The boy staggered backward in horror. He ran into his grandmother. She was gasping too hard to speak but took the boy’s arm and pulled him away from the dying man, wishing to spare him the sight, to spare him from bearing witness to the fruit of his harvest. She led him to the horse, breathing hard and shuddering on its side. The old woman took one look at the boy, into his eyes, and relieved him of his rifle. She chambered a round, shouldered it, and put one in the horse’s head, ending its suffering.
The boy stared at his grandmother, tears in his eyes. “Was this worth it? Was all this worth it?”
His grandmother had no means with which to answer that question. It was done now and they would have to see it through to the end. She pulled the butcher knife from an inner pocket of her coat. “We got work to do. Get back to the house and bring me your sled. I’m going to roll out its innards and quarter it.”
8
Randi hadn’t grown up in this town but she was familiar enough to get around. In better times, it was where she came to renew her driver’s license, pay her property taxes, and buy groceries. She plodded in an easterly direction, following their earlier trail until she hit the defunct red light. She got on Main Street there and headed into the central part of town. She passed an old garage that had been in business for more than fifty years. The parking lot was full of cars for which the repairs would likely never be completed.
Strangely, she noticed the plate glass windows on this particular business had not been broken out. Perhaps it was a small gesture of respect. The owner had helped many people over the years, fixing vehicles they needed for getting to work even when he did not have any assurance they could pay for the repairs. He gave payment plans to people who had no credit. Over the decades, hundreds of young men got their first job pumping gas from his tanks.
She passed the town hall and a bank, both showing signs of break-ins and vandalism. This main street looked identical to that of hundreds of thousands of small towns across the country. It was a hodgepodge of old houses and old businesses. There were several churches, a grocery store turned into a pharmacy, an elementary school, and a middle school. There were indications of foot traffic around the old school buildings, as if they were used as shelters and may still be housing some displaced folks.
She passed through the center of town, by the snow-covered Confederate statue and the town's original red light. This was the oldest part of town, built in the 1800s. Some of the buildings were stone, hewn by Greek and Italian stonemasons. She passed several closed restaurants, a defunct coal company headquarters, and in that whole time did not pass a soul stirring on the streets. There were plenty of signs of people collecting firewood or trying to find empty homes where they might scavenge a bite of food.
The sun was higher in the sky and along Main Street, sheltered by the row of businesses, the breeze dissipated to the point it almost felt warm. The sound of the snow under the horse’s hooves changed, indicating there may even have been a little melting going on. That would be welcome. The snow made everything in their lives even more exhausting than normal.
Randi squinted into the distance and could now see the gated entrance to the cemetery. She was glad she’d brought her sunglasses. The sun bounced off every snow-covered surface and without them she knew she’d be suffering from a headache. When she turned through the iron gates she automatically looked to the distance where she knew Buddy's daughter's grave was located.
Had the weather been warm, she would expect to see him sitting or kneeling beside the unmarked grave, just as he had through all of their other visits. He would be speaking softly to his daughter as if she were right there with him. With the snow on the ground, she expected to see him standing beside the grave or sitting on his horse but she couldn’t find him. The hair on the back of her neck stood up and her heart began to beat a little faster.
She dismounted and tied her horse to the gate hoping that no one would come along and steal it. She scanned the area behind her and saw nobody, but that didn't mean anything. There was a neighborhood back there. There were houses visible and she would be just as visible to them if they were looking out. They could be watching her right at that moment.
She looked back toward the cemetery thinking perhaps she was disoriented by the snow cover and looking in the wrong direction. She shaded her eyes and expanded her search area, scanning the entire swath of ground where she thought the grave to be. Her breath froze. She spotted two figures on the ground, hunched over a shape. She never could see well, even with glasses, and couldn’t decipher what lay before her.
Was one of them Buddy?
She couldn’t tell what was going on but she slipped into her dark place. Something felt wrong. She confirmed there was a shell in the chamber of the shotgun she was carrying and hurried toward the scene ahead of her. In the deep snow, she could not make good time and it was further than she could have run on the best of days. Admittedly, she was in better condition than she had been at any time in the past twenty years because of how physically taxing life was now. Still, she was not at peak cardio fitness. Her adrenaline pushed her forward, sweeping her up the hill. It took perhaps five minutes to get closer to the scene but it felt like an hour. With each step she feared the people would turn and see her. She prayed one of them was Buddy but she still couldn’t tell.
She wished that this was a cemetery with monuments she could hide behind. The flat markers made for a barren landscape that offered no protection, no concealment. When she was perhaps thirty feet away she could clearly see that neither of the two were Buddy. It was two strangers and they were butchering her horse, elbow deep in gore. Her stomach lurched at the sight of the blood, of the pieces of meat.
That had been one of her father’s horses. He was dead now, along with her mother. Nearly everything she owned had burned with the family’s home. It seemed as if the world was intent on taking everything that meant something to her. It was tearing her to shreds one little nibble at a time. She leveled the shotgun at the figures.
"What the fuck are you doing?"
