I've been working on this for a few months now. Hopefully y'all will enjoy it.
Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you're scared to death ~ Harold Wilson
Chapter 1
The stalls were cleaned, the stock fed and watered and she had walked the southern fence with Jake. No troubles there, which was a relief; it was mighty cold for October and she didn't much fancy pulling out the post-hole digger even if the ground wasn't frozen yet. The breakfast dishes were washed, the fire tended then she swept, put a load of laundry out on the line and put a pot of coffee on. Her morning's work was well-begun.
The hours passed in comfortable familiarity - the boy's schooling, sorting out the pantry, doing up the bills, lunchtime. The baby's naptime was nearly her favorite part of the day, surpassed only by that moment after the children's bedtime when she hung up her dishtowel and realised the house was quiet. That moment was magic. Naptime was a good second best though. She scooted the boys off to their room with dire threats of the fearful retribution she would wreak for waking the baby, set a chicken fresh-killed yesterday in salt water to soak, refilled her cup of coffee and - bless it - sat down. Her chair - her "throne" - was an old squashy armchair, fitted to all her kinks and corners and just perfect. The color was awful and the fabric across the arms were shiny with age, but you couldn't buy comfort like this. She wiggled her back against her chair just to emphasize how comfortable she was and, exhaling loudly, flopped her head back to stare at the ceiling for a moment. Just a moment, mind you; staring off into space doesn't get the work done.
Kate rummaged in her basket at the foot of her chair for the afghan she was working on. Finding her place, she set the hook in and turned the television on. Crocheting left the mind free while the fingers were busy, and this was her time to watch the news.
Double-chaining straight across in a nice navy blue, half an ear cocked to the reporter - half an ear was all they would get, the tripe they insisted on spewing half the time - it took a good many minutes for the hysteria in the reporter's voice to interrupt her thoughts. She paused in her work and gave the television her full attention. Moments later, the afghan dropped forgotten in her lap, she was watching raptly with wide eyes as the cameras panned to video footage of a mushroom cloud over New York.
She laughed weakly. Papa had always told her the world would end and she wouldn't notice until her chores were done. She noticed the half-hearted giggles sobbing from her throat and took a deep breath. Get a hold of herself, that was the ticket. The children. Mustn't act weak in front of-
Oh good grief, what was she going to tell the boys?
Never mind that now. Information, that's what she needed.
She turned the volume down and perched on the edge of her chair, listening as hard as she could. The sudden wave of sickness in Atlanta and New York is now believed to have been the work of biological weapons. The CDC assures us that what we had been told were road closures and shipping problems were, in fact, quarantine measures and that their precautions were effected early enough to prevent the spread of the infection. Tragically, that is now a moot point for New York as of early this morning. No word yet on who was behind these attacks, no terrorist groups have come forward to claim responsibility. We would like to remind our viewers that this is a developing story-
The television reporter, seated behind his desk with that silly sheaf of papers in his hands - as if that ever fooled anyone - stopped speaking. His mouth, with its perfect teeth for the televised smile, gaped open and for long moments she watched his eyes move slowly from left to right until she cottoned on that he was reading a teleprompter. Someone off-camera coughed hard and the reporter came to, stammered and shuffled his papers. He looked up at the camera.
This just in... Atlanta is gone. Large-scale evacuation measures are being put into effect immediately for the nation's metropolises and possible targets of concern. Everyone else, if you are watching this, you are advised to remain in your homes. Stay off the phones, stay off the roadways. Stay tuned for further instructions.
Well, bugger that. If she was going to start taking her cues from the government, she'd wait until the evening news when maybe they'd figured out their behinds from a hat stand. She flipped off the television, mind racing. Think, think, think. In Virginia, midway between New York City and Atlanta. Would fallout reach as far as that? She hopped over to her computer chair and fired the computer up. They'd said to stay off the phones but they hadn't said anything about the internet.
A few clicks of the mouse were all she needed to find out that the prevailing winds would keep anything nasty well away from southern Virginia. She sent out some emails and took a sip of her coffee, which had gone stone cold. That wouldn't do at all. Another pot was put on and she wandered around her kitchen, aimless, waiting for the coffee to brew. So much to do. What to do? Where to start?
She wandered back into the front room with vague thoughts of getting pen and paper from her desk to make lists of some sort, and something out the front window caught her eye. It was a van. A church van, pulling up her drive. All vagueness and discombobulated shock left her. Kate's spine snapped to attention. Her eyes narrowed. She grabbed her coat from the rack and slid open a desk drawer, pulling out her revolver. This house wasn't easy to find and she had no relatives in the area. Strangers never came here, had no business here. Her gaze flicked to the walkway through the kitchen; she kept the shotgun by the backdoor. No, best not to be too obvious. She added extra rounds to her coat pocket; discretion didn't mean stupidity. Hollering for the boys to stay in their rooms, she put on her coat and stuffed the revolver, comfortably gripped in her right hand, into the other pocket, and went out to greet the approaching van.
Her stride was easy, her stance relaxed but her eyes didn't stop cataloguing. The van was unmarked, a plain blue-white with no front plate. There were occupants in the back, besides the driver and passenger; how many, she couldn't tell. It halted well away from the front porch and parked. A tall, straight man got out of the passenger side. His hair was cut very neatly, and he pulled his dark wool overcoat closer about him before reaching back into the van. She stiffened, then relaxed her grip on her gun as he only pulled out his hat and settled it firmly on his short hair.
Oh, wait just one cotton-pickin' minute. She knew exactly what this was.
"Ahoy, the duty van," she called out. The fellow and his highly polished black shoes halted as he made his way towards her, ever so briefly. Just enough to confirm her conclusions.
"Ahoy, the house," he called back. "I'm unarmed."
"I'm not."
His smile was strained and he held his hands out in the universal gesture for surrender. He stopped a little ways away from her, hands still spread. "I'm OSSC Hockley. I'm just here to talk."
Kate took a better bead on him and shifted unobtrustively until he was shielding her from the van's line of fire. "What's a Navy senior chief doing on my property, Mr. Hockley?"
"Negotiating, hopefully. It's a bit cold and this might take a while. Could we step inside?"
"I don't think I'm comfortable with that, Chief. Keep talking, I might change my mind."
She assumed it was years of dealing with junior enlisted which kept him from sighing in exasperation. It still showed though. "You're right, Mrs. Jameson, we've no business being on your property and you have every right to be wary after what happened this morning. But this is war and the Navy needs you. Your country needs you."
"I've given the country ten years of service as a Navy wife," she retorted. Curious, in spite of herself, she blurted out, "What does the Navy need from me? I'm a housewife."
"Exactly. You're a Navy housewife in the middle of no where, fifteen miles from town. Pretty secure set-up you've got here." He paused to clear his throat. "We need to relocate some of our more sensitive personnel."
"Hide them."
"Yes."
"With me."
"Yes."
"That makes no bloody sense at all."
He cleared his throat again. "We're not asking you to understand it and it's probably better if you don't. All you need to know is that we would very much appreciate it if you would give room and board to one of my men."
She watched him, her face inscrutable. "Come inside and have some coffee. This might take a while."
OSSC Hockley was escorted inside and seated at her kitchen table. Kate fixed a plate of cookies and two mugs of fresh coffee and sat down across from him, placing her revolver on the table next to her mug. She curled her cold fingers around the hot ceramic to hide their shakiness.
"So," she began, "you want one of your men hidden in my house. What does this fellow do?" She smiled a bit as he shifted uncomfortably, and changed tack. "What is the Navy willing to offer?"
"We were hoping you would be eager to do your patriotic duty-"
"What you're asking is addressed in the Constitution, Senior Chief. Specifically disallowed. I've just heard of two bombs, there might be more. Goodness only knows what's going to become of any of us, or even whether I'm going to find anything in the shops on my next trip into town, and you're asking me to take on another mouth to feed." She took a sip of her coffee and waited for that to sink in. The shaking had stopped and this pleased her. "I'll need some compensation, and I'm fairly sure you came out here authorised to give it."
She had him and she knew it. "We've warehoused crates of supplies. One of those crates will be delivered to you." She began to object and he interrupted her smoothly. "Plus, he will be some compensation himself. He's a government employee with secure pay. He's qualified with the M-16 and a Beretta, they're standard weapons, and he has both plus some ammunition. Mrs. Jameson, you can't tell me a man such as him wouldn't be a relief to have around right now, you and your family out here all alone."
Her chin jutted out stubbornly. "I take care of things just fine on my own."
"Obviously you do. But you can't tell me he wouldn't come in handy. Mrs. Jameson," he said with a slight air of desperation, "he's one of my best men, a hard worker. Please, just say yes."
She thoughtfully sipped at her coffee. "Has martial law been declared yet?"
"It will be later tonight is the word we're getting."
The fellow was clean-cut, but that wasn't saying much. He was military, he was supposed to be clean-cut. He stood in the front room, weighed down with his c-bag, a backpack and a heavy-looking case. Eric Chavez, he'd introduced himself as. If the chevrons on his uniform meant anything, a first class petty officer.
"Pardon my saying so, but you don't look like a Chavez."
He chuckled hollowly, as if at a long-standing joke. "My family calls me wedo." At her puzzled look, he supplied, "It means 'white boy'."
"Oh. You can put your bags in the den for now. I'll clean out my sewing room, that'll be yours. In the meantime, the couch is comfortable enough."
She showed him the den, where he piled his luggage as tidily as possible in an unused corner. "As soon as possible, I want the bag burned. Your utilities too."
"May I ask why?"
She pointed to the name on his bag. "Chavez. No one's going to believe you're my brother if you don't hide that name."
Supper was quieter than usual. She introduced the twins, Sam and Jake, and baby Emma to their guest and shot dagger-edged looks at the boys, just daring them not to mind their manners, as she dished up fried chicken and potatoes. Round-eyed, the boys kept asking him questions but he didn't seem to mind. It was a bit of a relief that they were taking up the slack in the conversation, to be honest. She felt as if she might jump out of her skin. On their quiet little place, nothing much changed. In one vast swoop, abruptly everything had changed and she hadn't had time to sort it all out in her head. What she would really prefer would be to glue herself to the television to see what was going on out in the rest of the world, and maybe fall apart a little and cry and indulge in some moderate hysterics while she cleaned her guns to some old Hank Williams Jr. That was more than a little out of the question, so she had to settle for serving a stranger second helpings of three-bean salad and offering Emma tiny bites of her chicken with a steady hand. For the sake of the children, you know.
The lights went off only to come back on before their eyes had time to adjust to the sudden darkness. A few moments later it happened again. The second time, once the lights were stable once more and the reassuring hum of the refrigerator was heard in the kitchen, Sam went unasked to fetch some candles and matches. The lights stayed on though. Grateful that she'd baked yesterday instead of taking a nap as she would have preferred, after the boys cleared the table she brought out a cake and coffee for dessert.
Once the dishes were in the sink and the table wiped down, she reminded Jake that it was his turn to mind Emma while she and Sam did the evening chores. Mr. Chavez hurriedly gulped the last of his coffee, wiped his mouth on his napkin and stood up.
"I'll come, Sam can stay in and help his brother with the baby."
"I appreciate the offer but really, we're fine, we do this every day."
"It's cold out there, better for me to be out in it than him."
She relented and, telling the boys to stoke the fire, trudged out into the cold with their new boarder right behind. It was cold out, a brittle chill with a snap to it that signaled the first hard freeze of the year, and Kate was grateful for the warmth of the barn by the time they reached it. Soon she was buried against the flank of their old cow and milk was hissing into the bucket. She had told Mr. Chavez to feed and water the hens and collect the eggs - not much chance of him messing that job up. He was taking his sweet time of it though.
"All done."
Spooked, Kate nearly dumped the bucket over and contemplated whacking him with the rag she kept handy to clean Bessie's udder. "Fine. Thank you. Just sit over there, I'm almost done here, then we can see to the rest of the animals."
"I already did." She peered up at him over the cow's broad back. Not knowing him well enough, she wasn't certain but he looked like one of the boys when they'd been up to something.
"Already did what?"
"Fed the horse, the pigs and the steers. I wasn't certain whether you give them grain, maybe you just keep that for the chickens and the cow, so I left that bit for you. I also cleaned the water trough in the pigpen." He hopped on one foot, she heard his shoe squelch and he grimaced. "That feels moderately nasty. Do you mind if I look around for some Wellingtons next time?"
After the milking she checked on the other animals under the excuse of petting them, but could find no fault with his work. He'd neither overfed nor underfed them and there was plenty of clean straw laid down in every pen and stall. They walked back to the house silently and she stayed in the kitchen to cool the milk, strain it and sterilize the pail. She was going to have to be careful around that fellow - Kate didn't like surprises.
She had never waited for that magic moment of quiet with such anticipation as she did that night. She crocheted quietly in her chair - the next day she would have to pick out two rows to repair the mistakes - and their guest sat on the couch with a book he had borrowed from their bookshelves. At some unheard signal, she put down her afghan and he his book.
"They sound asleep," he said. She listened to be sure, nodded and flipped on the television.
Futile gesture, that. They stayed up until eleven, well past her bedtime, and heard not one bit of solid new information. The story of the century and the news media couldn't cover it properly. Geez, one would think they were in the business of disseminating information, the schmucks. Mr. Chavez volunteered that they were probably on orders to keep things quiet.
"But what about instructions, being told about the martial law and all that? What, do they expect us all to just sit on our hineys until they get around to letting us know what's going on?"
"Announcing martial law would likely cause a panic," he disagreed. "I'm sure there's problems enough out there without folks panicking, next would be riots."
"So you think the local governments are still in control?"
"No. I'm sure martial law has been declared, only I don't think they're telling us." He paused, examining his fingers and saying in an offhand manner, "Rather like the way you haven't told your boys."
"That's none of your concern," she said tartly. "My children, my rules."
"I agree, I agree, I didn't mean to imply anything," he said in a mollifying tone. "They're young yet, and this is rather scary. The boys must be, what, ten?"
"Twelve last month."
"Twelve last month," he repeated. He fixed his eyes on his fingers again. "This could get ugly, Mrs. Jameson. I'm not saying anything, I'm just saying that babying them might not be doing them any favors. Do they shoot?"
He glanced back up, right down the barrel of her gun. She had to give him some credit; he didn't blink. "I shoot. That's all you need to know."
He spread his hands slowly and she tucked the gun back under the afghan on her lap. "I apologise, you're right, I stepped over the line. I meant no spite, Mrs. Jameson, and this must be uncomfortable enough as it is without me prying. If it helps, until we're all more at ease I'd be more than willing to surrender my guns to you."
She smirked to herself. "That's already been taken care of. I took your guns when you were washing up for supper. The .22 too," she added. Curious, she couldn't help tacking on, "A .22 isn't a military weapon."
"My family has a farm in Texas. The .22 was my old peashooter, Dad gave it to me for my twelfth birthday."
She ignored that and fetched him some blankets and pillows from the linen closet in the hallway. She fed the fire in the woodstove while he made himself a bed on the couch, adjusted the dampers for a night burn and went to bed without saying another word.
The electricity was off the next morning. She dressed quickly, toes burning on the icy wood floor, and bundled Emma up to dress her by the still-warm stove. Sam took the milk pail out to fetch water from the hand pump by the barn, and Kate set some on the back of the woodstove to heat for washing. She fixed poached eggs on toast for breakfast, with a jar of beans from the pantry and hot sauce. They drank milk with their eggs and beans and Kate resolved to hunt up the old percolator they used for camping so she could have a cup of coffee. The water had warmed nicely by the time she and the boarder had finished with the outside chores and Jake had a lovely fire going in the stove. They thawed out some and Kate took a cloth dipped in the warm water to the kids' faces. A lick and a promise would have to do for now, until the lights came back on. Maybe there was an old wash tub out in the barn's loft, she was pretty sure she'd seen one up there. Big enough for Emma, definitely, and the dishes, and it would be easier to heat water for the bathtub for the boys and herself. She hadn't thought about the lights going off, she'd have to figure that out.
Her mind preoccupied, she didn't notice that their boarder had washed the dishes until she had sent the boys out to play in the fresh air so she could do her work without everyone underfoot. She thanked him grudgingly, and proceeded to ignore him as he helped her with the inside chores as well; shaking and folding his bedding and putting it back in the linen closet, sweeping, washing down the table and the counters, folding yesterday's laundry. The percolator was found in the back of the storage closet in her sewing room, buried under the sleeping bags, and the scent of coffee perking on the woodstove was a burst of cheer to her bad mood. She sighed in satisfaction with the first sip, seated at the kitchen table with a pen and paper.
"Are we ready to come up with a game plan?"
Kate scowled when he seated himself across from her, a full mug of his own in his hand. "I'm unfamiliar with this "we' you speak of. I'm your landlady, not your pal."
"And I'm not a leech. Don't make me feel guilty for every meal I eat because I'm not sure whether I'm taking food from your kids." They silently locked horns, and she wished she knew him well enough to read his body language. From the set of his jaw, if she had to guess then she'd say he had a stubborn streak at least as wide as her own.
"I figure the lights aren't our main concern right now," she said, conceding his victory without choosing to acknowledge it. "We've got water, heat, I can cook. What we really need to do is get to town. There's an older couple living up the road that I'd like to check on, too."
"Don't you have frozen stuff to worry about?"
"Not particularly. It hasn't been cold enough to butcher yet, so the freezer's about empty. Mostly fruit I haven't had time to dry or can, some odds and ends. The freezer's out in the barn, there's plenty of milk jugs I filled with water and stowed in there to keep the cost of running it down and it's insulated on three sides by straw bales. If our last outage is anything to go by, it'll be fine for three, maybe four days, and that was summertime."
"How are we fixed for groceries?"
With a smug look, Kate got up and opened the pantry door. It was a fair-sized room, an old-fashioned butler's pantry with shelves living both walls and space at the end for barrels and kegs. He peeked in and eyed row upon row of glass jars, stacked tin cans, square tupperware containers of pastas and baking supplies. At the end were two large, half-empty sacks of flour and rice and a sack of sugar. He frowned.
"This is good, I'm not saying it's not, but... how long do you think this'll feed five people?"
"You haven't seen the cellar yet." Kate opened a door next to the pantry, revealing steps winding down into shadowy, dank darkness. "Mind your footing."
His footsteps faded down into the cellar and she waited. A low, impressed whistle floated up the stairs, and she heard a door open. He must be checking the root cellar she and the boys had constructed by partitioning off one corner of the cool, stone-walled cellar. That was less impressive; freshly turned soil didn't make for a good garden, and the root cellar held potatoes, onions, carrots and a few pumpkins but not as much as she would like. Next year's harvest would be better.
Heavy steps stumped back up the cellar stairs. "That's kind of obsessive, to be honest."
"I take it you've never had to go shopping with kids in tow. Guaranteed headache. And it's a ways into town - Costco's even further. When we first moved out here, seemed like I was always dropping what I was doing to make a run into town for just a couple of things."
"Inefficient," he murmured.
"Very. It's also our first winter in the area, and I wasn't certain if we could get snowed in. So I changed my habits; started planning my trips, making long-term lists, buying as much as the truck would hold. Now I shop when I feel like it, I only buy what's on sale for a real nice price, and I buy lots of it. Saves me time, money, gas and there's a lot less hassle."
"I didn't see medical supplies."
"Oh, you can't live way out here without having that sort of thing on hand," she said.
He insisted on seeing what they had, and she could almost feel him rolling his eyes as she rooted around under the bathroom sink and in the medicine cabinet. She piled it all on the counter and - yes, that was definitely a patient expression on his face. The patronising little creep, it wasn't that bad. He bent over the sink and began scribbling rapidly on the note pad as she put it all back where it belonged; Bactine, half-empty box of bandaids, old roll of ace bandage from when she sprained an ankle last spring, the Mom-standard bottles of iodine, alcohol, peroxide, syrup of ipecac, infant fever drops, Tylenol and cough medicine. Peering over his shoulder, Kate read off the list he was compiling. Gauze pads, antibiotics (cream), antibiotics (pill and suspension), painkillers, dressing tape, gloves, betadine, pressure packs, calamine, plaster bandage, suture needle, sutures/gut...
"You're a corpman," she guessed, interrupting his scribbling. "Are you planning on doing surgery on my kitchen table?"
"I'm not a corpman," he said tersely, after a moment's pause. "We were briefed on what to keep on hand. And, no offense intended, but it would have been simpler if I had been allowed to take notes during the briefing, because you have none of it."
"My profound apologies, the next time I have a serviceman plopped on my doorstep I'll make a note to go shopping first."
Still writing, he walked back to the kitchen and she followed him. She'd left her coffee on the table anyhow.
"Communications?"
"What about them?"
"What are our capabilities?"
"Speak English, petty officer. I can't give a sitrep for you to add to the plan of the day we'll be listening to at tomorrow's morning muster."
They stared at each other for a moment and then their mutual annoyance faded like morning fog in the sunshine and they began to chuckle. "I deserved that, sorry," he said "Force of habit. But you can't pretend you don't speak at least a little of the lingo."
"I speak conversational Navy only, I am not fluent." She filled both their coffee cups and he thanked her.
"What I mean is, what sort of ability do we have to send or receive information? Obviously the TV's dead until the lights come back, but do you have shortwave, a scanner, CB radio, walkie-talkies... anything like that?"
"Oh, yeah, the Durango has a CB and there's a scanner on top of the bookshelf. Now that I think about it, we've got a hand-crank radio out in the barn too. I use it sometimes to listen to music while I'm working. Where's my head been, we could have been keeping in touch with the news all morning!"
"Don't worry about it, it'll take a while for the rumours to shake out from the real news and you're stressed. We're all stressed." He checked his watch. "Daylight's wasting, let's get a move on. We'll check on those neighbors of yours on our way."
Kate wasn't pleased at taking the children into town with them but the boys weren't old enough to stay with the baby alone, not without an adult close by. Nor did she have any intentions of leaving either her vehicles or her kids with their boarder. As luck would have it, Mrs. Schmidt had the situation in hand before they had even pulled down the elderly couple's drive. She met them at the door, wrapped in her big quilted jacket and waved them all inside. Kate didn't have time to object; the boys and Emma were efficiently divested of their outer wraps, flaky apple turnovers were placed in their hands and they were sent off to hear one of "Mister Bill's" old yarns. Poppy was a sweet-cheeked old gal, as country as a calf rope and admirable for her ability to cut a ladylike, elegant figure even when wrapped in an old quilted jacket, but right now she was all business.
"Now then, the young'uns are settled nicely - I told Bill not to bother getting his boots on, you'd be by sooner rather than later - and I've already made up a list."
"Miss Poppy, this is Eric," Kate introduced. Poppy looked him up and down, ignoring for a moment the offered hand, and her eyes settled on his feet.
"You're about a size ten?" Puzzled, he agreed. Poppy went to the door and rummaged around some, then brought back a pair of Bill's old work boots. "Take off your shoes and wear these. Bill's jacket is behind the door, trade yours for that one before you go. And for heaven's sake, let some stubble grow until that fresh haircut grows a bit."
"Ma'am?" he asked faintly, even more confused.
"Young man, I saw them folks head up to Kate's place yesterday and then you show up, with your military haircut and your polished dress shoes, and heaven help me if you ain't the sense to wear something besides the jacket they issued you when you enlisted. I can see where you ripped off the patches, look there. Kate must think you're a decent sort, else she would have shot you last night. She might shoot you yet, but in the meantime I'll assume you're a decent sort too. That means I can't have you walking into town practically advertising your rank at a time like this, not when she's with you. You armed, girl?"
"Yes, ma'am." Kate pulled aside her jacket to show the holster she had dug out of the closet. "There's more in the truck, with extra ammo."
"Good girl. I've packed you a lunch, here's the list and some cash. Get what you can, Bill's been listening on the scanner all morning and town seems quiet. Might not stay that way for long. And I meant what I said - keep him quiet. Talk on the scanner is that the military's moving into some of the big towns. Taking over, like. Folks're getting a mite nervous about the military. Mind, now, you be careful."
At the mention of the scanner, Kate's stomach flipped over. She pulled Poppy closer and murmured in her ear, "I haven't said anything to the boys yet."
"You're a fool," Poppy murmured back. "But that's your own business. Now get going."
Mr. Chavez and Kate flipped all but the front seats down in the Durango. That was the reason she had purchased it, only a few weeks before moving in. It was roomy enough to carry passengers with plenty of room left for cargo, plus the parts were easy to come by. Hers was a few years old with a third-row seat and a tow package, and could haul nearly as much as a full-sized truck.
