Survial Kit Series (Book 1): Survival Kit's Apocalypse

by Williams, Beverly

  “I’ll let you in on a secret,” I said, leaning in conspiratorially. “None of the things you’ll be learning is very hard. The only great mystery about any of it is that you haven’t tried those things yet. If you divide complicated challenges into smaller, more manageable steps, it’ll all be a cinch.”

  She thought about this awhile, and a smile dawned on her face.

  I shared Rule #2 with her: “Use your senses and your brain. Draw your own conclusions.” Then I assured her that allowing herself to try would be enough to allow her to learn the things she wanted to learn.

  We walked back to the lean-to.

  When Sam came to me, my guys felt that made the situation personal for them, too. They gathered some supplies for Sam and retrieved her belongings from Buck. Eric returned home with his hand swollen. I wondered what Buck’s face looked like. I knew Eric had been keeping himself in check; after my incident with Buck, he’d been itching to deck that loser. I bet Buck was hurting a lot.

  Eric caught my eye, winked. He’d seen me studying his hand. I had an inkling he knew full well what his winking did to me. Brat, I thought with a smile.

  Eric invited Sam to have a late supper with us, and she accepted. Matthew left to haul a couple of buckets of water in. Thom and I dug through a plastic tote bin of food. We agreed on heating three large La Choy sweet and sour chicken canned entrees. Thom found a bag of rice while I retrieved some pots and cooking utensils, and we started making supper.

  Eric addressed Sam. “Buck and Chet won’t bother you again.” He finished packing up a bin of stuff for her. Sam still looked worried, and he added, “Ever.”

  Matthew returned with the water. He sat next to Sam and reinforced what Eric had said, explaining why she didn’t need to worry. Matthew, Thom, and Eric had driven Buck and Chet from the camp, threatening permanent end if they returned. My guys had a lot more authority than Jeff could ever wield. They just didn’t exercise it often.

  Sam relaxed visibly as Matthew answered her questions about events she and I had missed. By the time we finished eating supper, she looked more at ease than I’d ever seen her.

  The guys helped us carry everything out to the big pine and we loaded the tent.

  “Want company tonight?” I asked Sam.

  She hesitated, wanting to say yes but wanting to be brave.

  “Sam and I have a lot to talk about,” I said to my guys. I looked back at Sam and she nodded.

  We bade the brothers good night—they each hugged both of us—and Sam and I climbed into the tent as the guys went to bed in the lean-to.

  We organized her things, and Sam told me more about herself. She talked about her life, how she’d met Buck when she was young. How she didn’t know why she’d stayed with him for so long. She told me things she’d kept bottled up for years. She cried some.

  I was able to sit there and listen and let her cry. Eric had taught me that tears happen for a reason. Forcing them to stop too soon only adds to the scarring. Easy enough to acknowledge when you’re outside of it, I thought. I still had trouble letting my own tears go.

  Sam talked late into the night. Finally, she started yawning frequently. It became contagious. I giggled as we yawned in sequence, which was contagious, too. Soon we both were giggling and yawning.

  “Enough!” I announced. “Shall we sleep, fair maiden?”

  “Indeed!” She put out the LED camp lamp. A moment later, in the darkness, her small voice whispered, “Good night, Kit.”

  “Good night, New Sam.”

  The promised training commenced the next day. We both woke up early and prepared ourselves for a venture into the woods. Sam hadn’t left camp since she and Buck arrived.

  We stopped at the same pond where Eric had held a crying Kit on the ledge.

  “Do you like climbing?” I asked Sam.

  “I—I’ve never even tried it!” she said, slipping off her backpack and approaching the rocks.

  I took off my pack too, and set it aside. “Rotters don’t ever climb anything, so it’s a good skill to develop. I guess the best way to teach you is to show you.”

  I climbed to the first ledge shelf. Sam watched how I moved. She followed me up slowly, carefully. She took some time to pick out where to place her hands and feet.

  “I’m sorry I’m so slow,” Sam apologized.

  “You’re learning. This isn’t a race. Besides, I’d rather have you be sure of where you’re climbing than grab the wrong spot and fall.”

