We found a small pallet of ammunition containing a number of different rifle and pistol calibers as well as cases of shotgun shells. We found a pallet of freeze-dried survival foods. We found several pallets of clothes, from which we took all of the jeans and workwear. We found pallets of shoes in one trailer. We only took tennis shoes and work boots as well as a few sturdy-looking shoes. The largest size we found in men's boots was a 14. Again I wished I were average-sized.
"Today was a pretty good haul, don't you think?" Dave said.
"Yeah, but what I really wanted to find was toilet paper," Yeti grinned.
Julie sat beside and against me by the fire. Max was on sentry duty. We were camped two miles from the interstate and more than a mile and a half from the nearest road. Our camp was well hidden. The fire was small and low. The night air was cold and the wind felt like it was off of snow. I guessed it was about 30 degrees.
"Where are all the people?" Yeti asked.
"Most of them are likely either hunkered down or dead," I said. "I am sure food and water are in short supply."
"But we haven't seen any bodies."
"We probably won't. It has been five months since the EMPs. That is plenty of time for the scavengers to get rid of the bodies. There never were many people out here anyway. I think the worst was, and still is, in the cities like Albuquerque."
"Are we going to go all the way to Albuquerque?"
"No, we will stop before then even if the wagons aren't full."
With five of us, keeping watch was not as much of a strain as it had been when Julie and I were traveling alone. I awoke at dawn feeling rested. Julie lay beside me still asleep, so I got up and covered her with the blanket we shared. Yeti was cooking breakfast over a small fire, while Max and Dave scanned the terrain with binoculars. I hoped we would find a few cases of binoculars in one of the trailers. I thought they would make good trade items at some point.
By nine o'clock we were moving north on the interstate. We saw several 18-wheelers in the distance. By evening we had gone through eight more trailers and found many items either for trade or that would be useful at the ranch. The wagons were each about 3/4 full.
In one of the trailers we found needles, sewing supplies, and many more bolts of cloth. Julie insisted we take it all. We also found camping tents, and cases of paper towels and toilet paper. I was hoping to find vegetable seeds, but it was the wrong time of the year when the EMPs hit. We did not find any seeds.
We camped out of sight of the interstate that evening. We had not seen a single living person all day. I was starting to get nervous. But then, the population density was low here, even before the EMPs.
Both wagons were filled to capacity by noon the next day. We turned around and drove south. That was when I saw them. There were people on the road. I made them to be almost two miles ahead of us. I couldn't get an accurate count, but I was guessing at maybe six or a couple more. As we came closer they just stood there. I could see there were women among them and at least one child. The men had long guns but none made any threatening moves as we approached. We stopped when we were about 200 yards away. One of the men waved a white flag and walked toward us.
"It could be a trap," Julie said.
"I know," I said.
Max was scanning the area near the people with his binoculars. Yeti was scanning the area behind and to the sides of us. Dave was on top of the lead wagon with a rifle.
"What do you see, guys?"
"Nothing," Max said.
"Nothing here either," Yeti called out.
I handed the reins to Julie, picked up my AR15, and grabbed a scrap of white cloth. Waving the white cloth, I walked toward the man approaching us. We met about 100 yards from the wagon. The man was rail-thin and his tattered clothes hung in folds on him.
"Mister, do you have any food you can spare?"
"The name is Wayne," I said. "What is yours?"
"I am Charlie."
"How many of you are there?"
"There are seven of us."
I could see five people on the road behind him. Then I noticed the baby in one woman's arms. "Where are you from?"
"Well, we are really from all over. We were stranded on the highway when our cars quit. We banded together after a couple of weeks. Do you know what happened?"
"Yeah," I said. "I think so. I will tell you about it later."
"We have had a really hard time of it. There were twelve of us originally. Five died, including Marisa's youngest. We haven't eaten anything in two days. We have been getting water from the river over that way." He pointed toward the Rio Grande.
Cap warned me again and again that after an event like an EMP, people would beg for food and that I shouldn't feed them. I thought I knew how I would handle that back when everything was just theoretical, but now I didn't. I felt bad for these people. They couldn't be completely helpless, as they had managed to survive for five months on their own. I thought about the child. What if it were my Ben. I would want someone to help him.
"We can give you guys a meal," I said. I waved the wagons forward. We took the wagons to the people. Some of them didn't look strong enough to come to us.
Julie went straight to the woman with the baby. There were two men, three women, one little girl, and the baby. Several of them had packs and bundles of stuff. Max, Dave, and I huddled while Yeti kept watch. "What should we do?" I asked.
"Feed them somewhere safer than here," Dave said.
"That sounds good to me," Max said. "Let's just find a safe campsite and get this done. I am nervous on the road."
So that is what we did. We loaded those folks on the wagons. I asked the two men for their guns and they gave them to me. I set the guns at Max's feet and we were on our way. Julie had the woman with the baby on the seat beside her and they talked until we found a campsite.
Max and Dave took watch, Yeti, Julie, and the woman with the baby worked on setting up three Dakota fire pits and getting the cooking gear out of the wagon. Soon they were preparing three pots of freeze-dried meals.
