Scorched Earth (Book 1): Good Fences

by Craven III, Boyd

  “And then Patrick said it was his turn…” Spencer was mumbling about the show, “…and SpongeBob said it was his toy.”

  Since no response was needed I listened to him as I started cooking. I had put a frozen package of bacon on the counter to thaw overnight and I started frying that up first in my mom’s old cast iron skillet, and when it was done I set it on a plate to drain and cool. I fried up some potatoes, then cracked and beat a dozen eggs. I poured that in and, before it could finish cooking, I crumbled up half the bacon, added a big handful of cheese and started flipping the conglomerate around in the pan.

  I’d always called it a poor man’s omelet, but I’d never made one that big. I risked a peek out the window and I saw the quad finally coming, pulling the trailer. If I had to guess, Randy or Brenda was driving and the other was walking beside it with Lucy and their guns. The timing was working out well, and as they finally pulled up to the door I was splitting portions up onto plates and setting the front table, just as the percolator finished the coffee run.

  “Oh, God, what’s that smell?” Lucy asked, coming in the front door.

  “Coffee,” I told her, getting the kids’ plates ready.

  “You are a God among men,” Brenda said.

  “Don’t let his head swell up anymore!” Randy shut the door behind him.

  “Hey now, don’t start on me. I haven’t had my coffee yet!” I told them, and we all had a smile.

  They looked tired and I could see how loaded the trailer was. No wonder they had to drive slowly; Randy probably had to lean forward so the load wouldn’t make the four-wheeler topple back on two wheels.

  “Wow, you get it all?” I asked them, noticing how many garbage bags full of stuff were near the bottom of the piles.

  “Yeah, clothing, food, rest of my preps along with the rest of my guns. Lucy here had a fully stocked kitchen, pantry and cold stuff. We’re going to have to do that smoker sooner rather than later before all the meat goes bad.”

  “Not to mention all the meat on hoof,” I said, thinking about the pigs.

  “Hey, do you milk your goats?” Brenda asked.

  “I was going to learn, but I never did. I just breed them so they can increase in numbers. They’ve been my brush control in the fields. Set them loose for six months, they eat down everything but what you want them to,” I laughed.

  “Those are Nubians. Supposed to be a good milking breed, and you have kids young enough with the does. You mind if I try sometime?” She asked.

  “I don’t mind. We’re just going to have to bribe them with some sweet feed, they’re pigs for their molasses.”

  “Ok, sounds good!” Brenda said before sitting down and attacking her food with gusto.

  Randy was hungry as well, but other than coming into the house and teasing me, Lucy was mostly silent. I thought about asking her on more than one occasion, but I didn’t want to pry or push. Maybe she was just tired. Then it hit me, despite saying they got almost everything, they didn’t talk about their trips through the fencing. I waited.

  When it became obvious there was something they weren’t talking about, or trying to figure out how to talk about it, it was slowly driving me crazy. I was about to ask them what it was, but was interrupted by the pounding feet of two elephants running down the stairs, giggling. Instead of poking and asking the question I wanted, I got two kid sized plates ready.

  “Is my Mommy here now?” a little voice asked from the couch.

  “Yes honey bear,” Lucy said, rising to walk to the couch.

  She picked him up and brought him to the table while he was squinting at the now rising sun, shining right in the window.

  “Mom, this smells soooooooo good!” Lindsey said to Brenda.

  “Well, don’t thank me, Brian is the one who cooked it,” Brenda motioned to me with her fork.

  “Did you?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “I bet you he put healthy stuff in it,” Ashlynn said, looking at her plate suspiciously, poking the pile of omelet with her fork.

  “Bacon, eggs and hash browns. I would have added more stuff, but I didn’t have a lot of time.”

  When Lucy sat down, she reached for her fork but Spencer was already grabbing it and as amusing as it looked, Lucy’s eyes widened in horror as Spencer put his mouth to the plate and started shoveling in the food. He literally pulled it into his waiting mouth. I laughed, and soon the tension broke. Maybe when the kids were done I’d ask.

