Cindy gave a hesitant nod, and the chickens shrieked agreement as Anderson splashed to the back of the Mule. He felt for the hitch in the dim light, operating as much by touch as sight. The safety retainer clip came off easily, and he popped up the lever on the coupler, but there progress stopped. The overloaded trailer was sitting cockeyed, with one wheel halfway up one of the stair-step ledges in the slate creek bottom, with all of the weight pulling backward on the ball of the trailer hitch. No amount of lifting or bouncing would free it. And the water was rising.
Anderson’s panic was rising as fast as the water and he forced himself calm. If he couldn’t unhitch the trailer, then he’d unhitch the hitch. He’d pull the receiver tube retaining pin and let the ball mount go with the trailer. He squatted and felt for the receiver tube then pulled the cotter key on the retainer pin, cursing when it slipped from his hand into the water. He tugged at the retainer pin. CRAP! Jammed in place just like the ball hitch by the weight of the trailer. But it was a straight pin, and he might be able to knock it out from the opposite side. Desperate, he patted the creek bottom for a rock, then rose and stepped over the trailer tongue to squat on the opposite side, waist deep in the rushing water. It was up to the trailer hitch now, boiling over the pin and obstructing his already poor view. He adjusted his squat, gripped the back of the Mule with one hand for balance and hammered blindly at the pin with the other. Hindered by the rising water and unable to see his target, he smashed his knuckles on the steel, but held on to the rock and bit down the pain. It took a dozen blows before he connected solidly enough to free the pin, and the result was both immediate and unexpected.
Free from constraint, the trailer tongue whipped to the right as the trailer sought equilibrium and rushed backward into the torrent. A glancing blow from the swinging tongue knocked Anderson back. He shot upright and took a step backward in a futile attempt to maintain his balance, but stepped into a shallow depression in the creek bottom, unbalancing him further. He stretched out full length in the raging water, sucking water up his nose as his head went under. The flood rolled him along the creek bottom underwater, strangling and gasping for air, as he clawed for something, anything, to keep from being swept away. His hand closed on a tree root and his legs swung downstream. He felt his hand slipping and scrambled futilely to get a purchase with his feet so he could stand.
He felt something snag the back of his collar, then a tug under his armpit, strong hands helping him to his feet. His head broke the water and he gasped and coughed before wiping the water from his eyes to see—Jeremy. The boy was hip-deep in the edge of the flood, his lower body braced against a thicker section of the same tree root that saved Anderson. The fear in the boy’s eyes was mixed with something else—determination.
“JEREMY!”
Cindy was in the creek, splashing toward them.
“STAY THERE,” Anderson shouted. “WE’RE OKAY.”
She did as ordered, though with visible reluctance, and Anderson surveyed the left bank. There were scattered handholds, and with Jeremy’s help, Anderson pulled himself to the edge of the creek and made his way upstream to the nearest one, then reached back and gave Jeremy a hand forward. They alternated, leap-frogging back to the half-submerged Mule. Water was over all four tires now and running over the floorboard. Steam rose from the rear of the Mule where the water was flashing against the hot muffler. They had minutes to get the Mule up the bank.
“GET IN AND DRIVE. JUST LIKE BEFORE. ENGINE AND WINCH TOGETHER. JEREMY AND I WILL PUSH.”
Cindy nodded and jumped behind the wheel, and Anderson turned, putting his back against the tailgate and then squatting to push with his legs. Jeremy copied him and they both pushed for all they were worth when the engine pitch changed and the Mule began to move. It was slow at first and then faster, and they walked backward, pushing as they went. Then the Mule was free of the water and it raced away from them up the bank, dumping them both on their butts on the sodden creek bank.
Anderson looked over at Jeremy as they lay in the mud, soaked to the skin with hair plastered to his scalp framing his mud-spattered face. “YOU OKAY, JEREMY?”
The boy nodded, wide-eyed and serious. “Did I do good?” he asked, barely audible above the ambient noise.
“YOU DID GREAT, BUDDY! YOU SAVED MY LIFE,” Anderson said.
The smile that split Jeremy’s face was like the sun itself.