It was a quiet drive, full of long thoughts they kept to themselves. The closer they got to town, the fewer people they saw and that made Kate a little edgy. Big things had just happened. It was natural to head to town, where they could resupply and gather information. So... where was everyone? She slowed way down on the approach to the city limits and was cruising along at twenty miles an hour as she rolled passed the feed store. The parking lot was empty. Ignoring the blank stoplight, she turned right down the main drag and kept the truck's speed low. She could have parked if she wanted, right in the middle of the road; there wasn't a soul to be seen. She asked Mr. Chavez to keep an eye out for any stores that were open and dialed the CB to channel ten. Dead silence. Picking up the mike, she keyed it twice. No one responded. Trying channel nineteen, this time she said in the mike, "This is the MightyMouse, can I get a check?" She waited. "Is there anyone on this channel, over?"
Chavez was grinning. "Mighty Mouse?"
"Batwoman was already taken." Channel eleven this time, eleven was usually active. "MightyMouse, asking for a check, over."
"MightyMouse, we thought you'd forgotten where your radio was, girl. I got your check, this is Scamp. Take it down to nine, over."
Surprised, she shot back into the mike, "Nine? That's the police channel, Scamp, I'd like to keep my radio, over."
"By personal invite from the sheriff, darlin', you trust old Scamp and take it to nine, over."
Well, hell. This was something new. She switched to channel nine.
"... need to find out if Obie's gonna let us use his ham..."
"...Obie's got a ham?"
"...if it plugs in and has an antenna out the top end, Obie's got it..."
"Will everyone just SHUT UP. Over." Ahhh, the dulcet tones of Sheriff Rider. "Good gravy, Sara Ellen's got a flock of chickens that don't chatter as much as y'all. Kate, you out there?"
"Hello, Sheriff. Scamp found me on eleven, over."
"Where you at, Kate?"
"Say 'over', please, sheriff, I feel like I'm interrupting. I'm down by Dan's Market, pulling in to park. Where is everyone, over?"
"Kate, this is my channel and I'll do as I please. Head on down to the Grange, we're all meeting there. You see anyone, you haul them in with you."
"Yessir, Sheriff, over."
The Grange, located next to the county fairgrounds, was used for town meetings, auctions and the occasional wedding reception. It was a long, squat building the primary appeal of which was its capacity: it could hold and feed four hundred people comfortably with a little room left over for dancing, so long as no one got crazy about it. As she pulled the Durango into the lot, Kate saw that 'crazy' was about the size of it. Looked like most of the cars in the county were lined up, with the overflow spilling into the fairgrounds.
Inside was a crush of people. The folding chairs and tables had long since been pushed aside to make room. It was standing only, wall to wall people, and despite the lack of heat in the building Kate began to sweat in her coat. She shrugged it off. No one seemed to know what the meeting was about but they weren't kept waiting long. The door to the kitchen opened and Sheriff Larry Rider moved through to the front, flanked by a couple of men. Kate recognised the deputy, Scott something, and Dan Wells, the owner of Dan's Market, the town grocery mart.
The sheriff lacked a pulpit and there was no microphone to be found - wouldn't work if they had one. There must have been upward of five hundred people in that hall, maybe more, all of them murmuring to their neighbors and exuding cold tension and fear so thick you could slice it, fry it and serve it with hash browns. No Hollywood scriptwriters stood at his elbow to write him a speech the likes of which would win him an Oscar. The sheriff didn't have any of these things going for him but what he did have, and used to fullest advantage, was being on a first-name basis with pretty near everyone in the county and a plan. He spoke to them from the heart, in the plain talk one used with a neighbor. He used strong words that struck the listener right in the gut; words like "mom" and "home" and "survive". The crowd stilled until the quiet rumble of Rider's voice reached easily to the furthest corner of the room, and he explained his plan. There would be no grocery shopping for anyone, not until they knew for certain that the delivery trucks would keep running. Scott and Rider had worked late into the night taking an inventory of the food in the stores and, until the delivery trucks could be guaranteed, it would be parceled out free of charge according to each family's need. Save your money for other stuff, he said, and work with your neighbors. Task groups were being formed to expand the county's options, find out vital information. In the meantime, everyone would have something to eat. Just remain calm. Spread the word.
Then he took out his gun and told them the first person who tried to riot, steal or harm anyone else would be taken fifty miles closer to the coast and dropped off with only the clothes on their back. There wouldn't be any funny stuff going on in his county, no sir.
Like a benediction from on high, a golden light spread over his lanky form and a low hum could be heard. The lights were back on.
This was everyone's cue to head out to their own places. Sheriff Rider called out that everyone should leave a list of needed groceries at Dan's, just shove the list in the mail slot and not to forget to head it with their name and address. It might take a couple of days but it was their top priority, and keep in mind that some would be asked to join a task group if there was a need.
Kate turned to go before too many of the crowd got the same idea. A tug on her sleeve distracted her, and Sara Ellen Rider folded her into a great big hug.
"My goodness, Kate, you're a sight for sore eyes. You haven't been to town for weeks. "
"Nonsense, I was just here the second week of September. Bought grain and canning lids, remember?"
"You ought to get out more," the older woman chided. "But I'm getting off track, Larry asked me to find you. Come out back, there's another meeting."
"One second, Sara Ellen. This is Eric. Eric, this is Sara Ellen, the sheriff's wife and a friend of mine."
Eric took Sara Ellen's hand and shook it. "It's a pleasure."
"Lovely to meet you, Eric," she answered graciously. She swept him a discreet look and then looked from Chavez to Kate and back again, a delighted smile curving her lips. Chavez must have read the woman correctly, because he quickly interjected, "My sister's told me a great deal about this town. I wish I could have come for a visit under happier circumstances."
"Oh! Oh, you're her brother. I thought maybe... well, it's a treat to meet you, Eric, we haven't met Kate's family yet."
"Yes, my mother's been after me to come check on her for some time now."
"But," Sara Ellen said as Kate inwardly flinched, "I thought Kate's mother died years ago."
"Of course," he said, covering his mistake smoothly. "We have different mothers. I'm her half-brother."
Kate decided this was an excellent time to change the subject. "What does Larry want with me? Poppy is watching the kids, I can't be too much longer or she'll worry."
Sara Ellen led the way outside, chatting to Chavez about the town. Kate prayed that he had learned his lesson and wouldn't make any more missteps. All was well, however, and by the time she had led them around the Grange to a little knot of people waiting by the county squad car he seemed to have her thoroughly charmed. Sara Ellen began the introductions and there was another snag when Sara Ellen realised she didn't have Chavez' surname and asked for it.
"Reed," Kate piped up. "I'm sorry, Sara Ellen, I hadn't realised I'd never told you my maiden name. Everyone, this is my brother, Eric Reed." Buddy, she said silently, you had better be worth lying to these people or they'll have to invent new names for the kind of hurt I'm gonna put on you.
The older woman took it from there. "Eric Reed, this is Kurt Yaeger, he runs Yaeger's Feed & Supply, you must have passed it on the way into town." A wiry man, his salt-and-pepper hair hidden by a feed store ballcap, shook his hand. "This here is Walter Cochrane, pastor of the Delaney First Baptist Church. And that unsavoury character in the squad car there, that's Jackson Hamill. Popularly known as Scamp."
Scamp waved from the inside of the car, still fiddling with the CB. He certainly looked like an unsavoury character; his grey hair too long, a cigarette dangling from between his lips and dressed in a rock concert tee shirt, black leather vest and ratty old jeans, he looked as if he would feel right at home in a biker bar in southern Alabama.
"Scamp! Are you smoking in my car?" The sheriff joined them, annoyance stamped on his features.
Scamp took a drag off his cigarette and drawled back, grey wisps of smoke escaping through his lips, "Sheriff, you told me to mind the CB."
"One of these days I'm gonna stop liking you. Kate, good to see you."
The sheriff quickly outlined his needs and how he hoped each of them might pitch in to help. Someone was needed to head a committee to oversee the distribution of food supplies, a job tailor-made for Sara Ellen and the pastor. Communications were a top priority; if the lights were going to go back off, the sheriff wanted to know why and when, not to mention that finding out how the rest of the nation was faring was vital information. The county needed a good, solid plan and a few contingency plans, and without knowing what the situation was no one knew what to plan for. This was right up Kate and Scamp's alley, between the pair of them they knew just about everyone within CB range, and that meant all the people who were most likely to have other communications equipment.
"I want rumours, I want hearsay, if China or Cuba farts and someone in Maine sees the President at the local swimming hole, I need to know," he told them. "Most of it will be crap but reading between the lines ought to tell us a fair bit we won't be seeing on the news."
Kurt and Dan were to canvass the townfolk and outlying farms. The goal: long-term food sources. The owner of the local feed-and-seed likely knew who was raising food in the county; Dan could distribute it through his market. The delivery trucks couldn't be guaranteed so the county was going to have to start looking within its own borders for groceries. The sheriff turned to Kate, as one of the county residents to be canvassed, and asked what she thought of this.
"It's got some problems, Sheriff," she said honestly and went on to explain. The eggs she gave to the townfolk wouldn't hatch out into laying hens, and the heifer slaughtered for beef otherwise would have had a calf and given milk in a little more than a year. "You're talking about my property, my sweat and hard labour. I'm not going to let people starve if I can help it but neither will I put the town before my own family."
"See here," Dan said reasonably, "I know where you're coming from, Kate, but we all have to pitch in even if it hurts. I gave everything in my store. Do you know how much it will cost me to restock when all this is over?"
"Sure, Dan, and that was good of you. But did you turn over your store before or after you'd set aside what your family needed?" she asked sceptically. He shifted uncomfortably and didn't answer. "That's what I'm saying. I'll help, just not so foolishly that I can't feed my kids."
The sheriff stepped in and continued. Scott and himself would be doing their own county-wide inventory, this one for all available weaponry and folks to shoot them. A chill finger ran up and down Kate's spine as the sheriff noted that it was a 'precautionary measure... just in case'. For the first time in nearly twenty-four hours, it occurred to her that an attack which stopped at just two large cities was strategically insufficient. Cool logic whispered in her ear, hissing sinister messages of looming disaster. For a moment, the sheriff's eyes caught hers and she guessed that he was hearing the faint thump of the drums of war as well.
Sheriff Rider thanked them for their assistance and Kate and Chavez walked back to the truck. There would be no shopping today. Scamp hollered at her to keep her ears on and she waved vaguely in acknowledgement. Bigger thoughts were currently occupying her brain. On their way out of town they stopped off at Dan's Market. She scribbled Poppy and Bill's name and address at the top of their grocery list and was going to call it good. Chavez stopped her as she was getting out of the truck and told her to put in her own list as well.
"We don't need anything," she said.
"How many people do you want knowing that?"
He offered her the notepad and she tore off a fresh sheet, writing at the top her name and address and underneath of that 'flour, coffee, cornstarch, sausage'. It wasn't a complete fabrication, she only had a couple of boxes of cornstarch in the house because the only time she used it was for her grandma's fruit salad at Thanksgiving, and there was no such thing as too much sausage. They would have plenty once she butchered a pig, in the meantime she was fairly certain she was down to her last few pounds. She felt a little guilty as she slipped the two lists through the mail slot; on the other hand, Chavez had a ****ed good point. She didn't want folks knowing what she had at the house.
Back in the truck, her brain returned to mulling over the previous day's attacks. Navigating the route home by force of habit, she struggled with the notion that she was staring at all the puzzle pieces right in front of her, she just had to figure out how they fitted together. Two cities... just two cities... It made no sense. What did Atlanta and New York have to make them targets that other cities didn't have? It was a blow, to be sure, but she couldn't see how it would in any way cripple America as a nation. Disorient them, yes. No one went to war to merely disorient an opponent though, and two cities ruled out an isolated terrorist or accident. It would need several cities, possibly NORAD and a large chunk of the military as well before an enemy nation could be reasonably assured of a crippled United States. The military clearly wasn't affected, they had mobilised before she's even heard the news, and were able to dump a serviceman on her front stoop almost instantly.
She almost slammed on the truck's brakes out of reflex when the puzzle pieces abruptly coalesced into a clear picture. Chavez. The military were hiding away specific servicemen in secure locations. Why? Communications, she answered herself. The way he was going on about communications capabilities... He had to be in some sort of communications job, maybe an IT. Or, yeah, now that she thought of it, hadn't that senior chief called himself an OS? Operations Specialist, and the chief had called Chavez one of his best men. So maybe an IT or an OS - definitely some sort of communications position. The military was putting ears on the ground. Stowing servicemen experienced in communications in numerous locations, spread out and relatively secure.
But why her? A little white, red and blue card flashed before her mind's eye and she could have kicked herself. All those big purchases at Costco, each swiped with her membership card into an accessible database. Of course. She was off the beaten path and regularly made large purchases at a feed store and Costco; they knew their man would be fed. The military wouldn't have any trouble mining the various databases out there to locate folks like her, hundreds of them, maybe more.
So the military had their ears on, hundreds of men and women out there waiting to hear... something. And somehow they were supposed to pass word of this on to their command. Okay, so she hadn't worked out all the details yet but it all fit reasonably well enough.
It was just as the sheriff had said, a person needed information to make a plan. Clearly there was another attack coming, the bombing of Atlanta and New York has been some sort of diversion, or the first wave.
"Hey, Chavez."
"Yeah?"
"I saw some ammo in with your stuff. How much do you have, exactly?"
He stared out the window, looking grim. "A lot."
"Define 'a lot'."
He turned to look at her. "Senior Chief promised you a crate, right? Well, those crates don't have much food. It's mostly ammunitions, parts, odds and ends and what the Navy calls 'tradeable goods'. If the power doesn't go out again, it should be here tomorrow."
They collected the kids from Poppy's house, caught them up on the news from town and made it home just in time for lunch. The boys were rather subdued as they ate their sandwiches. If she didn't know Bill much better than that, she might have suspected he'd let them in on what was going on in the world. One way or another, though, they would find out and the delay wouldn't do anything to soften the blow. After lunch she washed Emma's face, tucked her into the crib and dished up some cake. Then she invited Sam and Jake into the front room for a talk.
They took it better than expected. There were a tear or two, one softly murmured question on whether they were going to die, and then her little boys did her proud: they squared their shoulders and asked what their family could do to help.
"Oh, boys." She hugged them tightly to her. "You're getting so big."
"Hey Mom!" Jake said eagerly. "I guess I need to learn how to shoot now, huh?"
"Maybe," she hedged. Movement caught her eye and she saw Chavez leaning against the doorway. He grinned encouragingly and gave the family their privacy.
A green and black Bronco, jacked up in a passable imitation of Gravedigger and flying the Jolly Roger flag from an antenna, came roaring down the drive, horn honking. Chavez bolted from around the corner of the barn, behind which he and the boys had been working on putting the radiator back into an old Ford pickup, and Kate burst out of the front door with the shotgun already levelled. She sighted down its length as the screen door slammed behind her and then dropped the barrel with an aggrieved scowl.
"SCAMP!" She stomped up at the truck, where the sinewy older man was grinning at her unrepentantly. "Friggin' hooligan. I swear on all that's holy, one of these days-"
"Get your boots on, girl, we're headed out to Obie's," he said, cutting off her tirade. He took a drag on his cigarette and eyed her appearance with an ever-widening grin. "Love the look. Dead sexy."
Juggling the shotgun in a free hand, Kate yanked off her rubber gloves and pulled the bandana off her head. "Power's back on. I was cleaning. Moron. And I can't leave the kids, we'll have to head to Obie's later."
"One step ahead of you, Kate, Miz Poppy's on her way. Said she'd rather walk through the fires of hell than ride so much as ten feet in my truck." He said this as if he had been roundly complimented and, indeed, he looked incredibly pleased with himself.
She smacked him affectionately before going into the house. By the time Poppy had let herself in and was making ecstatic kissy-faces with Emma on the front room rug, she had changed into clean jeans, washed up and jammed a ballcap onto her head to keep her hair out of the way. Poppy called out as Kate headed out the door that Kate had better be packing; Kate waved the revolver in her hand and told her the shotgun was already in Scamp's truck. Kate hopped down the front steps and walked around the barn, passing Chavez on her way to tell the boys to mind Poppy. He didn't look too happy.
Scamp held the door open for her and she saw that her shotgun had been given the place of honour on the hooks welded just above the back window. The spare ammo had been left on the seat between them in easy reach. Scamp's old Colt was next to him and a carbine rested against his CB. He gunned the engine and roared it back down the drive and onto the paved road, humming an old Jerry Reed song.
"So Kate," he began, fiddling with the CB channels until he found two voices talking on eleven, "you gonna explain that whole brother thing to me, or are you gonna make old Scamp guess? 'Cuz I know and you know and you know I know that you've got three sisters and nothing else."
She puffed her cheeks out and exhaled. There was nothing for it, she was going to have to tell him. Besides, the old hellraiser was the closest thing she had to family in these parts and trying to bluff him out didn't feel right. So she told him everything, starting with the duty van appearing in her drive, the crate she was supposed to receive and her suspicions as to why the military had sent him to her place. Scamp let her talk and when she was finished, lit a fresh cigarette and took a thoughtful drag.
"I was in the Corps," he said suddenly. His statement had the desired effect; she was flabberghasted. He hadn't told her this before, and no one else had ever mentioned it. "Career. I keep that bit of information kind of quiet." His eyes twinkled at her. "Might ruin my reputation, you know. Anyhow. You've got a good head on your shoulders, girl, and I think you're on the right track but the whole thing smells fishy. Smells real, real fishy."
"How so?"
"You need to keep your ears on, girl. It's been all over the CB; the military's in Roanoke and Richmond." He gave her a significant look. "Some folks can't get a hold of people in the big towns no more, like they aren't there. Like folks have been moved somewheres."
"The news said yesterday that they would be evacuating the big cities in case of another attack," she said.
"You ever known someone who wouldn't get a hold of their folks if they were evacuated in an emergency? You start moving people like cattle, then you start treating people like cattle." Scamp took a long, slow pull on his cigarette. "Larry's put us in charge of county communications. We're a team, Kate, and the way I see it, our job is intelligence."
It wasn't hard to make the leap. "You want me to find out what he knows."
"Girl, I was pretty hot over our cities but I wasn't worried none. Not for myself, least ways. This Chavez fellow, all the way out here... that bothers me. Makes me think that maybe the bombs were just the tip of the iceberg, like you said, and I get the feeling Larry thinks the same. Something out there smells, and it feels like the kind of smell that has a deadline to it. I think maybe if you and I don't figure out right quick what that might be, we'll all regret it."
It was difficult to find the entrance to Obie's drive, obscured as it was by overgrown shrubs and tall cottonwoods. Only folks who knew Obie well and had been to his house often were able to get it right every time. That suited Obie right down to the ground. Obediah Wilcox - Obie to everyone who counted - wasn't exactly the social type. He was fond of telling and re-telling stories of chasing census takers and peddlers off the place with a shotgun loaded with rock salt, always finishing with that high-pitched laugh of his. Fact is, Obie Wilcox was more than a little strange. This never bothered him and his friends preferred to call him "eccentric".
The Bronco turned down Obie's drive and emerged out of the trees to a welcoming shot across the grill. Kate snatched for her gun, cursing at the ping of shot bouncing off metal. Obie's shotgun didn't appear to be loaded with rock salt today. Scamp flipped the CB to the loudspeaker setting and hollered into the mike, "Obie, you did not just shoot at my truck!"
A shotgun was peeping through a front window, barely visible. It went back into the house and a voice called out feebly, "Sorry, Scamp. I'll pay for the damage."
"**** right you will. Boy, put it away before I decide to knock you upside your head with your own gun." Scamp crossly hung the mike up, parked his truck and walked around to the front to see how bad it was. There was a single scratch marring the smooth surface of the grill.
Obie met them at the door, his normally pink face even pinker with embarrassment. He was dressed in full combat gear, his skinny frame weighed down under a flak jacket and utility pants bulging with tools and ammunitions. The Kevlar helmet was a bit much though, even for Obie. He escorted them into his operations room - other folks called it their living room - and offered them coffee. Kate took him up on the offer gladly; to a woman raising three children in the country by herself, there was no such thing as too much coffee. They perched on crates and boxes around a table strewn with a wide assortment of radios and maps. Kate got right down to business as soon as Obie had passed around chipped mugs of steaming instant brew.
"What's the news over the shortwave, Obie?"
His chest puffed out. "I always told you guys, didn't I. I always said something was gonna go down and y'all would have to come over here because I was prepared. No one would listen, they all thought I was a nut-"
"Kid, shut up and answer the lady's question." Scamp was clearly just a little miffed about his truck.
Obie was a bit crestfallen but resumed his cheerfulness as he talked. "New York City and Atlanta have been written off as a total loss. FEMA has set up a tent city fifty miles out from each city and won't come any closer. Survivors are being left to find their way there or not, whichever, and the military won't have anything to do with the matter."
Scamp was shocked. "No help at all? What about medical support, air drops, the National Guard?"
"Not a thing. I tracked down a guy I know in upstate New York, he's got some contacts closer in that have family in the city or something. Word was that the Red Cross wasn't sending anyone either. I should be hearing back from him tonight, maybe he'll have more information then. The military, though..." Both Kate and Scamp leaned forward to hear this. "No one can make sense of what they're up to. They're clearing out Richmond like a house on fire, moving everyone to a camp outside of Norfolk. Roanoke, that one was interesting."
"What did they do in Roanoke?" Scamp asked.
"Shut off the power." Obie savoured the looks on their faces. "Just waltzed in and shut down the city's power. Then they left. A gal in Kentucky told me that's likely why we lost power out here, people had to re-route around the downed section of the grid. Something like that, it made more sense the way she was describing it."
They thought about that some but neither could come up with a reason for it. Scamp spoke up. "What's going on globally?"
"Word on the airwaves is that there's a counterstrike being coordinated. The UN is freaking out, of course, saying the US is going to drag everyone into a third World War unnecessarily. That pissed the Brits off just a little. No one has any idea what sort of action we're planning though, or against who. The even money seems to be on North Korea but that might be just talk. And this is, at the moment, complete rumour without any sort of substantiation but a few minutes before you showed up everyone was saying that Australia had been hit."
Scamp gave a low whistle, a sentiment to which Kate had to agree. "You'll never believe this one though," Obie continued with an air of a magician preparing for the grand finale. He leaned in and said in a conspiratorial low tone, "The president's dead."
"Fact or rumour?" Kate asked immediately.
"Fact," came back the prompt answer. "The vice president sent out a message this morning promising a press conference tonight at seven."
"How?" Scamp asked.
"Get this," Obie said. "He was shot."
The three of them sat back again to take it all in. A possible counterstrike, Australia being nuked, the president dead. After a moment they pulled themselves together and the pair began to quiz Obie for any other nuggets of information. There had been some minor looting but all that seemed to be dying down fairly quickly, excepting Los Angeles, which had dissolved almost immediately into riots. There were a few isolated areas that had briefly gone without power; Kate suggested Obie find out whether the military had shut down those areas as it had Roanoke and he promised to get on that. Some large cities were being evacuated but there was no discernable pattern. The Miami and Tampa evacuations were being reported as neat and orderly while Orlando was ignored entirely and Jacksonville was being emptied as if the devil himself were snapping at residents' heels. The rest of the nation could be described similarly; some cities were calmly and slowly having their populations removed to scattered tent cities, some weren't warranting a second look and the military was driving the population of other cities before them at gunpoint. There was a heavy rumour that Chicago had been sealed off by the National Guard. All shipping had ceased and travel on the interstates was forbidden, though reports were coming in from all over the nation of military convoys tearing down the highways in a hurry.
Scamp felt around in his pockets for his cigarettes. "This is what you're going to do, Obie." Obie sat up straighter. "You're going to glue your ear to that radio and find out what the military and FEMA are up to. Kate and I want a list of the cities that are being evacuated, how fast they're being evacuated and which ones are being ignored. You hear anything local, or anything about power outages, you write it down for us. Stay the hell off your base station - listen if you need to but no talking - and keep a low profile. If you ask questions about the military, someone might eventually think you're interesting enough to come talk to in person."
Kate nodded agreement. Stationary CB units weren't considered secure, because every time you keyed your mike it would send a signal. Others on a CB could make educated guesses on how close you were based on the strength of your CB signal. Almost like a game of Hot/Cold - simply get in your truck and drive, if the signal faded then you were driving away, but if the signal grew stronger then you were getting closer.
