With the dogs in mind, they decided on a new, less lethal booby trap.
The original pit was only about four and a half feet deep. It was the maximum depth they could manage with the Bobcat’s bucket attachment.
But with good old fashioned shovels, they could dig a deep as they wanted.
Falling into the hole would be painful, without doubt. But it would no longer be one hundred percent fatal.
What it would be was a very effective way of trapping someone. Assuming that someone wouldn’t be able to crawl out of a seven and a half foot hole without the aid of a ladder.
Once done, they removed the mound of dirt that had lined the original trench since the day it was dug. Even in the moonlight, the mound was a hint that there was a trench in front of it.
They were afraid that intruders might see the mound and go around it instead of over it. And if they did that, they’d go around the trench at the same time.
Their logic was sound. Remove the mound of dirt, and there was nothing to warn intruders of the danger ahead. And in the darkness of night, the trench in the ground was damn near impossible to see.
Of course, the good guys already knew it was there and could skirt around it.
And the bad guys?
Hopefully they’d land on their heads and break their necks. But if they were lucky and landed uninjured, Scott and Robbie were pretty confident the trench would make a good holding cell while the group decided their fate.
Two years before, when Scott and Joyce were setting up the compound and planning for the blackout, they knew they had to plan for the long term. They also knew that anything made of electronics eventually went out. Nothing lasted forever.
So when they modified one of the storage barns and turned it into a huge Faraday cage by lining the interior with wire mesh, they packed as many electronic items into it as they could.
Including extra surveillance cameras and monitors.
On the huge electrical towers which ran past the eastern edge of the property and carried electricity from San Antonio into the small towns to the north, Scott and Jordan had installed two wireless cameras.
They were small, discrete, and solar powered. Each one had a solar panel which charged a small battery pack during daylight use. The battery had sufficient power to operate the camera during nighttime hours.
In the two years since they installed the two cameras on the electric towers they only had one issue with them. One of the batteries wore out and had to be replaced.
It was a very effective system.
And it just so happened they had four more of them, still boxed up and brand new, gathering dust in the back of the Faraday barn.
On the next to last day before John was scheduled to come back and pick them up, Scott and Robbie installed one of the cameras on the roof of Tom’s ranch house.
When he was ready for the initial system test, Scott called over the radio to see who was manning the security console.
Tom answered, “It’s me, little buddy. You ready to run the test?”
“Yes.”
Scott needed to make sure the camera’s autofocus was operational.
He stood three feet away from it and asked, “How’s the picture, Tom?”
“Crystal clear.”
Scott moved to a point about ten feet away.
“How’s the picture now?”
“Still crystal clear.”
Scott moved to a point about twenty five feet away. Then, on a whim, he asked Tom, “Hey, Tom, is there anyone there with you?”
“Nope. Just little ole me.”
Hannah had been in the kitchen, getting herself a glass of iced tea. She got one for Tom as well, and walked up behind him just in time to see Scott drop his pants and moon Tom on the monitor.
Tom was getting ready to say something, until Hannah put her finger to her lips to shush him.
She got on the radio and said, “Nice, Scott. Real nice. What grade are you in, again?”
Scott muttered, “Oh, crap,” and turned beet red. Robbie enjoyed a good belly laugh, and Tom and Hannah cracked up as well.
It was the first time any of them had laughed out loud in two weeks.
And it felt good.
-19-
Scott had mixed feelings about going back to San Antonio. On the one hand, it broke his heart to think of leaving his family and friends behind again.
But seeing them had been bittersweet. Seeing those you loved most in the world, but having to stay away from them, was its own brand of torture.
And everywhere he went in the compound, he saw flashbacks of Joyce. He fully expected her to come around the corner at any moment. He dreamed about her at night. He daydreamed about her in daylight. He thought he heard her voice blowing softly in the breeze.
He knew that the best thing for him at the moment was to get away for awhile. To get back to work in San Antonio. To stay busy and try his best to forget.
John called when he was ten minutes away. He’d already told Hannah and the girls he wouldn’t be getting out of the car this time. Saying goodbye to them two weeks before was very hard on all four of them. None of them wanted to have to do it again.
At John’s heads-up call, Scott and Robbie said their goodbyes across a ten foot chasm that seemed ten miles wide.
The pair double-timed it back to Tom’s place, followed closely by Tom and Jordan on the tractor and the Gator.
Once the guys were off the property, Tom and Jordan would move dead mesquite trees back into the open gap that separated the two pieces of land, then stake them to the ground again so they couldn’t easily be moved.
John pulled off of Interstate 10 and onto Highway 83. Four miles up, and to the south, just past a wide curve, was the turnoff to Tom’s ranch house.
He could have closed his eyes and found it by sense of smell alone. The bodies of the outlaws, laid out across the berm, had been rotting for two weeks.
