by Godsby Jim
“I know what I did, Ellie. Trust me, I know. And once I’ve found Georgia and made sure she’s safe, I’ll find a way to pay everyone back. I don’t know how, but I’ll find a way.”
Ellie finished rolling a cigarette, and this time it lit perfectly. As she took a deep drag on it the end flared orange. Ellie screwed up the empty tobacco pouch and shoved it in her pocket.
“Guess it’s time for me to quit,” she said, and looked at the ground sadly.
“I used to smoke. It’s not so bad, quitting. You won’t miss it much. Except for after a meal. And after a beer. And when you get stressed. And….hell, what am I saying? I still miss it,” said Ash.
Ellie laughed. She smoked her cigarette down to the end, dropped it to the ground and then crushed it under her good foot. She turned to Ash and smiled at him, and he felt like it was the first genuine one that she had ever given him.
“You did a shitty thing,” she said, “But maybe you’re not such a bad guy.”
Chapter 6
By the time they came off the pass and left the Lantern mountain range, they were like prisoners escaping from a penitentiary. Ash walked in front of the others and led the way. At first he’d enjoyed the break from driving, but after feeling his blood sugar drop and his head start to become light enough to float up into the air, he soon got pretty tired of walking. His stomach was cramped through hunger, and the night before he had dreamt for hours of burgers of all shapes and sizes, and when he woke up he had drooled down his chin.
Chad and Ellie hadn’t fared much better. After being in the army, Chad was the most physically fit of the three, and he had a more positive temperament to go with it. Even so, he had dark coffee-stain rings around his eyes, and his jokes were becoming less frequent and more forced. Ellie had started to feel the effects of her tobacco supply running out. Sometimes Ash would glance at her while they walked and he’d swear he could see steam coming out from her nose, and he thought that any minute she was going to breathe out a ball of fire and engulf the three of them.
As soon as they took the step that meant they had left the mountain range, Chad pumped a fist in the air and gave a weak cheer. Ash leant against a signpost that welcomed them to Green Gross County. There was a chilly wind in the air that hadn’t been present in the range, and it felt strange to be faced with open land after being hemmed in by cliff edges for so long.
They were on the crest of a hill. Ash knew that they needed to walk five miles south and they would come to Greenock city. From there, he knew that his body would run on adrenaline and it wouldn’t take him long to get home.
“Ash,” said Chad from behind him.
“What’s up?”
“My aunt and uncle live a couple of miles away. Think we can call in on them?”
Ash wanted to tell him no, that they were so close to his own house that he didn’t want to spare even a second. But he knew he had no right to do that. Chad only wanted to do the same thing as him; he wanted to go and see his family and make sure that they were okay. Ash was beginning to realise that people needed to look out for each other. It was a shame that it had taken a disaster for him to realise this truth, but there it was.
***
When they reached Chad’s uncle’s house, Ash started to get excited about the idea of resting on their couch for an hour or two and getting something good to eat. Their house was a two-storey log cabin that was cut off from everything else. The nearest neighbour, Chad informed them, was a senile old farmer a mile and a half away, whose sheep always escaped his fences and ended up chewing grass outside Chad’s uncle’s house.
“I could really go for some lamb right now,” said Ellie. “Hey, don’t suppose your uncle smokes?”
Chad shook his head. “He drinks, but doesn’t smoke. He used to be a track runner when he was younger.”
“Glad to be back?” said Ash.
Chad smiled. “You know what? Now that we’re here, I missed the pair of them more than I realised.”
The curtains on every window were drawn, and they couldn’t see any lights on inside. The front door opened without resistance, and when they stepped into the house they were greeted by darkness and the smell of damp. The building was silent except for the pounding of their boots as they walked from room to room. They didn’t find anyone, but there were signs that people had been living there, from the discarded food cans on the kitchen counters and muddy footprints on the wooden flooring in the living room.
“This wasn’t my uncle or aunt,” said Chad, looking at the muddy footprints.
“Times like this, people don’t worry about cleaning up,” said Ellie.
Chad shook his head. “It’s not that. They were both small people, and I used to make fun of the size of their feet. I used to tell them they had hobbit feet.”
He crouched to the floor and inspected the footprints closely. Then he turned and looked at Ash.
“This is a size twelve. What the hell happened here, Ash? Where are my uncle and aunt?”
Chad stood up straight and walked passed Ash and Ellie and out of the room. They heard his boots thud on the stairs as he ran up them. A few minutes later, they heard him shout down.
“What the hell?” he said. “Get up here, guys.”
They ran up and joined him, and they found him stood in what was obviously a child’s bedroom. The walls were painted blue with red spots, and model aircraft were suspended from the ceiling by wires. There were science books written for children lining a bookcase on one side of the wall.
