A Perilous Journey

by Darrell Maloney

  “Should I ask where you got the hand grenades?”

  “Like I said before, preppers know how to get things most people can’t get.”

  Going down ten flights of stairs was much easier and much quicker than going up, and they walked out into the street less than a minute later.

  There were a couple of thugs eyeing the Hummer from the street corner, but otherwise nothing was amiss.

  Frank nodded toward the thugs and asked, “Should we be concerned about Laverne and Shirley over there?”

  “No. They’re my guys. They’re my early warning system. If they ever see anybody approaching the building heavily armed they’ll fire three quick shots into the air. Then a pause, and four more shots.

  “That’s my signal to put away my hand grenades and to get the big stuff out.”

  “Bigger than hand grenades?”

  “You don’t wanna know.”

  “And that’s exactly why I’m not gonna ask.”

  Ronnie handed Frank the AK-47 and started inspecting the wooden plow blade, inch by inch.

  Frank was impressed.

  “Wow, Ronnie. Even after all this time you trust me to hold your primary weapon.”

  “I trust nobody, Frank. If you take me out Laverne and Shirley will take out the three of you. Simple as that.”

  Frank looked again at the street corner. Laverne and Shirley split up, and were now hunkered behind parked cars, each with a rifle in his hands.

  “Good thing I’m a good guy,” Frank said.

  “I know you are, Frank. That’s why I’m gonna save your life today.”

  “Huh?”

  “Get in. We’re going for a ride. Don’t worry, you won’t regret it.”

  Josie climbed into the passenger seat, Ronnie and Eddie in the back.

  Frank reconnected the starter cable and climbed behind the wheel.

  “Okay, Ronnie. I’m your chauffeur. Where we going?”

  “Go straight to Avenue Q. That’s five lights up. Turn left there.”

  “Can I at least ask where we’re going?”

  “I noticed several tiny cracks in your plow frame. The bad thing about tiny cracks is that they’ll only get bigger. You’ve been worried about the nuts coming free from your bolts. What you should have been worried about is your frame breaking apart. It’s well on its way.”

  “But… we made it all the way from Plainview.”

  “You got lucky, Frank. You made what, sixty miles or so? Guess what? You’ve got well over three hundred to go.”

  He let Frank chew on his words for several seconds before he let him off the hook.

  “Don’t worry about it. We’re going to get a real blade. One that’s made of steel instead of wood. One we can bolt onto your brush rack that you won’t have to worry about loosening or breaking apart.”

  It took them twenty minutes or so to get to a place called Western Implement Company, on the southern outskirts of town.

  “This place was in business for seventy years before the freeze shut ‘em down,” Ronnie said. “They sold mostly to cotton and grain farmers. Not snow plows, but farming plows. Irrigation equipment, planting equipment, too. Pretty much everything a farmer needed to attach to his tractor to work his crops.

  “Turns out they did a pretty good business in what they called mini-plows as well. They sold small plow blades to people to attach to the front of their pickup trucks.

  “Those guys were typically small entrepreneurs who went out after a snowfall and cleared parking lots of businesses and churches for a couple hundred bucks a pop. I knew a guy who actually did that and made a good living at it.

  “Maybe you knew him: Johnny Hudson. He retired from the Lubbock County Sheriff’s Office a couple years before I did.”

  “Didn’t he also raise and train police dogs?”

  “That’s the one. Exclusively German shepherds. He always said they were the best working dogs on earth.”

  “I never met Johnny. I talked to him on the phone a few times, though. We had a guy who escaped custody and was on the run for four months.

  “Johnny found him hiding in a cotton gin east of here. Idalou, I think it was.

  “Is he still around?”

  “Nope. He went east right before the freeze. Somewhere north of Dallas, as I recall. Maybe Denton. His folks were both still alive, but were getting pretty old. He moved his family there so he could take care of them.

  “I talk to him on the radio occasionally. Turns out he was a prepper too, but he kept that to himself.”

