Outside the Fire

by Boyd Craven

  “Who was that?” Angela asked, seeing he wasn’t on the phone anymore.

  “The HOA’s lawyer. Wants to sit down and talk. Probably going to settle with us about the fence thing.”

  “That was your work phone,” Angela said pointing to the separate cell phone sitting on the desk.

  That’s when the nerves kicked in.

  “How would he have that number?” Steve asked, rhetorically.

  “That’s what I was wondering.”

  “Well crap, I wonder if there’s something in the HOA about home based businesses?” Steve asked her.

  “There is….”

  “Well shit. I don’t think they can do anything about it, Billy next door does it and so do half of the people in the neighborhood.”

  “Selective enforcement. Still, this isn’t a court of law. It’s a contract.”

  “Damn. Yeah. Well, our guy is going to call us when they have a time set up.”

  “You should go shopping. Get your lists,” Angela said suddenly.

  “Why?” Steve asked her, suddenly curious.

  “Because you’re going to obsess over this and it’d be good for you and Amy to get out of the house for a little bit. It’s been a rough summer for her. Her sister is never home, you’re stressed out, and starting a new business isn’t helping. Go buy some prepping stuff or ammo!”

  “I’ve never heard of you actually encouraging me to buy more ammo,” Steve said, fighting back a grin.

  “We made really good money at IT Bytes. We set our budgets, we bought Amber a Jeep that’s basically brand new with cash, you’ve been maxing out your IRA’s and mutual funds, and yet you still had enough to do some prepping.”

  “Yeah, but the business isn’t earning quite as much—”

  “The house note and property taxes are paid a year in advance. Actually, the taxes are more like a year and a half. You’ve barely touched the severance pay. What would make you happy? A new gun?”

  The last thing Steve expected was this, but his mind was already swirling with possibilities. She had let him off the hook earlier in the year when she found out about the AR-15s he’d gotten and had actually been impressed that his ammo buying didn’t actually cost them more, he just got smarter and saved till his budget would allow him to get it by the case instead of the box. There were other projects than guns, ammo, and food he’d always wanted, and living where he did, he knew it wasn’t top of the list, but if his wife was giving him free reign….

  “I see that look, you have an idea,” she said.

  “Yeah, tell Ames that we’re gonna go hit Home Depot. I have my work done for the day, and unless some kind of problem pops up, maybe we can spend a couple hours. Daddy-daughter time.”

  “Good. What are you going to do until then?” Angela asked, bumping her hip into his.

  “Try to get out the door before you find me something else to do,” Steve told her with a grin, “Actually, I want to see the shelter for a minute. I want to see if I have room for another gun safe.”

  “We have plenty of room in the one...unless—”

  “Gotcha,” Steve said goosing his wife.

  She squeaked and he took off towards the garage. Amy saw part of the chase, but turned away when she found them kissing in the doorway leading into it.

  “I thought you were going to talk to Dad about us doing something. You keep sucking his face and it’s…gross!”

  They broke their kiss and Steve walked over and scooped his daughter up. She yelped in surprise.

  “I’m almost ten; put me down!” she screamed indignantly.

  He walked over and laid her out on the couch, staying out of reach of flailing arms looking for revenge. Laughing, he backed up.

  “Give me five and meet me in the garage. You and I are going shopping.”

  “Wh…where at?”

  “Home Depot,” Steve told her and pulled the door shut between the house and the garage.

  The door did little to muffle her screaming “yes,” and he imagined there was a fist pump involved. All kids were doing it lately. It was one of her favorite stores, especially in the summertime. Despite the heat, you could find a riot of flowers and all sorts of interesting things for projects she wanted to start.

  The garage wasn’t cooled the same way the house was, but they had one vent in here that tried to blow cold air from the air conditioner. Today it was failing. Making sure the door to the garage was still closed, he headed into his faux mechanical room. He left the lights off and walked sideways between the narrow pathway to the back where the trap door was. He pulled on it, and the lid popped up and he put a stack in front of it so it wouldn’t close on accident. He walked down there and turned on the light.

  Eight steps down and the steel and fiberglass shelter was almost twenty degrees cooler than the upstairs. It was easily a comfortable mid-seventies down there and the light would heat things up if he left the bare 100-watt bulb in. Steve made a mental note to buy a LED bulb to replace that one and then looked around. It was cylindrical in shape with a flat floor put in place. It was fifteen-feet long and the floor space was about five-feet wide at the narrowest point, though the walls curved out like the inside of a steel culvert. Four bunks were tucked into the space in the middle of the shelter, two to each side.

  Camp chairs had been broken down and put under the bottom two bunks and then boxes of instant food were pushed into there. Boxes that held gallon jugs of water lined one wall and towards the back was the combination area. Steve had made additions to the shelter after he’d found that there was a drain in the bottom that apparently was meant to drain the structure in case of an emergency flood. When he pulled the cleanout, he got a whiff of sewer so he had closed it back down.

