“Alice!”
She recognized Adam’s voice and stood up cautiously. “In here!” she yelled. “The kitchen.”
Adam came into kitchen, followed by the men from the checkpoint, all of them waving their guns around without regard for where their muzzles were pointing.
“Are you okay? We heard a shot!”
“Watch where you’re pointing those,” she said. “Everything’s fine.”
“Did you fire that shot?” he asked. “We were afraid you might have caught someone in the act of robbing your house.”
Alice tucked her pistol into her back pocket. “No, but I did have a little run-in with the neighbors. They’ve been breaking into my house on a regular basis. They must have seen the car and thought someone was trying to sneak into their territory. I caught one them trying to get in the front door.”
“You think they did this?” Adam asked, taking in the ransacked kitchen.
“Judge for yourself,” Alice said. “There’s a trail worn in the grass from my house to theirs. They’ve apparently been making a lot of trips.”
“We ought to run those assholes out of the neighborhood,” said another of the men. “They’re probably the ones been breaking in on everyone else.”
“We just can’t go accusing people of things like that,” Adam said.
“Why not?” Alice asked.
“Yeah, why not?” asked the man who’d suggested running them out of the neighborhood.
“There’s such a thing as due process,” Adam said. “You got to do these things by the book.”
“There is no more due process and there’s no more book,” Alice spat. “I could have killed him right then and there wouldn’t have been anything anyone could have done about it.”
Adam frowned. “You can’t just go around killing people.”
Alice felt her adrenaline rising. She didn’t like his lecturing, condescending tone. “I don’t know where the hell you’ve been,” she said. “He wouldn’t be the first person I’ve killed recently. He wouldn’t even be the first I’ve killed today.”
All the men looked at her then. She could tell from their expressions that they were looking at her differently than they’d ever looked at her before. That seemed to happen when you admitted killing people.
Adam gulped. “You killed someone today?”
“On the way out here,” Alice said. “I ran into a trap on the road. Some men tried to carjack me. I lived. They didn’t.”
“They?”
“Let me clarify,” Alice said. “I killed one man and I mortally wounded another. I’m guessing that he’s probably dead by now too, what with the lack of available medical care. So if I killed one more person today, I’m just not sure it would be all that big a deal.”
Adam approached Alice and put a hand on her shoulder. There was something disingenuous about the gesture, as if he thought it was what he was supposed to do. She turned her head and stared at his hand. He left it there until her eyes began to burn a hole in it, then he moved it.
“Look, I’m sure you saw a lot out there on the road,” he said. “We don’t live that way here. We’re still a civilized community. Things haven’t gotten that bad here yet.”
“Then either you haven’t been out of this neighborhood or you have your head up your ass,” Alice retorted. “Things are that bad right up the road from here. Did you not hear me use the words trap and carjack? That wasn’t in Richmond, it was here.”
Adam sighed. “I hope it stays up the road. We don’t want it coming here.”
“It will,” Alice warned. “And these boys next door will die anyway. Eventually they’ll rob the wrong person or accidentally kill someone. Then you’ll be forced to deal with them or they’ll kill one of you.”
“I don’t remember you being like this,” Adam said, frowning and shaking his head. “You always struck me as being a bit more polished and professional.”
“I don’t remember giving a shit what you think about me,” Alice said, looking Adam in the eye.
Adam was taken aback. He sighed heavily, as if disappointed in Alice. He wasn’t used to confronting this level of hostility. “We’ll just be leaving,” he said. “We were concerned about your wellbeing is all.”
“I appreciate that,” Alice said. “I do. It’s probably your own wellbeing you should be concerned about. Sounds like you’re still living in that fantasy world where things are going to be okay. The world beat that out of me several weeks back.”
Adam could sense the hollowness inside Alice, could almost hear the reverberation of her voice echoing in her vast, empty interior. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, turning to go. “I’ll check back with you later.”
“Don’t bother,” she said.
He turned back and smiled at her. “No bother.” Then he left.
There was something about him that seemed to be genuine. He came running when he thought Alice was in danger. He almost seemed concerned about what was going on with her emotionally. At the same time, there was that lingering feeling that it was all an act, like he was a serial killer going through the motions of being human while he was far from human on the inside. It was an insight she’d not had into the man before and perhaps it only came to her now because it was similar to how she felt on the inside, like something heartless and cold acting at being human. Like a meat puppet dancing on the stage of the world.
She put the man out of her head and began shuttling her gear from the house to the car. It took several trips. She could tell she was in better shape from her time on the road. Months ago this would have left her out of breath. While stomach ailments had left her a little weak, she had to admit that she was now in the best shape of her life.
Not knowing what she’d come back to once she left the house unattended, she packed the car as full as she could get it. She knew she was overlooking a million things and only hoped they’d be able to come back. Clothes were critical because it might be hard to find any of their sizes without stores to shop at. Shoes were the same way. After that, it was the guns, hygiene items, and their photo albums. She tried to find all their prescription and over the counter meds but they were gone. She hoped her husband had taken them.
