Prepper Mountain

by Chris Bostic

  Mom yelled something from the front door, but I couldn’t make out the words over the racket. I ran two steps at a time to join her at the doorway. We watched several fighter jets streak off toward the mountains without another word.

  As I stood dumbfounded, she turned to Dad and said, “We need to load up the Jeep, Harold. That’s our cue.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Austin came rushing up from the basement a moment later carrying a plastic tub. “What the hell was that?”

  “You know what I told you about using that kind of language in my house,” Mom shot back.

  “Jeez, the world comes to an end and I still can’t say baby curses.”

  Dad added a stern look. “Austin, listen to your mother.”

  “Fine, whatever. What’s going on?”

  “Flyover,” Mom said. “It’s beginning just like I thought.”

  “Cool.” Austin dropped the tub to run to the door. “Are you sure?”

  “Hard to say,” Dad replied.

  “But better safe than sorry,” Mom added on quickly. “Get the rest of the MREs up here so we can finish packing the Jeep.”

  Austin peered through the narrow glass panels alongside the door. “Uhm, Mom, you know there’s a strange car parked up the street watching the house.”

  “Figures.” She looked over his shoulder. “That’s no car. It’s the same ole Suburban we’ve come to know and hate.” She obviously cursed under her breath, but that kind of language was perfectly fine for the adults in the house. “I should’ve known we couldn’t get rid of them that easily.”

  “Who?” I asked, but no one answered. Mom told Dad to go with her and Austin downstairs to grab more of the not-so-delicious powdered food. I stood there in the entryway with Maddie waiting for someone to tell me something. It wouldn’t be my sister. She was busy staring up the street toward the black vehicle. But not at the people watching us. I’m sure it was at Luke’s house.

  “What’s all this end of the world business?” Maddie said unexpectedly.

  I wasn’t any expert on the subject, since I preferred to stay in my room and keep out of a lot of the non-stop conspiracy theorizing. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but say, “Have you not been paying attention? What’s Dad been talking about the last few months…maybe years?”

  She didn’t take her eyes off Luke’s house. “Something about the banks…and always about how the country’s broke.”

  I nodded approvingly. Other than leaving out the erosions to free speech and militarization of the police, she knew about as much as I did—and that didn’t go very far to explain why jets were flying overhead. The strange cars up the street made a little more sense, but I was not at all prepared when I heard the grumble of another pair of jet engines turn into a second round of house-rattling sonic booms.

  “Those guys are in a hurry,” I said absently.

  “So are we,” Mom replied, as she returned to the front room with her chin resting on top of a pair of plastic tubs.

  “This is about it,” Dad said. He turned to the left and dropped his tubs by the garage door. “We’d better load up inside if they’re watching. I’ll go pull the Jeep in.”

  “Good plan, darling,” Mom said, and turned to me. “As soon as we get loaded, Austin’s gonna take your dad’s Honda around the block a couple times. We’ll make sure that guy follows, then we’ll get outta here.”

  I wasn’t sure how Austin would get back with us. Maybe he wasn’t coming. Before I could consider that further, Dad said, “C’mon, kids. Bring this stuff to the garage while I pull in your mom’s Jeep.”

  “Sure, Pops,” Austin said.

  Rather than let him show me up, I followed him out, making sure Mom and Maddie were behind me. From inside a closed garage, we made quick work of filling a four door Jeep with a seemingly endless supply of water jugs, dried food, camping gear, and so on. It helped that we had a rack on the back plugged into the trailer hitch where we could stack extra boxes. Still it was going to be ridiculously crowded, even if Austin wasn’t coming.

  Dad finished winding a strap around the tubs to tie them tight to the trailer rack. He turned to Maddie and me. “You two go play outside while Austin gets in the Honda.”

  “We’re not eight, Dad,” she said.

  I had to agree. “We haven’t played outside in years.”

  “That’s what’s wrong with kids these days,” Mom interjected.

  My sister and I groaned in unison and headed toward the front door.

