by Lee Bradford
“Sometimes a state of emergency can bring out the worst in some people.”
“What do you think they wanted?” Autumn asked. “Money?”
“Two beautiful women all alone,” Brett said. He and Chet then made eye contact. “Well, not quite alone,” he amended. “But you know what I mean.”
A quick glance at Autumn told Susan her daughter hadn’t heard a single word he said after beautiful.
“Oh, I nearly forgot,” Brett said, reaching into his pocket and coming out with a row of pills, packaged in blisters. He tore off three of them and handed them to Susan. He then did the same for the neighbor standing in her doorway behind them.
“What’s this for?” Autumn asked.
“Protection against radiation,” Brett replied. “As you may already know, we’ve been tracking the prevailing winds coming in from the coast where the detonations occurred and they’re heading this way.”
“Will you come back to check up on us?” Autumn asked him.
Brett began to back away, grinning. “I’ll see what I can do. You folks take care.”
Autumn, Susan and the middle-aged neighbor watched him disappear.
After that they closed the door and locked it.
“I think I should probably go,” Chet said, his cheeks a distinct shade of red.
Fear flashed across Autumn’s face. “Really? Can’t you stay a little longer?”
He sighed and stared down at the coffee table. Slowly a grin began to appear on Chet’s lips. “Maybe I can stay for a bit,” he said. “Make sure you girls are safe and sound.”
Having a man around should have made Susan happy—it certainly made Autumn happy—but she couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t quite right.
Chapter 25
The gridlock Paul and Buck encountered as they left Kansas City in their dated but functional burgundy Chevy Celebrity was far worse than they had imagined.
During the drive, they’d seen colossal lineups in front of gas stations that looked like something out of Baghdad after the fall of Saddam’s regime. Other stations they passed had changed their signs to read: “No More Gas.” In places where prices were visible, many had been jacked up to incredible levels. Some stations went as high as twenty to thirty dollars a gallon. It wasn’t hard to imagine that somewhere in the city prices were even higher.
The police couldn’t be everywhere at once and so it wasn’t a surprise that fights were breaking out all over the place. Crowds surged in and out of grocery stores like a tsunami, clearing shelves as quickly as they could. With the power and communication infrastructures down, the chances that any of the stores would soon be resupplied was next to nil. This wasn’t about starving crowds demanding food. Buck had predicted the threads of society would begin to unravel three to seven days after the SHTF. So how could things have gotten so bad so quickly?
It didn’t take long to figure out the answer was fear. In fact, by this point, the fear had already transitioned into a full-blown panic. The shelves and cupboards in people’s homes weren’t empty, not yet at least, but the concern that they would soon be had sent people scrambling to gather up as much as they could. Watching the scenes of chaos and desperation play out around him gave Paul a new understanding and respect for Buck’s beliefs. For a long time, Buck had been the punchline for many jokes about the growing paranoia in America. If anything, the vision playing out before Paul only confirmed that we lived in a society where immediate gratification took precedence over planning for the future.
This wasn’t the sort of thing one contemplated on a full belly. The stabbing pangs of hunger had a funny way of putting life into perspective. If anything, Buck’s warnings, which had seemed so extreme, now appeared to have been far too tame.
In front of them a minivan braked suddenly, causing Buck to do the same. Their Chevy screeched along the asphalt, coming within inches of a collision.
Buck struck the steering wheel. “Don’t these people look where they’re going?” he growled. “This was exactly the kind of situation I wanted to avoid. The same reason I never did my shopping on Saturdays and Sundays. I don’t like crowds, I don’t like people, and I can’t stand how they get when they start freaking out.”
The traffic slowed to a crawl. That meant there was probably an accident up ahead. Paul knew that Buck had spent years building that bunker with the express purpose of avoiding exposure during times like this. He had already explained that the idea wasn’t to necessarily live there forever. The shelter was supposed to provide comfortable living for several weeks. By the time one had to leave to gather fresh supplies, the population would already have thinned out considerably.
