But if he did manage to crush it, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
It would still taste the same.
-17-
Mikey had waited a few days before coming back. Before he left the Castros’ house the day he saw the mysterious stranger, he’d snuck into the back yard to see what was in the black bag.
He was disappointed to discover that it just contained empty soda bottles.
Still, the stranger intrigued him. Why would a man go out to pilfer food and water, and come back with empty bottles? Why would he go through all the trouble of cutting a secret gate into his neighbor’s fence, when he could easily have come and gone through his own gate?
And finally, what was in the stranger’s house that was so valuable he’d go through all the trouble of installing screws along the top of his fence to keep others out?
He’d seen the rabbits. Was that enough to go through all the effort? Or was a man capable of raising rabbits under everybody’s noses capable of hiding something else as well?
It all boiled down to one thing… that wasn’t a normal house. If somebody went through all that work to protect whatever was inside of it, it must be pretty valuable.
Whatever it was.
It had taken Mikey longer to get here than he thought it would. He’d forgotten what street he was on that night he tried to hop the fence and gotten his hands skewered. In the dark, most of the streets looked alike.
He’d waited outside the Castros’ house for over two hours, waiting for the stranger to come out the door and go do his looting.
Finally, just after two a.m. he decided the man had already left.
But just to be safe, he’d proceed slowly.
There was another team of looters on the block. He could hear them a few houses down. They were talking as they made their way between houses. What fools. It was just a matter of time before someone heard them and shot them. He hid in the bushes until they worked their way past him. Then, finally, he went into the Castros’ house again. The front door was unlocked, as he knew it would be.
He turned the knob slowly, quietly, and eased the door open. There was no noise or movement from the inside.
He peered around the corner into the house.
There was a full moon on this night, and it cast an eerie orange glow into the Castros’ living room.
There was no one there.
Mikey crept into the house and closed the door behind him.
He’d learned that looters were creatures of habit. He’d observed many other looters at work in the previous months. They, like Mikey, had set routines they followed from night to night.
The stranger would be the same way, Mikey decided. He’d go out early in the night, and come back just before sunrise carrying his black bags full of stuff.
That gave him several hours. He could go through the stranger’s house at his leisure.
He’d have to do it in the dark, since he wouldn’t have the option of waiting until daylight. But he’d looted houses in the dark before and was pretty good at it. And the full moon would help light his way as he worked from one room to the next.
Looking for whatever treasures the stranger was trying so hard to hide.
Dave had had a fitful sleep. He woke up the first time in mid afternoon because he was thirsty. So thirsty he downed two small bottles of water.
And then, perhaps predictably, he woke up a second time a couple of hours later, desperately needing to go to the bathroom.
Going to the outhouse in the chilly temperatures woke him up, and he had trouble getting back to sleep.
It didn’t help that every time he closed his eyes he had horrible visions of a big blue and white airliner crashing nose first into the woods south of Kansas City. And of his wife and daughters screaming in their last moments of life.
So when Dave finally got to sleep, it was understandable that he slept right through sunset, and even past midnight.
He did wake up once and saw it was pitch black in his safe room. But he wasn’t concerned.
He had no place to go on this particular night. Nothing to do except cook his stew and read books, maybe watch a movie or something.
And he had all night to do that. There was absolutely no hurry.
So he let himself drift off to sleep again.
-18-
Mikey moved slowly, cautiously, through the Castros’ house and into their back yard.
He paused at the fence, next to the black trash bag the mysterious stranger had left behind, and listened for sounds coming from the stranger’s house.
Nothing.
It was as Mikey had expected. The stranger was already gone, doing his nightly looting. He likely wouldn’t be back until just before daybreak.
He carefully removed the slide bolts holding the passageway into place and opened it.
He left it open as he crawled through it, and was momentarily startled as two rabbits hopped past him and into the Castros’ back yard.
The deck was well built and sturdy. It was made of good wood, too. It didn’t creak or pop as Mikey made his way across it and to the sliding glass door.
The door was unlocked.
He slowly slid it to one side, making practically no noise at all.
Mikey slipped into the house and slid the door closed once again.
Then he paused for a full two minutes, listening. Letting his eyes adjust to the darkness of the house. Trying to get a feel for the house’s layout.
He already knew the downstairs front bedroom was completely empty. He’d snuck a peek into it as he passed it by on his way to the Castros’ house a few minutes before. The light from the full moon had shown into the bare window, and Mikey could see the room completely devoid of furniture.
The moon also helped him notice the “foreclosure” sign on the front of the same window.
“Well played, dude,” he’d muttered under his breath. “Well played indeed.”
Now that he was in the house, the only question was, were there people upstairs? Did the stranger have a family he left behind every night when he went looting?
Mikey crept silently up the stairs. If there were others in the house, he’d work his way back down, silently relieve the kitchen of whatever silver it might contain, and call it a night.
