“Carla, honey, this is Rockdell Farms. This farm goes all the way to the valley where Jim lives. Let’s follow this farm road a little longer and get clear of the highway. Then we’ll figure it out. It’s not safe to stay this close to the road.”
“Better listen to your mother,” came a voice from behind them.
Randi spun and found a haggard looking man approaching them, having walked out of the barn door. She held up a hand. “Stop right there!”
The man held his hands up in a gesture of innocence. “What?” he asked. “I’m just being friendly.”
“Mom?” Carla said fearfully.
The horses, sensing the wave of anxiety in their riders, stomped their feet and pulled at their reins.
“Nice horses,” he said. “Where did you get them?” He continued walking toward them. He was less than twenty feet away, his hand raised as if to calm the horses, or perhaps to make her think that was his only intention.
Randi yanked the automatic from her belt. Without warning she fired a round to the side of the man, then raised the pistol, letting it fall level with his chest. “I told you to stay back.” Her horse skittered and she held him tight.
He continued to smile that same used car salesman smile but stopped moving toward them. “I don’t mean you any harm,” he said. “I’m passing through and stopped off for the night.”
Something about the man sent shivers down Randi’s spine. His tone made her skin crawl. People didn’t make conversation anymore. They avoided each other. They kept to themselves if they knew what was good for them. This man was lying.
“On the fucking ground,” she said.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “You’re not being very friendly.”
“I’m not wasting another round,” she said. “Next one goes in you.”
He dropped to both knees, frowning. “Is this really necessary?”
“On your face,” Randi ordered. “Hands out ahead of you.”
He leaned into a pushup position, then lowered himself.
Randi heard an intake of breath from behind her.
“There’s a gun in the back of his pants,” Carla said quietly.
“You after our horses?” Randi asked. “That it?”
“You have four of them!” he erupted. “I only need one. I’ve been walking this stupid road through hillbilly country for weeks trying to get home. No one will help me.”
Randi walked toward him, standing out of his reach. “Maybe I should just kill you and save the next folks the trouble.”
“Maybe you should,” he said. “You’d be doing me a favor at this point.” He started to cry.
Randi walked around behind him, pointing her pistol at the middle of his back. “You even move and I’ll shoot you in the spine,” she warned. She leaned forward and snatched his pistol from his waistband. She thought he’d make a grab for her but he didn’t. She’d been ready for it. He continued to lay face down in the dirt, crying. Randi’s grandchildren watched him with silent fascination. They’d never seen an adult act that way.
“Carla and Sherry, you go on ahead,” Randi said. “Take the packhorse with you.”
“What are you doing to do?” Carla asked.
Randi backed away from the man, shoving his pistol in the waistband of her pants. “Do what I said. I’ll catch up in a second.” Randi moved closer to her horse and climbed on. She kept her pistol on him while the other horses put distance between them.
The man raised his head and looked at her. Snot strung from his nose. A mud of tears and dust blotched his face. “Is this where you kill me?”
She stared impassively at the pathetic creature.
“If you’re going to give me a pep talk about how I can make it home, save it,” he said. “I hope you die. Whoever those people on the horses are to you, I hope they die too. I hope you die last so you have to watch.”
Randi cast a quick glance over her shoulder and saw that her family had reached a safe distance. She was not going to be sucked into his angry rant, nor was she going to waste a bullet on him if she didn’t have to.
“Here’s your pep talk—fuck you. And I don’t think you’re going to make it. I think you’re going to mess with the wrong people and bleed to death in a ditch. That’s what I think.”
She turned her horse and galloped off. She only looked back once and saw him sitting there, his head in his hands, his body wracked by sobs. She could not bring herself to feel sorry for him. She knew his grief was for having failed to kill her and take her horse.
Galloping the horse was harder on her than it was on the horse. She could not recall the last time she’d done it. She imagined it was several pounds and two children ago. She was pleased that her family slowed as she rejoined them. She felt like she’d shaken a few vital organs from their moorings.
It was nearly full dark now and it was becoming difficult to see. They were in an interior valley of Rockdell Farms with no roads or homes in sight. Grazing land alternated with the stubble of feed corn. There were odd pieces of abandoned farm equipment scattered around the property, some of it so rusted it was unclear where the machine ended and the dirt began.
“There’s something over there,” Sherry said. “Carla wanted to go take a look but we wanted to wait until you were here.”
“What is it?” Randi asked.
“Some kind of rock building,” Carla said. “It looks like a beehive.”
Chapter 23
Randi
When Randi awoke, she felt like she’d been beaten with a bat. Everything from her ankles to her neck was stiff and aching. Although she had expected to be sore from a day of horseback riding, it had far exceeded her expectation. She’d spent the night sleeping on the rock-strewn floor of the old lime kiln the kids had found last night. The folks at Rockdell Farms had used the kiln to make lime from limestone over a century ago. They packed the kiln with limestone and wood, then let it burn for several days so they could manufacture lime for their farm.
