The Borrowed World: A Novel of Post-Apocalyptic Collapse

by Franklin Horton

  “I need some money,” the man rasped. “And you’re going to gimme your goddamn money.”

  My uncle said he peed in his pants right there, but my grandfather had his hand in and out of his pocket in a second, coming out with a Schrade pocket knife and opening the blade. In those days, they didn’t have all those fancy lock blade knives, tactical knives, and knives with pocket clips like we do now. It was just a plain old pocket knife with a long blade that my grandfather kept razor sharp. There was no further discussion, no threats, and no warning. My grandfather lashed out at the man, slashing him across the face, then stabbing him in the chest as the man staggered backward and dropped his own knife. The man continued to stagger backward, grasping his chest, trying to contain the dark ooze that seeped around his fingers. My grandfather stepped toward him, lashed out again, the knife flashing across the man’s throat before the man finally fell.

  My uncle said that my grandfather stood there over the fallen man, his shoulders heaving as he sucked in air around the cigarette he hadn’t even dropped in the scuffle. He’d acted so quickly and with such finality that he seemed like a man not of that time but instead like a warrior of some distant culture brought forward to a modern time.

  Immediately behind the restaurant was a steep bank that dropped to the lead-colored Tug Fork River. It was here where the restaurant threw their trash. It was also where the sinks and toilets of all the local homes emptied. It was into this river that everyone in the county threw their old tires and appliances. And it was where my grandfather threw the drunken, bleeding, and dying man who’d dared pull a knife on him and his son. He rolled the body and listened to the splash, watching the reflection in the water to see that it was moving downstream as it should and was not hung up on a root or rusting car frame.

  “Get in the truck,” he’d said to my uncle.

  My grandfather pulled a greasy rag from under his truck seat and cleaned his knife, then his hands. The rag was thrown out the window on the way home. They drove on, and not a word was said about it. Not then. Not ever.

  That was the kind of man I was going to have to be to make it home to my family, the kind of man who acted without hesitation during life and death situations. I was going to have to harden the fuck up. Sixty years ago this might have been the kind of country where a man could travel home and get help along the way from decent, trusting people. It was not that same America. For every good man in America, there was a drug addict wanting to steal from you. For every good woman, there was a deadbeat too lazy to work and waiting for a handout. For every child, there was a gang member, a sex offender, or a carjacker. This was not a group of coworkers coming home from a business trip anymore. This was war, and getting home was our mission.

  Gary’s pack had a long pocket between the main load compartment and the padded back plate. It was for carrying a hydration bladder, which Gary did not bring on this trip. He doubled a piece of paracord and tied a single point sling around the grip of the sawed-off shotgun, then shoved the shotgun into the hydration bladder pocket, where it was completely concealed from view. He tied the other end of the paracord sling to a D-ring on the shoulder strap of his pack. It was clear that his intent was to be able to use the sling to draw the weapon from his pack without having to remove his pack. The success of that would depend on how stuffed his pack was and how much friction the contents of his pack placed on that sleeve.

  He must have read my mind, or my look, which I have never been very good at masking.

  “We’ll see how it works,” he said. “Hopefully I can yank it out of there without shooting myself or someone else.”

  I powered up my GPS. While I waited for it to sync up with the satellite network, I double checked my weapon and made sure the magazine was full. It was then that it occurred to me that I had not replenished Randi’s magazine from when she emptied it last night.

  “Randi, pass me that pistol.”

  She removed it from her back pocket and offered it to me. I pressed the magazine release and dropped the magazine into my palm. Empty. I was glad I’d thought of this before she needed the weapon. The hollow point rounds for this weapon came in boxes of twenty-five rounds and I refilled the magazine from the partial box of Critical Defense rounds in my pack. When I ran out of these, I still had a full box of fifty rounds of .380 ball ammo. It would still punch holes, just considerably less damaging ones than the hollow points.