If, on the other hand, the upstairs was empty and the stranger lived alone, he’d rifle through all the drawers and usual hiding places upstairs as well.
He took off his shoes and proceeded slowly up the stairs in his socked feet, a single step at a time.
He never noticed the safe room in the den around the corner from the stairs. Wouldn’t have been able to see it anyway. The den was completely blacked out, with heavy insulated drapes pulled tight across all the windows. Even in the daytime it was dark in there. At nighttime it was blacker than the devil’s heart.
At the top of the stairs, Mikey paused again. He slowly looked around. Every one of the bedroom doors was open. Another good sign.
From his vantage point he could clearly see into one of the rooms. The bed was empty.
Had Mikey been tired enough to lay on the bed, he likely would have noticed it felt a bit… unusual. It might have caused him to investigate further, and if he had, he’d have discovered the cuts Dave had made into the underside of the mattress, so that he could pull the stuffing out of it and replace it with bags of dried food.
But Mikey wasn’t tired. And he was on a different mission. So what most people would have considered a treasure worth more than gold or silver was passed by.
He stealthily made his way through the second floor, carefully peeking into each room. The next room he came to appeared to be an office. There were two computer desks, facing one another, each with its own computer.
In a different time, the computers might be worth something.
But not now.
He passed the room by, knowing that people never stashed their valuables in computer desks. They were always in more intimate places. Places thei
r kids would never look, for example. Like underwear and lingerie drawers. Nightstands. Under the bed in the adults’ rooms.
He stepped into another bedroom only long enough to see that the entire room was lined with posters.
A kid’s room. Adults didn’t hang posters in their bedrooms.
He stepped back out and made his way to the largest room on the second floor.
Once upon a time it had been Dave and Sarah’s room. It was the room where Dave and Sarah once lay together and talked long into the night, sharing their hopes and dreams for the future. It was where they’d had many arguments, far from the ears of their sleeping children. It was also where they’d made up from those arguments. It was where both of their daughters were conceived.
But Mikey didn’t know that. Moreover, Mikey wouldn’t have cared. To Mikey, this was just the room with the king size bed. And therefore the room most likely to contain the treasure he was searching for.
He noticed the blinds were completely closed in the room. The stranger’s attempt to make the house look vacant, he assumed.
Screw that. A little bit of moonlight would make it easier to conduct his search. So he opened the blinds and bathed the room in an orange-tinted glow.
He went first to the jewelry box on top of the dresser, of course. Burglars always make that their very first stop.
He found what could have been a diamond brooch, although it was hard to say for sure in the dim light. He tossed it into his bag, along with a couple of gold chains and a pearl necklace.
Next, to the dresser drawers, where he went strictly by feel. Early in his career, he did his raids only during the hours of darkness. He got very good at finding things of value hidden underneath socks and underwear. Later, after he’d refined his technique and simply waited in an empty house until daylight, it became possible to do a more thorough search.
But he was still pretty good at finding things in the dark.
And that was good for this particular job. He couldn’t wait in this particular house for the sun to come up.
Because he knew the owner of this house would be back before then.
Meanwhile, Dave continued to snooze downstairs in his safe room, blissfully unaware that his house was being ransacked.
-19-
Mikey’s take in the master bedroom was only average. Besides the stuff from the jewelry box, he found another diamond studded necklace in a drawer. He could barely make out the words “Jared Jewelers” on the box, and knew it was the good stuff.
Sarah had hidden it in the back of her lingerie drawer, mixed in with her “toys.” She naively thought that would be the last place a burglar would look. She didn’t know that was always a burglar’s second target, after the jewelry box.
He found a purple velvet Crown Royal bag in the night stand full of Morgan silver dollars from the late 1800s. Dave had planned to use them to barter for goods in a pinch.
Now they were in Mikey’s backpack as he descended the stairs and went into the kitchen.
Dave had been dreaming of an island paradise. He and Sarah were walking hand in hand down a white sand beach. Her nose was sunburned, and he teased her about it. She giggled and told him to shut up or she was gonna kick his butt.
Then, inexplicably, his dream shifted direction. He and Sarah were in their vacation hideaway, listening as an intruder went through their drawers.
“Shhhh…,” Sarah told him. “They’ll go away in a minute. Make love to me.”
Then Dave’s eyes were wide open. It wasn’t a dream. There really was someone in his kitchen.
He shook the cobwebs out of his head. His heart raced, as did his mind. How many of them were in the kitchen? Were there others, somewhere else in the house? Did they know he was here?
He reached for the handgun he kept on the floor next to the bed and made sure the safety was off. Then he peeked through the open door of the safe room and into the den.
The den was still pitch black, because he always kept the heavy drapes closed. But he could see the sliding glass door in the dining room, and the moonlight coming in to bathe the dining room and kitchen in a minimal light.
