by Rose Francis
“So where’s the rest of it?”
“Come on, let’s find something.”
They went back into the pile and found a cook stove that was mostly rusty. They sat it down. Blake was thinking hard when a light bulb went off and Sandra started laughing.
“I know, we can set the freezer on the old work bench and use an elbow to make the connection to the stove.”
“That’ll work. We’ll have to play with the flue adjustments. We don’t want to cook the food so much as smoke it.”
“It’s better than smoking it over an open fire.”
“True,” he smiled.
It took them another hour to get things set up the way that she’d envisioned and he’d need a ladder to get to the upper rack of the new ‘smoker’ but it should work in theory. The last thing he did, that he almost kicked himself for forgetting about was to put some wire screen mesh over the top hole and then held it in place by wrapping the pipe with bailing wire.
“To keep the critters out?”
“As much that as keeping a spark from coming out of the freezer and landing on something in here.”
“Ready to fire it up?”
“I am.”
They left one of the hams whole, but sliced everything else out into strips that were an inch thick or less before filling the smoke chamber and firing it up the first time. It was apparent that there was too much heat coming through the smoker chamber so the hacksaw was brought out and Sandra made some cuts to the pipe, making a small flap on the side. Her thoughts were that smoke would rise higher than the heat, and let some of the heat vent out. They tested it, and that did the trick so they wrapped the flap with more screen door wire mesh and bailing wire.
They kept that fire smoldering with downed fruit tree branches… both pears and apple wood that was trimmed back every year from his small orchard. They had one more day before they would test the meat and made sure the fire was stoked before heading in to shower and go to bed. It had been a long week.
Chapter 7 -
Both of them awoke before the sun and hurried to get out the door first. Bacon had become the new obsession and both were hungry to try it. Sandra squeezed out the door first when she heard a buzzing sound and stopped dead. Blake crashed into her in his excitement and noticed her worried look right off.
“Somebody is coming.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Listen,” she told him and he did. It almost sounded like the buzz of a chainsaw, but far off. It took him a moment to realize that he was hearing the motors of quads. More than one or two.
“Do you think they could be your dad, coming up here for you?”
“Dad doesn’t have a quad.”
“He could have found one.”
“There’s more than one.”
Blake stepped back inside and grabbed his rifle and stepped back outside.
“You setup off the porch to the side by the rain barrel Blake.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Stand here on the porch and see if they are friendly or not.”
“What if they are not?” He asked, worried now.
“We’ll convince them to leave,” she pulled out her Beretta and held it in her right hand loosely by her side. “But if I tell you to shoot, don’t let up until I call for you to stop.”
Blake nodded, but he got into position. He knelt down and made sure his rifle was topped off and on safe. He could see the field in front of him between the gap between the barrel and the house, but to anybody coming up the hill, they’d have to be right on top of him to see him. He had no way to pre-aim the rifle without standing so he just sat there on his haunches waiting. Sandra gave him a quick smile and stepped down on the bottom step and waited as three quads came racing up, the riders whooping and hollering to each other. Each of them had a pistol in hand and one had a rifle strapped across his back.
Sandra held her hand up so they could all get a glimpse of her gun, and she trained it on them until they stopped over a hundred feet away.
“What do you want?” She called out, her voice harsh.
“We smelled the cooking. Figured we’d come up and see what’s shaking bacon,” the middle rider said and started laughing at his own joke.
“We don’t have enough to share here. You guys go on back down the hill.”
“Now lady, you aren’t being very nice, why aren’t you being nice? Nervous without your husband here perhaps?” The one on the left asked and Blake could just make out the tattoo on his face.
Two teardrops. If it hadn’t been done oversized and he hadn’t turned just right it would have gone missed.
“Sorry guys, keep moving. Nothing here for you,” she swung her gun up, pointing it in their direction and they all stepped off their quads.
“I take my turn first this time,” the one on the right said, raising his gun and rubbing his crotch.
Blake took his first shot just as Sandra shouted. The right side biker was blown off his feet by the crossfire and the other two almost fell backwards in shock. The middle rider slid behind the quad and lifted his head up enough to try to take aim at Sandra. Blake had a funny angle, but took the shot anyways. His 30/.06 blasted a hole through the flimsy plastic and fiberglass of the quads body panel and knocked the man over on his back as if he was mule kicked. He worked the bolt on the gun as the last guy took off running for the woods that Holloway Lane was known for.
He centered the crosshairs of the scope on his back and was pulling in the slack from the trigger to take the shot when a distant shot rang out and the man tumbled.
“Oh shit, there are more of them?” He asked Sandra, half panicked.
“I don’t know. That shot came from a ways off. Let’s reload and get behind some cover.
She hurried off the porch and squeezed in behind the barrel, full from the last rain. It wouldn’t stop every bullet, but it would stop quite a few. They waited until the sweat was trickling down the insides of their shirts, the bugs came out and slowly a portly figure walked out into the open, holding a rifle over his head.
“Who is that?”
“Let me see your gun.”
