Winter Fall

by Byron Tucker

Tearing off the bandage and smoothing it onto her back, he said, “That reminds me, I need to get some meds. Will you wait here for a sec?”

  Using his flashlight, he looked up and down the shelves of the various drugs and medicines, swiping a few broad-spectrum antibiotics along the way. Then he came to a stack of Advair, with their purple boxes. He performed a quick count, discovering there were twelve for the taking. Ryan scooped them up with his hands and came back out to the front, where he spotted Nora putting her shirt and sweater back on. “What's that for?” she said.

  “My niece. She has asthma.”

  “I see. You wouldn't know where someone could get food around here, do you? I haven't eaten a bite in almost three days.”

  Come to think of it, Nora did look a bit thin for a well-built woman. He knew if he just left her here in the village, she would probably die. She needed to be someplace with heat, and she needed food. In an instant, the decision was made. He would bring her back to his place, despite the little voice in his head screaming at him that it was a foolish thing to do.

  “I'll tell you what. How about I bring you to my house, where I'm also hosting my brother's family. I'll feed you and provide a warm place to sleep, but it can only be a temporary situation.”

  She nodded while casting her gaze downward for a second. “I certainly appreciate the offer. Even a few bites of food would be a godsend.”

  Ryan held up his hand as he heard a low rumbling noise, distant at first, but slowly drawing closer.

  Nora sported a frantic look on her face. “Oh shit, that's the snowplow. The raiders must have broken through the police roadblock out on 41. If we don't get out of here before they get here, we'll be dead meat. We'd better get going, now.”

  Ryan rushed outside along with Nora, stuffing the boxes of Eliza's medicine into the seat compartment. The grumble of the snowplow drew closer, but it was clear that it was coming up Main and not their street. Wishing he'd brought a spare helmet along, he told Nora to hop on behind him and, once he got the sled started, he eased away from the front of the store, not wanting to make a big show of leaving. The heavy snowfall provided extra cover, as did the sound of the noisy snowplow moving in tandem, one street over.

  Wondering how to make his way over to the trail without being spotted, Ryan heard a snowmobile roaring up the street behind him. Even before he had a chance to twist the throttle, a trio of shots rang out.

  “Hurry, get us out of here!” Nora screamed, reaching in her coat for her gun. “Go, go, go!”

  Ryan goosed the machine and Nora twisted her body behind him. Amid more shots fired by their pursuers, Nora let off a couple of her own from the .45, the massive gun sounding like a cannon going off at close range. “Got 'em! Now get us out of here.”

  He twisted the handle, cut over in front of the moving plow and made it to over to the trail. Hanging a right, he wound it up to max throttle, easily surpassing sixty in a few seconds. Glad to have the accurate odometer on the console, he flew for the next three and a half miles, slowing just in time to make the turn-off, which was hard to see in normal times, and virtually invisible now. Surprising Nora by taking a seemingly non-existent path through the trees, he zoomed into the woods about a quarter mile or so and then came to a stop, killing the engine.

  “Why are we stopping here?” Nora asked, looking at the snow-covered woods around them.

  “We need to be sure we're not being followed. We can't take the chances of anyone tracking us to the house. Thank goodness we're experiencing such heavy snowfall. Our tracks will be covered up pretty quickly.”

  “How much farther is your house, then?”

  He couldn't help but smile at her. Nora was easily the most attractive woman he'd had the pleasure to meet in quite some time. “About a five-minute ride from here, not far. I have a feeling you're going to love my sister-in-law's cooking.”

  Nora looked extremely appreciative. “I'm so hungry right now, I could eat shoe leather. I'd be forever in your debt if you could spare me a decent meal.”

  He laughed, propelling the sled forward through the thick snow. “Oh, you'll get more than just decent, trust me.”

  * * *

  Nora tore into the breakfast leftovers that Irene had heated up for her, eating like a starved wolf. Sam pulled Ryan aside into the living room, speaking in a low whisper as Jimmy and Eliza watched from where they sat on the couch. Shelly paced anxiously back and forth, not sure of what to make of this new addition to the household. “Why in the hell did you bring her back here?” Sam said. “You have no idea who she is.”