Near the Cave
15 miles northeast of Buena Vista, Virginia
Day 30, 6:15 a.m.
The rain didn’t stop until well after midnight, continuing to swell the creek. They spent the night well up the rocky creek bank, huddled together under the shelter of a tarp pulled from the back of the Mule. At some point, exhaustion had overcome him, and Anderson fell asleep. He awoke stiff and sore from his night on the hard ground, his multiple injuries competing for his attention. Jeremy snored softly beside him, but Cindy was already up, inventorying the contents of the Mule. He slipped from beneath the tarp and walked stiffly over to the UTV.
“How’s it looking?” he asked.
Cindy shook her head. “Most of the food was in the trailer. That’s gonna be a problem.”
“After we get settled in the cave, maybe I can scout downstream. I might be able to find some of the stuff.”
She looked skeptical. “You might want to check out the route up to the cave before you volunteer for that. It’s a pretty tough climb and I saw you favoring that leg.”
Anderson shrugged. “It is what it is. But I suspect you’re right, and if it’s as steep as you say, the rain won’t have helped. You think we’ll be able to get up there today?”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” she said. “Most of the path is rocky, and it looks like it’s going to be a sunny day. Any patches of mud will dry quickly. We’ll start as soon as we break this gear up into loads.”
At the mention of the upcoming climb, hunger won the competition as Anderson’s most pressing problem. “Ahh, I know we don’t have much food, but is there anything at all for breakfast? I’m freaking starving.”
Cindy reached in the back of the Mule and tossed him a gallon-size Ziploc bag stuffed with something nasty looking. “Venison jerky. Knock yourself out. You’ll need the calories, trust me.”
He ripped the bag open and stuffed his mouth full, chewing happily.
Cindy laughed. “I never saw anyone quite so enthusiastic about that stuff. You better take it easy, or you’re gonna choke.”
Anderson nodded and swallowed a half-chewed lump. “I told you. I haven’t had anything to eat in two days.” He looked over to where the chickens were hanging quietly. Here and there one stared at him, but most were unmoving. “And I’m looking forward to a chicken dinner. How many of them bought it?”
“You’re out of luck there, I’m afraid. They’re all hale and hearty, so no fried chicken. However, we might have eggs in a day or two, provided they weren’t too traumatized.”
She smiled at his crestfallen look. “I’m going to wake Jeremy up. We need to get this show on the road.”
***
With Jeremy’s apparent full recovery and their reduced inventory of supplies, load distribution proved less difficult than anticipated. Cindy had backpacks for herself and Jeremy, and they jury-rigged one for Anderson out of a small tarp. Cindy divided the loads efficiently and equally, snorting at Anderson’s not-so-subtle inference she was making her own pack too heavy for ‘a person her size,’ and suggesting she divide the heavier ammo between his pack and Jeremy’s.
“You mean a ‘woman’ my size?” she asked, looking pointedly at his swollen left knee. He shut up.
Other than a few days’ supply of food, Anderson’s bag of scrounged and improvised equipment, and an assortment of gear and tools, there were, of course, the chickens. They each tied four clucking birds to their packs, Cindy watching Anderson carefully to ensure he didn’t ‘accidentally’ kill one.
Cindy carried her shotgun, and Anderson took one of the M4s, givi
ng a second to Jeremy and hiding the third in the Mule. They pulled the UTV into a thick stand of trees and piled brush around it, then set out for the cave. Cindy led up the steep slope with Anderson bringing up the rear, his left knee already throbbing with every tortured step. Jeremy was in the middle, visibly proud of being trusted with the M4.
The trail was as challenging as Cindy said, and sweat poured off Anderson as he struggled upward. They walked with their long guns slung, leaving both hands to grab brush and saplings as they scrambled up the slope. At particularly steep points, Jeremy gripped a sapling with one hand and extended his free hand back to Anderson. The first time Anderson was annoyed, but quickly got over himself. So this was the kid they were worried about helping up the slope?
Anderson’s knee throbbed, and Cindy was a hard taskmaster. Despite her diminutive frame, she handled the heavy pack with ease, and she was obviously no stranger to hard physical effort. Each time he noticed her looking, judging how he was doing, he nodded and motioned her onward. The quicker they got to this cave, the quicker he could get off his knee.
