by Ron Foster
The scavengers of the world were having a heyday now. He used to refer to such animals as scavengers, not worthy of his consideration, dirty, filthy beings back then, but now somewhat greatly appreciated to him to avoid the sights of all those that passed before him forgotten and rotting on the highways, byways and in the houses that he visited.
Even lowly ants, which plagued him and bit him every chance they got he felt, were now appreciated as a measure of time or warning when he approached a house. He knew by observation of such small things leaving a trail in or out a window or doorway would let him anticipate the horrors he might see within.
Rat and mouse turds here and there in a house by their presence or lack there of could speak volumes and he blessed himself and his luck that he was no longer in the cities. That rats and cockroaches and such surely overwhelmed those places he had no doubts. He wonder about bits of trivia like that in the annals of the history that he remembered of war torn Europe how rats increased during such hard times but were also hunted for food to sustain a populace and became actually scarce. The plague and disease such vermin brought to places occupied by man must now be raging as far as he was concerned and he wondered how many people actually hunted them for food.
The government radio cautioned everyone to handle such vermin in sanitary ways as onsets of Bubonic Plague and other calamities carried by rodents were occurring. Strange thoughts crept into Farley’s mind, it was bad enough that rats carrying fleas might jump on dogs or cats hunting them for food but in turn they could also jump on humans and be passed on. But he grimaced, what happened to a rat that bit or ate an AIDS victim and had fleas? Could a person eating or being bitten by a rat that had AIDS or some other dire disease be cooked and eaten or not? Damn, zombie rats with rabies and AIDS! Oh hell no! People eating and being infected by zombie rats infected with all kinds of diseases such as typhus, gonorrhea, malaria, AIDS, etc., might be creating new forms of diseases as yet unknown to man.
“Avoid contact with people! Don’t assist, don’t share his water, don’t touch or hold a dying man’s or woman’s hand admonishments to himself had affected him far too much. He wanted to help most people when he encountered someone almost ready to pass in his travels and foraging. He really did, but he could not give succor or compassion to those needing his heartfelt assurances and compassions to his own detriment! Quandaries and madness seemed to stalk him always.
“It was dead, dead, dead, you are dead. I will talk to you for now; I will throw you a morsel of food or a mouthful of water but not from my canteen. But you still and all you are dead and I do not wish to share with you. I’m alive and I plan on staying that way and worst of luck to you, but I will talk and I will listen and I will give you the benefit of saying goodbye but I am selfish and I want to know if you are leaving anything we might need to feed ourselves or stay away from so therefore why am I really talking to you?” Farley thought confused about his own sanity or insanity.
“He didn’t know which these days worried him worse. Do you talk to the dead or dying, because he tended to do both? Was it to assuage their fears or his? Or was it only because he wanted something he couldn’t define on his own? He remembered one woman who he had run up on after breaking into a house that had taken herself to bed like oh so many do to pass their last moments and thinking the house was unoccupied when he hollered was anybody home many times, he came in only to be greeted with a raspy squeak of “I am here” that scared the hell out of him as he opened a closed bedroom door.
Closed doors mean things in empty houses. Closed doors means illness, death or worse.
Closed doors mean safety and hiding for the occupants. An untended house has all doors open. No reason to close a door if you are not there or not protecting something. Turning the knob on a closed door was Farley’s biggest concern these days and his main reason for constant dread.
A scared occupant with a gun, a knife strike from behind a closed door or a dead body would surely greet him and oftentimes he would not even venture to do so and instead decide to skulk off into the night or day leaving the place uninvestigated and no new horrors or dangers would be confronted by him that day.
But on this occasion, he ventured. He carefully turned the knob and hid behind the wall in a position he hoped to be out of the way of the blast of a shotgun and then carefully entered this room. A forty-ish woman emaciated form starvation awaited him with a sick death-room smell of feces and urine that accosted him upon his entrance. Water! I want water! He managed to make out her saying and though his soul said rush to her and hold her hand and give her what she wanted he did not. To go reassure her that help had somehow finally arrive was his wish but he caught himself, for to do so could be shaking hands with death.
He assured her he meant no harm and would get her water momentarily and then quickly went to the kitchen and got a fresh glass out of the cupboard and came back to her bedside. After filling it with his canteen he gently handed it towards her trembling fingers only to be shocked that she grabbed his wrist with amazing strength and said “Help me!” Farley’s first reaction was to jerk away and this caused the glass of precious water she held in her other shaky hand to fall and crash to the floor startling him even further and making him reach for his pistol. But it seemed that such a commotion and reaction that he was putting on had drained the last strength out of the woman and she collapsed and laid very still for a moment.
“What have I done? What did I do?” Farley said to himself studying the prone disheveled woman until she stirred again and repeated her request for water to which this time he foolishly just offered his canteen in a state of shock.