Many of their limbs were gone now, chewed off and carried away by coyotes or wild dogs. Much of the rancid flesh had been picked off by buzzards, and they’d soon be nothing but bones.
In the meantime, though, they stunk to high heaven.
John had to turn off the air conditioner because it was drawing in the outside air, and the smell of the decomposing bodies along with it.
It was a warm day, and a bead of sweat rolled down his forehead as he silently cursed his friends and wished they’d hurry up.
Finally, Scott and Robbie burst through the brush along the side of the road, both holding their breath as best they could, and breathing through their mouths when they had to inhale.
Robbie jumped into the front seat, Scott dove into the back, and John burned rubber in an effort to get away from the smell.
It didn’t work, though. The smell had already permeated the car’s interior, and they had to put up with it the entire way back to San Antonio.
One of the things they had to do as part of their police duties was search for bodies in abandoned houses and businesses, and to help drag them to the street for burning. They’d smelled decomposing bodies before. But on the job in San Antonio, they had a habit of spreading a dollop of Vick’s Vapor Rub on their upper lips, beneath their noses. That wasn’t what it was designed for, but it did an excellent job of masking the smell.
But they didn’t have any in the compound.
The bodies in San Antonio would eventually all be collected and burned. Six months later, maybe a year, the smell of decomposing human flesh would be a thing of the past. But that didn’t mean they’d ever forget what it smelled like. Each of them knew it would be with them until their dying days.
As they got back on I-10, Scott called on the radio.
“Hey, Tom, did you get those items we left for you at the back of your shed?”
Tom was on his tractor, dragging a dead mesquite tree back into place, and cursed out loud.
“Dammit, I forgot!”
Jordan said, “Don’t worry. Sit tight. I’
ll get it.
Jordan jumped on the Gator and fairly flew through the hole in the fence toward Tom’s ranch house.
Tom admired him as he went. He liked the way Jordan was always the first to volunteer, and how he always carried more than his share of the load.
“You know, Scott, that’s a fine boy you’ve got there.”
“I know, Tom. But I wouldn’t call him a boy to his face. He’s a man now, just as much as you and me.”
“Yep. You’re right. And a damn good one.”
“I’ve already decided that when I get out of San Antonio for good and get back here, I’m going to pass the alpha male hat to him. I think he’s ready now, don’t you?”
“Yep. He’ll wear it well, too. Does that mean you and I get to retire and start enjoying life?”
“Yep. With Jordan in charge we can just sit back and spend our days whittlin’ and spittin’.”
“Damn right.”
Jordan, his radio at his side, listened to the chatter as he drove to Tom’s wood shed. It made him feel good that his father, and the man he considered a grandfather, both thought him capable of taking charge of the compound.
He didn’t say a word. But he grinned from ear to ear.
Inside the house, others were listening too. Linda, working the security desk, beamed with pride. She’d always known what Jordan was capable of. Even as a boy he’d always been mature for his age. She found herself a little bit choked up.
Sara, standing behind her, put a hand on her shoulder.
“I know you’re proud of him, Mom Linda. I am too. I’m lucky to be here with him. If he hadn’t rescued me that day the world went dark, I’d be dead. And since I’ve been here, I’ve been able to live for the first time in my life. And it’s all because he wouldn’t allow himself to do the easy thing and leave me behind.”
Linda reached up and placed her own hand atop Sara’s.
“He never would have left you behind, honey. He’s just not that way.”
Jordan went to Tom’s wood shed and removed two weapons and two boxes, and put them in the back of the Gator. The weapons were fully automatic military issue M-16 rifles. One box contained military grade .556 ball cartridges. The other contained hand grenades.
The little boy in him wanted to go out later and throw a grenade and fire the weapons.
But the mature side of him told him no. The grenades and ammo might well save their lives again someday. It was not to be wasted.
And it was at that moment that he admitted to himself what everyone else apparently already knew.
He was, finally, a man.
-20-
Rhett and Scarlett had lived in an apartment in the central part of San Antonio when the blackout happened. They were luckier than most, in that a Sam’s Club truck broke down in the street directly in front of them.
When it became apparent that the lights weren’t coming back on again for awhile, most of their neighbors went looting the supermarkets.
Rhett and Scarlett, on the other hand, spent the second, third and fourth nights of darkness carrying shelf-stable foods from the truck to their upstairs apartment.
And two pallets of Dasani drinking water.
They were also lucky in that they were great friends with their neighbors in the apartments on each side of them. And that the apartment behind them was completely empty.
They enlisted the help of the neighbors, and between the six of them were able to empty the truck out completely.
Of the stuff they could use, at least. They left the Pampers and television sets behind.
Over the months that followed they’d modified their apartments somewhat to make them more secure from looters and prowlers. They knocked holes in the walls between the apartments and turned the three apartments into one. That enabled them to pass freely between the three without ever going outside.
