The old woman who had lived there had children, but they lived elsewhere and hadn’t come to claim the house yet. The town police officer told them that they could live there, as long as they took care of the place, until the rightful owners came to tell them otherwise.
My family thought we had gotten off easy—concerning marauders, that is. To hear the Guardsmen talk, the marauders would have killed us all at the drop of a hat. I was feeling pretty safe right then, and I said so one night at dinner, but Papa said, “Calm always comes before the storm,” to which Dad replied, “Some days you get the bear, other days the bear gets you.” Then Calvin said, in his best Forrest Gump voice, “Life is like a box of chocolates…”
We all busted up laughing, but, later, I thought about what Dad and Papa had said and I started worrying again.
What if Ben and his friends weren’t representative of most marauders? What if some would show up and really hurt us? Even worse, what if they went into town and hurt Skylar and I wasn’t there to defend her?
Not being able to sleep at night was beginning to become a habit with me, and I didn’t care too much for it.
Chapter 19
That summer was great—one of the happiest I could remember. After the spring planting—which was kind of hard until we got the hang of the horse-drawn planter Dad had gotten from Mr. Caruthers—I was pretty much free to do about anything I wanted after all my chores were done for the day.
Skylar got a job with Johnny and Crystal Phillips watching their two little girls while they worked around their farm. The Phillips’s live just a little over four miles from our house, and Skylar stayed with them during the week. The Phillips’s didn’t mind if I came and hung out with Skylar just as long as I helped her with the girls. I often assisted Johnny with work that was harder for Crystal, although she was pretty strong for such a little gal.
On the weekends, Skylar came and stayed with my family at our house. I wondered if her parents missed her a lot, and she said that they were pretending she was just away at summer camp or something. Sometimes she would get homesick, and we would ride to town and stay with her parents for the weekend. I slept on the couch in their family room and minded my manners, as my Mom brought me up to do.
I always helped Mr. and Mrs. Tipton with whatever they needed help with, and I could tell that they really liked me. Mr. Tipton even started calling me “son” and told me to call him Dave. Try as I might, though, it was really hard to shake the habit of calling him Mr. Tipton and it took all summer before I felt comfortable with it.
Mrs. Tipton wanted me to call her Barb too, and that was just a little easier because I was more familiar with her. Skylar had felt so comfortable from the beginning calling my mom and dad by their given names. I guess that’s because she had waited on them so often in the diner and felt like they were old friends. Or maybe it was just Skylar—she’s so comfortable being herself ever since she was liberated from the diner.
One day in June, Ben came riding to our house with Jenny. It was a Saturday, so Skylar was already at our house and we all spent the day riding around and having a good time. I liked Ben much more since he wasn’t interested in Skylar anymore and I have to give it to him, he had respected my warning about her right away. However, there was still one thing that bothered me about him. He kept talking about how he and his buddies had been working on making explosive devices, and they wanted to make up for the trouble they had caused our family by helping us set up a better defense system for marauders. I wasn’t sure exactly what their intentions were and it made me a little uneasy.
Ben told Dad later about the idea and Dad was a little skeptical too, but agreed to hear them out. It was decided that Ben would bring his friends back in a couple of days to talk to Dad and show him what they had come up with. After Ben and Jenny had left that afternoon, Dad said we would have to be ready for any shenanigans they might pull. He wanted to believe that their intentions were true, but he said, “You can never be too careful.”
Two days later, true to his word, Ben came back with his three buddies. They had borrowed Jenny’s two horses and were riding double on them, each with a backpack full of stuff. As Ben introduced his friends, the one named Doug was very sheepish and apologetic. He was the one who had shot at Alex and Ben the dog. He said he had panicked when he thought that Ben had been killed, but that he regretted even having the gun in the first place, especially when Ben the kid told them how kind we had been to him. He seemed sincere, and Alex and Dad both assured him that he was forgiven.
The men explained to us that they had started a sort of business to help people protect themselves against marauders. Since they had been forced to steal themselves for a while, they knew that the probability of vandalism and attacks would only get worse as people became more desperate and more dangerous with the coming winter. Doug explained that they were trading their expertise for food and other necessities, but that they had all agreed to give free help to us for the trouble they had caused.
Papa pulled Dad aside and whispered that they may just be trying to set us up to steal from us, but Dad said he’d already thought of that, and he had some tricks up his sleeve in case that was their ulterior motive.
So we all gathered around the guys and listened as they described how to make homemade grenades, torpedoes, and tear gas out of common household items. Dad asked them how they knew so much about making homemade weapons and one of the guys, Matt, said that he had been a zombie movie fan and had a book about what to do in the event of a zombie apocalypse. We all laughed, but he mentioned how the part about making homemade weapons was real, and he and the others had tried them out. They helped us make several different types of weapons and gave us pointers on how to protect ourselves and our property from zombies (or any other type of invader).
The guys also told us that we should keep some food in a box near the highway, off the ground and secure from animals, like our mailbox, with a sign that offered it to travelers. This way, hungry people just trying to get someplace, like the four of them had been, could get food without having to steal or beg from us.
