It was still several hours before sunrise, she knew, but the rising sun would shine bright on the farmhouse door.
If anyone came out to do morning chores she’d be able to see them clearly without being seen.
They’d slaughtered the cattle and taken the meat into the bunker with them.
The hay in the upper half of the barn would likely never be used; but it made great bedding for Kara and Misty, and a great place for Lindsey to hide as she watched the house.
The bales were heavy.
Almost as heavy as Lindsey herself.
But her adrenaline was pumping and gave her the strength she needed to push the bales around and create a perch.
A perch she could sit on and peer through the crack between two of the bales.
A perch which was far enough away from the window to be well hidden in the shadows of the loft, but which commanded an amazing view.
She could watch for any signs of movement while being totally hidden from view from the outside.
Now it was time to relax.
The hard part was over.
At least she hoped.
By the time the first rays of the sun lit up the front door of the farmhouse Lind’s adrenaline had worn off and her eyelids were getting heavy.
She stood up and paced in the darkness of the loft, confident that anyone in the house looking toward the barn would be blinded by the sun coming up behind it.
And wouldn’t be able to see her.
The pacing helped to wake her back up, and she returned to her perch.
A full hour passed with no sign of movement.
No one opened the drapes in the front window to let in the morning sun.
No one came outside to check the perimeter for interlopers or to enjoy a smoke on the front porch.
No one made their way to the barn for diesel fuel.
No one appeared.
She began to get her hopes up.
She heard movement behind her, in the soft pile of hay where Kara and Misty lay sleeping.
Misty was softly whimpering. She was starting to stir.
A few seconds later she heard Kara softly shushing the baby.
Then whispering to her, trying to coax her back to sleep.
For several minutes she heard absolutely nothing.
Then the muted sounds of Kara making her way toward her.
Kara appeared behind her shoulder, all alone.
Misty had been fed and was sleeping once again.
Kara whispered, “Anything?”
“No. I don’t think there’s anyone in there.”
“How long should we wait?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a couple more hours. Parker and the others sometimes sleep pretty late.
“If there’s anyone in there they might as well.”
“So… how do you want to do this?”
“I thought we’d wait a couple of hours, and if there’s still no sign of movement I could sneak over to the porch and see if I could hear anything coming from inside.
“If I can’t I’ll try the door. Karen said they left it unlocked so nobody would damage the house trying to break in.
“You can watch from up here.
“If I go in and come back out and give you the all clear you can come down.
“If I don’t come back out, there’s something wrong. You can go back to the bunker and tell everyone I ran off and you went looking for me and couldn’t find me.”
“Lindsey I can’t leave you here all alone.”
“Kara you won’t have any choice. What are you gonna do, try to rescue me with a baby in your arms?”
Chapter 17
It was probably the worst plan in the history of planning.
But these two unarmed young women didn’t have a lot of experience in breaking into seemingly unoccupied farmhouses.
It was the best they could come up with.
At mid-morning Lindsey crept down the rungs to the barn’s lower level and stole across the clearing to the farmhouse.
She hid in the shrubbery just off the porch and listened.
She heard birds chirping and a squirrel chattering.
She heard a bent ventilating turbine on the roof brushing against the wall of its housing each time it spun in the breeze.
She heard her own heart beating in her ear, racing at what seemed like a million beats a minute.
But she heard absolutely no indication there was another human being inside the house.
She had to work up her nerve to take the next step.
Kara watched from the loft with baited breath as Lindsey broke free from the bushes and climbed the three steps to the elevated porch.
Kara couldn’t hear the creaky boards on the porch which sent a chill up Lindsey’s spine and convinced the young girl she’d just announced her presence to the entire world.
She didn’t stop, though.
Didn’t turn back, didn’t run.
She tried the doorknob and it turned easily in her hand.
The door wasn’t so easy. It was swollen just a bit at the top and resisted her push ever so slightly.
But she won the battle and the door opened wide, revealing an empty front room.
Her father had dragged the bodies of Swain and his men from the house into the corn field, commenting they’d become food for the buzzards, foxes and coyotes in the area.
Whatever was left would become fertilizer for whoever farmed the land in future generations.
Nobody ever cleaned up the rest of the carnage, though.
There was still tell-tale blood spatter on some of the walls. Two large blood stains adorned the carpet, though by now they were more brown than red.
The blood was now old and dried.
Even the flies no longer had any interest in it.
The sight of the blood spatter brought back memories of the carnage that had occurred here.
Lind initially wanted to retch but was able to catch herself.
She tried to tell herself that death was no longer a stranger to her.
That at seventeen she’d already seen way more than her share of death.
She’d seen good men slaughtered as well as the bad.
