Sunfall (Book 3): Impact

by Gideon, D.

  The next questions pretty much sealed the deal.

  Firearms On The Property: Make, Model, Caliber.

  Ammunition On The Property: Caliber, Amount.

  “Take Dotty home,” he said. “Warden needs to see this.”

  Marco

  “You want me to scavenge garden hoses? You’re sure you can’t find a better way to get water to the house?” Marco asked, sitting on the closed toilet.

  “Well, sure. A better way would be with real irrigation tubing. Even an inch in diameter would work. But without going to the Home Depot down in Pocomoke, that’s out,” Corey said, leaning against the bathroom door frame. “Garden hoses are more skinny than I’d like, but it’s all we’ve got.”

  Marco frowned. “That’s going to be a lot of hoses to scavenge. I’m not even sure there are enough vacated houses in town to do it.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. Places like the prison should have longer hoses, and lots of them. 50, even 100 feet long. Maybe the churches, and the courthouse. Commercial businesses with landscaping. Places like that,” Corey said.

  “How do you even know you can get into the storm drains?” Mel said, snipping the scissors and laying the last rubber-banded lock of hair across the sink. She rubbed the stubbled remains on her head, sighed, and picked up the disposable razor.

  “While you’ve been stuck inside the house for the past week, I’ve been out with a crowbar pulling up manhole covers,” Corey said. “The storm drains give me a clear shot all the way down to the bridge. The exit drain to the river will be the tricky part.”

  “No. Getting all of those hoses will be the tricky part,” Marco said. “It might even be worth a trip-”

  “Too dangerous,” Mel said. She whisked the razor in a mug of water and went back to her hairline.

  “Just see what you can find around here first. If we come up short, we’ll talk about going to Pocomoke City,” Corey said. “It’s about 25 miles there and back. We’d probably be able to scrounge up the gas for it, but I’d rather save it for the generator.”

  “Getting them sooner is better than trying to find them later, after everyone else has realized they need them,” Marco said. He knew that line of thinking would be shot down, and sure enough, Corey snorted.

  “I really doubt anyone else is building a hydraulic ram pump to push water,” he said.

  “Not now, but soon they will be,” Marco said. “They’ll be in the library looking up how to get water. I’ve seen it happen.”

  He couldn’t get it through anyone’s head. They were all trying to figure out how to adjust to this new “normal”. But this was just the transition period between normal and chaos. They had to prepare for the chaos.

  “Your turn, pretty boy,” Mel said, holding the razor out to him so he could shave the parts she couldn’t see. “And if you cut me…”

  “You’ll cut me worse, I know,” Marco said, taking the razor. “Bend your head down.”

  Corey straightened from where he’d been leaning. “The sooner we get the stuff, the better. I know. I get it, Marco. But Ripley’s not ready. I’ve been catching her just staring off into space. I can say something and she won’t even hear me. She’s just…gone.” He made a motion of something fluttering away from his head.

  “Ripley doesn’t have to go.” Marco sloshed the razor in the cup. “I could go today, but this one told me we’ve got a scavenging trip planned.”

  “Because I’d bet money that you’ve been looking right over stuff that we need,” Mel said. “Tampons, maxi pads, Pamprin. You need a female partner, and we need to be out there doing something. Just because we went through some shit-”

  “We’ll talk about it later,” Corey said, cutting her off. “I’ve got more testing to do. Just get what you can in the meantime, all right?” He gave Marco a nod as he left. They heard the rear screen door bang shut a minute later.

  “That’s right, leave. Anytime I bring up what happened, or anytime I suggest that Rip and I need to stop sitting here stewing in our own brains, he just ends the conversation,” Mel said.

  “He can’t forgive himself for not being there to protect Ripley. For not being able to protect you,” Marco said.

  “I didn’t need him to protect me. I handled my shit.” She huffed and scratched at a little stain on the edge of the sink. “He’s treating us like fragile flowers. He thinks Rip is still upstairs in bed. If he knew she was in town, with Preacher? He’d be throwing a fit.”

