Or they could hold other things instead.
Of the seven drums lined up neatly along the back wall, three held wheat germ.
The other four held rice.
Lots and lots of rice.
That wasn’t all, though.
Along an opposite wall were a line of wooden pallets which held a lot of things one would expect to see on a farm.
Several large sacks of fertilizer.
Several large sacks of granulated herbicide.
Several large sacks of cattle feed.
Except the cattle feed wasn’t really cattle feed.
It was unprocessed corn, placed into bags which once held processed cattle feed from a popular maker of such products.
Its red and white checkerboard bag, as well as a large depiction of a healthy bull, was unmistakable.
Looters and anyone who was just poking around the barn would have passed it by.
The bags once fed Tommy and Karen’s milk cows, yes.
But they were kept after they were emptied, filled with corn from Tommy’s field, and carefully sewed closed again by Karen.
Between the drums and the sacks there was enough food to feed a hundred healthy men for months.
If planted and cared for, a hundred times that.
And if one got really hungry they could even eat the eight sacks of prime red sorghum.
They were the only bags of food in the whole barn which really held what they said they did.
The women would have walked into the barn and then back out again, disappointed there was nothing there to sustain them, were it not for the notes Karen made for them.
Now they knew they were in no danger of going hungry anytime soon.
Together, they placed one bag of corn onto a wheelbarrow and rolled it over to the porch.
Both were petite women, made weak by more than a year on mostly subsistence rations and little exercise.
They struggled to get the eighty pound sack onto the porch.
And then again getting it through the open window.
Once in the kitchen it would augment their diet for a considerable amount of time and stretch their MREs significantly.
They could ground some of it into corn flour and make tortillas, corn soup and several other things.
All over the world people were starving each and every day.
These two might not be in the safest place, and certainly wouldn’t have a lot of luxuries.
But at least they’d have plenty to eat.
The barn held six fuel drums.
Four, unfortunately, were empty.
But the other two together held just over a hundred gallons.
According to Karen’s notes, they could run the generator during the daytime, since it was heavily insulated and couldn’t be heard from the outside of the building.
It was vented to the outside of the house, though, and burned diesel fumes lingering in the air could give them away.
Karen’s advice, therefore, was only to run the generator for a couple of hours a day, and to turn it off immediately if they sensed there might be anyone in the area.
“It only takes two hours to charge the battery bank,” the note said. “Once charged the battery bank should provide you limited lights and fans for fifteen to twenty hours.
“Let into the habit of turning things off when you’re not using them, and to use only as many lights as you need to read or get around.”
The generator typically used about a gallon of fuel per hour.
Rough estimates told them they had enough fuel for only two months.
Not to worry.
Karen told them there were three more drums in the woods, about three hundred yards from the barn.
Tommy placed them there so he wouldn’t lose his entire fuel supply if the barn ever burned.
It would be a little bit farther to lug the cans, but they could handle it.
Probably the best thing Karen included in her notes?
The fact they’d spirited away three head of cattle: one bull and two heifers.
Neither had birthed a calf before, but both were healthy and should be able to.
Tommy built an acre-sized pen in a clearing deep in the woods. It had a stream flowing through it and plenty of meadow grass.
The cattle had been there for well over a year now, but there was no reason to believe they’d been found and poached.
One day soon, after they got settled and felt like a good walk, the women would go off in search of them.
Chapter 27
Several things about the Spear house puzzled Ronald.
The biggest one was the large wooden enclosure in the den.
It was little more than a box, made of five layers of half-inch plywood.
Nothing fancy. No windows at all, a single doorway on one end.
One wall of the box was the brick fireplace which was built with the house.
The only furnishings in the box were a tiny table which held a wind-up alarm clock and a folding cot.
On top of the cot was a blow-up air mattress barely as wide as the cot and two winter sleeping bags, one tucked inside the other.
It was apparent to Ronald this was where Dave, or somebody, lived the previous winter.
But why?
The basement should have been fairly comfortable, even on the coldest day.
It was below ground, was well insulated and well hidden.
Why would anyone risk sleeping in the den and burning a fireplace if it wasn’t necessary?
And the wooden box was only big enough for one.
What did Dave do with his wife and children?
Did he kill them to stretch his food supply?
It would have been a smart move.
Ronald had considered killing his own family more than once when Monica whined too much or the kids got on his nerves.
Still, Dave hadn’t struck him as the type.
Where had they gone?
And why in the world would they leave such a sweet set-up?
They had it made here. Abandoning such a place made absolutely no sense at all.
Other things puzzled him as well.
In the garage he found a Faraday cage, a wooden box covered with thin sheet metal.
