by E. E. Borton
I tried to think of another option, but there wasn’t any. As I looked up at the darkening sky, the ground shook from an explosion of thunder. The white landscape was turning green as the clouds overtook the sun. We could feel the temperature drop as we stood looking at the difference between surviving another day or freezing to death. We chose survival.
“How do you want to handle this?” asked Doug.
“Like I said, I’m going to knock on the door.”
“Diplomacy,” said Doug, smiling. “Your uncle would be proud.”
“I can’t think of anything else,” I said. “My brain is frozen.”
“We’ll cover the windows and the sides of the house,” said Doug.
Another blast of thunder caused a slab of snow to slide off the roof. The storm was moving faster than we thought. They took their positions while I strolled up the front stairs. I took a deep breath and knocked hard on the door. I wanted to make sure if anyone was inside, they could hear me over the brewing storm. As I stepped to the side, the front door exploded.
I dove over the railing and rolled up against a garage door. Splinters of wood were raining down as Doug and Daniel lit up the front porch. As I crawled to the corner of the house, I could see JD and Tucker shooting as well. A few seconds after they ceased fire, more shots rang out from inside the house. Daniel ducked down as a round hit the tree at head level. I knew the others saw where it came from when they opened fire again. Ten seconds later, all was quiet.
I signaled to them that I was okay. I hopped back over the railing as Doug and Daniel ran toward the porch. JD and Tucker were covering them. When no shots were fired and no movement was seen inside, they joined us.
We slung our rifles over our shoulders and drew our pistols. It was time to make entry. Doug went in first.
A man was lying in a pool of blood in the hallway behind the front door. A shotgun was on the floor next to him. We heard the sound of a hammer falling on an empty chamber coming from the next room.
When I turned the corner, I saw a man riddled with bullets sitting on the floor with his back against the wall. He was aiming his gun at me and squeezing the trigger. Over and over again, I heard the hammer fall. After a few seconds, his arm dropped and his chin fell onto his chest.
We cleared all the rooms on the first floor before regrouping at the stairs leading to the second floor. Four of us went up while JD covered our backs. We snaked into the hallway and cleared two rooms with open doors. The last door we approached was closed.
As we prepared to enter, we heard the snap of a gunshot, but nothing came through the door or the wall. Another followed. Then all was quiet again.
Doug moved to the other side of the door and then turned the knob. It didn’t give way. He reared back and kicked it in. I went in first. They came in after.
She was lying face-down on the bed with a gunshot wound to the back of her head. The little girl couldn’t have been older than five. Her mother was on the floor leaning against a dresser with a wound to the side of her head. A pistol was in her lap.
I couldn’t move.
I couldn’t breathe.
“Oh dear God,” said Doug, lowering his gun. “Dear God, forgive me.”
Chapter 38
The Last Contingency
I had to force myself to inhale.
Daniel pulled his sobbing brother out of the room. Tucker walked out behind them. JD came up a few moments later. I still couldn’t move. I was staring at the lifeless bodies, trying to figure out how to undo what we did. I couldn’t comprehend what was in front of me or why it happened.
We just needed shelter. We weren’t going to hurt you. We just needed shelter.
“Come on,” said JD, standing in front of me and blocking my view. “Let’s go downstairs. Nothin’ we can do about this now. We didn’t know they was gonna start shootin’ at us. We didn’t know they was gonna shoot themselves either.”
“They thought we were coming in here to rape and murder them,” I said. “I would’ve thought the same thing. They were right. We did murder them. We killed all of them. Look at what we did, JD. We forced a mother to shoot her own daughter and then herself. We slaughtered an entire family here.”
“You ain’t thinkin’ straight on this,” said JD, showing me out of the room. “They didn’t give you a chance to talk or nothing. What were we supposed to do, Henry? Let ‘em kill us?”
“Yes,” I said, stopping on the stairs. “If it would bring that little girl and her mother back, then yes.”
“We ain’t got time for this, Henry,” said JD, pleading with me. “We don’t get that door and those windows patched up, you’re gonna get your wish, and we’re all gonna die. It’s gettin’ colder, and it’s startin’ to come down sideways out there.”
I made it to the bottom of the landing and was hit with a blast of cold air and swirling snow. I guess it was the slap in the face I needed. Tucker was struggling to drag the body of the large man lying in the hall to the back deck. I reached down and grabbed the dead man’s ankles. We placed him in the corner and went back inside for the younger man. JD was walking back up the stairs to bring down the woman and little girl. He was the only one of us at the time who could do it.
I looked down at the younger man’s wedding band while we carried him down the hall. It made sense that he was the father of that child and the husband of the woman. Not because of the wedding band, but because he kept fighting us with an empty gun until his last breath. The most dangerous animal on the planet is a man protecting his family and his home.
When we laid him down on the snow-covered deck, JD walked out with the woman in his arms wrapped in a sheet. He placed her with care next to her husband and turned to go back inside. Tucker followed him, but I waited in the blistering cold for him to return.
JD had wrapped her in a blanket. He placed her in the small space between her mother and father. He stared down at them before looking up at me. He wasn’t going inside until I did. A bolt of lightning struck a tree on the hillside across the river. It was time to work on saving ourselves.