  “You want your own plate?” Lucy asked her son.

  “No, this is good for me,” he told her between bites, and I had to fight back a laugh as Lucy gave me a frustrated look.

  I got another plate out and got her some more. The rest I figured we’d make into breakfast burritos for lunch.

  Everyone ate in silence, and the kids asked if they could go outside and play. Spencer ran from the table and came back with a handful of matchbox cars and asked if he could join them.

  “No, not yet. I think we need to check out the farm and the gate to make sure no bandits and bad guys tried to get in,” Randy told the twins after a long pause.

  “Oh, ok. Think we can play a different board game today?” they asked me hopefully.

  “Anything on that shelf, kiddos. You can play whatever’s there,” I told them.

  “You’re going to regret that,” Brenda told me, shaking her head.

  “Why?”

  “Because my girls are monopoly masters. Don’t let them rope you into any games or you won’t get anything done today,” Brenda said with a grin.

  “I’m going to need a nap,” Lucy said in a small voice, “is there any chance you can keep an eye on Spencer for an hour or two this morning?”

  “Yeah, sure, I don’t mind.”

  The kids wondered off to find a game and I heard the three of them laugh and head upstairs. That’d make watching them easier. Keep an eye on the doorway and let the twins spoil the little guy rotten. The twins had discovered the rooms upstairs were brighter from the open windows, much brighter than my living room.

  “Ok, so spill it, what happened?” I asked when the kids footfalls left.

  “I’m going to get a quick shower,” Lucy said standing, before putting her dishes in the sink.

  I stood there, not sure what had just happened. I waited until the bathroom door closed before turning to Brenda and Randy who were looking everywhere but at me.

  “Did I do something wrong?”

  “No. We were planning on telling you anyways, but we didn’t want to spring bad news right off the bat.” Randy said.

  “So what happened?” I asked again.

  “Lucy’s neighbor woke up and came over. He… He pushed his way in the front door. He didn’t realize there was anyone other than Lucy in the house. Randy and I were in the kitchen and, when we heard the front door kicked open, we ducked and waited till we could see what was going on.

  “He said the way Lucy would get dressed without pulling her curtains was an invitation for him to watch, and wouldn’t she really like some…” Brenda shook her head. “it was bad. She denied it, even told him she had no idea her curtains were sheer from the outside. He told her he didn’t care, she couldn’t call the cops and he’d been watching her for a year. It was bad, Brian,” Brenda paused before continuing.

  “Both Randy and I popped out with our ARs and hit him with the flashlights. He just froze in shock. When we moved up on either side of her, we asked Lucy if she wanted us to shoot him. He was obviously there to rape and possibly kill her… I mean, the whole neighborhood listened to that damned emergency broadcast… and he probably thought…”

  “Did she shoot him? Is that why she’s upset?” I interrupted, a lead weight pulling at my heart.

  “No, no. She asked us to let him leave. She didn’t give the reasoning, but I showed him the door, maybe a bit rough, kind of like how you were scaring the guys yesterday,” Randy told me, “Anyways, I watched the door while the girls finished packing and carryi
ng everything to the fence. I had my NVGs on. It wasn’t ten minutes later a gunshot rang out from the house. It wasn’t loud, but I thought he was shooting at us.”

  I had a sinking feeling, and I was sinking further.

  “So the girls covered me, when we realized all the windows were down and I’d seen him go inside. We walked around the house before we went in. I found him upstairs, dead with a cheap .32 in his mouth. It was pretty horrible,” Randy told me.

  Wow, I knew it had to have been bad, but that was really rough.

  “Is she in some kind of shock?” I asked them both.

  “Probably a little more than I am,” Brenda admitted, “I mean, it’s been two days. If it hadn’t been for that emergency broadcast… Would he have treated it like any other Michigan power outage? He was ready to seriously hurt or rape her. None of us expected something like this to happen two days into an EMP.”

