“Hey, I needed to know the deets so I could finalize my plans to kidnap you and keep you in my basement. You didn’t think all those supplies down there were just for the apocalypse, did you?” he said.
She pinched his cheek. “It’s a good thing you never saw my top-secret closet space where I put up hundreds of clandestinely taken pictures of you.”
“That is also creepy. I think we’re well-matched, sweet cheeks.”
“We’re going to be late. Come on, I don’t want to miss the e—” Bradley elbowed Fletch hard and he gulped back the rest of his words.
Jared gave her a peck on the lips and tossed himself backward out the window. “Don’t wreck my truck, babe!”
“I’ll do my best,” she said dryly.
Bradley and Fletch led the way in her new truck while Jared followed in their original pickup and trailer of fencing. She followed Jared. She drove more slowly than normal, not wanting to lose any of the feed. It wasn’t exactly secured down. She hoped she wouldn’t be required to do any crazy maneuvering, because she was quite sure it wouldn’t be possible.
Bradley and Fletch pulled to a stop in the four-lane road that ran through the center of this part of town. The dealership was to the right, and a post office parking lot was to the left. Bradley pulled into the post office lot and got out. Jared pulled up and around, leaving her room in the back. They were here, but Jimmy Don wasn’t.
She got out and shut the door quietly. The hive of muties across the road made her uneasy. She hadn’t seen them, but there were enough to make Jared nervous, and that made her nervous. Jared wasn’t easily spooked.
“Well, it’s been thirty minutes now. Where is he?” she asked looking at her watch.
“Maybe he got eaten by wild dogs,” Jared said.
“Freaking really, man. That’s what you’re going with?” Fletch said.
“Hey! I saw a documentary on it once. It was horrific.”
“I think I saw that but wasn’t that over in like, Siberia?” she asked.
“It was Romania. And it could happen here. Wait and see. Cats too. They’re going to start running around in cat-packs and hunting people down. In a few cat generations they are going to totally forget they were once domesticated animals with carpeted cat condos and catnip-stuffed, toy mice.”
“What about Chihuahuas?” Fletch asked.
“Things of the past, man. Things of the past. They’ll be prey for the kitties.”
“You hear that?” Bradley asked.
The men shut up and she listened hard. She did hear something. It was the throaty whine of a diesel engine at high speed.
“It’s coming from the parkway,” Anna said and turned in that direction. They lifted their weapons to the ready and took cover behind the vehicles.
They all watched the entrance ramp as the noise got closer. She heard the loud chopping of jake brakes and cringed.
“What the hell is that guy thinking?” Bradley muttered.
The flatbed semi flashed its lights at them enthusiastically.
“I think that’s Jimmy Don,” Anna said.
“God forbid he ever just show up normally!” Jared murmured, shaking his head.
“Well, he isn’t exactly normal, is he?” Bradley commented. “But he’s saved our asses so I can look past his eccentricities.”
“Not sure if eccentric or insane,” Jared said with narrowed eyes.
The semi pulled up to them and stopped with a hiss of air. The trailer was long and contained bags of some kind of pinkish grains. Some kind of poison?
“Sorry about that folks, couldn’t remember quite where I put the stuff. Let’s get these here bags offloaded over near them service bay doors. Just stack ‘em there in a big old pile.”
The bags were forty or fifty pounds, and she was tired from loading up the chicken feed, but she helped as well. Better to get it done quickly.
“What are these things?” she asked as she passed Jimmy Don.
“You’ll see,” he said with a gleeful look.
The bags were ominous enough, but the tanks strapped to the back of the flatbed filled her with apprehension. What the hell were they going to do?
They trekked back and forth, dropping bags in front of the door until they had a very large pile. She scrubbed her face and leaned against the shaded side of a pickup truck. She was completely exhausted. It was getting late. They would lose the light in several hours.
“Okay. Get them tanks put around the pile there while I rig up this here machine.”
She watched as he pulled out a box with a handle and a roll of wire. He looked it over and took it to the pile. He began opening bags and dousing them. He stirred things around and seemed to take forever.
She decided it was probably safer to stay right where she was. The tanks held fuel and she was quite sure that the plan was to blow up the dealership. She really hoped she knew what he was doing.
Bradley walked over to where Jimmy Don was kneeling, and he gestured and seemed to be explaining something. Jimmy Don nodded, and they finished up. Fletch and Jared trotted back across the road and Bradley and Jimmy Don soon followed.
“We should probably drive back down thataway, just to be safe,” Jimmy Don said, motioning toward the parkway exit.
She raised her eyebrows at Jared. He shrugged and nodded at her to get in and drive.
The little convoy made its way back to the overpass and parked.
“You want to do the honors?” Jimmy Don called over to Bradley.
“Sure,” he said, and trotted back down the road where Jimmy Don had left the blasting machine and coiled wire. She got out and watched as he picked up both and carefully let out more slack. He stopped at what she hoped was a safe distance away from the impending explosion.
“Ready?” Jimmy Don called from his perch on the Semi’s steps.
Bradley gave a thumbs up.
“Everybody cover your ears!”
Jared wrapped his arms around her, and she watched as Bradley twisted the handle of the blasting machine.
