Fuel (Best Laid Plans Book 1)

by Nathan Jones

  Turner had finally put more men on the patrol roster, three to be exact. Also kids, to be exact. Trev had to wonder if there'd been less volunteers for the job of walking 20 miles over a period of eight hours compared to six hours sitting behind a roadblock, and only the younger guys had the energy to try it out. Rick, his brother Wes, and Pete Childress were all still in high school, Rick a senior and Wes and Pete sophomores, with Pete about six months older than Wes.

  All claimed to know how to shoot and had been given weapons to take on patrol from the stockpile Mr. Tillman had donated to the town storehouse, but Lewis had still insisted they avoid trouble entirely and just radio in if anyone approached the town, then abandon their patrol until Turner could send men to turn the interlopers back. The three kids hadn't been happy at that, and Trev had a feeling if they did run into anyone while on patrol they'd try to handle it themselves.

  Stupid, to assign those three. Even if there weren't any other volunteers Trev didn't like the thought of kids that young patrolling alone. Sure, Rick was only a few years younger than him so the sentiment was a bit absurd, but he still wished they'd been put on the roadblocks and Turner had sent older, more experienced men who could handle any difficult situations that might come up. And if nobody volunteered he should have gone the next step and assigned people anyway.

  Trev also didn't like them being armed, since it was anyone's guess whether they might waste time and bullets taking potshots at shrubs to pass the time, or might panic in a tense situation and shoot first and ask questions later. From what he knew of the three they were good guys, at least, but he wasn't sure they were up to the task.

  He also had to admit that getting only three more people was kind of BS. That still meant taking every fifth patrol, which meant at best he'd be out here every other day. Still, beggars couldn't be choosers.

  At the moment Trev was heading west towards the foothills, after spending a bit more time than usual on the eastern tip of the patrol hill overlooking Highway 6 watching what seemed like an endless trickle of refugees clumped in small groups passing by. He'd radioed their presence in, but judging by the apathy of the response he had a feeling people heading south on the highway weren't exactly news anymore. He only hoped Anderson and Turner had thought of how they were going to deal with things when that trickle of humanity became a stream or even a river. Especially if they decided to take a detour into Aspen Hill.

  The fact that they were there was another reason why Trev had to be more watchful, so even though he walked faster than usual to make up for lost time along the beginnings of a trail their constant walking back and forth had trampled, he also stopped more often to peer north over the top of the hill, and tried to do it behind cover.

  When the highway was about a mile behind him he paused yet again to poke his head up behind a familiar shrub, using the scope of his Mini-14 to save time rather than taking the trouble of getting out his binoculars and putting them back. He didn't see anything, and he was about to sling his rifle over his shoulder and duck back down to the trail to continue when he caught sight of a flash of blue disappearing behind a patch of tall bushes down below.

  He paused and started to lift his rifle to check through the scope again, then thought better of basically muzzling a living target and finished putting it away, going for the binoculars instead. He lifted them just in time to see a woman wearing a bulging school backpack stumble into sight from behind the last bush in the patch, heading his way.

  She was older than him, late 20s or early 30s probably, wearing short shorts and a snug sleeveless T-shirt. He doubted she'd intended to wear those clothes when she set out, or maybe she had. Either way she had to be regretting it now with her exposed skin fiery red with sunburn and her legs scratched from pushing through underbrush. She also had that dusty look of someone who'd been walking off the road for a while, and her steps were uneven and clumsy like she was having trouble putting one foot in front of the other.

  A refugee from the group he'd watched passing on the highway? There weren't too many other explanations considering the direction she was coming from. But no, if she'd just left the highway she wouldn't be that dusty and scratched up, would she? She looked as if she'd been trailblazing for a while.

  Unfortunately the trail she was blazing pointed right for Aspen Hill, and even slow and plodding as she was she'd reach it eventually.

  Trev grimaced, really hating this turn of events. He knew what he had to do, and this was why he was out here. It was a duty he'd volunteered for himself after insisting that they couldn't let the refugees in, and he hadn't changed his mind on that count. He just hadn't expected he'd have to turn away a starving woman who obviously needed help.

  Why couldn't it have been a group of ragged and belligerent ruffians who'd cuss him out and make it feel easy for him to turn them back? Trev had lost most of his guilt about the three men yesterday after the guy his age flipped him off. Although even if this woman made it unpleasant he didn't think he could possibly turn her back without feeling like complete garbage.

  Still, no help for it. For good or ill the City Council had spent the emergency money on other things, and there simply wasn't any food for even a few dozen refugees, let alone a few hundred. The town would be lucky to survive the winter as it was. Trev took a reluctant breath and stood, crossing the top of the hill and making his way through the sage on the downward slope towards her.

  The woman's head was hung low in exhaustion, eyes on the ground, and she didn't even see or hear him coming until he reached the bottom of the hill, more than halfway to her. But finally she paused, tucking a strand of blond hair hanging in front of her eyes back behind one ear, and looked up. She immediately saw him and froze, eyes widening with fear. Without a word she shrank back, nearly stumbling on a stone she'd just stepped over, and her eyes darted between his face and the Mini-14 poking over his shoulder.

