A Sudden Departure (April Book 9)

by Mackey Chandler

"I can understand that," Jon said. "I'm just upset I don't have anything to feed them."

  "I have a little feed in my bags," Victor said. "That will do for a day if we can water them."

  "Come in then. Sit and tell us what happened. It's cramped in the kitchen, but warm. We haven't used the big room in months and even if we fired the stove up it would take forever to get the chill off of it."

  "You have no idea how cramped we've been," Cindy said. "This is luxury."

  "How are you for food?" Barney asked. "If there's no way to feed us we'll turn around and go back down to the flat lands. It's hard there but the snow is gone and there will be things growing to forage there before up here."

  Jenny put mugs before them and poured steaming water.

  "It's going to be lean," Jon admitted. "But we can use the help. We can fish nearby soon, and if you can't, I can hunt. We need the help to get wood in for next winter and to get a garden in. Unless you can get food to bring back. Is there any place left to loot?" he asked bluntly.

  "Not that isn't worth your life to try," Barney admitted. "If Vic here rode down there he'd be dead and they'd eat his horse right quickly. They got no better sense at long range planning than to see it as meat on the hoof."

  "When did they ever?" Jonathan asked. Everybody nodded.

  "Eventually it will be safe to venture back to salvage things in a group, in force. The population is much smaller already, but I'm talking in a couple years," Barney said.

  "And yet you walked through it," Jon said. He was frankly amazed. He didn't think Barney had it in him, or that they'd ever see any of them again.

  Barney looked embarrassed. "We owe surviving the winter to Eileen," he admitted.

  "That's. . . interesting. Want to tell the story?" Jon asked.

  "We drove north until we ran out of gas. Everybody was going east or south, so it wasn't too bad. We had to run off on the shoulder for a few just flying south on the wrong side, but we could see them coming. Then we saw smoke from a huge fire ahead on the expressway and got off. We never did learn what that was about, but it was bad enough traffic on the other side started dwindling. We figured it looked big enough to block both sides.

  "After we got off on a two lane state route we got around the fire. I'm glad you had Cindy keep real maps, because I always just used the in dash screen that wasn't working. It looked like it had grown as we went around. By then we figured it was a forest fire too, not just a big wreck, but we got well north past it. By then there was little traffic on the back road. Probably, folks there wanted to stay put. When we ran out of gas it was night and we pulled over well off the road and turned the lights off. There wasn't a light to be seen anywhere.

  "In the morning we sorted out what we could carry. We tried to take way too much. It's amazing how steep and long a hill can be that was nothing in the car. We walked and walked and had one man pass us the other way in a pickup truck late in the morning. He looked scared to death of us and sped up going past. There were signs saying it was a national forest, and here were a few roads off the state route but no houses right on the main road. We did see a sign for a store and gas station that said thirty eight miles ahead. We had real doubts we could walk all the way here before you were snowed in, but where else did we have to go?

  "Did you get that far? To the store and station?" Jenny asked.

  "Early this spring, yeah. It was empty and stripped out, door hanging open. But nobody burned it. That seemed to be more common as we kept hiking. I have no idea what satisfaction people get from it."

  Vic cleared his throat. "Along the main road it might be done to keep folks like you from stopping and squatting. Then those folks can be a hazard to travel past. They may decide they're going to demand tolls from travelers."

  "I suppose," Barney agreed. "There was nothing else around there to stop for and we kept moving. But we stopped and wintered over well before the store. We were on a long downhill when Eileen called to me. When I stopped she was back uphill maybe fifty feet and I really didn't want to walk back uphill but she insisted. When I went back she pointed back up hill."

  "Somebody ran over one of those steel posts with the reflector back there," she said, pointing. "Then look at the guard rail ahead. They clipped the outside of it right where it starts. You can still see the tire ruts cut in the gravel."

  "You're right," I told her, "it looks like a big truck. That's from dual wheels, not separate tracks from front and back."

