The others drove their horses hard, climbing out of the ravine. “That pack of dogs never barked one time,” Bill gasped as he panted hard. Handing his reins to Mary, Bill jumped off his horse and let his AR hang under his arm.
“Ann, come here, girl,” Bill called out with worry, getting to his knees. Ann bounced over and Bill felt her over. “They would’ve been on me before I could’ve reacted, if Ann wouldn’t have let me know.”
Looking around, “Is she okay?” Mary asked.
“Yeah, I don’t feel any blood and she’s not sore anywhere,” Bill answered, loving all over Ann. Seeing love being given, Dan bounced over and shoved his face between Bill and Ann. “Okay, you get some, too,” Bill laughed.
“Why did dogs come after us?” Sandy asked with a quivering voice. “We’ve seen cows, sheep, deer, antelope, and rabbits. It’s not like there isn’t game.”
“They were probably domesticated dogs gone feral and they associate humans with food,” Johnathan offered as Bill stood up, taking his reins from Mary.
Climbing on his horse, Bill looked back over the ravine. “Well, they get to eat some of their own pack,” he said, settling in his saddle.
Taking off again, Johnathan saw what he had been looking for; a dirt road. Guiding his horse to the road, Johnathan let his horse settle into a nice walk. With his heart-rate still in high orbit, Johnathan held out his right hand, shaking the numbness out of his fingers.
To the south they heard a sudden torrent of gunfire, “That’s a long way off. I’m guessing, but I would say five, maybe six miles,” Johnathan told Sandy behind him.
“Why don’t they have suppressors? You made some,” Sandy asked as the gunfire continued for a few more seconds and then stopped. “They just let everything within ten miles know where they are.”
“Can’t say, sweetheart,” Johnathan said, catching a whiff of stinker and slowed his horse. In the ditch ahead he saw something but couldn’t tell what, so he eased closer and saw it was only a torso with the head missing. “Wild dogs aren’t all bad,” he said.
“Humpf,” Sandy snorted. “They need to leave us alone and eat the stinkers.”
Off to their right, Johnathan saw a farmhouse set a hundred yards off the dirt road with a large barn off to the side. When they were in front of it, he could see that the front door had been kicked in. Sighing, Johnathan looked ahead.
“There were enough stinkers out here to breach the house?” Mary asked Bill.
“No, baby. Humans did that,” Bill said, not looking at the house.
“We’ve seen houses where stinkers have pushed in the doors,” Mary said, turning in her saddle to look at Bill.
Giving a long sigh, “Mary, look in the doorway of the barn,” Bill told her softly, but didn’t turn to the house.
Turning back to the house, Mary stared at the barn and gasped, seeing three shadowy forms hanging by their necks in the open doorway. Settling back in her saddle, Mary felt remorse for the nameless family. “Why can’t the evil people just die?” she mumbled.
Moving hard through the night, Johnathan finally pulled back on the reins when the sky to the east was getting brighter. A very large ravine was in front of them and after the last one, he was tempted to look for another camping spot but there wasn’t anything close. Guiding his horse into the ravine, he rode along it until he found a long narrow draw that fed into the ravine from the east.
Steering his horse up the draw, Sandy moved up beside him. “Can’t we stay down here? These cliffs will block a lot of the sun,” she said, looking at the twenty-foot-tall walls of the ravine.
“Sandy, this is a ravine, a dry river bed. That small stream we crossed didn’t make this. If it rains to the north, we could get washed away in seconds,” Johnathan told her.
Wiping her head and staring at the small stream in the middle of the gouged land, Sandy asked. “So, is it safe to sleep here?”
“Yes, that’s why I looked for a long draw. This was formed by that tiny stream,” Johnathan answered, pointing to the stream beside them that wasn’t even a foot across. When his horse stepped in it, Sandy saw it wasn’t even three inches deep.
Reaching the top of the draw, they saw the small stream made a waterfall off the lip of the draw. “I’m taking a bath,” Sandy said quickly, looking at the waterfall.
“Hell, I’m taking a shower in my clothes and then taking a bath,” Johnathan said, pulling his horse to a stop.