The men of the party insisted that the women and children eat first. I was impressed. I thought these might be good people. We spent the afternoon and night there. Julie fed them small meals every two hours or so until they were full. I spent some time talking to the men while Julie was talking to the women. It seems that none of them were married to each other.
One man's wife had been with him, but she was one of the ones who died. He, Vern, was older, probably in his late sixties or early seventies, and I could tell that the loss of his wife hit him hard. They were on vacation when the EMP happened. He was a retired computer programmer.
The other guy, Charlie, was on a business trip just like I had been. He was in his thirties. He still had family in Missouri and wanted to get back to them. He was a mechanical engineer. The women were Ellen, Bernice, and Fiona. Ellen was the one with the baby and Bernice was her mother-in-law. Bernice had been a homemaker all of her adult life, and Ellen worked in a grocery store. They had been driving from Texas to California. Fiona was local and lived in Albuquerque. She was the youngest of the women, maybe 25 or so, and was single. She had been a dental hygienist. I noticed Yeti seemed interested in her, but she didn't seem interested in a 15-year-old at all. That evening, in our bedroll, Julie and I compared notes about what they told us. Everything checked. They seemed to be legitimate.
"Should we take them back to the ranch with us?" Julie asked.
"They will have to know that your dad may not agree to keep them on. We might take some of them with us when we leave in the spring. We need more people."
"Let's take them to the ranch and get to know them a bit. I think Dad will be OK with a few more. I helped him do the calculations on how many people the ranch can feed."
"Ok, let's tell them in the morning and see what they say."
We had a talk with them the next morning over breakfast. They all wanted to come with us. I am sure life on the ranch sounded better to them t
han what they had been through. If I had not met Julie, I might have been in the same shape as they were.
Vern was a Marine Corps veteran. He said he had been in Vietnam the last year of the war but had seen very little action. I was pleased. He might be a bit rusty, but that meant he could handle a rifle. I took his rifle off of the wagon and handed it back to him.
"Oh, this thing isn't much good," Vern said.
"Why not?"
"I only have one bullet for it," Vern smiled. I took the rifle again and looked it over. It was a lever action in 32-20. 32-20 cartridges would be very hard to find.
"Where did you get it?"
"We took it, and the shotgun, from some bandits about four days after the cars stopped."
"How did you do that?" I asked. Vern pulled his shirt back to show a compact 9mm holstered at his waist.
"With this."
I smiled. "Vern, I think you will fit in with us quite well."
"I think so too. It will be good to feel useful. My wife and I didn't have any children. She was all I had."
"Welcome." I shook his hand. I dug out an AR15, two 30-round magazines, and three 20-round boxes of .223 from a wagon. I handed them to Vern.
His eyes lit up. "Now this is a nice one."
Charlie, on the other hand, had never fired a gun. He was just carrying the shotgun because Vern told him he should. I thought his mechanical engineering skills might be handy though.
We started back for the ranch. The big half-Percherons had no difficulty pulling the loaded freight wagons, even with the extra people on them.
I thought about what I should do better on the next trip. I believed we had been lucky so far on this trip. I thought we would be better off with a few outriders, maybe two in front, two behind, and at least one on each side. The wagons were too slow. Mounted men would be able to respond to threats more quickly and be better able to protect the wagons.
I also thought we needed several trained dogs. The only dog on the ranch was too old for the task, but I was hoping to find some pups that could be trained. I was also worried about encountering roaming dog packs near towns and cities, and maybe even farther out in the countryside. We had not seen any so far, but I suspected there weren't that many dogs in the area. I knew that most cattle ranchers shot dogs on sight because they would form packs and run cattle down and kill them.
Radios would be useful to communicate with the outriders when we had some. That was something I would look into back at the ranch.
We were almost to the turnoff for Mountainair when the sound of a shot broke the morning stillness. I couldn't tell where it came from. I motioned for everyone to get off the wagon and shelter under it. I looked back and saw Dave was doing the same with the people on his wagon. Yeti was already down and searching to the east with binoculars. Max was slumped over in his seat. He was hit.
Another bullet slammed into the wagon by my head. Now I had an idea of where the sniper was. I yelled at Dave and told him to follow me with the wagon and for everyone to stay on the west side of the wagons as we drove toward better cover.
We found a low spot and drove the wagons into it. The horses were still exposed so we unhitched them and Julie and Yeti led them to a safer spot.
I looked at Max. He was still slumped in the wagon seat. He was dead. The bullet entered his left temple and exited the back of his head. I threw up.
I was mad. I knew I was going to kill the sniper. He took my friend away. I dug the Sharps out of the wagon along with a spotting scope we found in one of the 18-wheelers. "Can you spot?" I asked Vern.
He smiled when he realized what I was holding. "Damn straight," he said, "let's do it." So off we went, one old veteran and one younger idiot, looking for a vantage point.
Julie hugged me before we left and said, "Please be careful."
"I'll try. You better be ready here. We don't know what is out there."