They had what they came for and waved to Obie on their way out the door. Scamp took care of the driving, Kate manned the CB to raise the people they decided they needed. HickoryBill, out near the county line, he had a generator but she couldn't find him on any channel. Jane Slim was a high school girl in town, her folks had a generator and she promised to record the vice president's address at seven in case the power went out again. Close enough to Highway 58 to catch any passing CB traffic was Mumbler; he wasn't technically within the county borders, but Kate and Scamp agreed that this was no reason to not utilise any possible help.
Scamp dropped her off at her place, first extracting her promise to be listening in after the kids went to bed. She shucked her boots off at the door and took a moment to warm up near the woodstove - the house's heat was on but she'd always made a habit of keeping the thermostat set low and it was cold out. The sound of voices led her into the kitchen, where the boys, Emma and Chavez were seated at the kitchen table, watching Poppy bustle about. Poppy poured her a hot cuppa and, after excusing the boys to go to their rooms to read a book, Kate laid out for them what she and Scamp had heard at Obie's house. Her old neighbor was full of things to say but Chavez merely sat, frowning slightly. Kate had to wonder, if her theories about him were correct, whether he knew all of this already or was trying to figure out how to pass this information on to his command, and what she needed to do about either possibility.
It was late, late at night and he was blessing the concept of discipline. Discipline sent children to bed early, discipline led bull-headed workaholic women who probably couldn't unbend in hurricane-force winds to bed shortly after ten - quicker to bed, quicker to rise, work work workworkwork... It was amusing thoughts of whether she had ever, in fact, gotten tequila-drunk or, you know, displayed a sense of fun or whether she'd simply been born a boring country cowpoke who never sat down, that enabled him to stay awake on his couch in the warm fire-lit front room. And discipline. Discipline kept him awake too. He had an appointment to keep and heaven help them all if he missed it.
The covers slid aside and he crept, noiseless on stocking-clad feet, to the front door. He eased the latch up, gently lifting his borrowed jacket and boots out the door and setting them on the porch. They would be put on outside; cold work, but quieter that way. He didn't breathe easily until he stood on the far side of the barn, now dressed in boots and jacket. Never in eleven years of military service had he had a gun waved at him as many times as he had in the last thirty-six hours. Now that he thought about it, maybe that was her idea of fun. What an unpleasant thought.
The Durango wasn't locked, naturally. He fired up the CB, dialed to channel one and waited, his watch glowing faintly green in the darkness. At the pre-arranged time, he keyed the mike twice and waited. And waited. And waited.
Holy criminoly. They hadn't mentioned what to do if... No, wait. There. The meter's needle pegged out twice. Whoever his contact was had some power to their rig. He allowed the set period of time to elapse, during which they randomly deadkeyed their microphones in what would have been a vastly obnoxious manner had a CBer been monitoring the channel. When no one responded to tell them off, he settled down to the real work. Dots and dashes, dots and dashes, all conveyed by keying the mike. Simple. Ingenious. He highly doubted the military had come up with this idea, it made far too much sense.
He was such a cynic at two in the morning, but then, wasn't everyone?
His turn was done, time to receive any incoming messages. He watched the meter without blinking, translating the waving needle into dots and dashes and then into letters in his head. Later he would slip back into the house as silently as he had left, lie on his couch pretending to sleep in the warm, fire-lit room, and wonder if he wouldn't have been better off as a plumber.
Kate woke up to a blissfully warm house, Emma babbling nonsense in her crib and that Leghorn rooster she'd been meaning to kill for weeks making unholy shrieks outside her window. Ah, such blessed normalcy, a far cry from her nightmares haunted with bombs and guns and unforgiving cold. She stretched, shrugged the covers off, and as her feet hit the floor her stomach swooped unpleasantly into full wakefulness. Scamp was coming over for breakfast and bringing Jane Slim with him to discuss the county's situation. It hadn't been a nightmare at all.
But Emma had spotted her Momma and was shaking the crib rails with the sort of rage only a tyke with full pants and an empty tummy can summon. Doom and swooping stomachs would have to wait.
Soon a temporarily clean baby was in her high chair, squishing applesauce between her pudgy fingers and maybe even eating some of it, and Kate was pouring hotcake batter onto a hot iron griddle. Sam wanted to show Chavez how to milk a cow and Jake was itching to walk the rest of the fenceline all by his lonesome, like a man, so Chavez had offered her a deal: he would take the morning stock chores with the boys if she would open a jar of blueberry syrup. His mother used to make it years ago and he hadn't tasted any since he was a kid.
Gee. Twenty-seven degrees outside with an eight mile an hour wind, milking and mucking on an empty stomach, versus her blueberry syrup. That was a tough call.
She set the new jar of syrup on the dining room table and added a bonus jar of strawberry preserves. Back in the kitchen, she flipped her hotcakes and tossed sausage links into a skillet. Her last couple of pounds, that sausage, but a meeting of the intelligence committee ought to be worth it. The fat gilt should be ready for butchering in a few weeks anyhow.
Scamp roared into the drive at the dot of eight. Emma was filthy again but the boys and Chavez were washing up and Kate had brushed her hair and dressed. She applied a wet rag to the worst of the applesauce smears on Emma and moved her high chair into the dining room in time to say hello to her company.
Breakfast under these circumstances ordinarily would have been a rambunctious affair; Jane Slim had been out to their house for meals often and Scamp had exercised his standing invitation so frequently that he never bothered knocking on the door anymore. Scamp being Scamp and Jane Slim - real name Jessica - being a pretty teenaged girl for whom Jake recently decided he held a fancy, the noise could and did get to the level of a dull roar when both of them were around. This particular morning was different.
"How are your folks, Jessica?" Kate filled a plate with hotcakes, sausages and two poached new eggs and indicated the boys pass it down.
"Worried," came the laconic reply. This was just how the girl was and Kate didn't press. Jessica never said much but she listened with the force of a vast, patient intelligence beyond what a seventeen year old girl ought to have. When she did start talking, they had all learned to take heed.
Scamp took his plate from Sam with eager eyes. "Bachelor's rations seem kind of thin after your cooking. Nothing on a cold morning like hot food prepared by the hand of a Christian woman, eh, Reed?"
"Absolutely," Chavez said as he accepted a full plate from Jessica, "but every time my mother fed me like this first thing in the morning, she ran it all off me the rest of the day."
"Good for her, you was raised right, then. So," Scamp said, enthusiastically slapping butter and preserves onto a piece of toast, "what did y'all think of the vice president's speech last night?"
Jessica put a forkful of hotcakes into her mouth and rolled her eyes. Kate agreed. "For a fellow who didn't really say anything, he sure talked for a while, didn't he."
It was true. The vice president had covered the (assassination?) death of the president in under twenty seconds. He was shot, we're all very sad, please pray for his family in their hour of need, I will be assuming the presidency according to the procedures laid out by our Founding Fathers. The rest of the forty-minute speech could have been easily summed up with, "Please don't riot or leave your homes, lest our wonderfully patriotic military boys have to shoot you." The dual themes of the citizenry staying in their homes and how fantastic the United States' armed forces are were propounded on at stupifying length. They even showcased several individual servicemembers. The audience was introduced to Gene, a stuttering, pink-faced boy from Arkansas who had become a gas systems mechanic because his father, a high school English teacher, hadn't been able to afford to send him to college. Scamp and Chavez had a good chuckle over Gene, who - between the cameras and the presence of the vice president - had looked ready to wet himself or burst into tears. The message seemed to be, please stay in your homes for Gene!
"PR gimmick," Jessica offered. The rest agreed, but couldn't decide what the big deal was with the need for everyone to remain at home. It was tabled for future discussion and they moved on.
"Obie might be on to something," Scamp said, fishing a list out of his pocket. "There's a fair chance that you were right about Roanoke not being the only city where the power was shut off. So far he's got confirmation that they pulled the same trick in Savannah, San Antonio and Boise, Idaho. Maybe Orlando too, but that's still rumour. No reason why though."
That was the extent of their new information so after floundering around for the remainder of the meal with progressively wilder and more unlikely theories, they gave up and promised to meet again in a couple of days - sooner if something important came up. On their way out the door, Scamp pulled her aside.
"I run out to HickoryBill's to see why he wasn't on the radio," he said in a low voice. "No one home. He left a note on the table, said his wife and kids had been running down to see her folks in Florida and he was going to fetch them back."
"Oh, hell."
"Yeah, pretty much. The note said that if he wasn't back in two weeks, anyone was free to have his things as he wouldn't be making it home. I let the sheriff know."
After her inside chores were done and the dishes washed, Kate spent the rest of her morning cleaning out her sewing room, as promised, for Chavez. It took a bit longer than it ought to have; she kept running across things she wanted to work on. She kept the scanner in the room with her but the only activity was Larry and his deputy chatting about the canvassing projects. It seemed Dan and Kurt were running into the resistance she'd warned them about, though the sheriff was faring better and thought they had a good amount of firepower spread around. She took a break to feed everyone lunch then went back to make up some sort of bed in the room. An air mattress was all she had so it would have to work. Blankets she had aplenty; pillows, not so much. She'd have to see about better when she had a chance. It struck her as curious then, how everyday life was going on much as normal excepting only that she couldn't make a run to any big towns to buy anything.
A sudden racket from out front caught her attention and she went to see what the ruckus was. A moving van had parked in her drive and the boys were whooping with excitement as Chavez oversaw the unloading of an enormous crate. Now that she saw it, "crate" didn't seem an adequate word. The thing was huge, nearly as big as herself, contained with pallets and wrapped in industrial plastic. Chavez and the three burly men from the van were having trouble getting it down the ramp even with a flat bed dolly. She poked her head out the front door and hollered for the boys to fetch a crowbar and a knife, more to get them out of the way in case the thing should topple over. The men managed to get it on the ground safely though, and Chavez shook their hands and waved them off the property. She gave him a hand getting it open - slicing off the thick plastic and pulling the nailed-together pallets apart with a crowbar - with the boys dancing and whooping like wild Indians behind them. She had to admit, it did seem a bit like Christmas to get such a large package full of unknown things. She hushed them anyhow and started handing them packages and boxes to take inside. Chavez didn't look comfortable with having it all out in the open. When the last box had been dumped on the living room floor, he carefully cleaned up all the wrappings and took them out to the burn barrel. From the smoke that began drifting from the back of the house, she figured that he hadn't even waited to light the wrappings on fire - usually they only burned when there was a real need, and her to-be-burned trash pile wasn't large enough yet.
Kate waited for him to come inside, shooing Sam and Jake away from the boxes. The stuff was hers, but it seemed the polite thing to do and he might know more about what was in the boxes than she did. He took long enough that she finally realised he wasn't leaving the burning trash until it had been completely destroyed. He washed his hands when he came in, still reeking of smoke, and they quickly sorted the boxes and packages into piles under his direction. He had been right, the biggest pile was devoted to guns and ammo; two new .9mm Berettas, another M-16, bricks and boxes of ammo in all sorts of calibers - there must have been thousands of rounds - even some gun cleaning kits. Sam and Jake's eyes grew wide and Chavez, seeing this, beat her to the punch. He took the twins by the hand and explained to them, calmly and firmly, that they must never, ever touch his guns, that they were dangerous and useful weapons meant to cause death or serious injury - perhaps, if they were responsible and mature and had their mother's permission, he might let them watch him target practice the next day. The boys turned big, eager eyes on her and Kate gave her permission.
"But," Kate added sternly, "if I ever catch you messing with these guns, you'll never come near them again and you'll get a paddling your grandchildren will feel. Am I clear?"
"Yes, ma'am," they chorused and immediately feel silent, demonstrating as hard as they could what good boys deserving of firing a gun they were.
Kate and Chavez moved the guns and ammo into her bedroom closet, but there were still piles of stuff spread around her front room. She was at a loss as to where she would put it all - most of it was so random, not to mention items that she wouldn't usually have around. A pair of large battery-powered lanterns, plus batteries for them; cases of MREs; a stash of whiskey and vodka; something Chavez identified as a dosimeter; four-pound boxes of salt; caffeine pills and vitamins; cartons of cigarettes; and three large rubber tubs of medical supplies. Kate supposed this is what Chavez had meant by "mostly tradeable goods". Seemed like a bunch of junk taking up space in her house to her, except the medicines. The lanterns she kept out, the rest of it they hauled down into the cellar.
Once the front room was set right again, Kate told the boys to get their books and heard their lessons while she cleaned the new guns with Chavez' help. Afterward she sent the boys to their room to do some reading. Chavez was plinking away at the computer, having asked to check if his mother or sisters had emailed him, and she sat at the table, pen and paper in hand. Sausage wasn't the only meat they had run out of, she still had a couple of fat roasts, a few chops and some ground chuck but it was high time she sit down to plan a butchering. Normally she would have made do on spent layers not worth feeding over the winter, annoying extra roosters and some storebought meat until her stock were plumper. With no meat to be had in the store and an extra mouth to feed, something was of necessity being butchered early. Kate needed to figure on paper how long they could hold out - every extra day's delay put a little more lard and bacon on that gilt, and she might be expected to share the pork for Dan's Market.
"Hey, Chavez?"
"Yes, ma'am?"
"Do you hunt?"
"I used to. Dad goes every year with my uncles, and PawPaw until he got too old. Haven't shot a gun since I was fifteen unless it was on the gun range, though."
"It might be a good idea if you gave it a try. You've seen the freezer, we're low on meat. I've been figuring; I've got a pig nearly ready for slaughter; the bacon and hams will have to cure, so some of that won't be ready for eating for a while and I assume I might have to contribute as much as half the meat to Dan's Market so folks in town can eat. I can also kill some chickens, that way we should be able to have meat several times a week."
Chavez turned to face her, tapping his hands on his knees thoughtfully. "What about your steers?"
"It would be a waste to slaughter them before spring. I won't butcher the sow, the milk cow nor the heifer. There's the other pig too, if we waited until mid-winter we'd get an awful lot of fat on him."
He nodded. "Assuming a worst case scenario - colder than normal winter, no grocery trucks, townfolk have to eat - there's no way anyone in the county will have meat by February. Are there any big cattle or dairy people around here?" She shook her head. "Guess that fixes it. If I can borrow your CB, I'll go ask Scamp who might want to come with me, maybe there's a local who can show me the good spots. Can I take the shotgun and my .22?"
"Sure. Let me know when you're going and I'll pack you a lunch. I think the boys and I will go fishing. We haven't done that since last spring."
She flopped into her armchair, pleased with how everything was progressing. Chavez was being cooperative and making himself useful, the boys were handling things well, everyone had their health... Again she was struck with how normal the situation was. She had always thought a nuclear war would be chaotic and dangerous.
Kate pulled her yarn basket towards her and rummaged around for the unfinished afghan and her crochet hook. Smoothing the afghan out and finding her spot, she turned the television on and settled in for a relaxing afternoon. The boys were reading, Emma was napping, Chavez was outside on the CB and she had the front room all to herself. Lovely.
Chavez came inside to find her crouched on the rug in front of the television, her eyes staring blankly at the flickering images. "Kate!" He hurried to her side and knelt next to her. "What's wrong? Are you hurt? Are you sick?"
She faced him, her dead eyes unnerving. A short, mirthless chuckle escaped her throat. "I'm such an idiot. How did I not see this coming?"
She pointed at the television and they watched.
... the U.N. has officially declared this to be a world war and is calling for severe sanctions for what they have labeled 'unsubstantiated, unprovoked attacks" by the United States, Germany and the UK. While the world thought the United States was allowing a cooling off period for fact-finding after the attack on Atlanta and New York City, officials were in fact coordinating a counter-offensive with Britain and Germany. Early this morning, all three countries launched a carefully timed attack against several nations highly suspected of being behind the bombing of US soil. We repeat our earlier statement for those just joining us: only one nuclear warhead actually landed. Germany has confirmed their bombing of North Korea; later we'll go to a taped statement from the German Chancellor on the allies decision to minimise environmental damage by largely restricting the attacks to EMP detonations over the targets themselves. Again, for those viewers just joining us, America has led a counter-offensive against Russia, China, Iran and North Korea which White House officials are describing as "seriously debilitating". The U.N. Secretary-General is saying..."
"World War Three," Chavez murmured.
"Too right," Kate said. "Batten down the hatches."
Sorry for not posting last night. I am down sick, and didn't feel like doing the whole internet thing.
Chapter 7
Kate blew on her hands to thaw them out enough to grab her empty coffee pot and went back inside to fill it. No one was ever warm enough at three in the morning, particularly so when one was standing out in one's front lawn, filling coffee cups. Eight days after the attack, six days after their counter-attack and Kate was playing hostess to roughly thirty men, women and teens in hunting gear. Meat was getting scarce in town and Chavez' notion of a hunting trip had gone down like a house on fire. Soon enough it expanded into a general call for hunters; since it had been Chavez' idea, her place was named base of operations. Kate had gone to Poppy's to ask if he could borrow some of Bill's old gear. Bill never threw anything away. Both women knew that Kate still had all of Nick's things stored in the attic but, with an understanding look, Poppy had dug out a few well-used items. Sometimes it took a little while to learn to let go; in the meantime, Chavez could wear Bill's stuff.
She went back outside and handed Chavez a mug of fresh coffee and he thanked her gratefully, his face pale against his dark hair in the light cast by one of the hunter's headlights. Kate wasn't accompanying the hunting party but she turned to listen as Sheriff Rider stood on someone's tailgate to address them.
"Remember, the limit is one doe, two deer maximum. First-timers, stick with your group leader. They know where to go, what to do. Keep in mind your gun safety rules, I don't want to have to patch none of you up. Good hunting, everyone, and bag your limit if you can!"
Bag your limit, indeed. Most folks were still well-situated for food but there was something about seeing Dan's Market stand empty that shattered a body's composure. Folks began talking, sorting through their cupboards, eagerly anticipating the recently-enacted county meetings at the Grange to hear about Kurt and Dan's canvassing efforts. The conclusion reached was that the town would be completely out of food within a few weeks, the county residents were mostly not much better. With information like that knocking around in your brain, it was a little easier to see how reports of scattered food riots were starting up in distant places like D.C. and Lexington. As Sheriff Rider reminded them, though, this county was made of sterner stuff. Until the delivery trucks were rolling again, they were going to show this country what sort of people founded the United States and still populated it.
Poppy told her later that speeches like that made her feel kind of guilty for voting for the other guy.
Her old neighbor and Sara Ellen joined her on the front porch with their own empty coffee pitchers and watched as the mass of people splintered off into little groups. So many inexperienced hunters had dug out their Daddy's old shotguns to come along and help that Larry had deemed it the course of wisdom to assign a local pro his or her own little group to shepherd through the intricacies of their first hunt. The ladies listened as snatches of lessons passed by them, each wondering in the privacy of her own thoughts just how safe everyone would stay and what sort of luck they might have. There was a bit of a kerfluffle as everyone was preparing to load up; a pair of teenaged boys horsing around with their guns. Adolescent bravado, adolescent stupidity, whichever - Larry wasn't having any of it. Their guns were confiscated and the boys sent packing with much whining and pleas and final parting shots of how "stupid" everyone in the world was.
"Scott, you keep an eye on those two from now on, you hear?" Kate heard Larry murmur to his deputy. Harsh, maybe, but no one had time any more to pander to kids who refused to take things seriously.
Kate grabbed a small pack off the porch and took it over to Chavez. He was standing with his group, one of the largest at six people, and trying his level best not to look like a city kid.
"There's a couple of handwarmers in there, fresh thermos of coffee with a little sugar, no cream, fried eggs sandwiches, cold beans, a wet washcloth. Try not to eat until you've bagged your limit, I don't know if Tom told you that. We agreed, right, you kill it, you clean it, I butcher it."
He nodded. "Thanks for the lunch. Yep, the deal still stands. Hopefully I'll do so well you'll be out in the barn for two days with the butchering, and I won't have to fight anyone for the remote." He grinned. "Wish me luck?"
She grinned back. "Good luck. Don't shoot yourself."
The ladies stood on the front porch, waving them off untl the last set of headlights disappeared around a bend in the road. The night closed in, quiet and still, and they stood there until Sara Ellen shook them out of their reverie.
"Brrr, inside, girls. It's going to be a cold day for those folks. Thank the good Lord there's no wind."
"Well," Sara Ellen said once they were thawing out over hot, sweet coffee inside, "now that I've got the pair of you to myself, let's talk. Larry was right to organise a hunting party and your brother was a smart man to think of it, Kate, but this county needs more than meat. We need real food, supplies and lots of them or we won't be standing by the time the government gets this mess sorted out."
"I'm listening," Poppy said. Kate was already fetching a pen and paper from her computer desk.
"There's thirty-two babies in this county, only one of whom is breastfed. Three of them are still on the young side and I've talked their mothers into trying to get their milk going again, but we need formula and that's a plain fact. Kate, you're fortunate that Emma's as old as she is and you have your own milk cow."
"Bessie will be drying off at the end of winter but she's giving plenty now and she'll be back up to full buckets by spring. I can donate milk easy," Kate promptly volunteered.
"That's wonderful of you, dear, and we'll be taking you up on that for the bigger tots like Emma. Little ones need milk, regular and lots of it. It's the babies that worry me. None of them are going hungry yet but blamed if I'll allow a baby to starve on my watch. It's more than that though, we need everything. Soap and potatoes and bread... food... everything. We could drain this entire county dry and we'd still all starve by spring without a delivery truck to Dan's. Do you gals have any ideas?"
Poppy sighed. "There's nothing for it, we're going to have to arrange a trip to the city."
"That's going to be awful dangerous," Kate said quietly. It was, too. Kate and Scamp had feelers out and had gathered enough information to have a fairly good bead on the state situation. It wasn't pretty: no power in Roanoke, the silence emanating from the tent cities outside of Norfolk, shootings and muggings and crime. Not to mentioned the restriction on travel; who knew what would happen if they got caught.
"Fiddle-dee-dee!" Poppy slapped her hand down on the table. "If a thing has to be done then there's no sense crying over it. We'll need a prioritised list of supplies for the county, plenty of trucks and volunteers to bring it all home and someone to make the rounds asking folks to pitch in the cash to pay for it. What say I put on a fresh pot, whip us up some breakfast and we get started?"
Kate was napping on the couch late that afternoon, making up for her early hours, when the sound of a truck in the drive startled her to consciousness. Peeking through the curtains, she spotted Scamp's truck and a set of antlers hanging off the back. Chavez and Scamp were wrestling a bloody antlered bundle towards the barn. She groaned, but in a off-handed pleased way, and went to the kitchen for her skinning knife and bone saw.
Zipping her coat against the chill, she took her knives and an old clean sheet out the the barn with her. Chavez was positively strutting, grinning smugly from ear to ear as he waved proudly toward a tender young buck hanging from a beam.
"I bagged my limit and got a pair of geese and a turkey."
"He did good," Scamp agreed. "The only one who did better was me."
"Yeah, Scamp beat me by a goose. My other buck was older, that's the one I sent on to town. Is that all right with you?"
Kate eyed the hanging carcass with a touch of glee. She could let her stock reach weight now and they would still have meat. "Are you kidding? You're awesome, do whatever you want with the other one. In a couple of weeks they'll probably send out another party anyway, you can get a second deer for the house then."
Chavez was bouncing on ther balls of his feet like a kid. "Man, I hadn't done that in years. Dad would flip if he could see my haul. Hey, mind if I go email Mom after we're done?"
Scamp was doing his butchering in her barn too and she set to work as the men went back for the rest of their kills. A short bit of wood had been propped in the body cavity to hold it open. This she removed and with several buckets of cold water fresh from the hand pump, she rinsed the carcass well inside and out. The exercise was beginning to warm her up, and experience told her she would get warmer, so she shucked off her coat, rolled up her sleeves and went to work on the skin. She loosened it carefully, fisting around on the inside and occasionally employing a knife to cut it away. Finally she used a bone saw to take off the legs. Chavez gave her a hand with the head. She washed the carcass once more, patted it as dry as she could and wrapped it securely in the old sheet to tenderise.
Puffing a bit, she blew a stray wisp of hair out of her eyes. "The next one's all yours, Chavez. You get the clean-up, I need to get started on the birds."