  I had, but not to my friends, not to my Lucy. Then that thought kicked me in the gut. Did I really have feelings for her, more than just a passing attraction? Yes, I decided, I did, and it didn’t make me feel as guilty as I did before.

  “No free parking!” I heard one of the twins yell, and Brenda got up to head upstairs.

  That left Randy and I, who had more to say but waited for Brenda to leave.

  “He had a picture book. Photo’s he’d taken—“

  “What? Was Lucy—“

  “No, no, shhhhh,” Randy said, his eyes flickering towards the stairs, “None of these women were alive. They’d been abused, but none of them were alive when he took the pictures. I only looked at a couple pages at the back of the book. There must have been forty or fifty different women in that book. That guy offing himself was probably the greatest gift anybody could have given us.”

  “He was a serial killer?!” I asked, my mind exploding at the thought.

  “I think so. I don’t know what to do about it, man. I didn’t let the women see the book, I left it up there with his body. There’s probably stuff in the house that police could use, but…”

  “Why do you think he killed himself?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I mean, we just ran him out at gunpoint. I didn’t know the guy, but Lucy did. He was probably thinking everyone in the neighborhood would know he was going to, uh…”

  “Yeah,” I interrupted, not wanting him to finish the thought.

  “I need some sleep too. Brenda said she’ll stay up a bit longer and watch things from the bedroom we’re using, then I’ll trade off. Maybe later on we can work on those cameras?”

  “Yeah, that sounds good. Plus we have to put away the stuff from the quad and trailer,” I told him.

  “There’s never enough hours in the day, is there?”

  * * *

  Brenda wasn’t kidding. I got sucked into the next Monopoly game when the kids all came downstairs. I knew we couldn’t keep them cooped up in the house all the time, and they didn’t complain much, but when I did animal chores, they were more than happy to join me to get out in the sunshine. I kept my pistol and AR on me the whole time we were out, but nothing happened. Spencer had fun trying to chase a chicken that had gotten out of the inner pen into the garage and the girls soon joined in to help.

  It was the most hilarious thing I’d ever seen and I laughed until my sides hurt.

  “Aren’t you going to help them?” Lucy asked from the doorway, startling me.

  She must have been sleeping hard, because she still had a red mark on her face that matched her hand, and she had come looking for us as soon as she awoke.

  “Want me to? They’re running off a ton of energy right now…”

  “Brian, about earlier…”

  “Randy and Brenda filled me in. I’m sorry, Lucy.”

  She walked towards me slowly. “Will you hold me, for just a second?”

  I did. I understood at a fundamental level, that most guys would deny, that both sexes need comfort when their emotional ship has been rocked. We didn’t say anything, but I held her close to me as she watched the kids continue to chase Mr. Einstein the chicken, as Spencer had named him. It wasn’t a rooster, but I wasn’t going to argue, none of my chickens had names. I gave Lucy a quick squeeze when she started to make motions to let go before dropping my grip as well.

  “I feel safe here. You know? I thought I did at my house, but I don’t think I ever will again. It was just such a….”

  “I know,” I said, taking her hand, “you don’t have to be alone. You’ve always got a place here.”

  I hadn’t meant it to not sound as deep as it did, but Lucy threw her arms around my chest and almost knocked the wind out of me in a desperate hug. Spencer caught sight of that and came running up on her in the stumbling running manner all kids have and jumped, wrapping his little arms around her legs almost toppling her over.

  “Jam pile?” Lindsey asked her sister.

  “Jam pile!”

  That’s how I ended up on the bottom of the pile, my AR sitting high up on a bench before I let them pull me down. Tickle torture ensued. I won that round, but lost the war as Mr. Einstein flew on top of my head. I swatted him away and pulled myself up, all of us dusty and dirty but smiling. We needed those laughs. I got a bucket of feed, which immediately caught the chook’s attention, and dribbled some of it all the way to the inner doorway to the coop inside the barn. I cracked the doorway open and threw a handful of scratch in and closed the door.

