“They’ll be at the farm, so think of it as returning the property to its rightful owners,” Ruth explained when I had voiced my concerns. Really, I was surprised to find I still had any lines I was unwilling to cross. That made me smile to myself, since apparently salvaging from a friend’s family was still too far for me.
The store really offered little in the way of items directly useful but I found a few voltmeters and assorted small electrical tools that Sid might find a use for, and placed them in a box. Amy located a pair of one gallon water bottles stored in one of the cabinets and we added that to our meager haul. The small house next door that belonged to the Stevensons was likewise stripped of any food, water or firearms and Ruth gave a happy little cheer when she saw the attached two car garage was empty.
“Sid and Joan had a pair of bug out vehicles, one a Suburban and the other a pickup, with non-electric diesel engines” Stan said, “so they both likely got out with everything from their basement storage.”
“If they were so well set up here, why leave?” Amy had asked.
“Safety in numbers,” I said. “This is a nice little homestead but it is on a county road and with just the two of them I bet they would be hard-pressed to maintain security.”
Nobody had anything to say after that, so we loaded up in our same order as the day before. I had an idea where Ruth wanted to go but I worried how close the route would take us to the state park. Desperate people would have already flocked to the area lakes for water sources, eventually fouling them with improper sanitation, and I worried about ambushes or more barricaded roads.
And now, Amy brings up a story that needed to be told, but I cringed at the thought of reliving those moments.
“Yeah, Luke, what is the deal with your aversion to rest stops? We never did hear the reason.”
“Alright,” I surrendered with a sigh as Ruth chimed in her opinion.
“I did say I would finish the story and I will but please, don’t ask me to repeat it, alright?”
“Amy, Ruth, if Luke thinks it’s that bad, maybe we should just let it lie,” Stan reasoned.
“No,” I said with a wan smile I tried to plaster on my face. “You guys need to be aware of this. First, anyone know how long it takes a person to starve to death? A reasonable sized person, like before? No food but with water?”
“A week?” Ruth guessed.
“Three weeks?” Amy’s guess was better.
“Forty days, more or less, is what I read somewhere,” Stan finally said and the two women made their guesses.
“Yes, Stan, that’s what I’ve read too. That forty day point is important for a few reasons, and the first is that we are well beyond that milestone. People have already starved to death and will continue to do so. Hard to believe somebody could starve to death in the summer, but we’ve probably all seen it.”
“Now, this rest stop I was talking about earlier, somewhere outside Quincy, looked pretty shady but we needed the water and water had been offered. No food, but enough to fill our water bottles.”
“It was a trap?”
I could hear the question in Amy’s voice.
“Yes, of course, it was a trap. They had an older guy out front greeting the travelers, offering water, and ushering us on back. The squatters also had guys flanking us as we entered but they didn’t look to be armed and I didn’t think anything about it at the time. As soon as the three of us turned that last corner, we all knew it was a trap, but by then the escorts were trying to grab our arms and lead us further into that, well, that slaughterhouse.”
“What did you do? How did you have enough ammo to get clear?” Stan asked urgently, caught up by the story despite my best efforts to make it sound like some mundane chore.
I shook my head and realized most of my fellow travelers would not have seen the motion.
“Guys, this was two weeks after the lights went out. And I was coming out from Chicago. I didn’t have a gun then, just my club.”
“What kind of club?”
“The kind you make out of the wooden clothes hanger rod from your hotel room. Or at least, that’s where mine came from. I wrapped one end with some skateboard tape I found and tried to sharpen the other into a point but all I had at the time was a piece of a kitchen knife to scrape at the wood.
“Anyway, what I saw in that restroom is what I wanted to warn you guys about. Forty days to starve is what we agreed, right? This was day fourteen or fifteen and they were already eating the dead.”
“What do you…oh, shit, you are kidding, right?”
I couldn’t see Stan’s face but from the way he was breathing hoarsely, he got it. In a moment, Amy did too.
“I’d heard, but that was like an urban legend, isn’t it?”
“What are you guys talking about? Eating dead what?” Ruth was having to pay more attention to the road and the full impact of my words did not seem to sink in at the moment.
“Honey, what he means they were eating…the other travelers. The ones they were ambushing at the rest stop.”
“If one of the guards hadn’t gotten a little anxious and moved ahead of me, I don’t think I would have gotten out. They had men armed with machetes waiting just inside the doorway, and the guy to my left caught the blade right in the throat. The guy assigned to take me hesitated.”
“What did you do?” Stan blurted.
“I froze up, for just a split second.” I closed my eyes, trying to clear the image from my mind. A nude body, strapped to an overhead rope hung in the corner like a deer being processed. Standing around the partially dismembered corpse were three creatures in rubber boots and dark coveralls, all intent on their butchering chores.
“Then, I just started fighting to get out of there. I used the club, swinging it like a baseball bat and not really caring who I hit. The other guy with me, I never knew either of them by name, he had a knife and a piece of rebar and we fought together, but there were nearly twenty of them running at us. I know at least one had a gun because my new partner went down with a bullet in his belly. Everything was a blur after that, but somehow I got out and back to the road. Bloody and bruised, I somehow made it out. I didn’t stop running for at least a mile.”