It was a heartless idea and the way Buck had said it had been cold. Paul supposed it was easy to sometimes lose touch with the fact that they were talking about human beings, fellow Americans.
Buck would say that if people failed to prep for a day like today, they deserved what they had coming to them. It reminded Paul of the family they’d encountered on the highway, begging for gas or a lift. Buck had driven past them without blinking an eye. And so too had the woman in Platte City who’d refused to stop when they’d attempted to flag her down. “Every man for himself,” that was Buck’s philosophy.
Paul had never considered himself a deeply religious man, in spite of his late adoption of Christianity, which he had largely seen as a practical decision. But he couldn’t help wondering about the cost of only looking out for yourself. You might win your life, but you risked losing your soul.
“I gotta say,” Paul said, “I was mighty surprised you offered Wild Bill a spot in your underground lair. I mean, we needed a car, but it just seems to go against everything you stand for.”
Buck glanced over at him, his right eyebrow cocked. “You insinuating that I ain’t got no compassion?”
Paul thought about that for a moment. “I’m just surprised, that’s all.”
“I liked that old coot,” Buck said. “But right then I was willing to say whatever needed saying if it got us that car. You seem to forget that we were two strangers without a penny to our name when we showed up on that guy’s front stoop.”
“There was a used car lot not far from the gas station,” Paul replied. “I can’t imagine with all of those prepper skills you’ve been building over the years, you failed to learn how to hotwire a car.”
“What do I look like to you? A common criminal? Listen, I know lots of stuff and it ain’t all about filtering water or skinning squirrels.”
Paul’s hands went up. “I wasn’t trying to say you didn’t.”
“There’s a reason for all these preps, you know,” Buck said. “And not all of them have to do with anticipating some terrorist attack or natural disaster. I know it looks crazy from where you’re sitting, but you’re only seeing half the picture. The real benefit of the way I choose to live my life is true independence. The electrical grid can go down for two weeks straight. Hell, she could go down for two months and I’d be just peachy.” Buck waved a hand on either side of him, pointing to the stores and gas stations along the highway. “The real benefit is that I don’t need to be like the rest of these sheeple, running around like chickens with their heads cut off, attacking each other so that little baby Tommy will have something to eat tonight.”
“Maybe that’s true,” Paul said. “And yet here you are, smack dab in the thick of things while your underground castle keep sits empty. I guess that was the one oversight in your plan.”
“What oversight was that?”
“Family.”
Rain clouds rolled in shortly after that, turning the sky ink black and opening up with a torrent of rain. The two men sat in silence, inching along, raindrops the size of a fingernail battering the hood and windshield. Both of them were acutely aware of the precious gas they were wasting.
Thirty minutes later the deadlock gave way and so did the rain. The heavy traffic had been a consequence of an accident and the sheer number of cars all leav
ing the city at the same time. Interestingly, the other side of the highway, leading into Kansas City, was largely empty. For any plane or helicopter flying overhead, the image would’ve been a startling one.
“Sun’s starting to go down,” Buck observed, removing his hat and leaning forward so that his bushy white beard pressed against the steering wheel. “We should probably pull over somewhere and find a place to grab a bite and some shuteye.”
“You mean like a motel?”
“Motel? What are you, Paris Hilton? Besides, we ain’t got no money.”
“You could always promise them a place in your bunker,” Paul suggested, grinning.
“Funny man. Maybe I’ll do just that and give them the spot I’d reserved for you.”
“Well, we do have that canned beef and stew Teresa gave us.”
Buck shook his head. “Nah, that’s emergency food.”
“Emergency what?”
“Emergency food,” Buck spat with a growing hint of impatience. “You don’t go eating food that can last for weeks or months unless you absolutely need to. There’s no telling how long this trip will take. Besides, we still need to make it all the way home and I’m not counting on bumping into another kind old lady.”
“So what are you suggesting?” Paul asked, not entirely sure he wanted to hear the answer.