  "But there's no other marks like anybody ever came to pull it back up," Eileen said.

  "The road turned left around the hill there, and the hill side below the rail slopped down for maybe a hundred meters and then dropped off sharply again. I told Eileen that if anybody was down there they either survived and climbed back up, or there wasn't much we could do to help them. They likely went off three days back and there wasn't any rescue squads now. If there was somebody hurt so bad he couldn't climb back up, how would we transport them, and where? We had nothing to even get them back up to the road."

  "Well, I thought she was being kind and worried about others, but then she said what should have been obvious to me if I'd been thinking. "But if there's a whole big truck down there?" he quoted, "What's in it?"

  "That was a different matter. I had the women sit down below the guard rail, out of sight and climbed down carefully. When I got to where it dropped off you could see there was a ravine started there and got deeper as it went down. Then down below it joined another bigger notch in the hillside and turned abruptly right, downhill.

  "Well, obviously a long truck careening down a narrow gully wasn't going to turn sharply. I couldn't see anything but the back doors of the trailer, but the cab up front had to be crushed into the other bank of the big ravine. The trailer was laying half way on its side in the groove and clear from up there you could see it was bent out of square. It hit hard.

  "Where the truck went off was too steep to climb down, but I went back to the women and described what I saw. We all agreed I'd go down-slope from where we were and work my way around the hill to the truck. I didn't have an ax, just a hatchet, and hoped that was enough to see what was inside. It took me too long to get down there and bust the seal off the trailer door to make it back up by dark, but we'd already figured that, so they weren't worried.

  "The top of the trailer was translucent fiberglass so when I climbed in you could see good enough when your eyes adjusted. Everything was a jumble to one side and I had to crawl over it to get an idea what we had there. It was a Bradley's Discount truck for one of their big stores. It had a bit of everything, clothing, shoes, housewares, food and even drug store items. But lots and lots of it. There was no telling what else until you started digging in it.

  "The truck, the tractor that is, was smashed as bad as I suspected. The driver dead and no way to get him out without cutting tools. He was hard to even see it was so squashed. It was a diesel and the tank under you couldn't see, but I didn't smell any fuel and the top tank wasn't leaking. I figured if it was going to burn it would have by then.

  "Next morning I climbed back up and told them what I found. We decided we'd go down and shelter there until spring and have a lot more time and better conditions to make it up here. Cindy is practical, and she said by then there's be a lot less folks wandering around to cause trouble. We bent the road marker back up straight and scuffed out the edges of the tracks on the shoulder the best we could with our feet, hoping to keep anyone else from noticing."

  Eileen spoke up. "There was water in the bigger ravine, just a trickle the day we got there, but it increased through the winter, except a few times it froze. By then we'd damned it up some above the truck, about as big as a hot tub, and could bust a hole to get water."

  Barney nodded agreement. "We couldn't have stayed there without that little stream. We spent a bit more than three months there and were busy every day. It took near the full time to empty the trailer out. Some of the things we could have used at the start we just d
idn't dig out until the end. We built a privy over the stream downhill from the truck. Towards the end we cut our way through the back of the tractor and got in the driver's stuff in the sleeper cab. That's where we got the pistol and half a box of ammunition. Also a can opener. I can't tell you how much we'd have liked that earlier. There was lots of canned food but we had to cut them open.

  "There was gardening stuff including shovels we found early, and we dug a notch in the side of the ravine behind the trailer. That's where we slept after we floored it with plywood from the uphill inside of the trailer. We made sleeping pads out of stuff like baby clothes and cardboard that wasn't of any other use. We made up a stove of sorts notched in the hill side of the shelter. The chimney was a roll of sheet metal from the trailer and the sides were the fronts off a couple dishwashers. There were a couple nonstick grills that we broke the electric part off and laid across the tops of the dish washer veneers to make a top."