What I didn’t say was that was the first time I ever killed anybody. After I broke my club I got my hands on one of their machetes, and I just chopped my way out. I’m pretty sure I killed several somebody’s that day and if I had the chance, I would have killed them all.
“So, the moral of the story is to avoid traps whenever possible. For me, that means staying away from rest stops, but everybody who lives for long on the road has their own pet paranoia. And that was only the first time I saw it going on out there. Not the last.”
“It” being that pinnacle of taboos in Western culture, cannibalism. Sorry, lazy, worthless assholes that were too clueless to hunt game animals or figure out how to properly use a fishing pole, so they started in dining on their fellow humans. The other, other, white meat.
We drove in silence after that, eyes peeled for any sign of ambush or threat. Funny how the thought of ending up on the menu will sharpen a man’s wit and stoke his courage. I thought our little group might need that stiffened spine and a good dose of real fear before this leg of our journey was completed. We still needed to skirt the state forest and shoot the gap between two of the larger cities in Arkansas. Only time would tell if we succeeded.
Telling that story might have been a painful experience for me, but strangely I felt better after sharing the gruesome tale. For once, I wasn’t alone, and being with these new friends made me feel something deep inside that had been long absent. Hope.
I might not make it to my journey’s end, but at least I was traveling with people who made the trip worthwhile.
END BOOK ONE
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This first book is just the beginning of
Luke’s adventures. The next book, twice as long and filled with bloody action and gripping suspense, will offer readers a wider view of the world, and a nation rapidly spiraling into even deeper chaos. Also, learn more about Luke’s story from those lost months, and what the future holds for friends both old and new.
HOME FIRES BURNING
Walking in the Rain
Book Two
Coming soon, exclusively at Amazon.
And here is a sneak peek at the first two chapters of the next book:
CHAPTER ONE
Threading the needle between hostile, desperate camps of armed and highly suspicious survivors was not as much fun as it sounded, I quickly decided. Our new friends Ruth and Stan knew the route, sort of, from living in the area, and Ruth grew up just up the road. So, we relied on their native knowledge to navigate the tangle of gravel tracks and dirt roads over which we traveled.
Some places, though, required us to use the larger thoroughfares (another SAT word, that one), and there’s where the trip got dicey. The first barricade we had to negotiate turned out to not be so bad, in the end. Just a guard party maintaining security on one of the access roads into the Hobbs State Park.
I let Ruth do the talking at first. I couldn’t help but notice her Arkansas twang got a little sharper the more she spoke. The three guys at the barrier, which was a black Suburban parked across the two lane blacktop, all carried AR pattern rifles and looked like they knew from which end the bullets came out. Hunters, or prior military, I thought, so I let my eyes wander while Ruth answered questions and eventually spotted one of the snipers. Overwatch, I guessed, and figured they had two or three more guys out there as backup.
I tuned back in and listened intently as Ruth finished explaining our destination, being more than a little vague about the whereabouts of her family’s farm. In response, the older gentleman, at least, older to me since I placed him in his mid thirties, slung his rifle and his two compatriots joined suit.
“Look, we aren’t trying to block the road, just deter folks from coming into this part of the park. We got our families in there, you understand? Ya’ll can go on ahead and I hope you can get where you’re heading. Before you go, can I ask if you have any diesel you can spare? This ain’t no toll or nothing like that, but we got a generator running and I was hoping you might have some to trade.”
I could tell there was more to it than that, but I wouldn’t ask. However, the fact he was asking even though he could have tried to take us, and the truck, spoke to his overall good intentions.
“Yes, sir. We got a little,” I said, speaking up for the first time. “I think we can let go of a five gallon can if you can swap me some ammo.”
That I said anything seemed to take the gentleman by surprise, and I could tell from the indrawn breath from the back seat that Stan was caught off guard as well. Ruth didn’t make a sound, but she did glance my way.
“How much and what caliber?”
I paused, as if to think. I really didn’t need anything except some 308 Winchester but I wouldn’t ask for that. Diesel was still plentiful, just sitting there in those underground gas station tanks, but I was willing to bet they had already used up a fair portion of their diesel in the camp. Going out to recover more would be a dangerous chore.
“A box of 38 Specials, if you have it.”
The man gave me a look that wrinkled his brow but nodded. Laying my CETME across the seat, I slowly opened the door with exaggerated care. No need to give the watchers any reason to jump to a wrong conclusion.
“Brent, can you run back and get me a box of 38s, please?” The man asked, and gave a little wave as well to his sniper crew, hopefully calling them off. He gave me another encouraging nod and I walked around to the tailgate of the truck, popped the cracked glass door and reached in, again going with very slow motions. We still had three five gallon cans, two full of fuel, and I hefted the one closest to me and lifted it up on the top of the tailgate, then set it on the asphalt.