  “Yeah,” Frank said. “A lot of us did that.”

  -17-

  From a block away Frank saw a huge hulking sign in the distance:

  WESTERN IMPLEMENT COMPANY

  It was once lit up in red neon and served as a beacon in the night sky. And a notice to night travelers that they were about to leave the city of Lubbock.

  Smaller letters below proclaimed:

  SERVING AREA FARMERS SINCE 1946

  As they drew closer Frank wondered how in the world they’d find a small plow blade attachment in their lot beneath three feet of snow.

  He needn’t have worried.

  Someone, since the snow fell, cleared out the parking lot of the business, allowing access to its showroom.

  And there, through the showroom’s glass windows, Frank saw several such blades of varying sizes, lined up in a nice neat row.

  “So who do you think cleared the parking lot?” Frank asked.

  “I don’t know. I reckon it was one of the local entrepreneurs with a blade on the front of his pickup. Maybe he had a deal with them to plow their lot in exchange for a reduced price.

  “Or maybe it was a farmer in need of a piece of equipment himself. Though I doubt it. I think all the farmers are holed up on their farms waiting for the thaw.”

  Josie asked, “Do you think the farmers survived? I mean, if they all live outside the city, how would they get provisions?”

  Ronnie laughed.

  “Oh, you don’t have to worry about the farmers. They’re tougher than nails. My daddy was a farmer. He was the toughest son of a gun I ever knew. If cancer hadn’t taken him on his seventy fifth birthday he’d still be out there, chewing nails and spitting out rivets. Probably still working the fields.

  “You see, most of the farmers around here plant cotton or sorghum. Cotton ain’t edible, but the cotton farmers I knew planted other stuff too. The soil around here is perfectly suited for potatoes and carrots and squash and melons of all types. You can darned sure bet that they grew enough of those every year to jar and put aside.

  “Maybe not enough to last them for seven years, or however long this freeze is gonna last. But they’ll find a way to get by.

  “Worst case scenario, I imagine, is that they’ll visit their friends the sorghum farmers. You see, sorghum is a cattle feed. But humans can eat it too, in a pinch. A lot of it was exported to third world countries as a food source.

  “We’re not a third world country, but we can survive on it, even long term, if we have to.

  “Plus, farmers generally have livestock which can eat snow to get water, and will survive as long as the farmers can scrounge up enough hay or grass or feed. If they don’t have enough feed to keep their livestock alive until the thaw, they can slaughter them. Five slaughtered cattle can keep a farmer and his wife alive for a couple of years.

  “Around here we have a pretty good mix of farmers and ranchers. The ranchers are going out each day with snow blowers and blowing most of the snow off a different section of pasture every day. Their cattle eat the high grass he clears, and the next day he clears another strip next to the first one, blowing the snow on the now-barren land to cover it back up again.

  “In some cases the ranchers are trading the farmers heads of beef for any extra hay or grains they might have.

  “And even when their neighbors have nothing to trade they’re helping each other out anyway.

  “It’s the Texas way. We don’t le
t our neighbors go hungry if we have the means to help them. We just don’t.”

  They got out of the Hummer, leaving Josie and Eddie inside.

  The door to the implement company was unlocked, just as the door to the machine shop had been.

  In the semi-darkness of the showroom it was difficult to see the plows lined up by the windows, until Ronnie pulled out a small flashlight from one of his leg pockets.

  “Batteries will last forever as long as they’re stored below freezing,” he said by way of explanation. “I have a ton of them stored back home on the eleventh floor.”

  “I thought you lived on the tenth floor.”

  “I do. But I have the floor above me wired with explosives too. Or, at least the signs say it is. That’s pretty much the same thing. Anyway, I store some of my less pilferable items there.”

  Attached to each of the plow blades was an owner’s manual.

  On the last page of the owner’s manual was a handy list of vehicles that particular blade was designed to fit.

  It just so happened that Frank’s model of Hummer was listed on one of the blades.