During her trips to the car, she kept the revolver in her back pocket, exposed to all the world. She didn’t care. She felt eyes burning holes in her back. She knew it was the neighbors, watching her with hate for confronting them, for coming back and taking things that they planned on stealing. She wanted to turn around and shoot their windows out.
Restraint, she reminded herself. Show a little restraint.
When the last bags were loaded, she walked through her house again. She gathered some of the things she didn’t have room to take – framed family pictures, legal documents, and sentimental items – and packed them back into the gun safe. She shut the door and spun the latch, hoping that it would stay shut until she returned to retrieve the items.
She wouldn’t put it past those two neighbors to burn her house down after she left just out of spite. She hoped they didn’t; there were a lot of memories here. This wasn’t their first house but her son had grown up here. It was where he learned to ride a bike and catch a baseball. It was where her fondest memories were born.
She flipped her hair out of her face and those thoughts out of her head. She stalked through the house, turning the light switch off out of reflex as she went outside. Using her key, she locked the door behind her, and went to her car. She stood for a moment, taking her house in, then cast a wary eye to the neighbors’ house. A curtain slid shut. She swallowed the temptation to give them the finger. She didn’t need to make it worse.
She backed the car out of the drive and coasted down the street toward the roadblock. The men pulled the barricade out of her way. Adam tried to flag her down but she didn’t stop. She had nothing left to say.
Chapter 5
Alice
Alice’s mother lived on a farm on the western side of the county. Alice had
grown up there, her father farming for a living. She’d worked on the farm until she started college and had to hold down a full-time job to pay her tuition. Between work and school, she had little time left to help with the farm chores. She enjoyed the freedom too much to experience any guilt over not being there to help out. She was ready to explore life off the farm. She wanted to know what other young women did with their time. She wanted to hang out, go to parties, and she wanted a social life, all things that she felt she missed out on due to the burdens of farm life.
Because she remained in the general area, Alice still went back to help her parents over the years, but she never moved back to the farm. She lent a hand with processing hogs, canning, or putting up tobacco as her parents needed her. They never had to ask. She understood which chores around the farm took extra sets of hands and showed up when needed.
Recalling this made her wonder how she’d gotten so far from the simple life of her childhood. It had been the only life her parents had ever known. Both had been raised on farms and saw no other avenue in life than to one day get married and have a farm of their own to work. That they would one day be farmers had been as inevitable as the change of seasons.
Even though Alice reached a point as a teenager where she grew tired of the unrelenting workload of the farm, it had already shaped her work ethic. While she still enjoyed hard physical work on those occasions that she got to perform it, she’d never wanted a farm, and she hadn’t wanted to marry a farmer.
For her generation and those born around it, farming was akin to poverty. It was not a job that she or most people her age aspired to. She thought she understood something now that her father had never been able to convey to her in words, that farming was also about self-sufficiency. It was about having more control of your life.
In trying to escape what she saw as the trappings of poverty, Alice had given up a lot of things, including a working knowledge of how to farm, how to raise livestock, and how to process the things they raised into food and goods. She hadn’t passed this knowledge on to her son. She’d never taught him the things she learned as a child. It was like she had a tool in her toolbox that she’d not only failed to pass on, but had allowed to rust from neglect. It had never occurred to her until this moment how much of a failure that was on her part. She hoped there was still time to do something about it.
Her dad had passed away three years ago, leaving her with the responsibility of helping her mother out. She’d never minded, but she did wish her mom would move off the farm. Although she worried about her living out there all alone, still trying to raise a few animals and more garden than she needed, her mother wouldn’t budge. She just couldn’t see herself in an apartment in town. She liked the taste of food she raised with her own hands on her own land. She liked seeing the smiles when she shared the bounty of her garden with people who didn’t have one.
The road between Alice’s house and her mother’s farm was heavily travelled in normal times. It was a narrow and shoulder-less road. People drove too fast on it and accidents tended to be fatal head-on collisions. Today there were not many people out on it at all. There were some walkers, a few bikes, and a long, rattling Oliver tractor. She saw a few of the Chinese scooters that would run all day on a cup of gas. There were also a lot of vehicles abandoned along the shoulder and in the ditch. Some had rags hanging from the window like flags of surrender. They must have been placed there early in this mess, when people still thought they’d be coming back for them.
Alice was thankful for her functioning vehicle. She was aware that it made her a target so she maintained vigilance throughout her drive. She looked ahead for roadblocks and traps. She studied the people she passed for weapons or any indication that they may be about to launch some kind of action against her. She scanned the road surface for anything that might slow or disable her car. Her gun lay in its regular place now, beneath her right thigh, ready for when she needed it.
