Jay tugged on the cigarette, shaking his head almost angrily. He exhaled the smoke as he talked. “According to what law, exactly? They have no right to do that to anyone. This is still America, Dad.”
Bart coughed and spat a gummy wad of green phlegm into the dirt. Autumn always did that to his sinuses. “Not so much. No police. No government to speak of. No pledge of allegiance. We live on land formerly known and governed as The United States, but in no shape or form are we protected by the laws we used to live under. These men and women think that because they were National Guardsman before they can run whatever they want however they want. And son, they have the guns to enforce that belief. Might makes right in the new world, Jay.”
Jay spat into the dirt the same as his dad, and finished the cigarette off. He flicked the filter into a stack of crushed cars that they had arranged to form an impenetrable wall that surrounded the chain link fence of the junkyard. The car wreckage had served them well against the hordes of undead, but Jay wondered if it would stop men with big guns, humvees, and intelligent purpose.
“I suppose. I just don’t like the idea of these people. I like nothing about them. They keep selling the idea of moving up to the mountains where their ski resort-turned-fortress is, and each time it sounds less like a suggestion, and more like a threat.”
“I agree,” Bart said. “How’s this for an idea? How about we send some folks away before they visit?”
Jay looked at his father, confused. “How so? What would that achieve?”
“We pack up say, half the group and send them over the hill to the south. Towards the direction of the school people. It’s safe that way I think. I at least like that big fella with the shitty haircut and the tattoos more. Have our little scouting party scrounge up some supplies, or just take a break away from here. The rest of us stay behind to meet the soldiers. If anything shady goes down, at least some of us will get away.”
“Who stays and who goes?” Jay asked.
“I’ll remain behind with your mother and whoever wants to stay put. You leave with your sister and whoever wants to go for a jaunt in the country. If anyone asks what we’re doing, then you can explain it easy enough,” Bart explained. “You stay out until after the meet. Come back in a couple days after they leave.”
“What happens when they ask where everyone is?” Jay probed.
Bart shrugged and chewed on the idea. His eyebrows popped up. “If they ask, the easy answer is I tell them you’re out looking for food and supplies. I could tell them some of us left for greener pastures. But if they came back and saw the people returned, we’d be caught in a lie.”
Jay nodded, seeing the logic in his father’s idea. “Sounds good. Truth is good. Even to assholes. We haven’t been out scrounging in a long time. I think a trip to that cornfield between Westfield and Smithville should do the trick. The corn’s got to be about right for picking if the animals left us any. Sugar and butter in that field.”
“There you go. We don’t got much time to plan it all though. What’d you say? A day before they get here?”
Jay shook his head. “Not tomorrow but the next day.”
Bart stood from his comfortable stump and adjusted his ill-fitting jeans before they slid off his narrow hips. “Perfect. We pitch the idea tonight at dinner, then see what people are interested. Pack tomorrow, leave early in the morning the day after.”
“The northern people are slated to get here right about at noon. We could be on the road before they get here, sure,” Jay said after a bit of thought.
“Good deal. What guns should I bring? Shotgun and pistol?”
Bart snorted as the father and son started the walk back to their garage-turned-home. “Bring ‘em all.”
“Why?” Jay asked, confused.
“If they came here to kill us, no amount of guns you leave behind are gonna stop them from doing us in with their machine guns.”
“So Dad and I were talking earlier,” Jay started. He sat at one of the wooden picnic tables they had brought into the garage bay to form their communal eating area. Eight tables were arranged in a random geometric shape, and Jay’s chosen spot was nearest to what could be called the center. Mercifully the room that had originally been a high volume car stripping business had lost much of its industrial oil-scent, and now only smelled like sweat and grilled meats. Tools hung unused on pegs and sat inside red chests, waiting for the day when they’d be called to duty again. Jay continued, “And we think that a food run a couple towns over might be a good idea before it gets warmer.” At his feet the dogs peacefully shared a series of bowls filled with large chunks of dry dog food. If there was anything to be found in abandoned country houses, dog food was it.