  “Fine,” Maddie said. “What should we play, hopscotch or hide and seek?”

  “Very funny,” Mom said. “You’ll be playing hide and seek soon enough, so maybe…”

  “What?” I said, but everyone ignored me again.

  Before I could complain, Maddie grabbed my arm and said, “Come on, big bro. Maybe we can go for a walk.”

  Dad lost his usual composure. He snapped, “Don’t be going anywhere! Stay in the yard.”

  “Aww, we can’t even play in the street,” Maddie fake whined.

  “Just stay in the yard, please,” Dad pleaded, suddenly subdued. He sank down on the couch looking every bit of his forty-something years. Maybe more like Grandpa. The more I thought about it, the more I realized he was probably pushing fifty. He was in decent shape other than a little donut around the middle from too many powdered ones.

  Mom was the fit one. Besides telling us how many miles she’d walked around the hospital all day on her shifts, she was always the first to want to go for yet another walk every night. Suddenly, we couldn’t do that anymore; not with the black car parked up the street.

  “Mad, what do you wanna do?” I asked as the two of us stepped out the front door.

  “Go to Luke’s,” she said. “They can’t stop us if we just walk up there.”

  “Does he even know you exist?”

  I instantly regretted saying it that way. Her head whipped around at me, with eyes filled with something between rage and tears. Rather than snap, she mumbled, “Sorta.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just, uhm, I’m kinda pissed ‘cause nobody’s telling us what’s going on, you know.”

  “What’s to know? Like you said before, the world’s gone to crap.”

  “And now we’re suddenly leaving early for a vacation that doesn’t really seem like one.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “I mean sure, we bring MREs and that kinda junk on vacation. Mom’s weird like that. But all that extra water and clothes and stuff, like we’re leaving for a long time. This isn’t some normal camping trip. Something’s up.”

  Maddie shrugged and sat on the front porch. She kept staring up the street, showing no interest in anything other than maybe feeling sorry for herself.

  When it became clear she wasn’t going to say anything, I walked out to the giant maple tree in our front yard.

  “Remember when we used to climb this thing?” I asked. Maddie shrugged again. “Wanna give it a try?”

  “You can’t get your big ass up there,” she replied, which couldn’t have been any further from the truth. I wasn’t anywhere close to overweight, and perhaps a bit thinner than most.

  I puffed up my cheeks like a squirrel holding a week’s supply of nuts. “You calling me fat?”

  “If the boot fits,” she said with a grin, quoting Jessie from our favorite Disney movie.

  “It wouldn’t fit if I was chubby.”

  “Whatever, stickboy.”

  She turned her attention back to Luke’s house. I focused on the lower branch and pulled myself up without any troubles. In seconds, I was halfway up the tree, perched on a branch.

  Joe and I had always talked about trying out for a ninja warrior contest, but my desire usually derailed after about twenty minutes of training. That, and a lack of anything more than a tree to climb, wasn’t going to get me past the first obstacle on the course.

  I sat on a branch and wrapped my arms around the trunk. My head rested against the tree, and I listened to the bre
eze rustle through the leaves. I kept waiting for the telltale squeaking of the garage door opening, but Austin was taking forever. More likely, Mom was over explaining whatever plan she had in mind. She’d tell her favorite son everything.

  Maddie walked over to the base of the tree and leaned against it.

  “I talked to Katelyn today,” I said, surprising myself. I hadn’t planned on sharing that, but boredom won out. Maybe I needed to brag a little too. “Even went over to her house for a while.”

  “Katelyn who?”

  “Jennings.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The new girl from this year. She’s gonna be a junior like me, from Nashville. Tall, like almost my height.” Maddie shook her head, so I continued. “The hot brunette with the biggest-”

  “Hold it right there.” Maddie interrupted me. “I don’t need to know any more, perv.”

  “Who’s the perv? I was gonna say biggest brown eyes.”

