This Shattered Land - 02

by James Cook

  Brian stared at Gabriel with open curiosity and stepped closer to him.

  “What’s that?” The boy asked pointing to the sword on his hip.

  “What, this thing?” Gabe drew it from its sheath and kneeled down, holding the blade up where Brian could see it. “You ever seen one of these before?” He asked. Brian looked up at him with wide eyes and shook his head.

  “It’s called a Falcata. It’s a very old type of sword used by the Spanish, Greeks, and even the Romans a couple of thousand years ago.”

  “Can I hold it?” The boy asked.

  “Brian, you most certainly may not.” Sarah snapped, glaring at her son. Gabriel laughed.

  “Oh it’s okay, ma’am. I don’t mind.” He handed t he weapon to the boy hilt first. Sarah frowned, but didn’t say anything.

  Brian grinned from ear to ear. He hefted the blade clumsily, took a few steps back, and made a few half-hearted swings with it.

  “Careful.” Tom warned. “That thing ain’t no toy, son.”

  Brian sobered up a bit, and handed the sword back to Gabriel. “Thanks.” He said.

  Gabe acknowledged him with a nod, then stood back up and sheathed the blade.

  “I have a few pounds of smoked meat, and a case of pinto beans that I found not far from here.” Tom said. “I don’t suppose you fellas have anything for trade, do you?”

  “We’re actually running a little low on food.” I replied. “What will you trade for?”

  Tom and Sarah exchanged another look. Sarah seemed to deflate a bit, and finally lowered her weapon.

  “We’re pretty low on ammunition.” Tom said. “Got any to spare?”

  Gabe pointed at Tom’s hunting rifle. “Is that a .308 you got there?”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  Gabe took off his pack and fished out a couple of twenty round boxes of 7.62 cartridges. They are not exactly the same as .308 rounds, but any rifle chambered for that caliber can fire them. Tom’s eyes widened as Gabriel held the cartridges out to him.

  “How much do you want for that?” He asked

  “How about a pound of meat and three cans of beans?” Gabe replied.

  Sarah still looked dubious, but Tom appeared to be considering the offer. After a few moments, he nodded and reached out to take the ammunition.

  “I guess that’s fair enough. Brian, go get these fellas a pound of venison and three cans of beans.”

  The boy nodded and walked over to a blue tarp that covered a small cache of supplies next to the makeshift grill.

  “So you guys live close by?” Sarah asked, stepping closer and looking us over.

  I nodded and pointed to the northeast. “About two miles or so that way. Got ourselves a pretty nice setup. Solar panels, wood-burning stove, we even have a fence around our property to keep the infected out.”

  Tom’s eyebrows went up. “No kidding? Damn, we might have to pay you a visit sometime.”

  I smiled. “You’d be welcome. We haven’t had any visitors in…well, ever. It’d be nice to hang out with someone other than this guy for a change.” I jerked a thumb in Gabe’s direction.

  Brian brought over a plastic bag with the cans of beans and strips of dried venison inside. I took it from him and stashed it in Gabriel’s pack.

  “Listen folks, I appreciate the trade, but we have a lot to get done today.” I said. “We’re going to be heading over to Marion to hunt down some medical supplies in the next day or so. We’ll come by and check in on you tomorrow afternoon, if that’s alright with you.”

  Tom smiled and nodded. “I’ll look forward to it. Maybe I can bring down some game with one of these here bullets and have supper waiting for you.”

  “That would be awesome.” I said. “If I hear any gunshots tomorrow, at least I’ll know where it’s coming from.”

  Gabe nudged me on the shoulder with one oversized knuckle. “Why don’t you go get your stuff so we can get a move on?”

  “Oh, right.” I pointed back up the mountainside. “Is my pack still up the hill where I left it?”

  “Yeah, I didn’t touch it.”

  I turned and trudged back up the steep hill to where I stashed my rifle and my pack. I heard Gabriel talking to the family behind me as I left. Tom and Sarah asked plenty of questions, and it seemed like they were genuinely curious to learn more about us. I found myself looking forward to the prospect of having dinner with the little family tomorrow night. I knew it was probably not a good idea to be too trusting too soon, but I was tired of only having Gabe around for company. Don’t get me wrong, he is a good and loyal friend, but anyone gets tiresome if you have to spend too much time around them.