Two geese and half a turkey later, bits of down and small feathers clinging to her, she decided that she really hated plucking. The feathers were being collected on another old sheet, to sort through and save in a spare pillowcase. Maybe if the hunting was good enough this winter, Chavez could get his spare pillows and there would be a feather bed. Next time she would do the hunting and let him pluck the birds, though. The nude, clean birds were wrapped and she put them in the cargo space of the Durango, where hopefully they would stay cold enough overnight without freezing and she could start cooking in the morning. Chickens she let set in her fridge but there was no way three large fowl would fit. The men were still cleaning up in the barn, and Scamp cut a deal with her. If she would take care of his birds - pluck, cook and can them up along with hers - she could have the feathers and a third of the canned meat and broth. With a soft groan, she went back to plucking. At least they had promised to do the evening chores for her.
Around the supper table, over big bowls of chili and cornbread, the three adults discussed the ladies' plan for a foray into the big city. Weaponry was examined, as well as the number of trucks required for such a big trip, estimated cost, possible safe routes and who to send. Kate assumed she would be going along and was a bit taken aback to hear Chavez shooting the idea down vehemently, with Scamp backing him up to the hilt.
"I'm not asking folks to take on something I wouldn't do myself," she argued hotly.
"No one thinks you are," Scamp shot back.
"We've got full grown men, without families, who don't do as much for the county as you do," Chavez pointed out. "Just this once, let them take care of it. The world won't stop because you delegated, Mrs. Jameson."
"Chavez, I told you to call me Kate."
"And I told you to call me Eric."
Scamp, calmly cutting himself another square of cornbread, injected some common sense into the discussion by pointing out that the sheriff would probably take this trip on as his personal baby, and Larry would never allow people with families to go along on something so potentially dangerous. Kate reluctantly conceded the point, and the discussion turned back to which back route into Richmond was safest if Roanoke turned out to be unmanageable.
The air in the house had a faintly celebratory air after supper. Scamp provided his copy of Smokey and the Bandit ("Greatest movie ever made, that Jerry Reed was something else") and convinced her to let the boys stay up to watch it. Once the boys had been sent off to bed, nodding in their seats during the ends credits, Eric dug out a bottle and the three of them toasted the day's hunting. Tired, with a belly full of beans, cornbread and a shot of Jack Daniels, content again in her ability to feed the kids, Kate was feeling decidedly mellow as she waved Scamp off for the night and headed for a shower to wash away the residual feel of feathers and gore. Stepping out of the bathroom, long hair still damp and dressed in a cozy flannel nightgown, she jumped when she nearly ran into Chavez (Eric, call him Eric) in the hall.
"Sorry, I was just looking at your pictures." He indicated the standard family photos and snapshots lining the walls of the hallway. The boys' at a T-ball game, Emma coming home from the hospital, her and her husband on their wedding day, all of them lined up on the pier grinning from ear to ear the last time her husband had come back from a deployment, his boot camp picture.
"My husband," she said, absently straightening one of the frames. Eric only then noticed that she still wore her wedding rings. Kate turned on her heel and went to her room, clearly not up for a chat.
"Nick, you always were kind of a jackass," Eric murmured to the smiling face of Nick Jameson. He went into the front room to stoke the fire, seeing as Kate had forgotten, and headed to bed himself.
And here's another to make up for not posting last night.
Chapter 8
Kate had her big stockpots lugged up from the cellar before the house woke the next morning. She might have preferred to roast Chavez's kills but the birds were too many and too large, plus there were Scamp's to process as well. Instead she cut them into pieces for soup, the turkey in one pot and the geese in another, along with carrots and onions and a handful of herbs. She saved one of the breasts from the geese; sometimes the boys liked to play Indians with her rotisserie and a campfire.
The stock were tended and her stockpots simmering nicely by the time the house began to stir. Sara Ellen called just as soon as neighborly decency would allow. Turned out the sheriff had been so fired up by the need for a trip to the city that he'd left with a hand-selected posse before the sun rose that morning. A dozen trucks, twenty well-armed men and women, plenty of cash and the lists Poppy, Kate and Sara Ellen had supplied. They expected to be back by nightfall. Kate promised to keep them in her thoughts.
It was a plain sort of day. Kate drilled the boys on math and spelling and then Eric took them out to the pasture to watch him practice with his .22 and the new Berettas. She cleaned the fridge while Emma played on the kitchen floor, busily dumping all her pots and pans from the cupboards onto the floor. Unable to find anything else that needed doing right then, she sat Emma on the front room rug with some of the boys' old blocks and worked on her afghan while the aroma of turkey and simmering geese perfumed the house. At lunchtime she took her soup off the stove to cool, strained the broth, picked the meat off the bones and set it aside to process in her pressure canner. The stockpots were washed and refilled with more pieces of geese and vegetables and set back on the stove. In this manner she worked - afghan, soup, pressure can, afghan again - until by suppertime she was emptying the last load from the canner. Rows of cooling pint and quart jars lined one counter and two birds were left to finish off the next day. Supper was a quick affair: buttered noodles tossed with pesto and shredded turkey, canned peas, canned peaches and a loaf of bread, punctuated by the pings from the jars in the kitchen and the occasional snap of a log in the woodstove.
Kate was learning to take her peace in whatever short snatches life would give her. Phones buzzed that night around the county. The sheriff's group hadn't made it back.
Eric stayed inside with the children the next day so Kate could man the CB. She even went out to Obie's and harassed him into looking via his ham in the Roanoke area for a large group of travelers. By nightfall he chimed in that he'd had no luck.
"That doesn't mean anything, though. You know?" he said nervously. Yeah, she knew, but that didn't make telling Sara Ellen any easier.
By the third day folks had started collecting in groups at their neighbor's homes, little wakes in miniature. They brought food and cold comfort to distraught girlfriends and wives, they checked the windows often - just in case a truck was pulling in at that moment - and they waited. Poppy and Bill were sharing the hospitality of Kate's front room while Kate herself was still standing vigil over her CB. Night was falling on that third day and her fingers were growing numb as the temperature dropped, but she stayed her post.
"This is MightyMouse. Scamp, Roscoe, LicketyPicket, you got a copy?"
"MightyMouse here, can I get a break? I need a twenty on Scamp, Roscoe or LicketyPicket, over."
"MightyMouse looking for a twenty on Scamp, Roscoe and LicketyPicket. Anyone. We got a home-twenty desperate for information, over."
"This is MightyMouse. Scamp, Roscoe, LicketyPicket, you got a copy?"
A voice sounded faintly, overlaid by static. "...Licket..."
Kate lunged at her CB. "LicketyPicket, you got a copy? Over."
"...by God... Rosc..."
Crap. She wasn't getting enough signal to hear anything. "Mumbler, you got a copy on that signal? Over." He was out near the highway on a base station and far more likely to be hearing something between the static.
"MightyMouse, I got a copy on that signal and I mark it fifteen miles outside the county line. That's got to be Scamp's radio, nothing else would have reached your place."
She jumped out of the truck, shrieking and whooping and dancing and waving her arms. Poppy shot out of the front door, letting it slam behind her. "Kate! Kate, girl, what's going on?"
"They're alive!" She picked up Poppy around the middle and whirled her around. Poppy let her, stunned for a brief moment, then let out a shriek of her own as realisation came home. Kate set her down and they hugged fiercely. "Get on the horn to Sara Ellen, Poppy. Send everyone to Dan's Market, we've got a convoy coming into town."
Poppy ran up the front steps with the quickness of a girl, yelling for Bill. Kate fired up the Durango to warm it up, ducked her head inside the house's front door to tell everyone to get their jackets on, and went back to her CB. They had left the home place and nearly reached town before Scamp's signal hit her hard enough to hear properly.
"LickeyPicket, you got a copy?"
"I got your copy, MightyMouse. Kate, it is so ****ed good to hear your voice. Over." The mike kept getting passed around in Scamp's truck - clearly they were just as excited to be almost home. "Hey, Kate, it's Roscoe. How mad is my girl? Over."
Kate laughed. "Kate, Scamp says hi. You know this man has only two tapes in his truck? When he gets tired -" Another voice interrupted. "If he gets tired-"
"Yeah, yeah, if he gets tired of Jerry Reed then we listen to David Allen Coe. And he sings along. Kate, make him stop."
A crowd was already forming at Dan's Market in town, and it was growing larger with every passing minute. Kate signed off the CB and found Sara Ellen - a much changed Sara Ellen; a shaking, sobbing, dishevelled Sara Ellen. Kate patted and hugged her comfortingly and told her they had just hit the county line and would be home within twenty minutes. Sara Ellen sobbed harder and Kate mopped her face with a handkerchief. The sheriff's wife thanked her and subsided into hiccups.
"I swear, I held it together. I did. But then Poppy called and... and..." Sara Ellen dissolved into fresh bursts, wailing, "This is three days' worth of worry I couldn't show until I knew he was safe." She applied the handerchief to her eyes again and sniffled. "Kate, be a love and find me a hairbrush, please. I can't look like a wreck for Larry."
There are moments that you hold in your heart forever. The look in your love's eyes when you meet at the head of that church aisle on a fine spring day. Bottom of the ninth, down by one, runners on first and third, you hit the sweet spot and watch that ball sail away as if it will never land. Coming home to find the old place is smaller than you remembered but your father is just as large, and then he looks at you, his chest swells up and he tells you that you've done him proud. The moment the first headlights in a line of a dozen trucks rounded the corner of Main Street, with a crowd erupting into screams of joy for those they thought had been lost.
That was one of those moments.
It was a general melee when the trucks parked in Dan's parking lot. Men and women crying, everyone hugging then moving off to hug someone else, shaking hands, slapping backs. Eventually Larry called for quiet and the noise dropped a few notches, then he asked for help unloaded the vehicles. The town quickly assembled into a line and, passing boxes and packages down the line and into Dan's storeroom, they had everything stowed away and the store locked back up in record time. People began to disperse then, collecting their men and women and gradually wandering off for home. Eric found her in the crowd near Scamp and Larry.
"Kate? It's getting late, I was wondering if you mind if I take everyone home. I'll drop off Bill and Poppy, put the kids to bed and you can go on to Larry's house."
She looked up at him gratefully. "Would you mind? That would be awful good of you, I want to hear this. I can get Scamp to drop me off when we're done."
Once the mass of people had thinned down considerably, Kate's jubilation waned and she saw the sheriff's group more clearly. They looked exhausted and dirty, and some were hurt. Their trucks showed evidence of a firefight at most, rough wear at best; several spots that looked like bullet holes, scratches and dings in the paint. Strangely, all of the license plates had been removed. Kate hopped into Scamp's truck for the short ride to the sheriff's house and listened to LicketySplit - Dave Teague, one of the teachers up at the school - chatter on while she watched Scamp. He was silent and exuded a long-limbed, rangy tension.
"It's bad out there, isn't it, Scamp."
"Yeah, darlin'. It's bad."
About a dozen people arranged themselves comfortably in Larry's living room - Larry, Scamp, Dave Teague, Dan, Kurt Yaeger, the deputy, Walter Cochrane from the church, the high school principal and a couple of others whom Kate thought looked familiar but couldn't place a name to the faces. Sara Ellen bustled about getting drinks for the company and serving up warmed over chicken fricassee for her husband and the other members of the city run. Now that they were seated in a lit room, Kate noticed how exhausted they all looked. Scamp seemed to have shrunk in on himself and Larry had dark spots under his eyes like bruises.
Larry took a bite of his chicken, chewed and swallowed and shrugged that he didn't know where to start. He slowly told them about getting to Roanoke just fine, and spending most of the morning looking for someplace to buy supplies. Most places were boarded up and locked tight, others were empty and just waiting for looters. Then there were the city people. Groups wandered the streets, apparently for the fun of wandering; some of them had the thin, tired look of the sick. The principal had a cousin who owned a hardware store on the edge of town and they talked him into opening his store to do business with them but that was all the luck they had in Roanoke. They pulled outside of town and found a gas station, hidden away on a back road well off the highway, and the proprietor had been more than happy to fill their tanks and the fuel cans they'd brought with them, and that was their second find of the day. No one was ready to give up and go home just then, though, so the decision was made to try their luck and press on. They would head to Richmond and hope to find places to buy supplies on the way.
Lynchburg had been a little better but more frightening. Folks in Lynchburg were sick. Someone they stopped said the town had cholera. The group passed Lynchburg by without stopping again until they were well outside city limits. They had a stroke of luck in Dillwyn, both a grocery mart and an old Mom and Pop hardware store were open, albeit under heavy guard. The pastor had done the negotiating while Larry flashed his credentials and asked a few questions. Seemed someone in Dillwyn had scouted a wide swath of area for farms, and had snapped up everything to keep the grocery store running.
"It was strange," Scamp added. "I walk into this grocery store and there's milk, eggs, cheese, meat. Vegetables in the produce aisles. Folks shopping. I never thought I'd be so happy to see people shopping."
"They didn't get sugar and flour from those farms, though," Dave said darkly.
"Well, I wasn't asking no questions," Larry said. "If anyone asks me, I got a receipt for all that stuff and that's as far as I care right now."
They hadn't been able to buy everything they required but they'd put a fair dent in the list at least. It was getting on towards night and the good townspeople of Dillwyn showed them the borders and thanked them for their business, but no outsiders were allowed in town after sunset. Despite this, spirits were high. The group pressed onward, so long as their luck was with them.
"Richmond, though..." Larry trailed off and shook his head.
Scamp finished his thoughts. "Richmond was the first place we got shot at."
"By who?" Sara Ellen cried.
"National Guardsmen." Scamp cracked his knuckles, as though he'd like another go at them. "Didn't ask us who we were... didn't even let us get that close. They just opened fire. We got the hell out of Dodge but Kurt's boy took one in the leg. We patched him up, got way out of town and hunkered down for the night."
"Speaking of Derek," the sheriff said, finishing the last of his plate of chicken, "we need to find someone to have a look at his leg. It was a through and through, no bone, but I'll feel better if we can find a doctor to give him something. All we had was water and Tylenol, we found some antibiotics later but no painkillers stronger than horsepill Motrins."
The next morning they headed south. Figuring the folks at Dillwyn were on to something, they stopped at every farm or off the road diner or shop that looked like a possibility. Sometimes they were shot at. Twice the folks inside were dead and often they ran into sickness. The principal talked to a couple of these and reasoned that something was bad in the local water, as the illnesses sounded most like cholera or dysentery, and ordered everyone to avoid food or drink until they were parallel to or back west of Roanoke. Several places where they stopped, the people were more than happy to talk but had nothing they needed or didn't want to trade and occasionally they would get lucky and score some goods; seeds, lanterns, a little food, baby things, medicine, cleaning supplies.
Near the state line they turned to take the back roads west and ran into a patrol. "Troopers, guys in Army uniforms," Larry said. "I leaned way out the window, held up my badge and told them I was a sheriff on a supply run for my county, just looking to get home. I almost told them what county until Scamp, he yanked me down just as they started shooting. It's a miracle we got away, I'll tell you that. A miracle."
Larry shook his head. "Never thought I'd see the day when state troopers and my own military would shoot at me, just for being in the vicinity."
He fell quiet and it took folks a few minutes to realise that was the end of the tale. There hadn't been any other incidences between the patrol at the state line and getting back home. Kate thanked the sheriff and the men who had accompanied him, and Scamp pointed his truck in the direction of her house. Something was nagging at her, though.
"Scamp? When y'all saw those boarded up stores, sitting there without anyone in them... don't get me wrong, but why didn't y'all just break in and take what we needed?"
"No, girl, I know what you mean. Fact is, Sheriff and I sort of got into it about that very thing. 'Long about nightfall that second day, I took him to task, said we would have been home safe by now if he hadn't been so set on paying fair and square for what we needed. I guess he's not hungry enough yet for a change in his philosophy." Scamp lit himself a cigarette. "He will be, though. Sheriff's a good man, but sometimes what you need isn't a good man but one who's just exactly good enough."
Jericho had me all flustered and I forgot my nightly chapter. Two tonight to make up for it.
Chapter 9
Kate was pleased that the weather had stayed cold, because with all the worry over the sheriff's group gone missing she had clean forgotten about the meat. She started her canner going again, charged the boys to mind Emma and took Eric out to the barn to help cut up their deer. They quartered it quickly and took it into the kitchen to finish it out where it was warm. She liked her venison cut in a mix of roasts, steaks and "sirloin" cubes with all the ends and odd bits and toughest parts thrown onto a pile for grinding along with the bits of clean fat. One large, choice roast was selected to slice out and smoke for jerky. The meat was cold and firm, which always made for easier cutting, but she had to stop often to show Eric how to hold the knife and where to cut.
"Haven't you done this before?" she asked. "I thought your father and uncles were big on hunting."
"They are, but this was where my Mom and sisters took over," he admitted. "Once we got them field dressed and skinned, I stopped paying attention."
She chuckled. "What would you do if I wasn't here, then, eh? Hack out a chunk and burn it over a campfire?"
Thus began Chavez' instruction on butchering and processing. She showed him how to bone out the meat, how to slice neat steaks, how to wrap some of it for the freezer and can the rest. He was a clumsy but willing student - they had to take periodic breaks to bandage his fingers because he kept nicking himself on her sharp knives or burning himself on the stove. Still, his attitude was good and he seemed to learn fairly quickly. The next day, with the last of the jars pinging on the counter, she judged that doing another deer would have him good enough to work on a third by himself without too many mistakes. The work wouldn't be as neat as hers but probably more than sufficient.
While they - and the townfolk, too, most likely - were butchering and canning, Sara Ellen had been taking an inventory of Dan's storeroom. She came out for a visit with the list in hand and a worried expression on her face.
"They did good, don't get me wrong," the sheriff's wife said, taking the cup of coffee offered to her and sitting at the kitchen table. "They got pretty near everything on the list; lanterns, tools, seeds, soap and cleaners, a couple of generators, canning jars and lids, lots and lots of propane and gas, I don't know what all... everything but a kitchen sink. A fair bit of food, too, though at least half of it is dried stuff most people don't eat. I was hoping for soup and pasta, they came home with cornmeal and powdered milk. Beggars and choosers, though, right?"
"What are we missing, then?"
"Baby stuff," Sara Ellen said, putting her mug down. "They picked up a little over two dozen cans of formula powder, which seems like a lot but it works out to only a can for each baby. We could do with plenty of other stuff I keep thinking of, but our most pressing need at the moment is food for the babies."
An idea hit Kate just then. She went to her computer and brought up her internet. A few mouse clicks, a tiny bit of typing, and she turned the screen to show Sara Ellen.
"It's the webpage for the Wal-Mart in Stuart. There's the phone number, let's see if we can't reach the store manager."
"He won't be going to work with all this mess," Sara Ellen argued as Kate dialed. Kate listened on her phone, then looked up at Sara Ellen and smiled.
"No, but his direct number is still on the store voicemail."
Sara Ellen conceded defeat and dialed the number Kate had jotted down for her. She introduced herself as a local sheriff's wife and explained what they were looking for and why. Her lips thinned and Kate assumed she must be meeting resistance. Kate leaned over the desk and pushed the button for the speakerphone.
"... sorry, ma'am, but the only help we've seen in two weeks is FEMA, and all they did was clear out my store of what they wanted and tell me everything else belonged to them now, just in case they wanted it later. I'm paying through the nose for police protection, otherwise this gang that runs up and down the highway would have cleaned me out of what they wanted too."
"Mr, Pulaski, these babies have to eat," Sara Ellen pleaded.
He wasn't listening. "Headquarters won't answer the phone, I'm probably gonna lose my job... I don't know what to do."
"Sir," Kate said, "what did FEMA take?"
"Food, ammunition, bottled water, they completely cleaned out my pharmacy."
"And how are you paying the police?"
"They want cash and ammo. I've cleaned out the safe and the tills, and whatever ammo we had in the back. Wasn't all that much."
"So you do still have baby formula, baby food and diapers."
He hesitated. "Yeah. No one's wanted that yet."
Kate did some quick figures in her head. "What would you say to a thousand rounds of ammo?"
"You... you have that much? I've looked everywhere, FEMA's cleared everyone out." His voice was shaky. "With a thousand rounds and some cash, I could pay the police for another three weeks. That should be enough time for all this to settle down and get ahold of headquarters, right?"
"Mr. Pulaski," Kate said, "we're willing to offer a thousand rounds of .357 and five hundred dollars cash for formula. Is that acceptable?"
There was a moment of silence on the other line, and then he came back with, "Double that and I'll see what I can do."
"Fifteen hundred rounds of .357, six hundred dollars and we'll have the sheriff pick it up tonight."
"I said double."
"Or," Kate said pleasantly, "I could hang up right now and you could wait until you can't afford to pay the police."
She won the negotiation. Arrangements were made to meet at his house in Stuart that night and they hung up the phone. Sara Ellen grabbed Kate's hand and shook it hard. "Kate, dear, you are brilliant. That's absolutely fantastic. See if you can't do that again with the store in Christianburg and I'll go tell Larry." She turned to go and then had a second thought. "Hold up, do we have all that cash and bullets?"
"I've got the bullets, Obie will have a fair bit of the cash; you know he doesn't bank. See if you can't get the babies' families to pitch in for the rest if we're short. I'll figure out how to pay Obie back for the cash. Oh, and Sara Ellen..." Kate opened a desk drawer and took out a small orange pill bottle. "If you don't ask any questions, you can give these to Derek. It's Percoset, for his leg. He should eat something with every dose and maybe cut the pills in half, there's only ten of them."
A somber, small group waited outside of Dan's Market that night against the return of the sheriff and his group, Kate among them. Stuart wasn't far, they went with fewer vehicles, more and better armed people and had a plan of action before leaving town this time but nerves were strung as tight as a guitar string. Kate was particularly worried; against all sensible arguments and reason, Sara Ellen had gone with her husband. Better by far, she said, to ride shotgun quite literally than to wait at home in fear. Kate wasn't able to breathe again until the first headlights rounded the corner at close to midnight.
The sheriff was curt when asking for assistance in unloading the trucks but the way he described it, things had gone smoothly. It was in talking with the manager that Larry had gotten a bee under his bonnet - Sara Ellen would later relay to Kate that he had rather a lot of nasty asides for the local Stuart law enforcement on the ride home. Living in a town where order and law were yet enforced was apparently a fortune not enjoyed by many, and overestimated by the good Sheriff and his constituents.
"He's going to have an awful lot to say at the state convention this year," Sara Ellen remarked tight-lipped, as she and Kate shelved the goods as they were brought in. The sheriff and his wife were much more pleased by how fruitful this second trip had been. The manager had kept a few cans aside to leave on the shelves should FEMA come back. Otherwise, they had been allowed most of the store's inventory and had even been told to take jarred solid baby food, rice cereals and diapers besides.
"Of course, Larry insisted on giving the fellow another of those big boxes of bullets, so maybe he didn't want us to feel like he was cheating us." Sara Ellen dusted her hands and surveyed the shelves. "It looks like so much, but there's so many babies... It's a start, anyhow. With this much to work with, I can figure something out."
It was dark in the store and dark outside, neither of which Kate gave any thought to until she got home. She hit the light switch from force of habit when she walked into the unlit front room. Nothing happened.
"Power's out," Eric's disembodied voice said from the direction of the couch. Lovely. Just great. Well, at least they'd finished canning all the meat.
The power stayed out for three days this time. Thanks to the barn's hand pump and the woodstove in the front room, the biggest inconvenience to Kate was that she couldn't watch the news. Not that this was such a terrible shame, on the second night Eric said he almost missed the way she talked to the television, as if they could hear her patiently explaining what idiots they all were. It did mean she wasted more time on the CB though, as Obie devolved into their primary source of information from outside the county. She rustled up hot meals on the top of the woodstove and wished she had a wood-fired cookstove for the kitchen, like Poppy had. After a couple of disastrous tries at figuring out a way to do bread in the woodstove, she gave up and took her bread pans to her neighbor's for the baking. Eric was still awed at the notion of fresh homemade bread. Kate, though she wouldn't admit it in front of a firing squad, was more than a little embarrassed by her bread and wasn't certain if all the eye-rolling and lip-smacking was his idea of funny or whether he didn't know any better. Once upon a time, in her days as a happy homemaker in whatever city the Navy sent them, she had been a fair hand at baking and she could still roll out a fine pie crust and a passingly tasty cake. Bread, though... her bread-baking skills were definitely suffering from long disuse.
