The Traveler 01-03 Home, Canyon, Wall

by Tom Abrahams

  He stood in the entry, scanning the property one more time, and shut the door. He made a mental note of the weapons he’d left outside; Lloyd the shotgun, and the 9mm that nearly killed him. He’d have to wait until daylight to retrieve them.

  “I’m going to search you,” he warned. “I’m not going to hurt you. I need to make sure you don’t have any weapons.”

  She didn’t respond. Her arms were folded across her chest. She was shivering and trying to keep weight off her bad ankle.

  “I need you to lower your arms,” he said. “I’m going to run the back of my hands along your body.”

  She dropped her arms and flinched when he touched her. He carefully searched her as he would any potential threat. Satisfied she was weapon-free, he turned his back on her and stepped back to the front door to flip a series of switches on the wall. The entryway and a long hallway lit with a soft yellow glow. He pressed some numbers on a keypad.

  “The alarm is now on,” alerted the monotone security system.

  He put his hand on the small of the woman’s back, leading her toward the kitchen. She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. Both were filthy. Her feet were bare. Battle imagined she hadn’t bathed in a while.

  He helped her to the kitchen and punched the dimmer switch near the entry. He pointed to the lone barstool at a large white and gray granite island.

  He moved around to the opposite side of the island while she took a seat and swiveled to face him. She pulled her hair behind her ears using both hands and looked up at him.

  Battle set the rifle on the island in front of him, but kept his hands on it. He was a safe enough distance away from her should she try something, and still close enough to have a conversation.

  She was the first person in the house, other than him, in more than seventeen hundred days.

  CHAPTER 2

  AUGUST 5, 2032, 10:35 AM

  SCOURGE -2 MONTHS

  EAST OF RISING STAR, TEXAS

  “You know you’re crazy.” Sylvia Battle stood at the bottom of the largest oak tree on their fifty acres. She was looking up at her husband and his latest creation. “He’s never going to come down from there.”

  Marcus Battle slung his canvas tool bag over his shoulder and sat on the edge of the trapdoor, his feet dangling. He’d just finished affixing the second hinge to the door.

  “Him?” He laughed and slid his body into the opening, pulling the door closed behind him, then descended the fresh pine planks that served as a ladder on the trunk of the tree. “I may never come down.”

  He skipped the final couple of rungs and jumped to the ground, the tool bag slapping him on the side.

  “Careful.” Sylvia laughed, wrapping her arms around her man. “You’ve got a bag full of dangerous tools there.”

  “I’ll show you a dangerous tool,” he smirked and planted a kiss on her lips.

  “You taste like sweat.”

  “I’ll show you sweat.”

  “Enough, Marcus.” She slapped him on the chest. “You’re filthy.”

  “I’ll show you—”

  “Got it.” She shoved him and turned to walk toward the house. “You coming in?”

  “Yeah. I need to check the barn first. I’ll take a shower before I head into town to get some replacement supplies.”

  “I thought you did that already,” she said, stopping to plant her hands on her hips. “It’s an hour each way to Abilene. How long will you be gone?”

  “Three hours or less. I’m a fast shopper. I’ll stick to the list. I’ve got a rotation going. Out with the old and in with the new.”

  “Sir, yes, sir.” Sylvia stood at attention and saluted him.

  “I’m not a sir.” He rolled his eyes. “If you’re going to salute me, at least get it right.”

  “Sorry, Major Battle.” She giggled. “That always gets me. Major Battle. You should have stayed in a little longer, then you’d be Lieutenant Colonel Battle. So much better.”

  “You wouldn’t let me stay in,” he reminded her.

  “Whatever.” She waved him off and walked straight for the main house. “I’ll see you inside.”

  Marcus loved watching her walk. Her shoulders were back, her hips swinging slightly back and forth. She disappeared inside the house, and he made his way to the barn, one of three structures on their fifty acres. He’d fenced in the central two acres and added an electric gate. He didn’t like his wife and kid being alone in the middle of nowhere when he traveled, and the fence and the gate gave him a slight sense of security.

