Rhett retrieved another sheet while Scott moved the furniture out of the way. They laid the sheet next to the mother and then rolled her onto it. Then, to give her the modesty she no longer cared about but deserved, they rolled her up in the sheet to hide her nakedness.
From house to house they went, up one side of the block and down the other. As their shift was nearing its end, Scott called in to the San Antonio Fire Department.
“Fire Dispatch, this is Charlie Four Six.”
“Welcome back, Charlie Four Six. We’ve missed you.”
“Thanks. I wish I could say it was nice to be back, but I’d be lying.”
“Understood. How can we help you?”
“Do you have a unit that can do a controlled burn in the 2400 block of Green Plain Drive?”
“I think so. Fire Two Two, are you still on the west side and available?”
“Roger and roger, and we copied. Two four zero zero Green Plain Drive. ETA ten minutes. Scott, we heard you have yourself a new rookie.”
Rhett groaned and Scott smiled.
“Roger that.”
“Did he puke yet?”
“No, he’s still holding it in.”
“Well, good for him. Any pup that doesn’t puke the first day’s a keeper for sure.”
“Roger that.”
Fire Dispatch cut in.
“Hey, Fire Two Two. A little radio discipline would be nice.”
“Oops, sorry.”
Scott took off the latex gloves and mask, dropping them on top of the bodies to be burned along with them. Rhett did the same, and noticed for the first time that the stench was a lot stronger that he realized.
“We’ve got enough time before shift change to hang around here and watch, if you want to see the rest of the process.”
“Sure. Might as well.”
Five minutes later a sparkling clean ladder truck with the San Antonio Fire Department patch on each door rounded the corner two blocks away. It used no lights or siren. What they were doing wasn’t an emergency. It was merely a service, for the dead as well as the living.
While his crew was pulling hoses off the back of the rig, the driver came over and shook Scott’s hand.
“I heard about your lady, Scott. I’m sorry.”
“Thank you, Mark. I appreciate that. Mark Delgado, this is Rhett Butler.”
“For real?”
Rhett had heard it all before.
“Yep. For real.”
“Well, this sure ain’t Tara. But welcome aboard anyway, Rhett.”
Mark reached out his hand and Rhett shook it.
“Scott tells me you haven’t retched yet. Good for you. Any rook that can hold his lunch until the end of the first day is a good rook, in my book.”
Mark looked at Scott and said, “Hey, did you see what I did there? ‘A good rook in my book’… I’m a damn poet. How about that!”
Scott said, “Yeah, yeah.”
Mark looked at Rhett and smiled.
Rhett said, “Yeah, well, don’t give me too much credit. I may still puke yet.”
Mark backed away in mock horror and then walked away.
He looked back over his shoulder and called out, “Hey Scott… if he’s Rhett, does that make you Scarlett?”
Scott called back, “Hardly…”
Mark’s crew had two hoses unrolled and hooked up to the truck’s auxiliary water tank. Mark took a can of diesel fuel from the back of the truck and doused the first pile of bodies. Then he took a match and set it ablaze. Immediately, a thick plume of acrid black smoke lifted skyward.
This stench was different than the first, but equally as bad. Rhett started to turn green, but managed not to vomit.
Scott explained the process.
“They’ll let the fire burn itself out, and then stir the bones with a shovel and light them up a second time. Sometimes it takes a third burn, but when there’s nothing left but bones and ashes they’ll scoop them up and put them in a large metal drum on the back of their truck.
“Each drum will hold the remains of a dozen bodies or more, and once they’re full they’ll be taken to a mass grave north of the city and buried.”
The men watched the bodies burn. Mark was a man who joked around a lot because it kept him from going insane.
But he was also a deeply religious man.
As the bodies burned, he stood before them, removed his fire helmet, and held it over his heart. He lowered his head, and his crew did likewise.
“Dear God, we commit these souls to your care. We ask that you watch over them and keep them safe from further harm. They’ve suffered enough, Lord. They deserve a more peaceful journey now. Amen.”
It was a touching moment that Scott had seen several times before, but that never got old.
Rhett had one question.
“Why are they standing by with hoses if they’re just going to let the fire burn out?”
“That’s to keep the wind from spreading the fire. The water pumps are working at the water plant now, but only at about twenty percent of capacity. Some of the fire hydrants don’t work at all, so they can’t risk a fire that might burn hundreds of homes. Most of them are empty anyway, but some of them contain survivors. And they’ve been through enough already, without the fire department burning their houses down.”
“Good point.”
Mark walked back over to them.
“I see another pile a few houses up. Is that is?”
“Yeah, that’s the only other pile for today. We’ll be back tomorrow to pick up where we left off.”
Scott and Rhett got back in their unit and drove away. All total, they’d searched twenty four houses and recovered fifteen bodies.
Fifteen souls who would finally be given a permanent resting place.