  "It leaked smoke a little when the wind blew wrong, but it worked," Eileen said. "We used the dead limbs off the bottom of trees to burn and anything from the truck that would burn once we got it hot enough. I remember one night I burned a whole bunch of high heeled shoes. We kept the fire small and clean in the day though. We were scared to make enough smoke to be seen and somebody would find us."

  "There wasn't any bakery items," Barney said, "nor any prescription drugs. I figure the drugs get sent in a small truck for security, and Bradley's always had an in-store bakery. But lots of other stuff. There wasn't any bread, but there was fancy party crackers and peanut butter. More spaghetti than you ever wanted to have to eat, and salsa. No regular sauce to go with the spaghetti, but salsa works when you are hungry, and canned nacho cheese. That worked pretty well too. One big skid of flour, shrink wrapped but nothing to make it rise, so we made natural sourdough. And if I never see canned beets again that's fine with me."

  "There were two cases of those little Vienna sausages," Eileen said. "I was sorry when those were gone. There was over the counter cold medicines and stuff like bras and reading glasses were pretty much a waste, but there were decorative candles and socks. The socks were worth their weight in gold. There was a two wheel hand cart by the back doors too. When we left there we used it to bring a few things along, although it took us a couple days to carry the cart and the stuff we piled on it up to the road. We pushed and pulled it for three weeks on the way here, until we used up everything on it except some trade goods."

  "What did you find worth keeping and carrying for trade goods?" Jonathan asked.

  "We had to leave so much, and it's too far back to go transport the heavy stuff," Barney said, wistfully. "Cindy and Eileen picked the stuff to keep. I'd have left it all but they insisted they would carry it if I wouldn't."

  "We brought a big box of Imodium diarrhea pills in blister packs," Cindy said. "We tossed all the boxes and Eileen sat and trimmed all the cards smaller with scissors until they were as light as possible and put them in a bag. There was a box of sewing needles and they got the same treatment to make them lighter. They're on cards with a top and bottom fold over and the flaps got trimmed. And there was a huge box of disposable lighters, but we took about a hundred out of their packages and packed them tight, standing up in a box. That's all we brought and it might not sound like much, but it was tempting to dump them along the way."

  "They gave me a pack of sewing needles and two lighters for keeping them a couple days until we could get the horses from neighbors and bring them up here. I figured it for a pretty good deal," Vic told his hosts. That was good. Jon wondered if he owed him for the trouble.

  "You can talk to Jon here about it," Vic told them, "but we're going to have a local business directory about this time next year if you have skills or goods besides the needles and lighters you want to offer."

  "Is it safe?" Cindy asked Jon.

  "We're going to be listed as agricultural advisors. Vic convinced me he can vet the recipients. If we're going to do any trading with neighbors we can't just hole up."

  "There will also be some kind of fair and trade gathering in the fall," Victor said. "That's not organized yet, but we'll be asking people when they want it. If people know you have stuff they want, they'll come prepared to try to trade for it. If it feels safer, I can just say your stuff will be available there if you decide to, without putting you on a map.

  "I'm going to go feed the horses. I have a couple pounds for each, and let them drink their fill and start back. I thank you for the hot drink, Ma'am."

  'I'll get a bucket and help you water them," Jenny said, and they went out.

  "We marked where the wreck is on our map," Barney said after Vic was gone. "I know we may not get back this year, but it would be worth the trip in a year or two, even if we have to go the back trails and such."

  We have a rifle and a shotgun," Jon said, "not much, but some protection. At least from bear and coyotes if not well armed people. I expect all the animals to recover and grow bold with the human population way down. I was surprised to see you with a pistol," he said, looking and nodding his head at it. "Have you ever actually shot it?"

  "No, I gave it to Cindy, because you taught her to shoot. We decided the noise might attract attention to even show me how once. She carried it until we got to Vic's and insisted I take it. Maybe to save my tender male pride," Barney said.

  "What's still there worth the trip and danger?" Jonathan asked.