Well over an hour later, he limped over the lip of a rocky ledge to stand by Cindy and Jeremy as they stared into the cave. He was bitterly disappointed.
It was big all right, maybe fifty feet wide and twenty feet high. But it was just a shallow depression in the rock face no more than twenty feet deep, with the low morning sun shining all the way to the back of the ‘cave.’ It was little more than an overhang really, something to keep the rain off if the wind wasn’t blowing, nothing he would dignify with the term cave.
Cindy looked at him expectantly. “So what do you think?”
“Ahh … it’s great,” he said.
Jeremy was grinning, and Cindy managed a straight face for only a second before she too burst out laughing.
“Follow me,” she said, walking toward the back of the depression.
Anderson limped after her, Jeremy at his side. The boy burst out laughing again, and Anderson looked over at him, then turned back to Cindy. She was … gone.
Then he saw it, a vertical fissure in the back wall of the cave, just a fine line from his present vantage point. As he approached, he saw it cut into the rock face at an angle and was perhaps eight feet high and two feet wide, running straight back, a black vertical gash in the rock face, narrowing to a point at the top. Cindy’s pack with her clucking chickens lay on the ground by the opening, and a bright light flashed out of the blackness.
“Just drop your pack and come on in,” Cindy said, and he did as ordered, turning sideways and ducking slightly to squeeze in, with Jeremy close behind.
In twenty feet the passageway widened, and soon he could neither touch nor sense the walls. She ordered him to stop, and he complied as she bent down, her flashlight illuminating a stack of what looked like sticks on the rock floor. There was the snap of a butane lighter and flame flared. She was lighting a torch, and as it caught, the growing circle of light illuminated only the single wall next to them with blackness on the other sides. She handed him the burning torch then reached down and picked up two more, keeping one and handing the other to Jeremy.
“Might as well save batteries,” she said as they lit their torches off Anderson’s. His eyes widened as the circle of light grew. Even with all three torches going, he couldn’t see any other walls.
“How big is this thing?”
Cindy shrugged. “Don’t know. We’ve only explored this part. This room is about a hundred feet wide by two hundred feet long, but after that it gets dangerous. The floor drops straight off into a hole. You can’t see the bottom even with a real strong flashlight, but there’s water. If you throw a rock in, it takes a long time to fall and then you hear a splash.”
“This is amazing,” Anderson said.
“That’s not all,” Cindy said. “Watch the smoke from the torches.”
Anderson did, unsure what he was supposed to see. Then he noticed it, the smoke was moving away from them toward the back of the cave.
“We figure there’s some sort of crack all the way to the surface further up on the mountain. It must make a kind of natural chimney. We’ve had some pretty good size fires in here and never had to worry about the smoke.”
Anderson laughed. “Next you’re going to tell me you have running water and a bathroom.”
“Not quite. But there are a couple of springs in the back of the cave. Just trickles running into the hole I was talking about, but it’s good water.”
“How the hell did you find this place?” Anderson asked.
“We didn’t, our grandpa did. Or maybe his father, I was never quite sure about that. This all used to be Grissom land, back before they had to sell to the timber companies during the Depression.”
“Grissom land?”
“That’s our last name, Grissom,” Cindy said. “But we can talk later. You need to get off that knee, and Jeremy and I need to get in some firewood and more torch material.”
***
Anderson sat by the fire, perched on a short, round log Cindy had rolled from somewhere in the back of the cave and upended as a stool for him. His left leg was stretched out in front of him, the knee pain dulled by the Extra-Strength Tylenol Cindy had dug from her pack. At the edge of the flickering circle of light, Jeremy snored softly on a bed of evergreen boughs brought in to cushion the hard rock. Across from him, Cindy sat on an identical makeshift stool and poked the fire with a stick.
Dinner had been more venison jerky, chopped fine and boiled with most of their remaining noodles in a battered, blackened, and disreputable-looking iron pot also fetched from somewhere in the cave. He figured boiling water killed any pathogens, and the salty jerky flavored the noodles. It was surprisingly good.
“This is a pretty good setup,” Anderson said. “Y’all been using it a long time?”
