by A. R. Shaw
She stood there silently for a moment watching the locked door and looked down to the tile where the marks from his boots were the only proof he’d been there.
“I’m hungry, Mom,” Ben said, and she was too. Her stomach growled in protest of the savory aroma, and yet she knew Bishop had to have been starving but still wouldn’t share this meal with them when she’d asked.
“OK,” she said. Near the woodstove, Maeve served their simple dinner of elk steaks and pinto beans, which turned out to be a feast for kings.
12
Beginning the long trudge back to camp, Bishop untethered Jake from the back of Maeve’s property. He didn’t think the boy had spotted the horse hitched just past the tree line. He found himself taking in deep breaths of sharp cold air as he rode back to camp.
Being in Roger’s house brought back many memories. He’d noticed the pictures on the walls of his friend holding his newborn son, of Roger in uniform soon after recommission, of Roger at his wedding with Maeve in her dress. It was as if he just lost his friend, not knowing until recently that Roger had died over there like so many others.
Bishop had died over there, in a way. Part of him had at least, and he knew he would never be the man he once was. He would take care of Roger’s family and do his best to ensure they survived this. He owed him that.
When he arrived in camp, it was snowing again, adding yet more on top of what would eventually compact and become ice; it wouldn’t melt, not for a long time. All the snow that fell now would become another layer to dig out of for years to come. They would have to continue to dig in order to survive.
He dismounted from Jake and led him into the makeshift stable. Bishop was cold and hungry and so was his horse. He knew Maeve was just kind when she offered the meal and a chance at a real shower, but he couldn’t stay there for longer than necessary. There was something about her that bothered him. She was kind and gentle and totally vulnerable there by herself, and Ben was a good kid.
He hated to think what might become of them if someone with bad intentions happened upon them. Even just thinking about the possibility he found his fists balled up in anger.
Bishop laid out feed for Jake and used a clean towel to wipe away the moisture from his hide while he ate. Instead of going down to the stream for water, he scooped up buckets full of clean snow and set it on his kerosene stove to melt. After he had given the first bucket of water to Jake, he continued to add snow to the large pot. When the melted snow had begun to boil, he used some of it to warm a few main entrees of the MREs he had stashed away. Typically, he ate them cold, but for novice partakers of the prepackaged meals, he went the extra step. He didn’t even look at the name du jour on the package any longer; they all tasted the same. If he didn’t have a source of fresh meat or was out of time and hungry like today, he just grabbed one of the hundreds of these he had stashed away in boxes in the cave. Some of them were expired, but he still ate them with no ill effects.
The peanut butter and cracker packages were a treat he often used around midday if he was working especially hard. Otherwise, he seldom ate more than two meals a day.
Once he was finished with his meal, the boiling water had cooled to warm. Bishop removed his clothes. By candlelight, he stood naked near his stove and brought out a bar of soap and a rough hand cloth. He started at the top of his head and first washed the sweat and grime from his hair and face and then worked his way down past the back of his neck and his chest and finished at his feet. His muscles were sore and glistened with moisture in the golden candlelight. Once he had rinsed away the soap, he fished out a new set of clean clothes and dressed in another set of camo pants, clean socks, underwear, and a long-sleeve thermal tee. His metal dog tags were the only thing he wore continuously.
Once dressed, Bishop slipped on his boots once more and scooped more snow into the pot and added his dirty clothes. He didn’t care about stains; his only concerns were the germs. Once the water came to a boil, he left them there for another ten minutes and then turned off the heat. Once cool enough, he wrung out each piece and hung them by the woodstove to dry. By morning, they would be stiff as cardboard but sanitized. It was an efficient system he’d developed over time.
Adding another log to the fire in the woodstove, he heated both sides of the cabin wall, the stable lean-to area as well as the inside of his home. Then he slipped inside of his sleeping bag, set up on a cot with his AR-15 by his side, and fell asleep.
A few hours later, Bishop woke to the sounds of the war he once knew. By now, he’d learned to tell the dream to go away no matter the gore he found himself in, whether it was him reliving the time he found a mutilated Chinese child gored by a fellow soldier, her hands clinging to a stuffed bear, or when he discovered that same soldier a day later missing the lower half of his body from a well-placed grenade. None of it ever made any sense to him, and there wasn’t a single night that he didn’t relive some part of what he’d gone through. The nightmares were always right there waiting for his return, but it was more than that this time.
Now, Bishop was freezing cold in the dream, and when he acknowledged the dream, it began to fade away. First, the blood muted and then the forested terrain gave way to darkness, though the shivering did not. He woke himself and found that not only was he cold, but the temperature had plummeted drastically. Opening his eyes, he discovered white ice crystals had encroached well into his cabin through the cracks in the walls.
“Jeez!” Bishop said, alarmed at the drastic change, and he immediately jumped up from his cot and started a fire in the woodstove that heated both sides of the cabin wall leading to Jake’s stable. He quickly put on his outer gear and opened his door, finding another two feet of fresh snow blocking his way to the stable side.
After breaking his way through, knowing his horse was in jeopardy from the extreme temperatures, he found Jake lying on his side, ice crystals formed around his muzzle near the warmest corner of the stable.
