Outside the Fire

by Boyd Craven

“What you mean disarm? You’re carrying a gun right now?”

  Steve stood up and turned to him and just smiled. He really liked the subcompact .45 he’d taken to carrying, a newer purchase in the last couple of months. You couldn’t even see the outline with him wearing his jean shorts white shirt and a short-sleeved button-up that was left unbuttoned.

  “I’ve got a permit to carry, there isn’t any law or any ordinance for any HOA guidelines saying you can’t carry.”

  “I can just see something happening right now! You’ll pull your gun, and something will happen. It’ll be just like that…that…that kid in Florida who bought the skittles.”

  “That was an unfortunate case,” Steve said, “but…that nineteen-year-old ‘man’ attacked someone with a concealed carry permit. Only after the permit holder had his head smashed into the concrete a few times, and the nineteen-year-old man,” Steve said, emphasizing the M, “went for his gun, did the concealed-permit holder use it in self-defense. I’m not saying we’re going out to shoot people, but having someone walk around in the afternoons and evenings as an extra set of eyes might be better off armed. Besides Professor Toodles, what do you think those home invaders had? Kitchen knives and good intentions? Are we going to rush in there to help, or are we going to rush in there when something happens and be hurt or killed because we’re disarmed?”

  Doug Morris sputtered something, but his wife, who seemed to have the better judgment of the two, stood up and talked to him in harsh tones and yanked him back down in his seat. Her face was bright red, and from across the room, Steve could tell that her fury was directed at her husband and not at the Taylor family that Doug seems so intent on pushing buttons with.

  Amy gave Steve’s hand a squeeze, Steve looked over to his eldest daughter.

  “Daddy,” she whispered, “now should we tell them about the church?”

  Steve’s mind was torn on that. It’s not that he didn’t want to help them, because he really did. He just lost touch with the pastor while they were busy just getting on with their day-to-day business of flying under the radar. It had made Steve feel guilty. You never get too busy to go to church. You never get too busy to go see friends. Yet in his own mind he did just that. Hell, for a little while there he thought Matthew didn’t want to be friends, but Steve hadn’t gone over to Matt’s house, not even once. The guilt Steve was feeling doubled.

  “Tomorrow, I will go talk to the pastor about it.”

  “I think that’s a good idea, maybe they can help,” Amber told her dad in a hushed tone.

  “What church? What help?” someone from behind the Taylors asked loudly.

  Several heads turned from the other side conversation, startled.

  “Time to go,” Steve said, giving his wife and daughter’s hand a squeeze. Amber was the first one to get to her feet, sitting on the outside of the row.

  Jeff and Matt’s eyes both turned to see the Taylor family stand up and start walking out. Matthew gave Steve a nod, Jeff just glowered. Some people turned to look and see who was leaving the meeting early, most of them were watching everything else that was going on and all the side conversations in the meeting room. Getting outside, everyone took a deep breath.

  “God, it stank in there!” Amy said, making her sister let out a surprised bark of laughter.

  “What’s so funny?” Angela asked her daughters. “Most of these people don’t have running water. Now that the banks are closed, nobody’s working. Probably don’t have any more soap and shampoo.”

  “Or deodorant?” Amber said getting her giggles under control.

  “Or toilet paper?” Amy said and busted up in the giggles herself.

  Turning to Steve, Angela looked at him and said, “You gotta help me out here.”

  “Well I don’t know if he’s out of toilet paper. Seems to me that Jeff and Doug Morris are full of shit. I just figured all that stench was coming out of their mouth.”

  “Daddy!”

  “Steve!”

  Steve just laughed. Tomorrow would be a better day since they would be at the church. They would find out how much the supplies had lasted the past two months.

  CHAPTER 21

  Now that Steve was conscious of his decision to go to church, figuring that not making a decision was in essence making a decision… he made sure he was going to be up on time. He got out his wind-up clock from a storage bin in the garage, one that he’d inherited from his father from years ago. He had set it the night before, and when it went off first thing in the morning, surprised shouts came from upstairs directly over the Taylor grown-ups’ bedroom.