  When I returned the full LCP to her, I reminded her that the weapon was ready to go and to be careful with it. She rolled her eyes at me.

  “Grew up with guns,” she reminded me in a sarcastic, lilting voice. “Remember?”

  My GPS was fully synced and indicated that it was accurate to within fifteen feet of my position. I zoomed out and used the GPS’s waypoint tools to do a quick measurement from our current location to where I approximated Lloyd’s house to be. This type of route measurement was not completely accurate because the handheld unit made it difficult to trace all the twists and turns of the road but I came up with a distance of 8.3 miles.

  I repeated the distance out loud.

  “How does that translate into hours?” Randi asked. “How much longer am I going to have to be walking?”

  “If we’re going mostly downhill on this paved surface we might do three miles an hour or better,” I said. “With breaks, let’s say three hours or so.”

  “I can do three hours, I think,” she said. Then she added, as an afterthought, “I’m out of cigarettes now.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “Bastard,” she snarled. “You’re the one who’s going to have to listen to the complaining.”

  I smiled. “No, I won’t. You’ll be too winded to complain. If you have breath for complaining, we’re not walking fast enough. If you complain, I’ll just step up the pace until you can’t complain anymore. Keep that in mind.”

  She mulled this over. “You’re not just a bastard, you’re a cruel bastard.”

  “Let’s go. We’ve got miles to burn.”

  Chapter 20

  Through most of my hiking experiences, I was always excited to return to walking after a break. I enjoyed the breaks too, slumped against my backpack, enjoying a view, but there was something about the resumption of the trip that always carried great potential. It was when the world opened up to you. Walking the trail was where you saw things – the views, the wildlife, the indescribable play of light that photographs almost always failed to capture.

  However, the pleasure of resuming our walk on this beautiful day, in this beautiful place, was short-lived. We were walking in a straight line on the shoulder of the road, taking long strides and eating up ground. I was on point, Gary at the rear. We stayed close to the shoulder so we could duck over the edge of the road if we saw or heard someone coming. For the first mile or so there was nothing to be concerned about. Then a scream cut through the near silence.

  We all flinched, hands moving toward weapons, muscles tensing.

  “What the fuck?” Randi said.

  “That was close,” Gary said. “Just around one of these bends in the road.”

  The road followed the contour of the mountaintop, snaking around every shoulder, ridge, abutment, outcropping, or draw in the mountain, making it nearly impossible to see for any distance at all.

  “What are we going to do?” Randi asked.

  Another scream came, dropping to an anguished wail.

  “That sounds like Katie,” I said.

  “Shit,” Gary muttered.

  “I’m going to take a look,” I said. “Do you guys want to stay here or come with me?”

  Gary and Randi exchanged a quick glance before replying that they were coming with me. I dropped over the weedy shoulder of the road and started following the direction of the road, walking along an angled bank that offered some concealment from the road. The grassy bank was dew-soaked and we were constantly losing traction and sliding. After several minutes of fighting with the wet bank we arrived at the sourc
e of the screaming.

  I held a hand up, stopping Randi and Gary behind me. We dropped against the bank, creeping higher on the shoulder. Through the weeds we could see three ATVs, one of them with a trailer hooked to it. Four men and two women were scattered among the ATVs. I recognized one of the men and one of the ATVs from the day before. It was the passenger with the jail tattoos. He was probably the partner of the man we’d killed last night. He’d made his way back to his family or some group of lowlifes that gave a shit about them. Now he was back with reinforcements.

  At the center of the group was Katie. She was on her knees on the ground, her hands resting on Walt’s still body, a puddle of blood running from beneath him. I could not immediately see how he’d been injured or killed but there was a lot of blood. The older of the two women stepped forward and grabbed a handful of Katie’s hair, pulling her away from Walt’s body and onto her back. She dragged her for a short distance and then began kicking and stomping Katie, still holding her by the hair. Katie screamed and tried to protect herself but it was useless. All she could do was try to protect her head and face from the blows and kicks raining down on her.