  “Yeah, right.” She pushed off the tree and took a couple tentative steps toward the street. The black car was pointed right at us. Even the front window was tinted so darkly I couldn’t see anyone inside. Maybe it was empty.

  The squeal of rollers in desperate need of oiling cut through the afternoon like a siren. Dad should’ve worked on the garage door months ago, but he’d been too busy spending all his newfound free time either reading the paper until he memorized the financial pages—or writing articles for journals and websites that seemed to end up getting the Feds sent over to our house on a regular basis.

  I’d learned a whole lot of new words over the last year, such as dissident, subversive, and seditious. I never would’ve thought that about Dad. He was too mild-mannered. The anti-hero, or rather the one who hid in business clothes all day but never revealed his cape. Not even to us.

  The hero’s Honda growled to the life in the garage more like a muted cat than a lion. Mom’s yellow Jeep sat next to it, pointed nose out so the guys down the street wouldn’t notice the rack of boxes stacked on the back.

  The minivan backed out slowly at first. I dropped to the lowest limb of the maple to see if Austin really was driving. With a flat-billed skater-boy ball cap pulled down low, he backed into the street and swung the van around, narrowly missing the Johnston’s festering trash can. It’d been sitting at the curb for three days without being dumped. At least the recycling bins didn’t reek when they’d sat around too long.

  The Johnston’s can was piled high with the lid propped open, and the flies circled. Thankfully, we were upwind. It was one of the few times I appreciated Mom’s devotion to composting. We barely had one trash bag a week for a family of five.

  All the city services were running late. We were lucky to still have running water, Mom had said, though she didn’t trust the quality. When we weren’t living off the rain barrel, we filtered the City water before cooking, drinking, or even brushing our teeth.

  Besides trash sitting out across town, the streets were as crumbling as the broken sidewalks I’d walked on with Katelyn earlier. Before Austin headed up the street, I wondered if he couldn’t lose the Suburban just by dodging potholes that were more like craters.

  Austin stepped on the gas, squealing tires louder than the garage door rollers. The Honda showed more power than I expected. It fishtailed up the street before the tires gripped and thrust it forward like a tan-colored minivan rocket.

  The black Suburban didn’t move as Austin flew past.

  CHAPTER 6

  I stared up the road as forlornly as Maddie. Mom and Dad were probably staring through the slats in the window blinds wondering exactly the same thing as me. Definitely not the same as Maddie.

  I lowered myself to the ground to slowly head back to the house. Then I heard the crunching of loose pebbles on the pavement. I froze, leaning against the tree with my body toward the house, looking over my shoulder at the street. The black vehicle moved toward me.

  Maddie stepped back from the curb as the Suburban raced toward our driveway. Right when I thought it would jump the curb and plant itself in our yard, the driver jerked the wheel hard to the left.

  The windows were blacker than a cast iron skillet. I couldn’t even make out the outline of a driver as the vehicle whipped around and headed up the cul-de-sac in pursuit of Austin. The motor growled with power not normal for a vehicle that size. It was jet engine loud.

  The grumble of the motor merged with burning rubber, staying with me long after the Suburban disappeared from sight. Mom threw the front door open and had to yell to be heard.

  “Get in the Jeep!”

  “What?” Maddie said. I gave her a brotherly shove in the back before jogging to the garage to find Dad opening the driver’s door.

  “Get in back, guys,” he said.

  I was too busy processing everything else. “What about Austin?”

  “He’ll lose the tail and be back here in a minute,” Mom replied casually. “You ever see that boy drive?”

  “Like a maniac.” He drove me to school for a while, and I hated every minute of it. How he’d managed to make it a year without an accident, or a speeding ticket, was nothing short of miraculous—especially with the increasing number of policemen on the streets. It was to the point that they were practically on every corner around downtown, all with snarls underneath their helmets and body armor.

  I heard tires squealing from several blocks away. I stuck my head out the garage door. There was nothing flat about our subdivision, which helped me catch a glimpse of the Suburban between two houses. It was just up the hillside, moving through the neighborhood faster than the late for work dads and show off teens. The old man on the corner down from Joe’s house was probably shaking a cane at the Feds and yelling at them to slow down.