His teenaged sister Sharon–who looked just like Jay and Sharon’s mom, right down to the mousy brown bob haircut and the spattering of freckles on all of her exposed skin–looked at him, and then their father. “Why now? We still have weeks before the weather turns.”
Their father answered her as she stuffed another bite of cooked venison into her mouth. “Remember that big old corn farm between Smithville and Westfield? The one on the right side of the road near that brook and tiny covered bridge? We were talking and figured the corn there should be more than ripe, and an overnight trip to gather some up would be a good idea. Hit some of the farm stands on the way there and back and see if anything is growing wild now. There’s got to be berries all over the place. Take the four wheeler and the cart to carry everything. It’ll be good to get out and get the kids some fresh air.” Bart pointed his fork over to the Cahill kids, Emma and Aubrey, tomboys with corn silk hair both. Bart had joked to his wife late at night more than once that they didn’t need two girls who thought they were boys; they needed two girls who thought they were girls. Real girls, not girls pretending to be boys.
But then again in this world having female traits was often associated with vulnerability, and weakness. Guess some things never change.
Daddy Cahill seemed to approve. Frank replied, “I think it’s a good idea. Plus aren’t the assholes from the ski place up north coming soon? I wouldn’t mind being scarce when they come around.”
Sharon’s eyes popped wide like corn kernels in a pan. She looked to her father and older brother like she’d caught a kid with their hand in the cookie jar, and that kid was her Dad. “So that’s it, isn’t it? Really. You want to split us up in case something goes wrong with those people.”
Bart looked to Frank, then at Frank’s two daughters. “Frank, you mind taking the girls out for a walk?”
Frank knew the score. “Aubrey, Emma, let’s go see if we can throw some rocks at cans on the fence again.”
“Daddy, I’d like to stay,” said the older Aubrey, only having just celebrated her 11th birthday. “I’m old enough to hear this.”
Frank looked at her and shrugged. “Alright. You remember everything for me so you can tell me later.” The younger eight year old Emma however had already fallen in love with the rock throwing idea, and was scampering out the open garage door into the cooling September evening, replete with golden colored light.
Once she and her father had exited the garage and meal, Bart looked to his daughter with fatherly disappointment. “Tact, Sharon. Your catching on to the idea is a good thing, but your calling us out in front of the kids like that stinks.”
“I’m not a kid,” Aubrey said from her now empty picnic table. Her hands had bunched into fists at her side. One of the German Shepherds plodded over to her feet and rolled onto its side.
“Yeah you are,” Jay said sharply.
“Stop it Jay,” Aubrey said to the older ex-scrapyard worker. “No one is a kid long anymore.”
Jay was about to shoot her down again but Sherry–––Bart’s wife and his and Sharon’s mother–spoke up. “Jay, leave her be.”
Jay withered in his seat.
Bart continued his conversation with his daughter. “Sharon you’re going to have to learn one day that big brain of yours is
going to cause problems for you if you can’t make it control the flapping lips on the front of your face. Like I’ve been telling both you and Jay since you were little; if you want to be respected, be thoughtful of what you say.”
“Dad you ran a junkyard. I don’t think being respected was ever anything you were concerned with,” Sharon said, her words intended to cut.
Sherry stood from her seat beside her husband at the picnic table. “Young lady that junkyard put food on the table your whole life. That junkyard paid for our cars, your clothes, your braces, and the guns and bullets we’ve used a thousand times to stay alive the past near four years. Remember vacationing to Disneyland? If you want to talk about respect and your father in the same sentence, I suggest you do what he said and use your brain. Leave this room now.”
The teenaged Sharon stood and stormed out of the bay of the garage, stomping her feet and pouting. She shot an angry glance at her older brother, as if to blame him for the words that came out of her mouth. Jay looked to his father, wondering why he caught the bad look. Bart smiled and shrugged. What could you do?
“Go ahead, Bart,” Sherry said, returning to her seat. She scooped herself a second helping of cucumbers and vinegar.