She’d held her Aunt Karen as they’d mourned her Uncle Tommy’s execution.
Had done the same thing with Kara after her young husband was blown to bits.
She’d been through hell since the blackout.
Most people had in one way or another. Few were spared.
She reasoned that after all that, the sight of a few dried blood stains shouldn’t bother her much.
She walked past them in a room-by-room examination of the first floor.
Then she climbed the stairs to the second.
She walked past the spattered blood which once belonged to Swain.
She walked into her mother and father’s bedroom; the place where Swain once tormented her mother.
She saw an unused IV syringe on the dresser, next to a saucer where the residue of crushed crystal meth once mixed with water.
It was the last rig her mother fixed for Swain; the one he never got a chance to use.
It dawned on her then she had no right to judge her mother or her actions.
For whatever Lindsey had been through since the blackout, her mother had been through so much worse.
She wondered if perhaps her mother had suffered some emotional damage from being abused first by Swain, then by Manson.
Her mind went back to the conversation she’d had with her Aunt Karen. About the so-called Stockholm syndrome.
She’d heard about it in school, but didn’t recall much about it.
Didn’t even know if it was a real thing, or just a wild theory dreamed up to defend a newspaper heiress.
No child likes to think their parents might be insane.
But then again, no child wants to think of their parents going through hell and walking out the other side.
She wondered if she could have gone through the thing
s her mother endured and come out unscathed.
She imagined if she’d suffered just half as much as her mother she’d be a trembling pile of mush.
She began to think she’d made a mistake.
Perhaps she should have sat down with her mother and listened to her reasons for doing what she did.
She’d felt that in her father’s absence it was her place to keep a natural order in the family; to ensure everyone followed the rules and kept in their place.
She’d felt perhaps it was up to her to be the values police; the one who made sure no one abused any other member of the family. After all, there’d been plenty of abuse already from outsiders.
There was no need for members of the family to start abusing one another.
And that was how she saw her mom’s affront of her dad.
As an abuse of his absence. Using his mission to find Beth as an excuse to dally with the affection and the talents of another man.
Had she been wrong all along?
Was what Sarah did something she could neither control nor stop?
In any event, it was too late now. She couldn’t go back without severe consequences. They’d likely beat her or put her in chains.
She checked the last upstairs room and was convinced now the farmhouse was vacant.
And as she made her way downstairs to wave to Kara and tell her it was safe to join her, Lind felt as though she’d made a truly dreadful mistake.
Chapter 18
Robert Woods and Art Samuels were the first ones up, a full hour before.
They’d waited fairly patiently in the galley for one of the women to come in and make them their breakfast.
Truth was they were quite capable of mixing water into the powdered pancake mix and grilling the mixture into pancakes.
But they were lazy, as are a lot of men when women are around, and liked being waited on.
No, their habit was to sit in the galley and to ogle whatever woman got up first as they made breakfast for them, then cleaned up after them.
On this particular morning no one showed up.
Instead of doing for themselves for a change, the pair of under-motivated miscreants thought it appropriate to go look for someone.
They came first to Kara’s bunk to find her missing.
Next stop was Lindsey’s bunk, where they assumed the two were busy gossiping and goofing off.
Lindsey too was gone.
Woods smiled and got a mischievous look in his eye.
Without a word Samuels shared the same kind of smile, and together they stole down the corridor to the open shower.
In their dirty minds, that was where they’d find the missing women.
And since both women were off limits according first by Manson’s directive and then by Parker’s, neither man had ever seen either woman naked.
They’d always wanted to.
But they’d never had the opportunity.
Perhaps now they would, for no one could blame them for searching for goldbricking women who were shirking their responsibilities.
And really, now, where else could they be but in the showers?
The only other place was outside the bunker, and that couldn’t possibly be.
Could it?
They barged into the shower expecting to get an eyeful of naked human flesh and were severely disappointed.
But neither man was very intelligent.
The possibility they’d escaped still didn’t register.
Samuels looked at Woods and said, “Are you sure they weren’t in the bunk room?”
“I didn’t see ‘em. Maybe they were under the blankets or something.”
Dumb led Dumber farther down the corridor to Karen’s room.
Karen appeared to be expecting them.
When Woods demanded to know where Kara and Lindsey were Karen merely shrugged her shoulders and smiled.
By this time the commotion awakened everyone else in the bunker.
Santos and Vega were in the corridor now, trying to figure out what in hell was going on.
Parker was on his way out of the commander’s bunk, towel in hand, headed toward the shower, when Samuels told him, “Sir, the two younger women are missing.”
Parker did an about face and headed straight to Sarah’s bunk.
He caught her sitting in a daze on the edge of her bed.
She’d taken a sleeping pill the evening before to help her rest, and they always hit her hard.
