Waiting over an hour, he saw nothing to indicate Dave’s house was even occupied.
No lights in the windows. No smoke coming from the chimney.
No movement of any kind.
Of course, one of the key goals covered in the book was to make one’s house appear vacant.
It offered various tips, including limiting one’s movement.
Covering the inside of windows with heavy black plastic to hide any light.
And never ever burning a fire in the fireplace except on overcast and moonless nights.
Ronald’s surveillance yielded absolutely no intelligence at all.
He was uneasy, but had no other option than to move in closer.
Chapter 19
Ronald moved cautiously and carefully, a bit at a time.
He’d never served in the Army, but had seen plenty of war movies. He moved as he imagined a soldier would when trying to get into a firing position.
From the shrubbery in front of the house across the street he low-crawled to an abandoned car in the driveway.
Then to a large dogwood tree in the front yard.
Then to an abandoned Cadillac in the street between the two houses.
Finally, he made it to the side of Dave’s house, with his back up against a six-foot cedar privacy fence.
There he waited.
He didn’t think he was spotted. He’d kept a constant eye on Dave’s windows and hadn’t seen any movement.
Of course, any sentries watching out those windows would be trying their best not to be seen.
He paused for several minutes to catch his breath, calm his nerves, and to listen.
If he had been spotted, they’d certainly take some action to neutralize him. They couldn’t just let such an affront go unchallenged.
He had his rifle locked and loaded, ready to return fire should he have to.
He’d avoid it if he could.
He’d killed before. Several times, in fact.
He tried to justify the killings in his own mind by saying they were necessary.
His wife and children had to eat. Even if he had to resort to stealing their food. After all, he owed his allegiance to his family, not to strangers.
And shooting his victims before robbing them greatly lessened the chances he’d get shot himself.
Robbing a dead man was ridiculously easy.
But he was getting low on ammunition. And it was getting harder and harder to find.
He’d have to try to gun down Dave Spear with his first shot. If he were to miss and find himself in the middle of a firefight, the single magazine with six rounds he had in his rifle might not do the trick.
He heard no excited voices coming from within the structure.
Hadn’t heard any doors or windows open either.
No dogs barking, which might indicate someone was making their way through the back yard toward him.
It was perfectly still.
He stood up and ran his fingers along the top of the fence.
He’d already suspected they were there, and his fingertips confirmed it.
They were almost invisible even in the daytime, because the blackened and recessed Phillips screw heads blended in well with the dark gray weathered fence.
At night they were impossible to see, even with a full moon.
Most people wouldn’t have a clue they were there, and would make a dreadful mistake. They’d reach over the top of the fence to get a good handgrip, so they could climb over it.
And the inch and a half-long screws would shred their fingers or the palms of their hands.
They’d cry out in great agony and struggle to free themselves. And while they were cursing and moaning, someone from inside the house would be alerted to their presence.
They’d come out and shoot the invaders dead while they were hopelessly trapped.
Homeowners one, invaders zero. Game over.
But Ronald knew the screws were there. It was one of the low-budget tactics for securing one’s suburban home in the book Dave had loaned him.
Going over the fence was now off the table.
He slowly skirted the house, his back against it and moving slowly, until he made his way to the front door.
He paused there, his ear to the door, listening for any sounds coming from within.
Absolutely nothing.
He proceeded a bit further, to the front picture window.
And there he paused again, temporarily puzzled.
The blinds were completely open, and the angle of the moon was such that it cast a heavy light into the room itself.
Even at two a.m. Ronald could see the room was completely devoid of furniture.
Had Dave gotten the last laugh? Had he moved out of the neighborhood just before the blackout?
Had Ronald’s efforts on this cool dark night all been a wild goose chase?
Then, in the corner of the window, he noticed a piece of paper.
The paper was taped to the inside of the glass. He couldn’t make out the words, and he couldn’t hold a lighter up to it to read it.
But he knew more or less what it said.
He remembered another chapter in the book.
The chapter which explained how a homeowner could live in his house, while at the same time making it appear vacant.
The author of the book explained that no looter will waste his or her time breaking into an empty house, for there’s nothing to steal there.
The key, the author maintained, was to make such looters think no one lived there, so they passed the house by and went elsewhere.
It detailed methods to do so.
Like emptying out the front room of all its furniture and opening the blinds so the looter could peer in and see the empty room.
And posting a bogus “eviction notice” from a real bank in the same window.
And leaving several rolled up newspapers on the front steps.
Even the newspapers were there. Ronald couldn’t see them, as he stole around the front of the house and listened at the front door.
But he stepped on them and almost tripped on one of them.
Dave made a big mistake by loaning Ronald the book. By doing so he gave away his game plan.
And from that perspective Dave blew it.