They dug out an old washtub and some spare feed buckets from the barn, and washed them well. The washtub became their hot water heater when filled and set on the stove to boil. The buckets were filled at the barn, one was left in the bathroom for flushing the toilet, one was set on the kitchen counter for family use and the others were left just out the back door. The twins were kept busy running water to Poppy's house. They had their own hand pump in the back yard, one that hadn't seen use in perhaps decades. The first few goes had produced a gush of thin rusty mud that cleared to a reddish, dirty stream of water. Bill was taking it apart for cleaning and in the meantime they got their water from Kate.
Of bigger concern to Kate was why the power was out in the first place. All her information pointed to no shortage of workers at the electrical plants, everything seemed to be well in order and Mumbler had passed on that he'd listened in on a conversation where the topic was the governor signing an order to keep the power on at all costs. She hounded Obie to get to the bottom of it and the night of the second day, he stumbled on what he called a "hot tip". Someone out on the west coast, near Portland, was breaking a story that utility workers were deliberately bringing down power lines. Supposedly these utility workers, when asked, had said that higher-ups had deemed there to be too many violations of the restriction on travel and were shutting down the grid in spots to hinder the public's ease of movement.
"I don't know," she told Scamp over a morning cuppa. "Portland's a long ways from here."
"Yeah, darlin'. Sure is a long way away," he agreed.
"Seems kind of far-fetched, too."
"That it does."
"So just how cynical are we and why would someone want the public to stay put?" she asked.
"I don't think we'll ever have enough information to figure that out," Scamp said. "But I can make a few guesses and none of them end well."
Everyone has a price, and everyone has a breaking point. Years later Kate would reckon that her unwitting cooperation had been bought with a crate of ammo and hopped-up codeine, and sometimes that bothered her. All in all though, she didn't lose much sleep over it. Her breaking point, as it were, was something she had long given dark thoughts toward, seeming as it was that God or Satan or pure fickle destiny was trying so very hard to figure out at what point she might snap. Valiantly they would press on in vain, a thing which caused her a few smug moments, as not yet and not ever did Kate reach her breaking point. Tough as old shoe leather and about as palatable, Scamp called her.
If only the folks in town were the same way.
People were kind of cranky that first day without power. In their defense, it had been a tense couple of weeks. Tempers and nerves were short. One long, cold night was all it took to fray those nerves through like old rotted rope. Sheriff Rider tried to ask folks to not joyride all over town but they said, why not? The heaters in their cars still worked even if the furnaces in their homes didn't, and what harm was it anyway. Just a little fun, we're getting warm, awww c'mon, Sheriff, lighten up. Larry sat the afternoon looking out his front window, more than a little disgusted. His own deputy had sided with the townsfolk on it being harmless fun. Cars and trucks and bikes zoomed by his house and he watched as the folks inside laughed uproariously, and he waited.
It took until about two hours past dark for some of the big trucks to run out of gas and they began beating a path to Larry's front door, looking for a refuel. The sheriff told them no; they had their fun, now go home. That gas was for the generators. The crowd began to mutter and Sara Ellen left his side to go back in, for which he didn't blame her. His wife was a good woman but she wasn't rough. The sheriff tried talking, he tried reasoning, finally he unsnapped the cover to his holster and addressed the biggest talker standing out in front of the others.
"Just how big a boy are you, Gene," Sheriff Rider asked, his voice dead calm and his fingertips tapping the top of his holster. A shotgun blast echoed from the neighbor's house, zooming over the head of the malcontents gathered on Larry's lawn, and they all ducked down.
"I don't reckon he's nearly as big as he thinks," came Scamp's voice. He sauntered around the corner of the neighbor's house, flanked by Eric and Obie. Scamp stopped a few yards shy of the crowd, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth and his shotgun held loose. Not so for Eric and Obie; they had their long guns up and their eyes sighting down the length. For emphasis, Eric racked his gun quite calmly.
There's something rather repressive about that sound.
Gene stood slowly and shook his head in a dazed manner, as if waking up. He stammered a little and then apologised; he didn't know what had come over him; it's all this ****ed mess, you understand. Everyone was on edge. Sorry, Sheriff, we didn't mean to trouble you. You and the missus have a nice night.
Larry kept a careful eye out until the crowd had dispersed, then he leaned against the porch railing and exhaled loudly. The coal end of Scamp's cigarette flared briefly in the dark. "It's a good thing Sara Ellen called for us. Looks like things were getting a mite warm here. Sorry we didn't get here quicker, Sheriff, Kate found me at Obie's and I stopped to pick up Eric here on the way."
"Well, thanks for coming. I dunno what's come over everyone lately."
"Take off the blinders, then," Obie muttered. Eric stepped on his foot to shut him up, but Larry had heard him.
"What? What's this about blinders?"
Obie shuffled his feet a bit. "It ain't gonna get better, Sheriff," he blurted. "You know. All this. It ain't going away, it's getting worse. What's tomorrow gonna bring, huh?" He picked at a spot on his chin and shrugged, a gesture of futility. "I knew Gene, went to school with him and he's been dead weight all his life. Couple a days ago I was paying for milk for his baby girl, today I'm holding a gun on him. What about tomorrow, Sheriff?"
"Dammit, Obie, I can't wave a magic wand and make people pull their heads out," Larry said. "We're keeping everyone fed and as comfortable as possible, if people could just settle down and wait-"
"Wait for what?" Obie interrupted, his voice rising an octave. "There's bombs going off all over the world, and we ain't heard from no one. They... man, Sheriff, they're waiting to die, that's what they're doing."
An epiphany is nothing more than reaching a crossroads and knowing which path is yours. Four men stood quiet as Obie's words hung heavy, like dead fruit on a brittle brown vine, and had their epiphanies. Knowing your road and taking that first step are two very different things; a first step signifies acceptance, belief, concession. Men may have their epiphanies and understand, intellectually, that their path is correct and inevitable. That doesn't mean they have to leap onward forthwith, bursting out a happy cry. Scamp, having the fortune to be an old cynic, had seen his crossroads approaching from many miles away and had time to prepare. Pathetic consolation, that. How does one acknowledge - no, not simply acknowledge that one's former existence is no more but embrace that knowledge and move on to create a new existence? Answer: reluctantly as all hell.
That crossroad was reached and eyed warily, but none broached the boundaries that night. As Poppy had known for Kate, sometimes it took a little while to learn to let go.
Shuffling in his house slippers and flannel pajama bottoms, Larry yawned widely as he headed into the kitchen the morning of the fourth day. He filled the coffeepot on autopilot, set water to boil in the kettle for Sara Ellen’s tea and hunkered against the counter, eyes half-closed, with his old chipped mug in hand. Larry was not a morning person; he listened to the coffeepot chug and burp, sniffing the sustaining aroma of Kroger sale Columbian brew in his typical six o’clock somnolent state. He had poured his first cup and prepared Sara Ellen’s tea to steep before it hit him.
He had made coffee. In the electric coffeepot.
He cracked a grin and did a little jig, then picked up the two mugs and headed for the bedroom. “Sara Ellen! I’m late for work. By all that’s holy, I will get a hold of the state today, God willing and the crick don’t rise.”
It wasn’t to be, though not for lack of a worthy effort on the part of the good sheriff. Several phone calls, the entire morning and most of the afternoon later - the majority of this time spent on hold - his reigning success had been to reach a governor’s lackey of unknown ranking, probably so low on the totem pole as to never have seen daylight. Said lackey enthusiastically assured him a fax was being sent at that very moment to every county sheriff, mayor and hospital administrator in the state, and promptly hung up. Larry hadn’t had time to properly release his day’s frustration with a good slamming of the phone back onto its receiver before he heard the office fax machine whir to life. He stood over it and snatched at the paper that rolled off.
“****ation! It’s like I’m in a special level of Hell! One run by bureaucrats!”
Scott looked up from where he hunched over a computer, typing up a report. “Problem, Sheriff?”
Larry consulted the fax and looked at his watch. “Yeah. Turn on the television and put a fresh tape in the VCR. Supposedly the governor’s coming on for a special press release with all the answers his loyal constituents could ever wish for. We got about fifteen minutes, I‘ll give Scamp and Kate a holler and make sure they watch too.”
Larry was perched comfortably on the edge of a desk, fresh mug of coffee in hand, when the soap opera on the television cut out and went to an image of the governor in front of the Executive Mansion. The man was in his late forties, favored neat grey pin-stripes with gaudy ties and had a smile that showed about fifty pearly teeth. Larry could just see his grandmother squinting through her specs and huffing, “Butter wouldn’t melt in that one’s mouth.” There were bags under the man’s eyes now, though, and those eyes never seemed to stop moving. If Larry didn’t know politicians better, he would have thought the man was nervous.
“My fellow Virginians,” the governor began in a booming voice. Odd, Larry mused, I thought these things always began with ‘My fellow Americans’.
“Eighteen days ago, we suffered an attack on American soil the likes of which we have never seen. Pearl Harbor may have been our day of infamy, 9/11 the day that lives on, but eighteen days ago… my friends, that was a day of sadistic, self-gratifying tyrants. And in eighteen long days, you have not heard from your governor! No word from FEMA! From Homeland Security! I am here to apologise for that grievous lack of response, and to make amends.”
“I will be brief,” he said, and Larry marked his eyes shifting from left to right, appearing to scan for something, “so pay attention. The war that began not even three weeks ago is not yet over. I repeat, it is not over and you are all still in very real danger.”
The sheriff and his deputy leaned in as there seemed to be a scuffle off-camera. The governor began to speak quickly, rapid-firing his words. “People of Virginia, if you remember nothing else of my speech today, remember this. Do not trust anyone who comes to your door from the government. Do not trust the American armed forces. I am calling for an armed rebellion against the despotic forces whom have forgotten the birthright of Americans in favor of their own pursuits. Remember the spirit of patriotism which once won the freedom of your forefathers. This is our declaration of independence; may Old Dominion live on-”
Larry and Scott both jumped at the unmistakable sound of a rifle crack, and the television screen cut to the emergency broadcast system.
“Hot ****.” Scott muttered, going up to tap on the screen as if that would bring back the governor’s image. “Did they just…”
“Don’t move,” Larry said. He picked up a phone and dialed Scamp. “Scamp, did you see that? Yeah, that’s what Scott said too. Rustle up everyone on the CB and tell them to go on stand-by. I’m hereby deputizing you. You’ll get your shiny star later tonight.”
He dropped the phone onto its receiver and picked it back up again to call his house. An even tone beeped annoyingly in his ear and he swore for not having paid for call waiting. “Scott,” he said, swinging his coat on and clapping his hat onto his head firmly, “you don’t leave this station until I get back. Consider the county in a state of emergency and tell anyone who calls to stay by their scanners or CBs, and if they don’t have them to report here. I have to talk to my wife.”
Larry drove home with his official lights on, speeding and taking corners far too fast. He was a bit breathless when he went inside, and found Sara Ellen complacently knitting.
“Sara Ellen, did you catch the news?”
She looked up in surprise. “You’re home early! No, I didn’t, but we can watch it tonight during supper. I‘ve made a…”
She trailed off in shock as Larry walked straight to the sideboard, poured himself a shot of whiskey and slugged it back. He poured another and brought it to her.
“Drink it. You aren’t going to like this, but I think we’re going to war against D.C.”
The drive back to the station forty minutes later was a bit more serene that his race home had been; not much more, and his hands were twitching on the wheel, but a bit. He pulled the car off to the shoulder on a quiet stretch of road and just breathed until his hands stilled and his head cleared. Better, he pointed the car onto the road just in time to hear Obie start yelling on his radio.
“Sheriff! Sheriff, are ya there? We got incoming!”
“What? What do you mean, incoming? Where?” He stomped on the brakes to listen; the road was empty anyhow.
“Planes, sheriff, jets coming in over the highway! A helicopter, one of those ones from Vietnam movies - oh, lordie, I know this one, it’s on the tip of my tongue-”
“Pull yourself together, kid, crissakes!”
“There’s Marines in it, whatever it is - I swear, I’ll remember in a second… Jesus, Sheriff, we’re taking fire!”
He was on the verge of asking if Obie meant the Marines had hunted Obie down to shoot him personally when he registered a vibration, followed closely by a crashing roar, and another, and then a third.
”What the almighty hell was that?”
“Larry!” It was Scott’s voice, coming in from the dispatch radio. “Larry, I mean Sheriff, there’s a helicopter and there’s Marines and… what’s that? Reverend, what’s that they got? Oh god, I think they’re going to shoot, Larry, what do I do? Sheriff-”
Scott’s transmission cut off abruptly. For one instant, Larry couldn’t move. Then his foot slammed on the accelerator and, his cruiser fishtailing, he shot down the road back to town.
“This is an all-hands bulletin,” he said into the mike, barely noting that he was exceeding ninety. Screw it, this was a straight road. “I want everyone in the county armed immediately. Every able-bodied man and woman over the age of eighteen is to be armed and carrying extra ammunition five minutes ago. This is your sheriff speaking, and this is not a drill. Notify your neighbors and arm yourselves, this county is under attack by hostile forces wearing the uniform of our own military.”
Larry kicked dispiritedly at the still-smoking rubble that was once his station house and allowed Scamp to lead him over to the truck.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Scamp said. “You made the right decisions; we were outgunned, that’s all.”
It was several hours after. The fire had been put out, the bodies of the deputy and pastor removed from the wreckage and taken to the church, and three teams organized to scout the county and report back the damage. Inexplicably, the bombing run had turned out to be aimed at the highway only, and the helicopter crew had been satisfied with the destruction of the sheriff’s office. The damage to the sheriff had not yet been calculated.
Scamp lit a cigarette. “Well, Sheriff,” he drawled, “do you think fortifications should be first on the list, or should armament be our priority? After them two, I figure we ought to recruit everyone who can walk upright and swig whiskey, and split them into squads. There’s the supply problem, but that’s been an issue for a while now. Transport, communications, recon… lot’s to do, Larry.”
Larry knew what Scamp was doing, and he appreciated it. His spine straightened and they fell deep into a conversation about logistics.
Kate sat out on her front porch, slowly rocking in an old wicker rocking chair she kept out there. It was a fine, relaxing activity on sweet-scented summer nights, but bitter cold for November evenings. The kids were safely tucked into bed, the fire stoked, and Kate was rocking with her gun in her lap. Chavez had spent the afternoon at Bill and Poppy’s, helping Bill fix the old hand pump. Naturally, Poppy would have asked him to stay for supper, and afterward Chavez and Bill would have sat up yarning with their stocking feet toasting near the wood stove. It was late, past ten, and she expected him coming up the drive any minute now.
Sure enough, she heard the screen door slam at Poppy’s and a shadow crossed the yard to Kate’s driveway. She kept an eye on the shadow until it transformed into Chavez ten feet from the front porch. Calmly, Kate picked up the gun in her lap and put a round past his ear.
“Jesus!” He hit the dirt. “Whatever it is, I didn’t do it!”
“The United States military just bombed the highway and took out the sheriff’s office, Chavez. Scott and Pastor Cochrane were inside. Talk fast, and I might let you limp out of here with an extremity wound.”
She heard him began to swear, muffled from his face being pressed into the dirt. “I had nothing to do with it, Kate.” Cautiously, he put his hands behind his head. “Who was it, the Marines? Air Force? I’m Navy, you’re a Navy wife, you know we‘re just the Marines‘ taxi service.”
“True,” Kate admitted, cocking the gun’s hammer back. He flinched at the sound. “But you don’t sound terribly surprised, Chavez. This intrigues me. Tell me, you piece of filth, why you don’t sound terribly surprised.”
“Because I’ve been in contact with my command the whole time. I use your CB and Morse code. I have a theory that there’s a schism in the Pentagon, maybe even higher. There was nothing to tell you, though, definitely nothing like this, I swear it.”
Kate’s insides froze, completely unrelated to the cold night. She didn’t have the power of a base station, anyone within range of her CB had to be within the county or barely out of it. “Inside,” she hissed. “Moron. If they find out you’re compromising their operation security…”
She let the sentence hang; they both knew what would happen. Once inside the house, the doors securely locked, she turned and whipped him across the face with the butt of her gun.
“Talk!”
“Ow! Jesus, Kate!”
“Don’t give me that ‘Jesus, Kate’. I blame you. Now tell me this theory of yours and the basis for it.”
He moved to the couch and sat down.
“Okay. My command called an emergency meeting for select personnel, me included, just before the bombs fell. The meeting never actually happened, we were bombed right before, but that tells me we must have known something was going on. Instead, they loaded us up into cars and took us out to Norfolk for a briefing. One of the things we were told was that if we ran across any Marines, we ought to be very careful. That’s more than a little strange, you know, we work with the Marines all the time. A commander dropped a few subtle hints, nothing real big, but I got the impression that the highest of the higher-ups among the Marines and the Navy were not seeing eye to eye.”
He stopped to rub at his bloody mouth. “Then there were some other things my senior chief said on the way out here. Like what was in the crates. Do you know how long it takes to move personnel, let alone requisition new supplies? Yet they had those crates all ready to go, they had us all hand-picked already and they knew exactly where to take us on a moment’s notice. The military can’t do anything on a moment’s notice. I got to thinking. A whole crate full of common rounds of ammo, not just typical military rounds but Johnny Deerhunter ammo, Pappy’s old pistol rounds… thousands of them. What did they expect me to do with all of that? Repel an invading force?”
It clicked together. “Repel an invading force,” Kate agreed.
“Exactly.” He nodded. “That crate was pretty poor relief goods, but it wasn’t half bad as a booster supply for a ground unit.”
“And what about you?” Kate asked. “What’s your purpose? Are you a drill instructor, someone the Navy thought could whip this county into a crack unit?”
He laughed half-heartedly. “Not even close. Cryptology. If my theory is right, I’m thinking I’m somewhat like a tripwire. If I don’t check in as expected, whatever or whoever the Navy disagrees with just tipped their hand. If I do check in with information on the county taking a hit, once again, the Navy is alerted.”
“A tripwire.” Kate mulled this over. “Do you think the Navy will send us support? I mean, they can’t expect one rural county to take on the Marines alone.”
“I don’t think they expect us to win. I just think they wanted to give us a chance.”
The next few days were tense. Kate took over county communications, commandeering Obie’s spare CB radio to install in her kitchen. The CB hounds in the county had all channels monitored every hour of every day, and she assigned seven additional people to help Obie on the shortwave so that they could share off three-hour shifts. This freed Scamp up to drill the men and women Larry recruited into security squads; within twenty-four hours the two men had teams patrolling the county line and another patrol five miles out, plus several units strategically positioned to respond quickly for maximum coverage, rovers within the county itself and another unit that served as the best medic team they could manage. Evacuation routes were planned out carefully, and four shelters were in the planning stages. The shelters wouldn’t fit the entire county but would hopefully serve to hide most of the women, children and elderly until the violence was past. The old hand-crank emergency siren from decades ago was dug out of goodness knows where and re-installed in front of Dan’s Market.
“They caught us with our pants down once,” Larry told Kate one night when he stopped by on his rounds, “if we get enough time, they won’t do it again.”
Five long, exhausting, terrifying days were spent fortifying the county to survive attack from an outside enemy. What they didn’t know was that the enemy had already breached the gates. Twenty-three days after the bombs fell, the clock ran down to zero.
“Hello.”
“Kate, it’s Sara Ellen. I need you to find that medic team of Larry’s.”
“Are you alright? Do you need me out there?”
“It’s Dave Teague and Principal Hickley. They’re sick, Kate, and I don’t know what they’ve got but it looks awful. Mr. Hickley says they probably got it when they went to Roanoke with Larry.”
“What are their symptoms?”
“Mr. Hickley says at first he thought it was some sort of dysentery, some bug he picked up from the water. Upset stomach, bit of a fever. Then he says-” Sara Ellen paused, apparently quizzing the principal. “Then he says that he got a rash all over his chest area and his nose keeps bleeding at the drop of a hat.”
“Does Dave have the same thing?”
“Yes, dear. Find Larry, please! I’ll give them an aspirin and some cold cloths to bring the fever down, but Dave came over to find Larry because his family’s coming down with it too, he needs the medic team. Do you think they can handle this?”
“Pump them with fluids, I’ll track down the team and send them out your way.”
Kate hung up the phone. It took only a moment to find the medics with the CB and they said they would be right out to Larry’s place to help Sara Ellen out. Kate, with long years of experience nursing the kids back to health, promptly forgot the call and went back to experimenting with a pasty dough. It had been Poppy’s idea - Cornish pasties and fried pies were portable, and transportable, meals that stored well enough in the freezer and could be carried in the packs by folks manning the lines, foil-wrapped and ready to heat in a small fire. Sam told her he had read in a book that they had been very popular with miners at the turn of the century. He sat on the kitchen counter, reading out filling recipes to her as she worked the dough.
By morning the principal had died, vomiting blood. The Teague family lasted three days longer. The burials were quick; by that time, they had bigger worries. No one knew quite what had killed Mr. Hickley and the Teagues but, whatever it was, it was spreading rapidly. A week later the sick had to be directed to the school, the makeshift medics were swamped and begging for volunteers. Larry stopped at the school on his rounds. Facing a gymnasium of groaning townsfolk, entire families, neighbours, on cots and sleeping bags and blankets stained with bloody diarrhea, he sent out immediate orders for everyone in the county to quarantine themselves. He could practically hear the pounding of hooves as he closed the barn doors after the horses had already escaped.
Whatever units remained intact and healthy, he put to dividing out the stores from Dan’s Market. Every family received their share, along with a pamphlet Sara Ellen printed up for him telling them they were under orders - under no circumstances were they to leave their own property until quarantine was lifted. Each unit astutely left these care packages on front stoops, knocked and then ran.
Kate took small consolation in that she wasn’t personally concerned. They rarely left their property and had few visitors; mostly Larry, Scamp, Sara Ellen and Poppy, and none of them had taken ill. They obediently complied with the quarantine orders the moment Larry told her to pass the word, as did Scamp and Poppy, and went about their business as usual. Kate kept careful tabs on communications, as best she could with half her staff down sick with the Roanoke flu. She cooked, she cleaned, she made sure the boys minded their lessons. Eric assisted her, tended the stock and kept the boys out from underfoot and off Poppy and Bill’s property. Every evening she checked in with Scamp over the radio, and some nights she thought she heard Eric go outside after she had gone to bed. Her and Scamp had talked about Eric, and at length agreed that he was to be considered neither friend nor foe until further evidence presented. Besides, there was nothing to be gained by killing him and definite consequences in doing so.
Several days into the quarantine, no longer able to run over to Bill’s house to hear his stories or be fed illicit pastries by Miss Poppy or have Scamp come over to plot and scheme pre-pubescent mayhem (which is not noticeably different than the mayhem enjoyed by aging and only slightly reformed rascals) the twins were exhibiting classic symptoms of cabin fever. Eric had been saving an ace in the hole for just such a situation and offered to take them out back and teach them to fire the .22. Kate plugged her ears until the whoops subsided enough to be heard, and made Sam and Jake first recite the rules of gun safety. Satisfied, she watched through the kitchen window as they trooped out to the far end of the back pasture with Eric leading the way.
He had the boys set up their targets and double-checked with them that there was nothing in the line of fire behind the paper bull’s-eyes. Carefully he went over the various parts and they watched him with round eyes, then they moved on to how to stand and how to hold the weapon and why each rule of gun safety was so practical. After thirty minutes of instruction, he gave Sam the first five rounds. Despite being identical, Jake was more rough-and-tumble and comfortable with the gun, but Sam was the steadier twin.
He had brought a hundred rounds with him and they stopped for a break once the boys had shot off fifty of them. He took advantage of the break to remind them of the various parts and to dry-demonstrate how to clean the rifle, telling them with a grin that their next lesson would depend on how well the boys cleaned the gun when they were done. A sudden report jerked his head up, quickly followed by a second and a third. Coming from the front of the house.
“Drop, boys!” They flattened themselves on the ground in an instant. He pulled his Beretta from the back of his jeans. Another crack, and this time he thought it sounded like Kate’s shotgun. “Don’t move until I or your mother come back for you. You hear me?”
Not waiting for a reply, he bolted for the house. Blood pounded in his ears. It seemed to take forever to reach the back of the house, he felt like he was swimming through molasses. Finger on the trigger, gun raised, he quickly and cautiously skirted the kitchen wall around to the front porch. He turned the corner, sweeping the area with his gun, searching for a target. Truck in the drive. Unfamiliar. Man on the ground, face down. Another in front of the truck. Seated. Stomach wound, big one. Third man on the steps of the porch, already down. He consciously took a breath and then spotted Kate, still at the front door. She was motionless, the shotgun level to her eyes. She lowered it and saw him.