  “Oh God, I forgot how loud that thing is,” Angela said, pulling a pillow over her face.

  “Don’t worry, I got it,” Steve said, reaching over and hitting the button to silence it.

  Feet came thundering down the stairs, and Amy ran and launched herself and landed on the top sheet in between her two parents.

  “Guess who we get to see today?” Amy said brightly, being one of those annoying people that don’t need caffeine to get the day going.

  “I don’t know, who’re we going to see today?” Steve said, sitting up letting the sheets fall to his waist.

  “We get to see…”

  “Her boyfriend,” Amber said from the doorway.

  “He is not my boyfriend!” Amy said loudly.

  “You’ve been excited ever since Dad said we were going to church today.”

  “Well, let’s go you guys. Get up; get up,” Amy said, pulling at the sheet covering her mom.

  “Get out of here,” Angela said. “Let’s get up and ready. Amber would you—”

  “I’ve got the little camp stove already working on boiling some water,” Amber said sweetly, despite the fact that she looked like she just ran out of bed. “It’ll be ready and in the percolator in about twenty minutes.”

  Steve smiled. His daughter was almost seventeen, and she already appreciated the finer things in life. Honesty, integrity, jeeps with big engines, and most of all…coffee.

  The sermon had gone on a lot longer than any of the previous services the Taylor family had sat through before. The pastor was joined at the altar with his wife, and they read off community news by candlelight. Then the pastor launched into a sermon, was a little bit of book of Matthew, and all of the revelations thrown in.

  Steve sat through it all, almost wondering if other churches were having the same type of sermon and discussions going on. Looking around the congregation, he noticed the people weren’t in as poor of shape as the folks from his subdivision. They didn’t stink as bad either. There were still some individual families where you could tell things had hit them harder than it had some of the other members there.

  After the sermon, everyone waited in line to say their goodbyes and then gather out on the front lawn of the church to continue talking. With no TV, no phones, no Internet, no radio, no news…everyone was hungry for gossip, for new information. As usual, the Taylor family was the last one to say their goodbyes, deliberately holding back even though the Taylor girls wanted to run out to the crowd on the lawn and join in on all the discussions.

  “There was a great sermon,” Steve said, shaking the pastor’s hand.

  “Thank you, I didn’t want to go all doom and gloom in there,” the pastor said with a smile. “I’ll leave that for the Baptists.”

  The pastor’s wife busted out laughing, she gave her husband a playful punch in the shoulder. Their son was nowhere to be seen, Steve figured he was probably outside playing with the other kids and catching up on the news himself.

  “Are you guys getting to come here for the community dinner now?” the pastor asked them.

  “What community dinner?” Angela asked.

  “Well, it’s a good thing we bought all the supplies we did. Instead of just handing out food, what we’ve been doing is using the church kitchen and kind of making a mass meal. It isn’t much, but we can make sure everyone in our congregation gets one good big healthy meal a
day.”

  Steve was about to say something, but the pastor’s wife spoke up first.

  “And we’ve only dipped into the food that the church purchased for this reason so far, I just wanted you to know,” she told Steve and Angela.

  “Oh no, that’s what we bought it for. We might need to come and start taking from the community store ourselves someday, but we’re still sitting in really good shape. Is everyone here doing all right?”

  The pastor looked at Steve for a moment and shook his head.

  “We’ve had some unfortunate news. Some of our older members of our congregation have run out of their medications. We’ve heard rumors, but we lost three so far to heart attacks. Mrs. Bertie was insulin-dependent and passed away yesterday, and we lost a few more due to heatstroke or heat exhaustion, whichever it was.”

