The Scott Pfeiffer Story (Book 2): Sheol

by Woods, Shane

  She was right. I pulled near to the left side of the road and tapped my brakes three times to brake light signal a stop, and then slowed until we were in fact parked.

  At first, I only saw a single animal. A large black steer stood alone in a smallish field fairly close to our vantage point. The creature lazily chewed on patches of grass as if the whole world had never stopped spinning. Its eyes flicked in our direction, and then right back to the task at hand. Just a passerby of the apocalypse, not concerned with the greater scope of things besides ‘chew grass, swallow cud, fart, repeat’.

  The animal had been surviving healthily and unmolested due to the care of another. Where once a simple cattle fence had been, the supports were bolstered and made to hold lengths of chain-link fencing. The lengths of fence appeared to be held together with a mixture of ratchet-straps and industrial zip ties. Lengths of heavy, bare copper wire snaked its way through the weave of the fencing.

  “Wouldn’t touch that fence,” Fred cautioned, as if he noticed this at the same time as me. “Looks spicy.”

  “I don’t know if that’s the right word,” I chuckled, “but I agree. Hands off.”

  “What do you think?” Clara asked.

  “We came all this way looking for farm animals,” I explained, “that right there looks like a farm animal to me. Let’s find out if he belongs to anyone.”

  “Hey Scott?” Fred asked.

  “Yeah, Fred,” I replied.

  “I want you to notice that this fine specimen is, in fact, not running around all willy-nilly,” Fred stated completely deadpan.

  “Fuck you Fred,” I stated just as flatly before speaking into my radio, “All teams, fifty-yard spacing, roll slow, we’re gonna follow this fence and see if the owner is around. Over.”

  All returned in compliance and as I started rolling, letting the truck move on its own accord, they held back. Once I was about fifty yards ahead, the second truck began lumbering forward, its trailer creaking as it was once again put in motion. Eventually, the third truck followed suit.

  We followed the length of fencing for a while, taking note of the blackened lumps lying around its perimeter. Every so often, what appeared to be an infected lay burnt to a crisp just our side of the barrier. In some places, a piece of ragged clothing hung here and there. Once, an entire hand, fingers still clenching an obstacle they would never pass.

  We came upon a small road branching off from the main avenue and I turned the truck left to continue following the new direction the fence took. Before long, my truck was pulled alongside a gate near a barn and a driveway leading up to a colonial-style home at the end. Before I could even unbuckle my seatbelt, a trio of men in a John Deere Gator pulled near to the gate and parked.

  One of the men dismounted the small vehicle and approached the fence. He was a bear of a guy, who looked as though he’d be just as at-home in a small country bar. Easily pictured slow-drinking a beer in a motorcycle vest with a trucker cap pulled low showing more of his black beard and neck-length black hair than it showed of his face.

  The other two that were with him took position on the other side of the machine and kept low, their rifles positioned pointed skyward but able to drop to the ready at a moment’s notice. I instructed my people to take similar stances, remain ready, and we’d see how this goes.

  I disembarked my driver’s seat and approached the same as he did, stopping maybe a half-dozen paces from my side of the gate. He did the same again.

  “Nice day today!” I exclaimed, then immediately cringed internally. That was going to be my opening line. Really?

  “We ain’t much in the business of meeting neighbors,” the man spoke. “State your business, or get the fuck on outta here.”

  “Sorry,” I conceded, “let’s start from the beginning. We need animals. We’re willing to make generous trades if need be, but winter is coming and we’re going to need to keep a bunch of people fed.”

  “And if I say no?” he responded, no humor in his voice. “What if I wanted to keep my cattle?”

  “Well,” I explained, “they’re yours. That’s kind of your say, I’d imagine. But we can help each other.”

  “You’re no raiders,” he observed. “The last two groups tried to strongarm them. They’re buried in that field behind you.”