They also knocked a hole in the wall between Rhett and Scarlett’s place and the apartment behind them. Since it was vacant, they removed the blinds in the living room so that looters could see it was empty and have no reason to break in.
The two bedrooms in the empty apartment, though, were blacked out, their blinds completely closed. They became the storage rooms for all the pasta, beans, soups and Ramen noodles they’d taken from the truck.
The men had taken turns in the weeks following the EMP, standing guard on the walkway outside the three apartments. The looters never came close. There were plenty of other places to rob, after all. Ones that weren’t guarded.
The looters might have tried harder if they’d known the treasure trove of food that was behind those walls. If they’d known there was enough to keep them and their friends alive for a year or more, they might have decided it was worth a shootout.
But the thieves didn’t know that, and Rhett’s group was mostly left alone.
Their supply of drinking water had lasted for six months, but by the time it ran out they had a Plan B. They’d set up a series of plastic tubs and barrels along the roofline every time it rained. They drained the rainwater through socks to catch any tiny particles of asphalt shingles the water might have caught while rolling down the roof. Then they used a propane gas grill to boil the water before refilling their empty Dasani bottles.
Their actions in the first days of the crisis enabled them all to survive unscathed, even as people all around them were giving up and killing themselves in mass numbers.
They’d heard the shots. They could smell the decomposing bodies.
They knew they were lucky.
It was eight months before they’d begun to venture out. By that time, the six of them had become more than just friends. They were more like a family.
It was at that time they took inventory of the food they had left and realized they’d be running out soon.
So the men began to scavenge for more of it.
It was rough at first. All of the supermarkets had been picked clean. Most of the abandoned trucks had been too.
But more often than not, the matching backpacks that Rhett, Mike and Andy took from a Walmart truck were partially or mostly full each time they returned from their scavenging missions.
It was on one of those missions that a police cruiser pulled up, just as they were climbing out of the back of an elementary school window.
They’d raided the cafeteria pantry, and filled their backpacks with several bags of flour and several cans of Crisco.
The looters who’d come before them hadn’t seen any value in the items, and had left them behind.
But Mike’s last name was Garza. His grandparents came to the United States from Mexico. His grandmother cooked up the best flour tortillas north of Mexico City, and he’d watched her do it many times as a boy.
He knew the value of flour and Crisco.
They were crestfallen to see the police cruiser, though. They almost bolted and ran, but Mike and Andy regarded Rhett as their unofficial leader.
Rhett kept a cool head and went to talk to the officer instead of making a bad situation worse and trying to get away. Mike and Andy were uneasy. It was the first cop they’d seen in almost a year, and they didn’t know how the blackout had affected the police department.
They were afraid that all the cops had gone rogue, and were just watching out for themselves now.
But they needn’t have worried.
The man in the police car had been John Castro. And he was really there to help.
John knew the city had shifted into survival mode. Looters were no longer really considered looters, he explained to the men. They were now considered nothing more than citizens, trying to provide food for their families, and to survive to see another day.
“Just as long as you don’t hurt others while you gather food, or steal from another citizen, then we look the other way,” John told them.
“It’s been that way for a very long time now.”
John spent half an hour with the men that day, and filled them in on a lot of things. He told them abou
t the plague that had overtaken the city, and to stay indoors as much as possible.
“It’s important that you keep to your own kind as much as you can. Try to stay away from others as much as possible. And don’t come into physical contact with anyone outside your circle.”
It was then that Rhett realized why John was staying ten feet away from him, and why he’d held up a hand when Rhett started to come closer.
Rhett had asked, “How are the others surviving?”
“Some, like you. Most of the ones who are left, and there aren’t many, are taking over whole city blocks and turning them into farms. They’re knocking down fences and clearing the trees and shrubs out of the yards. They’re banding together to plant crops, and to care for them. Most of the blocks only have a handful of people, and they’re able to grow enough food to sustain them.”
“Where are they getting the seeds?”
“They’re sharing. Those that already have them are growing crops and then taking a portion of their new seeds to neighboring blocks.”
“Wow. For the first time I wish we’d rented a house instead of an apartment.”
“Go out to some of the residential areas. Walk in unarmed, and hold out your arms to your sides. That way they’ll know you’re not a threat. Ask to speak to the block leader, and then ask if they’re looking for anyone else to join their group.”
“Would they let people they don’t know just walk in and join them?”
“Not if they get the sense you’re scumbags, no. But if you convince them you’re good people, and are willing to work hard and carry your share of the load, they might.
“You see, many of the blocks are barely getting by. Some of them have mostly old folks, or are too few in numbers to grow enough crops to get by. They’re realizing that farming is hard work. Especially without modern irrigation equipment and fertilizers and such.
“So some of the block leaders will turn you away. But they’ll just as likely refer you to another block that needs strong men, or security.”
An Undeclared War (Countdown to Armageddon Book 4) Page 7