The SAPD was manned at only fifteen percent of its official authorization now. Most of the officers who’d been on the force a year before were dead, or had quit their jobs to protect their families and forage for food on a full time basis. In a world where money was now worthless, a job just didn’t mean as much as it did before the blackout.
Being so short manned, the department had eliminated or modified many of its policies and procedures.
Among the first to go was the standup and outbrief that once took place at shift change. It once served a valuable purpose; a chance for the oncoming shift to compare notes with the officers going off duty, and to pass on any pertinent information the new shift needed to know.
Now, the officers finishing up their shifts just called in to report they were “10-7,” or off duty. Incoming officers would call in that they were “10-8,” or in service.
Seldom did their paths cross.
Another policy that changed was their squad car policy.
In the weeks just following the blackout, the SAPD was completely afoot, on bicycles, or on horseback. That was when most of the officers got frustrated and quit. They felt that without transportation they were absolutely worthless for preventing crime. And they were essentially right.
As the months went by, though, Scott’s friend Tom figured out a way to get a few vehicles running. Scott passed the word to John Castro, who passed it onto the department’s motor pool, and within days a few units were running again.
As the months went by, more and more units came back into service.
No longer did officers coming off shift have to pick up their replacements, who then took the outgoing officers home. It was time consuming and a waste of manpower, and nobody missed those days.
Now, there were enough cars available to allow every officer to take his squad home at night.
And the twelve hour shifts everyone was working no longer stretched into thirteen.
Rookies, though, got no car. Not until they completed their ninety day probationary period.
Scott dropped Rhett off at his house on Baker Street and Rhett said, “You’re welcome to come in and meet my girl, if you promise not to try to steal her. She’s the best thing that
’s ever happened to me.”
“Not right now. Maybe sometime when I don’t have the stench of death all over me. What’s her name?”
Rhett smiled. “You won’t believe me if I tell you.”
“Sure I will. Wait a minute. It’s not Scarlett, is it?”
“Yep. Scarlett it is.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
Rhett got out and said, “See you in the morning.”
Scott drove away laughing.
-26-
Up on the mountain near Junction, four men rode down Highway 83 on horseback. They slowed as they neared the berm marking the private road to Tom Haskins’ ranch house and to the compound.
A tall thin man on a tired old bay appeared to be in charge of the group.
He sidled up to the berm and looked over the bodies lined up on its side.
“Yep. That’s Tony Pike all right.”
The sign gave him pause.
THESE MEN
WERE WARNED TO KEEP OUT
AND IGNORED THE WARNING.
LEARN FROM
THEIR MISTAKE.
“We’d better move cautiously from here on out.”
He took out his Winchester from the sheath on the side of his saddle and tied his horse to a roadside shrub.
The others followed suit.
The group crept slowly past the berm and down the gravel rode. It was eighty yards to the end of Tom’s driveway, and they had nothing for cover but sparse brush on each side of the road.
It would be a good place for an ambush.
But their progress went unimpeded, until they got to the turnoff for Tom’s ranch house.
Marking each side of Tom’s driveway was a huge white boulder. Tom had them trucked in many years before because he thought they would impress his wife.
She’d laughed and said, “Honey, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but those are the butt-ugliest rocks I’ve ever seen.”
In an effort to make them less ugly to her, he’d taken a mallet and a cold chisel and carved their initials into the back of one of the rocks. Then he chiseled a heart around them, and called her out to take a look.
She softened her stance.
“Well, I guess they’re not that ugly after all.”
Then she added quickly, “But don’t get any more.”
In the years since Millie’s death Tom had gone out every year on their anniversary, picked her a bouquet of wildflowers and laid them on the ground next to that heart.
The tall man told the others, “You men take cover behind those boulders. I’ll scout out the place. Be ready to provide cover fire for me if the shooting starts.”
One of the men dropped behind the biggest of the boulders. He laid his knee into a pile of dead flowers and found himself wondering how they came to be there.
The tall man carried his Winchester at arm’s length, far away from his body. He wanted it known he didn’t want any trouble.
As the old ranch house came into view, he called out.
“Tom Haskins! It’s Jim Colson. You know me from the old days. We don’t want any trouble. We just want to talk.”
Colson hadn’t seen Tom Haskins in several years. But he knew Tom well enough to know he’d fire a warning shot before he killed anyone. That emboldened him enough to move a little closer.
Hannah, on the security console, had seen the group of men right around the time they paused at the white boulders. The wireless camera Scott had installed on Tom’s roof was sharp enough to make out their faces.
Hannah had called Tom and Jordan as soon as the men came into view.
Both came running.
“I know those men,” Tom said. “They’re good men. They’re not outlaws.”
Linda, walking up behind him, had seen enough pain and violence lately.
She told him, “Just let them be, Tom. They’ll see you’re not there and they’ll leave. Just let them go.”
But Tom was old school, and a cowboy. And that wasn’t the cowboy way. When an old friend or neighbor came calling, you didn’t hide from them. You went out to see what they wanted. They might have trouble, and they might need help.
