The Borrowed World: A Novel of Post-Apocalyptic Collapse

by Franklin Horton

  “Isn’t the government doing anything to help?” one of the group from the shelter asked.

  “The only thing we know for sure that the government is doing,” Gary said, “is sending some buses down the interstate to gather stranded folks up and put them in emergency camps. Some of our folks went with them, but we didn’t want to.”

  “Shit,” someone in the group muttered. “That’s messed up.”

  “Why aren’t you walking the roads?” one of the group asked. “What the hell are you doing all the way up here? The road is easy walking compared to this. Maybe you could even hitch a ride.”

  “It’s not safe,” Randi said. “The cops are all busy with emergencies so people are pretty much doing whatever they want. There have been attacks on people walking the interstate. We’ve seen shootings and had to defend ourselves, too. The trouble is unavoidable if you stay down there. It’s extremely dangerous.”

  There were other questions about specific regions of the country, presumably where these hikers had family, but they were areas we hadn’t heard anything about.

  “We haven’t had cell reception all day,” the guy at the table said. “I was hoping we’d get some today to call home. Now I’m worried about my parents.”

  “There’s reception further up the trail,” Gary said. “We’ve didn’t have any all day until about six miles back. There’s a fire road that crosses the AT and there’s a pocket of reception there. ”

  The guy got up from the table and started gathering his gear. “Let’s pack up,” he told the girl. “I won’t be able to sleep tonight until I’ve at least tried to get a hold of my family.”

  She got up also and began gathering her gear.

  “Try a text if you can’t make a call,” I told the guy. “We could text but we never could get any calls through.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Sorry to dump all that bad news on you guys,” I said. “I know it’s a lot to take in.”

  The guy started shoving items in his packet. “Are the rest of you guys going?” he asked the group that had come out of the shelter.

  They looked around at each other, nodded, and went back to start gathering their own gear. One guy stuck around. He was similar to the others in appearance – scruffy, sweat-stained, and tanned.

  “Where exactly are you guys headed?” he asked.

  “Why?” I replied, my paranoia kicking in instantly.

  “Tazewell County,” Gary replied. “At least that’s where I’m headed. The others live in that general area.”

  “My girlfriend and I are students from Emory and Henry College,” he said. “She’s back in the shelter packing her gear.”

  “We’re familiar with Emory and Henry,” I said. “Gary had a daughter who attended there.”

  “We were hiking up from Damascus,” he said. “We were going to go to Shenandoah National Park and have some relatives pick us up there. Our families live in the Bristol area.”

  “I would head home,” I said. “No telling if anyone will get able to get there to pick you up with the fuel restrictions, and even if they did they wouldn’t be able to drive you this far with no fuel. You may not even be able to get a call out to your relatives to pick you up. You may end up isolated and on your own. Not a good place to be.”

  “Can we hike with you?” he asked.

  I expected this and had no problem with it. As a parent, I would hope that someone would help my kids in a similar situation.

  “Sure,” I said. “We’re fresh on the trail and will probably not be able to keep your pace, though.”

  “That’s no problem. We can slow it down for you old folks,” he said with a grin.

  I looked at Gary. “I’m having second thoughts already.”

  The guy extended his hand to me. “I’m Walt. My girlfriend is Katie.”

  I shook his hand. Then he shook with Gary, waving to Randi who was a little further back.

  “Pack your stuff,” I told him. “And we need to eat a bite, so give us a few minutes.”

  He nodded and wandered off to tell his girlfriend of their new plans.

  Gary, Randi, and I shared a quick meal of jerky, crackers, and water. We bid goodbye to the departing hikers as they hastily moved out, taking large strides to gain more ground with each step. Walt and Katie said their goodbyes to their trail friends and exchanged contact info so they could get in touch at a later point.

  “So that’s what I’m going to smell like when I get home?” Randi asked.

  I nodded. “Maybe even worse,” I said.

  She shook her head at the repugnant thought.

  “It keeps the bugs away,” Walt assured her.

  “And everyone else,” Gary added.

  By my GPS, we averaged 2.5 miles per hour over the next three hours of walking, which did indeed gain us a few additional miles before feeling the need to stop for the night. As the sun fell over the horizon and our weariness grew, the sound of insects and night birds began to emerge. Walt and Katie dropped their packs when we selected a frequently used group campsite for the night.

  “Do you guys even have any gear?” Katie asked. She was an athletic, smallish waif of a girl with short hair. We’d learned over the course of the past few miles that she was a triathlete who’d competed throughout the world. She carried her fifty pound pack like it was nothing.

  “Some,” I replied.

  “We have a tent,” she said. “I feel kind of bad about sleeping in a tent with warm sleeping bags while you guys are roughing it.”

  “No worries,” Gary said. “We’ll be okay. Use the gear you have and be glad you have it.”

  Walt and Katie found a good tent site and set up their camp quickly and efficiently. You could tell they’d done this many times. One rolled out a protective ground cloth while another dug the tent out. One rolled out the tent while the other dug out poles. Before you knew it, they’d assembled their camp, said goodnight, and climbed in for the night.