  Marco pulled the razor up Melanie’s head and frowned.

  Corey could claim that he got it, but he didn’t. None of them did. They should be covering the windows with wood, fortifying the doors…now, while they had time. The arrival of the National Guard had calmed things down, but in the end all it did was delay the inevitable. Sooner or later the Guard would run out of supplies or they’d leave. When that happened, it would be every man for himself. He’d seen it firsthand.

  Which was why he’d taken Ripley’s map of the town, the first night they’d gotten here, and gone for a walk. He’d marked off the houses that didn’t seem to have anyone in them. No candlelight inside, no movement or sound. He’d continued doing that for the next two nights until he’d covered the entire town on the eastern side of the river. As the days had passed and he’d noticed more people leaving, he’d marked those houses, too.

  Empty houses were full of abandoned, but useful things. Things that he knew the group would need later. And if he could get it and store it away before anyone else even thought to go looking for it, all the better.

  “Done,” he said, stepping back.

  Mel lifted her head and eyed herself in the mirror. She rubbed a hand over her now-bald head, and to Marco, she looked a little shell-shocked. He’d never tell her that, though. He didn’t need a razor in his eye.

  She picked up the hair that she’d so carefully portioned out and secured with rubber bands. Thick braids, thin ones, locks of dark brown hair and locks of bright purple. All of it went into one of the brown grocery bags that Dotty had saved. Mel had said that one day she might tie the hair to barrettes and make extensions out of it, but he didn’t think that’s why she was keeping it. That hair had been her identity for years; her way of thumbing her nose at her mother and everything the Congresswoman’s lifestyle signified. Giving it up was a huge change.

  “Screw Preacher,” she muttered, rolling the bag up.

  “Preacher’s not the problem,” Marco said. “You know that.”

  “Save your psychology for someone that gives a shit,” she said, handing him the bag and taking the cup from the sink. “I’ll bitch at who I want, when I want. I’ll dump this outside and then we can go.”

  She pushed past him, and he checked the sink and the floor for any leftover hair. It was important that if anyone ever came looking for Melanie Rhodes, infamous daughter of the Speaker of the House, there’d be no trace of her. They’d thought that in a small town like this, she wouldn’t have to be so careful.

  That had lasted all of one night.

  Preacher had cornered Mel the day after meeting her and told her that he remembered where he’d seen her before…in the gossip magazines at the prison. One of the prisoners had even had a glossy full-page shot of her in a bikini on some rich playboy’s yacht stuck under his bunkmate’s mattress, but she’d had fire-engine red highlights then, not purple. The Speaker’s wild child had been loved by the paparazzi and a constant burr in her mother’s side.

  Preacher had reasoned that if he could figure out who she was, then other people could, too. So had begun Mel’s confinement, which Corey seemed to take as his personal mission. For the entire week they’d been here, she’d only gone outside in the daylight to rush to the outhouse and back, and then only with a cloth tied around her head and someone--many times, Corey--playing lookout. Sometime last night she’d decided she was tired of the whole situation. When he’d come into the Millers’ house this morning to compare notes on everyone’s plans for the day, sh
e’d already been in the bathroom cutting her hair off and planning on coming with him.

  “Not there,” he said, stepping in to the kitchen to find her shoving the bag into the cabinet under the sink. She leveled a glare at him, and he held up a hand. “If you want to keep it, it can’t be anywhere in this house. Get your pack, and make sure you’ve got water and a flashlight. I’ve been working on something, and it’s time you saw it.”

  Marco

  Andrew Carnegie had once said that the wise man puts all his eggs in one basket, and watches the basket. Elon Musk said it’s okay to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.

  Living in Sarajevo as a young child when it was under siege and being bombed, Marco had learned that a man with just one basket was a fool. One who would soon be starving.

  He didn’t care how hard he had to work; he was never going to starve again.