She could hear fear and uncertainty in her voice, but there was rage there as well. It was not fear of these people but fear she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from doing to them what they were doing to her horse. She hoped they heard it too. She hoped it made her sound unbalanced and half-crazy because that was exactly what she was at the moment.
The figures froze. One was mid-slice, intently removing a chunk of warm meat from the body. The other was stacking the slippery chunks on a bed sheet. She couldn’t imagine Buddy allowing this to happen while he still had breath in him. She risked a sideways glance but couldn’t see him anywhere. She returned her attention to the people in front of her.
"I asked you a question. What the fuck are you doing to my horse?"
An elderly woman, big, and perhaps around sixty years old, started to turn around.
"Don't you move! Don’t turn around!"
"This is our meat,” the old woman hissed. “We killed it fair and square. You best go on your way and leave us alone."
Randi wanted to kill the woman right then for her admission. "Where is the man that was on that horse? What did you do to him?"
When the figure next to the old woman spoke, it was clear from his voice that he was a boy, probably fourteen or fifteen years old. “All he had to do was give up the horse. He didn’t have to fight." It was not defiance in his voice but remorse.
"Did you hurt him? Did you kill him for this horse?” Randi asked, her jaw clenched.
The boy started to speak again but the old woman elbowed him. “You don’t have to tell her a damn thing. You just keep your mouth shut.”
Randi's heart pounded. Keeping her gun on the pair, she took in a wider scan of her surroundings and froze when she found a disturbance in the snow she’d missed before. It was a bloodied tangle of limbs. Randi returned her glance to the people in front of her just in time to catch the old woman easing a pistol out of her jacket pocket.
>
Randi fired with no warning. At close distance, the 12 gauge round wrought instant death. The old woman pitched forward across the horse, her neck ending in a venous, shredded rag of meat. What had been her head was now a spray of pink texture that settled onto the snow. Her blood spilled silently onto the cooling meat.
The boy jerked sideways and fell away from the body. He skittered away, pushing with his feet. "Granny! Granny!” he bellowed in horror and revulsion.
"You stop right there!” Randi screamed. “You have any weapons on you?"
He pointed at the other side of the body, where the deer rifle lay on a tarp.
"I killed a boy your age once before," Randi said. "It didn't sit right with me. I still have nightmares about it. But I had to do it and I’m willing to do it again. You’ve got one chance. You get off your ass and you run as fast as you can down this hill. If you stop running, I might change my mind about letting you live. If you come back, or if you bring other people back, you’re doing to die. They’ll all die. You got it?"
"Can I have my granny?"
"Fuck no. Leave her for the coyotes and the buzzards.”
The boy looked at Randi, trying to comprehend what he saw as incomprehensible cruelty. She looked him in the eye, clearly seeing that he didn’t understand the parallels between what he had done and what she had done. It was the selfishness of youth. He was the center of the universe. All he understood was that she’d killed his grandmother, he couldn’t see his own role in it. Couldn’t see that the two of them, he and his granny, had started this ball rolling.
When the boy didn’t move, Randi shouldered the shotgun again and put the bead on the boy. “Time’s up. Run or die.”
He struggled to his feet and scrambled through the snow, falling several times. Randi fired, churning the snow several feet behind him, wanting him to know that she was serious. Wanting him to know that she could live with the guilt and bad dreams if she had to. When he was halfway down the hill, she turned to where Buddy lay in the distance.
The adrenaline ebbed from her body and a great sadness overwhelmed her. “Oh, Buddy. I said I was done crying over this world. Please don’t make me break that promise.”
She staggered toward him, each step revealing more of the carnage, each step hurting more. He was lying across the wooden marker that she and Ariel had made for his daughter’s grave. His blood ran across the carved sign, filling the letters and numbers in. Randi dropped to her knees. Her nurse’s instinct was to check for a pulse but there was too much trauma. Even if he’d still been alive, they could not have saved him. That these wounds were fatal was merciful.
Randi peeled off his knit facemask. While the mask had been blood-spattered, the face beneath it was clean, though pale and flaccid in death. She touched his face; his cheek was cool.
“You were important to us, Buddy Baisden,” she whispered. “We all looked up to you. You kept us headed in the right direction.”
She stroked his hair, remembering how he’d helped her set things right for her parents’ deaths, remembering what he’d done to the people who allowed his daughter to die. “I hope you’re with your family now. I hope everything is right with them and that you’re happy again.”
A single tear pushed its way free and rolled down her cheek. She had promised herself she could not cry anymore. There was too much loss, too much suffering, to let it all inside. She removed her hand from Buddy’s face and put it in her lap. She dug her thumbnail into the back of her other hand until the urge to cry was replaced with a dull pain. By the time she quit, her own blood was rolling down her fingers.
9
Charlie Watkins was the son of Alice, one of the original group stuck in Richmond with Jim. Alice's journey home had been quite different. She parted ways with Jim, Gary, and Randi early on. She had a much rougher go of it due to an early insistence that FEMA’s rescue efforts would get her home before Jim’s reckless fantasy of a cross-country hike. When FEMA failed to live up to its end of the bargain, Alice and Rebecca, another coworker, made the decision to try to do the same thing that Jim and his party had done. By choosing this option so late, they lost the option of traveling with a group they could trust even if they didn’t always get along.