  “I know you told me we’d have to rough it if we passed up the shelter,” Randi said. “But how the hell are we going to sleep out here? I mean, I’ve camped before, but not like this. I had actual camping stuff. What do I need to do?”

  I dropped my pack and looked at Gary.

  “What do you have in the way of shelter?” I asked.

  “I’ve got a tarp and a piece of painter’s plastic,” he said.

  “I’ve got a tarp and a piece of Tyvek house wrap,” I said. “Between your items and mine, and a little paracord, we can throw up a quick shelter.”

  “What do you need me to do?” Randi asked.

  I was impressed that she was eager to help. I knew she was not used to this level of activity, spending most of her time at a desk and not really having any physical hobbies. She had to be exhausted. We were all tired, though, and the job would go faster with more hands.

  “Gather some leaves,” Gary said. “Find a forked stick and use it to rake leaves into a square pile about eight feet by eight feet. Make it about a foot thick and pick out any big sticks from it. If Jim doesn’t mind, we can put his Tyvek over that and it will give us a soft bed. We’ll string one of our tarps over top of it to ward off any dew or overnight rain.”

  With a plan in place, we all went to work with the same weary efficiency that Walt and Katie had demonstrated earlier. In about twenty minutes, we had a functional shelter. I had planned to eat a little more and drink another bottle of water, but that went out the window when we completed the shelter and all sat under it for a test drive. Within seconds, we were all fumbling with the purloined hotel blankets and covering ourselves. I put my pack at my head and used one soft corner of it for a pillow. I could feel my pistol poking me in the side and I started to remove the holster and slide it under the pack, but I was asleep before I could complete the action.

  At some point in the night, I thought I heard the sound of an ATV nearby but I couldn’t be sure if it was real or if I dreamed it. I rolled over and went back to sle
ep.

  Chapter 17

  Working until darkness closed around them, Ellen, Pops, and Pete strung a series of tripwires around the house. There would be three rings of tripwires that any trespasser would have to get through to make it to the house. Those farthest from the house used the fishing line because they had more of it than anything else. Attached to the fishing line were clip-on bells from the fishing aisle at Wal-Mart, strings of cans that would rattle together, and even a set of wind chimes from the back porch. Anything that would make a noise that the person on watch would hear.

  The next two rings utilized mason’s twine and party poppers. Someone activating one of these trip wires would set off a small firework that would give us a very loud notification of an intruder. Hopefully it would startle the visitor also, and perhaps send them running the other way.

  Ellen would do the first watch tonight, Pete the second, and Pops would take over in the early morning. They planned to try that arrangement for the night and see how it worked. They could always switch the arrangement if it didn’t.

  Ellen’s shift went without any hitches. She moved from the front porch to the back and walked around the house several times. The night was warm and quiet. At one point, coyotes began yipping and howling in the distance. Rather than being scared by the sound, she was always thrilled by it. It was part of why she loved living in the country so much. When her shift ended, she gave the yard one last scan with the night vision and went to wake Pete up.

  When she was sure Pete was fully awake and not going to pass out in the porch swing, she went over the basics with him. She hung the night vision monocular over his head and made sure he knew how to use it.

  “I’ve used it before, Mom,” he said. “Several times.”

  “Just checking,” she said. “This is important work. We’re all depending on you. You’re such a big boy now.”

  She leaned over and kissed him on the head, then gave him the shotgun, showing him that there was now a round in the chamber and that it was ready to fire when the safety was turned off. She went over this in great detail, even though she knew Pete had a lot of gun experience for someone his age, knowing that repetition was how things became committed to memory, even if it was irritating.

  “Remember how loud this will be if you shoot it,” she reminded him. “Don’t be startled. Just make sure you have a firm grip on it so that it doesn’t kick the fire out of you.”

  Pete nodded.

  “If you have things under control, I’m going to bed,” Ellen said.

  “I do, Mom,” he told her. “I’ll be fine.”

  And he was fine. For most of his shift, that was.

  It was around 2:30 a.m. when the tinkle of a bell, followed by a hissed curse, told him that someone had found the first ring of tripwires. From his dark perch on the front porch, Pete quietly raised the night vision monocular to his eye and looked out in the direction of the bell. He could clearly make out two men walking toward the house through a field to his left. They were not men he recognized. He could see well enough to know that neither man was his father. One man was carrying something in his hand that may have been a pistol but it was hard to tell. Neither man had any sort of long gun.

  Pete started to go wake Ellen and Pops. He stood and the porch creaked beneath his feet. He took another step and there was another creak. His heart rate accelerated. He could feel the fringes of panic. He knew that his own sound was broadcasting through the silence of the night as clearly as the bell had. He turned back toward the field without moving his feet and took another glance through the monocular. The men were closer now, crouched low and moving quickly across the damp grass. They would be on him soon.

  Pete dropped the monocular back to his chest and took another step toward the door to the house. There was another creak of boards beneath his feet. How had he never noticed before that the porch was so loud? Another step and he could hear the men talking, whispering back and forth. He took another step and reached in the darkness for the door handle. He knew he was close, knew the handle was just outside his reach. He felt tears burning down his cheeks and his breathing increased. He wanted to run but had a job to do.

