No, Steve didn’t fault him in any way.
But he still had to go.
Steve considered himself a genius. And although he’d never progressed past his sophomore year in college, he considered himself especially gifted when it came to analyzing the human mind.
No sirree, Freud had nothing on Steve.
In Steve’s flawed thinking, everyone had a breaking point under certain situations. And everyone, without exception, would come and try to kill Steve and take all his provisions if given a chance.
The breaking point, in Steve’s reasoning, was the blackout and the prospect the lights would never come on again. That cars would never run again. That supermarket shelves would eventually empty and people would slowly starve to death.
Because they were too stupid or too lazy to prepare as he had.
That was why Steve went to such great pains to hide his existence. He never considered the possibility that others might come to him not to kill and rob him. But to team up with him. To appeal to him that a group of people, not a solitary soul, had a greater chance for success. That perhaps another person, or even several, might be worth the food and water they consumed.
For eventually even Steve’s stash of food would run out. And when it did, extra bodies could grow and hunt and gather food much more efficiently than one man.
And in the interim, additional bodies could help protect what he had by providing twenty four hour security, not to mention more firepower.
More fingers on triggers, so to speak.
Steve didn’t consider any of that. He’d been alone and lonely for so long, his mind couldn’t even comprehend trusting anyone enough to partner with them.
Steve used to watch the prepper shows that depicted people buying old missile silos or vast tracts of land in the country to built fortresses on. He couldn’t afford that. If he could, he still would have gone it alone.
There had been, therefore, only one alternative for Steve. He had to hide in plain sight. Pretend to disappear from the face of the earth. No one could come after him if they didn’t know he was there.
So he prepared, harder than anything he’d ever prepared to do before. He spent every spare penny and every spare minute building and stocking his impenetrable fortress. And he told no one.
No one knew anything.
Except for Major John Shultz.
And even though the major, as a law enforcement officer, should have been upright and honest, that in itself was no guarantee.
Steve had seen and heard of many corrupt cops in his day.
Even though the major was neighborly and friendly and always had a smile on his face, he couldn’t be trusted.
Some of the most evil people Steve had ever met had hidden their true nature behind a smile.
No, in Steve’s mind Shultz was no different than any of the others. Under the right circumstances, he’d turn on Steve and kill him.
Steve wouldn’t give him the chance.
He hated the whole concept of leaving his sanctuary, to go back out in the dangerous world.
But he’d erred big time when he opened his mouth and given away his secrets to a Texas Ranger, of all people.
And there was only one way to fix it.
Several months before, Steve had surreptitiously installed a hidden gate on his back privacy fence.
He shared the fence with a large house directly behind his.
It was once a nice house, but three years before it was vacant and on the market and Steve broke into it.
He’d spent the better part of two days sabotaging the house. First by planting nests of termites in the attic as well as some of the load-bearing walls.
He drilled tiny pin holes in several of the water pipes.
He removed the plates from electrical outlets and light switches, then scraped the protective coating from the wiring just behind them.
He placed dead fish and two dead cats in the walls and beneath the attic insulation.
And he flushed cement down the toilets and washed more down the sinks and showers.
Not enough to block the flow of water and waste completely.
But enough to make it back up constantly.
The insurance company blamed vandals for the smell and replaced the carpet and attic insulation. But the smell never went away. A family bought the house for a greatly reduced price, but within a year defaulted on the loan and moved out. They said to the bank, “Go ahead. Try to foreclose. You sold us a house with a lot of hidden problems, including leaky pipes and termites. You foreclose and we’ll sue.”
The house was vacant, and would be until all the legal issues were resolved. Then it would have to be stripped down to the bare studs to fix everything.
It would likely be vacant for years.
Another thing Steve did was to build an eight-foot privacy fence, at his own expense, around the back yard of the house. Although it was empty and seldom saw any traffic, he worked only on Sunday afternoons, and he had a cover story ready.
Oops. He was a one-man fence installer who’d contracted to build a fence on the next street. He was simply working at the wrong house.
But no one ever challenged him. No one ever asked what the hell he was doing. And after the fourth Sunday the yard had a fence that was eight feet tall.
All the houses on the next street, including the vacant one, were a single story high.
Steve had the only two story house on his side of the block.
The only house high enough to command a view over the eight-foot fence and into the yard behind his was Steve’s own house.
He could grow corn in the back yard of the vacant house until the proverbial cows came home.
And no one would ever know it.
On this particular night, though, he wasn’t going next door to plant corn.
On this particular night he was using the vacant house for another purpose.
To mask his coming and going on a mission to rid himself of the Shultz problem.