  Inside the fence was the barn, the main house, the three-car garage, and a garden. He also had added a treehouse for his son’s birthday. Wesson was about to be nine. He was the center of their world. If it weren’t for Wes, Marcus knew he probably would be lieutenant colonel. He’d probably still be active, probably be in Syria or Iran. Or he’d be dead.

  Instead, he was swinging open the large barn door and stepping inside a two-thousand-square-foot guardian against the end of the world. The barn contained a cache of goods that could keep his family alive and thriving for years if everything went to hell.

  Having served six tours of duty in three war zones, he knew what hell was like and believed he could never be too prepared.

  Along the back of the eighty-foot-long wall of exposed beams, Marcus had constructed a series of twelve-foot-high shelving units. The unit stretched for forty feet and featured six shelves, each two feet apart. He’d divided them into four ten-foot sections; dry goods, canned goods, toiletries, and first aid/hardware. He even managed a stash of antibiotics and corticosteroids. A former army medic who’d become a pharmaceutical sales rep had given him samples on trips through Abilene. They were common, broad-spectrum drugs with a decent shelf life, and the rep told him the drugs lasted long after the marked expiration date. Even if they lost some potency, Marcus thought it better to have something on hand in an emergency. TEOTWAWKI was definitely an emergency. Marcus would always pay for lunch in exchange for the supply.

  It took him three years to fully stock all of the shelves, and as items were set to expire, he’d use them and purchase replacements. Marcus knew Sylvia thought at first it was a big waste of time and money, though she’d stopped complaining when a freak winter storm had blown through central Texas, crippled the power grid, and left the roads to and from their property impassible.

  It was that storm that convinced her to let him buy a trio of Norcold freezers that ran on solar, natural gas, or electric current. They weren’t cheap, but they could lengthen the life of their food storage by months. He kept two of them stocked with ground hamburger, chicken breasts, pork loin, and venison. The venison he’d hunted and dressed himself. There were even a couple of packages of boar sausage.

  One of the three freezers, all of which were in a row against the western wall of the barn, was dedicated to water. It was filled from top to bottom with gallon jugs of frozen well water. If by some chance his well became contaminated or the pipes froze, the frozen jugs in the freezer would be the only potable water available. Once thawed, it might last his family a week or two. It was better than nothing. He used and refilled the jugs every month.

  The eastern wall was lined with weapons. Inside a sliding locked cabinet that stretched most of the wall’s twenty-five feet were wall racks replete with rifles, handguns, a shotgun shell press, boxes of ammunition, a composite bow and quiver, and a couple of dozen high-precision arrows.

  Marcus also had a gun safe in the master bedroom closet of the main house, in which he kept his favorite sidearm and a sawed-off shotgun, which he jokingly called his “room broom”. This armory was for the end of days he was certain he’d see in his lifetime.

  As he always did, he checked the lock on that cabinet first, tugging on it before spinning the combination numbers on its bottom. He turned to his left and walked along the warehouse-style storage racks along the back of the barn. He scanned the shelves along the bottom, the items that expired more frequently, and pulled
out his cell phone.

  “Open notes,” he said into the device. “I need AA and AAA batteries. Also I need another two boxes of Sudafed, three tubes of Neosporin, and five bottles of aspirin.”

  He walked the remaining shelves, checking expiration dates on bags of rice and cans of beans, soup, and tuna, before finishing his rounds with the freezers. His list wasn’t as long as he’d anticipated, which was good. He’d spend less time at the store and less money.

  Marcus closed the barn doors as he left, walking by the large natural-gas-powered generator that abutted the edge of the barn. Each of the three buildings had a dedicated emergency generator that automatically engaged in thirty seconds.

