by Scheer, Ron
“That’s the problem. I’m not sure. When I was attacked, I cut across a field to the next mile. I was so relieved to have escaped that I didn’t pay attention to how far it was to the highway.”
“I’m glad those Scavenger’s missed,” Josh said.
Here we go again. I waited for a sarcastic comment, and decided to stop this before it started. Whatever our feelings toward one another, I was smart enough to put them aside. Couldn’t he do the same? We had to find Chane. Our feud could wait. “Josh…this isn’t the time. We need to focus on finding your sister.”
“I was serious. If you’d been hurt, or killed, no one would know where Chane is. Don’t get me wrong. I’m going to smash your face to pulp when this is over, but my sister comes first.”
That was comforting. “A truce, then.” I reached across my body, holding out my hand.
He looked at my hand for a moment. I saw the struggle going on in his bruised face. Slowly, like he was pushing through a stiff current of running water, he leaned toward me and took my hand.
It was the first time I’d ever seen one of his hands pointed in my direction that wasn’t in a fist. When his hand enclosed mine, it reminded me of a mouse getting swallowed by snake.
“A truce,” he said, “but only a short one.”
We rode on. This part of the highway was familiar, so when the house with the collapsed roof came into view I wasn’t surprised.
“That’s the first mile gone,” I said.
“Is that the road you found the alternator on?”
“No, it was the same one we need to go down. Wait…how’d you know it was me that found the alternator?” I was half afraid Charlie ratted me out.
Josh snorted. “I overheard Frank telling Dad. Me and Jason didn’t waste any time letting the rest of the town know. Everyone likes watching you squirm in the jolting ropes.”
Maybe I should have been worried about getting more jolts, but instead, I was relieved to know that Charlie wasn’t to blame.
Josh asked, “Were you attacked before or after you found the alternator?”
“After.”
“That means if we come to the place where you found it, we’ll know we’ve gone too far.”
“True, but I doubt we’ll get that far. With those Scavengers holding Chane, they’re not going to leave the road unguarded. We’re going to have to be very careful once we get a couple of miles down that lane.”
“We could go cross country,” he said.
I pointed at the barbwire fence separating the overgrown meadow from the shoulder of the highway. “It would mean having to jump those now and then. I’m not the best rider.”
“Don’t you have some tools in those saddlebags? Surely there’s something in there we can use to either cut or break the fences?”
I turned Fred toward the shoulder and rode her straight to the fence.
Josh and I dismounted. The three strands of barbwire that separated us from the field were placed at intervals from my ankles to my waist. The closest fence post to me was a cracked and worn tree limb as big around as my forearm. Kicking it only gave me a sore toe. A thin piece of baling wire, twisted into a tight knot, held the barbwire to the fencepost. Opening the saddlebags I rifled through Sawyer’s tools until I found a pair of wire cutters.
“Think these will work?” I asked.
“Yeah, they’re perfect.”
Closing the wire cutters over the topmost strand of baling wire, I tried to untwist it. The pliers slipped off, and I managed to stick my sore knuckles into one of the barbs. I bit my bottom lip to keep from crying out.
“Here, give me those,” Josh said.
I handed him the cutters and watched as he cut right through the rusty twist. The barbwire sagged, but not enough.
Once again, I wanted to slam my forehead with my palm. Why were tools so hard for me?
Josh quickly cut through the remaining twists. “Now stand on these sagging wires while I lead the horses through.”
“First it was the pry bar, now the pliers,” I said as we remounted and rode on. “How’d you get so good with tools?”
He surprised me with an actual answer. “When I was little, I hung around Charlie Meyer a lot. He showed me all sorts of tools and how to use them. He’s the one that showed me how to break into a house.”
“What was Charlie doing breaking into a house?”
Josh grinned. “It was actually his own house. He’d accidently locked himself out.”
“Why are some of the houses still full of furniture and things?” The question slipped out. I didn’t even think about where it was leading.
