to the edge of the woods. He picked a spot with good cover and a wide field of view and began observing, his eyes moving from one area to another.

  “Why do we have to watch more?” Al whispered. “If we’re leaving we ought to keep going.”

  “I killed two men over there. When you do something that serious, it doesn’t hurt to err on the side of caution. Let me ask you, why didn’t you have any weapons at your place? Here in the country almost every house is sure to have rifles and pistols. ”

  “There was a man, one of our neighbors, a man named Jackson that didn’t die from the sickness. Willie told us he went to the houses for miles around us and collected all the guns. He came by our house one night and kicked in the back door while we was eating supper. It was before Mamma and Daddy got killed. He had a pistol and made Daddy give him his shotgun and hunting rifle. Willie said Mister Jackson was crazy in the head and we was lucky he didn’t kill us all. He went away to somewheres and never came back. Every time me and Willie went in a house looking for food we looked for guns too, but we never found none. We did have a pistol for a while that the man didn’t know Daddy had. The men who raped Beth took it.

  Time passed. Jake began to itch in many different places. Funny how that happens, he thought, “chiggers, ants or centipedes,” laughing at himself. It really wasn’t funny. After fifteen minutes, they rejoined the girls. Janie jumped to her feet and ran to hug her brother.

  “We kept waiting to hear guns,” she said. “We were scared.”

  This was the first time Jake heard her speak. Her voice and vocabulary said nine but she still seemed too small.

  “What you worried about? We got Captain Whitey leading us,” Al replied jokingly.

  “Whoa there, Al. Call me Captain Avoidance,” Jake said, shaking his head. “I don’t like situations like this. After we put some miles between us and your farm, we’ll find a place to hide for a few hours to eat and rest.”

  As they walked, Jake took time to show them how to move through the underbrush without leaving a trail. Janie, with the resiliency of youth, turned it into a game, trying to walk without stepping on any plants or scuffing the ground debris, and chiding any of them when they did. They had traveled about a mile when Al called for Jake's attention.

  “I just remembered. If we keep going this way, there’s a cave beside a skinny little creek. You can’t see it because of the bushes. The only reason I found it is ‘cause a baby pig I hit with a marble ran inside.”

  “How far do you think?”

  “Pretty far still, but it’s a big cave.”

  “I guess you’re the Captain now?” Jake said, smiling, waving his hand with a flourish for him to take the lead.

  The cave opening was at a sharp curve in the stream, and was barely big enough for Jake to enter on his hands and knees. A fortunate arrangement of several large boulders had allowed water at flood stage to wash out the soil behind them. Less than three feet inside the opening the cave panned out to a space, although little more than five feet high, had a level dry floor. It could have held ten or more in comfort. Beth let the other two enter, and pushed Jake’s pack and the bags in before joining them. The opening allowed barely enough light to see.

  “This is perfect,” Jake said. He sat for a moment in thought. “If anyone does come, I doubt they’ll search very long. They for sure won’t figure on us hiding so close.”

  “We gonna get hungry if we stay here too long,” Al said.

  “We would if we had to depend on what we took from your place, but you have no idea what I have in my pack. I’m going out and erase any signs we may have made coming in and then I’ll make a false trail for a few miles. While I’m gone, how would you like some biscuits and strawberry jam with your leftover fish?”

  “Mister Jake, if you got strawberry jam and biscuits you’re willing to let us have, I reckon I won’t bury this butcher knife in your heart while you’re sleeping tonight,” Beth said with a straight face.

  “You’re kidding right?”

  “Just thought I’d say something so’s you know we ain’t friends yet. Mamma used to say, ‘sometimes wolves act like sheep till they’re hungry’.”

  “Your mamma’s right Beth,” he replied while digging around in his backpack. “Keep your knife handy, but I guarantee it won’t be me you need it for.” He removed the jar of jam and a plastic container full of biscuits he had baked the day before and turned to face the kids.

  “Al, hang onto the pistol. I’ll be back in about three hours. I wouldn’t advise it, but we’re not so far from your place you three can’t return if you want to. While I’m gone, you think about traveling with me. If you do, I want your word I can sleep peaceful at night.” He reached for his rifle, and crawled from the cave.

  The kids stared at the tin of biscuits and the jar of jam sitting beside his backpack. Beth stood, bending low not to scrape her head on the roots dangling from the ceiling, pulling Janie to her feet along with her. “Al, dig a spoon out of our bag for the jam, Janie’s ready for a surprise.”

  “What’s jam?” Janie asked.

  “I’m sure Jake’s got a spoon in his pack,” Al said.

  “An’ I’m sure he does too, but he didn’t say we could look in there. Maybe it’s a test or something. One of our spoons will do good enough.”

  “What’s jam?” Janie asked again.

  “You’ll see in a minute, sweetie,” Beth said, squatting beside the can of biscuits. “What you think about him, Allen?”