  The Suburban rounded a corner, heading in the direction of Katelyn’s house. A pang of regret hit me as I returned to the Jeep to attempt to cram myself into the backseat next to my sister. I so strongly wished I was getting ready to snuggle up with Katelyn on her comfy couch instead.

  “Climb on in, kids,” Mom said.

  “Where?” Maddie pointed to a small back seat stuffed with bags and water jugs. Somehow the three of us were supposed to fit in there.

  I opened the door behind the driver’s seat. An avalanche of uncomfortable footwear spilled onto the garage floor.

  “Sorry about that,” Mom said. “Just jam those under the seat if you can.”

  “More like sit on them,” I muttered.

  “What’s that, hon?”

  “Just saying they might not fit in here. Kinda like me.”

  Maddie sighed as she opened the door across from me. “Mom, you know we’re not two anymore, right?”

  “Ha, imagine if we still had to use those bulky car seats, Harold.” Mom got that faraway look in her eyes, while I squirmed to shove a foot between water jugs.

  “Not funny, Mom.” Maddie grunted as she shoved a duffel bag off her seat onto my side.

  “Watch it.” I didn’t really mean it though. I was well enough cocooned that she couldn’t do more than push it to the middle, which was where I guessed Austin was supposed to sit. I should’ve tried to make him room on the outside, but I couldn’t budge.

  The Jeep was the biggest of its type, but my knees were still crammed against the back of Dad’s seat. My chin rested on the duffel bag, while my feet were surrounded by a pile of boots. The water bottles that wouldn’t fit in the crates were arranged in the small cargo area in the back into an unsteady wall, pressing against my head every time I leaned back. If we hit a bump, they’d probably spill onto me like falling bricks.

  Somehow, from underneath a pair of backpacks, Mom turned around to make sure we were settled in. She couldn’t see my sister, who was packed in directly behind her.

  “Maddie, could you scootch over?” she asked.

  That drew a quick response. “No.”

  “You need to make room for Austin.”

  “How?”

  “It’s eith
er that or he’s gotta climb over you,” Dad said, ever the reasonable one. “You want his butt in your face?”

  “Eww, no.”

  “Then you might want to slide over.” Dad turned the key to start the engine. It growled to life while Maddie growled under her breath. She huffed and jerked and threw herself around, looking like a tantrum in a straitjacket. She was stronger than she seemed, and could do just about anything when she set her mind to the task. It was a strong-willed mind.

  Maddie glared at Mom, who continued watching her. “Don’t even tell me to put on my seatbelt.”

  “I suppose we can leave those off this time.” She pointed to all the padding around us. “Besides safer than air bags, huh?”

  “Doubtful,” Maddie muttered.

  “Yeah,” I said, “the wheels will probably snap off under all this weight.”

  Dad grinned in the rear view mirror. He surely couldn’t see any more than me and a pile of junk. “We will be riding a little lower, for sure.”

  “He’s calling you fat,” I whispered to Maddie. She wasn’t any thicker than I was, but it was always fun to mess with her.

  She stuck out her tongue and tried to extricate an arm from a pile of luggage, probably to punch me.

  “Nice love tap.” I laughed at her when she’d finally wiggled an arm loose. I counted myself lucky she didn’t have enough room to wind up and deliver more than a gentle shove. I couldn’t have defended myself if she’d gotten a free shot. “That what you wanna do with Lukey?”

  “More like you and Katelyn.”

  “Who’s that?” Mom asked.

  “The, uhm, new girl in my class, the one-”

  “Zach’s obsessed with her big ole boobs,” Maddie interrupted. She shot me a devious, but playful, look.

  Mom shot upright, inadvertently throwing the backpack up onto the dashboard. “What?”

  “I did not say that!” I glared at my sister, who leaned away but kept the grin plastered all over her face thicker than her makeup.