  The biggest one.

  “Looks like this is your lucky day, my friend,” Ronnie concluded.

  Each of the blades was banded to the top of a wooden pallet.

  Frank found an unpowered pallet jack in the building’s warehouse, behind a pair of saloon-style swinging doors.

  It took the three of them: Frank, Ronnie and Eddie… a full two hours to drag the contraption out to the parking lot and to attach it.

  But when they were finished, Frank was happier than a barrel of monkeys.

  On the way back to Lubbock’s downtown and to Ronnie’s high-rise paradise, Frank asked Ronnie how much he owed him.

  “Hell, it wasn’t mine to sell, Frank. It belonged to Western Implement. And they went out of business a long time ago. Its owners are dead now. I guess you could consider it a gift from Saris 7.”

  “Okay, then. How much do I owe you for helping me install it?”

  “Again, not a penny. That’s what friends do for one another. I know for a fact you’d have done the same for me, if our roles were reversed.”

  “Thank you, Ronnie.”

  “You bet, friend.”

  That was the Texas way.

  -18-

  Frank returned the Hummer to the skyscraper again and parked in the same place he vacated a while before.

  That it was still available shouldn’t have been a surprise, since the city wasn’t exactly buzzing with traffic.

  In their entire journey across town and back they’d only seen half a dozen four-wheel drive vehicles out and about.

  Still, it was nice to see the city trying to survive the meteorite’s wrath with some small sense of normalcy.

  While Frank worked to remove the starter cable Ronnie stood over him and the two shared small talk.

  “Ronnie, who cleared the city’s streets? And for that matter, who keeps them cleared when new snow falls?”

  “Oh, the city does. It’s how they keep a handful of people employed. And they don’t clear every street. They just clear the main thoroughfares. Those people who live on the residential streets have to dig out their own vehicles. So precious few of them do it.

  “But the city is laid out in a grid pattern. The east-west thoroughfares… 4th and 19th Streets, 34th and 50th Streets… are exactly one mile apart and are zoned for businesses. The streets in between them are residential streets.

  “Likewise, the north-south thoroughfares… Avenue Q and University Avenue, Indiana and Quaker Avenues and the others… they’re exactly a mile apart as well.

  “That means that every Lubbock resident lives somewhere inside a one-mile square box. And that no matter what direction he wants to go, he’s no more than one half mile from the nearest through street.”

  “Half a mile is still a long way to dig a path.”

  “Yes, sir, that’s true. But if neighbors get together and help with the digging, it doesn’t take more than a couple hours a day, no more than a month or so, to break out onto one of the busy streets.

  “And let’s face it. In a world where almost nobody goes to work anymore, what else is there to do?”

  “So how come there are only a few drivers out and about?”

  “Mostly because folks want to conserve their gas. There’s only two stations, and they get their gas from a refinery that’s operating in Shreveport, Louisiana. They send a tanker every couple of weeks, but the gas is very expensive. Nine dollars a gallon, last I heard. Most people can’t afford it. And those that do like to squeeze every last drop out of it.”

  “So the highways are open outside of Lubbock?”

  “Only one. Highway 84. It goes southeast to the I-20, which is open east to the refinery. I’m afraid that where you’re headed… due south…. all of ‘em are covered with several feet of snow.

  “Of course,” he finished, “that ain’t no problem for you now.”

  Then he changed the subject.

  “Say, where were you planning on getting your fuel? On your way to south Texas, I mean?”

  “I don’t see it as a problem. When I got myself carjacked and had to drive up here to Plainview I had to fill up several times. There are abandoned vehicles littering the highway between here and there. Fuel won’t be a problem.”

  “It’s older now, Frank. Not as good as it once was. I’ve got some stabilizer. I’ll give you a few cans before you leave.”

  “You’re too good to me, Ronnie.”

  “I’ve got precious few friends left, Frank. Gotta be good to somebody, I guess.”