At a major intersection, she saw that an oak tree had been cut down across the road at one point but someone had made the effort to saw it up and roll the logs off onto the shoulder. She slowed as she passed by it, noting that what she thought were cigarette butts littering the surface of the road were actually spent shell casings. There were smears that she took for blood but no bodies visible anywhere. Drag marks indicated the bodies must have been tossed over the hill. There had been a roadblock here at one point and the day had ended badly for someone. The memory of coming upon such a roadblock with Gary when she was helping him get a box truck was still fresh in her mind.
A little further down the road she came across a head-on collision. She could see it from a good distance off, the bright colored vehicles sitting at odd angles. While she felt an initial wave of concern for the victims, she noticed that she did not feel the level of concern she might have felt six months ago when coming upon the same scene. She realized that the feeling of concern was programmed into her and could be programmed out just as easily. Of much greater importance to her was whether there was room or not for her to navigate her vehicle around the accident. She was pleased to see there was.
It was a tight squeeze on the narrow, two-lane road. She had to put a tire off the edge of the pavement and creep by slowly to avoid getting her vehicle hung on the wreckage. She noted that all the windows in the entangled vehicles were shattered. As she pulled alongside the driver’s door of a 1980s model Thunderbird, she was shocked to see that the bodies had not been removed. She couldn’t even tell if the driver was a man or a woman, the face being so bloated and fly-encrusted. The passenger had been partially ejected, travelling through the windshield and ending up crushed between the vehicles. It was a gory sight that fascinated her as much as it repelled her.
It reminded her of war photos she’d seen, with the bodies of enemy soldiers left scattered among debris. It was easy to forget that the dead may have been important to someone. In this world as it was now, with no phone and no news, word may never reach the families of these victims. It was like the world used to be before the advent of the electronic age. If you died away from home, outside of the sphere of where you were known, your fate may never make it to the folks back home.
About twenty minutes later Alice approached her mother’s farm on a dirt road that seemed more desolate than at any time in her memory. As a child, the road had seemed alive with other farming families and livestock being moved back and forth. There was always something going on. She was never more than a few minutes’ walk from a friend’s house. She played outside until well after dark, always feeling safe, and any neighboring family would care for her as well as her own family would.
Now the road seemed surreal, winding through a barren and lifeless facsimile of what had once been her community. She saw no farmers working, no children playing. There was damaged fencing that could have been taken down by falling limbs, persistent cattle, or even thieves. It was the kind of thing that most respectable farmers could not have let lie for even a single day in better times. Fences were a sign of the health of a farm. If the fences were dying, the farms, and the families on them, were likely dead or dying too.
Her family’s farm extended down to the road and she drove along hundreds of feet of cattle fencing that her father had installed with his own hands. When she reached the driveway, she found it blocked by a hulking hay baler that had been pulled across the entrance. She stopped there, turning off the car and listening. She could hear nothing other than the ticking of the engine. Had her family put this there as a barricade?
She opened her door and got out, revolver in her hand. She stepped away from the car because the baler was blocking her view of the house. She could see no movement. Her mother’s border collie would normally be at her side by now but there was no sign of it. Down the road about a half mile, on the opposite side of the dirt road, was the neighbor’s farm, and she could see no movement down there either. The emptiness of it all, the surreal feeling, reminded her of the Stephen King story Children of
the Corn.
She would like to roll the baler out of the way and drive on through but it was too heavy for her to move alone. Sitting perpendicular to the driveway, there was not even an easy way for her to nudge it with the car and move it to the side. She looked toward the house again. There were no lights, no cooking smells, and no vehicles. There were no chickens in the yard and she saw no movement in the hog pen. Where they even still here or had someone else moved in?
She reached back and shut the car door. It closed louder than she expected and the noise stood out in the absolute silence of the pastureland. She started to walk away, then worried about leaving the car. She reached back through the window and removed the key, then grabbed her pack from the back. There were other things in the car that were important to her but after what she’d been through the pack was her lifeline. The things in the car were things she could live without. The things in her pack were not.
She pocketed the keys and slung the pack over her shoulders and checked the chamber of the revolver, confirming there was a live round ready to go in each chamber. With another look toward the house, she moved toward the gate, turning sideways to squeeze her body between the gatepost and the baler. The pack hung up on a strand of barbed wire and it took her a moment to unsnag herself. When she did, she continued easing around the baler and started to walk toward the house.
She made it one step before a shot rang out and she dropped to the ground.
Chapter 6
Alice
Alice lay on the ground stunned. The side of her face burned and she put a hand to it. When she drew it back, there were blotches of bright red blood on it. The impact had been to her right. The bullet hadn’t hit her, so it had to be fragments from the bullet shattering when it hit a thick steel component of the baler. Before she could get her head together and get back to her feet, the front door slammed. She looked in that direction and saw her son Charlie clambering down the porch steps, a rifle held to his shoulder and aimed in her direction. He still did not recognize her. He appeared to be coming down to finish her off.
Valley of Vengeance: Book Five in The Borrowed World Series Page 3