  They were connected to a natural gas line that ran underneath his property. He’d reached an agreement years earlier to lease a section of his land to an energy speculator. When the play hit gas, the operator installed a gathering line exclusively for Marcus’s use.

  Central Texas was a huge source of natural gas, accounting for a large part of the fifty-eight thousand miles of pipeline that ran through the state. Unlike a lot of landowners, Marcus kept his mineral rights when he bought the land. That move allowed him to earn royalties on whatever was found beneath his property: oil, gas, a mixture of the two.

  The speculator had been more than happy to accommodate Marcus’s insistence on a free, virtually unlimited and uninterrupted flow of natural gas rather than paying out residuals on the find.

  The in-kind deal allowed for the gas to flow from the well to a nearby field treatment plant that removed the sulfur, helium, and water from the otherwise dry gas. That gathering line, much narrower than the pipeline, carried clean gas directly back to the Battles’ property.

  Sylvia told Marcus she wasn’t sure about the arrangement. She didn’t like the idea of a gas well and the aboveground mechanics operating on her land. She thought her husband was foolhardy for turning down the monthly four-figure payout the residual would provide.

  Marcus had insisted she think long term. Between the natural gas and the solar panels on the roofs of the barn, house, and garage, they were living off the grid. They had no electric bill, and when the worst happened, they’d be living like nothing happened. At least, that was the plan.

  Marcus stepped onto the porch and opened the front door to his home. He was immediately leg tackled by his son.

  “Is it finished?” The boy looked up vertically at Marcus, his eyes wide.

  “Yes,” Marcus said. “You’ll be able to play in the fort until you shove off to college.”

  The boy buried his head in Marcus’s legs and squeezed.

  Marcus was right about so many things. His son shoving off to college someday wasn’t among them.

  CHAPTER 3

  OCTOBER 13, 2037, 2:14 AM

  SCOURGE +5 YEARS

  EAST OF RISING STAR, TEXAS

  Battle couldn’t take his eyes off the woman slurping hot broth behind the steaming bowl she held to her face. She’d bathed and was wearing an oversized faded TCU T-shirt. The purple horned frog was barely visible from the wear. Her shorts, also Battle’s, were cinched with a drawstring as tight as she could knot it. Her purplish, swollen ankle was expertly wrapped in an Ace bandage.

  Her hair, still wet, was an auburn color, something he couldn’t tell when she was dressed in the grime of the chase. Her face was drawn, her eyes sad, but there was something beautiful about her. The pain etched into the thin lines on her brow and her temples made her appear paradoxically vulnerable and resilient in a way Battle hadn’t seen since Aleppo, a lifetime ago.

  He shook off the thoughts of the battlefield and offered her more milk. She nodded from behind the bowl.

  “You don’t want to eat or drink too fast,” he warned. “You’re back out on your own in a couple of days. I don’t want you sick.”

  She lowered the bowl and took a gulp of the milk before wiping her mouth with the back of her arm. “How do you have this? I haven’t had milk since before the Scourge.”

  “It’s powdered milk. I keep it in a vacuum-packed container and mix it with water when I need it. It’s okay, but I really should have stopped using it a couple of years ago.”

  She held the glass at her lips and put it down. “Maybe I should have water.”

  He shrugged and glanced at the glass. “I haven’t gotten sick. There’s an aftertaste, that’s about it.”

  She picked up the glass and took another sip. “Thank you.”

  “You said that. It’s not a big deal. And you can’t stay here long.”

  “You said that.”

  Battle walked back to his refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of well water. He uncapped it and took a swig. “You haven’t told me your name.”

  She ran her finger through the bowl and licked it. “Lola.”

  “Lola, huh? I’m Battle.”

  She squeezed her eyebrows together, deepening the furrow between them. “Battle?”

  “Yes. Who were those men?”

  She traced the inside of the empty bowl with her finger, her eyes avoiding contact with his. “They’re part of the Cartel.”

  “What’s that?” Battle took another swig and leaned on the counter.