It had been like sleeping in a cave, the ground damp and uneven. The conditions had not bothered the children, who fell asleep without even eating. Before long, even Carla and Sherry were asleep, the ride taking more of a toll on them than they’d admit. Randi had lay awake listening to the night. Her mind churned for a long time before she finally succumbed to sleep herself.
They had a breakfast of homemade strawberry preserves. They passed around a single spoon and each person scooped from the jar. On an empty stomach, the sugar might give them a little short-lived energy, though it would not sustain them. Randi didn’t think they had much farther to go, though yesterday had proven her navigation skills to be sub-par. She hoped she did better today.
When they had eaten their fill, they packed their few possessions back into feed sacks and tied them onto the pack horse. They saddled each horse and climbed up. Randi could tell that everyone was suffering. She perhaps worst of all. She could not make it back onto her horse at all. She was short, which already made it difficult, and her suffering legs could not lift her into the saddle. Her thighs felt as if they might perhaps be permanently damaged if such a thing was possible from simply riding a horse. She was ready to give up and walk when Carla finally rode alongside her, extending a hand. Randi took it and pulled herself up.
“Thanks,” Randi said, mildly embarrassed.
“Which way?” Carla asked.
Randi nodded to where the farm road passed through a gap in the low hills. “That way. We’ll find a road there that we can follow into the valley where Jim lives.”
“Didn’t you used to have a radio?” Sherry asked. “Can’t you radio him to come get us?”
“It burned up in the fire,” Randi said. “I didn’t see any point in carrying it with us to your dad’s house so I left it on the kitchen table.”
Sherry looked glum. “Everything hurts. I’m not sure I can take another day of this.”
“My second day of walking home from Richmond felt like this,” Randi said. “I’d slept in the woo
ds after walking all day. It was miserable. Just like now.”
“I don’t know how you did it,” Carla said. “I would have given up.”
“I already told you how I did it,” Randi said. “I reminded myself of what I had waiting for me at home.”
They rode in silence for a quarter hour, the horses’ feet scuffing on dirt the only sound. As they got closer to the gap, they began to see more cattle. The cows crowded around them and followed.
“I’ve never seen so many cows,” Randi remarked.
“They look hungry,” Carla said. “I hope they don’t decide to eat us.”
One of Sherry’s daughters, riding contentedly in Carla’s lap to this point, instantly became terrified. “Cow no eat me!” she cried. “Cow no eat me!”
“Shhh, honey, it’s okay,” Randi said. “Aunt Carla was just joking. Weren’t you, Carla?”
Carla did her best to assure the little girl that it was a misunderstanding, though she didn’t look so certain. The damage was done. The child would never again trust a cow.
When they reached the road, they found a tarpaper shack beside the gate they had to use to leave the farm. Randi had grown up around many houses like it, although most had been replaced by mobile homes now. There’d been entire neighborhoods of them, framed and sided of rough sawmill lumber then covered in the rolled tarpaper with red or brown brick patterns. The houses were never insulated and relied on coal fires in Warm Morning stoves to stay tolerable. This one had probably belonged to a tenant farmer at one time.
They stopped at the gate and Randi got off to open it. A scruffy man in a tank top and boxer shorts came staggering out of the house. He didn’t appear to see them. He leaned against the round porch post, dropped his boxers to his ankles, and began urinating in the dirt.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Randi demanded.
Startled by the unexpected voice the old man jumped but did not—or could not—stop what he was doing. He squinted at them as if he had difficulty focusing.
“‘Bout made me piss on myself,” he grumbled.
“I don’t give a damn if you piss on yourself,” Randi said. “Do you not see that there are six ladies here?”
“All I see is six trespassers,” the man said, finally relaxing enough to continue sprinkling his lawn. “You best be getting on your way because I got a gun.”
“I can see that,” Randi said. “It’s old and wrinkled and it probably doesn’t fire.”
He took offense when Randi’s daughters burst out laughing. He pulled his boxers back up indignantly and stared at Randi again. “For a second I thought you were my dead wife coming back to haunt me. You got her mouth.”
Randi unfastened the gate and directed her family through, handing off her reins to Sherry to that she could lead her horse through. “We’ll be on our way. You can go back about your business.” The old man crooked a gnarled finger at her, a prompting to not run off so quickly. “Say, missy, you don’t have a drink of anything, do you?”
“We might have some water,” Randi said. “Not much. We could spare some.”
The old man shook his head in irritation. “I don’t need no damn water unless it’s firewater,” he said. “Liquor. Even a beer would do.”
Randi shook her head. “Sorry. Fresh out.”
The old man turned away. “Just as well, I guess. That shit got me fired last night anyway.”
Randi shook her head at the old man, walked out, and shut the gate behind her.
Chapter 24
Jim
As summer was turning into fall the various gardens in the valley were producing the last of their crops and Jim wanted nothing to go to waste. He had a substantial garden at his house. They had always enjoyed canning or freezing their produce, although this year it was likely to be canning or dehydrating. Even Gary had a garden, having inherited the one that Henry and his wife were raising at their home before they were killed. It had been slightly overgrown when Gary moved in, and his family resurrected it.