  "There is a case of dish soap, too heavy to carry. Cindy tells me soap is hard to make and takes valuable fat. There were about a dozen bicycles boxed up in the front, unassembled, but we opened one and there weren't any tools to assemble it. We need some tools, I have a copy of the assembly instructions that name the sizes. If we assemble some bikes we can use them to transport stuff. Hang it on the bike and walk it. We also figure there are probably tools and other stuff still in the cab. It was just too nasty to go all the way in there, but by the time we go back the driver will be bones and it won't reek."

  "The bikes would be valuable," Jon agreed, "since we don't have horses. They're probably going to be too dear to buy for a good long while too."

  Then there's something you might not need right now," Barney said, "but will be craving by next year. There was an entire pallet of salt onboard."

  "If any of it's still there," Jonathan worried.

  Barney shrugged. "We smeared mud on the back doors and leaned cut saplings against it. You have to know what you are looking for to see it from the drop-off, not at all from the road. Unless somebody sees the end of the guard rail and figures it out they have no reason to even go down that far. The guard rail was rusty already when we climbed back up. Pretty hard to tell if it happened three months ago or three years."

  "You could see it from the air," Jonathan speculated.

  "If you have assets like a functioning aircraft, one wrecked semi with unknown contents isn't going to get you excited. There's not a straight stretch of road nearby to land a regular plane. Anybody that well equipped is going to go loot the huge warehouse the truck came from. Likely put guards on it and claim it for their own," Barney said. "I would."

  "Probably the government has secured a lot of those big assets," Jon said.

  "Exactly," Barney agreed.

  "I like how you think," Jonathan agreed. Odd how things change, he thought. He was never that impressed with his old son-in-law, but this new one was OK.

  Chapter 25

  "I've learned a lot from you about worming out information," Jeff said.

  "Thank you. I think," April said uncertainly.

  "No, really, it's a good thing," Jeff insisted. "I went back and am reading all my mother's old papers until she stopped publishing. I can often see how a person came to a conclusion even if I'd never follow that mental path myself."

  "And did it let you reproduce her fluid?" April asked, knowing that the ultimate goal.

  "No, it hasn't, but I tried a combination of metals using some of the same techniques s
he pioneered, that I thought likely. It made an alloy that displays some unusual properties, but isn't fluid and doesn't do the same trick of concentrating the gravitational flux as hers. Trouble is she told us she discovered the really useful liquid alloy as a mistake. I can only get so close by knowing what she was working on, but knowing her thinking can't help me repeat a mistake."

  "Will it be useful?" April asked.

  "Oh yes, but it's going to take some thought and experimentation," Jeff said.

  "Well good. I'm glad it wasn't time entirely wasted," April said.

  * * *

  The supposed director of the physical Mars colony, not the research community head, was Albert Schober, an Austrian. Happy wasn't entirely surprised when he was given an appointment to meet the man. He'd have called and requested an interview in time if he didn't meet the man socially. With only a bit more than two hundred permanent residents he did expect to get to know him. Honestly, he might reasonably get to meet everyone in such a small group. But there was two levels of administration between them. To have a meeting set on his screen before he even met his own boss did surprise him.

  When he was shown in it was immediately a bad start. Schober was grinning like a maniac, or worse, a natural politician. Happy immediately didn't trust him. The man had no reason to be that pleased to see him yet. Then the man started reciting Happy's history. At a certain point he felt the object was no longer praise but intimidation, the point to be made that there could be no secrets from him, back to Happy's fifth grade spelling skills if need be.

  That Schober had opinions was soon apparent. He shared them freely, but then had the unfortunate habit, for a supervisor, of asking if Happy didn't agree? Rather than disagree, Happy's answer was that if it didn't pertain to his work, he'd stick to job related issues both up and down the line of command. That wasn't sufficient to please Schober. This interview was not honestly about work. At least the fake smile was gone by the time he left.

  Well shit. . . Happy thought, going out the door. That went bad.