Alice’s journey was ill-fated from the beginning. They joined forces with another traveler who ended up murdering Rebecca. Alice thought she was safe but crossed paths with him again later and ended up imprisoned in his basement. By her own tenacity, she escaped and got herself home. The experience hardened her but it did not change her luck.
She lost her mother and husband soon after she made it home to her family. At that point, she decided she and her son Charlie should accept Jim’s invitation to join them in the valley where he lived. Her acceptance wasn’t an admission she needed help. Instead, she was becoming increasingly aware she was going through some emotional trauma from experiences on the road and she wasn’t able to give Charlie what he needed. She wasn’t really able to be a mother to him anymore. She needed to get him around people who could help him. He needed to be among people who could still experience empathy and compassion.
Just as they were reaching the valley, Alice and Charlie saw Jim abducted by a group of former law enforcement officers who were holed up at the local superstore. Despite having butted heads with Jim often in their professional lives, Alice developed a begrudging respect for Jim when his predictions of social collapse materialized just as he’d said they would. She made the decision to send her son Charlie on to the valley, to warn Jim’s family of his abduction, while she followed along. She was successful in helping Jim escape but it cost her her life. During the extraction, she took a round to the back of her head and died in a muddy cornfield before ever reaching the valley.
Despite having children and grandchildren of her own to take care of, Randi took Charlie in. She and Alice were never close. In fact, they butted heads on numerous occasions, but she did it because she was one mother trying to help another. She hoped if the situation were reversed Alice might have done the same for her children. In the few months Charlie lived with Randi, he had become close friends with Jim’s son Pete.
They’d gone to school in different parts of the county and never met but they were similar in that they both rose to the occasion during this period of societal collapse. Both had easily fallen into the routine of providing food and security for the people they loved. Neither seemed to be experiencing any depression or feeling of loss over what the world had been. Everyone else seemed to be going through it but the two boys showed astounding adaptability. They’d easily taken to carrying guns and living in survival mode twenty-four hours a day. No one in the valley knew where the world was going, but wherever that was, young men like Pete and Charlie were ready for it. They would be the leaders of their community. They would be the future of their tribe.
There were not a lot of places the two boys could go but they been granted an increasing level of freedom within certain parameters that Jim set for them. As long as they were careful, Jim allowed them to fish in the nearby stream. They were instructed not to confront anyone they saw and, should they encounter anyone, they were to retreat quietly and come back home. They were also allowed to hunt and established a trap line that was providing a variety of fresh meat to supplement their dehydrated meals and survival rations.
Wild game was not the only meat available. Some farmers in the valley were culling their cattle herds, since they were having difficulty feeding them through the winter. Some hay had been stored before the collapse and before the food ran out, but managing the large bales without machinery was a struggle.
Being that the valley was farm country and there were dozens of barns where feed had traditionally been stored, rats used to be a problem for farmers. Their numbers were dropping as people ran out of cat food and cats were forced to work for their supper. There was still a good supply of rat traps to be found in barns throughout the valley. The boys scoured those barns and found dozens of wooden ra
t traps with wire bales. Most of the people they spoke with didn’t need them anymore and were glad to let the boys have them.
Rather than sitting in the woods all day with a rifle, Charlie was putting traps to work for him. Using a trick he’d learned from an old man, he made squirrel poles and leaned them against tress where he saw indications of squirrels. The poles were about eight feet long and intersected the trees at about chest level. After being in place for a few days, squirrels took to using the poles as shortcuts to the ground. Charlie allowed them to get used to the pole before placing a trap on it.
When a few days had passed and the squirrels had become accustomed to using the squirrel poles, he mixed up a little dehydrated peanut butter and baited his rat traps, which were nailed to the squirrel poles. Each day now Charlie and Pete walked a path in the woods and checked their rat traps. Nearly every day they found a squirrel in one.
They also used electric fence wire, which they found in abundance, to build snares in which they caught rabbits, groundhogs, raccoons, and even deer. When so much work needed done around the various farms, it made a lot of sense to let snares do the hunting for them. They just had to check them each day, rather than exerting time and energy hunting the woods for an animal they may never encounter. Such trapping methods may not have been legal or ethical in better times, but rules and laws were mostly out the window at this point. People had taken on a pioneer mentality, doing what they had to do to survive
Sometimes, while checking their trap lines, the young men would go visit Hugh, the radio operator who’d recently joined them in the valley. Hugh was a longtime friend of Jim's whom he had not seen in many years. They hadn’t gone to school together but Jim had worked with Hugh at his afterschool job.
The boys enjoyed visiting Hugh because he was full of stories. The man had an interesting career trajectory that gave him a vast knowledge of survival, weapons, and tactical operations. Hugh was vague about his background and not forthcoming about how he’d built his knowledge base. Jim suspected that Hugh worked around the world as a civilian contractor in the security field. Hugh would neither confirm nor deny, though sometimes if the homemade liquor was flowing, his tongue would loosen and he would tell a new story, redacting and sanitizing it of time, location, and detail.
Switched On: Book Six in The Borrowed World Series Page 9