The Search For Home

by C A Bird

  Jon felt trapped, with no way to get his family out of town. He knew Stu and maybe Vance would kill his family without hesitation. He was forced to do their bidding until he could find a way out.

  The second winter was bad and Mary and the boys lost a huge amount of weight. He hunted continuously and was sure he had found every last can of food in the town. The group was so desperate that even some of the other men had been sent out scrounging. But Jon was the one who brought food back every day. He wouldn’t return until he had. Ben didn’t allow him any weapons so he used his traps and snares, not daring to use his rifle for fear they might hear his gunshots. As long as he produced, they would allow him his freedom.

  Mary had the propane, backpacking stove lit and put the pot full of water on the stove. Jon had brought boxes full of propane cylinders from the hardware and sporting goods stores. He thought again about them trying to escape but he didn’t know where they could go or how they would get there.

  Taking the squirrel upstairs and out into the yard, he butchered it and buried the entrails in the yard adjacent to their own. He cut up the squirrel meat into small chunks and added them to the pot along with some greens and a couple of roots he pulled out of his satchel.

  The boys had fallen asleep, and as the soup simmered Jon and Mary lay in each other’s arms on the thin mattress that served as her bed. They had sparsely furnished the basement not wanting it to look lived in if anyone searched the house. He stroked her dry, thinning hair.

  Sitting up on the thin mattress, he faced her and signed, “It’s going to be alright, Mary. Winter’s over and I’ve noticed there’s more game out there. Rabbits are everywhere but I’m having trouble getting them in my traps. I wish I’d been a hunter before all this went down. The mortgage business didn’t exactly prepare me with survival skills.”

  “No, but you’ve kept us alive and I know we’re going to be all right.” She checked the soup and said, “Wake up the boys, the meat’s done.”

  He shook them awake and carried them to the corner of the room where they always ate their meals. Mary kept that area scrupulously clean, trying to prevent sickness. She fed the boys slowly, hoping they could keep the nourishment down. Even as little as they ate, they had started to have digestive problems. Mary gave them each a multi-vitamin. It was one thing they had an abundance of.

  “When can you come back?”

  “Don’t know. You might need to go out for water… so you can grow these.” He pulled out some seed packets from his pack. “Ta da.” He grinned at her and she grabbed the packets to see what he had.

  “Carrots and beans! Oh Jonathan where did you find them?”

  “They were in a garage. Even though we didn’t use very many seeds last summer I can’t find any in the stores. I think someone else found them all and they’re either very good at hiding, or they’ve left town. Be really careful. You can’t grow them where the garden was last year. It’s too exposed. Put them between the side yard and the fence.”

  Jon hadn’t eaten any of the soup. He would try and get his share of the meal that Ben’s group would have that night.

  “I need to get back.” He poured the remainder of the soup into a plastic container. Mary would have to make it last for a couple more meals before it went bad. He hugged the little ones and was glad to see they had perked up after the meager meal. Josh tugged at Jon’s scraggly, blond beard and laughed.

  “Yeah,” Jon said. “I’m a real Grizzly.”

  He went to the wall and removed a board between two studs. Mary handed him the plastic bag and he added the cans to the small pile hidden in the recess.

  “Jon, don’t take any chances of getting caught with food. I couldn’t bear it if you never came back.”

  “I’m always careful, and as for the corporate bigwigs… they’re idiots. Baby, I really need to go. I’ll be back tomorrow if I can make it.” He signed goodbye to her and the boys.

  The sun was west of overhead and he only had a few hours left in the day to catch more game to make up for the squirrel he had used to feed his family. Running into the hills he checked his trap line and found he had caught another squirrel and a rabbit. He gathered more roots and greens and by the time he approached the hotel it was almost dark. He hoped the others had found some food. Ben always saw to it that he got a few bites since he needed Jon alive, but if the food he brought was all there was he was likely to go hungry… again.