Chapter 30
When Steve built the extra-tall privacy fence around the yard of the house behind him he placed the pickets on his side of the fence. On the other side, as viewed from the back porch of the vacant house, there were three two by four stringers which stretched horizontally between the fence posts.
Stringers onto which the pickets were attached from the other side.
The pickets were standard cedar, six inches wide with dog-ears at the top. As with the rest of his fence, Steve had screwed long wood screws into the top of the slats, pointing outward, to prevent anyone from scaling the fence into his own yard.
There was another modification he made as well.
He cut four of the slats, directly behind the center stringer.
Those four slats weren’t connected to the center or lower stringer at all. They were held together by a piece of plywood two feet wide and three feet high.
On Steve’s side of the fence.
The piece was held into place not by nails into the stringers, as the rest of the pickets were.
No, these four pickets, and their plywood backing, were held into place by four sliding bolts. Two on one side, two on the other, connected to the next slat on each side.
On each side of the plywood was a standard drawer handle.
Steve had effectively fashioned himself a trap door of sorts, or a secret gate, through which he could come and go easily without going over the fence or making any type of noise. His gate was invisible to anyone in the back yard behind his own.
In his mind, it was a work of genius.
Of course, in Steve’s mind, so was everything else he did.
It was after midnight. Most of the grocery store looters would be in bed now, tired after spending all the day before stealing from supermarkets.
Word had gotten around the law would look the other way as long as the looters weren’t taking too much.
So instead of pushing home a shopping cart full of canned goods, they were carrying home a co
uple of bags at a time.
It was a pain in the ass from their point of view, but it kept the law off their butts, and they were able to stockpile way more than their fair share by making several runs each day.
There wasn’t an awful lot of looting going on in the residential areas. There would be, eventually, as more of the supermarkets ran out of provisions and people became more desperate. For now, though, the prospect of being shot by an angry homeowner was forcing looters to more or less behave themselves.
That being the case, there weren’t a lot of people on the streets. At least not in the residential areas.
But Steve couldn’t count on his luck holding. He’d always been a pessimist and thought himself to have incredibly bad luck.
As he saw it, even if there was only one other person out and about in this particular neighborhood, he’d somehow manage to spot Steve leaving from the front door of his house.
His solution was to leave his yard through his secret gate, then to make his way through the yard of the vacant house, through the vacant house itself, and around the end of the block back to his own street.
It was a round-about way of getting where he was going, sure.
But it greatly lessened the chances of being linked to his empty house if someone were to see him scurrying about.
Before he removed the secret panel from the fence he made sure his rabbits were on the other side of the yard and not in a position to follow him through.
Rabbits would be his primary source of protein once his frozen and canned meat stores ran out. He chose them because they bred quickly, ate grass and weeds and old corn stalks, and because they were quiet.
Mostly because they were quiet.
They were also far enough away. He removed the secret gate and crawled through, then placed it back where it was. It couldn’t be fastened from the back side, but it didn’t matter. No one could possibly lay eyes on him until he exposed himself on the street.
And he considered himself a master of camouflage.
The black clothing and black face paint would enable him to blend in fairly well under the overcast night sky.
And exceptionally well as long as he stayed mostly in the bushes and shrubs.
A little at a time he made his way to the last house on the block, then over to the other street.
His own street.
Then he made his way to the fifth house. The one across the street and three houses away from the house owned by John Shultz.
At the fifth house, he made sure again it was vacant. The “For Sale” sign was still in the yard.
The realtor’s auxiliary lock was still affixed over the doorknob.
The blinds were still completely raised in the front window.
As he climbed over the fence it occurred to him that someone else could have copied his idea to make their home look vacant. But then he shook it off. After all, he was the only one smart enough to come up with and implement such a ruse.
In the back yard, he checked the sliding glass door on the patio, then the windows.
They were all locked, but that wasn’t a problem for someone as smart as him.
He took a small glass cutter from his pocket and scored the glass. Once, twice, three times. Then he tapped it until the pane fell more or less silently onto the carpet inside the house.
He reached his arm inside the window and unlocked it, then raised it up and crawled inside.
This would be his base of operations for the next twenty four hours or so. By the time he returned home, he’d know when the major left for work in the morning. Whether he walked or rode on horseback. Whether he went alone, or someone else came by to pick him up.
And lastly, what time he came home the following evening.
Armed with all that information, he’d create a plan which would result in Major Shultz’s death, and ensure Steve’s safe getaway.
From his backpack he took an inflatable air mattress, three bottles of water and two cans of pasta, a candle and a book to read.
And made himself at home.
Chapter 31
A week came and went. The lot for the citizens of Lubbock, Texas was a bit better in one way. The water was back on again.