  Ryan let out a sigh, not wanting to get into an argument. Wise or foolish, he had made a decision, and it would just make life easier if his brother would accept it. “I think she could be a valuable source of information of what's been going on in town, down by the bridge, I mean. Besides, you'd have done the same thing, and you know it.”

  Sam glanced over Ryan's shoulder, apparently amazed that someone could be so ravenously hungry. “Well, I'd not mind asking her what the food situation is like down there.”

  Ryan waved his hand toward the table. “Let's ask her and see what she has to say.”

  Looking almost drunk from eating two plates of food, Nora looked up at Ryan and Sam sitting across from her at the table. “I suppose you guys are as hungry for information as I am for food. I haven't been able to eat this well since the ash started falling.”

  “Where have you been getting food since then?”

  “Until the raiders moved in, they were still running supplies up from Marquette, a State National Guard convoy every three days, and a few private deliveries by truck. They had drop-off points and people had to line up to get their share of food. However, they gave out mostly beans and rice which required cooking, which a lot of people were unable to accomplish without power or gas. A number of houses burned down when people started cooking with fire indoors.”

  “That's horrible,” Sam commented.

  Nora took a swill of orange juice. “Once the National Guard stopped coming a few weeks back, the gang folk started moving in. I haven't been able to figure out what they call themselves, as they don't use radios much. But people usually just call them raiders. They raid houses they think have a lot of food, and they're absolutely ruthless. That's why the people who could, fled, although I have no idea of what it's like in Marquette or wherever they went. The problem is, they won't have a place to stay, unless they find someone to take them in.”

  Ryan said, “There's no National Guard in Marquette either, that you know of?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “We don't know as people who go there don't come back. Maybe it's a deathtrap, I just don't know.”

  “How have you been able to get by all this time, then?” Sam asked.

  “Sneaking around, salvaging what we could. Mainly we just hunkered down and rationed out what we had. We used a camp stove for cooking.”

  “The raiders came to your house looking for food, then?”

  She nodded slowly, staring at each of them in turn. “Yes, they gave us a chance to vacate without being shot, but my hubby wouldn't have it. He got out his shotgun and took out quite a few of them before they swarmed the house. I managed to shoot my way out the back with the .45. And here I am.”

  Sam shook his head in amazement. “I just can't believe you managed to walk twelve miles, at night, in a raging blizzard, after losing your husband in a gun battle.”

  Nora paused momentarily before answering. “It's enough to make me think that the ones that went immediately were the lucky ones.”

  Ryan flashed her a smile, wanting her to feel at ease. “Don't worry, you'll be safe here.”

  She duplicated the vacant stare she'd had before. “I hope you're right, as you sure won't be safe if they decide to take this house.”

  “How many raiders do you think there are?” Sam asked.

  “Hundreds,” she replied in a deadpan voice. “I'd not be surprised if there were four or five hundred i
n all.”

  Ryan stiffened as the implications of what she said sunk in. “That's a lot of people raiding for food.”

  “Yah, you got it. They're not going to stop until they've picked every house in the Keweenaw clean.”

  Sam looked at Ryan as if he'd just seen a ghost. Ryan patted his shoulder and said, “Let's not think about that right now.”

  However, Nora was right. It was going to be a problem they were going to have to deal with at some point, and how they were going to deal with it, he had not a clue.

  Jimmy's Journal Entry, November 6th, 2019

  Time for another journal entry again. I know I've been slack about doing these, but I'll try and get things summed up what's been going on so far. Not long after I wrote the previous entry, a week later or so, Ryan went to the village on his snowmobile and brought back some meds for Eliza and a chick for himself. Yeah, her name is Nora, and she was on the verge of death when Ryan found her. She got shot in the shoulder, but she's all better now, since it didn't get infected or anything. He was going to turn her out after a week, but “nature” took its course, and they're boyfriend / girlfriend now. They sleep in the motorhome, which works out well for the rest of us, as the house isn't so bad with just four of us in here.