  3

  Chris gazed with wonder at the little chocolate bundle in her arms. Karen was asleep, her belly full of warm milk. With light brown skin, the beginnings of dark, wavy hair and full lips, she had characteristics of both her parents.

  Before this baby, Chris had been secure and tough, a scientist… but now she was scared to death. When Mark had suggested they go back to California to try and discover what was going on in the outside world, the old Chris had jumped at the chance, but now she was beginning to realize the dangers outside their protected valley. Before the war she and Dr. Tanner’s team of scientists had traveled the world, looking for the perfect environment to farm the oceans. Chris had a Ph.D. in Marine Biology with a specialization in sustainable food production, and was a professor at The University of California at San Diego. Life was exhilarating and full of promise.

  Then came the war, and she, along with over two hundred others, had traveled to the Sangre De Cristo Mountains of New Mexico to ride out the worst of it in a bomb shelter built by her billionaire father. She was excited about helping the Remnant survive and prosper, even after they were expelled from the shelter by terrifying mutants and earthquakes. They’d built a town and planted crops, and she was a major part of that. She’d lost her father in an accident, and her brother Clay, who had been banished from the shelter for attempting to rape another resident, was killed at “The Battle of Platte Rock” when he and over a hundred others had tried to attack the colonists for their provisions… and for revenge.

  But now she was a mother. She and Aaron had fallen in love and married, as had several other couples that had been thrown together in the new world. Her best friend Mark, who had been raised by her father, had met and married Lori. But although Chris was scared, she still had her sense of adventure and realized they couldn’t remain in the valley without knowing what was happening on the outside.

  Chris laid the baby in the box she used as a bassinet and covered her against the cool of the evening. Climbing down from the wagon, she walked over to the campfire they built each evening, using it for cooking, and to gather around for companionship and conversation when the chores were finished. Mark and Lori stood with hands around hot cups of coffee and several others had joined them by the fire.

  “This isn’t exactly turning out the way I expected,” she said, as she joined the others at the fire. Aaron came over, put his arm around her and pecked her on the cheek.

  “No? What did you expect?” he asked.

  “Well, I didn’t expect to be attacked almost every day. And, is it just me, or are we making really slow time?”

  “We’re definitely taking it slow but I think we need to be careful,” Mark told her. “This morning could have been real bad if there had been more of those guys. We spent almost an hour tonight making sure our camp was safe.”

  “Yeah, and we don’t know how often we’ll find water,” Skillet said through his greying beard and mustache. “So it was good we stopped at the reservoir by Maxwell yesterday, and refilled our barrels.”

  Mark took a swig of his coffee. “I’m sure after we check out Raton that we’ll make better time heading west. What do you think Terry?”

  “I heard that the wagon trains in the old west traveled fifteen to twenty miles a day. I don’t think we’re doing so bad. How fast did you expect us to go, Chris?”

  “Back in the day, at around eighty miles an hour, I could have made the trip in a couple of days.”

  “Hell,” Mark said, “I could fly it in a few hours. In a slow plane.”

  They all
laughed and stood a few minutes recalling the days before the war.

  “What do you think we’ll find in California?” Chris asked.

  “I think we’ll find a radioactive wasteland, if you ask me,” Skillet said.

  Mark nodded his head. “Most of the cities along the coast had military targets so you may be right. But I have to know. And we need to see if there are any signs the Chinese are following up the attack.”

  “At this rate we won’t get to California before winter,” Chris said.

  “It’s California. Does it matter?” Terry asked her.

  “Sure as hell be a lot warmer than our friends in Willsburg.” Jimbo chuckled, as he tossed a limb from a Juniper tree onto the fire. It flared up and sent embers into the air as they all watched them float into the night sky, mesmerized by the tiny, twinkling fires.

  Mark broke the spell. “It’s about twelve hundred miles to the coast. Take us anywhere from two to three months to get there. It’ll be mid-summer. We need to stop and rest a day every now and then. And it depends on being able to find food. And whether we get attacked again or run into bad weather.”