  Now, it sported a small half bath without running water. There was a sink for brushing teeth and cleaning up, but the water would have to be brought over from the cases of water he’d been stocking. Same with flushing the toilet. He didn’t know if it actually hooked into the sewer lines, not knowing how deep those were put in Georgia, but he figured in an emergency, even if it came out into a storm sewer, they had someplace to use the bathroom. Two small walls and a curtain closed off the doorway there, and on the wall opposite of the bathroom, in a cramped area, was a small cooking surface. An old Coleman stove had been set up there. Underneath the cabinet he’d not only stored his pots and pans, but several gallons of fuel.

  If you were to back out of the kitchen half a step and turn towards the bunk beds and the entrance to the bunker, you’d almost run into the gun safe. It was the only thing other than the bathroom fixtures that were bolted down tight. He spun the dial and entered the combination. When it was open, he pulled out the gun he’d been practicing with as of late, one of the 1911s. He put it into a holster and then tucked it into the back of his pants. A spare magazine went into his pants pocket and after he was adjusting his belt and shirt, he was ready to go.

  “Daddy, you ready yet?” Amy called down from the garage.

  “Yeah, be right there,” he said, closing the safe and spinning the dial, locking it.

  “Why are you getting all these pipes?” Amy asked for the fourth time.

  Steve had the pipes cut in half so they were five-foot-long and then had threads cut onto the end.

  “Can I tell you a secret?” Steve asked her.

  Even the plumbing associate leaned in.

  “Yes,” she all but whispered.

  “Remember Uncle Dewey’s hand pump?”

  “Yeah?” Amy asked, not for sure what his pump had to do with the pipe.

  “I’ve got a sand point here, some special couplings, a driving cap, and the pipe is the last thing I need before I put a pump on top of the pipes, just like his pump.”

  “Oh, that’s going to be so cool. Are we going to put it in right away?” Amy asked.

  The guy from plumbing grinned and finished off the last set of threads and slid the pipe into the already heavily laden cart. “Do you need a pitcher p
ump for that?”

  “I thought you guys didn’t stock them?” Steve asked.

  “We do now, we got a reset and we have all kinds of pumps now, especially with all the new pond stuff. It’s a new vendor for us and you know how Home Depot is down here in Georgia.”

  “You get all the good stuff?” Steve asked her.

  “You got it,” he said and walked them over two aisles.

  He helped them pick out a pitcher pump, and Steve opted for the heftier one, with better internals.

  “Anything else I can help you find?” the associate asked.

  “Do you know where I can find a fence post driver and a post hole digger?”

  Steve and Amy were loading up groceries from Sam’s when his phone started buzzing. He pulled it out and saw text messages from both his wife and Amber.

  Daddy, get gas, it’s going up all over the state. The news said it’s gone up another forty cents today.

  And then from Angela: Call me.

  “What is it, Dad?” Amy asked.

  “I dunno, your mom and sister are both blowing up my phone,” he said and thumbed in Angela’s number and hit send.

  “Hey baby, what’s going on?”

  “It’s…turn on the news. You know what to do about this. You’ve been…” Angela’s voice was shaky and he could tell she was close to tears, or afraid. Probably both.

  “I will. Is everything ok at home? Are you ok?”

  “Yes, but it…I’m glad you’re too old for the draft.”

  “What’s going on?” Steve said, firing up the truck to get the air conditioning started on the summer heat that had slowly crept up while they were inside.

  “There’s a naval fight and they just closed the stock market down. Something about the Federal Reserve, and now, they say gas prices are going up.”

  “There’s a lot of fear….” Steve said aloud.

  “Yes, just come home, help me figure out what this is.”

  “I will babe, I love you.”

  “Love you too, hurry.”

  They both hung up and Amy looked over at her dad as he put the phone down on the dash.

  “Is Mom ok?”

  “Yeah, I guess the Navy is in another fight. There’s some other stuff going on and gas is getting expensive.”

  “Oh, ok,” Amy said, and then got her Kindle out.

  Steve marveled at how innocent and out of the loop his daughter was. If there was a sudden suspension of trading and the Fed was involved…every conspiracy theory and fear ran through his head. Instead of speaking it aloud, he pulled out and headed towards the gas station. He almost had a full tank, a habit he’d gotten into when he lived in the frozen North and turned on the talk radio.

  “…ing news…the president will be holding a press conference in an hour regarding the Chinese retaliation and sinking of the US Missile Cruiser….”

  “Daddy?” Amy asked.

  “Yeah, hun,” he said turning the dial down.

  “What happens if we get into another war? I know we’re just getting out of one right now. We can’t fight two at the same time, can we?”

  “We’re already sort of doing that,” Steve admitted.

  “Oh, so this would be like a third?” Amy asked, putting the Kindle face down in her lap.

  “More like a fifth or sixth.”

  Her eyes got wide.

  “Don’t worry about it, Amy. As long as no nuclear weapons are used, we can take on the world. America has the biggest and best military. Even if the whole world ganged up on us, we’d still beat them.”

  “Does the whole world want to fight us?”

  Steve mentally kicked himself.

  “Nope, they’d be foolish to try.”

  “Oh, ok,” Amy said and picked her Kindle back up and began to read.