  I made the mistake of hiding my gear a little too well, and it took me a few minutes to find it in the thick patch of foliage where I had stashed it earlier. When I returned to the camp, Gabriel was showing Tom and Brian how to tie their tarp full of food up in the boughs of a tree to keep the multitude of brown bears in the area from getting into it. Sarah stiffened a bit when she saw the high-tech assault rifle hanging from my chest on its tactical sling. I hadn’t really noticed it before, probably because I was distracted by the rifle she was pointing at me, but Sarah was actually quite pretty. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, with bright red hair, blue eyes, and cute little dimples in her cheeks. Tom was a lucky man.

  We exchanged a brief round of goodbyes and handshakes. Some of Sarah’s suspicion of us seemed to have waned a bit, and she even managed a smile as she bid us a good day. Gabriel told them to fire three shots into the air if they ran into any trouble before we came to see them tomorrow. Tom promised they would, and we set off to finish the hike back to our cabin.

  “So what do you think?” Gabe asked once we were well out of earshot of the camp.

  I shrugged. “They seem nice enough.”

  Gabe nodded. “They’ve managed to survive this long out here on their own, so I think it’s safe to say they’re not stupid.”

  We were silent for a little while farther on our walk before something occurred to me. “Do you think there might be other people around here? I mean, we live less than three miles from those folks, and we didn’t even know they were here. Couldn’t there be other people around that we don’t know about?”

  Gabe considered the idea for a moment. “I hate to say it, but you have a good point. It’s big country around here with lots of places to hide. I know a lot of folks that survived the Outbreak fled to the mountains to get away from the infected. We’ll have to keep our eyes peeled.”

  The rest of the hike back to the cabin passed in silence. We didn’t run into any infected for a change, which was nice. Chores around our property kept us busy and our thoughts occupied us for the rest of the afternoon and on into the evening. Just as the sun was beginning to set, I grabbed a fishing pole and a tackle box and spent an hour fishing in the stream that flowed around the base of the mountain. A couple of fair sized brook trout took the bait and gave me a good fight before I landed them. That put a smile on my face; brook trout are good eating. The fish went on the grill over the fire pit in the front yard after Gabe helped me scale and clean them. My big friend was more pensive than usual as we ate.

  “Something on your mind?” I asked.

  Gabe pulled a bone from his filet and tossed it into the fire. “It just seems like a shame for those folks to sleep out in the cold tonight, what with them having a kid and all. We got plenty of room here. Maybe we should let them stay with us until we leave for Colorado.”

  I looked across the fire at him. “You sure that’s a good idea? We just met those people. I’m not sure we should trust them that much yet.”

  Gabe was quiet for a moment before he replied. “They seem like good people. I don’t think they would try anything stupid. Besides, we ain’t gonna need this place much longer.”

  Deep down, I agreed with him, but I still wasn’t willing to take an unnecessary risk.

  “We’ll see how things go tomorrow.” I said.

  A
little after dawn the next day, just as we were making breakfast, we heard a single gunshot reverberate around the hills to the south. Birds took flight in the distance under the hazy yellow light of the early morning sun. A few tense seconds went by as we listened for the two follow up shots that would indicate a distress call. They didn’t come. We both let out a sigh of relief.

  “I hope he got something.” Gabe said.

  “If he did, I hope he gets to it before the dead show up.” I replied. A shot that loud was bound to attract the infected.

  We spent the rest of the morning taking stock of what we needed to raid from Marion. Medical supplies were at the top of the list, as well as clothes, new boots, and toilet paper. I never realized until the collapse of civilization how much I took the little things for in life for granted, like toilet paper. The stuff is like gold if you can find it. I think there is a certain amount of irony in the fact that at the end of the world, one of the most valuable and treasured commodities a person can hope to come across is a roll of ass-wipe. Maybe that says something about the human race in general.