  Dad thinks Ryan is making a huge mistake with Nora, as she's an extra mouth to feed and taking up room we don't have, but Ryan insists she's resourceful and can shoot guns just as well as he can. She even shot a deer the other day, which got my dad to shut up about her being a drain on the food supply. If you want to know what I think, I think it's cool he brought her back. She would have died otherwise, and I think her and Ryan get along great with each other. Eliza thinks they should get married. Maybe they will, I say it's about dammed time for Uncle Ryan, considering he's even older than my Dad. And Mom likes her okay, it's just that she considers the kitchen her domain and doesn't like it when Nora tries to help. I just tell Nora that it happens to all of us, and not to take it personally, so I think she's pretty cool with Mom.

  If there's a downside to having Nora around, it's her fear that we're going to get overrun by raiders at some point. She's got Uncle Ryan all worked up about it, so he's been using his tractor to build this huge berm of snow around the house, to make us hard to see, and to block anybody from crashing their vehicle into the house, which is a valid concern, I guess. We've heard some gunfire on a few days, but it was probably just hunters, nothing major. If there's a good thing about this, it's me finally, FINALLY being able to shoot one of his guns. Just the little rifle so far, but hey, it's a start. I hit a really close spread on the target too, and I could tell Uncle Ryan was impressed. Nora is great with guns too, I got to watch her empty the magazine of Ryan's Glock all into the two inner circles of the target. Hell, she can shoot better than Uncle Ryan can.

  I know I'm not supposed to know this, but I overheard them talking the other day in the shop, and Uncle Ryan was telling her about the AR-15 he has. That's a like a military-grade weapon that can do some real damage from a long ways out. Man, I'd love to get my hands on that baby. But I already know what he'd say if I asked if I could shoot it. “Not in a million years, Jimmy.” Hell, I'd love just to be able to see the dammed thing. I wonder where he keeps it.

  As for my folks, I suppose they're doing okay, considering. Mom's absolutely thrilled to have all that Advair for Eliza, and my sister's been doing pretty well besides, but it's really the boredom that gets to all of us around here. Mom tries to get us to play these math games with each other, mainly for Eliza's benefit, but there's only so much of that you can do before it gets really old. Uncle Ryan's got the shortwave in the motorhome now, so I hardly ever get to listen to it, and I've pretty much run out of stuff to read in the house. Mom says there should be some paperbacks in one of the compartments of the motorhome, so I'll have to go look for them sometime. Mainly, we just sit around, eat, talk, eat some more, play with the dog, play a game, go outside for ten minutes, freeze our asses off and spend thirty minutes in front of the wood stove thawing out drinking cocoa, which was fun the first couple of times we did it.

  Oh, the weather, man, talk about arctic. Although it's just early November, the weather is brutally cold all the time, staying below zero both day and night. Since Lake Superior hasn't frozen over yet, the frigid winds are causing huge lake effect snows, and we've been getting feet and feet of snow, which is why we've been able to build a twelve-foot berm around the house and shop. Ryan says that the lake should be frozen solid in about a month, and that should shut off most of the snow. He says that the cold will keep getting worse though, maybe getting down to sixty below by Christmas. That's because the stuff spewed into the upper atmosphere by Yellowstone plus the nukes is blocking most of the sunlight, causing temperatures to go way down. It's a great thing we have the windmills for off-grid power, as we really need to have lights on inside the house to do anything, as it's just too dim outside, even in the middle of the daytime. If there's one good thing about the nasty cold, maybe it'll freeze the raiders in their tracks, and we won't have to worry about them anymore. Let's hope that's true, as we just need to be able to hunker down and get through the winter without being attacked or anything.

  I guess this is all I have to say for now. I'll try to write another entry soon.

  Chapter 18

  “We've got a real problem, Ryan,” Nora said, lifting a piece of toast to her mouth.