  He slid the silver key into the lock and checked back over his shoulder as he opened the door.

  “Where the hell did you get a key to the back door?” Mel said, hurrying inside.

  “It was in a little magnetic box stuck in the wheel well of the car in the garage,” he said. He locked the door behind them and checked the window, triple-checking that no one had been watching them. Usually he made sure to only come in here at dawn or dusk, but Mel had delayed him today.

  “So you broke into the garage?”

  “No, they forgot to lock the door to the garage. But I would’ve broken in, if I’d had to.”

  Two days after he and Ripley had made it home, the couple in the house across the street had taken off. They’d packed up their dogs and their SUV, given Dotty a few tearful hugs, and had left. Marco had waited until near sunset—in case they changed their mind or realized they’d forgotten something—before he’d gone inside and started stripping the place of anything useful.

  “The cache is in here, in the pantry,” he said, crossing the kitchen.

  “Cash?” Mel asked, following behind. “You’re hiding money?”

  It might as well be, he thought.

  “Not c-a-s-h. C-a-c-h-e,” he said. “You pull up the edge of the carpet here, under this curtain. Stick your finger in the hole, and pull.”

  The pantry was the size of a walk-in closet. It was lined with shelves on three sides and the bottom row had kitchen curtains stapled to them that just brushed the floor. The curtains hid large appliances that would look unsightly on the prim kitchen counters—or even on the pantry shelves—with all of their cords and accessory parts. Anyone coming in here would push the curtain aside, see a bunch of slow cookers, electric griddles, and waffle makers that they couldn’t use, and move on. They wouldn’t notice the precise cuts he’d made in the carpet.

  That’s what he hoped, anyway.

  “I’ve glued the padding and carpet to the top of the door,” he said, lifting it up. “If you close it from the inside, it’ll lay back down and disappear.” He motioned her to the steps. “Ladies first.”

  It had taken him nearly an hour of crawling and knocking on the floors to find the entrance. From being in Dotty’s and Ripley’s houses, which were old like this one, he guessed it would be built the same way…with a cellar. Walking around the outside of the house and pushing aside the knee-high grass, he’d found small metal air vents in the foundation. Those told him there was at least some kind of space down there; maybe nothing bigger than a crawl space. But there was no outside entrance. What he’d finally discovered was that the trap door to the cellar—in the very sensible spot of being in the pantry—had been carpeted over. Completely, as if someone had remodeled the place and simply decided that an old, dusty cellar was a relic not fit for their new, updated kitchen. Their lack of foresight was a huge benefit to him and the families.

  “Holy shit, Romeo,” Mel said from the bottom of the steps, swinging her flashlight around. “You’ve been busy. Or those people were preppers.”

  “I don’t think there’s been anyone but me and the spiders down here for years,” he said. He climbed down and switched his own flashlight on. “When I found it, there was just the bare shelves and those old empty jars.” He directed the light to a cluster of jars on the top of the shelves. He hadn’t had the heart to touch those. They reminded him too much of his father’s buried jars, hidden deep in the earth with their precious passports inside. Those jars had saved his and his parents’ lives.

  He shook the thought away and walked over to a little stool in the corner. It held a few candles and a handful of lighters. The little vents high in the walls provided some light, but not enough to actually see. Lighting a candle, he lifted the tarp on the floor.

  “There’s a mattress and sleeping bag under here,” he said. “Bottled water and MREs from the Guard there on that shelf,” he pointed, “and a bucket in the corner.”

  A twin-size mattress had been all he’d been able to squeeze through the trap door by himself, and even that had been a chore. Finding enough cardboard to line the bare dirt under it had been easy. He’d wanted something like mylar blankets to put under the cardboard, to block the cold from seeping through, but he hadn’t been able to find any of those yet. Ripley had some in her pack, but it was important for those to stay there.

  “You moving out?” Mel clicked her flashlight off and picked a paperback book off the shelf closest to the bed. “Planning on leaving us?”