He eyed me for a moment before he said, “I probably shouldn’t tell you this. It’s not something a lot of people know, but then, it’s not really a secret. When the cache was completed, every unoccupied home was stripped. The job was done. The problem was that as the years went by people died.”
“So the houses that are still furnished are from after the cache?”
“Yeah”
I’d never thought of that. It made sense, but it didn’t answer the whole question.
“Why didn’t someone collect the items after those people died?”
“I asked my father about that. He told me there were two reasons. One, there wouldn’t be anything in those houses that we didn’t already have a bunch of, like tools. The second reason is that the dead were friends and family of other townsfolk. No one was comfortable taking their things.”
My parents’ house was the same way. All the furniture and household items I hadn’t moved to the RV remained inside. I wouldn’t want someone to go in and haul off all their things.
“How many houses have stuff in them?” I asked.
“No one knows for sure, but I’ve been in at least thirty.”
It surprised me that he admitted entering the furnished homes. I carefully calculated my next question, doing my best to make sure the tone in my voice carried nothing but curiosity. If Josh thought I was accusing him of something, he’d clam up. “Why?”
He shrugged. “Because I can.”
I knew there was more to it than that. I would have to draw it out of him. “I bet you’re looking for something. Something left over from before the Collapse. Something someone told you about.”
“Shut up, Orphan Boy. It’s none of your business.”
If I could irritate him just a touch more, maybe he would blurt it out to keep me quiet. It was a fine line, though. If I pushed too hard, he’d either stop talking or throw a punch. Most likely the second option.
“I’ll bet you’re stashing your own little cache somewhere.” I gulped and hunched my head into my shoulders. So much for being careful. Where had that come from? I’d just accused Josh of stealing. I waited for him to nudge Bonnie closer and punch me in the face.
Instead, he shouted, “I want to know what life was like before, all right? Now shut up, Orphan Boy! Go make yourself useful and find those Scavengers.”
I must have touched a raw spot for him to explode like that. I never expected Josh to be curious about anything, unless it was new ways to bully me. It occurred to me to ask him what he’d found, but I decided I’d pushed him hard enough.
We’d gone a couple of miles, cutting our way through two more fences, and we were in the middle of an overgrown field that gently went uphill. Prairie grasses and weeds rose up all around us. We were almost to the top of the hill when Josh said, “Do you smell that?”
I sniffed. A faint odor of wood smoke wafted on the air. “We must be getting close,” I whispered
“Let’s leave the horses here and go on foot.”
“I don’t know if that’s such a great idea. If we’re discovered, it’ll be a lot easier to get away if the horses are under us.”
“Yeah, but we’ll be a lot easier to see if we’re mounted.”
He dismounted. I stayed on Fred.
“C’mon, Orphan Boy. I want to see what’s on the other side of this hill.”
With a frown of dismay, I dismounted and followed. The tall grass provided us with some cover, but it was hard to walk through. After a few minutes of trudging beside Josh, I let him break the trail and followed in his footsteps. It only made sense. He was bigger.
We were almost to the crest of the field when Josh suddenly sank to his knees. “Get down,” he whispered harshly.
Falling to the ground, I crawled forward.
The hill sloped away from us in a gentle decline. Where the land flattened out, a line of evergreens grew. It was obvious that someone planted them as a windbreak. The trees formed an L-shape around a large farm.
I could see the roofs of four large steel buildings, set in a square, and six grain silos, in two rows of three. On the far side of the silos, I could just make out the beige metal roof of another building.
I whispered, “Do you see anybody moving around down there?”
“I see the same thing you do, idiot,” he snapped. “Those evergreens are too tall and thick to see what’s happening on the ground.”
I mustered my courage. “Stay here. I’ll go in for a closer look.”
Before he could argue, I crawled on my hands and knees through the thick weeds. Thorns pricked through my clothes. By the time I arrived at the tree line my face, hands, and arms were covered in shallow cuts and scratches that burned and itched like crazy.