  Ryan, sitting across from her at the dinette table in the motorhome, took a bite of his own toast, already feeling concerned about what she was about to tell him. There was no question Nora had found her way to his heart, as he had never in his life felt such strong love for a woman, not even Lacey. From her perspective, being with Ryan was like the blooming of a century plant, as she'd spent over ten years in a loveless marriage. Come to think of it, she never even grieved for her late husband. So the love was tangible, it was real to both of them, and they had little doubt of its permanence. In the span of a single month, he had gone from lifelong bachelorhood to finding a lifelong mate.

  The problem, if it could be considered as such, was how she was solidifying her hold on all aspects of his life, including dictating how things should be run in the twin households of the Durant family. It was important to clear the air now, before it really was a problem. “I'm all ears, Nora. Say what you need to say, and we'll talk about it.”

  Nora let out a deep sigh, folding her hands on the table in front of her. “You see, your sister-in-law is destroying your food reserves. I'm sorry to be so blunt, but she's going way overboard in cooking so much food. Now, I've taken the liberty of making a rough inventory of what you have on hand in the cellar, and I've calculated that at present rates of consumption, it'll be all gone inside of twelve months. You and me both know nothing's going to be grown next year, and maybe not even the year after. Any game still alive out there is going to be frozen solid in another month, so we can't rely on that either.”

  Ryan did his best to quell his annoyance, which he didn't have much difficulty doing, as seductive as she looked. He could hardly go a minute of being around her without experiencing the tug of physical attraction. Gosh, this woman's got me wrapped around her thumb. “What do you propose to do, send the family out into the world, to starve in below-zero cold?”

  “Of course not, silly. We both have sense enough to know it's not an option, at least not for a while. What I am proposing, however, may cause a bit of tension, but we just can't be in denial about this any longer. We're going to have to cut back on our eating, and we're going to have to cut back hard. We need to cut back to around fifteen hundred calories a day. I suggest starting at that level and see how we fare, since that'll be a severe reduction.”

  Ryan blew out his breath between pursed lips as he shook his head slowly. “Oh boy, Irene's not going to like it, and neither will Jimmy. I can't imagine that boy eating less than three thousand calories a day.”

  “That's extremely wasteful. Granted, we may have to up his
allowance a bit, say, perhaps eighteen hundred a day, which should keep him from getting too skinny. But face it, we're all going to have to get used to being skinny. There is just no more food coming in, anywhere, and we probably won't be able to obtain any for a very long time. I know we've heard about those National Guard distribution centers on the shortwave, but they've also become killing grounds too, so that's really not an option. I'm sorry to say this to you, Ryan, and I know that I've been guilty of it as well, but you just cannot deny the situation we're facing. We've got to cut back and we've got to cut back now.”

  Realizing she was absolutely right, knowing that he should have been enforcing this from the very beginning, he threw his hands up in defeat. “I'll go have a talk with them.”

  “No, you'll do no such thing. We'll do this together. We'll both lay out the game plan of what needs to be done to conserve our food supply. And then you're going to put me in charge of managing the food supply and our daily meals, to make sure Irene doesn't exceed the daily limits.”

  He shook his head. “Oh boy, she's not going to like that. Cooking is her pride and joy, and it's probably the singular reason she's been able to keep her sanity in that house.”

  “She'll still be able to do the cooking, with the added challenge of making do with limited amounts. I'll just be the gatekeeper, so to speak.”

  And drill sergeant, too. “When do you propose that we do this?”

  Nora pointed to the open door of the motorhome. “Now's just as good a time as any.”

  A few moments later, the six of them gathered around in the cramped living room, with Jimmy, Eliza and Irene sitting on the couch, and Sam in the easy chair. Ryan and Nora stood on either side of the wood stove, which had a roaring fire going, making the room a tad too warm despite the bitter chill outdoors. Nora had on two of Ryan's sweaters, making her look even more imposing than usual, and when she spoke, the volume of her voice filled the room, easily commanding the attention of the entire family.