He helped her sip from the flask and held her head while cursing himself “I’m gonna die too” and decided to drag up a chair from the corner and sit a minute as long as they shared the same fate. “Thank you” the woman managed to wheeze out after the first few sips. “Is Buddy here?” “Who is Buddy?” Farley asked. “Buddy, my husband. He said he was coming home today.” The disoriented woman said. “No one’s home right now, not that I’ve seen anyway.” Farley said looking anxiously about and looking for any other inhabitant, but knowing in the back of his mind that her plight indicated nobody had been around for at least a week. “More water!” she said. Farley said to himself what the hell, I’m dead already if she does have something and held her thin greasy blond locks and assisted her in drinking from his canteen once more.
“That’s better. I’m sorry I’m not quite with it you might say. Do you have any food?” The woman questioned.
“No, honey, I don’t except some bits of jerky. Where is Buddy?” Farley asked still trying to determine what exactly was going on.
“Oh, he went to town, was it yesterday or a week ago? I forget, to go get me something. He’s not back yet is he? Are you a friend of his?” The woman asked in her delirium.
“No, I haven’t seen him. Maybe he’ll come back soon.” Farley said playing the game and wanting out of here as soon as he could.
“Ok, he is just taking a long time. I’m o.k.” The woman said and paused. And then she reached from under the covers and pointed a pistol his way.
“Oh shit!” Farley thought to himself and fumbled for his own pistol as the sight of a police model .38 pointed in his direction.
“I see death in back of you.” The woman mumbled and that was it….the woman expired.
Farley got to doing a hesitant quick look over his shoulder and then looked down upon this woman sweating bullets that in her agony and her passing she had all too closely had a chance of taking him with her to the great beyond because of his lack of caution in his compassion. He didn’t know what to do, he was beside himself.
That she in her state of affairs was planning on shooting him for robbery or protection or just an insane moment rang heavy on his mind for his lack of preparedness for such an event. That his kindness to other’s weaknesses could have been his last effort in life troubled him more than he could even think about. And he ar
gued and cautioned himself to never ever take such risks again no matter how he felt. After he got done mentally shaking as well as cursing the woman for such an act, he found himself in the weirdest quandary that he ever had. He had decided to be kind and give her water; he was rewarded with a pistol to the front of his face. That she had meant him harm personally, he would never really know. Could be it was a matter of whether or not she thought she could shoot death that she saw coming for her from behind him to protect him or herself she was going to shoot. That’s what I’ll believe, Farley convinced himself and gently pulled the covers over her face and he would trouble this death house no more.
“Damn. I got this canteen to consider now. I damn sure ain`t leaving it here and I’ll damn sure remember to boil it out later when I get time.” Farley decided and put it back in the pouch on his web gear.
Never approach the dying, the insane or the hurt without using extreme caution. They will do you harm whether they care for you or not. Deal with them like wounded animals and be sure you treat them like a badly injured cat or dog and wrap them up with cloth so they will do you no harm or themselves when you try to give them assistance.
Farley remembered such lessons from picking up a beloved cat once that had been attacked by dogs and the cat in pain had scratched and bit him unmercifully even though he was the beloved master. Caution in all things, Farley, caution those that you love and those that you hate because death, like a drowning person, likes company. Fools rush in, they say, where angels fear to tread. Don’t rush in to help another in need because you might truly end up becoming an angel inadvertently or not. The pain of the body and the mind will cause the most inexplicable reactions.
Note to self: when you want to go looking for guns, besides looking in cemeteries, people always have their guns close to them in these types of situations and a good place to look is under the covers of the bed or under their pillows. Everything is most dangerous before it dies or when it’s considering dying as in backed into a corner and giving it their all. Farley remembered from his military times that even a dying man might have a hand grenade under him so he can take out one more of the enemy with him.
“Hey Farley, that is one screwed up story but I know where you are coming from. How about if we see about spreading little booby traps around heading this way. I know we don’t have any explosives offhand but knowing your ass you could probably come up with something. Do it like rigging the war souvenirs but use empty cases of food or something like that for bait.” Charlie said thinking about his military training and Vietnam War experiences.
“Oh, I sort of did that something like that with those hillbillies that chased me a bit too far that time. They just wouldn’t give up the trail, reckon they didn’t like me being around very much and were making sure I knew it. I can’t go back over there by the way, nor do I want to...” Farley said, regarding Charlie.
“Aw shit! What the hell did you go and do now?” Charlie asked looking at him sideways waiting for the rest of the story to come out.
“I sort of left a few extra shotgun rounds that fell off in the dirt resting on a nail, in back of me if you know what I mean. Hey, those suckers had hunting dogs! And my survival and evasion techniques needed a little help or a little improving until I got away to the highway.” Farley said.
“I guess you aren’t going to tell me if you heard anything going off in back of you.” Charlie said.