  “What did you to do my son, you fucking bitch?” the woman kept screaming at Katie, her voice harsh and raspy. “Did you kill my son? Was it you that killed him?”

  Katie sobbed, unable to respond. She looked like she was going into shock. The other woman, much younger, likely a sister or someone’s wife, stepped forward and kicked Katie in the back, right over the kidney. She then landed a series of punches on the side of Katie’s face, one after another, hurling abuse at her the whole time. After the last blow, she slung Katie by the hair. Katie sprawled onto the pavement. The woman bent and spit into Katie’s face.

  The men surrounding the fight did nothing to stop it. In fact, they looked amused by the whole thing, smiling and joking. One even lit up a cigarette.

  “I like a good cat fight,” the man from last night said.

  “What I wouldn’t give for a scoped rifle,” Gary whispered beside me. “Even a .22 caliber would be an improvement. We’ve got nothing that’s accurate at this range.”

  It was probably a little less than a hundred yards to where all of this was taking place and our handguns with open sights were insufficient for the job.

  “What do we do?” I asked. “Do we leave her? Do we wait for them to leave and let things play out?”

  “That girl hasn’t done anything,” Randi said. “I killed that old bitch’s son. I don’t want Katie to die for something I did.”

  “What do you propose we do?” I asked her.

  She looked at me like I was an idiot. “Why don’t we just rush them?” she said. “They’re all looking the other way. By the time they notice us, we’ll be close enough to shoot them.”

  Gary and I looked at each other.

  “Might work,” Gary said. “We’d have to be quiet and move quickly.”

  The younger woman who’d punched Katie and spit on her now stood over Katie’s body, staring down at her with disgust, her breath heaving. “Fucking bitch,” she said. “Let’s just kill her now. She ain’t gonna tell us shit.”

  The woman reached into her back pocket and withdrew what looked like a .22 caliber mini-revolver, probably a North American Arms model. She put a thumb on the hammer and pointed the gun at Katie’s head.

  “Let me kill her, Mom,” she said coldly. “Please, just let me kill her.”

  The older woman looked down at Katie’s trembling, blood-spattered form and shook her head. “No one’s killing her until I know what happened to my baby.”

  The older woman, apparently the mother of the man we’d killed, walked to the ATV cart and returned with an old-fashioned butcher knife.

  “Last chance, girl,” the woman said to Katie. “You start talking or I start cutting your pretty little face up. I’ve butchered livestock my whole life and I ain’t scared of a little blood.”

  “She’ll do it,” the man with the tattoos said. “She’ll cut you, bitch. You better tell her what she wants to know.”

  “We have to do this now. Randi, you take the two on the farthest left,” I said. “I’ll take the two on the farthest right. Gary, you take the center two.”

  “Why do I get the center two?” Gary said. “That’s where Katie is. I don’t want to hit her.”

  “I don’t either. And you’re a better shot than I am.”

  Gary didn’t have anything to say to that.

  “Let’s hit it,” I said. “We walk quickly toward them with weapons up. Don’t run. Don’t draw any attention. Take firm, quiet steps. As soon as the first one turns, we start shooting. Remember your shooting lanes.”

  “What the hell is a shooting lane?” Randi asked.

  “Just remember to shoot the ones I told you to shoot.”

  “Why didn’t you just say that instead of trying to be all tactical?”

  “Sorry,” I replied. “Let’s do this.”

  We shrugged out of our packs and checked our weapons. I confirmed that everyone was ready and started to stand. No one on the road noticed. Everyone in the group ahead of us had their eyes glued to the older woman waving a butcher knife toward Katie’s face. I started to walk toward the group, checking to see that Gary and Randi were with me. I tried to check my speed to make sure that we were aligned as close as possible so no one would be out ahead and get shot when the chaos started.