“Well the cat’s out the bag then. Jay and I are thinking with them coming back in two days we should send a group out. They’re too big and too well armed for us to fight back if they come here with that on their minds, and each visit here makes us think the day when they choose to muscle on us is getting closer and closer.”
“What do we do?” Margaret asked. Margie–as she liked to be called–was an old and wizened survivor of three husbands plus the apocalypse. She was as pickled as three gin and tonics with lime a day over ten years could get you, and just as sour. “Let them come take our home?”
Bart nodded. “Yeah. Better that than them coming and taking our people. I have no interest in moving to their town to work for them just to get a slave’s wage in some strange communist version of America.”
“How do you know it’s communist?” Margie asked, sipping on a glass of sun brewed tea. (No sugar for her, she didn’t care for sweets, thank you very much.)
“From what they’ve said to me. They’re hiding behind some sort of policy about the greater good in the time of war. Donate your steel, recycle, pitch in, all that. If you do all they ask, they give you a ration of food to limp by on. And I’d be willing to bet the fatheads in charge on that mountain eat whatever they want and do whatever they want all day. You know what they’re calling themselves now, right?”
“No,” Margie said.
“The Northern Valley Cooperative. Or as they liked to abbreviate it, the NVC. Last time V and C were strung together it was the Viet Cong, and there are some memories about those folks my uncles could share with ya.”
“Two letters don’t make you evil, Barton,” Margie said with a condescending cackle.
“Maybe not Margaret, but deeds do,” Bart said back to her.
“So we go for a trip?” Sherry asked, breaking her husband’s building ire. She was already on board with the idea and wanted to get others in line as well.
“Those who want to go and be somewhat safer while they’re here visiting. The Cahills I imagine, maybe some of you others too. Jay will be going, taking our guns with him. He’ll be collecting corn and coming back in a couple of days after they’re long gone. Should be fairly simple. It’s only about twenty miles to the cornfield. Six hour’s worth of walk. Call it eight with a lunch break. Camp there, come back in two day’s time. It’ll be a nice little adventure.”
“I can’t walk six minutes let alone six hours, Bart. I’m too old. I’ll stay behind,” Margie said in a shockingly unselfish show of good sense.
“We’d love to have you,” Bart lied.
That seemed to appease the wrinkled Methuselah.
Bart’s statement of, “Bring ‘em all,” as it related to the small community’s gun collection wasn’t much of a statement at all. They had been hit particularly hard by the undead due to the nearby presence of a retirement-age trailer park and a burning need for survivors to attempt to steal things from their junkyard without trade. In mid-September on the morning of the visit from the Northern Valley Cooperative Bart handed two pistols, two shotguns, and three long rifles to his son.
He kept one pistol and one shotgun for himself. They had more firearms, but they ammunition for them had long ago evaporated into the air that was the skulls of the undead.
“Are you sure Dad?” Jay asked as the six people leaving on the food gathering journey shuffled around in the road nearby.
Bart laughed as Emma and Aubrey played tag in the middle of road, smack dab on the yellow line. Traffic ain’t a worry is it? “Yeah I’m sure. Like I said the other day, we won’t put up a fight if they get ornery. You just enjoy a long walk to the cornfield, pick some berries along the way and back, and be safe. I wish more people were going with you. Frank and his two kids plus Roy isn’t much of a trip. It’ll all be fine.”
Jay laughed at his father. “Dad, if it was going to be alright, we wouldn’t think this was such a good idea.”
Bart felt a swelling of pride in his son, and gave him a hug. After patting him on the shoulder he walked over to his petulant 15 year old daughter Sharon. She wore a fat backpack that sat on her shoulders more like a mini-fridge than a piece of hiking equipment, and she had a square set to her face that matched.
“Don’t be so angry all the time,” Bart said to Sharon as his wife moved to speak with Jason behind him.
Sharon’s eyes told Bart she wanted to be mean to him again but that big brain inside her thick skull asserted some sense, and she held her tongue from the worst of it. “I’m just not happy.”
