The morning is finally here, and we have everyone from all the groups here to watch us set the first house. No one seems to doubt that we will accomplish this task, and their confidence makes me more confident. James and Jenna say they have done this before and it is no big deal. I know we have to remove the axles and the tires from the two sides, then slide them onto the foundation and connect the two halves. Naturally we have the usual jokes, about not realizing we wanted to put that house on this foundation. They really know what they are doing, because it takes less than an hour to get the two halves pushed as close together as we can push them. Now James gets this device that looks like a come-a-long, that he fastens to the two sides of the house. He has a second device for the other end, and then they draw the two sides tight up against each other.
The rest of the day is spent anchoring the two halves to the foundation and bolting the two halves together. Tomorrow we will tie the siding in, and begin working on the inside to get it ready to be lived in. Of course we will have to connect the basement stairs, and finish off the basement with shelving units, and maybe even an extra room down there. The houses that are going to be put on a slab instead of a basement will be easier and take less time. This house already has the tunnel in connecting it to the house we live in, and the tunnel goes out the other side to the slab where the other house will be put. Crews are also working on joining all the houses that already exist in the group. Josh, Isaac, Jake, and Adam seem to be everywhere today, helping with the house. They along with Ben and Hank have proven to be some of our best workers, and in this group that’s saying something. Everyone helps no matter what the job is.
When the day is finally over and we can relax a little or at least I could, if Robin and Dayna would let me. They want to know what I am going to do to help Josh win over Betty, who they claim he is in love with. I saw him trying to talk to her today, I say trying, because every time he got close she walked away. Something tells me she still holds a grudge about when George got hurt. Now George has been spending a lot of time with Marge. He is a little older than she is, but they make a nice looking couple. Dayna, Robin, Charity, Carrie, Cassie, and Melissa think it’s their duty to play match maker for our group. In this case they want me to talk to Betty and see why she doesn’t like Josh. They don’t like my attitude when I tell them that if Betty doesn’t like him that only leaves about thirty other single women in the groups that would jump at the chance to marry Josh. All the other guys seem to have met girls that at least talk to them regularly. My loving wives tell me that if I don’t try to help, that’s more than we will be doing so I figure what the heck. I can at least talk to Betty.
My daughters love me, I get to read them stories, plus they tell me how much they love me all the time. In the morning the crew starts working on the house we set yesterday, and another crew gets started moving the next house into place. I do manage to get a few minutes to talk to Betty, and she says that she just doesn’t trust Josh and the others yet. She thinks he’s a nice enough guy, but she is no hurry to get married, or even get serious with anyone. At lunch I tell the women and they say they will just have to think of a way to get them together. Naturally I wish them good luck, hoping that I will not be involved in the next plot to get them together. The next house is set to be put into place tomorrow. It will go in much the same as the other one, except there will not be a basement, but there will be a crawl space to get at the wiring and duct work that is below floor level.
9
The morning starts out kind of cold and gray. Definitely not an ideal day to be working outside, but we want to get that second house set in place. I have a feeling of foreboding that just won’t go away, and I can’t figure out what could be wrong. We have the wheels and the axles off the one side of the house when Robin comes running and says that Barb’s group is under attack. All the men with me take off for their homes to get their rifles, and head for there to help. Robin brought my fifty with her, and like the others I am wearing a sidearm, so I run to the barn to get one of our motorcycles to head cross country. Barb’s group is between five and seven minutes away across the fields and woods, since we made a trail and graveled it. Josh, Isaac, and Ben are already on their motorcycles with rifles hung over their shoulders. They take off about twenty seconds before I do.
We are tearing across the gravel path, going as fast as we dare without losing control and crashing into a tree or flipping the bikes. When we are a few hundred yards away, we can hear gunfire coming from that direction. Josh is riding right next to me, when he leans toward me and says that Doc Betty came over here this morning. He says if anybody hurts her he will personally kill them. I know that Isaac and Ben like girls that live over here as well. I think of everyone in all the groups as my family, and will kill anyone that tries to hurt them, or does hurt them. We pull up just before we get to the yards of the homes here. We don’t want to blunder in and get ourselves killed either. We can hear sporadic gunfire, so we know that the group has not been taken over yet. I tell Josh and Isaac to go around one way, while Ben and I go the other way. We can hear more motorcycles coming the way we came.
We can hear motorcycles in the front of the houses as well, and it sounds like they are firing as they ride past because we hear glass breaking. I can hear children crying, and I am really starting to get ticked off. I have no idea where these guys came from, but I am pretty sure I know where they are going today. We get to the edge of the porch on the house where Barb lives. I know for a fact there are a couple of mothers who share this house, and at least six children, and these animals are shooting into the windows. I am getting ready to look around the porch when I hear a man’s voice, demanding that they send out girls for them to take with them, or they will set fire to the houses. I am close enough to hear what he says afterward to his buddies. He laughs and says they are going to set fire to the houses anyway, but why waste good women.