Cindy looked up. “Not lately, but we used to come all the time with my grandpa.”
“You and Jeremy?”
She shook her head. “No. I meant my brother, Tony, and I when we were kids. Then things got … complicated. Anyway, Jeremy’s only been here once, but he’s always bugging me to come back.” She looked over at her snoring son, her face softening. “I expect he’ll get his fill of the place now.”
“He’s a good kid. How old is he? He seems pretty capable.”
Cindy’s head snapped around. She scowled. “For a ‘retard’ you mean?”
“Whoa! Time out! I didn’t mean it that way.”
She sighed. “Yeah, you did, whether you realize it or not. But I’m probably a bit hypersensitive too. Anyway, he’ll be twenty-one next month.”
“You don’t look old enough.”
She laughed. “Thanks, I think. I started early. I was fifteen when I had him. Same sad old story, I guess, local teen gets knocked up by older boyfriend. He was seventeen.”
Anderson just nodded. It was none of his business, really, but Cindy looked over to make sure Jeremy was fast asleep and lowered her voice.
“Our parents were super religious, and we got married and moved in with my folks. I’d embarrassed them terribly, and despite being outwardly supportive, it was pretty obvious they considered Jeremy ‘God’s punishment.’ They made excuses not to be with me in public, and I soon understood without them saying it that it might be better if I didn’t take Jeremy out at all.”
“How about your husband and your in-laws? Were they supportive?”
She laughed mirthlessly. “Not hardly. Jimmy’s dad was a deacon in our church and even more ashamed than mine. And Jimmy? Well, Jimmy was a hotshot high school jock not at all thrilled with marriage, much less having a Down syndrome son. On graduation day he joined the navy and never came back. It took several years, but we divorced, yet another cause for family embarrassment.”
“So how did y’all end up in the cabin in the woods?” Anderson asked.
She sighed. “That’s a long story.”
Anderson shrugged in the flickering light. “I got nothing but ti
me.”
“I didn’t go back to high school after Jeremy was born. I just studied at home and got my GED. Then I got a job as a nurse’s aide in the local nursing home. There aren’t that many jobs available in a small town. I knew that wasn’t going to work. Jeremy had no chance for any sort of life unless I got him out of the house where he was considered a burden. I left him with my folks and took the bus to Richmond to find a better job.”
Anderson looked puzzled. “But how was that better? Even if you got a job that paid more than minimum wage, you would’ve still had living expenses. And Jeremy was with your folks, so how did that get him out of the house?”
Cindy didn’t say anything for a long moment. “Because I had no intention of looking for a minimum-wage job. I … I took a job dancing in a club. The tips were good and it was all cash. It was the only way I knew for Jeremy and me to be independent. I told my folks I was in business college on a government grant and came home once a week to see Jeremy. It didn’t take long to save enough to get a decent apartment and afford a babysitter for Jeremy. We only came home for the holidays, and things actually improved with my folks. At least until they found out.”
“But how—”
“I’d been dancing about three years. I stayed away from drugs and resisted the considerable pressure to do… other things, and I was saving a lot of money. My folks believed I was working as an administrative assistant. Then one day one of the local good old boys from Buena Vista came into the club and recognized me. I suspect he couldn’t get home fast enough to spread the news, and needless to say, my folks didn’t take it very well. In fact, the entire family disowned me except for Tony, and he took a lot of crap from everyone for still talking to me.”
She sighed. “So then I pretty much had to make it work, because I sure wasn’t getting any help from anyone else. Dancing isn’t the sort of thing you can do forever, and besides, when Jeremy got older, I didn’t want him asking what I did for a living. So I danced five more years, socking money away and learning about investments. When my grandparents died, Tony inherited some of this land. As the disowned family slut, I wasn’t in the will, but when the dust settled, Tony quietly gave me half of what he’d inherited. That’s the ten acres our cabin is … was on. By that time I had enough investment income to live modestly, presuming we kept our expenses minimal. Jeremy loves the woods, so I decided to build a cabin and live a simple lifestyle. So that’s my whole sad story.”
Push Back: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (The Disruption Series Book 2) Page 14