  Ironically, it was Katie who saw us first. We had closed half the distance when Katie peeled her hands from her face. She was clearly in shock, accepting that she was going to be tortured and then die. The woman stood over her, talking to her in a low voice that kept us from understanding the words. We closed ten more yards. Katie raised her head and she was looking straight at us, blood running from her nose and mouth. Gravel was embedded in gashes and abrasions. Ten more yards and the old woman noticed Katie’s eyes, noticed her distraction. Maybe she even saw our reflection in her pupils.

  We were at twenty yards when the first head turned to us. It was the old woman who held the knife. Her hate-filled eyes widened and she opened her mouth to yell something. The words never left her mouth. Gary’s .40 caliber Hydra-Shok round caught her in the face and sheared everything from frontal lobe to brain stem. She dropped the knife and fell onto Katie.

  The man I’d seen the previous day, the one who was no doubt a partner of the one we’d killed last night, was in my sights. I had planned on him being my first target. I was set to double-tap him center mass when he dropped behind an ATV. I started to pursue him but saw my secondary target turn toward me. It was exactly like a shooting drill I practiced at home, shooting at spaced targets. The man was a little older than me with a shaggy gray beard and long, unkempt hair. He wore a greasy t-shirt and blue mechanic pants. He raised a shirttail to reach for a revolver, but I caught him before it came free of his waistband. Another double-tap. One to the neck, one through the breastbone. He fell with a grunt.

  I returned my attention to my first target in time to see him roll into the ditch, partially obscured by an ATV. I fired at glimpses of him, but didn’t connect. He scrambled up a short bank, dodging my shots, and disappeared into the treeline.

  Randi was blasting away, not having much luck. The LCP had nearly non-existent sights and her first shot, no doubt targeting center-mass as we’d told her, went a little wide and caught a skinny guy that looked like a meth dealer in the arm. He grabbed for his arm, and she emptied the pistol at him, catching him again in the shoulder and once in the abdomen, and he went down. The remaining man, fortyish with greasy black hair, stubble, and a dirt-covered face, dropped behind the ATV trailer. Gary and I both plowed rounds into it, punching holes in the plastic sides of the trailer and dropping the man behind it.

  I turned my eyes back to the remaining woman in time to catch her raising that tiny revolver on Randi. Before my brain could tell my hand to center up on her, she thumbed and dropped the hammer, firing a .22 round in our direction. Randi screame
d and the woman’s thumb began to draw the hammer back again for a second shot. By this time, Gary and I were both moving our weapons to target the woman. Just before we fired, we saw a blur of movement in front of her. The movement caused me to hesitate for a fraction of a second. It was the butcher knife in Katie’s bloodstained hand that caught my eye and there was a brief flash of reflection from the blade as it plunged into the vile woman’s abdomen. She doubled over in pain, dropping the pistol. Katie withdrew the knife and was on her instantly. She pulled the woman down to the pavement, plunging the knife repeatedly into her chest and neck. Katie’s violence was the only sound in the great silence of the parkway.

  Gary and I watched until her movements slowed and she dropped the knife. She fell over sobbing, curling into the fetal position.

  “Cover me!” I yelled at Gary.

  I scrambled up the bank and looked for the man who’d escaped me. I could see the trail he’d taken – the broken branches, displaced rocks, missing chunks of moss – but I would not pursue him. He was probably in there waiting for me to do that. I knew, though, that by leaving him alive I was taking a big chance.

  Aside from the one that got away, everyone in that group had been hit at least once. They’d all dropped but I didn’t know if any of them were still dangerous or not and I had to check on Randi. When I returned to the road, I holstered my weapon, closing the steps to where she fell and was holding her face, blood seeping between her fingers. She was cursing in a low voice, repeating the same words over and over. That was a good sign, at least.

  “Randi, where are you hit?”She continued her mumbling curses. I took her by the wrists and pried her hands from her face. It was immediately obvious that a round had simply grazed her cheek.

  “I’m a nurse,” she hissed. “Give it to me straight. How bad is it?”