We agreed that it was a good idea and decided to make a larger box to contain enough food to get a group of travelers a few miles. If that amount of food didn’t satisfy those who came for it, then they were probably up to no good anyway.
When we took a break to have lunch, which Mom and the grandmas insisted the guys eat too, I got to talking with Dakota, the third man, about who they were and how they had met. Dakota told me that the three of them had been engineering majors at UMKC and had shared a dorm. Shortly after PF Day, the university kicked everyone out of the dorms because they had to shut the whole campus down. The guys didn’t have a way to get back home to their families, each of whom lived quite a distance away, so they hung out together in Kansas City, seeking shelter and scavenging food wherever they could find it.
They had found Ben, nearly frozen and starving to death, and had taken him under their wing. They had been planning to try to make it to Omaha, which was the closest city where any of them had relatives, when they found an opportunity to live in our town. The townspeople had been so friendly and helpful to them that they had decided to stay, at least until they found a better way to get to Omaha than walking.
After talking to Dakota, I felt much better about the three of them as people, and so did the rest of my family when I told them their story later that night.
Dad, Alex, and Papa decided that it couldn’t hurt to fix up some of the weapons the guys had told us about, so we spent several days working out all sorts of scenarios and provisioning the farm with defense systems. We had quite a lot of fun talking about zombies and started calling any type of marauder that might threaten us “zombies.”
We even taught Mom, Robin, and the grandmas how to use the various weapons in all the places we had set them up, and we went over emergency plans in case of “zombie” attacks. Even though we were enjoying ourselves—it was kind of like setting up to pla
y a video game or to be in a zombie movie or something—there was always a sense of seriousness and real concern in our actions. We all knew that being a lone farm right off the highway, with plenty of grain and livestock, put us in danger just like the National Guardsmen had warned us about.
Our neighbors, the Thomas’s, were in danger too, so Dad and Alex went to their house and helped them. The Fab Four, as we had begun calling Ben and his buddies, had already been there, so Alex and Dad had only to help the couple implement what they had been taught. One of the things that the Fab Four had enthusiastically approved of was the air horns. They believed that if a gang of marauders was scared off from one farm, they would probably go to the next one to see if they would have better luck, so advanced warning like that could make a big difference.
It was also agreed upon that if we heard the alarm go off at the Thomas’s’, two of us would ride over to see if they needed help, but since there were only the two of them, they could not return the favor. Rick Thomas felt really bad about that, but Dad convinced him that he couldn’t leave his place unguarded to come to our aid, nor could he leave his wife, Carla, at home to defend it herself.
Mom felt uneasy about me going to the Phillips’s alone to see Skylar, without anything to defend myself, so I started taking my shotgun with me. We had fashioned gun scabbards for the saddles and I felt like a regular cowboy with my gun on my saddle and my hunting knife in my boot. I hoped I would never have to use either of them, but they made Mom feel better about me going places alone.
All this talk of zombies and marauders made it hard for me to sleep at night, in spite of the defense systems we had in place. I would lay awake for nights, thinking I’d heard a noise in the yard, or going over scenarios and plans in my mind so I could execute my part flawlessly when the time came. I knew that was probably impossible, since there was no way to cover every scenario, but it made me feel better anyway.
Chapter 20
I couldn’t believe how fast the summer went by; in the blink of an eye, it was already fall. Although Skylar was still helping the Phillips’s while they harvested their huge vegetable garden, Crystal canned dozens of jars of vegetables, and Johnny got their small herd of cattle ready for winter, I wasn’t able to spend as much time with her as I had during the summer. We had harvesting and preparing for winter going on at our house too.
We had about 200 acres of grain to harvest, hay to cut and bale, logs to chop for the fire, and our own large garden to harvest. Mom, Robin, and the grandmas canned over a hundred jars of fruit and vegetables and always needed help carrying them down to the cold cellar. We also “laid in” potatoes, carrots, onions, apples, sweet potatoes, turnips, radishes, and several varieties of herbs in the cold cellar.
That Thanksgiving was enjoyable, as usual. Skylar got to spend the day with us and we were all able to take a much-needed break from all the winter preparations. We had plenty of food, the weather was warm, and all of our family was happy and healthy.
The weather waited until early December to get cooler, and that is when the livestock owners did their butchering. Calvin and I helped the Phillips’s and Dad and Alex helped the Thomas’s. We each earned a side of beef for our help, so we traded two sides of beef for two sides of hog from the Smithson’s. We spent the first two weeks of December butchering, smoking, rendering fat, boiling bones and hooves for glue, etc. By the middle of December, we felt we could finally sit back, relax, and enjoy the holidays.
Well, except for the upcoming birth of Robin’s baby. Mom and the grandmas were still making clothing for the baby and diapers stuffed with absorbent down feathers.
Now normally I don’t keep track of the date. Mom keeps a calendar in the kitchen where she marks off each day, but I don’t really need to know most of the time. One date will forever stick out in my mind, however, because of all the things that happened on that particular day—December 17th.