He knew it was to protect electric or electronic items from being zapped with electromagnetic pulses.
It wasn’t very big. About as big as a casket.
And it didn’t contain much.
Three car batteries, two dozen rechargeable flashlight batteries, some wristwatches.
Did having spare car batteries mean that Dave had a working vehicle?
Could that be where they went? In a pickup truck to gather a large amount of food or other supplies?
Would Ronald be asleep some night in his new castle, only to hear the garage door roll up and a vehicle full of angry people pull in to do battle with him?
He made a point to padlock the garage door from the inside, and to move furniture in front of the front and back doors.
Doing so wouldn’t prevent a major gun battle when Dave returned.
But it would prevent him from sneaking up on Ronald and his family.
Other things bugged him as well.
He’d seen several rabbits coming and going in the back yard. There were several holes under the rear fence.
Several more under the fence on the east side of his yard.
The rabbits seemed comfortable there, and were a very odd sight indeed.
They were a bit skittish when Ronald went out and approached them, but not as much as he’d have expected.
They certainly didn’t bolt as Ronald would have expected wild rabbits to do.
It was almost as though they… almost as though they felt they lived there.
Another thing Ronald found, in the garage in a large box marked “seeds” was a collection of fruit and vegetable seeds.
Each were in plastic zip-lock bags, rolled tightly to let the air out of them and then wrapped a second and a third time in vac
uum-sealed airless pouches.
In an airless environment Ronald suspected they’d be good for many years.
Each package was marked in black sharpie with the type of seed and the date they were packed, and there seemed to be every variety of fruit and vegetable imaginable.
All that begged the question… where was Dave planning to plant such seeds?
And what was he waiting for?
The spring planting season came and went, and there didn’t appear to be anything growing in the back yard.
Heck, even if he’d planted them, the rabbits surely would have eaten his crops as soon as they came up.
Maybe that explained why no one was around.
Perhaps they had a grow space somewhere else.
Outside the city, perhaps.
Perhaps they were off in Dave’s mysterious vehicle tending to mysterious crops in some mysterious place.
That was a lot of speculation, but nothing else made sense.
Maybe these seeds were backups. Seeds for a second crop in case a late freeze or spring hailstorm destroyed their first crops.
Maybe the first crops weren’t in peril.
Maybe at that very moment Dave and his family were at some secret farm hidden in the hill country south of San Antonio, pulling up weeds and gathering beans and wheat.
Now Ronald was at a loss.
He desperately needed to find out what was going on.
He needed to go to his own home, the one they vacated, to retrieve that damn book.
Dave had told him it was his guide for setting up his house and his operations, both security and agricultural.
That book… the one he should have brought with him to begin with… it might shed some light on where Dave was growing his crops and why they’d bug out from a perfectly good shelter for apparently no reason.
He couldn’t leave the house at night.
That was when they’d have to return, for it would be suicide to drive an operating vehicle down the streets in broad daylight.
Tonight he’d set up a watch schedule. He’d take a shift, then have Monica take one, then have his kids take a third shift together.
They couldn’t do much, other than help each other stay awake and to wake Ronald up if Dave’s family came back.
But that would allow Ronald to get a good night’s sleep, so he could get out again in the morning.
And get that damned book.
Chapter 28
Things went smoothly.
Nothing went bump in the night. There were no unexpected noises outside, no visitors came calling.
Or homeowners either, for that matter.
Ronald went to bed about midnight after rousting Monica out of bed to take over the watch.
She in turn toughed it out until four a.m., despite almost debilitating dizzy and nausea spells.
It wasn’t easy for her. By the time she woke up her children to relieve her she was almost ready to pass out.
“Whatever you do,” she told them, “keep each other awake. Wave your arms. Walk back and forth. Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep or your Daddy will beat you senseless.”
They said, in perfect unison, “We won’t, Mommy.”
“Wake him up if you hear anyone outside. Or any noise that scares you.”
“We will, Mommy.”
Monica took four ibuprofen tablets and three anti-nausea tablets and went to bed.
Within two minutes she was out like a light.
Not long after sunrise Ronald awoke and walked out to find his children trying their best not to nod off.
Amy stood on one leg in the middle of the floor, like a flamingo.
When her leg fell asleep or she started to teeter she switched legs.
Robert marched… not paced, but marched, soldier style, back and forth across the living room floor. Each time he turned he performed an almost perfect about-face.
Any real soldier would be proud.
Neither child uttered so much as a word, for they’d been warned by their mother.
“Your father wants you to listen. And you cannot listen if you’re chattering all night to each other. You have to keep the chatter to a minimum.”
They obeyed her instructions to the letter, partly because she was their mother and they wanted to please her.