A heavily forested area lined both sides of the interstate. Buck explained that they would pull off the highway, find a secure location near the woods and make camp there. But the part that really worried Paul was the dinner menu. Buck refused to tell him what they were going to eat, only that Buck would take care of it.
The rain, which had been coming down in buckets for close to an hour earlier, meant that building a fire would pretty much be impossible. That left Paul to wonder whether Buck’s plan had anything to do with picking wild berries. If this was what independence felt like, Paul felt a growing conviction he didn’t wanna have anything to do with it.
Chapter 26
They pulled off the highway outside of Deepwater, Missouri a few meters past Truman Lake. Most of the traffic had thinned out, allowing Buck to cut off the interstate at a break in the guardrail. Beyond was an open field which led to a lush treeline. The Celebrity’s tires struggled to keep traction on the wet grass and the car fishtailed more than once. Buck brought her out of sight along a dirt road that ran along the highway, probably used by ATVs. After they stopped, Buck exited the car and went to the trunk. A minute later he returned with the length of fishing wire Travis had given them.
“You’re gonna go fishing?” Paul asked, feeling like the mystery had finally been solved.
“Nope,” Buck replied smugly. He proceeded to tie what he explained was a slip knot. He made more than one of them and exited the car again to search among the nearby trees for appropriately sized branches and twigs. After that he disappeared into the forest for nearly ten minutes. When he returned, Paul was out of the car, listening to the occasional car passing them by out of sight.
“Care to fill me in?” Paul asked, the cuffs of his pants along with his shoes wet from the damp grass.
Buck let himself into the car and reclined the seat, his ball cap perched over his face. “Now, we wait,” he said enigmatically.
He’d obviously set some kind of trap, but a trap for what? More importantly, how would they cook it? Hungry as they were, Paul wasn’t going to eat anything raw. Getting sick and maybe dying from some disease wasn’t worth it for Buck to prove a point.
In the fading light, Buck lay back in the driver’s seat, his heavy forearms crossed over his chest.
“You know, I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”
“Uh-huh,” Buck said from under his cap.
“When we were at Wild Bill’s place, why’d you ask him for that child’s squirt gun? I mean, it just seemed like such a strange thing to ask for. I was sure you were gonna ask him for a road rocket.”
Buck peeked out from under his cap. “A what?”
“A road rocket. Back when I was on tour with The Wanderers we drank them all the time.”
“I’m sure you did.”
“Anytime we had a beer in the tour bus or in one of the cars that followed close behind, we referred to them as road rockets.”
“Oh, you thought I was gonna ask him for a beer to drink while we drove.”
“Yeah, but instead you asked for a squirt gun.”
“Well, we only had one real weapon.”
“The shotgun,” Paul said, suddenly remembering with horror the ashen look on the man’s face a second before Paul had killed him. “But I don’t see how a kid’s toy is gonna do much. It’s purple and shaped like a ray gun. You pull that on someone and you may kill them with laughter.”
Buck’s beard distorted ever so slightly as his cheeks rose into a smile. “Right you are, Paul. A squirt gun filled with water won’t do much more than wet a man’s shirt, but you fill that same gun with urine and you shoot it into a man’s eyes and let me tell you, the pain he’ll experience will be excruciating. It won’t kill him. But it’ll stun him long enough to get in close and finish him off with your bare hands.” Buck held his thick fingers in front of him, flexing them at the knuckle till the joints popped one by one.
“Oh,” Paul replied, blinking away the imaginary sensation.
Buck glanced down at his wrist watch. “Okay, it’s time.” He sprang to his feet and made his way into the forest, Paul close on his heels. It seemed like the old guy had more tricks up his sleeve than Paul had given him credit for.
They went to where Buck had laid out the first snare and found it empty. The second was far luckier. A possum struggled in vain to free itself from the slip knot. Buck moved in quickly, scooping a thick branch off the ground and clubbing the animal on the head.
“You wanna be clean and merciful,” Buck said. “No need for the thing to suffer.”