  “He seems okay, but we got a gun an’ knife now. We could run away with these biscuits and jam. Willie says there’s still plenty of food in the houses further away. ”

  “Silly, we could take his whole backpack, but we ain’t that kind. He seems okay to me too. Besides, you see the way his eyes keep jerking around looking for stuff. We ain’t trained up like he is. It’s for sure we ain’t going back to the house. I say we go with him."

  She felt something tapping her thigh, and took the spoon Janie was using to get her attention.

  “Do you want the pistol?” Al asked.

  "No, he gave it to you. Anyways you’re too little to be fighting with a knife. If he tries to do anything to us, go ahead and shoot him. Aim for the chest like he said, and I’ll stab him with my knife. He can have two holes in him like Willie.”

  “What’s Jam?” Janie repeated impatiently, “I’m ready for my surprise.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Jake back-trailed the last few hundred feet of the path they had taken to the cave. He found some signs of their passage, a few trampled plants, which he straightened, and a scattering of scuffed footprints he smoothed by hand and re-covered with ground debris. He came to a spot that was soft with ground water and overgrown with moss. It was disturbed
so badly there was not much he could do to erase their passage.

  He left it as he found it and moved off at a tangent to lead away any search. He left occasional signs of his route as he went, crossed their creek two hundred yards upstream from the cave and continued about three miles further, remaining vigilant for anyone following him.

  At one point, he had to take the long way around a herd of cattle gone wild. There were at least a hundred head, with some dangerous looking bulls among them.

  As he walked, it struck him that compared to the northern half of the nation; the southern states had rebounded quickly in the four years since the end of the nuclear winter. There were a great many dead hardwoods visible in the woods surrounding him, but just as many were putting out spring buds. The evergreens ... pines, cedars, magnolias were still populous enough to color the forest green. The underbrush was thick and vibrant.

  He topped a small rise and spotted a treeless patch of land. It had been farmland in the past. Not much remained of the farm. A chimney and some burned timbers where the house and barn once stood. Scenes like that were common during his travels, not as often in rural areas, as closer to major highways.

  Since the Die-Off, and the end of the long winter, the gangs and thugs who normally clung close to the vestiges of civilization were ranging further afield, searching for more people to kill rape or recruit. Something in the psychopath mentality enjoyed burning things.

  He did not bother investigating closer. Too many times, he had found the bones of people killed in unspeakable ways.

  He skirted the open area and continued a bit farther before making his way back to the cave, taking care not to leave a trail.

  Jake thought about the kids. He had shouldered responsibility for them willingly, even though he knew they would delay his arrival at his destination. It was a good thing he still had plenty of time to get there.

  He had not lied to Beth when he told her he would have normally bypassed their place. His rule was to avoid people as much as possible. These days, people most likely meant trouble. He would have shot those men anyway, but if the victims had been adults, they would have never seen their benefactor.

  The young ones were a different story. It never entered his mind to leave them to fend for themselves, but it was hard enough traveling alone in these dangerous times. Now he would have to ride herd on a trio of youngsters untrained in the skills needed to stay alive. He hoped they were quick learners, for his sake, and theirs.

  Jake recalled the hysteria that ran rampant in the states following the nuclear exchange in Europe, the Mideast and Asia. Prices on all necessities skyrocketed in the US as severe shortages began to arise. Gasoline sixty dollars a gallon, bread twenty a loaf, forget meat unless you were a millionaire. It was not just the poor, even the upper middle-class were unable to absorb the cost.

  The price gouging did not last long term. The desperate were going to eat and feed their children. The looting and rioting, along with the burning, went beyond anything the authorities could handle. Of necessity, the police and other essential service personnel were with the looters in the stores, grabbing what they needed.

  The Federal Government had prepared for this contingency. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was mobilized, backed with deployments of the National Guard and from other branches of the military. Essential industries, industrial and farming, were nationalized. These measures, along with strictly enforced martial laws, restored a semblance of order. The stores and gasoline stations were restocked and ration coupons issued. This did not completely prevent hoarding, and ‘Prepping’ became the driving force for most people. Survival bunkers, community, and individual, were created and stocked.

  The plague, coming so soon after the breakdown of services, was a horrific blessing. In its aftermath, the survivors were few and widely scattered. There weren’t enough people left for looting to make a dent in the supplies available. They had access to more food than they could consume in a hundred years, much of it preserved in such ways it would be edible for decades.

  Even more died in the short-term nuclear winter that followed on the heels of the plague. The atmospheric-debris injected into the atmosphere by the nuclear weapons used in the Eastern hemisphere eventually spread around the globe, masking the sun and lowering the temperature.

  The weather turned erratic. For the first two years, it snowed a lot of gray snow. Places far south as Jacksonville, Florida saw snow cover for months at a time. The third year, and in some ways the worst, a warming spell set in, and instead of gray snow, the world was deluged with downpours of oily, ashy mud.