Bart felt that earlier swell of pride get squashed by a wave of fatherly empathy. “Baby, it’s a hard world. Happiness doesn’t come as easily as it used to. I’m sorry. I wish I could’ve done more for us to be happier than we are.”
Sharon’s eyes were leaking with streams of tears when she looked up from the ground. She slid her skinny little arms around his skinny little midsection and squeezed. His ribs bent inward and he let out a whimper. “Dad, don’t say that. You’ve been great. And this trip is a good thing. It’s a good idea. I’m sorry I ran my mouth at dinner the other night. I didn’t think.”
Bart kissed her forehead and squeezed his daughter tight. “Sharon there’ll be plenty of time to think properly in the future. One dinner’s worth of stupid is just the appetizer in the meal of life.”
“I love you, Dad,” she said to his chest.
“I love you too, Sharon,” Bart said.
A few minutes later Jay and Sharon led the hulking brute Roy as well as Frank Cahill and his two daughters that looked like boys away down the road. The two German Shepherds happily trotted alongside, eager for an adventure. Corn was their secondary mission. Getting away from expansionist neo-nationals was their primary.
Jay looked over his shoulder at his father as he dragged the chain link gate closed and slowly drove the flatbed wrecker into place behind it.
Jay followed the gold stripe in the middle of the road, one ratty sneaker at a time. Inside, he hoped it led to the Emerald City.
Barton heard the heavy rumble of the military vehicles long before he saw them. That was the thing about the world now; a deathly quiet sat everywhere, crowding out the noises of the birds, which was the only thing anyone heard anymore, unless the people made their own noise. The world suffocated you if you let it.
Silence frightened, and the only thing more frightening than the silence was noise you weren’t making yourself.
This noise stopped Bart’s blood from pumping. It made the four dogs still in the compound bark like the end of the world was coming again.
At first he heard the diesel rattle of multiple humvees, coupled shortly with the higher pitched squeak and rattle of struts, or shocks, or moving parts all manufactured by the lowest bidder. A few minutes after dee
p underneath the military whine of the humvee engines Bart heard a heavier growl. Something much larger and more powerful. The noise of the bigger engine came with steady rattling clank, like a pair of metal bowling balls falling down an endless set of stairs in concert with one another.
He moved to the closed gate and climbed up on the flatbed truck he parked behind it. The choice of place to stand felt very theatrical to him, but it also made him stand taller than a man walking below him. When he saw the flat fronted tank with the giant machine gun atop it, he knew the visit had a much larger purpose than trading for car parts. Bart recognized the beast. He’d seen tanks just like it in movies many times over, as well as on the news. He remembered that the back end of it opened using a ramp, and soldiers would come out.
Bart wondered how many soldiers this one right here had inside it.
In total three humvees, two straight-body box trucks and one rather intimidating tank stopped in the road outside his home. His sanctuary.
The top hatch of the tank popped open and a man’s upper torso appeared. He rose until he positioned his body behind the mammoth machine gun that sat atop an iron mounting. The man rested his elbow on the gun casually, like it was a buddy at a bar. His lip was fattened with tobacco and he launched a fresh squirt of spit into the air off the side of the tank. The brown spittle left a smear on the road where Bart had hugged his son earlier. Bart felt offended but hid it.
Bart recognized the man, but didn’t know his name. As he waved to the man who had just appeared out of the tank, he heard a metallic hum and watched as the rear ramp of the tracked vehicle lowered, and shortly thereafter, a half dozen armed men wearing body armor and military uniforms spilled out. They moved with… unpracticed military style to points surrounding the line of vehicles where they dropped to their knees and watched the surrounding world for threats.
Bart hid a laugh as the dogs kept barking.
“Good afternoon,” the man in the tank said loudly over the idling engines. “I’m Captain Picarillo of the Northern Valley Cooperative.”
Adrian's Undead Diary (Book 9): The Dealer of Hope [Adrian's March, Part 1] Page 5