Pulling his horse over to Johnathan, Bill pointed to an animal trail that ran out of the draw. “We can use that and set up there for a guard,” Bill said. “The horses can climb it when we leave, but let’s do it when there is light and lead them.”
“Sounds good,” Johnathan said, pulling off his cap. “First or second?”
Holding out his fist, “Loser takes first,” Bill said and Johnathan grinned, balling his fist and they hit their opposite palm three times. “Damn,” Bill said, holding rock.
“Paper covers rock,” Johnathan chuckled.
Pointing at a flat grass-covered area a few yards from them, “You think that’s enough grass for the horses or do we need to break out the grain?” Johnathan asked.
“Johnathan, that’s half a football field of grass. If our horses can mow that down before we leave, they need a diet,” Bill declared.
“You really studied up on horses for Allie,” Johnathan chuckled.
Moving to his horse and starting to undo the saddle, “I knew it was only a matter of time before the cabin became a horse stable,” Bill said.
Working on his own saddle, “I wish we would have,” Johnathan said.
“I wish you would’ve told us about it sooner,” Sandy said. “We were just getting the knack of getting supplies that you two forgot all about.”
Pulling his saddle off, “I thought you were going to file for divorce,” Johnathan admitted, putting his saddle down. Taking off his backpack, Johnathan grabbed the coil of rope.
“The only reason I got mad is because you didn’t let Mary and I have input on the design,” Sandy said, dragging her saddle off. “It could’ve been made more user-friendly. Walking in, it just screams ‘Man Cave’.”
Stringing the rope across the draw over the grass, Johnathan tied it off on large rocks as Bill led his and Mary’s hobbled horses. “Yeah, I was going to ask if we could use the rope to make a hitch,” Bill said, looping the halter rope so the horses had a lot of slack.
“Bill, my horse runs off, I’m tracking it and then shooting it,” Johnathan vowed, walking back for his and Sandy’s horses. He chuckled, watching Sandy and Mary fighting the first of the pack saddles.
True to her word, Sandy was the first one under the cold waterfall.
Chapter Twenty-Three
May 31
Standing outside the shop, Jennifer watched in awe as Ian ‘played’ with their newest creation. The chassis that had sat in the back of the shop with tracks was running and being put through its paces. Jennifer had no idea yet what it was for, but it didn’t look nice. It was nine feet long and seven feet wide.
Except for the front, the hull was covered with thin metal like a turtle shell and the top of the shell was over her head. The next scariest thing about what the boys called their ‘Battle Bot’ was the front; a six-foot-long and six-foot-wide V-shaped series of rollers with shredding teeth. The V of rollers was upright and laid back at a slant of forty-five degrees over the front and the depth of the V was three feet.
Ian was jogging around the backyard and the Battle Bot was chasing him. It wasn’t fast, but Ian had to jog to keep away from it. Lifting his arm, Ian pressed a controller and the Battle Bot stopped. Watching Ian stare at the Battle Bot like he was ready to bolt was the most chilling thing to Jennifer. The boys were terrified of this creation.
Watching Ian creep around the back of the bot, he opened a panel and put something in and then gave a visible sigh of relief. Unable to take it anymore, Jennifer walked over. She had helped build the damn thing, but t
he boys had just said it was an automated stinker killer. “Ian, okay, it kills stinkers and I’m guessing with the spinning teeth, but how? It’s battery-operated, I helped build the batteries. It will run out of power,” she said, stopping beside him.
Seeing that Ian didn’t want to take his eyes off the Battle Bot, Jennifer grabbed his arm and pulled him further away. “Yes, but look at the front. When it hits a stinker, they will fall toward it. See that bar at the bottom that’s six inches off the ground? It will hit them and they fall into the shredder,” Ian told her.
“You’re telling me those spinning gears will chop up a stinker?” Jennifer asked, clearly not believing it. Walking over to the shop, Ian picked up a rather large piece of firewood. Watching Ian move to the bot, “Ian, don’t,” Jennifer said, running over and grabbing his arm.
“I put the block in for the drive control,” Ian said, lifting the handheld remote and pressing a button. Six cylinders on each side of the V started spinning. None spun fast, but the thick, curved blades now looked more like teeth as Ian tossed the log in.