I step around the porch and find myself facing three of the attackers. I am holding my fifty at arm’s length, so I just point at the closest one and pull the trigger. That gun makes more noise than most people have heard from a gun, plus it picks the guy up and throws him back about ten feet. The others dive behind the other end of the porch. Josh and Isaac come around the corner and get driven back by gunfire from those two, plus some guns across the way that we can’t quite place. I don’t know where he learned to do it, but Josh dives out from behind the building firing his handgun toward the two at the end of the porch. He must hit at least one, because we see him start to rise up, then fall face down in the dirt.
The bullets are hitting all around him from the other side of the road where one of the other houses is. We still can’t see them, but we send some lead of our own in that direction, which at least makes them move. We now have reinforcements, who are spreading out to surround the enemy and end this battle. The biggest problem is that we don’t know how many there are. We know for sure they are down two men, but that’s as much as we know for sure. We hear some shooting coming from behind the house where the other bad guys were shooting from, then we hear Dons voice saying that these three won’t be hurting anyone else. Our guys come out from behind the house, and start walking toward us. They are saying we better get the backhoe out and bury these guys. For some reason I don’t feel like it is all over yet. I am looking around to see if we missed anyone when one of the moms, Caroline, comes running from one of the other houses, and her son and daughter, who are like five and six, come running out of the house we are standing in front of.
Josh is smiling, watching Caroline and the children meet right next to him. He turns to look my way when he yells “NO”, and wraps his arms around them turning them away from us. Just then one of the guys we thought was dead, raises up and fires at them with a semi-automatic handgun, hitting Josh at least two times, before we can shoot the guy with the gun and put him down for good. I run to Josh, because I have had some training, and I have to lift him off Caroline and the children, who are unhar
med, because he took all the lead meant for them. He is still alive, and it doesn’t look like the bullets hit the heart or lungs, but there is still a lot in there to be torn up. Doc Betty is beside me before I can even assess the damage, telling two of us to carry him into the house.
Barb has the table cleared, and tells us to lay him on it, so that Betty can see what she is doing. Josh is coherent anyway, and asks me if Caroline and the children are okay. I tell him they didn’t get a scratch. He asks how many times he got shot. Betty comes over and smiles telling him he didn’t get shot, he just got the worse brush burn she has ever seen when he fell on the dirt. We have some drugs that we found at the hospitals we have visited, but we are not sure they will do any good now. Betty asks him if he would like to drink some whiskey to help kill the pain, and he tells her he will put up with the pain. He tried whiskey once, and that was enough for him. One of the bullets went straight through, and the other one we can see bulging against his side. Betty cuts the skin where we see the bulging, and the bullet falls out.
Betty checks the wounds closely and says that it looks like the bullets missed all the vital organs, but she does have to operate to make sure. Apparently some of the medication we found works, because she is able to knock him out, and operate on his shoulder and his side, where the wounds are. She has him all stitched up, and is washing her hands when he wakes up. He smiles, which is more than I think I could do, if I was just hurt as badly as he was. He tells Betty that this has to be the most painful brush burn he ever got. Caroline has been standing close by ever since we brought Josh in. She asks if she can thank him for saving her life and the lives of her children. Betty smiles and tells her that depends on how she wants to thank him. She goes over and gives him a hug and a kiss on the forehead. The two children come over and climb on a chair to see him, and then kiss him, but they lean against his side to get close.
He just smiles and says it was worth it to get good kisses like that. Betty comes back over and is running her fingers through his hair when she tells him he will have to rest for a while before he can go back to work. She also tells him that he won’t be able to climb that ladder up to the bachelor’s dorm in the barn. She says she has two beds in her room, or at least she will have when I put a second one in there, so he can be where she can keep an eye on him, at least until he can get around on his own. Betty asks if we have a gurney to take him back to our group on, and Isaac, Jake, Hank, Ben, and Adam come in with one of the gurneys we confiscated from the hospital in town. They load it into the van and ask us if we can take care of him when we get home. They don’t want to go back tonight just in case there are more attackers around. If there was ever any doubt about Josh and his group’s intentions, there are no more.
When we get back to our homes, we have to tell everyone all the details, after we carry Josh in to the house and into Betty’s room, so she can keep an eye on him. Tim and I tease her saying that we know he is too weak to attack her, but what if she attacks him, the poor guy is defenseless. Josh smiles and says he is willing to take his chances, Betty smacks me and Tim, and then our wives smack us for teasing her. I pick up little Timmy so that no one else will smack me. It’s all in fun, and when I say we get smacked, it really doesn’t hurt. Josh is up walking around the next morning. We make sure he knows enough to take it easy until he is back to full strength. Our biggest fear is infection, because we do not know how good the medications we have found are. Betty is very knowledgeable about herbs and plants that are good for healing, so he should be fine in a few weeks.