“Get up, buddy,” he urged the animal. Urging him to walk and move his blood through his arteries was the only way to save the animal. If he let him lie there, he would surely die of exposure in no more than an hour’s time. “Damn, I should have known better,” Bishop cursed to himself.
Then he thought of Maeve and Ben. If only he’d known the temperature would make such a drastic drop he would have prepared them, but right now they were more than likely all right since she’d had the woodstove going when he left. It was near morning outside, just barely; only a faint moon lit the sky behind the clouds.
He pulled on Jake’s harness and had to yell, “Get up, Jake!” Only then did the animal finally make the effort to do so. He wasn’t steady on his legs either. Bishop walked him around the small stable to get his blood pumping. When he finally seemed as if he would survive, Bishop gave him a little hay, not enough to fill him full but enough to keep him interested.
Then Bishop went back to his cabin and loaded more wood into the woodstove. Generally, he only fueled it enough to avoid freezing in order to limit the amount of smoke coming from his chimney, but this was unavoidable. He let the wood burn high, and soon the ice crystals that were invading his space began to retreat.
As an additional effort, he grabbed two large stones to heat on the woodstove and then alternated them in Jake’s water trough every few hours to keep the water from freezing over. They conducted a lot of heat and helped to keep the stable area warmer as well. Now he saw a need to enclose Jake’s stable area completely. The lean-to wasn’t going to work in these kinds of temperatures.
As soon as the sun began to rise, Bishop had confined most of the structure so that the snow could not enter by covering every chink in the wood slates with scrap pieces and then tacking a tarp around the exterior. Jake could rest safely from the elements. “There you go, buddy. Not a bad place,” he said, and Jake answered him with a shake of his head.
Bishop’s last task was assembling a gate, and he was thankful he’d scavenged useful items left in the
woods over the years. He was able to build everything from the scraps he’d found.
Once he was finished, he added more wood in the woodstove to keep up with the extreme cold and realized he now would have to continue to keep it going around the clock.
The structure built onto the cave entrance was large enough to fit a woodstove and the kerosene stovetop along one wall and to hang items on pegs on the other side. The chimney was vented through the roof there. The walkway opened to a table area, and then beyond that was the cave room where several cots were lined up. He slept in there, and that was also where he kept all of his supplies.
The only problem with his setup was that there was only one entrance and one exit. That was something that had always bothered him—one should always have more than one exit from any particular dwelling.
By then it was only early evening, and he was wondering how Maeve and young Ben were faring with even colder temperatures and the extra snow on the ground. She wouldn’t try to drive in this deep snow, right? There’s no way they cleared the roads. But his mind kept telling him if there was a will there was a way, and if Maeve wanted to take the truck out to get to the store she probably would have tried to chance the trip no matter the conditions, which worried him.
He found himself saddling up Jake with the excuse that he needed to get the horse moving and told himself he would just swing by Maeve’s house to check for tire tracks and come straight back and that was all.
Bishop took a different trail than the one before so that he wouldn’t mark a clear path through the trees between her property and his hideout three miles into the woods.
Not long after he set out, he smelled not only pine logs burning but something else as well. It was pitch dark by then, but as he and Jake meandered through the forest, the smell became even stronger. By the time he was only a mile away from camp, he began to see a glow through the trees coming from the direction of Maeve’s home.
“Oh no!” he said and urged Jake to hurry through the deep snow. As he traveled closer, he found it wasn’t her home set ablaze but that of a nearby neighbor’s. He rounded the house in a hurry and found Maeve and Ben standing in the front driveway.
“Ben, get back in the house!” she yelled, and then she looked up at him, startled. She didn’t recognize him at first. He pulled his hat away. “It’s all right, Maeve. Get inside. I’ll go check it out.” He could see she was concerned about what was happening to her neighbors a half mile down the road.
“There was a truck there. They had guns. We heard shots. There are children in that house!” she screamed.
“I said get inside the house and lock the doors, Maeve! Do it now!”
He took off as she headed inside. He hated to yell at her, but she wasn’t going to listen to him otherwise. He’d seen that same stunned look in soldiers as bullets flew. You had to get their attention and fast, or else they’d die.
From his point of view atop Jake as he neared the burning house, at least three men were pulling items out into the front yard. He stayed just outside the glow of the fire to try and discern what was taking place. That’s when he noticed a body of a man out front in the driveway. The snow around his head was crimson red. No doubt he’d been shot execution style.
Maeve had said there were children inside, but he saw no young people around the place.
Bishop crept around the side of a barn. He intended to take the one man on watch by surprise but needed to stash Jake in a safe place. If there were people still inside the house, then they were either dead or dying by now. “Stay right here, Jake,” he said as he tethered him to a post safely out of sight. Then he pulled his rifle out of the saddle and slung it by the strap around his back.
Peeking around the side of the barn, he counted again and found only three men, all armed, two of them moving what looked like ammo cans and rifles out of chests they’d hauled from the house and loading them into a pickup truck while the third man stood watch.
“Damn looters already,” Bishop whispered and then took advantage of the lookout’s damaged peripheral vision. He’d been staring at the fire for some time, and since Bishop knew his field of vision was compromised he ran along the periphery in the pitch dark until he was nearly on top of him.