Big time.
He committed a prepper cardinal sin.
Page 24 in the same book started out,
“Chapter 4: Be Careful Who You Trust”
Chapter 20
Just west of Tucumcari the sun was setting.
They’d ridden until nearly noon in search of a bit of shade to make camp in.
So Dave didn’t mind much that they slept later than usual.
When he woke up about five, Beth was already awake and was using a stick to draw dogs in the sand.
Dave went over and asked, “Who’s this?”
“That one is Rusty, the one next to him is Spike. I keep trying to draw Stretch, but I keep messing up his face.”
“Yeah. Dachshunds have kind of weird faces, all long and pointy. Basically they’re all nose and eyeballs.
“The others look pretty good though.”
“I miss them.”
“What happened to them, honey?”
“Swain shot Rusty and Spike. He had his men tie them to a fence and used them for target practice.”
“I hope you didn’t have to see that.”
“No. I was in the house with Aunt Karen. It was just a couple of days after they shot Uncle Tommy and the other men. Aunt Karen was upstairs in bed, still throwing up and crying all the time.
“We heard the shots, but didn’t find out what happened until after.”
“How did Stretch manage to survive?”
“He wasn’t around that day. Aunt Karen said Stretch had a girlfriend from the farm down the road, and sometimes they snuck off into the woods to meet and play.
“We figured that’s where he was that day. Because he didn’t come home until after dark.
“By that time Swain was passed out from his drugs and some of his other men were drunk, and it was too dark to take him out and shoot him too.
“So he got lucky, I guess.
“They left the other dogs out there for a couple of days. For some reason they wouldn’t let us bury them until they started to smell real bad.
“We tried to keep Stretch from finding them, but he got out of the house and went looking for them.
“Lindsey said dogs don’t cry, but she’s wrong. When Stretch came back he had tears in his eyes and was whimpering, like he wanted us to try to help them or something.
“He died in his sleep not long after that. I think he died from sadness.”
“We probably need to leave pretty soon. Would you go over to Sal’s tent and tell him to get his old wrinkled butt up?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No, I won’t tell him to get his old wrinkled butt up. It’s not nice. But I will ask him if he’s awake and almost ready to go.”
Dave smiled.
“You’re too sweet for your own good, Peanut. But okay, I’ll settle for that.”
When she departed on her mission, Dave went to the field where the horses were grazing, tied together with fifty feet of rope.
He lifted the rope and led them back to the rig, then went about the process of hooking them back up.
He wasn’t yet halfway finished when Beth walked up behind him.
There was no mistaking the look of concern on her face.
“I stood next to his tent and called out to him, Daddy. But he never answered.”
Dave tried not to adopt the same degree of concern.
“Did you hear him snoring?”
“No.”
“That’s okay. Sometimes he doesn’t snore.
“You stay here and watch the horses, okay? Give them each a dried apple. I’ll be back in a minute.”
Dave repeated her footsteps, as well as the process, almost exactly.
He stood outside the zipped tent and called out, in a normal voice, “Sal? You awake?”
There was no answer.
A little louder he asked again, “Sal? You up?”
Nothing.
Dave felt a bit uneasy when unzipping the tent. Not because he dreaded what he’d find, for he didn’t want to think Sal had died.
No, he felt uneasy because he felt he was invading the man’s privacy.
After all Sal was a very sound sleeper and was also hard of hearing.
In all likelihood he just never heard them calling out to him.
And no man likes waking up to the sight of another man looking at him.
A pretty woman, sure. But not another man.
He unzipped the zipper and peered inside the tent.
The old man inside the tent grunted and shielded his face from the setting sun, which came in at just the right angle to shine in his face.
He looked half sleepy and half surprised.
Dave immediately apologized.
“I’m sorry, Sal. Forgive me. I was… well, you didn’t answer and we were worried about you.”
“What?” the old man shouted loudly.
Loudly enough for Beth to hear some distance away, and to breathe a sigh of relief.
“I’m sorry, I thought you might be hurt.”
If the sun hadn’t been shining brightly over Dave’s shoulder Sal might have been able to read Dave’s lips to help him make out the words.
His vision wasn’t bad for a seventy three year old man.
But his hearing sucked.
He scrambled to grab the hearing aid next to his pillow and turned it on, then jammed it into his ear.
Dave started again.
“I’m sorry Sal. We were worried about you. You didn’t answer when we called.”
“Of course not. I didn’t have my damn hearing aid in.”
Dave walked away and Sal got up and started getting dressed.
“Did you know he wore a hearing aid?”
“Oh yeah. His brother Benny gave him new batteries for it. Before then he couldn’t hear and I had to yell at him a lot.”
Dave learned two things that evening. The first was that his friend secreted a tiny hearing aid in his left ear.