“No, that was around the Fourth of July if I remember right and people still had fireworks around to play with I guess. If I my memory serves me, it had to do with something about a disputed case of peaches we both enjoyed if you remember right.” Farley told Charlie.
Farley had to learn that just because it wasn’t nailed down he couldn’t tote it off any time he wanted to. A lot of shit, a whole lot of shit was just unaccompanied these days and not for his persistent pilfering. Now if he had known for a fact that someone had a claim on those peaches, he wouldn’t have tried to sneak them off. But to his mind it was a gray area at that point and that’s when he started questioning himself as to becoming what he feared.
Yes, he would steal, no problem, he would steal for his family and friends even though he still had some morals about him. He kind of knew that his discovery was attached to somebody in someway even if no one was present. He was ready to fight for them regardless and defend himself and this bounty even before all hell broke loose and the owners discovered the loss and decided it was worth giving chase to get them back. That’s when Farley really decided to lighten his daily carry load when he went out on his so called trapping and foraging trips.
Charlie Woo noticed the changes in Farley’s EDC (every day carry) gear changed dramatically. He had been going out with a light day pack or his heavy trapping basket if he was setting new lines, but nowadays all you saw him in pretty much was web gear full of ammo, a canteen, his knife and an empty butt pack to carry back his pilfering and they had some rather heated discussions on this new approach.
Farley had reminded Charlie, however, that the majority of people around here were already long dead or that the house owners never made it back to their homes or vacation houses and that any so called untouched area was a haven for any migratory or opportunist travelers trying to survive, or for that matter serve as base camps for the bigger marauder bands.
He told him and Miss Feng and the rest a long time ago that he had ransacked most of the territory around him doing what Farley’s do and making it appear that everything within a mile or so had been gone through and generally pillaged by somebody that didn’t care in order to ward off any migratory bands. But he had his reservations and regretted doing that now in some ways.
You ever seen these stupid ass blogs on the internet that say something to the effects “hey make your house look looted and you see these pictures of clothes and stuff strewn all over the yard and such to make it appear that you should leave the place alone as not w. That’s just plain ass bullshit to Farley’s mind as to what they actually were. To him any place that looked like that just says you got something to hide and something to fool with. Either that or you are hoping on waiting on stupid to bypass you which probably won’t happen eventually or otherwise... Everybody is going to get around to looking in everything that looks abandoned.
Nobody goes into such a frenzy of dragging out all the old clothes and trash and strewing it across the yard if you’re just looking for survival stuff to loot. The only times you see such carnage and vandalism is out in front of stores that are left over from the first days of looting and everyone fighting between themselves over the last scraps of food after either law enforcement or the violence disturbed them.
If you loot a house, it’s the same as a damn burglary; you break in the door or the window. There is no yee haw crazy crap about it. You get what you want and you get out of there. There are no mass signs of general dropping bullshit or vandalism out there unless it’s staged. Farley still kind of wished he had him a whole bunch of broken window decals to patch on his own damn house but other than that, let the grass grow, just be looking normal and typically abandoned if anything. Any house that had the “Oh we had us a riot in this house” type crap, was just one more thing he had to consider what sort of idiots lived in there and were they still surviving.
Farley didn’t tell them that at the entrances of the highways coming towards them not too far in the past, he saw a dead body here and there. Security was kind of paramount then discouraging groups of surviving stragglers heading their way and he once or twice reluctantly undertook the gruesome task of making the appearances more gruesome like the churches’ militia did when they hung a looter for all to see and left him there.
He hated this crap but he thought about it a little bit and said ‘what the hell!’ “Hey, Charlie, you remember that poor s.o.b. that I just left with a little food and water and went on my way? He was still sitting there when I came back a week later, against a tree deader than hell and I got me a magic marker, wrot
e ‘looter’ on the back of a 55 mph sign and put it in his lap, wrapped a couple lengths of old rope around him and left.
Now what does that look like to anybody walking down the same road? Looks like we caught a looter and tied him to a tree to die or did something to him and left him for a message. I didn’t kill him, and he was a pretty good old soul, and if you believe in boogers and haints, he’s probably laughing like hell. I won’t walk back by him cause he might jump up and yell ‘Booga! Booga!’ and scare the hell out of me.” Farley said to Charlie and laughed a bit crazily.
“Boy, you ain`t right. Would you really do that? Or are you just alcohol consumed tell me tales?” Charlie asked regarding him.
“I have done worse than that. You know them damn stupid survival whistles? I stuck a broken one in his mouth hoping the wind would make an eerie noise if you come by! I’m glad I was drinking that day because I wouldn’t do it again. I have a thing about dead bodies, a strong aversion you might say to them be it a normal funeral or a tragedy. But seeing how me and him had us a decent conversation before he passed, I went over there and told him what I was up to and I think he kinda laughed because he was smiling.” Farley said, giving Charlie another reason to question his sanity about being able to mess with a body’s death grimace.