A fire would be useless until we sealed up the house. JD and Tucker went upstairs to take interior doors off their hinges. I started going through each room downstairs to find anything we could use to seal up bullet holes and broken windows. Doug sat on the couch with his head in his hands. His brother sat beside him with his arm around his shoulder. We didn’t care that they needed a little more time.
In the garage, I found a treasure of supplies, tools, and hardware. The family we killed had provided us with everything we needed. There would be plenty of time to think about that when the job was done.
There was a thermometer attached to a post on the front porch. Before we boarded up the last window, we noticed it read negative five. With the wind howling, I guessed the wind chill was closer to twenty below and dropping.
Even with the windows and doors covered, freezing air was still penetrating inside the living room. We gathered sheets, towels, and clothing and stuffed them into every crack we could find. Daniel left his brother’s side and started a fire. We found an axe, started breaking up furniture, and created a pile of anything that would burn. (There was half a cord of wood in the garage, but we didn’t know if that would be enough.)
The house creaked and moaned as the relentless wind tried to blow it to the ground. Glassware and figurines danced on the shelves with every detonation of thunder. We were an hour into the storm. It was impossible for us to know how long it would last, or if it would ever stop.
Even wrapped in whatever we didn’t stuff into a crack and huddled around a large fire, we couldn’t stop shivering. The air was so dense and cold, we could feel it spilling down from the chimney and around the flames.
“I can still see my breath,” said Tucker, breaking the silence. “This is insane.”
“I spent a winter in Montana a few years back,” said Daniel. “We got caught in a storm while we were snowmobiling. I thought I was going to f
reeze to death back then. This is a helluva lot worse.”
“I hope everyone back home is okay,” said Doug, speaking his first words since the bedroom.
Faces filled our heads. Kelly’s filled mine. We had a sturdy home, but it wasn’t built for this kind of cold. I could only hope that she wasn’t alone and had made her way to my uncle’s house before the worst of it hit.
“I should’ve cut more wood,” I said.
“I’m just glad Momma’s with Donna and her kin,” said Tucker. “Kelly’s probably there, too, Henry. Perry built himself a good home. They’ll be fine as long as they stick together. Just like us.”
“That’s right, brother,” said JD. “We’ll be fine. We may lose a toe or two, but we’ll be fine. So will Momma and everyone else. They’ll all take care of each other.”
“We should be taking care of them,” said Doug, shifting in his seat. “Not out here freezing to death with a dead family on the back porch. I still don’t understand what the hell happened.”
I did.
It was always part of the family plan. It was the last contingency. If all else fails and a gang of thugs makes it up the stairs, don’t let them take you or our daughter alive. You know what they’ll do to you, what they’ll do to our little girl. The unknown of the next world was easier to accept than what they knew was coming in this one. In their eyes, we were the monsters that came out of the storm.
“They thought we was coming to hurt ‘em,” said JD. “We know we weren’t, but they didn’t. And they didn’t give us a chance to explain. It was an accident, Doug. That’s all this was. It’s sad, and my heart is broken for what we did, but we had to do it. We just knocked on a door, man. Should we have been shot at for doin’ that? Knocking on a damn door with a storm from hell bearin’ down on us?”
“She was a baby, JD,” said Doug. “My daughter is –”
“That ain’t on us!” said JD. “I don’t care what you say; this ain’t on us. I wasn’t going up there to rape that girl or her momma. I wasn’t gonna steal from them. I just didn’t wanna die out there on that road. Henry knocked on the door and without sayin’ shit they tried to kill him. I wasn’t gonna let them kill my friend, none of my friends.”
JD lowered his head and his voice. He wasn’t angry at Doug. We all knew that. He was angry at the things that brought us to their door.
“I don’t know what to think sometimes, Doug,” said JD. “All this killin’ just to stay alive and keep our people alive. I have nightmares, just like all of you have ‘em. I never once had to fight for my life before the power went out. It seems now that’s all we do.
“Things ain’t always gonna go right for us, like today. I gotta believe my heart’s still good because I don’t mean any harm to no one, unless they’re looking to hurt me or my family. They tried to hurt Henry, and he’s my family. They tried to hurt you and Daniel, and you’re my family too. Tucker’s my family, but there ain’t nothin’ I can do about that. He was born into it.”
“Thanks, brother,” said Tucker, smiling and jamming his shoulder into JD’s.
“I hear you, JD,” said Doug. “I do. I don’t put this on you or us either.”
“Where do we put it?” asked Daniel.
“I put it on Castle and his goddamned militia,” said JD. “He’s the reason we’re here. Now, it worked out for those women in Chattanooga, us being here, but it didn’t for this family. I put all of this on him.”
“You think he’s still alive?” asked Tucker. “I mean, with this storm and everything. If he got caught out in the open, he’s frozen solid by now. They all are.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “We’ll figure that out if we survive the night. There’s no way in hell they pushed through this. If they did find shelter, they have enough food and supplies to last them a very long time.”