  “Let’s try this from the beginning,” I said, approaching the gate with my hand extended. “I’m Scott. Scott Pfeiffer. I’m the head of a large compound of survivors in the Falls. I enjoy a good scotch, classic cars, and being able to eat.”

  “Erik Kearns,” the man replied, accepting my hand in his and shaking firmly. “This is my farm.”

  “Has it always been, Erik?” I asked him. “Pleased to meet you, by the way.”

  “Not always,” he admitted. “The previous owner was attacked and killed by the monsters. A big one moved into his barn, too. We cleared it all out, put up a fence, started rescuing animals. It’s mine now.”

  “Erik,” I continued, flashing my best salesman smile, “my teams are awfully exposed out here. What say we open this gate and come in and talk. I think I have an offer you may appreciate, but I don’t like having our backs exposed, especially since we were just very recently engaged.”

  “That you?” he asked, jerking his thumb at the smoke cloud rising with authority over the distant landscape.

  “I believe that was,” I explained. “Investigated a human ambush the infected had overrun, got ambushed by them instead. Lost six people.”

  “Alright,” he stated and motioned to the two with him, “but, just inside the gate. Only two of you on the porch to talk, the rest have to stay with your trucks.”

  “Fair enough,” I beamed, but a moment later, my confidence dipped slightly.

  As he turned around and motioned again, the men from behind the Gator broke cover; one spoke into his own radio, and five more in total appeared from around various equipment and pieces of cover. I had thought we had him outnumbered. He was confident because, plainly, he had one man more than us in the immediate vicinity, no telling how many more waited around, then.

  The gate swung open, and I watched Clara slide over to the driver’s seat and put the truck in gear. At first, she pulled straight forward, then the reverse lights illuminated, and she backed the truck in and to her left, positioning it out of the way yet close to the exit and pointing in the right direction to depart the area quickly if need be. Good girl, I thought and smiled slightly.

  A moment later the other two trucks approached and after lots of direction from others, each managed to back safely into the safe area inside Erik’s farm.

  I motioned for Clara and instructed the others to remain with the trucks. Clara came to meet me, and we followed Erik wordlessly to his front porch where he motioned for us to sit.

  “What’s going on?” a woman asked as she emerged from the house. “Who are these people?”

  She was thin and appeared to be in her mid-to-late twenties. Her wavy dark hair was a mess and she had clear bags underlining her equally dark eyes. She wasn’t ugly, but the recent turns of our world had definitely taken its toll on her. A little girl that looked much like her mother burst out of the door yelling for her daddy and was immediately wrangled by the mom and coerced back inside.

  “My wife,” Erik introduced. “Name’s Angela. Angela, this is Scott, we’re just having a talk. Business.”

  Angela rolled her eyes and kept a hushed conversation with Erik as she motioned repeatedly in our direction before spinning and storming back inside the house.

  “We have kids here,” Erik explained as he found a seat across from us, “she’s just worried about their safety, new people here and all.”

  “I feel it,” I assured him. “We have a couple-dozen or so at our own compound. It’s a challenge keeping them separated from the world. That’s one way we can help you.”

  “How so?” he questioned, eyeing me wearily.

  “We hold twenty-five-ish square blocks of Cuyahoga Falls,
” I detailed, “surrounded by a ten-foot dry moat and backed by a ten-foot fence reinforced with earth. It’s manned, guarded with armed sentries twenty-four seven, and only accessible by water or by a double-gated security fence.”

  Erik’s eyebrows raised slightly as if to say ‘Damn, bro’ and he shifted his gaze to Clara. She silently nodded and rocked her head in my direction, and I continued my spiel.

  “We have two-hundred survivors, approximately,” I explained. “An armory, and an open trade route to another colony nearly on the same scale as our own. I offer safety, security, and longevity.”

  “But mister,” he began, “we’ve been here since the beginning. We ain’t doing great, but we’re not doing badly, either.”

  “I never said you were, Erik,” I corrected, “but your numbers are small. Your wife looks damn tired from just keeping up, and I noticed your guys operated that front gate like the wires running through it didn’t matter.”