And partly because they knew their father was likely to beat them unmercifully if he wasn’t pleased with their performance.
In this case he was.
When he saw the methods they were using to stay awake, while being perfectly quiet and listening for any sounds from outside the house, he was impressed.
And although he’d never heap praise upon them, he was proud.
‘I’ll take over now,” he told them. “You guys can go back to bed and get some sleep. I’ll wake your mama up when I leave in a couple of hours and she can make you something to eat.”
The tykes didn’t have to be told twice.
They were off like a shot, Amy to Beth’s bedroom and Robert to Lindsey’s.
Like their mom, they fell asleep very quickly.
That was okay with Ronald Martinez, who was free to strut around his new home as a king might strut around his palace.
He stood at the sliding glass door leading to the patio where Dave once sat talking to two rabbits he was convinced were the reincarnated souls of daughters Lindsey and Beth.
On the other side of the fence to his left was where Dave buried a kid he shot dead in an unfortunate accident.
The teenager burglarized the house.
Dave caught him rummaging through kitchen drawers looking for silverware or other valuables.
He turned and Dave saw something shiny in the kid’s hand.
He assumed it was a gun and fired his own.
The kid slumped down, coming to rest in a seated position on the kitchen floor.
He sat there all winter.
Dave couldn’t burn him without attracting unwanted attention to what was supposed to be a vacant house.
He couldn’t bury him because the ground was frozen solid.
So was Mikey, the kid, after just a couple of hours.
For months the two were uneasy companions, then something akin to friends.
Dave carried on long, albeit one-side conversations with the boy. They talked of life, death, and unfortunate mishaps.
It wasn’t until springtime when the ground thawed that Dave was finally able to bury him, still in the seated position, next door.
That plastic drum in the corner of the back yard?
Ronald still hadn’t figured out what it was for.
It had a length of PVC pipe coming out of the bottom of the drum, which led to a metal pan.
There were holes drilled into the end of the capped pipe, and a couple of socks covered the holes.
The socks were held into place with a couple of hose clamps.
It was the oddest contraption Ronald had ever seen, and for the life of him he couldn’t figure out what it was used for.
He’d seen the rabbits. They hopped back and forth between the yards like it was a big playground.
But he never put two and two together.
He assumed the rabbits were wild, and for some reason had overcome their fear of humans.
It never dawned on him the rabbits once belonged to Dave.
Or that the drum was a long-term watering system to help keep the rabbits alive in his absence.
Of course, he never planned to be gone this long.
The drum had run dry long before.
The rabbits stayed alive by eating roots, full of moisture, and dew-covered grass.
There was so much about Dave’s operation Ronald didn’t understand.
Had he been a more intelligent man he might have figured much of it out.
But intelligence had never been his strong suit.
Later this morning he’d retrieve that book.
Dave said he used it to set up his house, his security operation, and his farming operati
ons.
Ronald couldn’t wait to get his hands on that book, and to actually read it this time.
He was convinced it would explain everything.
Chapter 29
Ronald Martinez had been a normal guy until the morning of his thirty fifth birthday.
He’d been laid off his job at an auto plant for eight months or so.
That in itself wasn’t unusual.
He’d been in the new car manufacturing field all his adult life after scoring his first job at a GM assembly plant fresh out of high school.
As a “flunky” it was nothing glamorous: refilling parts trays for the men who actually had the “hands-on” assembly jobs.
But he worked his way up and by the time he was in is thirties he was not only one of those people who drove around town saying, “that’s one of mine, and so’s that one…”
He was also nearing retirement.
Then the plant closed.
No one wanted the particular car he was building anymore.
Hey, it happens. Car trends come, car trends go. An auto assembler rolls with the punches.
This layoff lasted a lot longer than any he’d experienced before, though. Automation meant robots were performing a bigger role than ever before, and more built-up assemblies were being made using overseas labor at half the cost.
The two together meant fewer workers were being hired for shorter periods of time.
Ronald was only twenty months shy of scoring enough credits for his pension but getting there was the toughest thing he’d experienced in his career.
And he was getting depressed.
He’d done heroin a few times when an old motorcycle injury started acting up.
He used it to get high and to ease his worries, yes. But it also seemed to be the only thing that helped his twisted back and made it possible to get out of bed some days.
And as long as he only snorted it and didn’t shoot up, and only used it on his worst days, he figured he’d never get hooked.
No junkie starts out planning to get hooked.
They just do.
So he had a problem.
He thought he could lick it anytime.
So did Monica, and she stood by him. Back then he was a good man and a good husband who worshipped his kids.
Then he got popped for possession.
He’d gotten an inheritance from his favorite aunt and had a little extra money in the bank.
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