  “It’s spring. Other than our afternoon downpours, how bad can it get?”

  “Oh no, Terry. You did not just say that,” Lori told him. “That’s always a bad omen.”

  “How far to Raton?” Jimbo asked him.

  Terry and his family had come from Raton after sheltering in place for the first winter. They were “preppers” and had planned ahead with provisions to get them through the worst of the war’s aftermath. They left town after having to defend themselves against hungry survivors, and after seeing one of the mutated creatures in their neighborhood. Mark sometimes thought Terry resented the easy time they’d had in the shelter. Terry’s family had suffered horribly. His son Cody had been shot and almost died, his right arm forever weakened. Terry and Izzy’s eldest daughter Marci had been raped by Clay Hargraves’ gang when she and Terry were captured while trying to pass through Eagle Nest.

  “We’re only a few miles away. We’ll drive up there in the morning. God knows what we’ll find.”

  Izzy, chimed in, “It will really be good to be home. I wonder if our house is okay.”

  “Do you think you’ll stay?” Chris asked her. “What if there’s no one there?”

  “I don’t know. Surely some people survived. But with Marci living in Willsburg we may go back, or maybe she and Tucker can move up here. We could start another town. Set up trade.”

  “You need a minimum number of residents to have a viable population,” Mark said. “I guess it’d be okay if there’s enough people. You need to be able to plant crops. You’ll have seeds, of course. We have boxes of them.”

  Skillet and several of the others moved off to their tents. Skillet was always the first up in the morning to get breakfast ready. Mark and Lori, Chris and Aaron and Terry stood staring into the fire.

  “Tomorrow, we’ll drive up the freeway and check it out, but we won’t go into town until you all get there. Maybe Matthew can ride up and see what it’s like away from the freeway. He’s real good at scouting.”

  “We need to have someone else take the night shift tomorrow night for sentry duty then. He and Einstein always get stuck with graveyard duty,” Chris said.

  “They like it. They’re both loners,” Mark said. “Let’s get some sleep.”

  ***

  “What do you suppose that is?” Terry turned to Izzy and pointed up the freeway to where they could see a line of some kind across the road. Izzy, the binoculars up to her eyes, had reached over and put her hand on his shoulder and told him to pull over. They were parked on the right shoulder gazing north. The mid-day sun cast almost no shadows, making it more difficult to see.

  “It looks like a barrier. I can see a guy standing on top of a wagon. Oh shit!” she exclaimed. “Take a look. He has binoculars too, and he’s looking right at us.”

  Terry took them from her and scanned left and right along the barrier. “You’re right. They’ve put a barrier across the freeway. There’s a chain link fence stretching into the plain on either side of the road for at least a quarter mile. I see some kind of a trailer with the guy on it. But there are others, and they all look armed.”

  “That’s not the kind of reception I was hoping for,” she told him. “Can you see if it’s anyone we know?”

  “Naw. They’re too far away.”

  Cody, riding in the back seat and acting as rear guard, said, “Here comes Sheri.”

  Sheri rode up to the Jeep on her bike. “What’s wrong?”

  “Looks like they have the freeway shut down.” Terry handed her the glasses.

  “Hmm. They know we’re here. We better get back to camp and let the others know.”

  Terry swung the Jeep around and they headed back to the intersection of Highway 64 and the I-25. Pulling to a stop, he saw riders to the northwest and waited for Matthew Pennington and Willy Yancey to join them.

  “So what’s up?” Willy asked, as he reined in Jasper.

  Terry jerked a thumb back the way they’d come. “There are armed men up ahead and they saw us. They barricaded the freeway. I think we need to leave the camp where it is and beef up security.”