“They told me to come out and I wouldn’t get hurt. I came out all right, but I don’t think this is what they pictured.”
She went back inside, letting the screen door slam behind her.
It was a bit dumbfounding, her lack of any typical reaction. Chavez was almost getting used to how often she waved a gun in his face threateningly; he hadn’t ever really thought that she would shoot it, though. It was just a tough-guy act. Sort of like the way his Grandpa said his uncles had Little Guy Syndrome: little people without a lot of muscle or enormous size to their advantage overcompensated by acting bigger and badder than they were. Kate was small, a little smaller than average for a woman, and her physical disadvantage was even greater when one took into account that she operated as a lone woman. Sure, she acted rough and tough and never missed an opportunity to aim her guns at him, but it was all a defensive bluff. Right?
He methodically went from dead man to dead man, checking pulses to be certain. Suddenly he wasn’t quite so convinced that Kate was suffering from Little Guy Syndrome. A cold shudder ran up his spine and gave him pause. All those times she had waved a gun in his face hadn’t been idle demonstration of superior bargaining position…. She honestly had been debating whether to kill him.
Perhaps he ought to offer to do the dishes more often.
He fetched the boys from the back pasture and Sam kept sobbing even after he assured them that their Mom and baby sister were all right. The shooting lesson was cancelled and he told them to go read in their rooms for now. They went in by way of the kitchen, where Kate was doing something with a bucket of water. Sam hugged her fiercely before he would go to his room.
“Here,” Kate said once the boys had shut the door to their room. She pushed the bucket towards Chavez. “Wash your hands, they might have had Roanoke flu. It‘s hot bleach water.”
It certainly was hot. He winced as he dropped his hands into water just this side of boiling, and scrubbed thoroughly. She handed him a wet bandana and indicated he should tie it around his face. He wrinkled his nose at the eye-watering stench of bleach coming from the wet bandana. “I have no flu masks,” she explained practically, “and we can’t leave the bodies there to rot.”
She tied a bandana around her own face, shielding her nose and mouth, and he followed her out of doors. She searched the truck and found a stash of ammunition and food - no doubt stolen - in the back. Anything that was unopened she pitched out of the truck and piled near the porch. They would decontaminate them and add them to their own stores. It would have been nice to return them to their rightful owners, if they had any means of locating them and if those owners weren’t quite likely dead. Kate stripped the dead men of their weapons: a battered Glock, a truly ancient .30-30 and, of all things, a pellet gun. Disgusted, Kate threw the latter into the back of the truck and tossed the others near the pile by the porch.
Kate and Chavez hoisted the dead bodies into the back of the truck and she dusted her hands. “Take them out to the county line and dump them. They won’t bother anyone out there.”
He was seriously bothered by the time he returned from this grisly chore, and not entirely by handling the dead bodies. Kate was taking this awful well. Too well. He went into the house and found her in the kitchen, scrubbed pink and wearing her bathrobe.
“There’s fresh clothes for you in the bathroom, take a shower and use lots of antiseptic. Leave the bandana with your dirty clothes.”
Over her protests that she had just showered and was running the risk of contaminating her anew, he tilted her face up by the chin. Her eyes were dilated wide, despite the bright winter sunshine streaming into the kitchen, and her breathing was just a little shallow. Chavez retrieved the open bottle of Jack Daniels from the cupboard above the fridge and poured a generous measure.
“Drink. I think you’ve got a mild case of shock.”
“Nonsense. I was more upset the time I shot a wild dog.”
“Drink.”
“Oh, fine.” She tossed the contents of the glass down her throat and came up sputtering. “Ha-happy? God, that’s awful stuff.”
He poured another shot and set it before her. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”
She eyed the glass distastefully but took a healthy sip. “There isn’t much to tell. I thought it was Scamp, the way they came tearing into the drive. I opened the door to ask them what they needed but I stayed inside, with the shotgun hidden behind the door frame. They were laughing, and got out of the truck, and the one up front showed me he had a gun and told me I was pretty - if I came outside without making a fuss, I wouldn’t get hurt.” The hand holding the glass began to shake and she chugged the rest of the fiery liquid, coughing once or twice. “I’d been over it, oh, I don’t know how many times. I even practiced it over and over again when we first move here. One big step out to hold the door open, pull the gun up level, grab with the other hand, finger on the trigger, aim and shoot. Center mass. I didn’t mean to shoot two of them in the face, I was going for a belly-shot and only got it right on the third try. My hand was shaking, it threw off my aim. I got the last guy dead-center twice and then I was out of shells. I need to start carrying more than two extra shells in my pocket.”
She moved to take another drink and found the glass empty. Her hands shook and she watched them, then whimpered, “Oh god, I killed those men, and they were going to kill me.”
She began to cry, softly leaking tears as if she didn‘t want to impose or admit weakness. Chavez patted her back, awkwardly at first and then he threw an arm around her shoulder and squeezed her. She buried her face into his shirt and sobbed. “You did it, Kate. It’ll be alright, you did just fine.”
With the evidence cleaned up and disposed of, the boys were told that Kate had seen a pack of wild dogs trying to get into Bill and Poppy’s chicken coop and was driving them off with the shotgun. Against his advice, Kate chose not to tell the sheriff about the incident. It was never spoken of again.
The Delaney school gymnasium was a small example of what was currently happening on a national scale. Most of America was in various states of triage; virtually all metropolises a seething hotbed of sickness and crime, smaller yet still substantial cities that had isolated cases traded sickness for the starvation from cut-off supplies, hamlets and burgs from coast to coast fighting it out as best they could when and if it showed up on their door. The US military had, with road blocks and colour of law and a few cases of localised sabotage, slammed the brakes on a sophisticated highway, rail and air transportation system in the hopes that halting the movement of people would halt the movement of the disease. The generals who so ordered this approach were children of the forties and fifties, and perhaps in the fifties this would have enjoyed some moderate success. Nuclear families of that era rarely went further than fifty miles from the front door of their childhood home. A mobile modern society stayed mobile even in times of disaster, however. Divorced fathers who had been transferred three hundred miles away from their erstwhile family fought to get back to the city where their children lived; elderly snowbirds risked everything to get back to their northern homes and their middle-aged children fled south to find their aged and sometimes frail parents; and college students hiked and biked to their home states. On a smaller scale, brothers two towns over went to check on sisters, city folk decided this would be a fabulous time to head for that holiday cabin in the little mountain community or the house on the lake where they spent their summers. Illegal immigrants crossed the Rio back to Mexico and vacationers or opportunists headed north to Canada. From there it began a steady trek to Central America and Great Britain, and then Europe and South America. Like a slow-burning wildfire, creeping hidden and inexorably across the landscape, it burned wide swaths as it painstakingly crossed the globe. Only island nations that had time to institute the strictest quarantine measures were spared.
Folks in Kate’s county called it Roanoke flu. Others called it the death rash, Nosebleed flu or gave it a local handle like Atlanta bleeding. It was virulent, worse so because for its week-long incubation period the infected felt fine, yet were spreading contagion everywhere they went. The mortality rate, depending on age and health of the person and quality of care, ranged from twenty to fifty percent. Doctors took heart once they established this; that really wasn’t as bad as expected, that was actually quite survivable, considering the alternatives. It took weeks for the true effects to shake out. Lack of communications, lack of supplies, in many places a lack of power and running water - a high infection rate with a moderate survival rate wasn’t so bad at first, this was true. The dead began piling up, however; medical supplies began to run out, food was in short supply and the only resource that until now had been plentiful - able-bodied workers - suddenly dried up. Those who survived faced weeks of recovery, hastened only by a good diet which simply wasn’t available. Those who died needed burial, but there were few left healthy enough to handle the mounting chore of body disposal. What began as a frightening but basically better than even chance of surviving turned into death by secondary effect: malnutrition in the weak, a host of diseases that thrived in unsanitary conditions where corpses proliferated and a skyrocketing crime rate as survivors scrabbled among themselves for what little food and clean water could be found.
It was weeks before anyone talked or thought of anything that wasn’t the flu, or the final loss of electricity. By that time, there were far fewer people left to discuss much of anything with. The third world war was over, won by a hemorrhagic fever. Kate never forgot the relief she felt, sitting outside Obie’s house and hearing him shout to her through a window - Larry’s quarantine had not yet been lifted - that all previous reports were now confirmed: what remained of the military wasn’t enough to control the original thirteen colonies, let alone patrol coast to coast wreaking havoc. The military threat had ended with only two men lost. She never could determine whether the flu saved more lives than it cost.
Lives like Poppy. She had been walking from the barn to the house and waved when she saw the house coated little figure shuffling to the chicken coop. Poppy hadn’t waved back. Kate drew closer.
“Ho, Poppy! You folks doing okay?”
“Stay back!” Poppy brandished Bill’s hunting rifle wildly, flecks of blood dripping from her nose and spattering her housecoat. “Stay back, Kate. I’ll shoot you before I let you pass this on to the kids.”
Somberly, Kate drew back as ordered. Night and morning, she began taking care packages of food and medical supplies and dropping them over the fence. Chavez began chopping extra firewood and kindling and stacking it, too, handily near the fence for Bill. Several fat chickens were sacrificed and her potted herbs ravished to make nourishing hot broth. She tore through the big tubs of medical supplies from the crate for something, anything that looked as if it would help her neighbours - a clotting agent, fever treatments, electrolyte drinks, anything - and tossed it all into a plastic bag to go over the fence. The first care package had been sent in a nice basket but she had switched to plastic bags when Poppy made a show of burning the basket rather than let it go back over the fence.
After a few days, no one came out of Poppy’s house to pick up Kate’s care packages. No smoke curled from the chimney. Chavez watched her stand by the fence, staring forlornly at the silent house. After a while she reached over and picked up the pile of plastic bags and took out the old sandwiches and broth. The congealed food would go to the pigs. The canned applesauce and medicines would go back in the cellar. There was nothing more Kate could do for them.
The next morning, Kate awoke to find a note on the kitchen table warning her to keep the boys away from the barn. He had gone to Bill and Poppy’s and was placing himself under isolation. She checked Chavez’ room; it was empty, his bags and blankets gone. She stepped out on the front porch and looked over the fenceline. The chicken coop and animals pens stood quiet; he must have taken their animals and added them to her own stock. Moreover, under Poppy’s old birch tree were two fresh dirt-covered mounds. This touched her. Chavez had risked infection to give the old folks the final help they could offer: a decent burial.
For two weeks Eric remained in the barn, sleeping in the hayloft. She would see him, from time to time, out the kitchen window doing chores. His meals were left on the kitchen step, and she opened the door after he left with them to find the collected eggs and his laundry. These were carefully decontaminated and the laundry then washed. There was no collecting the milk, because there was no way to decontaminate it. Bessie was nearly dry, though, so there wasn’t much milk anyhow. Eric fed what there was to the pigs and baby Emma made do with powdered milk from down cellar. After two weeks, Kate left a note with his supper to come back inside if he was still without symptoms, they were well beyond the incubation period.
On a cold morning in the end of January, Bessie surprised them all with a wobbly-legged heifer calf. That same day Larry announced the end to the quarantine.
Water and lightning both seek the path of least resistance. It is the nature of all things, and after millennia of ‘progress’ human nature was as yet little changed from the time they first realised round things roll better than not-round things. People, water, lightning - all enjoy the easiest and most sensible way and will unerringly find that way when left to their own devices.
Joe Meacham had the biggest place in the county and also held the distinction of being the only actual farmer. He had been standing out in the field across from his house one nasty February day, testing the dirt not because he had any notion how he would get the planting done but because this was the week he always tested the dirt to see if it was dry enough for planting. Chancing to look up, his mouth went dry with sudden fear. Coming down the road, on bikes and carts and walking, was a horde of people. Maybe as many as thirty. He had a sidearm in his holster, but one gun against two dozen bandits were not good odds.
“Howdy,” a fat man shouted. He stopped his bike and leaned it onto the blacktop, mopping his wide greasy face. “Gosh, I shoulda got in shape years ago, this takes a lot out of a fat man like me. You Joe Meacham?”
“I am,” Joe said warily.
“Good, I didn’t fancy another few miles on that bike if you weren’t. Let me have a breather, by that time the carts ought to have caught up and we can get to work.”
“Get to work? On what?”
“The planting,” the fat man said, as if Joe was daft. “You didn’t plan to do it all yourself, did you now?”
The fat man introduced himself as Phillip and with a wave of one chubby hand indicated that the people straggling down the road were mostly his neighbours. One of them was pushing a cart loaded with every garden tool they could lay their hands on. “We been talking for weeks now,” Phillip explained, “and the way we figure it, if we want to eat then we better hope y’all get your crops in. So while I catch my breath, let‘s discuss economics and then we can get to work.”
“Economics,” Joe said stupidly. This Phillip was an odd character, sweaty and dishevelled and with the saggy look of a large man who had lost a lot of weight too quickly - Joe’s mind boggled at how fat he must have been before the bombs - but he had a knack of making Joe repeat everything he said as if his English were bad.
“Well, yeah. This here’s your job. You didn’t think we were going to leave you to sweat all year, just so you could turn around and give everything to us? Now, that’s not right. Not right at all. Way I figure it, we’re all out of work. I’m an accountant by trade, you see anyone that needs their taxes done? Of course not. You’ve got work for us, and you can pay in good food. So, boss man, let’s talk wages. What do you say to us workers sharing a thirty percent part of your crops?”
Astonished, Joe didn’t even think to haggle. “That sounds wonderful!” He could have leaped for joy. With thirty people, it might take some time but he could work all three fields and maybe even expand a bit.
“All right, then. We’ll feed ourselves and probably bunk out here - we’ve got our bedding and things coming on another cart - say, do you have a barn we could sleep in? Just during the week, my wife is hoping to see me back on the weekends.”
*
It had been a hard winter. There was little to be done about the lack of electricity but to adapt as best they could. The fortunate had wood stoves or fireplaces or dual-fuel basement furnaces, and they took in family and friends who did not. More than a few survived the flu only to die of carbon monoxide poisoning or house fires when the ill-advised built fires on bricks or in barrels in their chilly living rooms. One of the first things Larry had done after lifting the quarantine was to organise teams of woodcutters out of anyone with chain saws and axes, roaming the countryside for deadfall to cut for fuel. The second tasks were clean-up and supply, for lack of better terms. These folks went from house to house, burying the dead, scouring the home for unused supplies - particularly anything edible - and noting the address if the home had some means of heating or cooking with wood. It was putrid, grisly work but Larry had plenty of volunteers once he made it known that the clean-up teams had priority for getting their own house that heated with wood.
The priority lists became that first winter’s big controversy. Every kind of thing was scarce, scavenging helped but at the cost of the county’s rapidly dwindling gasoline. The few people to whom leadership of the county had defaulted faced tough choices, the toughest being whom to feed. In a pretty, rainbow-hued world, Larry would have had plenty to go around for all, enough anyhow to keep everyone going. Simple addition proved that if he tried this, the only thing he would accomplish would be to keep the county on a starvation diet until he lost everyone. Larry was an idealist, but not a stupid one. The priority lists were a natural extension once he made peace with the thought that their supplies could not carry everyone.
There were a few who decided it would be easier to take, rather than make themselves useful enough to rank higher on the priority lists. Larry had the onerous chore of presiding over that winter’s first criminal trial. The defendants were three young men, boys really. Once upon a time he had thought them good kids. He went to church with Keith’s folks and had cheered Trevor the previous winter as the best varsity high school running back the county had seen in years. The Fighting Mustangs had gone on to the state single-A championship largely based on the boy’s skill on the field. Trevor grinned at him as Scamp read the charges: theft, assault, attempted rape.
“The sentence is hanging,” Larry said solemnly. “May God rest your souls.”
It was, thankfully, the first and last trial of the winter. Not the last crime, but when the would-be thieves kept winding up dead those who might have followed in their footsteps wisely decided that being a career criminal had too short a life expectancy. With such a well-armed citizenry, the opportunistic roving bands of thugs quickly learned that there were easier targets elsewhere and life settled down into a hungry, bare-bones yet basically lawful existence.
With the first warm breaths of wind that foretold spring, folks turned their thoughts to improving their lot in life. Spring was the natural time for that; having come through a hard winter, people resolved to make sure they were not in such poor position by the time the next rolled around. Kate had animals, land, food and the means by which to grow and preserve more. Her property was not large by any definition of the term but she was finding that without the crutch of power tools, modern machinery and the fuel on which these ran, she could not work even her middling acreage with only one man and two boys. She needed labourers. Plenty of others in the county were discovering the same, to greater or lesser extent, from Joe Meachem down to Old Man Hickock. Lloyd Hickock had no trouble deciding that perhaps he ought to dig up his acre of prized irises in favour of planting potatoes. The arthritic knees of a seventy year old told him this might be a bit easier said than done, however.
Kelly Carpenter wandered idly through her empty home, dressed in a sweater and her coat even though she was inside. Her house, the home they had been so proud on buying, the home where they had brought their two girls home from the hospital, her kitchen that Jon had remodelled as her tenth anniversary present, was useless to them. It had no fireplace, no water. They had taken shelter at the neighbours, who had a fireplace where the Carpenters did not, as well as an empty basement. She gazed at the pictures hung on the walls, her family smiling down at her from better days. There was Mikayla’s first birthday, with chocolate cake smeared liberally over her pudgy little face. Kelly’s stomach cramped with hunger and the memory of chocolate brought a sudden gush of saliva across her tongue. She ignored this. Jon was always working with Larry on one crew or another, as did Kelly herself, and they maintained a decently high rank on the priority lists so the hunger wasn’t too bad. She ate every day, her girls sometimes ate twice a day; all in all, they were doing pretty well. Kelly sat on her nearly new couch, enjoying how comfortable and soft it was after sleeping on a bare mattress on the floor next door, and began to weep. How low they had sunk since the bombs, that she might consider herself fortunate to sleep on the floor of the neighbour’s basement and eat once a day.
Lisa Adler had no neighbour in whose somewhat warmer basement her family could shelter, all of her neighbours in their apartment complex had the same problems she did. Nor did she have a husband who could work on the sheriff‘s crews and earn them a higher ranking on the lists. Brett had stumbled home one night weeks ago, gut-shot and roaring drunk. Frankly, she had long stopped caring where he’d been or what he had been doing but there was no way she was letting him drag Mikey down with him. She had slit his throat and spent half the night dragging him to a house she knew to be empty, all the way on the other end of town. No one had seen her and the cleaning crews would find him when they made their way to that area. She had spent the tag end of that miserable winter huddled alone with Mikey in a corner of her living room under a pile of blankets to stay warm, feeding him cold beans from the meager store the sheriff had given her. She would push one bean at a time into his little mouth, watching him chew and swallow, then follow that with some water from a sippy cup and another bean until his shrunken tummy felt better. The beans were for Mikey; she waited until the can was empty and then licked it clean. Every now and then the sheriff or his new deputy would stop by, and if they had anything - a sandwich, a little plastic Tupperware bowl of cold soup or Sara Ellen’s potato salad - they invariably gave it to her. She wanted to give it all to Mikey but sometimes she just couldn’t help herself, and would eat half and let her little man have the rest. The days blended one into the next, distinguishable only by what she fed Mikey. On odd days he ate beans, one at a time. Even days she fed him a gruel made of a spoonful of cornmeal mixed with water and a sprinkling of salt, left overnight to thicken. Saturday was the day she had three empty bean cans on the counter, whether it was really Saturday or not. One precious sterno can was opened and lit, and a hot soup made by cleaning out the already-licked bean cans with hot water and adding to the water an entire half-can of beans and a spoonful of cornmeal. It felt extravagant to put so much food in the little pot she kept for their Saturday stew. The moment the hot broth reached a boil, she cut the heat to conserve her fuel and then she waited on the other side of the room, distracting Mikey from the smell of hot food until it was cool enough to eat. They would split the entire pot, spoonful for spoonful until Mikey couldn’t eat any more. Then they would sleep, snuggling tight in their nest of blankets, and on awakening would again trade spoonful for spoonful. Some weeks the pot lasted until Monday, then it was back to cold beans for Mikey until the next time she had three empty cans and could say it was Saturday.
One day she awoke to sunshine streaming in the window. It felt hot against her face. She stood unsteadily - it wasn’t yet Saturday, it was easier to walk on Sundays - and made her way to the front door. Her fingers, clumsy and thick, fumbled with the locks and finally she tugged the door open. Warmth flooded her as she basked in the bright spring day.
“Come here, Mikey,” she whispered. “It’s beautiful.”
She laboriously dragged their blankets to the front step and sat Mikey on them, and they watched the clouds sail past in the bluest sky she had ever seen. They saw no people but they did see birds, and green trees, and a few early flowers. Mikey held his hand out to a butterfly. She hadn’t seen him smile all winter, and she hugged him tight and they laughed. He fell asleep quickly, so warm and comfortable out in the sun. Lisa put him inside to sleep and sat on the front step. There were still people around, she knew it. Winter was over, they had made it, but Mikey wouldn’t live through another winter like that. Her face crinkled with the effort of thinking; they needed a plan. Stumbling to the corner of the coat closet where she kept their supplies, she assessed how much they had left. Four cans of beans, several spoonfuls of cornmeal in the bottom of the one and a half pound container, quite a lot of salt and two sterno cans. Water and matches. It would be plenty. She began fixing a Saturday stew even though it wasn’t anywhere close to being Saturday. If she was going to do the walking she thought she’d have to do, she would need food.
As long as the world had spun on its axis, there had been haves and have-nots, and those who thought it the obligation of those better off to provide. Thievery just didn't pay in a county where the sheriff had gone to such efforts to make sure that almost every home had access to a gun, and where surviving the burglary itself would mean a trial, a short drop and a sudden stop. That didn't prevent the sudden proliferation of begging.
Kate was quickly labelled a have, downright wealthy in these times. Once the men figured out that she felt no remorse at turning them away empty-handed, they merely changed tactics and sent their children to her door while they waited down the road. Larry biked out to her place for a visit and located an entire encampment in the ditch just around the bend from her house, the children making their daily trek to Kate's house for food. He fetched a few men from town and scattered the camp, instructing them in no uncertain terms that it was time to move on down the road or be arrested as a public nuisance. That night, Scamp and Eric cleaned out Poppy's house and moved Scamp in. That solved the worst of the problem; thin-faced, dirty urchins still showed up on Kate's door, hands out pathetically, but now Eric and Scamp would split up and locate the waif's parents and make sure they kept moving. Larry admitted to sleeping better at night knowing his nominal communications coordinator had Scamp next door. Obie had been telling them just that afternoon about people a few counties over killing each other for far less food than Kate had.
Kate was sitting at her computer desk - the computer itself long since relegated to the hayloft in the barn - compiling the weekly communications report. Gas reserves were terribly low and it was a bit far for Larry to bike out here more than once a week unless it was necessary, so she had instituted a new system. Her small allotment of gas was split among Obie, Mumbler, and Jane Slim, with the bigger portion going to Obie. In this manner was she able to keep some communication abilities in the county going, with the gas powering generators that in turn powered the CB and Obie's shortwave. Once a week they would give her everything they hade heard, and this she would organise into neat little nuggets of information for Larry, like she was doing now. This was also when he picked up her weekly offering for the county: eggs from the chickens, butter and milk. When she butchered, at least half of it went to Larry to be distributed to those in more dire straits than herself.
The bell Jake had rigged in the barn began to ring, and she sighed. Another beggar. Kate looked out the living room window, expecting a ragged man practicing his humble face or a thin, dirty child she would have to make wait on the front porch lest he or she steal when she wasn't looking. What she saw instead was a skeletal woman staggering down the driveway, pushing a grocery cart with a pile of blankets.
"May I help you?" Kate said from the front porch as soon as the woman drew near enough. The woman stopped, leaning heavily on the cart and gasping for breath.
The woman drew herself up with difficulty and held her hand out. Kate shook it, feeling the thin, fragile bones with almost nothing to cover them. "I'm Lisa. Lisa Adler. I want to go into business with you."
"P-pardon me?" It was quite safe to say that nothing about this woman was what Kate had been expecting.
"I can… I'm sorry, may I have a drink of water? It was a very long walk." Indeed, Lisa seemed on the verge of collapse. Kate was stunned the woman had managed to walk as far as town in her condition. There was a pitcher of water on the counter inside but Kate went to the pump instead, where it was fresher and colder. The woman gulped greedily and leaned against her cart, breathing slowly.