There were several homes in the valley that had been abandoned for various reasons. Some of the folks who lived in those houses had been killed by the released convict that had terrorized the community in the early days of the disaster. Sometimes Charlie Rakes had burned the home after the murder. Even in those cases where he burned the homes to the ground, sometimes the garden still remained, weed-choked and going rogue.
There were other houses that had been abandoned for unknown reasons. The people who lived there had simply left to go to work on the day of the terror attacks and had never come home, or left shortly afterward, attempting to reunite with family. Many of those homes had gardens, and while they were weedy and plundered by animals, there would still be vegetables that survived and could be harvested.
Jim still had the nagging feeling that he needed the permission of the community to harvest these gardens. Did he really need to do that? There was no committee or group overseeing such things and Jim didn’t particularly want there to be. He was an anarchist at heart. He had never liked answering to people. Maybe that was what Ellen was seeing when she accused him of enjoying the state of the world. She was seeing the sense of freedom he was experiencing at no longer having to answer to anyone.
As far as getting any consensus on something like harvesting an abandoned garden, there were families in the valley that knew each other and regularly communicated. There were also several that stuck to themselves. It wasn’t like a division existed, it was just a situation where people that hadn’t associated with anyone before the disaster were continuing that pattern. Jim and his group didn’t feel like they were trying to steal resources, they simply didn’t want them going to waste. They didn’t want to be sitting around the woodstove in the winter wishing they hadn’t let those tomatoes fall to the ground and rot.
Jim figured at some point he needed to make an effort to get to know these other families. If they were going to live in this valley together, decisions one family made might impact the others. Like blowing up the road. Although he wasn’t ready to take credit for it yet, his decision to blow up the road from town was a good example of that. He knew it was the right thing to do, yet how would he feel if someone else took such a major decision upon themselves?
In discussion with his group of friends and family—his tribe—someone came up with the idea of harvesting all those vegetables from the abandoned gardens, preserving the food through canning or dehydrating, and delivering some to each family in the valley. It would be a good icebreaker to open communication with those families who were still keeping to themselves. It would be a good way for Jim to test the waters about his plan to close off the road at the other end of the valley, completely sealing them off from vehicle traffic.
They had pulled the hay wagon to two abandoned gardens already and found a variety of squash, pumpkins, tomatoes, peppers, beans, and some corn that had dried on the stalk. There were nearly a dozen of them working head down in the garden when Gary raised his head, a look of confusion on his face.
“Stop a second. You guys hear that?” he asked.
Everyone stopped what they were doing, always paranoid now that any new sound meant new trouble.
“I don’t hear anything,” Jim said.
“I hear it,” Ellen said. “It sounds like horses.”
Jim started to make a smart-ass comment until he heard it too. It was the clopping of hooves on pavement. He climbed out of the row of cherry tomatoes he’d been picking. “There,” he said, pointing toward the road.
“How’d they get by Pete?” Ellen asked.
“They’ve come in the back way,” Jim said. “Through Rockdell Farms. It’s the only way to get in now and he can’t see out that far.”
Gary dug a pair of binoculars out of his daypack and raised them to his eyes. “Oh shoot.” He still struggled with profanity.
“What is it?” Ellen asked.
“It’s Randi.”
“Randi?” Jim asked. “Our Randi
?”
“Yeah. She’s on horseback with a couple of young women and some children,” Gary said. “This can’t be good. That’s a dangerous trip to make with children.”
They grabbed their weapons and took off toward the road. Ellen followed with a Remington 870. The rest of the crew paused their labor and watched.
As soon as Jim and Gary were within earshot of the horses, they called to Randi, not wanting to startle her by charging toward her with guns. Both knew her well enough to know that she might open fire on them if she couldn’t immediately identify who was running toward her.
Randi steered her horse to the open gate as the men reached it. She slid off the horse, groaning as she hit the ground, then gave each man a somber hug.
“What’s going on?” Gary asked. “Is everything okay?”
Randi shook her head. She took a deep breath, gathering energy for what she had to say. “No. Everything is not okay. Everything pretty much sucks. My house got attacked. They killed my parents and one of my brothers.”
Jim took in the group, studying each pained face. They told the story without words. He started three different curses, struggling to contain himself in front of the young children. “Do you know who did it?” he finally asked.
“We’re pretty sure,” Randi said. “We think it was a neighboring family. There’d been some bad blood over the years. I don’t know why things broke loose all of a sudden.”
Jim shook his head in disgust.
“Oh, Randi,” Gary said. “I’m so sorry.”
Randi maintained her composure. Each day made the callouses on her heart that much thicker. “We weren’t home,” she said. “Me, my girls, and one of my brothers had gone down the road looking for my ex-husband. My girls wanted to make sure their dad was okay. When we got back home, the house was on fire, and my parents and my other brother were dead.”
“Where’s your brother? The one who was with you?” Jim asked.
“He stayed behind,” Randi said. “He wanted to make things right.”
The Borrowed World (Book 4): No Time For Mourning Page 11