Up close, the mass of pine needles and twisted branches formed a barrier only a rabbit could slip through. I tried anyway. Still on my hands and knees, I grabbed the closest needle filled branch and pulled. It left an opening big enough to squeeze into. I crawled forward a foot or so, and repeated. I pushed and squirmed. All the while moving branches out of my way with whichever of my limbs was most convenient.
At least the ground under me was soft from all the brown fallen needles. I inched forward, twisting my body every which way to get through the tight inter-connecting branches.
The branches rustled with every movement. By the time I peeked out the other side, I was covered in pine needles and expecting someone to be waiting for me. Pulling my legs free of the last of the branches, I stood up. I was beside one of the large steel buildings. I pressed my back to it and looked around.
To my right, down the side of the ribbed steel wall, I saw the corner of the next building. To my left, the evergreens turned the corner, forming their L.
I sniffed. The trace of wood smoke was gone. Instead, my nose filled with the heavy scent of pine. Heading left toward the back of the building, Pushing down the temptation to run, I softly put one foot in front of the other.
When I reached the back side of the building, I peeked around the corner. The trees were only a few feet away, forming a dark, narrow corridor barely wide enough to walk through. Even in broad daylight shadows shrouded it in darkness.
I walked the corridor until I came to the far corner of the building. The soft and spongy cushion of dried needles deadened my footsteps. In front of me was an open space about thirty feet long. Beyond that was the next building. Farther down, another expanse of grass led to the two front buildings. The faint rasp of saws and a low murmur of voices came to my ears.
Dashing across the opening, I came to the next building, the trees still forming a dark corridor. Reaching the corner, I poked my head out and saw the back of the house, a large two-story cottage.
White, grey, and tan stones were mortared together to make walls, accented with black shutters and window moldings. The back of the house had six windows on the second story. Below, on the ground level, three bigger windows were set behind a large wooden deck. The roof angled down so steeply that a tall man could reach up and touch the eaves.
“See anything interesting?”
I jerked around so fast I almost sprained my neck. A man in a faded white T-shirt and overalls had snuck down the corridor behind me. He reminded me of Charlie Meyer, except when Charlie smiled, he did it without a shotgun.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The man nudged the barrel of the shotgun toward the house and then back at me. “Turn around and start walking.”
I gasped for breath. My mind couldn’t form a coherent thought with the shotgun pointed at my back. Finally, after ten or fifteen steps, I remembered Josh.
I wanted to yell out to him. Warn him to get far away. I drew a deep breath, ready to shout, when I realized how stupid an idea that was. Why not set off an alarm alerting the man I had an accomplice? As it was, Josh might still have a chance to complete our mission. He might even be able to get both me and Chane free, if I didn’t get shot first.
With every step past the sheds, the scene opened up in front of me. People were working everywhere. Four ladies washed clothes in a watering tank. A dozen men chopped and split wood. Six more hauled the pieces away and stacked them. Next to an apple tree, a lone girl with long blond hair was sorting apples. Further on, a half-dozen people butchered a deer on an old picnic table near a fire pit.
The dead animal was a reminder of my forthcoming punishment. I shook that worry aside. Um, hello, there’s a shotgun pointed at your back!
I smelled the fear in my own sweat. It overpowered even the scent of wood smoke. My hearing sharpened, and the soft murmur of voices and the rustle of leaves in the trees thudded in my ears. Most disturbing was the sound of the axes biting into the blocks of wood. It sent chills down my back and I worried they might decide to save a bullet.
Flatbed hay trailers and grain wagons were parked next to the tree line. Next to them, a rough corral held around twenty horses. Two men hauled buckets back and forth from the water pump to the tank in the corral.
In all, I estimated there were seventy people working in the large yard, and other than numbers, there was no real difference in their tasks than in what we did back in town.