  He turned up the radio to a low level and decided to hit the gas station closest to the house, outside of town. Listening to the radio, it sounded like a ship had been attacked as it sailed too close to one of the disputed islands. The missile defense systems shot down the missile and they in turn, fired on the installation. Other islands launched and a submarine (from anybody’s best guess) had fired a torpedo almost right underneath the missile cruiser. The submarine was immediately sunk and all hell broke loose. The reports started getting dicey on speculation and might-have-happened type statements, so he muted it and paid no more attention.

  Almost immediately he saw that the gas stations were changing the prices. What had been about seventy cents higher on average was now over one dollar and ten cents more than it had been six months ago. He remembered seeing milk at Sam’s had also been a little higher than normal, but that had been creeping up forever now. He shook his head and when Amy started singing some Miley Cyrus, he tuned her out. The only wrecking ball he cared about was the one facing the nation. He had worried about civil unrest, but maybe Dwight had been right all along. He wasn’t prepping for a zombie apocalypse, just the collapse of the dollar.

  Could that even be possible? He switched to the FM stations and went to the local Public Broadcasting Station. They were talking about the pitched battle in the South China Seas as he pulled into the gas station, and he left the truck running and rolled down his window and left the radio on. He started filling his gas tank as they started talking about the gas prices creeping up as tensions and market volatility were named as a reason. There was no mention of the stock market being closed early, but that’s what he was listening for.

  He kept a small amount of cash at home, if there was a sudden bank run, he’d need to be there fast. Still….

  “…in breaking news, the President has ordered the US Navy and Airforce to maintain its space in international waters and any ship approaching them without proper identification will…this just in. Several Iranian Revolutionary Guard Naval ships have been sank as they raced towards a US…”

  “Dad, can I run inside and get a candy bar?” Amy called.

  “I’m almost done here,” Steve called back. “I’ll get you one from my stash at home.”

  “You have a stash of candy bars at home?”

  “Sure, how do you think I can survive your mom and Amber—”

  “Dad.…”

  Steve grinned, though his guts were starting to feel nauseated. Maybe now with a flexible schedule, it was time to up his research and get with Dwight to see what he thought of his prepping, and what his chances were. It was time to let the old farmer in on his plans if something were to happen.

  CHAPTER 10

  Steve and Dwight finally got a chance to sit down over a backyard barbecue and Angela had known that Steve wanted to talk to Dwight about what looked increasingly to be some scary times ahead. He’d been pretty close to being squared away with food for the four of them for a while. He’d even hinted around at church and gotten the pastor interested in prepping a little bit, but more so as a community-based idea as more and more people were having a hard time.

  Inflation was starting to kick in, and though some products and services had almost doubled in prices, only the poorest of Americans were really being hurt by the pinch. Steve could see it, but he hadn’t had a chance to talk to Dwight about things because the wily farmer had been getting busier with the harvest and getting ready to replant.

  “Damn corn prices are low this year. This god damned global warming…everybody has good crops,” Dwight snarked, reaching for a Corona that was sitting in the cooler on the back patio.

  “Sorry to hear that. Didn’t put you in the red, did it?” Steve asked.

  “Excuse me, hon,” Angela said stepping outside.

  “Hey, babe.”

  “The girls and I are going to head out now.”

  “Ok, you sure you don’t want to take one of the Colts?”

  “No, I’m not used to carrying it yet. I’m not as comfortable with them as you are.”

  “Ok, you three stay out of trouble. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Steve told her with a grin.

  “Sa
me with you two,” she made a little wave and the back door swung shut behind her.

  “What were you asking me again?” Dwight asked, taking a swig.

  “The corn prices. Didn’t put you behind, did it?”

  “Naw,” Dwight told him. “If I was buying something like the Monsanto seed I might have an issue, but I set aside my own corn for seed. With two growing seasons down here, I don’t have any problems with that. That plus the chemical fertilizers. I don’t gotta buy them none, because I make my own. Better off using what’s free than spend a ton of money.”

  “Huh, I didn’t realize you were kind of an organic farm.”

  “Not organic, but a lot of the same practices. I don’t ask the government for permission to grow the way I do, so I don’t want to ask them to come out and certify me on a piece of paper that I have to get tons of inspections and pay fees for. You might not get rich from farming, but it is a way of life.”

  “We just have to find you a lady friend. A crazy chicken lady who can put up with you,” Steve said taking a sip.

  “Yeah right. I’ve been alone for ten years now. I’m too old to get back on that wagon. Nuh uh, no siree.”

  “What about that Loretta at the church? She’s been making eyes at you.”

  “That’s because…I don’t…Oh, fuck off.” Dwight said turning red for the first time that Steve could ever remember.

  He tried not to laugh, but a chuckle escaped before he could cut it off. After a minute, Dwight started laughing too.

  “Yeah, well, she’s had her hat set for me for a while now,” he admitted.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t laugh. It’s just…damn, I’ve never seen you get touchy like that.”

  “My fault. She’s a sore spot. The last time my son came around…it’s just…I don’t want him to think I’m trying to replace his mom.”

  “Ah, ok. Sorry, I won’t bring that up.”

  “No, it’s my hang up on things. Now I have a feeling you asked me over to pick my brain about something.” Dwight told him taking another long pull.