Our chores, and the projects we are working on, continue through the winter. There are days when all we can do is the chores, like making sure everyone has firewood for their woodstoves. The chickens need tended and fed every day. The same goes for the cows, they have to be milked in the morning and again in the evening. The milk has to be pasteurized and the cream skimmed off. That’s what we use for ice cream and butter. We also have to grind the wheat into flour at the mill. We have been doing that once a week even if we don’t need the flour right away. With all five groups making bread, and other things with it, we do use quite a bit though. The young people love to ride the horses, so they get plenty of exercise. The hunters will often take the horses, so they can go a mile or so from home and not have to go back for the meat.
We are still planning to make trips farther out than we have previously gone, looking for people who may wish to join our groups. We have made a couple, where we went out about a hundred miles, but so far we have not tried any long trips. Tim, Ken, Gary, Sara, and I, all know of other military bases in North and South Carolina. We are planning a trip over that way soon for two reasons. To see if there are any people, and to see if there is anything we can use on those bases. Teddy, Jerry, and Steve have been asking if they can go on one of the trips when we go to those bases. I told them to ask their moms, and they were a big help. Their mom’s told them to ask me. I don’t have a problem with them coming along. I just hope we don’t run into any real trouble. If any of them get hurt, I will never forgive myself and neither will their moms.
We decide to go on Monday morning, figuring we will easily be home by Friday or Saturday. Isaac, Adam, and Jake are going with Jenna, James, Gary, Sara, and me. Of course the boys are coming along as well. Don’t tell their moms, but I have been teaching them to drive. It’s not like there are a lot of other drivers on the road, plus if they hit something, there is no one to sue you over it. Whenever I think about car accidents, I think of Ma Horton. She got in more accidents than anyone I ever knew, and none of them were ever her fault. I’ll never forget the time she was parking the car in the BX parking lot, after dropping Gunny off at the door. This PFC tried to beat her to the parking place, and hit her car just behind the driver’s side door. He proceeded to yell at her, but several people saw the accident and told Gunny, who had already gone into the store. He came out and got to the car at about the same time I did. Not that she needed any help. That young kid was trying to brow beat her into admitting it was her fault, and she wasn’t about to.
Ma never took any guff from Gunny, she wasn’t about to take any disrespect from that kid. When she got through reading him the riot act, she even had his mothers phone number and called her to tell her how rude her son was. Ma wasn’t going to press the issue by calling insurance companies, because Gunny and I always enjoyed working on the cars and we got pretty good at body work, but his attitude was so nasty, she let his insurance pay for the damages. Every time I tell the girls about Ma, they all say they would have loved to have known her. They have all said that they met her in dreams and enjoyed those dreams very much. The children all say that Ma and Gunny visit them in dreams all the time.
The trip to North Carolina takes us most of a day. It’s not that far, but the roads are not good at all, and there are a lot of cars parked all over the place. The damage is much worse here than where we live, because of the weather that hits the coast. James and Jenna want to study the structures at the base, and check out some of the cars, and other things that are made from steel. The rest of us are checking the base for whatever we feel we can use. The weather has ruined a lot of goods we could have used, but we do find a large supply of uniforms, tee shirts, weapons, and some of the military rations that are still good. Of course that topic can get an argument started as to whether or not they were ever good. The young people love them almost as much as they love the military knives they find for sale in the Base Exchange. They empty the entire warehouse of every knife, every tee shirt, and every uniform they can find. There are numerous items that I will not go into, but we leave there with one full truck.
We find that we can fill our gas tanks from the supplies at the base. They were prepared for power outages, because the gas pumps can be worked by hand. We have to prime the pump, but after that we can fill all of our vehicles and replace any gas that we used from our cans of gas. We find no signs of life anywhere, but that doesn’t surprise us much, because of the harsh storms
this part of the country gets. We visit two bases in North Carolina, and do well at each of them. There is more than one military base in South Carolina as well, and we visit two of them. One of them is almost to Florida, and in our world was a training base for the Marine Corp. The weather seems to have hit that one the hardest of all. We fill our last truck from this base, but we don’t leave much behind that is good either.
We decide to go back to the west, and then head north. There are some fairly large cities going this way, and we find some very large food stores that have barely been touched. We also find a great outdoor store that we all decide we can’t leave without seeing what they have. We all also agree that we would love to have this building back at the farm. They also have several trucks similar to the ones we already have. We spend about four hours getting one to where we can drive it. We hope it will get all the way back home. The boys have it loaded with supplies while we are working on it. We find some great cold weather gear, not that we need it where we live, but you never know, so we throw in a couple dozen sets of the under clothes and at least that many one piece suits and parkas.
There is a great gun department, where we pick up some very nice guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition. The boys find a large supply of bows and arrows of all styles and sizes. They also find room for a large supply of fishing equipment to take back. This store has a large supply of dehydrated foods packed in aluminum foil so they should still be good. Naturally we can’t get everything we want in the truck, but we do get a lot, plus we are planning a return trip in the near future. While we are working on the truck, Jenna nudges my arm, and tells me not to look to the left, there is someone next to a building over there. I pretend to be reaching for a wrench and glance that way. There are two young children watching us from behind a dumpster. The only reason we can see them is because we are standing on the loading dock of the store.
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