  “Did you see any working vehicles?” Matthew asked in his soft voice, with just a hint of a British accent. He and Willy both wore cowboy hats and long sleeved white shirts but with the spring weather warming up neither man wore a jacket. Willy had on cowboy boots but Matthew wore beige, work boots. He had always hated cowboy boots, even when working on his grandfather’s cattle ranch south of Taos, New Mexico. Both men were in their twenties, Matthew twenty-six and Willy twenty-two, but Willy looked much younger than Matthew. His wild, blonde hair stuck out from under his hat while Matthew’s long, black hair, tied in back with a leather thong, hung halfway down his back.

  “No, they had some kind of trailer shoved up against the fence, and I spotted what looked like small shipping containers. They could have moved all that by hand or dollies.”

  “If they don’t have cars or trucks they probably won’t follow us. But we can’t chance it. Let’s get back to camp and have the wagons stay put.”

  “I’ll tell ‘em.” Sheri swung her bike around and took off. She had been an Olympic cyclist before the war, and standing on the pedals, shot off toward the south.

  Willy grinned, “That gal can really fly.”

  “Hey Willy, don’t forget you have a fiancé back in Willsburg,” Izzy reminded him.

  “Hell, I don’t mean nothin’ by it. She’s just the fastest thing on wheels.”

  Matthew gestured to Willy and they kicked the horses into a canter, riding west into the brush. Gunning the engine of the Jeep, they headed after Sheri who had already disappeared over a rise in the freeway ahead.

  As they drove, Izzy looked around at the vast emptiness. It was eerie, driving along I-25 without a sign of another car and no evidence of humans or animals anywhere to be seen. No contrails in the sky. No sounds of civilization. Two dust devils played tag in the distance until they disappeared behind a line of barren hills. The grasslands were still winter brown but there was a touch of green as spring overcame winter.

  She felt a great sense of loneliness in the vast, empty high plains.

  But Terry and Cody were with her, helping to relieve the feeling. Her two younger daughters, Missy and Kris, had stayed behind with the wagons and her eldest daughter Marci, who was newly married, had stayed home with Tucker in Willsburg. They had all spent the last year with the survivors from the bomb shelter, and had made good friends, but Izzy wanted to know what had happened to her home and the friends she had known in Raton. Some, she was painfully aware, had died from the radiation, but there were others she had known for years, and she needed to know what had happened to them. She hoped they would find out tomorrow, one way or the other.

  As they sped south on Highway 64 they spotted the wagon train about five miles south of the barricaded freeway. T
he Jeep passed Sheri and arrived a few minutes ahead of her. Their four-wheeler left the road and jounced across the plain toward their companions. Sheri had to dismount and push the bike the final two hundred yards through the brush and soft earth. As she arrived she heard Terry finishing up his story of the barricade at Raton.

  “Maybe we should skip Raton and just head west,” Dr. Whitehorse suggested. “We don’t need any trouble.”

  Terry and Izzy both protested at once. Izzy said, “It’s our home. We raised our family there and had friends and neighbors. We need to find out who’s blocking the road. It could be people we know. Terry was in the Better Business Bureau and knew a lot of the town leaders. You folks don’t have to go with us but we have to know.”

  Jimbo patted her shoulder. “Don’t worry, Izzy. We’re gonna find out.”

  “Yeah,” Mark told her. “We need to know too. If there’s a large population that’s self-sufficient, maybe they can trade with The New Mexico Colony. The more people that’ve survived, the better everyone’s chances are.”

  They decided to camp there for another night. If the town didn’t have any working vehicles the five mile buffer should provide safety. Only a few days out of Eagle Nest, they still welcomed the afternoon off, free from travel. Especially the kids, who talked Sam and Willy into playing a killer game of touch football. Jesse, Danny, Sheri and Carlos formed a team to play against them and the game wore on until dinner.

  The kids won the game with high fives all around.

  “That was nice of you to let Ash and Kevin win,” Lori told Sheri, who was red-faced and filthy.

  “They beat us fair and square,” Sheri said with a wink. “I hope Skillet has some hot water for a sponge bath.”

  They doubled the nighttime guard. Matthew and Einstein had stayed up during the day so they could sleep at night rather than pull their normal sentry duty.