“Say we do survive, and they did find shelter, Henry,” said JD. “What do we do then? Every step we take lookin’ for ‘em puts us farther away from home.”
“Once we get into that valley,” said Daniel, “we’ll be in a national forest. No houses or shelter in there. Another storm like this hits us while we’re in there, we won’t have a chance.”
“Wait,” said Doug, reaching through layers to pull out his map. “There actually are homes in there. They’re right in the middle of nothing. There’s five miles of thick forest on either side. I guarantee you they know they’re there, too. If my calculations are right, they would’ve just passed them when the storm came up. They would’ve had time to go back.”
“So they made it inside one of those houses, or they’re dead,” said JD. “I have a feeling Henry here is gonna tell us we need to find out either way.”
“This storm might make the decision for us,” I said, putting my hands closer to the flames. “I know you all want to head home and check on your families. I do as well.”
“But,” said JD.
“I don’t know if this storm is a sign that a brutal winter is coming, or if it’s another isolated freak weather event. I do know that if General Castle is alive, he won’t stop coming after us until he has that train and our town. We’ve seen his reach, and we know his plans. The next time he comes we won’t be able to stop him. He’s cut off from the rest of his army and exposed. He won’t be if he makes it home. One way or another, it’s up to us to make sure he doesn’t make it home.”
“What happened here was bad,” said Doug. “I still have no idea how I’m going to face my family. I just think it would be worse if I face them knowing we gave up on what we came here to do. All of this would be for nothing.”
“Those folks in Chattanooga won’t stand a chance either if he makes it back,” said Daniel. “Seems they’re counting on us as well.”
“I ain’t ready to quit,” said Tucker. “Like JD said, all of this is on him.”
“I guess that settles it,” said JD. “We kill Castle or we die tryin’.”
Chapter 39
Mush
After taking a relentless beating for several hours, the house stood its ground against the storm. Frigid air was no longer being pushed around the fire and through tiny cracks. We were able to peel off a few layers and welcome the warm embrace from the flames. With full bellies and hands wrapped around hot mugs, we could exhale and relax. One by one, eyes closed until mine were the only two open.
We could have been buried under ten feet of snow, but nobody cared. There was no need to post a watch. I can’t remember the last time we were all able to fall asleep at the same time in the same place. Nobody would be trying to come through the door. Nobody caught outside in the storm could have survived.
We only had minutes to spare, or we would have died. There’s no doubt a few people in Stevenson did. There’s no doubt thousands or more were killed in the states to our north as the storm made its way south. Even if they managed to survive, any livestock left outside wouldn’t have. It was still early in the fall. I could only imagine what would be coming down from the sky in the dead of winter. I felt a sense of urgency to get home. To get all of us home.
I stopped resisting it. I put more wood on the fire before leaning back into the couch and closing my eyes. She was always the last thing I thought about before I fell asleep.
When my eyes opened, I was confused. Nobody was in the same place. I sat up when JD walked in front of me to stoke the fire.
“Good morning, sunshine,” said JD, stirring hot coals.
“How long was I out?” I asked.
“About seven hours,” said JD, turning to look at me. “You okay, man?”
“I swear, it feels like I just shut my eyes,” I said, looking around the room.
“Yeah,” said JD. “Same for me.”
“Where is everyone?”
“Trying to figure out where the river went,” said JD, warming his hands.
“What?”
“That’s what they said, so I told them to go look for themselves. They didn’t wanna wake you up by prying open the
doors, so they went upstairs.”
As I made my way up, I heard them talking in the corner bedroom that faced the river. They were huddled around the window when I entered. The only colors outside were white and blue.
As with most of the other insane weather events, they wreaked havoc and disappeared as fast as they arrived. The thunder snow blizzard, or whatever that thing was, was nowhere in sight. The sky was crystal clear and bluer than I had ever seen. I imagined it was a common scene in Siberia, not so much in Tennessee. When I looked down at where the river was supposed to be, there was nothing but a blanket of white.
“Is it frozen solid, you think?” asked Tucker, standing beside Doug.
“No,” said Doug. “Most rivers don’t freeze solid. It’s still flowing underneath. The layer of ice and snow on top of it acts as insulation and keeps it from completely freezing.”
“It looks low,” I said.
“That’s the part I don’t understand,” said Doug. “Maybe someone manually shut the gates at Chickamauga Dam. It’s about seven miles upriver from Chattanooga. Why anyone would do that, I don’t know.”
“Maybe the ice choked the river farther north,” said Daniel. “Like some kind of ice dam. No telling how cold it got overnight up there.”
“I thought there would be more snow on the ground,” I said.
“I thought so too,” said Doug. “It looks like maybe just another four inches or so.”
“That’s good news for us,” said Tucker.
“You’ll think different when you start walking in it,” I said. “Look at how it gleams. It’s just a giant sheet of ice out there.”
“There’s at least an inch of it covering everything,” said Doug, looking down at the railing on the deck and the frozen bodies in the corner. “I was hoping to bury them before we left, but that’s not going to happen now.”
“Let’s start working on some breakfast,” I said. “We’ll be burning a lot of calories out there.”