  “I’m liking the climbing,” she told me, looking down to the nearby water.

  “Then let’s go climb something else.” I was eager to take her into the trees. We descended, grabbed our packs, and returned to the forest.

  I chose a fir tree for us to start with. Firs never felt as sturdy to me as spruces, but they didn’t carry as much of a bite, either. I’ve never had firs break on me or anything; they’re just a bit more flexible. Springier.

  Sam loved climbing the tree even more than she’d loved the rocks. She surveyed the land around us and basked in the sunlight.

  When we returned to the ground this time, she tried to pick the sap off her hands. I motioned for her to come over and pulled a tiny can of WD-40 out of my backpack, along with a rag. With a quick spray, the pitch wiped off. Sam looked at the WD-40 like it was a miracle product.

  After her introduction to climbing, which I’d decided was not silly after all, it seemed like a good time to teach Sam how to defend herself. I wasn’t sure where to begin with this, but eventually settled on the throwing knives. She’d need to learn some combat skills eventually, but at the time it seemed like she needed an expansive bubble of personal space. (This was why I’d been glad she’d let the guys hug her the night before—she needed that, too.) At a junction in the trails, we found a big wooden sign on a post, and I drew a target on it with a stubby permanent marker. I showed her how to hold the knives and demonstrated the way to throw them. All eight of my knives whistled into the target’s bull’s-eye, which I’d drawn extra large for Sam’s benefit.

  Sam gave it a try. The first knife’s handle bounced off the sign’s post. The second knife plunked into the ground in front of the sign. The third knife flew over the sign. The fourth knife also flew over the sign. The fifth hit a tree several feet to the side of the sign. The sixth knife actually landed behind us. Sam had become so frazzled, she’d let go of it on the windup.

  “I’m hopeless,” she said, embarrassed.

  “You think I learned to do this overnight?” I handed her another knife. “Be patient with yourself. And don’t think about it so much. The skills for this aren’t in your brain, they’re in your body. Like when you’re peeling carrots, and your mind wanders, but your hands keep going. Okay?”

  She looked at me dubiously.

  I instructed, “Look at the sign.”

  She looked at the sign.

  “Don’t try. Don’t think about what you’re doing. Don’t care about whether you hit the target. Now, throw the knife into the sign.”

  She threw the knife. It stuck in a corner of the wood. She whooped and twirled around.

  I handed her another knife. “Do it again.”

  She did, and this one landed inside the target area.

  We collected the knives and she started over again while I sat to laze against a tree.

  “You’re a natural after all,” I told her.

  She looked so overjoyed, I wondered whether anyone had ever praised her in her entire life.

  While Sam continued her target practice, we heard Eric and Jeff approaching on the trail. They were arguing.

  “You can’t just sit on your ass and let rotters keep coming in. It’s fucking absurd. We need to be proactive. I’m sick of having this conversation!” Eric said. “If a big group comes along—”

  “We don’t have the resources…” Jeff whined as they rounded the corner and saw us. He stopped speaking, but kept walking. His face was bright red.

  Sammy moved to collect he
r knives, and I looked at Eric. Eric was far more pissed off than I’d ever seen him. He had his fists clenched at his sides. He nodded a hello, in spite of his fury. I nodded a bit of encouragement. Jeff needed to hear this from someone.

  They disappeared down a trail and resumed their talk.

  “If we’d started when we first talked about this, we’d have a solution in place already,” I heard Eric say. I agreed, and resolved to come up with that solution.

  I took Sammy out to the zip line, a reward for training hard. She loved it as much as I did, clearly.

  “Eric set this up?” she asked.

  “Yeah, how lucky are we?”

  She ran, shouting as she floated up to the tree, “This kicks ass!” She shoved off the tree’s trunk with her feet and returned to me on the ground.

  I knew Sam wanted to learn not only how to protect herself; she wanted to be able to fight. Baby steps, though. She still needed space, and I wasn’t about to try to teach her to brawl when she didn’t have any idea how to break free from someone’s grasp. This first training day, the zip line trip wasn’t her only reward. I gave her Officer Bissett’s police sap. She looked at the spoonlike leather thing before reaching out to take it. Then she marveled at its weight in her hands.