  By ten in the morning we were finished taking inventory, and our stocks of food were down to just a couple of week’s worth. After that, we would have to delve into one of the four plastic buckets of freeze-dried provisions that Gabe had stockpiled a few months before the Outbreak. The desiccated food lasts damn near forever if kept in its original packaging, and one bucket would be enough feed us both for fifty-five days. We would not have to go hungry anytime soon, but the freeze-dried stuff constituted our emergency rations. We wanted to save it for the trip to Colorado. As for water, our rain cisterns were full, which gave us a little over four-hundred gallons of fresh drinking water. That would keep us stocked for a good long while if we were careful with it.

  Most of the rest of the day saw us doing mundane work around the cabin. We rotated out the repetitive day-to-day tasks so that we didn’t get too tired of having to do one thing or another. It was my week to clean the cabin and do laundry. Gabe had wood chopping, water hauling, and dishwashing duty. Bringing water up from the stream at the base of the mountain was the most important of these tasks. We only used the water from our cisterns for drinking and cooking. Any other use and we got it from the stream.

  There was nothing difficult about cleaning the cabin. Running a broom across the floor and giving the smooth concrete a once-over with a mop was usually enough to keep it livable. Other than that, all I really had to do was dust and shovel ashes out of the wood stove. Laundry, on the other hand, was a different story altogether. Without the benefit of a washer and dryer, it was an extremely time consuming, labor-intensive task. This is especially true during the winter months when it is too cold outside to dry laundry on the clothesline. During that time, we have to wash clothes a few items at a time and hang them up over the stove to dry. Now that the weather was finally warming up, we would be able to do laundry in larger quantities, and do it outdoors. That would save us a lot of time. After I finished cleaning the cabin, and hanging our clothes and linens out to dry, I took a few minutes to look over our weapons.

  Gabe had quite a number of firearms before the Outbreak, which we had supplemented with my own collection and a few other scavenged items. We had a wide variety of weapons to choose from, but mostly we just stuck to the ones that we could fit suppressors to. Less noise equals fewer encounters with the undead. Even though there was enough ammunition on the shelves in our underground shelter to outfit a small army, we were always on the lookout for more. We could only carry a few thousand rounds with us on our journey west, but it was still nice to know the location of a large stockpile, just in case. We had also cached a few boxes of ammo in the mountains around the cabin along the paths that we traveled the most frequently. We might never need it, but it was good to know it was out there if we did.

  I took a little time during the day to inspect my rifle. As I feared, the barrel was nearing the end of its service life. The rest of the rifle was still in good shape, so I stripped it for parts and left the barrel in a scrap metal bin. It didn’t bother me too much to get rid of it; I had two more just like it on the gun rack. I grabbed one of them and took it down to the firing range Gabe and I set up in a clearing at the base of the mountain. Breaking it in cost me a couple dozen rounds between sighting it in and zeroing my optics. When I got back, Gabe was sitting on the front porch running the blade of his big stag-handled Bowie knife over a whetstone. Judging by his posture, and by the fact that he was honing a knife already sharp enough to shave with, I surmised that my large friend was getting impatient to go and visit with our new neighbors.

  “You about ready to head out?” I asked, stopping to talk to him on the porch.

  He nodded. “Ready whenever you are.”

  “Okay. Let me grab a couple of things and then we can get going.”

  Anytime I plan to go more than a mile away from home, I always run through a quick checklist to make sure I have the bare minimum of equipment needed to survive. First, I checked my web gear. Both of the one-quart canteens were full. My multi-tool, LED flashlight, and the suppressors for my pistol and rifle were all in their pouches. Next, I checked my weapons. The fighting knife was in its sheath, and my long-handled hatchet sat in its harness. I loaded a thirty-round magazine into my assault rifle, and worked the charging handle to put one in the chamber. Four more mags went into pouches on the web belt. I did the same for my pistol, a Kel-Tec PMR-30 chambered in .22 magnum. The magazines for the pistol also held thirty rounds each. Five mags for each weapon gave me three-hundred and sixty rounds loaded and ready to go. With the web gear squared away, I turned my attention to my rucksack.