"Thank you, that's much better. I was saying, I want to go into business with you. A bakery. I can bake, I can bake anything. Decorated wedding cakes, just like the professionals, light bread, white bread, heavy ryes and sourdough and challah. Breadsticks. Rolls; dinner rolls, orange rolls, cinnamon rolls and monkey bread. Applesauce cake, pound cake, banana bread, even baklava if anyone wants it. Frostings and ganache… if you've ever bought it in a bakery, I can make it."
The woman seemed desperate to convince her, yet Kate was puzzled. "It sounds impressive, but what does this have to do with me?"
"You have food." The woman, with her sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, said this reverently. "Flour and yeast. You have it, yes?"
Kate sat on the front step. This needed some thinking. "You aren't asking me for a handout? Just flour and yeast to start a bakery?"
With effort, Lisa pushed the cart into the shade offered by the front porch's awning and sat down. "Other things too, if you have them. Whatever you can spare, and if you can find an oven for me to use; I'll do the baking and take it all to the customers. I'll make it worth your while. Three-quarter share of the income for you, one quarter for me."
Kate's first thought was that she didn't need a three-quarter share in a bakery, they had plenty enough without it. The other woman's surety that she could turn out professional-quality baked goods, though… Visions swam in her head, of crusty loaves of French bread, cupcakes, gooey cinnamon buns dripping sweet warm frosting, along with the freedom of no longer doing their daily baking. She had grown to hate baking, wasting so much of her time turning out the loaves that she still hadn't learn to make well enough to measure up to what they had enjoyed before the bombs.
"What did you say your name was again?"
"Lisa Adler. My little man is in the cart, his name is Mikey."
"Let's go inside, Lisa. Bring your little man."
Lisa moved the blankets aside and Kate shrank back when she saw the baby. Just about Emma's age, he was. His scalp was stretched tight over his too-large head and he was thin, though not as bad as his mother. "Here… I'll carry him. He's a bit heavy for you." She was lying. He was as light as a feather.
First things first, they needed food. Kate poured some applesauce into a bowl and set out plain bread and water. Their stomachs likely would have rejected anything stronger. Kate watched her feed her boy bits of bread dipped in applesauce, and couldn't help quizzing her.
"My bread, what am I doing wrong?"
Lisa examined a piece and tore it experimentally. "Knead more and stop baking on humid days." She tasted a tiny piece and chewed on it slowly; Mikey opened his mouth, bird-like, and she gave him another little bit. "Bread mellows on the second day, it becomes a bit tougher but the flavour rounds out and it is easier to digest. For that, you need fats in the recipe; oils, eggs, butter. Bread won't keep without them. This here, it wants to be a rustic Italian but tastes like a flat potato bread. Leave out the fats and add more salt next time."
Kate restrained the urge to clap her hands and instead began to plot how to feed the Adlers up so that Lisa could manage the walk back into town. That they would have to stay the night was without question; she was stunned the woman had managed to push that grocery cart all this way as it was. If Lisa wanted to open a bakery, Kate could see her way to helping her get it started. As it was, the woman would have to be a far sight stronger if she planned to walk a cart full of bread back to town.
A few days later Lisa wasn't appreciably any fatter but she was stronger. Kate and Sam took turns by the hour, spooning chicken broth and mashed vegetables into little Mikey. Everyone cheered when he was able to keep down watered milk with a little sugar added. Eric kept silent, only questioning with a glance as to why she had decided now to take in strays. Truth was, she didn't quite know herself. There was something about the way the woman had struggled to reach her house, starving yet only wanting the means to get herself a job.
Scamp did anything but keep quiet. He ribbed her mercilessly. "Oh look, here's Mother Theresa now," he said as she let herself into his kitchen. "I hear tell Eric's stopped letting you answer the door."
"Stow it, Scamp. She'll be making her first run to town tomorrow with a cartful of baked goods, and she says she can stay at her place just fine and come out twice a week to do the baking until she can find someone closer who has a working oven."
"I still say I was jipped. That cookstove was Poppy's, it should be you cooking on top of the living room stove."
"Cook? You're a bachelor, your idea of cooking is dump a can in a pot and heat it up." She handed him a loaf of bread wrapped in a paper bag.
He sniffed it suspiciously. "Yours or hers?"
"Hers, ingrate. See if I ever cook for you again."
"Well, hell, you're already hiring out to have your cooking done…"
"I am not hiring a cook," she retorted primly. "I'm helping her start a bakery. For that, you don't get to see what's in bag number two."
The first official day Adler's Bakery was open was a rousing success. Baking bread was a lost art. Most folks hadn't had a slice of bread in months. Lisa pulled the last loaves of French bread from the oven in the wee sma's, carefully bagged it all up, loaded her grocery cart and made the walk into town having traded with Sam and Jake - minding Mikey for a cupcake each. Her pitch was simple; she knocked on a door, said that she was selling fresh baked goods and turned back a corner of a paper bag to let the aroma of still-warm French bread waft free. The matter of payment took a little finessing.
"Oh, wow." Kelly Carpenter leaned over the bag, eyes closed as she inhaled the yeasty scent. "You have no idea how good that smells. What's the price?"
"What do you have?" Lisa asked, folding the bag carefully bag into place and putting it back in the cart, under a blanket to keep warm.
"Beans?"
"No beans," Lisa said firmly.
That sent Kelly off on a hunt through their belongings. Everything of value in their home had been transferred to the basement for the winter, and she pawed through the small piles and carried up everything she thought could be traded for bread. These she spread on the front step and she and Lisa sat down to look it all over. Lisa deliberated, then picked up a can of evaporated milk, a can of cherries and a can of Spam. Kelly thought this over and took the Spam back.
"My husband might not approve, it's our only one," she apologised.
"For the milk, you can have one loaf. Any kind. For the cherries, any two items in the cart except the chocolate cake."
"You have chocolate?" Kelly whispered hungrily.
"It's just a small one. No telling when we'll get more chocolate, though, so I'll want a good deal on that. Sorry, but what you've got here won't buy a chocolate cake."
Kelly rocked back on her heels, thinking. "What do you think would buy a chocolate cake?"
"A lot more than you have here." Lisa continued when she saw Kelly's face fall. "Something substantial. I'll be back next week, if you think you might want one I can make another cake for you."
Kelly nibbled on her lower lip and then held out her hand. "One moment." She disappeared around the house and returned shortly with a gas can.
"It's nearly a full gallon. No one knows we have it, Jon's been saving it from the little bit the sheriff used to give him a few weeks ago when he was on corpse duty. I've no idea where he thinks he'll go on a gallon of gas, though."
"That will buy a chocolate cake," Lisa agreed. The milk and gas went into the bottom of the cart and Kelly took her French bread and chocolate cake with delighted eyes. "Come back next week," she called as Lisa pushed her cart down the street.
Back at Kate's house, everyone downed tools to examine how well the bakery had done on its first day. Kate gloated at the gas, sure that this would shut Scamp up for good. She'd sacrificed a little baking cocoa and gotten gas in return!
"I'm taking the gas can back," Lisa said apologetically. "I didn't think until I'd left that I didn't give her anything for the can."
There were three bars of soap, a clean Mason jar, several cans of evaporated milk and canned soups, a can of Spam and one of tuna, a one pound sack of rice, a jar of salsa, three yards of fleece and a half-empty can of baking powder. "There might have been more," Lisa said, "but I wanted that baking powder and she knew it. I'm trying to trade for baking supplies so I don't have to use up yours."
"I still have plenty. Good thinking though. Trade for stuff that's the hardest to get."
"Is there anything I ought to look for that you need?"
"Nothing I can think of off-hand. The gas is great, and that fleece will come in handy. Emma's outgrown her coat, I can make another with that. If you can find cigarettes for Scamp, he'd really love it." Yeah, cigarettes would definitely shut Scamp up.
Lisa kept aside three cans each of milk and soup and the baking powder, and pushed the rest at Kate as her share. Kate instructed the boys to put it away, even if she didn't need most of it. Lisa would be sticking to her bargain if she kept her share, and it could all be traded if Kate found she needed anything badly enough.
The second trip was even better. There was business enough for two trips each week and Lisa was beginning to get regular requests. One of these she negotiated for a bike with a child carrier in return for twelve weeks of delivery, twice weekly. After the third trip Lisa and Mikey moved back to her apartment, taking with them her new stash of canned goods.
Kate was sitting in her cellar, paper and pencil in hand. She was supposedly taking an inventory but in reality she was staring hard at the bags and boxes as if a glare with enough weight behind it would make the numbers come out the way she wanted.
That Adler woman had struck a nerve. Kate had known that folks were going hungry. She would even admit that she knew, deep down, that some folks were starving to death. What she hadn’t known was that there were folks out there who were basically decent, hard-working people who were starving, and their children with them. Or maybe she had known this and merely refused to consciously acknowledge it. Either way, Kate was in the throes of a moral crisis; survivor’s guilt, noblesse oblige, a Mother Theresa complex as Scamp accused or some overwrought mothering instinct. What it came down to was this: good people and their children were starving and Kate had food. So how much could she donate and still have enough to feed her own family until the crops came in?
Not much, as it turned out. The cellar which had looked so full the previous fall was, after a winter of hard use, now an echoing chamber with dwindling piles where once had been boxes stacked as tall as Kate herself. She had plenty still, oh my yes, certainly enough to keep them all well-fed until the big harvests began in the summer and her long-term goods - sugar, salt, flour and such - were barely touched. The trouble was that what had seemed like so much when she was just feeding her three children became less when Eric and later Scamp were factored in, and never had been enough to feed a county. Work the numbers however she might, even taking the family down to two meals a day, she had at most perhaps three hundred pounds of food to spare. Which was quite a lot, really; she had worked the numbers carefully for the least they could keep for themselves, and moved everything that could be counted as spare under those sums to one side of the room, but, looking at the pile, she realised it wouldn’t begin to touch the need. It always went back to the problem being that the entire county was hungry, and one woman, no matter how large her mothering instinct, couldn’t care for them all.
Eric found her seated cross-legged on the dusty floor of the cellar, busily figuring how many pounds of food she could up her donations to if she slaughtered all but her very best breeding stock. He didn’t know whether to roll his eyes or hug her, so he settled instead for taking away her pencil.
“You can’t help them all, Kate.”
“No, but I can try.”
They had been through this a few times already, which is why Eric knew what she was up to before he had looked at what she was writing. When the sheriff had told her in passing about having to take a man at gunpoint to the county line for drawing a gun when Larry had only been able to give his family two boxes of food meant to last until spring, he had seen her double what she was sending in for the townsfolk and make up another box for the man’s family. That night he had talked to her about it, but let it lie. The first time she had looked a child in the eyes as the little thing asked for food, right afterward he had found her in the cellar doing much the same as she was doing now. He had put his foot down that time and gotten a huge row in return. They had compromised after a lengthy argument; she would butcher Poppy’s male goats and the doelings. He never much fancied goat meat anyhow. One week, after hungry children had been at their door one after another every day, he had caught her loading the truck with everything in the cellar, tears streaking down her face.
“No, Kate. That’s final,” he had said, wrapping his arms around her. She had sobbed and sobbed, mumbling incoherent words between sniffles that it was an evil world to let children go hungry. He had packed her and the boys off to go fishing with the promise that everything they caught would go straight to Larry and he’d clean the fish to boot. She had fished every day that week and salted down the cleaned fish every night, and they had turned over an enormous box to Larry. She had made no more mention of the food in the cellar.
Five months he'd lived with her and he still couldn't peg her. On butchering days he would find her up to her elbows in guts and organs, a decorative bloody smear where her nose had picked the wrong moment to start itching, as nonchalant and indifferent to the smells and fluids and squelching noises as if she truly didn't notice. She had coolly gunned down three would-be rapists before they'd had time to blink. He had yet to see her flinch; Kate was hard as nails. But then something completely expected and, yes, sad would happen and she'd lose it entirely.
Eyes blazing, feet firmly spaced, she squared off in front of him. Whoo boy, he was in for it. Pity he couldn't think of something pithy and sensible to tell her besides no.
"I've already figured it all up," she argued. "We'll still have enough for two square meals a day until the early corn comes in. I can't just stand by and let everyone starve, Chavez."
Oh, hell, the last name. She only saved that for special occasions. What did his father do when Mom fired up like this? "I think you ought to have consulted me before making that decision."
She puffed up like an offended hen. "Oh, do you? Need I remind you-"
"No, you don't. This is your house and your kids and your food. Every day for five months now, I've helped you out with Emma. I've fed her, I've bathed her, I've put her to bed. Who taught the boys to shoot, took them fishing, graded their math and backed you up when they stepped out of line? Jake might as well be my shadow. I care for those kids, Kate; months now you've let me get attached to them, work just as hard as you, but when it comes to family decisions, well, I'm nobody. That's harsh."
Kate deflated. "I'm sorry," she said, "I didn't think. You're right, you've stepped up and done a man's share and you deserve a man's say in decisions that affect the kids."
"Thanks. I appreciate that, really." He handed her pencil and paper back to her. "My say is that the kids are already sacrificing so that others can have something. You do enough, and you're a good-hearted woman to do so, but not so much as a roll of toilet paper more. We have our own to look after."
.Sitting on the front porch, sharing a post-prandial pipe, Eric told this story to Scamp that night as the occupied matching rockers. Eric admitted that he still couldn't figure out why she had overreacted, and Scamp shook his head.
"Kate's got a shell like any man. A stiff upper lip, they used to call it. That's what I like about her, she doesn't need a man around and in a lot of ways she's just as good as a man. She's a strong woman. I've seen a few men come sniffing around. They don't get the time of day and they start in on how she's an uppity man-hater. That's bull."
Eric agreed. "Most of her friends are men, you know."
"Exactly. I told them boys, she ain't got a problem with me so it must've just been them. You see, that's the thing about a strong woman. If you want to win her, you've got to be more of a man than she is."
"Wise words, Scamp, but I'm not looking to win her, I'm just looking to understand her so I can keep the peace."
Scamp took a slow draw on his pipe, eyes crinkling. "Sure. If you say so. All right, I'll tell you this about Kate. She's got herself a hard exterior, just like a man, but inside? Her heart's all woman. You want to understand Kate, then you just need to figure out which part you're talking to."
Scamp stood up to go. "And I'll say this much. If you keep trying to convince yourself that Kate isn't the best any man could do, you're a lot dumber than I figured you for. I've seen the way you look at her."
Eric stopped rocking. He drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair and looked up to meet the older man's eyes. "I can't."
"Why not?"
"Because when her husband comes back for her, he'd kill me."
Scamp leaned on his hoe and blew on his fingers to thaw them. It was spring all right, but spring was taking its sweet time warming up. Kate said it was planting time, though, and Joe Meacham agreed with her. So here he was, his cheeks whipped raw by the blustery spring wind and his fingertips numbing around his hoe. Kate's fields had already been planted and she'd come over with Jake and Eric to help him get his early garden in.
Kate saw him, looked up at the sun and called for a break. Eric and Jake headed straight for the warmth of their front room, but Kate lingered. Scamp had been looking like he had something on his mind for a few days now.
They began the walk to the house together, slowly. "Darling, you mind if I ask you a personal question?"
"Fire away."
"I thought your husband was dead."
While this wasn't a question, Kate understood him anyhow. She hesitated, thinking how to explain. "He left," she said simply.
"Left? What, just like that?"
"Yeah, actually. One day he didn't come home from work. Not so much as a phone call since. I tried calling his command but all they said was that he was still showing up for work on time."
Kate realised that Scamp wasn't keeping pace with her, turned back and saw he had stopped dead. "He just... left? No word, no nothing?"
"Yep. I was lucky. Nick's credit was shot, so the house was in my name. I sold it just before he cleaned out the accounts and closed them. Back east was expensive, and a housewife doesn't translate into a marketable skill that leaves a lot after the daycare was paid. So I sold everything I could and went looking for something rural where it didn't cost much to live. I made a bundle on the sale of the house, some idiot city person offered way more than I was asking, but I needed something cheap that would keep us going, and that would leave enough over that we could manage if I was careful. I found it here."
"That pansy little son-of-a-bitch."
Kate said nothing. She'd used up her cussing over Nick a long time ago.
They reached the front porch and Kate stopped. A thin, prickling feeling came over her and she shuddered reflexively. She turned, first this way and that, as an animal scents out which direction the danger is coming from.
"Kate, what's-"
"Shhh. Did you hear that?"
They fell silent. Nothing moved but the wind. Then, off in the distance, like tiny firecrackers...
"Gunfire. Where's it coming from, Scamp?"
"County line. The back road intersects with this one here and then on into town."
"Then move!"
She would never know why this gunfire set her adrenaline pumping. It could have been hunters, or folks scaring off a pack of dogs, or someone target shooting. She knew better, and the kitchen shotgun seemed to appear in her hand of its own volition while she stuffed boxes of shells into a bag.
"Kate, what are you thinking?" Eric said, stuffing his Beretta down the back of his pants. A tiny part of her brain said to get him a holster for his birthday and that Scamp must have told him where they were headed. "The kids!"
"You're right, of course, what was I thinking? Sam, come here." Sam presented immediately, front and center. "Here's the shotgun, Jake, you take the .22. One of you to the side of the barn and the other in the house. I'm trusting you, boys. If there's too many, take the baby and run. Here's the keys to the farm truck, it's got just enough gas to get to Larry's house. Momma loves you. Don't let me down."
Kate ran into her room and dug frantically through the closet until she found what she was looking for. She hefted the spare M-16 once or twice to feel the weight of it and, mimicking Eric, tucked the new 9mm into the waistband of her jeans. It felt cold against her skin. She slung the rifle strap over her shoulder and met the men by the front door.
"You got the ammo?"
"Yeah," Eric said, "but you aren't coming."
"I'm not sending you out alone, and neither am I going to wait here for trouble to find me," Kate said as she went out the door. "If we can't overpower them then I'm going to draw whoever it is away from the house. My guess is that the patrol has trouble penned up against the ditches we dug on the county line. As the land lies, bypassing that blockade the easy way takes you straight to our house."
Eric stopped arguing and raced her to the Durango. Scamp beat them both and had it fired up. Kate sat shotgun and Eric jumped in the back just in time. Scamp peeled down the driveway as if all the hounds of hell were on their heels.
Kate checked her watch. Lady Luck was smiling down on them. "Jane Slim, this is MightyMouse, come back. Jane Slim, I know this is your shift, come back, over."
The channel crackled and then Kate heard a mike key. "MightyMouse, this is Jane Slim, over."
"Jane, get the sheriff and tell him we're about to have a shoot-out on Road 14 at the county line. I need all hands backup, about five minutes ago, over."
"Roger that, I'm gone."
Scamp had all eight cylinders roaring as they approached the dirt piled on both sides of the ditches, and laid rubber as they came to a hard stop.
"Heads down!" he shouted needlessly. Shots rang out everywhere and a stray round pinged off the top of the canopy.
They kicked open the doors and hit the ground, crouching almost double as they ran. They reached the near dirt wall of the ditch and waited. Kate threw the bag of ammo in first. Scamp, with a few hand motions, peeked up and laid cover fire with his old sawed-off as Eric and Kate scrambled over the low wall. Scamp, showing the agility of a man decades younger, was right behind them.
"Thank God!" cried a young man. His face was bloodless and his eyes wild. He fiercely clenched the cold hand of another, equally young, boy who wasn't moving "We thought you'd never get here!"
Kate caught on. "Who did you radio?"
"Obie. A few minutes ago. Maybe thirty. I don't know." The boy was panicky and near to tears.
"Who's in charge?" Scamp demanded. The boy pointed. Dan, from the market, lay flat near the top of the barrier, picking his shots with care. Scamp scooted over and tugged his leg. Dan waved another man to take over and slid down as soon as his spot was filled.
"How many?"
"Couple dozen, maybe more, less three."
"How many do we have?"
"Eight, now. Two down. With you, eleven."
"Kate!" She moved closer. "How long you figure it'll take the sheriff to get here?"
"Depends on if anyone still has gas. Those will be here in less than fifteen. The rest, an hour at least." Too long, Scamp mouthed to himself.
The man who had taken Dan's place shouted, "They're coming!" They all scrambled up the embankment and lay flat. Kate sighted through her scope at a man running toward them, firing his pistol. He had no shirt and dirty camo pants. Her trigger pulled and blood blossomed across his naked chest. She took a breath. Another, this one in a trucker hat and jeans, grinning maniacally. The rifle kicked and the grin disappeared.
Too late, she realised her companions weren't aiming at the women. One clambered over the wall and triumphantly looked around for a target. Her eyes fell on Eric. No time for a rifle, no time to aim. Kate reached around, pulled the gun out of her waistband and fired in rapid succession. The gun cracked repeatedly, then the woman's arm cracked as a bullet found bone. One more shot, dead center. Then Kate sighted quickly down the embankment and emptied the rest of her load. Another down and the rest ran for better cover.
*
Kate licked her lips and wondered why she hadn't thought to bring water. Her mouth tasted like dirt. Twenty minutes they’d spent in the trench, the rush had been repelled and now no one on either side felt like making the first move. Dan had put two guys in positions near the top of the piled dirt and told them to shoot anything that moved. Hopefully this would keep the other side pinned down until they had time to figure something out. The rest of them huddled at the bottom and worked on a plan in hushed whispers.
Dan wanted to set up an ambush of sorts. His idea was to divide the men into two teams, order them to follow the trench until they were each about thirty feet off the road on either side and then play dead. Eventually, he whispered, the invaders would assume they had run for it and try to come over, at which point they would cut them to ribbons in the crossfire.
“You’re a fine man and an excellent poker player,” Scamp said, “but that is the most piss-poor excuse for a plan I’ve ever heard. You’ll have us shooting in the direction of the enemy, sure, but our own men are gonna be right on the other side of ‘em. Friendly fire accident waiting to happen. Besides, what if they don’t all come at once? We might get a few of ‘em and then the rest will know we’ve spread out, and they’ll do the same. Instead of defending this spot of road right here we’ll be defending the entire trench. They outnumber us, it’s basic numbers that someone will slip through.”
“I’m open to suggestions, Scamp.”
“I’m working on it.”
Scamp muttered into his whiskers and drew little lines in the dirt which meant something to him but nothing to anyone else. After a moment he looked up. “All right then. Here’s what we’ll do. We’ve got the ground advantage and we’re outnumbered bad, so we pretty much have no option but to take a defensive strategy. I want five men spread across the top of the trench, right across the road, and two teams of three to head back about fifty feet on either side in case anyone over there gets the bright idea to go around us anyhow. Y’all stay in your position and take a shot at anything that moves. We’ll keep them pinned like that until the sheriff gets here with more men, and then we can send teams around to outflank them.”
It wasn’t great but it would have to do. Kate parcelled out ammo as best she could from what was in her bag. They had plenty for the M-16s and 9mm, tons of spare .38 and a few boxes of shotgun shells that matched Scamp’s gun and a couple of others. The rest would have to be thrifty. Dan, Eric and Kate volunteered for the more dangerous road assignments, Scamp headed north with the two men who had the least ammo and the remaining three went south along the bottom of the trench.
Eric made her take the southernmost post nearer to the treeline and shook her hand. “Good shooting.”
“You too.”
“If they overrun us, I want you to haul it south towards the house.”
She only nodded. He wasn’t ordering her to tuck tail and run, he was telling her to retreat and set up new defences in a separate location. They both understood that.
The minutes crawled as they remained at an impasse, each side taking frequent shots but making no direct hits. The invaders had been confident when they arrived, but the loss of three in the initial surge and seven more in the next had taught them caution. This county was already proving to be expensive, they didn’t want to lose even more. The defenders were equally as concerned, if not more so. Kate had hoped the sheriff would have been there by now. The silence from within the county spoke volumes about the lack of fast transport, and that meant they were going to be forced to hold them off alone until Larry could round up a significant crew and bike them all out to the county line. Another forty-five minutes at least, by her best estimate, and maybe more.
They were approaching that mark when Scamp whistled them down from their positions. Eric signalled the other two men to hold the trench and he and Kate slid down.
“They’re making us waste ammo,” Scamp warned. “Trying to wait us out. Pass the word to stop shooting at some jackass sticking a hand up and waving it.”
“What did you pull us down for?” Eric asked shrewdly. “You could have passed the word yourself and left us at our posts.”
Scamp was quiet, tapping the butt of his shotgun with one hand. “It’ll be dark in a couple of hours.”