  What little color flushed her cheeks vanished. She spoke slowly, every word sounding calculated. “You don’t know what the Cartel is? You don’t know who they are?”

  “No.”

  “How is that possible?” she asked. “They control everything, at least for two hundred and seventy thousand square miles.”

  “What do you mean everything?”

  “Everything,” she repeated, her eyes lifting to meet his. “They run the water, the gas, what little power we have. They control the food supply and the roads.”

  Battle studied her face, the concern in her eyes, and the barely visible tremble in her lower lip. “Never heard of ’em.”

  “Then how do you have all this?” she asked, waving her hands around the room. “Power, running water, cold milk, and hot soup?”

  Battle considered the limitless number of answers to that question and chose the easiest. “I just do.”

  “And they let you?”

  “Nobody lets me.”

  “It’s been five years since the Scourge started,” she said. “How have they not taken this from you? How do they not know you and you not know them? I can’t be the first person to come here.”

  “You’re the only one who’s lived to talk about it, except for the one who got away tonight.”

  She sat up and backed her body away from the counter. “So you kill everybody.”

  “Yes.”

  “Wh—”

  Battle held his finger to his lips. He needed to think.

  These weren’t random scavengers or thugs. They were organized criminals with bosses. How the Cartel hadn’t found him until now was miraculous. But the blessing was over. The one who got away would be coming back with reinforcements.

  “Wh—” Lola tried again. He shushed her again.

  He didn’t have much time. He needed as many answers from Lola as he could get: who she was, how she’d become involved with the Cartel, how she escaped, what she knew about the men he’d killed and the one who escaped. Any actionable intelligence was critical to their survival.

  “They’re coming back,” he told her. “They’ll kill both of us unless you tell me everything you know about them. And I need to know everything about you. Understood?”

  Lola nodded and tears welled in her eyes.

  ***

  OCTOBER 13, 2037, 7:42 AM

  SCOURGE +5 YEARS

  EAST OF RISING STAR, TEXAS

  They sat on the back porch, the sun casting its earliest shadows from the east. Battle looked to the right, seeing the orange glow peek through the tangle of oaks and mesquite beyond the fence line.

  Neither he nor Lola had slept while she’d carefully unpacked her story. Battle struggled to understand her. At times she spoke in fragments and non sequiturs. He knew she was le
aving out details, but conceded to himself those were left in her head.

  He slid his palms along the cracked arms of his Adirondack chair. She rocked back and forth, rhythmically pushing with the ball of her uninjured foot in the high-back chair next to him.

  “So after you left Louisiana,” Battle coaxed, “you moved west into Texas and found shelter in Tyler.”

  She nodded. “After my husband was killed, we couldn’t stay there. Louisiana was always supposed to be a waypoint for us anyway. I didn’t know anybody. The shelters were overflowing. It was lawless there, and that was before the Cartel.”

  “What did you do in Tyler? You still haven’t told me how the Cartel kidnapped you.”

  She stopped rocking. “My son, Sawyer, he—I—we did what we had to do.”

  “And the Cartel?”

  “They moved north from the border and east from Arizona, I think,” Lola said. “I don’t know, really. There are so many rumors and legends about them, I’m not sure what’s true. I still can’t believe you don’t know about them.”

  “I don’t have television,” he said. “And I rarely listen to the radio, shortwave or otherwise.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s nothing out there for me. My world starts and stops here. I need to focus on protecting what’s mine, not concern myself with the outside world.” Battle shifted in his seat and then redirected the conversation. “This is not about me, right now. I need to know about you and the Cartel.”

  Lola looked north, toward the vegetable garden directly behind the house, and shuddered. “My son,” she said, swallowing against what she was about to tell him, “he stole from them.”

  “What did he steal?”

  “An orange.”

  “An orange?” Battle looked at Lola. A tear rolled from the corner of her eye down her cheek. He was surprised she had any tears left. “That’s it?”