But it was much worse in other ways. Not everyone got the word to flush their pipes, despite best efforts to spread the news.
Across the city, dozens of people became violently ill and threw up everything which went into their mouth. When their stomachs were empty the dry heaves made many of them want to die.
A few even took the opportunity to make it so. Typically by self-inflicted gunshot for those who had guns. And by hanging for those who didn’t.
The sociologists and psychologists who were advising the city council had predicted a reduction in suicides when the water started flowing again. Actually, the opposite was true. Word got around that people were getting sick in mass numbers and the citizens developed an immediate distrust of the city government.
“They’re trying to kill most of the people off so they can stretch the food supplies.”
The rumors were false, of course. But rumors circulated much faster than the “official news” from the mayor despite his best efforts.
The mayor wanted the citizens to know that most of the sick got that way because they refused to open their doors when the police and firemen came around. Instead of facing their visitors and receiving critical information, they hid in the back rooms of their houses. And in almost all cases, taps which were already opened began pouring water, which was then joyfully consumed in large quantities.
Just in case it stopped flowing again.
The bodies were piling up faster than they could be disposed of individually.
City mechanics, by this time, got four police cars and a dump truck working again.
It wasn’t that they were master mechanics or magicians. Rather, it was dumb luck that a man inspecting patrol cars noticed that the starter appeared to be okay on one car. A few cars later he found a battery which was miraculously spared. Another car’s electronic ignition seemed to be in working order.
By cannibalizing working parts and using them as replacements, they were actually putting cars back on the road again.
The mayor got his hopes up.
“We’ll get the word out to civilian mechanics throughout the city. They can do the same thing to all the stalled cars on the streets. They can get the city rolling again the same way you guys did.”
“Not so fast,” the chief mechanic told him.
“We were only able to do it because we buy fleet vehicles. We buy dozens of vehicles at the same time, all the same make and model.
“We had ninety 2014 Crown Victorias to go through to get just four of them running.
“In order for a civilian mechanic to get a 1995 Chevy Citation running, he might have to find fifty other 1995 Chevy Citations to scavenge parts from. There probably aren’t that many, and if there are, they’re spread out all over the city.
“The same thing would have to be done for every make, every model of vehicle. It would take years. Yes, they can get a few running. But not enough to make much of a difference.”
Still, it was a start. The city dump truck was given to the Lubbock Fire Department, which was using it to pick up bodies and to transfer them into a special burn pit south of the city.
The mayor admonished the police officers and firemen, “Be sure you tell the citizens we’re not taking their loved ones to a landfill. Tell them it’s a makeshift crematorium and mass grave. That’ll make it a little easier for them to accept.”
In reality, it was indeed a landfill, and more often than not the bodies weren’t completely burned before having dirt bulldozed over the top of them.
The Rangers had working radios now, and the musters were changed to once a week. Information was shared over the airwaves now, and it was win-win for everyone.
The horses didn’t have to haul their riders from the suburbs to downtown every other day and back again.
They were getting more rest and more grazing time, and started putting weight on again.
The Rangers had more time to do their primary mission: watching out for the welfare of the citizenry. And for emergencies they could contact the LPD, who would dispatch one of their four working police cars.
One thing that hadn’t changed over the course of the week was Randy’s desire to catch Tom’s killer, and to find Sarah.
And he wasn’t having any luck with either of them.
Chapter 32
A month to the day after the blackout began, Randy was back on the Texas Tech campus.
As he dismounted he encountered a couple of coeds who seemed to take an interest in Trigger.
“Hey, are you a cop? You look like a cop.”
“I’m a Texas Ranger.”
“That counts.”
“Nice pony,” one girl remarked.
“He looks tired,” said the other.
“Yep,” Randy replied. “I’m afraid we all are these days.”
“We’re on the rodeo team. Do you guys have need of any more horses?”
Randy was taken aback. He knew that Texas Tech had a roping and riding team they fielded for intercollegiate events. He’d been to see them compete. But it never dawned on him they might be willing to lend some horses for the cause.
He suddenly felt stupid.
“You guys have horses you can loan?”
“Well, we can’t. Not the two of us, I mean. But we’ve been worried about them. They’re stabled over at the Ag yard and the stable masters say they don’t have the authority to sign them out. So they’ve been cooped up for a month now. They’re getting fed and watered, but aren’t getting any exercise. That’s not good for them.”
“You’re right,” Randy agreed. “It’s not. Who can I talk to about letting us rotate some of our ponies out with yours?”
The girls looked at each other, then one responded, “Probably Jake Stewart. He’s the program manager.”
A Whole New World: Ranger: Book 2 Page 9