  The erratic weather pattern gradually diminished, and for the last four years, nature had been in recovery mode. The normal rains washed the mud away. Dormant seeds sprouted and grew. Most wildlife species, especially in the southern states survived with enough numbers to mate and repopulate.

  Beth’s statement that eighteen was just a number, and her not knowing about the world beyond the farm, had registered. She was nine when the plague first appeared and twelve at the end of the long winter. That meant Janie was only five and Al was ten when she had assumed responsibility for them after the murder of their parents. Nothing had equipped her for the rigors of this new hard world. The collapse of civilization had left her family isolated, uninformed and unprotected.

  There seemed to be guilelessness to them, perhaps resulting from not being exposed to the previous pressures of social mores that dictated a dog-eat-dog interplay in almost all interactions. Not attending school, subjected to the peer pressure of other children where the art of deception and manipulation is learned, seemingly left them open and genuine.

  He realized he was making assumptions, and that he did not really know them. He was taking a chance allowing them to be armed, but given the dangers of moving about, especially traveling the roads, as they would be soon, he would be remiss in not allowing them some means of personal protection. Still, Beth’s glib statement about burying the butcher knife in his heart while he was sleeping did worry him some.

  *

  At the cave, he called softly to alert them he was back. He found them huddled against the far wall, sound asleep. As he put away the biscuit container and jam, he noted the three biscuits they spared for him. As sweet starved as they probably were, it must have been a hard choice for them to make. Watching them sleep for a minute, he felt his own fatigue, decided what the hell, and lay down beside his pack.

  The sound of them whispering woke him. They sat close together, as far from him as the cave allowed. Judging by the amount of light filtering through the opening, it was getting to be late afternoon. He roused himself to drink water from his military flask. The whispering ceased and he could feel their attention. He ignored them for the moment and snaked out the entrance to assure himself no one was in the area. He returned and sat on the dirt a few feet from them.

  “We’re hungry and thirsty,” Beth said.

  Jake tossed her his flask. “Pass it around,” he instructed. “Are you hungry, Janie?”

  “I like jam.”

  “I bet you do, but how would you like pancakes with honey, some beef jerky and some dried apple slices for dessert?”

  “You got that in your pack?” Beth asked.

  “And more,” Jake replied, “but, we’re going to need to gather additional supplies before we can travel. Now, if Al wouldn’t mind sneaking outside and getting some dead hardwood sticks about as big around as my thumb, we can make a meal fit for royalty.”

  “How much we need?” Al asked, moving towards the cave mouth.

  “Whoa, slow down, Champ. Slow and careful going out. Get as much as you can wrap both hands around. They don’t have to be very long. Stay on this side of the creek and keep low and quiet while you do it.”

  “What about pissing and such?” Al asked. “We did it in here, but it stinks.”

  “We’ll do it in here until we leave. We can cover our messes with dirt to keep down the smell.” Jake tosse
d Al the nearly empty flask Beth had returned to him. “Refill this in the creek while you’re out,” he continued. “Judging by the slope outside, the dirt overhead isn't very thick. I’m going to jab a hole through the roof and the girls are going to make pancake mix.”

  Using a garden trowel from his backpack, he attacked the roof of the cave. The tight packed dirt was less than three feet thick. When Al returned, Jake was pleasantly surprised the sticks he gathered were neatly bundled with a thin vine securing them.

  “Good job Al, pull up a seat and watch,” he said, patting the ground beside him. “Anything you learn will come in handy. Cooking can be a sloppy, haphazard chore, or it can be fun. Personally, I prefer it to be fun, considering the time spent finding food, cooking food, and the cleaning after.”

  “I want to learn what you know,” Beth said. “You pay attention too, Janie. Mister Jake ain’t skinny.”

  “Smart attitude, Beth,” Jake replied, ignoring the Mister. “I do know a lot about staying alive and healthy. By the way, don’t say ain’t. Say is not or isn’t.”

  “You a teacher or something?”

  “Or something,” he replied, smiling. “We may be reduced to living like primitives, but it won’t hurt to preserve our language. It’ll help us stay above most of the trash calling themselves human these days.”

  “You’re strange, Mister Jake. I know enough to say isn’t, but we got into the habit of saying ain’t. Long’s you don’t act like we’re stupid you can remind us if we say it.”

  “I know what you mean, Beth. My mom used to say bad habits are easy to make, hard to break. Let’s get back to the pancakes. Once you add the salt and baking soda to the flour, stir the mix with some water until you have a thick, runny paste... Beth, you add the water and show Janie how to stir it. Just add a little at a time. Al, open the top flap of my pack and get the stove, it’s a shiny metal thing.”

  Thirty minutes later, they were sitting in a four-cornered circle eating pancakes covered with honey and nibbling thin strips of seasoned dried beef. Beth was close to the almost smokeless stove, tending a pancake on the flat cooking surface while she ate.