It took us almost half an hour to find the vantage point we wanted. It wasn't very far from the wagons, but we didn't want the sniper to see us so we moved low to the ground and very carefully. It occurred to me as we went, that maybe the uniform of the caravan should be some form of camo—if we could find it, that is. I also thought we should paint the wagons in a camouflage pattern so they would blend in and not be as easy to spot.
The sniper fired at the wagons about every ten minutes. I figured he was letting his rifle barrel cool down between shots. We spotted him on his fifth shot. He was about 300 yards away from the wagons and he had a scoped rifle. The idiot was sitting in a chair with the rifle propped up on a folding card table. I estimated we were 350 yards from him. I flipped up the tang sight on the Sharps and set it, chambered a round, tested the wind, aimed with some correction for the slight breeze, and fired.
"You got him," Vern said quietly.
"I looked through the spotting scope and the man was lying on his back in the overturned chair. He wasn't moving. Vern and I made our way to the body. My shot had taken the man in the center of his chest. I suspect he died without even knowing he was hit.
We appropriated his rifle, a scoped 30-06, and everything else that looked useful. We found his shack just behind the hill he fired from. The stench was awful, as bad as in the Boss's barn. From what we could tell, this guy had survived since the EMP by sniping people on the highway and taking their supplies—and more.
The bone pile fifty feet from his camp showed the man was a cannibal. He had been eating the people he killed. After the End of the World, the monsters had come out to play. I threw up again. That was a bad habit that I hoped to get over some day.
Once we got back to the wagons, I sent Yeti and Charlie to the shack to collect anything of use. I wanted them to see for themselves. While they were doing that, Dave and I dug a grave for Max. Fiona offered to help, but I said we would prefer to do it ourselves, as Max was our friend.
"You guys cared about him a lot?" Fiona asked.
Dave nodded his head. "He was a true friend. The three of us went through a lot together. We were a great team."
Max's grave was finished by the time Yeti and Charlie returned. They both looked rather sick as they piled some more stuff on a wagon.
Vern stood guard as we lowered Max into his grave. I said a few words even though I didn't know what to say.
"Max," I said, "we are going to miss you. You were as good a friend as any man could ever ask for. Both Dave and I owe you our lives. I don't know what to say other than friendships such as Dave and I shared with you come along rarely. Most people never have as good friend as you have been. Thank you for being you. You will be missed and your memory will certainly be alive as long as Dave and I live." I saw Dave nod. "And we will tell our children of you as well. I only wish it could have been me instead of you." By now I was choking up and could no longer speak.
Dave threw the first shovelful of dirt in the grave and soon Max was buried. Dave took some sticks and made a cross and placed it at the head of the grave. I could feel the tears flowing down my cheeks as we drove away.
Death came quickly and unexpectedly after the End of the World. In spite of my guilt about cheating on Lucy with Julie, Julie was right. There was no guarantee either of us would ever reach Indiana; in fact the odds were probably against us. I didn't figure things were much better at the ranch either with that mob of soldiers so close.
I hoped there had been no attack while we were gone. I hoped the soldiers had simply moved on to easier pickings and would leave the ranch alone.
Our trip back to the ranch was uneventful. We skirted Mountainair and saw no one. We were a tired crew when we rolled in. George met us at the gate. He didn't seem too surprised at the newcomers. The first thing he said was "Where is Max?"
"Max is dead, George."
"How?"
"Sniper."
"Damn. He was a good man. I really liked him. By the way, that girl you brought back shot herself. She just grabbed a pistol and shot herself, right in the yard by the house."
"That is too bad," Julie said. "Is she alive?" George just shook his head.
"She went through more than she could handle," I said. "That is sad."
"Did you find much stuff?" George asked.
Yeti was now beside the wagon. "Yes Sir, we made a really good haul."
Louisa, Dorothy, and a newcomer woman came out of the ranch house. They were all wearing aprons and I figured there were three cooks now. With so many people at the ranch, I was sure they were needed.
"Let's get these folks settled," Louisa said. She motioned to Yeti to gather the new folks and take them into the ranch house. I had no idea where they were going to bed them down, but I knew they would find a way.
I looked around. Since the End of the World I met more good people than I had known before. Maybe that was because I seldom got very close to people before the EMP. I also met more bad people then I had ever known before. It seemed to me that society would be socially stratified for a while yet to come—us against them, them being people who wanted to kill us for what we had, or to enslave us.
Community was far more important now than it was before. I did not think very many people could survive this new world without help. There was safety in numbers right now and would be for quite some time to come.
Two days later they came.
Chapter 20
Wayne
We have been back at the ranch for two days. The latest newcomers are settling in. Both bunkhouses are full. Except for George, a couple of the first newcomers, and me, the ranch house is full of women, while the men fill the two bunkhouses. George told me that back in the day, the ranch had 20 hands and could bunk another dozen. The ranch house had been added on to numerous times and now had eight bedrooms. Most of the women were doubled up, either with another woman or their husband and/or, of course, children. There was talk of either adding on a wing to the ranch house, or building more houses at headquarters. Yeti wanted to see the entire ranch compound enclosed in a ten foot palisade. However, there wasn't enough timber available for that, or to build onto the ranch house, for that matter.
EMP 1500 MILES FROM HOME Page 24