I was woken out of a deep sleep by the barking of the dogs sometime before dawn. As I strained to hear any unusual noises, my ears picked up the faint sound of an air horn coming from the direction of the Thomas’s’ farm. I jumped out of bed, pulled on my clothes, and met Dad, Mom, Calvin, and Alex in the kitchen. As per our plan, Dad and Calvin prepared to ride to the Thomas’s’ while the rest of us prepared to defend our farm. I felt a shot of adrenaline running through my veins and was surprised to find that, instead of being afraid as I thought I would be, I was actually excited. I know, kind of a dumb response, but I couldn’t help it; I was psyched.
Dad and Calvin rode off at a gallop with their rifles in the saddle scabbards and pistols in their coat pockets. Alex hesitated before following me outside and I heard him tell Mom to check on Robin, who hadn’t been feeling good all night. He and I then saddled our horses and began to patrol our land, careful never to stray too far from the house.
After what seemed like hours, but was probably only fifteen or twenty minutes, we heard gunfire from the Thomas’s’ farm. You would not believe how hard it was to stay where we were when we heard that. We had no way of knowing if Dad and Calvin were the ones shooting or if they were the ones getting shot at. We wanted so badly to gallop over and help, but we couldn’t leave Mom and the others without our protection. Alex would not leave Robin, due to give birth any day. I really understood the phrase “between a rock and a hard place” at that moment.
After a few more minutes, we heard shouting and the sound of people running on the highway. The setting moon was about three-quarters full, and soon we could see a bunch of men coming toward us. Alex told me not to shoot until we were sure they were bad guys. I was still trying to figure out how I was going to know when the group suddenly spread out and began to surround the front of our property. There must have been at least thirty or forty of them and they were swarming us from all sides before we could decide who to shoot first.
I need to take a time-out here to tell you how our property is laid out, so you will be able to understand how difficult it was for Alex and me to defend it against that many people. Our house faces west, toward the highway, and sits about a hundred yards back from it. A gravel driveway goes past the house and back to the barn, which sits another hundred yards behind the house. On the north side of the barn sits the three grain silos and the paddock extends to the east of the barn and silos for about twenty acres.
Beyond that are woods. On both sides of our house, extending out for several hundred yards in both directions, are parts of our fields, surrounded on both sides by more woods. We have creeks running here and there through the woods, so we always have water to replenish our well. Across the highway to the east of our property is more woodland extending for a couple of miles. These woods are owned by a man from out of town who used to use it to hunt on once a year.
Now back to the early morning of December 17th. The sun was beginning to rise behind us and I could just make out the faces of our opposition. They were all yelling and screaming so loud that I couldn’t hear what Alex was saying. Our horses were scared and prancing wildly and I was afraid I might lose control of mine. I knew I couldn’t pull my gun out and shoot at anything and still stay on the horse.
Apparently, Alex thought the same, because he motioned for me to fall back to the house, where we dismounted, let the horses go, and prepared to shoot at the crazy horde flooding into our front yard.
These were definitely not zombies! In fact, I never understood how zombies could take over the world anyway. I mean, they’re so slow moving and they have no weapons. These guys seemed to be flying at us with their blood-curdling screams and their hands in the air, and now we could see that most of them held some kind of weapon in their hands, not guns, but something to throw or hit with. I had the distinct impression of the Indians in a cowboy movie and, as they got closer and closer, I half expected to see war paint on their faces.
I kept hearing that old song by Trapt, Headstrong, playing over and over in my mind: “Back off, I’ll take you on…this is not where you belong.�
� I got off a couple of rounds and one guy fell about thirty yards in front of the porch. Another guy threw something at me, but I was able to duck as it sailed over my head and slammed into the wall of the house. I could hear other objects hitting the walls and even breaking windows. Alex shot a couple of people too, and that seemed to change the direction of the horde. Instead of advancing toward us, they now started circling around both sides of the house.
From Calvin’s room on the second floor, the one that faced south, came one of our homemade grenades, followed by one from the opposite side of the house. I could hear Mom and Papa shooting at them from both sides of the back porch. Gram and Granny were tossing the grenades out the upstairs windows and, after only three or four of them, the marauders started backing off.
Several had been shot or injured and lay on the grass, moaning or still and silent. I don’t know how many shots I had fired, but my shotgun only holds six, so I knew I’d need to reload soon. Alex motioned for us to go into the house, so we backed in through the front door and took up our positions at the living room windows while we reloaded.
Mom and Papa also came in the back door and we set ourselves up like soldiers defending our fort. Papa had blood dripping from the side of his head where he’d apparently been hit with something, but he assured us he was all right, that it would take more than a rock to keep him down. He waved off Mom’s attempt to look at it.
It was completely silent for a few moments. The intruders had stopped shouting and we had stopped shooting and throwing grenades. Then the dogs began growling and I realized, to my sudden relief, that someone had brought them into the house. All of a sudden, an air horn began screaming, and I could hear the mule and the donkey braying like they were possessed, the horses neighing, and hooves pounding the ground as they ran off down the paddock.
Teenage Survivalist Series [Books 1-3] Page 12