Jennifer jumped back as the log bounced down the V and she saw the teeth tearing large chunks of wood off. The wood chunks were spit out the side as the log bounced around on the bottom, getting very tiny until it was smaller than her hand and fell out a gap at the bottom.
Lifting his hand, Ian pressed the button and the chomper stopped. Turning to Jennifer, he saw her mouth wide open. Jennifer grabbed his arm and pulled him from the front. “You and Lance created a Terminator!” Jennifer cried out.
Cocking his head to the side, Ian nodded. “Yeah, I guess we did,” he admitted with a grin growing on his face.
Thinking that was wrong on so many levels, Jennifer couldn’t take her eyes off the thing. “Um, how do you know it won’t come for us?” she asked meekly.
He turned her around and pointed at flat squares on the ground that formed a box around the Battle Bot. “Those are boundary markers, that’s why it would stop,” Ian explained, but Jennifer still didn’t like the Battle Bot and pulled Ian further away.
“Ian, the battery we made for this thing weighs like five hundred pounds. Don’t you think we need to limit its power and take out some of the hybrid batteries you put in?” Jennifer asked hopefully.
“Humpf, be glad because Lance wanted an eight-hundred-pound battery, and for the Battle Bot to be two feet longer and two wider,” Ian said, looking at the shimmering machine. “The damn thing already weighs over a thousand pounds.”
“We have other batteries, so we can make it smaller,” Jennifer said with her hand drifting to her pistol. If that thing turned on, she was shooting it.
“No, we’d need the nickel-iron batteries that we made. They can take an eighty percent discharge without getting hurt. It doesn’t have to go fast and any lighter, and it might flip. Plus, it needs the weight to chomp stinkers,” Ian told her.
“You’re sure it’s off?”
“The drive train is off, the operating computer and shredder is still on,” Ian answered and lifted a long piece of plastic, painted red. “This is the key to shut it off. It has R/C command, but I don’t want the thing fully active inside our fence.”
Nodding rapidly, “I agree,” she said and pushed him toward the Battle Bot. “Put the key in it, so it will go to sleep.”
Looking up, Lilly saw Ian creep up to the tank thing the boys had built with Jennifer behind him. “Whoa,” Lilly said, noticing Jennifer had her pistol out and holding it with both hands, aimed at the ground. “Knew that thing was dangerous as hell.”
“Hey, don’t let the metal slip,” Lance snapped and Lilly looked back down.
“Sorry,” she said, holding the thin sheet of pure silver over a satellite dish. Out of all the metal the boys had melted down, the silver was the first one they’d done something with. They had gotten to see what the three-foot-long rock rollers were used for.
The molten silver had poured out like syrup and rolled through five sets of rollers, with each one getting narrower. At the end, a three-foot-wide, paper-thin sheet of red metal had slid down the metal table. “Lance, I get that you’re making a parabolic mirror, but what for?” Lilly asked.
“We have three more sheets to do, then I’ll show you,” Lance replied, screwing the sheet down carefully, making sure it stayed flat against the curved surface of the dish. When they were done, Lance grabbed her arm and pulled her over to a smaller one they had completed yesterday.
“See this?” Lance said, tapping a large metal box held over the disk as Jennifer and Ian came over. “This is a Sterling Engine. It is one of the most efficient engines, but the power-to-weight ratio sucks ass. Then, when you add the fact that the engine runs off heat or cold, you can understand why we went with it. The downside, a Sterling engine is on or off.”
Moving to the side, Lance flipped a switch. Lilly and Jennifer jumped when the dish gave a hum as it moved, turning to the sun. They covered their eyes as the sunlight flashed off the silver covering the dish. When the dish stopped moving, they moved their hands. “Okay, it found the sun,” Lilly said and Lance held up his hand for her to wait.
After ten minutes, the motor mounted on the arm began to slowly hum. “Watch the light on the table,” Lance said, pointing to a table outside the shop as the hum of the motor became louder. Seeing the light come on, Lilly and Jennifer gasped.
“You created super energy?” Jennifer cried out.
“Jennifer, the Sterling Engine has been around for over a hundred years,” Lance said as the hum of the motor became steady.