It wasn’t the savage dancing and drinking around a huge fire I expected. I didn’t see a pile of scavenged loot lying about. There were no guns being fired wildly into the air. In fact, other than the shotgun at my back, I hadn’t seen any weapons at all. Threadbare clothes aside, no one looked like a desperate savage. This place was so organized, Frank Miller might have assigned the tasks.
Most of the people noticed me. Those that didn’t were prodded by their neighbors. Fingers pointed in my direction, but aside from the man at my back, no one showed any threat of violence. My fear abated a touch. The man nudged me onto the deck with the barrel of his shotgun.
I noticed again the blond girl sorting apples. She was about thirty feet away, with her back to me, kneeling next to several wooden crates. The way her long hair flowed down the back of her shirt reminded me of Chane.
I stopped at the door to the house. Nothing good could happen in there.
The man nudged me again, harder. “What, you waiting for an invitation? Get on in there.”
My hand trembled as I reached for the handle. My fast-beating heart doubled its pace. Sweat slickened my hands, and my knees were giant globs of jelly. I wanted one more glimpse of the blond girl. I didn’t know if I was walking a death march or not, but if I was, I wanted one look at her face.
As I pulled the door open, she picked up one of the wooden crates and turned toward the house. I caught a glimpse of her high cheekbones and upturned nose. Chane! For a moment my fear left me. Why wasn’t she tied up? Why wasn’t a guard watching her? Why didn’t she try and escape?
“Yeah, there she is. Now quit staring and get a move on. I swear, you boys are all the same. A pretty face makes you forget what’s important.” To make his point, he shoved the barrel of the shotgun hard into my back.
I’d swear the barrel of that gun put a hole in my spine. Clenching my teeth, I bit back a cry of pain.
Had she seen me? Despite everything, I wondered how this was different from any other day—me staring at Chane and wondering if she’d noticed me.
I entered a kitchen. Injured people lay all over the room on mattresses, chair cushions, and pallets of anything soft, which explained the missing mattresses and cu
shions from the strange farmhouse I’d searched. The bloody bandages and torn clothing of the injured were gruesome, but the noise was worse. I’d never imagined the sound of pain being hurtful, but it pierced my skull and made my head ache.
These were the victims from the failed attack a few days ago.
The man with the gun pressed me forward. As we walked, I tried to keep my eyes on the fading brown paint of the wall in front of me. I didn’t want to see the pain on the faces and in the eyes of these people. I didn’t want to see their bloody wounds. But my eyes betrayed me. I couldn’t stop staring, like some morbid part of me wanted to look. It was hard enough to gaze at all these injured people, but the overpowering stench of decaying flesh, congealing blood, and leaking pus coming off of them made it ten times worse.
Here and there people moved around the injured. Some carried water and others strips of cloth for bandages, but the ones holding fly swatters turned my stomach.
It was wrong, sick, disgusting. I couldn’t even think of word for how revolted those flyswatters made me. A man in blue overalls and a faded cowboy hat nudged a fly off of a seeping bandage. I tried not to watch as the fly buzzed around the wound looking for a safe place to land.
I tried to think only of the flyswatters and how I would love to have one to use back at home. I imagined trading something I owned for one. What would it be?
Splat.
The sound brought it all back.
What was left of my fear was replaced with disgust. I was almost grateful for the man prodding the shotgun into my back to keep me moving.
I’d seen wounded people before. Mom had been a doctor. But this was rougher medicine than anything I’d ever known. In town we had the infirmary. Each patient had their own hospital bed. It might not have been exactly sterile, but it was far better than this—this was a breeding ground for infection.
The man directed me to a flight of stairs that were the golden brown of fresh honey. I know, because I forced my eyes to stay there. I’d seen enough. At the top, I found myself in the middle of long hallway that ran the length of the house. There were doors on both sides of the stairway and more further down the hall. There was no way to know which door I would be led to, but the steady pressure of the gun barrel let me know I wasn’t there yet.