  Steve’s mouth dropped open in shock. He knew there was going to be losses, he was just surprised that he hadn’t seen or even heard of these losses before. Then again, they’ve been staying real close to their house. It was one of the only ways he could think of to feel safe. He looked the pastor and his wife over, noticing the changes in them. Before things got rough, the pastor hadn’t exactly been fat, but he hadn’t been a skinny guy either. His wife as well was full figured, and they looked like they had been losing weight.

  “Are you guys eating enough?” Steve asked them bluntly.

  “Oh yes, probably better than we ever have. You’re talking about quantity not quality. Our diets changed, we’re exercising more, we’re doing what we need to do. I’ve never felt so good in my entire life.”

  “I’m really glad to hear that. How is your son doing?” Steve asked, a sly grin directed at the littlest Taylor in the family.

  “Daddy…” Amy interrupted.

  “I’ll take her outside to go find him,” Amber told her parents.

  The four of them watched the girls nearly run outside, Amy’s laughter and giggles belying the fact that despite the world changing drastically it was still one she could find happiness and joy in.

  “He’s doing really good,” the pastor’s wife said, “he was getting a little lonely, but people started coming back to church. When the power first started getting really wonky, people stayed at home for a little while. You would think all those post-apocalyptic and zombie books had everyone all freaked out.”

  “But he got used to it; how have you guys been?” the pastor asked Steve.

  “We’ve been doing pretty good, actually. We just kind of…we’ve been staying close to the house. Members in our neighborhood aren’t doing so well, and we helped one neighbor out with food. Also helping folks out with water every once in a while, and I think while I’m now the first one in the community to have a hand pump there’s two more from the rumblings I heard at the meeting. The hard part of all of this is realizing that trying to stay in the house, and out of everyone’s public view…I mean they are suing us…again…We’ve been trying to fly under the radar. I was wondering—”

  The pastor interrupted Steve. “I don’t mind if you want to take some of the supplies to go towards the community you live in. We bought this is a safeguard for all of us, you more so than anyone else, and contributed to the food pantry we set up here at the church. I know the prepper mantra is, ‘two is one, and one is none,’ so why not have three, so if you like to do this, whatever you want,” the pastor told him with a grin. “The only thing I ask is that you don’t do it in front of the whole congregation while they’re out here waiting.”

  “Yeah, I can see how that would make things look weird. I don’t know if I really want to do that, or maybe set something up so—I don’t know what to do, Pastor.”

  Angela looked over at her husband and put her hand in the crook of his arm. “That’s because you care what happens, even if you don’t like a lot of the people living around us.”

  “Why didn’t you guys move?” the pastor’s wife asked her, “with all of the ongoing trouble?”

  “I don’t think we ever really thought about it,” Steve said. “I mean, as long as we were staying within the law, the HOA notices were annoying more than anything else, and when they sued us…I think I kind of dug my heels in and…this is gonna sound horrible.”

  The pastor looked up to Steve and nodded. “Go ahead Steve, it’s confessional time,” the pastor said with a chuckle.

  “I mean, they sued us. They went public saying we did something wrong, that’s all on record somewhere. I’d like to go on record of at least being right, and if not right, at least have it show that we weren’t guilty of whatever trumped up charges they were saying. I mean the last time they sued us, it was for putting in a hand water pump. Then the next day the neighbors started showing up looking for water,” Steve said, shaking his head in disgust.

  “But you did help them; you did give them water,” Pastor’s wife said.

  “Yes, he did,” Angela said, with a note of finality in her voice.

  “So, you want to go outside and hang out with everyone? They usually do this for about an hour and then supper will be ready at…well, at about suppertime.”

  “I think we’ll have to call it a maybe,” Angela said looking out the doors of the church and watching the kids chasing each other.

  Amy and Amber were being chased by several of the boys, both parents looked on in mild surprise and amusement as their older daughter played like she was ten again. Despite some of the bad news, some of the horrible news, they were still having fun. “Let’s go,” Angela said taking her husband’s hand.