  “It's all right,” Trev hurriedly called, carefully keeping his hands at his sides to show he meant no harm. He didn't relish turning her back but he certainly didn't want to frighten her. “I'm a scout from the nearby town.”

  A sort of desperate relief filled the woman's face. “A town!” she breathed. “How far? Is there a place I can stay?”

  Seeing her pitiable condition was almost enough to make him rethink his insistence that they turn away the refugees. Even knowing the grim reality of the situation it seemed inhuman to have to refuse her, monstrous even, and he felt physically sick as he forced himself to shake his head. “I'm sorry, I'm here to turn everyone back. The town is walled off between the hills, all the roads blocked. We're not letting anyone in.”

  Her relief slowly bled away into a sort of stunned disbelief. “But they told me there'd be a place for me when they sent me south away from the riots.”

  Trev couldn't meet her large blue eyes, welling with tears, and had to look away. “Which town were you sent to?”

  “P-Price,” she said in a quavering voice. “I'm almost there, aren't I? Is that the town you're guarding?”

  “No, Price is farther south. If you follow this hill behind me east you'll reach Highway 6 in about a mile. You can follow it south to where you're going, and you'll find refugees who can help you get there.” As he finished speaking he started to unsling his daypack to give her all the food and water he had. He couldn't let her past but he wasn't completely heartless.

  She must have thought he was going for his .223. “No!” she nearly screamed, stumbling forward a few steps before dropping to her knees. At first Trev assumed she'd tripped until he realized she was literally begging. “I can't go back to that! You don't know what it was like in the group I was traveling with, what they do to-” she cut off with a ragged breath and lifted her clasped hands beseechingly. “Please, whatever your name is. I'll-I'll make it worth your while if you let me into your town. I'll do anything.”

  From the way the woman said it Trev had a feeling he knew exactly what she was offering, and the sick feeling in hi
s gut got worse. He'd never even considered going to a prostitute or paying for sex, but even if he had he'd never forgive himself if he forced this woman to resort to such a desperate act just to survive.

  Nothing up to this point had come close to driving home the point of just how bad things had become, or how much worse things would become before they got better. If they ever did. And Trev's resolve completely vanished in the face of his disgust at himself. “No, it's all right,” he said quickly, “I'll bring you in. We can't let you stay, I'm sorry, but at least we can give you a meal and a bed and maybe some food to help you get to Price.”

  Her hopelessness was replaced by an almost absurd look of relief and gratitude, and seeing it Trev had to look away again, for some reason feeling even more guilty than with her begging. “Oh thank you, thank you! I won't cause any trouble, I promise. I'm a good person, I'll get along. And maybe when you see that you'll let me stay.”

  Trev didn't respond, and he still couldn't look at her as he realized why he felt so awful. How many other good people would they have to turn away? Would his neighbors have any more stomach for the task than he did? He could convince himself it was just one person he was bringing in, and just a single meal and maybe a few provisions, but there'd be more situations like this in the future. Probably every day if things among the refugee groups on the highway were as bad as this woman made it sound. With so many they wouldn't even be able to offer a meal to most, which meant they'd either have to turn away people in this same sort of desperate circumstance, or try to help and end up starving along with them.

  But then he'd known it would come to this from the moment he joined Lewis in arguing that point at the town meeting. The expression “damned if you do, damned if you don't” had never felt more applicable.

  “I'm Trev,” he said, offering her his hand.

  She took it with both hers and clasped it like a lifeline. “Amanda Townsend, but call me Mandy. Thank you!”

  Trev retrieved his hand as quickly as he could without being rude, and to disguise it finished his earlier motion of reaching into his daypack to pull out a bag of jerky and his water bottle. Mandy accepted them almost reverently, although she wasted no time in lifting the stainless steel container to her cracked lips and swallowing in desperate gulps.

  In spite of her sunburn and grime she was an attractive woman, although considering her earlier offer it almost felt wrong to notice that.

  He walked a few steps away while she ate and drank and pulled the radio off his belt. “Trevor Smith on the northern border here,” he said. “Can you send someone else to take my place out here for a few hours? I'm bringing in a refugee, over.”

  There was a long silence, then an unfamiliar female voice said “You're kidding, right? The same Trev who pretty much demanded we turn away refugees at the town meeting?”

  Trev felt his face flushing. “She's about to collapse from exhaustion and deprivation. I thought we could at least give her a meal and a place to spend the night before sending her on her way.”

  The reply came after another uncomfortably long silence. “Oh okay. That seems like the Christian thing to do.” He wondered if that was sarcastic. “By “we” I assume you mean “me and Lewis” can give her food and a place to stay, right?”

  “Yeah, I do,” Trev replied with a sigh. He'd intended to feed Mandy with his own food from the start, but whoever it was on the other end of the radio didn't have to make him sound like such a tool. Then again he was going directly against what he'd publicly said earlier. “Over and out.”