He handed her the rifle, and she held it up. She looked at Blake, smiled and looked through the scope again before letting out a whoop of joy and took off running. Blake could only check her progress with the scope and cover her as she ran towards the man.
“Daddy…..” The words floated up to him and he smiled as she jumped into his arms, knocking him over with the whole body hug. Blake smiled and lowered the rifle.
He checked to make sure the dead were really dead and tried not to look at the pair as they walked up the hill, their chatter running a mile a minute in excited voices. He stripped the raiders of guns and ammo and turned their pockets out, not finding much. In the pack strapped on the quad he opened it, and stopped dead, his hand afraid to reach in when he see’s what’s inside.
“Hey Blake, it’s my…”
She rushed to his side, seeing him transfixed.
“Don’t touch those.”
“I won’t,” he mumbled.
“What’s got you two so spooked?” Pastor Duncan said walking up holding his hand out.
Blake shook it absent mindedly and nodded to the bag. The Pastor looked inside and rubbed his chin a minute.
“If the pins had been pulled, they would have already gone off.”
Inside were half a dozen grenades sitting on top of a package wrapped in plastic.
“Who are those guys?” He asked Blake and Sandra who’d wrapped her arms around him in a tight embrace again.
“I think they are convicts.”
“Why do you say that Blake?”
“The tattoos on them. They look like gang tats.”
“He’s right Dad, look at this guy.”
They poked around for a little bit, and then Blake loaded up the truck and drove them out past the silo and dumped them into a shallow ditch. None of them wanted to spend the time and
the effort to bury them, and it’d been obvious to all what their intentions were. Once Blake made it back to the house, he sat down to the tiny table in the kitchen to smell the agonizingly delicious aroma the frying bacon was making. Pastor Duncan had sliced it in thick slabs and was working the griddle and Sandra had her hands wrapped around a mug of coffee. Blake got some for himself and sat back and listened to Duncan tell his tale.
“…And when all the cars on the highway stalled out, I knew it was something bad. My watch and phone were dead so I figured an EMP. I grabbed my bag and the case I keep my rifle in and walked towards Greenville. I saw the planes fly over me and I turned to watch as they crashed. There were two of them and it looked like they fell close to town. I headed north and tried to stay by the roads as much as I could. I traveled by night mostly because on the third day, people got desperate.
There was no water, the stranded motorists were starting to fight and steal from each other and then some of the hard cases showed up.”
“Hard cases?” Blake asked.
“The prison in Greenville. They had to do something with the prisoners and less and less guards were showing up for work. Probably taking care of their families. They just opened the doors and ran before they could be caught. Rapists, murderers along with the gentler purse snatchers were suddenly free in a world without any one to stop them. That’s when I went into the woods and tried to avoid everyone.”
“Oh my God Daddy, was it bad out there?”
“The little town I skirted between here and there was on fire. Not from the planes, but from the looting. People were going crazy. Have you two had anyone else give you problems before today?”
“No,” Blake admitted.
“Well, if you guys plan on running that smoker for any length of time, you may want to put out extra security. I smelled it from miles away. It’s how I homed in on you. When I got close, I could hear the quads coming and I ran the rest of the way up here.”
Blake couldn’t help but looking at the portly man before laughing at the thought. Soon Sandra busted up as well.
“What’s so funny you two?”
“How many miles did you run Daddy?”
“Well, it felt like all the way but… Say, you aren’t making fat jokes when I’m making you bacon and fried potatoes are you?”
“No sir,” Blake came to a sobering end of the laugh.
“About that, what would we need? To fortify or whatever we need to do here?”
“Make it damn hard for anybody to even get up the lane. You’re the only house up here aren’t you?”
“Yeah, my grandparents left me ten acres, but the rest of it is owned by a lumber company. They logged it years back and let my family farm it for something like a dollar an acre.”
“Good, so nobody has any business back here?”
“What are you getting at?”
Pastor Duncan laid out his plan. It was devious and his experiences in brush wars across the world became evident. He hadn’t always been a holy man, only becoming a man of the cloth once his wife had died when Sandra was born. Still, it was scary how much about war and death the pastor knew.
Chapter 8 -
The next morning Pastor Duncan got up early, having already given the two kids instructions on what they would need. He’d dressed in his camo outfit after letting it air out overnight and headed off down the lane. Today would be a day for making traps.
Blake and Sandra spent most of the previous afternoon scrounging in the barn for metal posts, old barbed wire, bailing wire, pipes and scrap metal. The first thing they did was close in the lane where Blake drove along the fence line up to the house. Now it just looked like any other barbed wire cow pasture that was overgrown and ready for hay to be cut or cows to be let loose in it. They tried to brush out the tracks where the quads had come up as best as they could and then they started with the tricks and traps.
A spool of monofilament fishing line was used. Old rat traps were nailed to trees about head high and loaded. A small stick was jammed in the bottom of the tree to complete the lever although if they had eye hooks it would have been better and they tied it off on the other side on small saplings. Glow sticks from the camper came out and were taped in place. The theory is that you can’t be everywhere at once unless you literally have an entrenched army close by, so an early warning system was what they were building. Somebody walks down the lane and steps on or trips the monofilament line; it’ll pull the release on the rat trap, making it snap the glow stick. The illumination could be seen for quite a ways and in the now quiet world, it would sound like the bark of a small rifle.