  “Wait, what are you getting at?” Clara asked me directly.

  “Does your electric fence not work anymore?” I asked Erik.

  “It does,” he said, his gaze dropping, “but it runs on a generator. Without a steady fuel supply, we have battery-powered sensors up. One of them goes off, we run the fence for fifteen minutes.”

  “I see,” I said flatly. “How many of you are here? And how many animals?”

  “About fifteen of us,” he described. “Six kids, five are mine. Dozen heifers, a steer, handful of pigs, goats, and sheep. About fifteen chickens, too.”

  “You’ve been caring for them all your own?” I asked. “How’s food and supply here?”

  He confirmed that they kept a team effort, not caring just for the animals themselves but the farm in general. Supplies were typically in short supply but they did the best they could with what they had, though the lack of a populated local area made scavenging for more a big risk, especially since they didn’t have the physical presence to send out regular teams or stage any long-distance runs, such as what we were on.

  “Come with us,” I offered, and watched the surprise break his features. “We have everything you are lacking. We have a house ready to move into but there’s no heat. We could definitely offer better accommodations in one of the main buildings if you prefer.”

  “I don’t know man,” Erik replied. “I don’t want to agree and find ourselves in a bad situation.”

  “I get it,” I comforted. “But look at it this way. You’ve already met the guy with the final say in everything there. Me. And, if we’re wrong, I’m not exactly going to risk my people to hold you there. You’d be free to leave any time you wanted. All I ask, is that you do the same as the other two-hundred or so people there and do your part.”

  “Which would be…?” Erik asked for clarification.

  “You’ve done well here, that steer on the way in was healthy,” I offered. “I think you’d pretty much be doing the same thing as you are here. And if you like, you and your people would definitely be a help for us city folk at assisting Cody with regular agricultural duties too.”

  “Well,” he spoke, “I still don’t know. Let me lay it all out to my wife and our friends. You can stay the night if you want. But not in the house.”

  “All teams,” I spoke into my radio, “set up camp for the night. We’re having a sleepover. Over.”

  “I can trust you here?” Erik questioned.

  “As much as we can trust you,” I warned. “This isn’t our first night in the new world, dude. We aren’t looking for fights we don’t need. You already said yourself you’ve had enough raider issues as well.”

  “Speaking of,” Erik started, “what about you? Any big troubles?”

  I explained to him what had happened in the past, the group from Old Northern High School, the small parties here and there who bit off more than they could chew, and I touched as lightly as possible on the new issues with Colonel Parker.

  By the time the discussion was over, the sun was beginning to drop low toward the horizon. I turned to view the large barn closer to the entrance to the property and pointed.

  “Unless it’s strictly forbidden,” I advised, “I’d like access to the top floor of that barn for no more than three of my men at a time.”

  “Just hay and feed up there,” he said. “Long as they don’t wreck it.”

  I spoke more instructions into my radio. Three hour shifts for each three-person team. One at one end of the barn, one at the other, and a third person to watch the other two.

  I walked back to the makeshift encampment to find the tents set up on the trailers themselves and affixed by tow straps instead of tent stakes. They had been moved to encircle a small central area with a low-burning firepit. Several of our people sat around eating jerky and other snacks from their bags, several more already lay asleep.

  I settled in around the fire and kept the conversation soft between us, but we talked of nothing important. We spoke of the past and things we had done or seen, the stories broken from time to time with soft laughter from one or more of us. The flames threw dancing light all around us as we reminisced.

  Every so often as we spoke of our old jobs or school days, one of us would take a low shot at Fred and the fact that he was the oldest one around, in his 40s.

  After a while or so longer, we heard raised voices from the household. I placed a hand on my rifle and twisted slightly to offer my ear to that direction. It was a woman’s voice, and I assumed it to be Erik’s wife, Angela. The voices quieted as quickly as they escalated, and I had assumed it was over.