  “You mean, it’s always that easy?” Ashlynn asked.

  “What?” I asked, not sure what she was saying.

  “You got the chicken back in by giving it treats. It’s totally manipulating you,” Lindsey told me.

  “Well, I did it quicker than you three weirdos… Who won that round by the way?”

  * * *

  We got the security system started the same day, but it took us three more days to get all the wires run. It didn’t give us more than two directions of coverage on the farm, but I could see the gate and the fence along the subdivision. The cameras had built in solar panels, and weren’t the most discreet things, but they worked. The monitor in the house hooked up to two coaxial cables that linked all the cameras, and three of the big solar panels in the faraday cage were used to charge batteries to run the monitor and the radio in the room Lucy was in.

  The solar panels had been an easy install. Build them up on a frame, run the wires to the charge controller, charge the batteries we’d taken out of Randy and Brenda’s cars they went back for late one night… Then the monitor was plugged in via dc/ac converter that was alligator clipped to the batteries. It looked Rube Goldberg, but it thankfully worked the first time we turned it on.

  With one person watching the monitor, the rest of us could relax a little bit and we let the kids play outside after a week of no activity. The smoke in the distance seemed to double every day that week, but it looked far off. We weren’t getting any ash from it, but I’d started to worry that whatever was burning would meet in the middle of Flint and Saginaw right where we were. It was a bad time too; it had been a really dry spring and summer was in full force, and everything seemed drier than it had ever before. The corn didn’t care, it grew regardless, but everything else that was dry probably fed into the fires.

  I worked with Lucy a bit on her marksmanship, but we’d gotten mad at each other. Brenda took over teaching her about the guns and firing until Lucy was ready to move up beyond the .22. I gave my AR to her to use and her eyes went wide.

  “But, that’s huge! It’ll break my shoulder!”

  That made me laugh, and I explained that it did have some kick, but not as much as the big guns. It was a really easy one to fire. She took it reluctantly, and soon the ladies came back with grins. Lucy told me that she’d found her new favorite toy and she could shoot the middle out of the ten ring with it. Obviously I wasn’t going to give her my baby… so we kept cycling her though different firearms and had plans to start teaching her how to use a pistol.

  15

&
nbsp; A couple of times over the next week or so, one of us would see somebody come to the fence. They would stand there, letting their arms hang through the barbed wire. Many of them were looking dirty and disheveled. On a day when half a dozen people were all lined up on the fence, I got a bucket out and ran water into it.

  “What are you doing?” Randy asked.

  “Look,” I said, pointing to the left side of the monitor.

  “They look pretty bad, don’t they?” Randy commented.

  He’d taken to staying up the latter half of the night, watching the monitor and keeping an eye out while we slept.

  “Yeah, I was going to run some water out to them. That can’t hurt, can it?”

  “You’re better off not doing anything, actually,” Randy told me.

  Gone was my happy-go-lucky friend. He was being serious, dead serious.

  “Do nothing?” I asked.

  “How can you? You go out there all showered and shaved, and they’re going to know you aren’t as bad off as they are. What are you going to do when they all start asking for food? I don’t know about you, but I don’t have that much stored. I think it’ll start a big bunch of suck once we open that door, even a tiny crack.” Randy said passionately.

  “It’s just some water,” I argued, starting to get irritated with him.

  “Listen man, it’s your place, but I think you’d be putting us all at risk. I’d leave them, man.”

  I grunted, and then put the bucket up on the counter for washing later. You never knew when you’d need it.

  * * *

  Two weeks passed since the EMP happened, going into three. We all slowly adjusted to the new life, and worried about Frank, Kristen and Ken daily. The Docs would have been a great addition to the help as well, but it wasn’t any of them who eventually showed up, it was Brandon Sanderson and his three sons. They were pushing a hand built cart with bicycle tires for wheels. They looked at the front gate and then started talking, gesturing wildly.