  A bang behind him scared him nearly to death. In his panic, he could not tell if it was one of the party poppers or if one of the men had opened fire on him. He spun and clicked the safety to the fire position, pointed the muzzle of the shotgun toward the last sound he’d heard in the darkness, and fired. The fire erupting from the short shotgun barrel temporarily blinded him just as the noise from the blast set his ears ringing. When he recovered, he could hear a man screaming.

  “Shit, Mike, you okay!” the voice said. “Mike, get up!”

  Pete snapped to attention and racked the slide on the shotgun, ejecting the spent round and chambering a fresh one.

  “Mike!” the voice in the darkness said one more time.

  The shotgun erupted again, Pete still in a state of blind panic, his adrenaline pouring through his body. He racked the slide again.

  BOOM!

  He pumped the slide again.

  BOOM!

  Pump.

  BOOM!

  He continued until there were no more rounds. Behind him the porch door opened and he spun his head toward it, nearly blinded by fear, tears, and adrenaline but catching himself before he turned the gun in that direction. Ellen came rushing out the door, a pistol in her hand, Pops behind her with his at the ready.

  “What’s going on?” Ellen asked, shining a flashlight onto Pete’s chest, illuminating his face. In her panic, she did not realize that this could have made Pete an easy target for any shooter still out there in the darkness.

  From his panicked expression, she could see that this was no false alarm. She heard the groan of a wounded man in the dark. She started to shine the light toward the sound but Pete grabbed the light and turned it off. He handed her the night vision monocular from around his neck, all the while pointing his empty shotgun in the direction where he thought the intruders were.

  In the green flow of the night vision, Ellen could see two men lying in the yard about thirty feet away. One was still. One was moaning and moving around. She dropped the monocular to her chest.

  “Oh, Pete,” she said, her voice full of regret and sorrow at what he’d had to do.

  Pops took the shotgun from Pete. Pete collapsed into his mother’s arms, sobbing loudly and holding her tight. She held him for a moment, still worried about the potentially dangerous wounded man.

  “Go to Pops, baby,” she whispered in Pete’s ear. “Mommy has to make sure we’re safe.”

  She turned on her flashlight and trained it on the two men. Her weapon was raised in the other hand. Occasionally, she would sweep both the light and weapon across the yard, making sure there were no other people with them. In a dozen or so steps she reached the men. She kicked the still one and could tell that if he was not dead now, he would be by morning. There was no response. The other man was conscious, blood pouring from a wound in his stomach. He pressed his hand to it, trying to stem the flow of blood but there was a hell of a lot of it.

  It was the rabbit hunter who had been at the gate earlier.

  “You shouldn’t have come here,” Ellen said.

  “You’ll go to jail for this, bitch,” the man hissed. “If my family don’t get you first.”

  Ellen could hear crying behind her and knew it was Pete. The emerging man inside Pete had known what he had to do tonight, but the little boy inside of him was having a hard time seeing it before his eyes.

  Seeing the shotgun in Pete’s hand, the man looked at Pete. “Look what you done to me, boy!” he screeched. “They’ll put your momma and you both in jail for this. And if the cops don’t take care of her, my brother will. He’ll shoot her bitch ass right in front of you!”

  Ellen dropped her pistol and fired a single shot into the man’s head ending his rant. She’d heard all she was listening to. Pete was having a hard enough time dealing with this. The las
t thing he needed was to be having to deal with the threat of potential consequences. She knew there would probably be no consequences to a shooting like this, under these circumstances, but Pete didn’t know that. She mourned for her poor, soft-hearted child.

  “Stay with them,” Ellen told Pops. “I’ve got to get the tractor.”

  Ellen used the rubber tracks of the excavator to compact the soil over the hole they’d just dug and refilled. Jim had taught her how to use the machine but she wasn’t very efficient at it. Once she had it in place, the digging went quickly. Pete and Pops stood watching. They were in a hollow behind the house, out of sight from everyone but the waning moon. An owl broke the night with his mournful sound. The hole was beneath a feedlot where the neighbor’s cattle came to eat. The ground was in a constant state of trampled, muddy carnage. No one would ever know.

  Chapter 18

  It was 5:24 a.m. when my internal clock woke me up. Either that or my bladder, which was ready to explode. I rolled out of the crinkly bed and took shelter behind a nearby tree to take a leak. I wasn’t particularly shy but tried to use my manners occasionally. What I could see of the sky looked clear, giving me hope of a dry day for walking, even if it might be hot and humid. With pressing business attended to, I walked back to our shelter. My legs were stiff from the previous day’s walking and I could tell that I was slightly dehydrated.

  I lifted my pack from beneath the tarp and sat down against a tree. We’d been munching candy bars and sucking down water bottles all day yesterday and I needed to take inventory of my supplies. I was glad that we were drinking up some of the water bottles because I was tired of carrying all that water weight, but the bottled water was too precious to toss out because we needed it to keep going. This was a constant dilemma for the trekker and backpacker – how much water to carry. Too much weighs you down; too little and you find yourself fighting dehydration.