Paul nodded. He almost felt like he should be taking notes. Buck cleared an empty space off of a fallen log and used his pocket knife to skin the creature. The guts he threw into the forest, away from the place where they’d eventually make camp.
“I’ve never had possum,” Paul said, his face squished up.
“Don’t worry. It smells real nasty, but tastes a lot like pork.”
“How you gonna cook it?” Paul asked, eyeing the damp forest floor.
Buck pointed to their right. “I found a standing dead pine tree over there. Even though it’s wet outside, the wood inside is dry and powdery. The process is real simple—even you could do it, Paul. You peel some bark off a tree to use as a base, then shave bits of dead pine wood in increasingly bigger pieces. The idea is to grow the fire slowly so that by the time you put on the damp pieces of wood, you’ve already built up a decent amount of coals.”
“That makes sense. So I guess we gotta gather some wood to keep it going.”
“Not we, Paul. You. I’ll get the dead pine and build the spit to roast the possum.”
Paul turned to do his job and then stopped. “I suppose you’re going to light the fire by rubbing two sticks together, or is that my job too?”
Grinning, Buck reached into his pocket and produced a lighter. “No, I think we’ll leave that one to Mr. Bic.”
Ten minutes later the possum was roasting over a nice fire. Buck explained he normally preferred cooking this sort of meat over hot coals, but they didn’t have the luxury of getting fancy. When it was ready, Buck cut some flesh off with his pocket knife and handed it to Paul. It was too hot at first to eat, and Paul cradled it in a plate of small leaves he’d made. When it cooled, he took a bite.
“Not bad,” he said. “You’re right, it does taste like pork and it’s just as greasy.”
Buck nodded, dangling a chunk over his mouth before dropping it in.
Paul pointed to the old man’s face. “You’ve got some in your beard there, Barv.”
“Don’t you start with that again,” Buck said. “I could see the way your face lit up wh
enever he called me that. You were having a ball, weren’t you?”
Paul had been, although the idea of having fun under the circumstances only accentuated the heavy weight in his heart. He stuck his hand into the knapsack that Travis and Teresa had given them when his fingers struck something hard. He removed the mystery object, discovering a mickey of Jack Daniels.
Paul let out a whoop. “If we make it out of this,” Paul said, cheering the sky and undoing the cap before taking a sip, “I’m going to recommend that couple for a sainthood.”
He passed the bottle to Buck who took a small swig and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Last time I drank out of a bottle like this,” Paul said, “we were opening for Def Leppard at Madison Square Garden. Our biggest gig to date. Twenty thousand drunken and rowdy fans chanting, ‘Start the show, start the show,’ and there I was backstage feeling like my heart was about to explode. The room was spinning like you wouldn’t believe. I mean, you spend your whole life praying for a moment like this and then when it comes you aren’t sure if you’ve got the courage to walk out on that stage.
“I said I was backstage, but what I didn’t tell you was that I was on the can. The drummer, Rick Allen, knocks on the door and says, ‘You all right in there, mate?’ I told him I wasn’t sure. He probably thought I was doing a line of coke, but I never touched the stuff.
“He pushes his way in and hands me a bottle of JD. He’s only got one arm—not sure if you knew that or not, but when a one-armed drummer hands you a bottle of booze, you take it. And I did and gulped half of it down.”
Paul looked over at Buck, who was listening with a skeptical look on his face. “When I got out on stage I realized I’d forgotten the words to every song we’d ever written. It was straight out of a nightmare, like the ones where you get to school only to realize you’ve got no pants on. So I got to the mic and held it for a minute, the crowd chanting so loud I couldn’t hear myself think. But through the noise I heard the music start up. By the third bar the first line still wasn’t there, but I decided to start singing whatever came to mind. To this day, I don’t remember what words I was belting out, but women were showering me with panties and bras. It was a crazy night and one hell of a crazy life and I gave all of it up to marry Susan. And let me tell you,” Paul said, pausing briefly, “if I had to do it over, I’d do the same thing.”