  “This is a sap,” I explained. “If someone tries to hurt you, hit them with it. Hit them hard, and run.”

  She bounced it off the base of her thumb three times. And then she smiled.

  joined Eric on the cliff during his Post Watch. He looked tired and frustrated.

  “Do you want me to cover this for you?” I asked.

  “Nah, I’m good,” he said, looking out over the camp.

  “Any resolution with Jeff?”

  Eric shook his head. “He doesn’t think it’s possible to keep the rotters out. He won’t even let us string warning lines around the boundaries like we have at the lean-to, because he doesn’t want to ‘misdirect our resources.’ He’s so concerned with other people right now, he doesn’t see the bigger danger in rotters. If a swarm comes by, camp is screwed, all thanks to Jeff’s bumblefuckery.”

  “He seems to have trouble focusing on more than one threat at a time,” I observed. “I almost left camp as soon as I arrived. He acted so weird about having a stranger around.”

  “We had a big problem with a small group that stopped by a few days before you got here. We lost a few people and a lot of supplies. Jeff kinda went off the deep end. He’s been paranoid about it happening again. I’m sure it didn’t help that he couldn’t place where he knew you from right away.”

  “Don’t remind me. I can’t believe he showed those pictures in front of everyone.” I felt a bit of panic about that again, but Eric steered the subject back to security.

  “Jeff and I have had this conversation so many times I’ve stopped counting. I can’t understand why we aren’t doing anything to protect the camp.” Then he looked embarrassed. “I… kinda slugged Jeff, for being obtuse. Before the city.” I tried not to smile about his hitting Jeff, but didn’t quite manage to hide my feelings, and Eric grinned. “Don’t encourage it!”

  “Sorry,” I laughed. “By the way, I think I have a way to contain the rotters if a big group comes by. It’s not a solution, but it might be a start.” I described the beginning of the only rational plan I’d come up with so far. My idea was pretty simple; explaining it didn’t take long.

  Eric mulled it over, smiling. “That sounds great, actually. Let’s talk to Mattie and Thom about it, and we’ll do something, if Jeff can’t be bothered to.” Eric yawned and rubbed his eyes.

  I hugged him. “I got this. Go do something you want to do.”

  “What I want to do is right here,” he said, holding my head to his chest while continuing to scan for threats beyond our camp’s boundaries. I giggled and he said, “I meant that exactly the way it came out.”

  “The day Jeff nearly drove you to leaving camp?” Thom asked. “When Eric and Matthew went after you?” he added, as if I needed reminding. “I took all the pictures away from Jeff.” He looked up. “I don’t usually start fights.”

  It was true. The brothers could all hold their own in a fight, but Thom preferred to keep the peace.

  “I punched him in the face,” Thom told me.

  Again, I couldn’t help but smile.

  “I kept these.” He pulled the battered pictures from his pocket and handed them to me, looking embarrassed. “Didn’t want Jeff to have them after that. I figured if you didn’t come back, I’d still… kinda carry you around with me awhile.”

  “I wasn’t going to come back,” I admitted, batting down an impulse to hug him. “But…”

  “‘Sup?” Matthew asked, arriving at the lean-to with Eric.

  “Talking,” I replied. I skipped ahead in what I had to say. “I was just telling Thom that Jeff was Officer Bissett’s friend.”

  “Huh!” Matthew said, reaching down to retie his boots.

  Eric followed suit. Retying shoes is like yawning. It can be hard to watch someone do that and not copy it.

  I didn’t want the pictures. I slipped them back into Thom’s pocket before leaning to retie my own boots.

  Jeff himself arrived at our camp a moment later. Eric straightened, bracing himself for something. I worried about what was up. We greeted Jeff, and he motioned to Eric, and they walked off together.

  Matthew gave a little jab at my shoulder. I hopped up, rushed past him, and donkey-kicked the back of his leg, under his knee. He stumbled, but recovered.

  “So that’s how this is gonna be, huh?” He wiped a readied fist across his face and sniffed and laughed and shook his head.