Turning to look at Ian and then Lance, “Then, why didn’t we use it?” Jennifer asked.
“I don’t know. It may have been around for a hundred years, but I only found out about it last year,” Lance said, flipping the switch and the dish turned away from the sun, but the hum stayed on. “It operates on heat differential. It takes half a degree to get a Sterling Engine to start up. This one needs to be higher to overcome the torque of the generator I have it hooked to.”
“We have power, you even put bigger turbines in the powerhouse. Why do we need these?” Lilly asked and Jennifer wanted to hug her because she wouldn’t have to ask it.
“To power shit outside to kill stinkers and if someone pisses us off, it can kill them,” Lance said with a smirk.
Raising her hand, “Um, you aren’t putting the Terminator Bot close to us, are you?” Jennifer asked, then lowered her hand.
“Nah,” Ian said. “We are setting up the first one outside our patrol area, just north of Girdler.”
“There are a bunch of stinkers there,” Lilly pointed out.
“Duh, that’s why we want to put it there,” Lance said, looking at his watch. “Patrol soon.”
Cutting her eyes at Lilly, “Guys, if your bot comes near me, I’m shooting it so don’t get mad,” Jennifer informed them.
“Told Lance the same thing,” Ian nodded, turning for the cabin.
“It has a desktop for a brain, not a super-conducting chip!” Lance cried out, throwing up his arms and following Ian. “I showed you the program, it doesn’t think.”
“It might learn how,” Ian objected, opening the door.
“What did you teach the ladybugs to make in the chemistry lab?” Jennifer asked, walking in as Ian held the door open.
“Potassium hydroxide for more nickel-iron batteries,” Ian answered and Jennifer groaned.
Turning around to look at Ian as he came in, “Ian, you taught them how to get lye from animal fat and get nitroglycerin. You don’t need to teach them your dangerous stuff,” Jennifer told him.
“I only made a few drops of nitro,” Ian protested. “This is the best way to learn chemistry, trust me. The lab is in the far corner of the yard, so it’s okay.”
“We like lab time,” Carrie yelled out and Jennifer saw they were at their desks, watching a lesson on the large flat screen. The screen was paused as both girls looked at Jennifer with narrowed eyes.
“Hey, I did
n’t say anything about them teaching you how to use the plasma cutter, so back off,” Jennifer snapped.
The ladybugs turned to Ian and he held up his hands, “I’m not in this,” he said, walking off.
“I’m going to get ready,” Lilly said. “Come on, Allie. Patrol time.”
Jumping from her desk, “Say what again, I dare ya! No, I double dare ya, motherfucker! Say what one more goddamn time!” Allie cheered out and Jennifer rolled her eyes as she tilted her head back.
“I’m hiding Pulp Fiction,” Jennifer moaned. “I liked the snowman songs better.”
Walking past Jennifer and laughing, “Oh man, that’s funny as hell, no matter how many times I hear it,” Lance crooned, heading for the stairs.
Meeting up out back, everyone checked gear as Lilly put Judy inside. It was George’s turn to go with Dino. “Just making rounds?” Lilly asked, patting George and Dino.
“Section two,” Ian said. “Need to check on the bear trap people.”
Shaking as a shiver ran down her spine, “My dad had one on our mantle. Be damned if I want to see one actually set up,” Lilly said, checking her rifle. “We shopping tonight?”
Lance looked at Ian, “I don’t need anything, you?” Lance asked and Ian shook his head. Carrie was standing beside Jennifer and opened her mouth, but Jennifer covered it.
Leaning down and whispering, “You ask for something stupid and I’ll tell Lance it was you who broke his Borderlands game at the birthday party,” Jennifer warned. Carrie’s face went pale as she slowly nodded and Jennifer took her hand off.
Glancing over at the ATV shed, Lilly saw the large neatly-stacked filled rolls of barbed wire, but only two empty spools. “So, we done with barbed wire?” Lilly asked.
“It’s not worth stopping for two spools,” Ian said, checking the batteries in his NVG and thermal scope. “We will refill them when we use what we have to patch the holes in our diversion fence.”
Forsaken World (Book 3): Rite of Passage Page 30