“Thank you,” the man said, his face relaxed a bit. “We’ve been rationing the diesel but still, running that gennie takes a steady sip of fuel. Need it though, ‘cause two of the little ones are on insulin. We just need to hold out until this mess gets straightened out.”
“I understand, and I wish we could spare more. You tried getting it out of the tanks at a gas station?” I asked, already fearing the answer.
“Yeah, one of our guys is an electrician. He said it takes a three phase generator to run the pumps and we can’t find one that still runs.”
Yep, like a figured. I’d seen the same situation before. Fortunately, I also saw how other folks got around the problem.
“Just get a regular old single phase generator like you have and hook it up to something like a sump pump, I reckon. Just drop a hose in the tank and pull out what you can with your pump. Would be slow, but still you should be able to work something out. As for the insulin, I can’t begin to tell you how to make that.”
The man nodded and stuck out his hand.
“My name’s Richard, but folks call me Rich. That’s a fine idea. We’ll give it a try.”
He paused, and gave me a keen-eyed expression. “You don’t think this is going to get straightened out any time soon, do you?”
“I’m Luke, and no sir, I don’t. Near as I can tell, the rest of the country is like this. No place to really mount a recovery from, if that makes sense.”
He just shook his head, and I wondered if one of those little ones dependent on the insulin was one of his children.
“I get you, Luke. Look, you guys need to be careful up ahead. Like I told your friend, the folks in Bentonville have set up something like a wall around their town and are guarding those Wal-Mart distribution centers like Fort Knox. The other cities in the corridor have followed suit. I think you might be able to scrape through Springdale like Ruth mentioned, but be on the lookout for ambushers. Not everybody is as fair minded as we are, you know.”
“I follow, Rich. If not for the baby we’d still be afoot. Slower but safer that way. We just picked up the truck recently and I hate that big old target on my back.”
“I wish I could give you more detail about what you are facing out there, but we haven’t strayed far from the Park since we moved in a month ago.”
“Why’d you move, if you don’t mind me asking?”
Rich laughed. “Most of us lived in a small subdivision over in Lowell. All electric appliances, no water source and the lots were too small to really plant a garden. We had four trucks in the whole community that still ran, so we scouted around until one of us remembered the little cabins in the campground here. No electric, but hand pumps for water and conveniently placed fire rings to build cook fires. All the comforts of home, now. We fish and tend our gardens and watch the roads.”
I nodded. All the comforts indeed. Rich didn’t mention how they dealt with trespassers and I didn’t need to ask. That they were still alive said enough. I decided to share a little more intel, for whatever good it might do.
“Sweet. One last thing and please don’t take this the wrong way, okay? If anybody comes around saying they are from the National Guard and tries to get you folks to go to a FEMA camp, just nod your head and play along, then get the hell out of the Park.”
“You saying some of these thugs are impersonating the Guard? Seriously?”
“I don’t know about whether they are real or not, but just be careful. I saw one of those camps up in Illinois and once they get you inside, good luck getting out alive. The one I saw in Missouri was worse. They might have started off trying to help people. But, with little food and no medical care that I could see, I figured out real quick I had a better chance surviving out in the wild on my own.”
“So we have to be ready to fight the Army too?” Rich said, sounding deflated and a little defiant.
“No, I didn’t say that. You shouldn’t fight them at all if they try to relocate you. Just ask for some time to pack up and pretend t
o be excited by the prospect of being saved. If you can get them to leave for a later pick up, then haul ass out of the park.
“On the other hand, if they just stop by to check on you, then likely you all should be fine. I’ve seen some other Guard troops up in Missouri that were just trying to help folks. Distributing water and things like that. I think it depends on the commander of each particular unit.”
“How do you know all this? I mean, sure, Missouri is pretty close but how do you know what was going on in Illinois? Is that something you heard somewhere?”
“Saw it with my own eyes. Look, we better get going before your folks and mine start getting worried. So good luck, and I hope I’m wrong about how long this will take to get the power straightened out.”
When we got back on the road, driving through the gap in the lane where the SUV had been pushed aside, I was thinking about what Rich had said. Bentonville would definitely make a great target for looters, what with multiple distribution centers situated in the area. Of course, if the Bentonites were manning the ramparts, then the bandits would just have to go elsewhere for their looting and pillaging. Places like the small farms that dotted the rural stretches of country bordering the big cities.
“What was that all about, Luke?” Stan asked, breaking through my woolgathering.
“Selling them the diesel, you mean? Well, it got Rich to loosen up a bit and frankly, I figured out they weren’t going to rob us when he had his snipers stand down.”
“Rich, huh?” Ruth interjected absently. “What all did Rich have to say? He seemed pretty tight lipped when we spoke. And what snipers?”
Though the words came out terse, I knew Ruth was just venting some of the stress we were all feeling.
“Like everybody else, he’s just worried about his family. They are a lot like you guys, Ruth, suburbanites from over near Lowell. They banded together and decided to bug out to the park early on after they figured out the power wasn’t coming back on any time soon. The snipers were just a precaution and I didn’t mention catching sight of them, anyway.”
Walking in the Rain (Book 1): Surviving the Fall Page 9