The second was that he should rid himself of his bad habit of always expecting the worst.
Chapter 21
Sal was grumpy for all kinds of reasons.
First of all because he was awakened from a deep sleep, in the middle of a dream about Nellie.
Nobody likes to be rudely awakened.
Especially when it interrupts a great dream.
Also because, while Dave Spear was a friendly sort and not a bad looking man, he wasn’t Sal’s type at all. Given ten chances to choose whether he’d rather see Dave Spear or his dear departed wife, he’d choose Nellie all ten times.
Thirdly, because in his dream he was romancing Nellie and getting ready to make love to her.
It was an act of bliss they hadn’t performed often in her last years, and he was so looking forward to experiencing it with her again.
Even if it was only a dream.
Instead he woke up to see Dave’s big head invading his tent and hurting his eyes.
Anybody would be grumpy.
But that wasn’t the main reason Sal was grumpy on this particular evening.
Sal wasn’t sleeping well of late.
He’d been feeling his heart race periodically throughout the nights, when they were on the move.
And occasionally he felt pains in his chest.
Nothing serious. Not yet anyway.
If any of the pains were heart attacks they were tiny ones.
Ones which were insignificant, as far as heart attacks go.
He once had a mini attack in the middle of the day and Nellie had rushed him to the emergency room.
He, like most men, was stubborn and pig-headed and didn’t want to go.
He, like most men, relented and went anyway because his wife ordered him to.
Because he, like most men, knew his wife was the boss despite his public protestations to the contrary.
The cardiologist at the hospital wasn’t his regular doctor. He didn’t call it a heart attack. He called it a cardiac event.
Sal could still recall the look on the man’s face when Sal said, “Whew. I guess I got lucky on that, didn’t I?”
The doctor replied, “Don’t take this too lightly. Every time you have a minor episode it damages your heart a bit more. It’ll pave the road for a massive coronary. Have you been watching your diet and exercising and taking your medicine religiously?”
“Well, no.”
“No to which one?”
Sal shot Nellie a disdainful look when she answered for him.
“No to all three, doctor.”
“I suspected as much,” the doctor said. “Those three things will help you live, but only if you take them seriously.
“Make an appointment with your regular doctor and tell him what you just told me. He can help you live several more years. Maybe many more years. But only if you take those three things seriously.”
Part of the reason Sal remembered that doctor’s words so well was the way the occasional chest pains felt.
They felt exactly like it felt the night Nellie took him to the ER.
He assumed that every time he experienced such a “cardiac event” he was damaging his heart more and more.
He also took the doctor at his word that such events paved the way for a massive coronary: the “big one” all people with bad hearts know will come eventually.
But Sal would keep it to himself.
He’d been out of medication for weeks now. For a long time he and Nellie made a point to stop at every drug store and big box store they came across and search through their pharmacies.
But the druggies had it all now.
At first the addicts only took the pain killers and the psychiatric drugs. The controlled substances lock
ed in cabinets at the back of the pharmacies.
Once all the good stuff was gone they started experimenting. They tried combinations of anything and everything until they found something that made them feel high.
Then they took every one of those particular pills the pharmacy had.
Some took the wrong combinations of drugs.
Before their shelves were finally empty it became more and more common to find druggies dead on the floor of the pharmacies.
Some were killed by others wanting the same medications.
Most, though, were killed because the drug combinations they took to get high killed them instead.
That was okay. Nobody would miss them.
Now they were merely obstacles to step over for others seeking their own high.
These days the pharmacy shelves were empty. The dopers had taken everything.
Now it was a waste of time to even look for medicines.
At least in the pharmacies.
Rumors flew that the big box stores shipped their medications on specially wrapped and specially marked pallets at the front of their trailers.
And it was true. Some of the big retailers did.
But Sal couldn’t climb into the trailers.
Nellie could, with some effort.
Before her mind went she scored him a couple of bottles of aspirin, which he took daily to thin his blood because he had nothing else.
But she never scored what he really needed.
Eventually the trailers too had been emptied of medications.
It wasn’t just Sal. Most of the insulin-dependent diabetics in the country had already died, and the heart patients were going fast.
Sal knew he’d soon stop being a living, breathing human being and would become instead just another statistic.
But he’d continue to keep it to himself.
He’d continue to take the daily aspirin and would suffer through the dizzy spells and the pain in an effort to meet Beth’s mother and to beg her forgiveness.
It had become his final goal. The one thing left on his bucket list he wanted to do before he died.
He owed the poor woman that much.
In the meantime he wouldn’t complain about the situation. He’d never been a whiner.
He’d merely take it as it came.
If he was a little more grouchy in the meantime, oh, well… it was what it was.
A Stunning Betrayal Page 7