  As they walked from the Hummer to the building’s main entrance Ronnie remembered something he wanted to show them.

  “Hey, Frank… wanna see something cool?”

  Eddie answered for him.

  “Oh, I do, I do Mister Ronnie.”

  He led the group to the southwest corner of the twenty-story building.

  “Look up,” he said, “and tell me what you see.”

  Frank wasn’t good at a lot of things.

  But many years of being a Marine and a cop, and of living with Eva, had taught him how to follow instructions to the letter.

  He stood right next to Ronnie, looked up, and said, “Well I’ll be darned. The building is twisted.”

  “Back in 1970 it was called the Great Plains Life Insurance Building. In May of that year Lubbock got hit by a huge tornado. Tore up the whole town and killed a lot of good people. And it was so powerful it actually twisted this building.”

  “Wow. That’s a pretty good wind.”

  “At the time it was the tallest building ever to survive a direct hit from an F-5 tornado. Now I think it ranks number two. I think there was a building in Waco that’s a couple stories higher and survived an F-5.”

  Eddie suddenly got a worried look on his face.

  “There ain’t gonna be another tornado today, is there Mister Ronnie?”

  Ronnie chuckled and said, “No, son. It’s much too cold these days for tornados.”

  “Speaking of too cold,” Josie said through chattering teeth, “Can we go inside now? It’s too cold out here for man or beast.”

  “Why, certainly,” Ronnie said. “My apologies. Let’s go inside. My place isn’t heated as well as I’d like, but it’s not as bad as most.”

  This time Eddie made it all the way up to the fifth floor before he had to stop and rest. Frank was winded as well.

  “You guys go ahead,” Frank said to Ronnie and Josie. “I’ll stay here with him and make sure he gets there.”

  Ronnie found humor in that his body outlasted the others.

  “Wait a minute, Frank. I’m older than you. How is it that you don’t have the stamina to make it up ten flights and I do?”

  “I don’t know, Ronnie. Maybe you’re used to it. I haven’t climbed a flight of stairs in ten or twelve years.”

  “And you trust me to be alone with your wife? Knowing she coul
d decide that I’m tough and virile and would make a better husband than you?”

  “Oh, I don’t trust you at all. But I trust that she has better taste than that.”

  Ronnie roared with laughter.

  “You guys hungry?”

  “I could eat, yeah.”

  Eddie agreed.

  “Me too, Mister Ronnie.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell you what. Josie and I will share a glass of wine and we’ll make you some grub. Take your time, ain’t no hurry at all. But I gotta warn you. It stays around fifty degrees or so in my place. It don’t take food very long to get cold.”

  -19-

  “Pork chops? Where in hell did you get pork chops, Ronnie?”

  “Okay, Frank. I know you’re not the shiniest bullet in the magazine. Let’s go over this one more time. Repeat after me… Preppers know how to get things other people can’t get…”

  “Very funny. But I’d have thought all the swine would have been killed off years ago.”

  “And you’d have been wrong. These come from a farmer friend of mine who lives just west of here, in a little town called Levelland.

  “When the world went cold he made a deal with the owner of a grain processing plant.

  “He said ‘I’m stuck with a hundred hogs and eighty head of cattle that’ll starve to death in a matter of days. You’re stuck with four silos mostly filled with sorghum that you can’t sell because the railroads aren’t running any more. How about we team up?’

  “So they made some kind of deal. I don’t know the particulars, but I do know that once a month he shows up at my door and brings me twenty pounds of beef and twenty pounds of pork. Sometimes I trade him a gun or some ammo. Sometimes he prefers half an ounce of gold.

  “He gives a cut to the owner of the sorghum and everybody’s happy.

  “I take half the steak and half the pork and offer it up for trade. Anybody who brings me a rifle or two handguns or two boxes of ammo gets a steak or pork chop dinner with all the trimmings. Baked potato, fresh corn and a biscuit…”

  “What? Where in heck do you get that stuff?”