He heard a drawer open, and things being moved around.
He heard someone mutter, “jackpot.” Mikey had just found the antique set of silverware that Sarah had inherited from her grandmother.
Dave was at the foot of the stairs now. He peeked upstairs and saw no one. Heard nothing. He proceeded on to the kitchen.
The box of silverware was in Mikey’s backpack now, and he’d moved onto the other drawers in search of more.
He didn’t hear Dave, in socked feet, sneaking up from behind.
“Freeze, you son of a bitch.”
In Dave’s mind, just like witnesses always said at crime scenes, things seemed to move in slow motion.
Despite Dave’s warning to freeze, the man in the kitchen did the exact opposite. He turned to face Dave. In the dim moonlight coming through the sliding doors, Dave could see the look of fear – or maybe just surprise, on the man’s face.
And something in his hand caught a glint of light.
Something shiny.
In Dave’s mind, that meant a gun, or a knife.
Dave’s survival training kicked in. He was back in Fallujah again. Back in those days when one didn’t have the luxury to think about the situation he’d found himself in. To act quickly was to survive. Those who stopped to think wound up in body bags, coming home in flag-draped coffins.
He already had his weapon aimed at the intruder’s chest. Now he pulled the trigger. Once, twice, three times.
The man dropped to the floor in a seated position, leaning against the cabinets behind him. His head slumped a bit to the side, his mouth slightly open.
He was dead.
Dave had no time to relax. There were probably others. He knelt down, back against the kitchen cupboards, expecting the man’s accomplices to come running to his aid.
Not a sound, other than Dave’s own rapid breathing.
He waited five full minutes before he moved again. Then when a bank of clouds went in front of the moon and obscured the light, he eased back into his safe room.
And retrieved the night vision goggles from underneath the bed.
He crept back out into the den and pulled aside one of the drapes. A large and very thick cloud bank was covering the moon in its entirety, and probably would for several minutes.
For now, the advantage was his.
He slowly crept up the stairs. One step at a time, crouched low, waiting for fifteen to twenty seconds between steps.
As he neared the top of the stairs, he could see into Lindsey’s room through her open door. His eyes were level with the bottom of her bed now. He’d taken the sheets off the bed some time before, and there was nothing beneath it. He could see all the way to the far wall, and knew that no one was hiding behind the bed.
He carefully made his way into the room.
His luck was holding. It was still pitch black upstairs. Assuming that his adversaries didn’t also have night vision capabilities, then he could see them, but they couldn’t see him.
If they had the same type of goggles, he was screwed.
Dave peeked around the doorway of Lindsey’s room to survey the hallway. But not where they’d expect his head to pop out. He crouched down low first.
And he saw nothing.
One room at a time he cleared the upstairs. When he was confident there was no one on the second floor, he made his way back down.
If there was anyone hiding downstairs, they almost certainly heard him opening and closing the doors above them, and had ample time to escape.
Hopefully they were long gone.
But he couldn’t count on it.
He went carefully from room to room, saving the garage for last.
The garage was a special kind of problem.
Because of the way it was situated, coming off the pantry, there was nothing for Dave to hide behind. Nowhere for him to
jump to if someone was in the garage waiting for him to walk through the door.
Hopefully, there was no one in there. And if there was, hopefully they were smart enough to reach up and pull the cord to disconnect the garage door opener, and then manually open the door to escape.
If there was someone in there, and if they weren’t smart enough to escape when they heard Dave’s gunshots…
Well, that created a special kind of problem.
The term “Mexican standoff” popped into Dave’s mind.
Dave sat for several minutes on the kitchen floor, just a few feet from the man he’d killed, looking through the pantry, his eyes fixed on the door to the garage.
He knew this could go on for hours.
If there was someone in the garage, he might be waiting to ambush Dave as he went through the door. Or, he might be waiting for Dave to leave, or let his guard down, so he could come out and attend to his buddy.
Or, there might not be anybody in the garage at all.
In all three of the scenarios, it might take several hours to resolve itself. Dave knew for damn sure he wasn’t going to go busting into the garage, only to be shot dead by an intruder laying in wait.
And if the intruder was a patient man, it could be a considerable amount of time before he decided to make his own move.
He sat on his kitchen floor, his weapon trained on the door leading into the garage, and had an idea.
He slowly opened the cabinet door beneath the kitchen sink. That’s where Sarah always kept things like dishwashing liquid, cleaners and sponges.
All that stuff was worthless to Dave.
However, she kept other things down there as well. Including insecticides, wasp and hornet spray and bug bombs.
The bug bombs, specifically, was what Dave was after.
The previous summer, long before the EMP struck the earth and put everybody back into the stone age, they’d had an infestation of carpenter ants.
Their kitchen and pantry were overrun by thousands of the critters, marching in little columns from here to there looking for something to eat.
An Unkind Winter (Alone Book 2) Page 7