“Looks like we found little Chad’s room,” said Ellie, and grinned.
Chad’s face was serious, and his eyes showed an anger that Ash had never seen in them before.
“This was my room,” said Chad. “But none of the stuff is mine. Same in the master bedroom. It’s completely different.”
“So they changed things around some when you enlisted. That’s no big deal,” said Ash.
“No. you don’t get it,” said Chad. “All of this stuff, it belongs to someone else. Guys, I think my uncle and aunt moved house without telling me.”
With that he sat down on the child’s bed and sunk into it. He put his head in his hands. When he pulled them away he wasn’t crying, but his face still looked puffy. Ash walked across the room and sat beside him.
“Come on, buddy,” he said.
“I just wanted somewhere that I belonged,” said Chad. “That’s all I ever wanted. And when my brother said he didn’t want to write letters to me, I just felt so alone. The army made me feel like I had someone, at least for a while. But they weren’t family. Not really. They were good dudes, but they had families of their own.”
Ellie hovered on the doorframe. From the look on her face, Ash could tell she felt uncomfortable. He had seen a different side to her over the course of the trip and he knew that she could be a warm person, but it seemed like emotions were difficult for her to handle.
“I’m gonna go downstairs and see what supplies they have. I’ll see if they have anything we can cook on the stove,” she said.
“Great,” said Ash.
He turned to Chad. He felt sorry for the young recruit, and he knew how he felt, in a way.
“When my parents split up,” said Ash, “I was only thirteen. I thought that they were gonna fight over who could look after me, that they’d both want me to live with them so much that they’d go to court over it. In the end it didn’t work that way. They both stood in front of a judge and tried to argue that the other person should take care of me. Their court battle was to get rid of me.”
“Why didn’t they want you?” said Chad.
“My mom had a career at a fashion magazine and she was trying to become editor. By then, my dad had gone into full-scale prepper mode, and he didn’t have the time to look after a kid. I’ll never forget how betrayed I felt when I heard him tell their judge that he thought I should go live with mom.”
“It must have sucked, being shoved around like that.”
&nb
sp; “Sorry, Chad. I know you got problems of your own right now. Just thought it might help you to know that you’re not the only one.”
Chad got to his feet. He stood below one of the airplane models. It was a B-1B Lancer, and when Chad poked it, it twirled around on its metal coil. It looked like some kid had spent painstaking hours putting it together. That was something that Ash always admired; the determination to see a project through to the end.
“Your dad sounds like he’d be a pretty useful guy to know right now,” said Chad.
Ash nodded. “If you think Tony Shore is a prepper, he’s got nothing on my dad. He’s the ultimate survivalist. Last time I visited his house, he’d dug out a shelter below his living room and filled it with enough equipment to survive any disaster you could ever think of. He’s so well prepared that I’m guessing my dad would be more useful to some folks right now than even the government would be.”
“So why don’t we go find him?” said Chad.
Ash looked out of the bedroom window. From here he couldn’t see the city, but he knew that it wasn’t far away. Georgia was there, at home. He hoped she was safe. Then, five miles away in the middle of the Split Spring Woods, was his father’s house. Despite their relatively short distance away from each other, Ash hadn’t been to see him in over fifteen years.
After the court case and custody had been given to Ash’s mom, Ash had tried to stay friendly with his dad. But after the second visit, he knew it was going to be impossible. He couldn’t look at him without thinking to himself “you didn’t want me. You could have looked after me, but you were happy for mom to take over.”
Ash left home five years later and got a job as a travelling salesman, and he met Georgia when he knocked on her door to sell a cutlery set. He was so stunned by her that he completely forgot his pitch. Georgia had always been there for him, and she had filled the gap left by the family who didn’t want him. Now, all these years later, she was in trouble. If it was a choice between finding Georgia and finding his dad, then the woman would win every single time.
“What do you say, Ash? Are we gonna go find your dad?”
“No way,” said Ash. “The only person I care about finding is my wife. The old man can go to hell.”
There was a sound from outside the house. Ash stood at the bedroom window and saw a car pull into the driveway, the tires scraping over the rough stone.
“That your uncle and aunt?” said Ash.
“Nope,” said Chad. “I don’t know who the hell this is. Could be the new owners.”
Ash watched three figures get out of the car, and he got a shock of fear in his chest.
“Whoever it is, they’ve got guns.”
Chapter 7
Ash moved away from the window so that the strangers couldn’t see him. Before he did, he saw that they were two men and a woman. One of the men had a rifle, and the other two people held pistols. Their car was an old Volkswagen Bug with mud splattered down the side. These were the only kinds of vehicles that they were going to see from now on, he realised. The only good car these days was one without any electronics on board, and that meant that every single shiny car on the road was now a useless pile of crap.