“Preppers never learn to keep their damn mouths shut,” the guy on watch said. “Loose lips sink ships,” he said and spit into the snow near the dead man.
Bishop lost all doubts that these people might be the owners upon hearing the leader’s slur. The two additional men were still busy loading items into the back of the truck when the spitter said, “Hurry up. It’s damn cold out here.”
He’s right about that much, Bishop thought and then raised his AR, sighted the spitter. He took a breath, let it out and held, then squeezed the trigger. The shot hit the man right in the temple. He never saw it coming and fell to the ground in a heap alongside the owner.
The other two men leaped from the back of the pickup to the other side and took cover. Bishop was already on the move, having anticipated their actions, and ran around the front of the truck before they even had a chance to aim. With two successive shots from his AR, he caught them both—one in the chest and the other in the neck.
Then he heard a child’s scream coming from the second floor of the burning house, and when he looked up, he saw a young girl with blond hair standing in a window staring down at him in fear.
“Oh, Jesus!” he screamed and immediately looked for options to get her free. There was no way to enter the house from the front entrance. The entire first floor was engulfed in flames. There was only one way to get to her, so he climbed the outside of the front porch and pulled himself up onto the roof. Since the first floor was an inferno, he knew he was taking a chance with his life and traversed the edge of the building to keep his weight on the outer walls.
He climbed until he was right at the dormer to the girl’s window. Looking through the window past the frightened girl, he saw through the smoke that her bedroom door was closed but already on fire. She had stuffed a blanket under the door to keep out the smoke.
“Open the window!” he yelled to her, but she only continued to scream. “Stand back!” he said, but she didn’t respond to that either. He had mere seconds before the child would die before his very eyes, so he reached for his knife. With the pommel he pounded through the glass, shattering it everywhere. The fire came alive behind the girl, feeding on the new oxygen immediately, and with one motion, Bishop reached for her, grabbed her, and swung her out into the night and around the side of the house. The fire engulfed the empty space soon after, and Bishop was left with no other option than to fall with the girl to the snowy ground below.
When he did, he landed on his side with glass all around them, and he found the girl was unconscious on top of his chest. He sat up and held her small body in his arms. She had a pulse, but they were both covered in cuts and burns, and the back of his right arm was cut up.
Lifting the girl in his arms as he stood, he noticed she wore a white nightgown singed at the edges. He was sure she’d just lived through horrors no one should see and couldn’t help but think maybe perhaps it wasn’t fair to save her life. Maeve will know what to do with her. The child was smaller than Ben and weighed nearly nothing.
Quickly trying to get back to Jake, he passed the truck loaded with supplies from the burning house. Then, out of nowhere, the guy he’d shot in the chest earlier raised his handgun.
With the injured child in his arms, Bishop struggled to grab his AR-15 in time. Instead, he swung his boot when a shot rang out.
13
“Mom, what’s happening? I’m scared,” Ben said as he watched Maeve from near the fireplace. She stared out into the darkness toward the bright flames down the road. There was nothing to see, though. They’d heard a few terrifying shots and then nothing again.
She imagined Bishop’s body lying dead out there in the snow, and there was nothing she could do about it. Terrified as her son, Maeve turned to Ben an
d said, “Son, can you stay right here for me? Don’t do anything but sit right there, no matter what you hear. I’ll be right back. I’m just going to go down the road a ways to see if I can spot Bishop. Do you hear me? Don’t move a single muscle from this spot.”
But her son looked up at her with a pleading stare. She was riveted to where she stood. How could she ask this of him, this boy who’d already lost his father?
“Don’t go, Mom,” he whispered, his face as pale as a ghost’s.
She delayed her answer. “I’ll only go as far as the driveway. I promise you, I’ll be right back. I will not leave you.” She grabbed her pistol then and didn’t look him in the face as she headed toward the door after putting on a black wool coat. “I’ll only be a second,” she said and drifted quickly through the doorway.
In the pitch dark, her eyes took a minute to adjust and still could only barely make out shadows. Once she traversed through the snow to the end of her driveway, she peeked east around the tree line. Through the glow of the fire beyond, a quarter of a mile down the road, she saw a man on top of a dark horse loping his way toward her.
“Bishop?” she whispered. Whoever it was, he was slumping over, silhouetted with the blaze behind him and bobbing with the horse’s slow cadence. She was riveted to her spot behind the pine trunk. It has to be Bishop.
If only she could shine her flashlight, she could know for sure, but she was afraid it might be one of the shooters who attacked the house down the road.
The rider neared, and she squatted down with her Glock in her hands. The horse drifted close to her and then stopped.
“Maeve,” he said, his voice weak. “I know you’re there. Take the child.”
Flooded with relief, she wiped her sleeve over her eyes and slid the gun into her big coat pocket while she came out from behind the tree trunk. Nearing the side of the horse, which sniffed her and nudged her shoulder, she nearly cried out when Bishop draped the unconscious child over her arms. Though there was little light, the girl wore a thin white nightgown and showed no signs of life. “Oh my God.”