It was how he was raised, and how he lived his life.
“No,” he’d said as Colson left the others and started walking toward the ranch house. “I need to see what they want.”
Tom turned to Jordan and said, “Jump on the Bobcat and head for one of those mesquite trees at the end of the driveway. I’ll meet you there with a chain and hook you up.”
“Yes, sir.”
The compound’s north field shared a common fence with Tom’s old ranch. Normally, Tom would have gone that way to meet with the men.
But that was the way Tony Pike and his gang got in before. And now it was heavily fortified. The dead mesquite trees that lined the barbed wire fence, with their razor sharp needles pointing to the outside, were staked to the ground now. They could only be moved with great effort, and the men would be long gone by the time Tom got there.
The end of the driveway for Scott’s house, the one leading from the compound to the gravel road, wasn’t as heavily fortified. They’d never been assaulted from that direction. The dead trees there were too heavy to push or pull by hand, and had to be dragged away by the Bobcat or the tractor. But at least they weren’t staked down, and could therefore be moved relatively quickly.
In six minutes flat, the largest of the two mesquite trees blocking the drive was out of the way.
Jordan stood at the ready with a AR-15 and a 9 mm handgun, in the event there was trouble.
Tom left him with instructions.
“Use the Bobcat’s hydraulic jaws and pick that tree back up. Be ready to drop it back into place as soon as I come back through that hole. If you hear shooting, drop it into place immediately and high-tail it back into the house. Take up a position in the northeast window.”
“Tom, I can’t leave you out there if they start shooting.”
“Yes you can, and you will. There are four of them and only two of us. If they take a shot at me, I’ll be off in the brush quicker than a jackrabbit. I’ll lose them in the heavy woods and let you know when I’m ready to come back in. If you go out there, they’ll just have twice as many targets to shoot at.”
Jordan didn’t like the idea. But he knew there was no point in arguing.
-27-
Jim Colson made it to within twenty feet of the ranch house, twenty yards at a time, calling out loud and clear that he wasn’t looking for trouble.
It finally became apparent that Tom Haskins wasn’t there. He wasn’t the kind of man who’d cower in his house, even if he somehow knew he was outnumbered.
Finally, Colson walked up to the door and knocked.
“Tom, it’s Jim Colson! I mean you no harm. I just need to talk to you.”
Nothing but silence.
Colson turned and walked back down the drive, and met the others at the boulders.
“He don’t appear to be here. He may be hunting, or foraging food.”
One of the men asked, “You didn’t go in to make sure he wasn’t there?”
Colson looked at the man as though he were a special kind of stupid.
“We didn’t come here to invade a man’s home. We just came here to talk. Either he’s not home, or he don’t want to talk. In either case, we’re finished here.”
It was at that moment that the four heard the Gator, coming up the gravel road toward them at a good clip.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Colson observed. “I wonder how he got that thing running.”
Tom stopped his vehicle forty yards away from the men and dismounted. He held his hands out to his sides and briefly turned around so they could see his back.
He wanted them to know he was unarmed.
He approached them with due caution. He’d known Jim Colson for years, and knew he was a good man. He knew the others too, to varying degrees, and believed them to be God-fearing men as well.
But then again, he wanted to be careful. Even good men sometimes turn bad under the right circumstances.
Colson handed his rifle to one of the other men and met Tom halfway, his hand outstretched.
“Tom, I never thought I’d see one of these things moving again. Are you a prepper?”
“Well, no. But I’m acquainted with some.”
“So maybe the rumors I’ve heard are true? That you got that old Ford of yours running also?”
Tom was still wary.
“Well, that depends on why you’re asking.”
“Oh, relax, Tom. We’re still friends. At least I consider us so. I hope you do too. I don’t really mean to pry. It’s just that I thought all the vehicles were dead forever. I heard rumors flying around Junction that you’d been seen foraging for food, and driving that old Ford around with boxes tied to the top. But I figured them to be fairy tales. The only other vehicles I’ve seen running since the blackout are a couple of dirt bikes. They’re owned by the Willow family, up north of the lower Llano River. They’re preppers, and somehow managed to save them from the blackout.”
Tom said, “Down in San Antonio, they’ve got quite a few vehicles running now. Or, at least their police cars and fire trucks. All it takes is a new dry battery that’s never been used and a few replacement parts.”
Colson raised an eyebrow, a bit leery of Tom’s story. But then it dawned on him that Tom Haskins was as honest a man as he’d ever known.
“Would you be willing to show an old friend how to do it? You could help a lot of folks out.”
“I’ll show you, Jim, if you can find the battery. It won’t be a lot of folks, though. Any battery that ever had acid in it will be shot. And that lets out about ninety nine percent of them, since they’ve only sold sealed batteries for years. About the only place you’ll find a dry one is in an old farmer’s barn somewhere, or at a farm implement store.
An Undeclared War (Countdown to Armageddon Book 4) Page 10