  A beat or two later however, Erik stepped out onto the porch just barely illuminated between the candlelight in the window, and the moon overhead. Another shadow, one of the other men, appeared next to him, leaning in with a bit of aggression to his body language. They hadn’t broken a rough whisper as of yet, and even when they’d start to become louder, it was broken bits of conversation at best.

  I was strongly getting the impression that Erik wanted to leave, or stay, and the others weren’t in agreeance. The words ‘my half’ got thrown around a few times loud enough to hear, as if it were being used for bargaining purposes.

  I sat only a few more moments listening to the scene as best I could before relenting. The world was going nowhere and whatever they were going to decide, I’d figure out in the morning. If it was really important, they could wake me for it.

  “I’m going to sleep in the truck,” I informed my friends and got up to head in that direction.

  “Me too,” Clara agreed and got up to come with.

  “Excuse me?” I said, side-eyeing her, and she laughed.

  “It’s a crew cab, I’m lying in the back, you can have the front,” she chuckled.

  “I fart and snore,” I cautioned.

  “So do all men,” she replied, pushing me forward.

  I grunted a reply and climbed into the front of the truck, pausing for a moment to pick a scrap of, well, someone, from the fencing around the windows. I reached over and flipped up the center console to present a bench seat that would double well enough as a bed. I then stripped my shirt off and balled it into a pillow and laid down without saying a word as I felt Clara shifting until she found comfort as well.

  Before I could even say goodnight, or at least think to do so, I was out cold.

  TEN

  Morning came, and the truck was miserable. Even after waking up at some point to crack the front windows a bit, the interior was an uncomfortable combination of chilly and stuffy.

  I sat up to find Clara had stepped out at some point and I had the truck to myself. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I swung open the door and shuffled with my eyes nearly closed toward the front gate. Here I unbuttoned my pants and let out a stream of early morning urine, watching it sleepily as it steamed on contact with the cool ground. I pulled my noodle back in, stretched, yawned, and turned to see a scene I definitely did not expect.

  Clara approached, offering a water bottle of MRE coffee a
nd grinning.

  “Does anything wake you up?” she giggled.

  “Pee,” I answered before taking a swig of the mixture. “But you guys should have woken me. What the fuck?”

  While I slept, they worked. One more truck had joined our three, and only mine remained without a trailer. The others had been mostly loaded front to back with supplies, equipment, and what appeared to be half of the animals that Erik said he had.

  “We’ll have to make a trip back for more,” Erik stated as he approached us. “Bedding for the cows and the rest of the feed and some equipment. Tractor and side by side too, if y’all want it.”

  “You’re making a good choice,” I told him, “I’ll do my best to make sure you won’t regret it.”

  “I sure hope so,” he cautioned. “It wasn’t the most popular suggestion we’ve had here, that’s for sure.”

  “Everything okay?” I interrogated. “Heard yelling last night.”

  “That’s just how she communicates,” he laughed. “We’re good, and ready to leave when you are.”

  “And the other guy? Outside?” I prodded.

  “Yeah, Adam.” He nodded. “Just Ange and our kids are leaving, we agreed to half, since we were here first. We keep half the supplies and animals and they keep the farm. When did you want to get on out of here?”

  “Shit doesn’t wait anymore, so let’s go now,” I instructed, walking back to the driver’s side of the truck.

  Erik and I both spoke the order to depart into our radios, and within ten minutes every person was rounded up and ready to go, every animal was double-checked and ready as well.

  It was an interesting sight, seeing cattle strapped down to the flatbed trailers like large, furry lawnmowers. We were reassured a few times by Erik that this is how they got transported on open trailers. The smaller animals were merely left on shorter leashes and stood in place. Chickens? Yeah, they got the star treatment and rode within the truck cab of the pickup Erik supplied.

  Every spot that didn’t contain a human or an animal had been packed in tight as could be with whatever Erik was taking. Another flat trailer had been brought out and my own truck had been backed up to it. To this, several thick livestock blankets and numerous bundles of straw and hay were secured.