“Yeah. And?”
“You, Kate and one of my guys are the only ones of us with night-vision scopes and he’s on his last magazine.”
“Oh, crap.”
“Yep. That about sums it up.”
They all fell silent, thinking. “I can fit all of us in the Durango,” Kate offered. “We can haul out of here if we have to.”
Scamp worked this around in his head and shrugged. “If Larry don’t show, I don’t see as we have any other choice. It’s settled then. When it starts to get dark we’ll all fall back to the house and the county will have to take its chances.”
Maybe a mile in the distance, the roar of an engine could be heard. It was coming in fast.
“What’s that?”
Scamp popped his head up and took a quick look around. “Reinforcements.”
“Finally!” Kate said with relief.
Scamp shook his head grimly. “Their reinforcements. Get back to your positions. New plan: kill the new guys before they can trench in.”
Kate and Eric scrambled back up the embankment and lay flat, rifles at the ready. One thoughtless invader stood to get a better look at the incoming vehicle and Eric popped him in the shoulder. He grinned at Kate, ostentatiously drew a mark in the dirt and held up one finger. Oho, it was gonna be like that, was it. Kate grinned back and sighted through her scope.
A four-wheel drive came into view, coming in at top speed. The truck bed was loaded down with gun-toting thugs, waving their rifles and hollering in anticipation of a fight. Kate kept her scope on it, waiting, waiting... CRACK! The truck lurched sickeningly to the left as her bullet tore through tire rubber. She took aim again quickly. CRACK! The driver’s side windshield spiderwebbed around a neat hole and the truck rolled heavily about forty yards from her post, spilling people all over the road. Echoing barks began to spit from her companions as they took advantage of the confusion and the thugs running, limping and crawling for cover.
In the noise of the melee, Kate didn’t see or hear the fellow come running in from the south until he was frantically tugging on her boot, and she nearly shot him for his trouble.
“Jesus, Jack! What?! I’m busy here!”
“They... they... over there... I’m sorry, ma’am...”
“Spit it out, boy, I’m kind of in the middle of something!”
“They got past us!” he gasped. “Five guys, we didn’t see them, Chuck got one but they sh-shot him!”
Kate stared at him, then down the trench toward the south. Her home was in that direction. “They got past you?”
“Yes, I’m so sorry-“
She leapt down into the trench and, pausing to stuff a box of ammo in her pocket, tore off down the ditch without another word.
Kate stood where the ditch ended, about fifty feet from the road. Gunfire barked behind her but she was deaf to it. This is where the creek entered the county, which is why they had halted the ditch and took it up again twenty feet on the other side. Her eyes followed the trickling water into the county. She and the boys fished in this creek. It went conveniently right past their back pasture.
Kate took off, following the creek and covering ground as rapidly and silently as possible. Both hands were on the heavy rifle, one finger on the trigger guard, the warm metal of the 9mm comforting against the small of her back. No telling how fast they were going. Maybe they wouldn’t see the house.
Burning pain began to shoot through her chest with every breath. Kate pushed herself harder. Nearly there now, no one in sight. She should be seeing her back fence right about... There it was. With the last of four men hopping over it, and she wasn’t close enough to take a shot.. Oh God, boys, run!
She sprinted. Bugger if they heard her, she’d draw them off. Ten more yards... The men were ambling across her pasture, laughing. Probably thought they were home free now, and with an easy mark right ahead with smoke rolling like a welcome mat from the chimney. A report sounded from the barn, and she heard the farm truck’s engine’s starter. It kept cranking and cranking and cranking. No no no, I’m not close enough yet! Her eyes never left the men as she tore through the impeding brush. Their guns came up and they looked around for a target. The truck’s starter kept cranking and cranking and cranking. She swore at herself for not starting it more often, and another shot came from the barn. They didn’t have a target but now they had a direction, and they began pumping rounds into the wooden structure. No, no, no-no-NO-NO...
Kate hopped the fence with a leap that would have made her PE coach cry tears of joy, raced thirty feet and dropped to one knee. Rifle up. CRACK. CRACK. Three heads swung her way and one hit the dirt of the pasture forever. The rifle bucked a third time and jammed. Shit! Numbly she heard gunfire as she threw the rifle aside and pulled out her handgun. The sights kept jerking and it took a half an instant for her to realise she was crying. Her leg kicked out from under her with a blow that felt like the mother of all horse kicks, and Kate went down shooting.
*
Eric squeezed off a particularly good shot and glanced over at Kate to gloat. Inexplicably, her spot was empty. Alarmed, he looked around and spotted the pale, panicking boy from earlier.
“Where’s Kate?”he shouted over the noise. The boy sobbed and pointed down the ditch in response.
“I told her they got past us and she went after them. I’m s-s-sorry!”
Eric looked down the ditch and then back at the boy. “How long ago?”
“Minute or two, maybe five.”
A mass of townsfolk, all armed to the teeth, swarmed over the county side of the embankment and his eyes lit on Larry, sliding into the ditch with his head down.
“Bet you boys are glad to see me,” Larry joked.
“Have you seen Kate? Is she with you?”
“No, I thought she was here with you.”
“Sonofabitch! KATE!”
Despite spending his entire adult life in the city or aboard a ship, Eric had grown up a farm boy. His folk’s place was sixteen miles outside of town, and a teenager that far away from everything gets cabin fever mighty fast. Eric learned early and well that while his parents would only laugh at being asked to chauffeur him around to all his friends’ homes, they were more than happy to drive him to Scout meetings, football practice and track meets. In the valiant name of having a social life, young Eric became quite the sprinter.
Years of nights out smoking, exerting himself only for the mandatory twice-yearly PT quals and the plain effects of time had once had him convinced that his days of running were gone with his youth. That day, Eric ran the race of his life.
*
Kate gasped at the sudden wash of pain and beads of sweat broke out on her forehead as she rose back up. The three men advanced on her, swaggering and laughing. Morons. They were at a closer range now and a leg wound didn’t interfere with her trigger finger in the slightest. Smoothly her gun hand went up and a man went down. Two to the body, one to the head. Make sure the bastard didn’t get back up again. They were going to get her, but she’d sure as hell leave less of them for her boys to shoot at.
A report sounded a third time and one of the two remaining jerked as a small bloody hole appeared in his shoulder. They whipped around to face the forgotten threat of a long gun and a small figure distracted them all.
“Mom!”
“Jake, baby, no! Go back!”
Jake raised Eric’s old pea-shooter once more and the men responded with their own. Jake and Kate fired at the same time. Kate side exploded in pain - warm, sharp pain - and dimly through the haze she swore she hear the crack of her M-16. Maybe Jake got the weapon cleared, she thought stupidly. Good boy, he’d have a better shot with her bigger rifle. The rifle cracked again and again and again, and the world spun and tilted as it filled with the sound of nothing but rifle fire. The ground was cool against her cheek; foggily, she wondered when she had lain down but decided it didn’t matter. Her leg hurt, her side hurt but the ground was lovely and cool and she was so very, very tired.
“Kate! Kate, open your eyes, girl. Look at me.”
Eric swam into view, lurching about fit to make her seasick. She squinted and the world stopped spinning briefly. “That hurts like hell,” she drawled.
“I bet it does. Can you wiggle your toes and your fingers for me? Good, that’s good.” He stripped his coat and shirt off, and his bare chest goose-pimpled in the brisk, chill air. She giggled thickly.
“Put your clothes back on, the neighbours will talk.”
“I need a bandage, this’ll do until Jake gets something from the house. Kate, I’m going to roll you over to check for an exit wound. It’s probably going to hurt.”
“All righ-“ She gasped in shock as sickly waves bombarded her. She felt blood running thickly down her back, and then world went black and she felt nothing at all.
That stupid hen was under her window again. Next time Larry came out she was sending a note to Sara Ellen for tips on how to break a broody hen of setting too early in the year.
She opened her eyes and the room lurched dizzily. “Well, hello, darling. Took you long enough.”
“Scamp?” Her throat was dry and swollen.
“Shush. Drink something.”
A glass of cold water was carefully held to her lips and she gulped greedily. It felt as if she still had dirt in her mouth from the trench. The trench! “Oh my gosh, Scamp, where’s Jake?”
“Jake’s fine, not even a scratch. Can’t say the same for you. You’re a damned idiot, Kate, running off like that all by yourself. I tell you, I ever see you pull a stupid stunt like that again I’ll shoot you myself. Now sit still, you don’t want to pull your stitches. I’ll go let everyone know you’re awake.”
Eric and the boys came in and she hugged them - gently, with her right arm only. They sat on the bed and chattered to her; airing grievances (Mr. Eric made me do the dishes last night when it was Sam’s turn. Was not! Was so!), solemnly informing her they had lost a steer and the sow to the gunfire and in general telling her the stories of the affairs of little boys. She held their hands to calm them, looked gravely at them each in turn and asked if they were quite all right.
“Oh, yes,” Jake said. “Mr. Eric talked to me last night, while you were sleeping. He said it was normal to be upset, even big grown men in the Navy get upset when they shoot someone. But then he said I wasn’t the one who killed him, I only nicked him, and I did it to defend my mother just like a good man should. Say, Mom, that was pretty brave of me, huh?”
“I tried to get away with Emma, like you said,” Sam piped up a little defensively, as if he felt guilty for not being as brave as Jake. “Only the truck wouldn’t start.”
“That’s all right, Sam,” Eric said. “You did exactly as your mother told you. Jake was brave, but he was also foolhardy to leave his cover like that. Jake needs to learn to keep his head better when he’s that badly outnumbered. If he hadn’t gotten lucky, he would have wished he’d been in the truck with you.”
Jake pointedly ignored him. After a few minutes the boys were getting a bit rowdy so Eric shooed them out of the room, saying their mother needed rest. He came over and sat next to the bed.
“What’s Jake’s problem?”
He chuckled. “He’s mad at me for taking his gun privileges away until fall. I told him that he isn’t being punished for not following orders; he stayed in the barn to ‘hold them off’ when the truck wouldn’t start and Sam backed him up that he intended to get into the truck as soon as Sam got it started. He’s being punished for leaving the cover of the barn, but he thinks he was a right little hero and I’m failing to appreciate what a man he is.”
“You’re right, and I’ll tell him so myself,” she said firmly. “I thought my heart would stop when I saw him running across that field.”
“I think my heart did stop when you ran off without me,” Eric said quietly.
“I had to. Those men were headed straight toward my children.”
“But you went without me.”
She flushed and her hands picked at the yarn ties on her quilt. “I’m sorry.”
There was an awkward moment, which Eric tried to smooth over. “Well, the doc says you should be all right. Lots of blood loss but no major arteries. Your side was a meat through-and-through, he says the scarring will be pretty considerable but you’re lucky it was far enough over to miss the abdominal cavity. You’re probably not so lucky on the leg, he thinks it nicked the bone.”
“What’s that mean? Wait a sec, what doc?”
“I’ll get to the doc in a minute. On the bone nicking, he says it’s likely you’ve got a hairline fracture in your thigh bone and a chip taken out. He can’t cast it so you’ll have to be off your feet for a few weeks, he thinks that kind of thing can cause nerve damage or an extra lump of bone to grow while it’s healing if you don’t baby it.”
“Okay, I’ll take his word for it. What else?”
“He says the dressings need to be kept very clean and changed often to prevent infection, you’ll be weak for a while from the blood loss so you need to eat well and get your rest, and said to give you Percoset for the pain.”
“Yes, please. I feel awful.”
Eric pulled a pillbox from his pocket and handed her one with a glass of water from the night stand. She gulped it down. “Now, interesting thing. We have a doctor of sorts for the county.”
“When did that happen?”
“Yesterday. It must have been all of five seconds after I realised you were gone that Larry and something like half the men in the county can running over the other side of the ditch. I took off after you and got the rest from Obie and Scamp later.” He rolled his eyes. “Obie sounds disappointed that it was so easy once they showed up.”
She chuckled. That sounded like Obie, all right. “They did pretty much like Scamp said; reinforced the ditch and sent the rest in two teams to outflank them. It was over in a few minutes. So they’re rounding everyone up and they see this guy sitting about twenty yards back, all by himself and unarmed. He said he had a cousin in the county who could vouch for him, and he did.”
“Who?”
“Lisa Adler. Or her husband anyway, but her husband was found dead weeks and weeks ago. Got into a knife fight by the looks of it.”
Kate put two and two together. “And this guy is the county’s new doctor? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“No, let me finish. From what Lisa told us, her husband’s entire family was about worthless but for this guy, and he wasn’t all that great either but he was a big improvement over the rest. He got caught with a couple of marijuana cigarettes and was given the option of enlisting or going to jail. So he joined the Navy and became a corpsman. Stayed in for his tour, re-enlisted, did just fine until he finally got caught in a random drug test after seven years in and they threw him out. She says that other than the pot, he’s basically the only decent guy in the whole family.”
“If he’s so decent then what was he doing with that lot?”
“A hostage. He tried to hike to Georgia as soon as the weather warmed up, hoping to check on his grandmother, and they picked him up. He told them he was a military medic and they let him live. He never participated in the raids, his job was just to clean them up afterward. They fed him but they wouldn’t turn him loose.”
“So we liberated him.”
“Sort of. Larry sentenced him to two years’ community service for aiding and abetting. He’s not allowed to take anything in trade for his work until then, nor is he allowed to own a gun, but Sara Ellen will feed him and Larry’s looking for somewhere he can set up a clinic.”
“So how good a doc is the guy?”
“He’d just made second class before being booted out, so he must have been pretty good. Second class in seven years is great for a corpsman. Not doctor quality but probably close to a professional RN.”
“Well, that’s something anyway. We needed a nurse pretty badly.”
“We need a lot of things. Larry has the security detail holed up in his house right now for debriefing, trying to figure out where things went wrong and how to improve them for next time. It could have been bad out there.”
“It’s coming together. Might never get back to normal, but we’ll figure everything out eventually.” Kate yawned. The pill was kicking in and it was making her groggy.
“You sleep. I’ll have some food waiting for you when you wake up,” Eric said.
“Mm-kay.”
What followed was several weeks of purgatory for Kate. She was an active woman by nature; enforced laziness drove her crazy. After two weeks of staring out the window and being relegated to her bed, she finally kicked up enough fuss that Eric said anyone that bad-tempered was well enough to be moved to the living room. He made her let him carry her, though, and blamed doctor’s orders that she wasn’t to put weight on her leg. Then, every morning he would carry her into the front room where she would help the boys with their lessons, play with Emma, do her county communications work and knit from the prison that was her couch. Every night he carried her back into bed. After three weeks, when he caught her staring longingly at the front porch and the beautiful spring day beyond it, he let her spend the afternoons in a rocker on the porch. Her temper improved remarkably at this point.
Eric’s affliction was more generalised. He learned that most unhappy lesson of all men whose womenfolk come down seriously ill: keeping a house running isn’t nearly as easy as they thought. The kids and the housework was in itself a full time job, then there were the stock, the fields and gardens, taking care of Kate and helping Scamp put in his garden. He freely confessed to cheating; for weeks they lived off canned food and other simple stuff, and baked goods he traded Mrs. Adler for. He had time to trade, he did not have time to cook. It should be said that if Kate gloated she did so in private, and kept her public comments to complimenting him on how well he was doing managing the house.
The peas unfurled their first leaves and Kate missed it, but she also missed having to hoe the weeds that soon followed and the second planting of the less-hardy early spring vegetables. By the fifth week she was sneakily getting around when she knew no one was looking and eagerly awaiting the doc’s weekly visit so she could pester him to get up. He allowed this on the sixth week with the caveat that she was restricted to light duty only. She immediately stood up and went to get supper going.
Larry came by for his report a couple days later and scowled deeply when he found her out in the garden. “You’re supposed to be resting.”
“This is very restful.” She dusted the dirt off her hands and invited him in for a cup of coffee. He sat at the table while she fetched the weekly report, brewed a fresh pot of coffee and set out a plate with a few dense, moist slices of Mrs. Adler’s special of the week, an apple-walnut bread, with a dish of butter.
Larry spread some on a slice and took a bite. “Oh, wow, this is fantastic. Where did you find this woman, Kate?”
“Actually, she found me.”
“Keep her around. I don’t think the county has eaten this well since the whole mess started.”
He polished off his cup of coffee and another slice of the bread while he read the report, and Kate topped off his mug. Larry set the report on the table and put his reading glasses back in his shirt pocket.
“Kate, I have a few things I’d like to poll some of our most prominent community members about.”
“Well, go right ahead, Larry. You’re the sheriff, after all, you wouldn’t need the permission of us regular folks to do a simple thing like that.”
He laughed after a moment. “No, Kate, I mean you are one of the prominent members and I’d like your opinion on a community matter.”
“Me? I’m a housewife, what’s so important about me?”
He laughed harder. Wiping tears from his eyes, he said, “Gracious. I’m down to only three folks who have enough extra that they can donate to the townsfolk, and of the three you give the most, the oftenest. You’ve run county communications for months. You’re wealthy enough to finance a bakery, as far as wealth is calculated these days, and you fought to defend the county without a second thought and were wounded doing so. The women in town think you’re something else.”
She gave him a blank look in response. “Oh, let it go, Kate. Anyhow, the first is communications. Thanks to you, I know that Kentucky has split into three different states and tomorrow their holding elections for the new governors. That’s real good. And this here, about Florida’s citrus crop suffering because they’re having a bad drought down south. Very valuable. Upstate New York is almost completely controlled by some jackbooted thug with his own army, always good to know, and a report by an unverified source that Norfolk is a ghost town. That’s all solid information but with the exception of Norfolk, none of it’s close enough to be of much use. I’m beginning to think we’re wasting our gas by trying to figure out what’s out there, because the answer seems to be not a whole hell of a lot.”
“I’m sorry, Larry, I’ve told them to set priority for more localised communications but there isn’t anyone out there. Obie said that other than the new guy he found outside of Suffolk, he’s pretty certain we’ve got the only airwaves in Virginia.”
“No, Kate, you did good. That’s just it, though; we’re using gas to listen to ourselves. There isn’t anyone else talking.”
She stirred her coffee and put the spoon down decisively. “You’re right. I’ll miss it, but we’re wasting resources. I’ll tell Jane, Obie and Mumbler to go ahead and pack up shop.”
“Good, I was hoping you’d see it like that. Now, I had an idea about all those empty places in the county. Their owners died or took off and haven’t been heard from. I say we hold an auction this fall, and I can use the proceeds to keep in reserve in case we ever get that shipment of tea we were talking about back in February.”
“I’ll do you one better,” Kate said. “Give the proceeds of the sale to Dan in trade for handing over nearly all his inventory when the bombs first fell. He’s a businessman, he’ll know how to haggle for a better price and he has to have his store back. It’s his way of life, and he gave it to the county.”
“By gaw, I didn’t even think of that,” Larry said. “You’re right, anyone coming to town to trade will probably head straight for the market and we do owe Dan that much. Great idea. Next item is probably more news than anything else; Jon Carpenter made it back into town four days ago.”
“Really now?” Kate leaned forward, deeply interested. “Was he successful?”
“As Doc Holliday said, ‘Wyatt, I am rolling.’” Larry grinned hugely. “The way Jon and his boys set their system up, it wasn’t all his. Every time they found something of value they divided it among themselves and the agreement was that each keeps the contents of their own bicycle cart as pay for the trip. Once I explained the situation to Jon, though, he and his boys talked it over. They kept a fair share for themselves and their families and donated the rest, which wound up being nearly two-thirds of six bicycle carts. Pretty skimpy when I handed it all out, though I can now say for complete certainty that everyone in town will make it until the gardens start coming in.”
“That’s wonderful!” Kate clapped her hands gleefully. “So, did he have any news?”
Jon had plenty of news, as it turned out. They had swung south at first, thinking that Stuart would be a good place to start. The Stuart everyone recalled was no more, it had been replaced with a lawless, every-man-for-himself replica of the worst bits of the Wild West. The bicycle carts had been humming along at a good clip, the men looking forward to reaching town, when on the approach to Stuart they paused at a gallows emblazoned with the words, “PROFITEERS AND BULLIES BEWARE”. Several old corpses dangled from the gallows, some still wearing tattered yet recogniseable uniforms of the Stuart police. Jon and his crew had carefully backtracked and sped east as fast as their bikes would go.
Cruising down back roads and whatever small country highways were left open, they guessed by the few signs left standing that they were another two counties over before meeting a living person. She fed them a hot meal of fried chicken and bread, and warned them that they had better travel at night for the next few days as there was a gang of bandits that had laid out most of the roadways in those parts. They thanked her for the meal and the tip, and began exercising a lot more caution. The trip had stopped seeming like such a lark then, Jon would later tell the sheriff.
Further south they ran across a small community of sorts, perhaps three dozen people all on one rural road that had fared well. The men met them at the head of the road, heavily armed, and after a few tense minutes they exchanged as much information as each had. The neighbor group gave Jon a few hot tips on roads that stood completely empty where he might find useful items and told them that their little group had an extensive orchard and might visit the town to trade later in the year.
They worked their way back west, skirting Stuart again and running into not a little trouble, before winding up in the furthest western reaches of Virginia. Folks were very spread out in those hills, and very wary. When Jon was able to get someone to talk to him, he asked one why they seemed to be so little troubled by a criminal element.
“He said,” Jon told the sheriff, laughing, “‘Oh, we done keeled all them folk. They int’rrupted a blamed good barbecue.’”
Jon did get a few of the otherwise stand-offish western folk to talk to him and found that most were hungering for news, and Jon had a treasure of it compared to them. Both sides compared notes and Jon let a select few, including one fellow who was a mason by trade, know where to find their county.
Pickings weren’t good in that area as a general rule so they veered east-northeast, toward the outer reaches of Roanoke. It was hard travelling. Between the roadside camps of refugees and frequent encounters with roving gangs of various size, the only reason they crossed Roanoke with as much goods in the carts as they came in with was because they moved quickly and went back to travelling in the dark. Immediately north of Roanoke they hit a great stretch of road, full of empty houses that still had plenty of goods in them. They filled the carts and decided the trip had been a success, and made their way back home.
Larry told her all this and leaned back as she refilled his coffee mug and passed him the sugar. “What gets me,” he said after a moment, “is how everything just fell apart. Those places had some fine police departments, I knew some of the guys working there. How did law and order go so bad, so quick for them but we’re still doing all right? I mean, we’ve had to take some steps and there’s been problems, sure enough, but our county is still pretty peaceful.”
Kate considered her words before answering, because this thought had occurred to her as well. “The short answer is that they didn’t have you. The long answer is that most people will go along to get along, all they want is someone strong enough to step up and tell them what’s right and how things are going to be. Sounds like in some of those places the law just decided to pack up or use their authority to fend for themselves first and only, and let the regular folk do the same. I imagine in some, the law tried but were outnumbered and whoever won became the new law. Here, we had you stand up and tell everyone that things were going to be exactly the same as always. Folks that might have turned to begging or stealing, or fallen in with the wrong side of the law just to get along didn’t because you were here to ram civilisation down everyone’s throats. You stayed your post, and everyone stayed normal because of it.”
Larry shook his head. “There has to be more to it than that. I can’t accept that I’m the only law enforcement officer in all of western Virginia that didn’t throw my training, my entire character out the window when things went to pot.”
“Well, sure,” Kate said. “You could say that we got lucky. Seems that we were awful overdue for a raid like the one we had a few weeks back. On the other hand, that could have been your doing too. You saw to it that most everyone in the county had a gun and some ammo. You recall we had a number of beggars and thieves for a while there but they all kind of got the hint after a few shootings went badly for them, or you run them off. So you could say we got lucky, or you could say that you made us the least attractive target in the area.”
Larry still shook his head and Kate laughed at him, throwing his earlier words back in his teeth. “Let it go, Larry. You’re the finest policeman in all of western Virginia, and false modesty doesn’t make that any less true.”
Well thank you for bringing this story back to the top of the posts.
Harsh reality of living in a post disaster/war time.
Would love to see more installments at some point.
Thank you dear author!
I do hope there's more. This is a really good tale, and well written too!
Bad
Follow me to http://badkarma00.wordpress.com/ for all my craziness So say we all. . . .
"If you value your lives, besomewhere else." Ambassador Delenn.
Really good story, but the story stopped in 2007 and the last post on Tb2 by ChiliPalmer was in 8/15/2008.
Does anyone know who ChiliPalmer is, to get the author to resume?
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