  “Well, I’m storing all these cans and stuff here as a backup cache. But the bed? The water? This is for you,” Marco said.

  Her head came up. “Excuse me?”

  “If or when your mother makes Agent Perkins come looking for you, they’ll tear Ripley’s house down to the studs. Miss Dotty’s, too. Just like at the school, your only choice is to not be there.” He sat the paper bag with her shorn hair onto the shelf where the book had been. “So far there’s only enough water for you for a week. The Guard stopped handing out bottles a couple days ago and it’s bring-your-own-container now, but I’ll keep looking-”

  “You really think he’ll come?”

  “You really think your mother will just accept him not being able to find you? That she won’t look for you?”

  Mel snorted and tossed the paperback onto the tarp. “She’ll probably be relieved.”

  Marco watched as she started to pace, hands on her hips. “No matter what her titles are, she’s still your mother, Melanie. Mothers will raise heaven and earth to find their children.”

  Mel held up her hands. “Stop. Just stop. I know your mother did some incredible things to save your life, but she’s not my mother.” She pointed to her head. “I just shaved this so people wouldn’t realize she is my mother. I just don’t want to think about Mommy Dearest right now, k?”

  “Okay.”

  Mel turned and started scanning the shelves. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, Romeo. I appreciate this. You just kinda hit me out of the blue with it.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said. “And you’re right. I haven’t been getting feminine things. When I go into the bathrooms, I’m looking for soap, bandages, and medicines. Prescription and over-the-counter.”

  “Looks like you found a shit-ton of those,” she said. “There’s even cough syrup.”

  Marco frowned. What she called a shit-ton, he called barely getting started. He needed help. More people could carry more things, make each trip more efficient. But more people also attracted more attention. He had two other spots in town where he was storing things, just so he could make shorter, faster trips and avoid being seen. Still, he worried daily that he’d open them up and find someone had come behind him to clean it all out. Going into houses in the daytime was tricky, because people were out and about. They walked to the Rec Center to get food and water from the National Guard. They stood on corners and chatted with neighbors. He’d even seen an idiot sitting in front of his house with his car running, charging a cellphone and a couple of bluetooth speakers on his dash. The longer this went on, the more people were g
etting cabin fever and coming outside, looking for something to amuse them.

  Scavenging at night wasn’t an option, because the flashlight waving around would catch attention even faster. It would be like a lighthouse beacon. He’d been trying to go out around dawn and dusk, because people paid less attention to what was around them when they were transitioning between daytime and nighttime activities. So far, he hadn’t gotten caught. But it was all going so slowly, being alone.

  And then there was the Guard. He’d been trying to time their patrol route, but either they didn’t have a schedule or they were being random on purpose. Yesterday they’d stopped him and asked him where he lived and what he was doing. He’d given them Dotty’s address and waved his empty bucket around, saying he was headed to the park to pick up sticks and branches to make a cooking fire. It was all “yes sir” and “no sir”, with lots of smiling and acting like a clueless schlub. Anything to keep them from getting off of that MRAP and frisking him for weapons. They’d finally let him go, with a firm warning to be quick and get back home.

  “I want you to talk to Corey,” Mel said, pulling out a box of soap and sniffing it. She jerked her head back and made a face, dropping the soap back on the shelf like it was hot. “Cinnamon soap? Nasty.”

  Marco blinked and brought himself back to the present. “About what?”

  “About crawling out of my ass. And Rip’s. Someone needs to tell him, and he won’t listen to me.”

  “I can try, but I don’t know if it will help.” He lowered himself onto the mattress. “How’s she doing? I mean, really.”

  Mel turned to look at him and let out a huff of breath. “She’s a little screwed in the head, okay? No way around it. But that’s normal. It’s a normal reaction to everything she went through. She had a guy try to rape her. She killed people. You don’t just bounce back from that shit right away.”

  “You killed people. You seem to be doing fine,” he countered.