Another trap that made them nervous was also a rat trap. It had a hole drilled and sanded through one end so a shotgun shell would rest inside of it so when the trap was sprung, it would hit the end of the shell. To set it off, they nailed a trim nail into the tree, leaving a small nub sticking out. The trap was screwed or nailed close with the shotgun shell primer almost pressed tight against the nail. Dozens of these were set out, but they made Blake nervous. One wrong move and the shell would explode outwards instead of down a straight path to the barrel. The triggers were also setup using the monofilament. Good thing grandpa hated rats. Blake thought to himself.
Then they pounded in the sharpened pieces of scrap at odd angles into the ground. Rusty barbed wire was wrapped around it tightly making a tangle foot trap in random areas heading up to the house. All the ¾” black and galvanized pipe they found in the barn was cut down to about eight inch lengths. One inch caps were drilled and small metal screws were drilled, the sharp point pointing into the pipe. The caps screwed onto about six inch piece of one inch pipe and a shotgun shell was inserted into the ¾ pipe and lowered carefully into the 1” pipe.
The entire thing was buried to within an inch of the ground with the tops of the pipes wrapped in basic glad wrap. The idea was to make what was called a toe popper, Pastor Duncan had explained. You step on the ¾” section of pipe sticking out and the shotgun shell’s primer goes off from the screw. Ugly, but effective. It wasn’t hard to find enough materials to make two dozen of these.
Lastly, the junk in the barn was moved around to artfully hide the root cellar. A heavy slide lock was installed on the inside to use as a last resort panic room. They stored extra water and some of the pistols they got at the auction.
This work took most of the week, and Pastor Duncan spent most of his days watching from down the lane, trying to spot trouble before it came up. When Blake and Sandra weren’t working at a feverish pace, they kept the garden watered and weed free and read more of the Firefox books.
“It’s too bad you don’t have any livestock,” Duncan told him one night.
“Never needed any.”
“It’d be nice to have eggs again.”
“You know, I don’t see any reason why we can’t find some chickens someday. I don’t have any feed for them, but they could forage and get scraps like my grandparents chickens did.”
“I wonder what it’s like out there,” Sandra pointed towards town.
“It’s been a little more than two weeks since the grid went down. I got close to the end of the lane the other day using one of Blake’s bicycles. There wasn’t anybody around. I am curious though.”
“Wait another week?” She asked her father.
“Yeah, probably. I don’t know how bad it’s going to be. The town could be gone, or the prisoners could have made it out here. Anarchy, Armageddon, you know… the end of the world as we know it,” Duncan was deadpan when he said this but was surprised by the reaction from the kids.
“And I feel Fine,” both Blake and Sandra sang out loud, before their jaws dropped and laughed. It was one of those surreal moments and the ended it with a big hug where her father watched awkwardly.
“You know, since I’ve been here, I’ve stayed in the camper at night. It’s got more than one bed.”
“The bed in here is comfortable enough?” Sandra asked and Blake turned four shades of
crimson when he got the drift.
“No Sandra, he means… Pastor Duncan, Sandra and I tradeoff the bed for the recliner every other night. That way one of us can get some good rest and the other is close to the front door.”
Relief washed through the old man’s face and he fanned himself.
“Phew. I’d been meaning to ask, but in this day and age, I don’t know if that’s polite or…”
“Oh Daddy, stop. Both of you men look like you’re going to have a heart attack.”
Blake smiled at that and walked down to the basement. More to give them some time to talk but he was also wanting to look at his store of food. A single person didn’t touch his dried food stores as much as the three of them had, and more and more of his pest proof buckets were emptying. The timing of the grid going down was horrible as he could have picked up the Azure Standard order from the farm and fleet store before his date. He put it off, and he had to admit to himself, it was because of the date with Sandra.
He’d thought about her plenty of times, and had grown comfortable and fond of her. Her energy and enthusiasm had made the hermit a little nervous more than once, but she’d grown on him. Now, it was a struggle to keep his emotions in check now that her father was here. Love at first sight? Cupid had shot Blake true. He was smitten. He was pretty sure she felt the same way, but he worried that the way things were that the timing was all wrong. He would wait.
Heavy footsteps came downstairs as he was running through Sandra’s list of his dried goods and a heavy hand touched his shoulder. Duncan was smiling when he turned to face him.
“I’m sorry about that. You two hit it off so well, and with you two being alone together… and me wanting to give you space but I had this dad moment and…”
“Duncan,” He said, using his name without pastor for the first time, “it’s ok with me. Your daughter is very special to me, and I imagine to you. I just can’t believe that I never ran into her before.”
“Went to catholic school,” he smiled and Blake laughed.
“Well you know what they say about… Never mind,” Blake cut off turning a dark red.