For a second he thought about the future. How far was this going to go? Was there going to come a point where everyone started using horses again? He didn’t even know if the government was doing anything to get the power up and running. Back at the ranch, Tony Shore had told him that even if they still had the capability to get the grids back online, it would be at least five years before they saw any progress. In that time, disaster writers had predicted that ninety percent of the country would die. It gave Ash a chill down his spine to think about it.
“We need to get to Ellie,” said Chad.
Ash snapped out of his thoughts. He remembered the brigands in the Lantern range who had demanded a toll, and he knew that until proven otherwise, they were going to have to treat the strangers as hostile. That meant they needed to be ready for anything. They had to be ready to kill, if it came to that.
“We left the guns on the kitchen table,” he said.
“Let’s go down, but don’t make too much noise.”
They got into the kitchen, where Ellie stood above a stove. On top of it was a pan, in which baked beans and sausages bubbled away. Ash was so hungry that the smell almost made him pass out. Ellie dipped a spoon in the pan, lifted it out and tasted the beans. Ash wanted to rush over and grab the spoon off her.
“What’s wrong guys?” she said, with the spoon in front of her mouth.
The front door of the log cabin opened. Ellie put the spoon on the table and reached into her pocket for her pistol. Chad picked up his own gun from the table, and then raised his finger to his lips for them all to be quiet. Ash grabbed his crossbow and made sure that it was cocked. He nodded at Chad, and then pointed at the wall next to the door. He wanted him to stand there so that they could catch the strangers by surprise when they entered the room.
“Keep your fingers near your triggers,” he whispered. “We’ll try to reason with them, but you might have to shoot.”
His heart was pounding in his chest, and he wondered if he really had it in him to kill a man again. He’d killed a mountain lion a few days earlier, but that seemed different, somehow. Talking an animal’s life wasn’t the same as taking a man’s.
A door opened behind them. Ash hadn’t even realised that there was another door in the kitchen, and by the time he span round, a man stood in the entrance with a rifle pointed at Ash’s head.
“Drop it, chief,” he growled.
The man had a handlebar moustache that was greased at the tips. His forehead was covered in worry lines, and his skin looked so tough that it could have been mistaken for tanned leather. He wore a thick wool coat with a fur hood, and over it he had a thin plastic waterproof cagoule. His khaki trousers were covered in mud, and there was a small splatter of blood on his black boots. Ash was quite a tall guy at six foot two, but this man towered over him in height and dwarfed him in size. He was like a bear dressed in human clothes.
The man shifted the rifle in his hands, but he never moved his aim away from Ash. There were footsteps in the door behind them, and Ash knew that the other two strangers had stepped into the room.
“I suggest you don’t move an inch,” said the man.
Two other two strangers walked in with their guns raised. One of them, the woman, checked the side of the door and spotted Chad immediately. It was as if she was used to checking for hiding places and traps.
“Put your guns down,” said the woman.
Her face was dirty, but it was obvious how attractive she was. Despite that, she had a mean look on her face, and Ash got the sense that she’d happily shoot the three of them if it came down to it. He wondered what these three strangers had seen in the last couple of weeks to make them so hardened.
The Bear man spoke.
“I want you to slowly put your weapons on the table,” he said.
Ash shook his head. He held the crossbow at waist height. He couldn’t risk moving it up to eye level to take proper aim, but if it fired, it would still stick in the Bear’s chest.
“No way. We don’t know who the hell you are. You think that we’d disarm ourselves?”
“It’s either that or I put a bullet in your thick skull.”
“Let’s all calm down,” said the third stranger.
He was a much smaller and thinner man than his friend. He had a rough beard that was thick and black on his cheeks, but around his mouth it thinned out and became grey. His hands looked soft, and his skin was pale. In contrast to his bigger friend, he didn’t seem like he’d had a tough life.
The Bear gave his friend a scowl.
“We can’t have strangers coming into our house and stealing our shit.”
Chad sprang away from the wall.
“This is my uncle’s house,” he said.
The woman followed him with her gun, one eye squinting through th
e sights. Chad relaxed a little and leaned back against the wall, but Ash could tell from his face that he wasn’t happy.
“Listen,” said Ash. “We’re not here to steal. Or to get into a fight, for that matter. This house used to belong to Chad’s uncle and aunt.”
“Well it doesn’t anymore,” said the Bear.
“I realise that. So we’re just gonna be on our way.”
The woman let out a guffaw of laughter at this, and her eyes lit with amusement.
“Go? Go where? You sure as hell don’t want to go to the city, I’ll tell you that for free.”