  “Yeah we'll see if we can find someone to take over for you, but your best bet is to ask Lewis on the way into town. Cya.”

  Small chance he was going to take a stranger to the shelter to talk to Lewis about taking over for him. His cousin would kill him if he did. He'd just have to leave the northern border open for a bit, and if trouble came of it there was no one to blame but Turner for not setting up a better system to deal with people on patrol needing to head back to town for some reason. Well, Turner and Trev himself, since he could technically just send Mandy on while he continued his patrol. But uncomfortable as he was about letting her in at all the thought of letting her in unescorted was even worse.

  He turned back to find the sunburned woman gnawing on the largest piece of jerky in the bag. “Do you need to rest? The town's about four miles away.”

  “As long as I can eat on the way,” she replied. Trev nodded and started up the hill and she was quick to fall in behind him.

  On the way back he was feeling too guilty about his borderline hypocrisy to talk much, but after Mandy had finished eating she was happy to fill the silence for the both of them by telling her story.

  She'd been a dental hygienist in Spanish Fork before the attack, single and living in a one bedroom apartment with less than three days of food in her cupboards since she mostly ate out or ordered in. For the first few days after the attack she'd treated things as normal, going to work and eating at her usual restaurants. It wasn't until she saw her favorite places closing down because of lack of ingredients that she realized that food wasn't making its way into the city and she should probably start stocking up just in case.

  It was almost too late when she went to the store, as she saw to her dismay that all the food aisles were empty and other items were quickly being snatched up as well. She'd even gone to the pet food aisle in desperation, only to find that it, too, was bare. It was pure good fortune that she found a small bag of cat food that had somehow gotten mixed with the kitty litter and escaped notice. The idea of eating pet food revolted her, but she'd purchased it all the same in case of a real emergency.

  She'd started eating from it the next day, while at the same time going door to door around the apartment complex begging to purchase food. Some gave her a bit out of the goodness of their hearts, although nobody accepted any of her money, but she was still getting hungrier by the day and was almost out of cat food.

  When the riots started a week after the attack Mandy started to get really scared and seriously considered leaving, but there was nowhere to go. A single man living a few apartments down offered to let her ride with him and some friends to Denver, where they'd heard FETF was setting up a relief station, but she'd assumed he was a creeper with bad intentions and had refused.

  “I've spent the last five days wishing I'd accepted,” she admitted to Trev. “Now that I've seen really bad men I realize how harmless and generous my neighbor was.”

  The night of the riots the disaster became personal for Mandy, when a group of hoodlums began looting her apartment complex. She'd woken up to screams, crashings, and the sound of gunshots, and had scrambled to hide in the foot space beneath her vanity, pulling the small stool in after her and stacking some dirty clothes on it until she was hidden.

  She'd waited there for almost half an hour listening to awful noises all around her before she heard the sound of people breaking into her apartment. For the next fifteen minutes she listened as her stuff was thrown around in the living room and dishes in the kitchen were smashed as if for fun. Then the looters had found their way into her room and began tossing it down for anything worth looting.

  Mandy had sat in petrified silence watching through a tiny opening between the clothes piled on her footstool and the corner of the foot space, barely daring to breathe as her bed was overturned and her closet ransacked. Her dresser drawers were emptied on the floor and her clothes tossed around as they searched for hidden valuables, and she'd been forced to listen to them making crude jokes as they pawed through her underwear. With each passing second she'd grown more and more certain that they'd eventually find her, and when they did she'd soon wish she were dead.

  But the closest the looters came was searching the vanity directly above her and smashing its mirror. Then they all started shouting and left in a rush to go on to the next apartment.

  Even after they were gone Mandy waited for more than an hour without hearing any noises anywhere in the
rest of the complex, cramped in the tiny space sobbing her eyes out, before she finally found the courage to crawl out and look at her devastated home. The looters had stolen all her valuables and destroyed most of what they didn't take, shattering her last illusions of normalcy. She'd gone out into the complex to find other families gathered comforting each other through the tragedy, and even with others around her had never felt so alone.

  Luckily a Hispanic family living one floor up kindly welcomed her into their home, although the next day FETF arrived to inform everyone in the apartment complex that they'd been assigned to a temporary evacuation shelter in the city of Price to the southeast. The coordinators gave the families enough food for a few days and showed them the route to take along Highway 6, then sent them on their way unescorted.

  Along the way Mandy's group joined up with other evacuee groups heading in the same direction until there were hundreds of them strung along the highway in a line as far as the eye could see. Even though her group was among the first people who'd set out they did pass a few other groups, although far more often were passed themselves.

  On the third day Mandy was dismayed when she recognized many of the men in a group that had just caught up to them as the same ones who'd ransacked her home. And true to their nature they'd immediately joined with other men of the same vile morals and seized control of the growing caravan, confiscating all food to “properly oversee its distribution”. From then on the distribution to anyone not in that group was halfhearted at best, with men offered little and women and children scarcely better treated. Only the most attractive women in the caravan ate as well as the looters, provided they gave the thieves-turned-despots a reason to be generous to them.