  CHAPTER 22

  Not wanting to wait all day to get the food from the church, Steve took the entire family to the storage unit. The gates were locked. He’d forgotten about the electronic code access. With the power out, it wasn’t working. Now a chain and padlock were across the front, and the office of the mini storage dark.

  “Are they even open?” Angela asked.

  “God, I hope so. I paid for at least a year in advance. Paid cash.”

  “You want me to go check, Dad?” Amber asked.

  “No, I got this,” Steve said, getting out of the truck and slamming the door.

  They had taken the truck to church, because it had the most fuel in it. There wasn’t any conscious decision to take or not take Angela’s BMW, and the way the Jeep guzzled gas everyone naturally just piled into Steve’s truck. It also hadn’t been driven in a while. Steve remembered his father’s advice that the quickest way to kill a car is to park it for a long time.

  Walking up to the door to the office, Steve stopped to look. There was a note on the door that said “knock hard.”

  Steve knocked hard, trying to be careful not to crack the tinted glass door. He wasn’t expecting anything, his hopes shot, but within a couple moments he heard footsteps approaching from the other side of the glass and a deadbolt turning. The same young woman who rented him the unit opened the door and gave him a smile.

  “Hey Mr. Taylor, you need to get in your units?”

  “I do. What’s with the lock?” Steve asked her, curiosity in his voice.

  “Well, it’s something new I had to do. When the electricity goes off, it keeps the main gate locked. I dug out the electronic lock in it, and now I just use the chain instead of the electronic deadbolt to keep people’s stuff safe.”

  “You not keeping me out, are you?” Steve asked with a grin.

  “I wouldn’t keep you out, Mr. Taylor,” she said, little blush hitting her cheeks.

  “I meant, I might need to get some stuff out of my unit,” Steve told her looking back at the truck and seeing Angela watching him intently.

  Oh great, Steve thought to himself, Angela probably thinks I just flirted with the kid when it was the opposite. Or maybe she didn’t mean her comment to come out the way it did, and it was an embarrassment? Steve looked back at the young woman who barely met his gaze, the red creeping into the tips of her ears.

  “I set aside a key for you, Mr. Taylor,” she said with a grin, and the
n followed his gaze to the truck and saw three blonde ladies staring at her from within the truck’s windows.

  “What you did, renting those units in cash…it helped me out of a bad financial situation. I don’t know if you realize it, but I go to your church. I listened the day that you and Pastor first talked about being ready for something like this. I took that money you gave me for the units after I got my bills paid up, and I went on a little bit of buying spree in Costco.”

  “Sam’s Club?” Steve asked, a grin breaking his features.

  “Same thing, right?”

  “I guess so,” Steve told her with a grin.

  “I’ll go get you that key, and use it to open the gate, but could you lock it behind you?” she asked, all business like now,. “With the power out more often than not, I won’t have my security cameras and alarms working. I’m hoping somewhere to scrounge up one of those mechanic’s bells.”

  “Mechanic’s bells?” Steve asked her.

  “You know…this thing with a rubber hose that has a plug in the end, it runs by your car driving over and it makes it sound.”

  Steve slapped his forehand and grinned. “Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. I had a blonde moment there.”

  The girl let out a laugh, and gave him a raised finger as if to say be right back, and went inside. A moment later she was walking back out and pressed a key into his hand.

  “Thanks,” Steve told her.

  “No problem. See you around sometime?”

  “Yeah, I’ll be around now and then. Not too often, though.”

  Steve gave her a little wave and headed back to the truck, opened the gate, and got in.

  “So, Daddy,” Amy asked in a singsong voice, “who’s your friend?”

  “I told you not to!” Angela said, her voice sounding irritated.

  “It’s not like Dad was flirting with her or anything,” Amber told her mom in a sarcastic tone. “I mean, did you see her playing with her hair, Dad?”

  “What?” Steve asked almost throwing the kids into the front seat’s headrests as he slammed on the breaks.