She was very groggy and trying her best to wake up.
Parker demanded of her, “Lindsey and Kara are gone. Did they tell you they were leaving?”
She merely looked at him. His words half-registered, and she was trying to make sense of them.
“Gone? Lindsey? What do you mean?”
Despite her zombie-like state he could tell she was as surprised as he was.
She knew absolutely nothing about their disappearance.
He demanded of Woods, “Did y’all check the showers? The galley?”
“Yes, sir. They’re gone.”
“Damn it!”
He brushed past everyone and searched the entire bunker himself, starting with the “flop room” at the bunker’s far reaches.
By the time he made it to the pillbox he’d searched every nook, every cranny, every place there was to hide.
From the pillbox he crawled through the still-opened hatch door and jumped down onto the bulldozer tracks on the north side of the structure.
That was as far as he went.
He looked in all directions and seemed to sense there was no reason to track the women.
They weren’t worth the trouble of chasing.
If they really didn’t want to be there, holding them against their will would be a waste of manpower.
They’d have to be tied down or guarded twenty-four seven, and that would be a hassle Parker didn’t want to deal with.
He crawled back into the pillbox, securing the hatch behind him.
“Call everyone together in the day room,” he barked to Woods.
“Yes sir.”
The rest gathered quickly save Sarah, who was still groggy and stumbling about.
She was the last one to arrive, and as she staggered down the corridor toward the day room Vega asked, “Are we going after them?”
Parker said, “No. They’d tax our manpower having to watch them constantly, or they’d just escape again.
“If they don’t want to be here to hell with them. Let them see how long they survive in the woods.”
“What if they go into town for help?”
Parker laughed.
“You saw that little old man who ran the sheriff’s office. He couldn’t lift a rifle as high as his head to save his life. There’s no help in Ely.”
“What if they change their mind and come back?”
Parker thought for half a second before responding.
“They’ve lost the right to be here. If they come back I want them shot on sight.”
Chapter 19
Amy Martinez knew Beth well in grade school.
They sat side by side in Mrs. Jamison’s classroom, and across the table in the cafeteria.
They sometimes traded snacks from their lunches, as Amy’s mom constantly packed corn chips along with Amy’s tuna sandwich.
No matter how many times she told her mom she didn’t like corn chips.
Beth, on the other hand, loved corn chips, and would trade whatever she had for them.
Even a Twinkie, which was close to a cardinal sin to the other kids in the lunchroom.
But Beth lived in the world of Lindsey Spear, who was constantly going on and on about her weight.
“Twinkies will give you wide hips, and boys won’t like you,” she told Beth more than once. “They like boobs but not butts.”
Beth didn’t have a clue why that was important or even if it was true.
But she was very impressionable, so if she had to sacrifice her Twinkies today to land a boyfrie
nd tomorrow it was a sacrifice she was willing to make.
So Beth and Amy were classmates and occasionally trading partners and casual friends.
That was why Amy felt guilty, and a little bit ashamed, when she found out the house her father had stolen belonged to Beth Spear’s family.
She got her first clue when she was exploring the house and walked into Beth’s bedroom.
It was heavily decorated with Goofy Grape and his pals.
Now, there was nothing wrong with cartoon characters fashioned after fruits and vegetables, per se.
At least not for little bitty kids.
But Amy and Beth were in second grade, for crying out loud.
They were practically grown up.
Well, practically practically.
Amy outgrew Goofy Grape and his silly smile by the time she was four.
Not a single one of their other classmates were still fans of the purple pal.
Except for Beth.
Beth still proudly carried a Goofy Grape backpack to school each day, right up until the lights went out and the world went crazy.
Goofy’s best friend, Ollie Orange, adorned Beth’s notebook.
The notebook was covered with stickers depicting the smiling faces of Loretta Lime, Anna Banana and Kasie Kiwi.
It was all very nauseating, but something Amy overlooked because Beth was so sweet.
And more or less normal in every other way.
When she was exploring the new house her father found, she went upstairs with a flashlight and went from room to room to see what treasures she could find.
The first bedroom she walked into sported a huge poster centered on one wall.
A poster featuring a bigger-than-life portrait of everybody’s favorite grape yelling his catch phrase… “Let’s all be goobers!”
It was enough to make Amy want to puke.
She didn’t, but she did get curious enough to start opening drawers.
“No, it can’t be…” she said as she went, trying to convince herself she wasn’t going to find what she instinctively knew was there somewhere.
And there it was, in the third desk drawer.
The drawer with a “Bobby Broccoli” sticker on it.
A handful of school papers with Beth Spear’s name at the top.
“Oh, great,” Amy said.
She felt almost… betrayed.
Alone (Book 10): Return To Ely Page 6