  If you pack carefully, a military issue three-day assault pack can hold everything you need to survive with room to spare. Mine had a slot for a water bag, a first aid kit, three pairs each of socks, underwear, and t-shirts, two hundred spare rounds for my rifle, three hundred for my pistol, fishing line, para-cord, a wool blanket, and a small roll of trash bags. The side pockets contained toilet paper (lots of that), an aluminum half-liter water bottle, two day’s worth of MRE’s, and a small flask of hard liquor.

  Yes, liquor. Cut me some slack, I’m Irish.

  The last item in my pack, secreted in a pocket just under the flap, was a Sig Sauer Mosquito and a suppressor for it. The Mosquito is a pistol chambered for .22 long rifle, which is much smaller and less powerful than my Kel-Tec’s .22 magnum. I brought it along because I could pack five hundred spare rounds without adding too much weight to my pack, and because I liked knowing that even if I lost my other weapons, I had the means to defend myself and bring down small game. I sincerely hoped I would never need to rely on it, but it was nice to have anyway.

  The best thing about my pack is that it connects to the web gear harness. That makes putting everything on and taking it off much faster and easier than if the two items were separate. Once I had checked and double-checked my harness, I slid the straps over my shoulders and buckled it on, making sure everything rested comfortably in its place before going back outside. Gabe’s MOLLE vest sat on the planks next to his chair. He glanced up at me to see if I was ready to go in the wordless way by which men often communicate with one another. I nodded. He put the whetstone down on the table next to him and stood up to return his Bowie knife to its sheath. It took him all of about fifteen seconds to buckle on his vest, slip on his pack, and grab his SCAR from where it leaned against the cabin wall. He shot me a brief, meaningful glare that said I should stop using old-fashioned equipment, get with the twenty-first century, and use the damn MOLLE vest he gave that was currently collecting dust on a shelf in the bunker.

  Yes, he said all that without actually speaking. Guys can do that.

  I frowned at him to let him know that I liked my old-fashioned web gear. I had been using it for years, and I had no desire to switch to something I wasn’t used to this late in the game. He rolled his eyes and shook his head in the universal symbol of ‘whatever, dude’ an
d stepped off the porch to trudge toward the main gate. I scowled at his back as I followed.

  Gabe set a fast pace on the hike to the Glover family’s camp. The widening gap between us forced me to jog several times to keep up. Gabriel has a much longer stride than I do, and when he is in a hurry he can really move. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of asking him to slow down, so I simply sped up. About forty minutes after stepping off the front porch, we climbed atop the high ridge that overlooked the campsite. Gabe immediately started picking his way down the steep hillside, but I stopped for a moment, surveying the area to see what protection it offered against the infected.

  The ridge I stood on surrounded the camp on three sides. It looked like a giant hand had scooped out a half-acre section of the mountain a hundred feet from the peak. Only by approaching the camp from the northeast could one find a pathway that permitted passage down into the basin. The side not protected by the ridge was, for all intents and purposes, a cliff. It had trees and shrubs growing on it, but their angle to the mountainside was a steep one. A skilled climber might be able to make it up to the edge of the camp, but the infected would have absolutely no chance. All in all, it was a pretty good spot to build a home. If Gabe and I had not chanced to see these people on the road, we most likely would never have known they were here.

  That was not a comforting thought.

  Who else might be out there among the hills and valleys, unseen and unknown? The world was living in desperate times, and desperation makes people notoriously unpredictable. With winter loosening its grip on the high country, I had a feeling that I might find out who else had taken up residence near my home sooner rather than later. I resolved to reiterate my concerns to Gabe, and started down the hillside.

  When I reached the camp, it was immediately obvious that our neighbors had been very busy since yesterday. The fallen limbs that littered the ground the last time I visited were gone. A couple of newly felled trees lay nearby, one of them trimmed for layering on the cabin, and one partially broken down for firewood. A wide tarp they had spray-painted in brown and green woodland pattern stretched across poles in a broad tent over the first few layers of the cabin. It wasn’t exactly an ideal shelter, but it was certainly better than nothing. I nodded to myself in approval at the family’s ingenuity.