  We moved away from the deck. Thom watched with a bemused grin.

  Matthew jabbed at me again. I leaped away. I jumped up and launched off a boulder, kicking at his chest. His hands fell to his sides as he leaned and backed away. My foot hit squarely on target, but without much force. We reset.

  “Sam’s a quick learner,” he said, punching at the air where I’d been.

  “When you get her out of her head, yeah,” I told him, landing a decent punch to his shoulder.

  “I saw her practicing with the throwing knives earlier,” Matthew said, barely dodging my other fist, “and she’s getting pretty good!”

  “He’s just trying to distract you,” Thom laughed.

  “He’s always trying that!” I replied as I prepared an attack.

  I charged Matthew, jumping and turning in the air. I caught the length of his lower leg with my foot. He grunted and backed away, rubbing his shin. It wasn’t a real injury, just a sting to wake him up. I let him breathe for a minute, and enjoyed Thom’s laughter.

  “What are you, some sort of ninja?” Matthew asked. “Hold.” He grabbed Thom’s Gatorade and gulped down a large portion of it.

  “Certified! I attended the Bovine Institute of Ninjectic Arts,” I boasted, thinking of the farmer and liking the sound of “Ninjectic” in there, for today. “I’ve got the brochure somewhere.”

  Matthew threw the Gatorade bottle to Thom and we prepared to go again. We circled, studying each other and cataloging body language.

  “You gonna fight with her sometime?” he asked me.

  “Who?”

  “Sam!”

  “Maybe.” My weaker ankle rolled on a tree root and I fell on my ass.

  “‘Kay?” he asked, offering a hand.

  I smiled ruefully, letting him pull me up. I shook my foot out and tested it. I dusted myself off. “Fine.”

  Matthew took another quick drink break. I knelt on one knee in the middle of the grass, prepared to push myself up.

  “Ready?” Matthew asked.

  “Yep.” I had my eyes closed and my face pointed at the ground, listening and feeling.

  He hesitated.

  “Come ON!” I finally hollered.

  Matthew charged me. Before he could blink, he was lying flat on his back, looking at the sky.

  Thom’s laughter filled our home
again. I laughed with him.

  Matthew shook his head and got back up. “I have no idea what just happened. How did you do that?”

  I showed him exactly how it had been done, and I smiled inwardly about my secret: I could still make him fall into a few other traps, and he wouldn’t see those coming. I’d save them for later.

  We went back at it, not talking for some time.

  Thom and Matthew and I were so focused on the fight, we failed to notice Jeff reentering our campsite. He’d returned alone, having sent Eric off on some sort of mission. Eric would tell me about it later, or not. At any rate, no one said, “Hold.” Jeff had never seen us doing this before. Alarmed, he shouted without warning, misreading the situation and startling us all.

  It screwed up our timing, again. Even though I managed to pull back, even though Matthew managed to slow his momentum, his fist caught me hard on the side of my nose. It started bleeding profusely.

  “It’s okay!” I told Matthew, who looked… well, probably like I had when I’d punched him. I laughed, because it seemed silly.

  Thom pushed a clean rag to my face. He palpated gently, telling me he didn’t think anything was broken.

  Jeff demanded an explanation, and I told him, “We’re just horsing around.”

  “Good way to get hurt,” Jeff preached.

  “It really is okay,” I promised Matthew, patting his shoulder as Thom led me away to clean me up. “Get you next time?”

  “Yes!” He bumped my fist with his.

  I closed my eyes as Thom pulled me along the trail.

  “Okay?” he asked, slowing and guiding my steps more carefully.

  I nodded with my eyes still closed. “Had the makings of a migraine before Matthew and I began to play. Letting off stress was helping, but now it’s growing again. Like Jack’s beanstalk.”

  This brought a dirty image to mind, but I let it slip away quickly.

  Thom checked my nose. The bleeding hadn’t quite stopped. I held the cloth firmly to my face, thinking my countenance must be frightful. I was glad he hadn’t tried to take me back to the lake at the main camp.

  He led me to a nearly silent river. It flowed slowly, smoothly down around a bend, away from view. Like mercury in the overcast day’s light.