The raw power of the explosion ripped through the peace of the small town. The boom of the detonation radiated outward and triggered an echoing blast from the buildings nearby. The service section of the dealership disappeared into a cloud of smoke, debris, and dust. Glass and concrete shattered and plowed through the air before raining back down in a deadly arc.
Bradley lowered his arms from his head and turned to them with a wide grin. He seemed happier than she had seen him in a long time. All it took was blowing up a damned building.
What was it with men and blowing stuff up?
She was surprised that the cars out in the lot didn’t explode too. Surely they should have?
“Whoowweee!” Jimmy Don said. “I ain’t seen an explosion like that in a while. Sure does make you feel better, don’t it?” he said with a look toward them. Fletch nodded and took off toward the dealership at a trot.
“Stay here,” Jared said and held his rifle down while he also ran to the destroyed building.
Jimmy Don didn’t bother following. She had a thought.
“Hey, have you been over to the pound?”
She felt guilt and sadness working its way through her at her inaction regarding the animals. Why hadn’t she thought about them right after this all happened? She felt like a terrible person. An even worse thought made its way through her brain, but she shoved it aside. It was too horrible to think about and it would drive her crazy.
“Yep. I went over there a day or two after it all happened. There weren’t many animals out there. I let loose the ones that were there and left a bunch of food and water opened up inside so they could get back in to it if they were of a mind to. Went out to the animal hospital on the other side of town too. It was cleared out and the cages were empty.”
“Thank God. I felt horrible thinking there were animals starving to death there.”
“I think most people had enough time to see what was going to happen, so they made ar
rangements for their animals to be taken care of. I went around town with a group from Sten’s bunch shortly after it happened and made sure there weren’t any kids left anywhere.”
The fact that Jimmy Don and Sten went around looking for children that needed help made her feel extremely ashamed. While she and Jared had been concentrating on finding his sister and mother, there had been kids out there that needed help. It was something that started to eat at her, and she knew she would have to live with that failure for the rest of her life.
“Did you find any?” she asked quietly, hoping the news wouldn’t be bad. She didn’t know if she could bear to hear bad news about the children.
“A few. Most were able to fend for themselves a little and they were fine. Like I said, the people knew what was coming, and many made arrangements. You’d be surprised at how many toddlers and kids we found with huge stockpiles of food and drinks. We found a couple of newborns just in time and some older babies. They didn’t even seem particularly upset. Sten took them back to his community. There are a lot of nursing mothers there that will love them. They won't remember it.”
She closed her eyes and swallowed back the tears. She was devastated for the rest of the world. She felt a breeze cool her face a little and inhaled deeply.
“It’ll be okay,” Jimmy Don said. “The world will work itself out eventually, and we’ll find a new normal. People will go on living just like always. One day this will all be just a chapter in the history books.”
She nodded. It was oddly comforting.
“Here they come,” he said, nodding toward the men.
“Pretty sure we got them all. Body parts everywhere and we didn’t see any movement,” Bradley said.
“We should get the fencing back home. I’m sorry babe, the animals…”
“It’s okay. Jimmy Don already went around to check. I’d still like to check the farms around here though,” she said.
“Done that too,” Jimmy Don added.
They all looked at him.
“What? A man has to work. I can’t be sitting around in my rocker waiting to die, and those sons a’bitches, pardon my French, that caused this deserve to pay.”
“What do you mean, the ones who caused this?” Jared asked.
“Me and Harry are gathering intelligence, as you boys like to say,” he said with a glance to Bradley. “We’ve got a contact who thinks he knows exactly what is going on and who started this mess.”
Her mouth dropped open. “Who?!”
“Don’t know yet. We’re trying to get up a group to go check out his story. Supposedly, he’s got inside information. I’ll tell you more some other time. Right now, it’s about to get dark. You folks get on home before them screechers find out what we done to their buddies over here.”
“Good idea,” she said.
They loaded up and drove home. There was a lot to think about and driving alone at twilight made her thoughts take a sinister turn.
Jimmy Don’s contact thought he knew who caused this plague to spread. Did he know who created it? They all knew or figured that someone had been messing with some kind of bug in that Russian lab, but what if this wasn’t an accident?
What if this had all been planned?
Chapter Seventeen
Defenses
Jared
Anna was quiet the night before, and she hadn’t said much today. He didn’t know what had changed, but he didn’t like it. He could usually count on her to call him an idiot at least once, or roll her eyes at him, or something…but she hadn’t done any of those things.
Hank was working on the trench and had made an amazing amount of progress since yesterday afternoon. He was almost halfway done. He and Bradley were getting the chain link panels set up, but it was slow going. They had talked about just digging down, but they decided to set them in concrete supports. It would provide a much higher level of protection. It was also taking much longer than he had originally anticipated.
They had laid out the fencing all along the perimeter and were now mixing and pouring concrete to set the support posts. Fletch and Stew were providing security. Anna was doing something in the house.
“Let’s give this a day to cure then we can set up the fence,” Jared said.
He took off the work gloves and got a drink of water. It was hot, humid, and blindingly bright outside. There wasn’t much they could do here the rest of the day.
“Should we go to the store now? See if they’ve got anything left worth taking?” Bradley asked.
“Yeah, we probably should. I hope to hell those things haven’t started nesting in there though. Imagine walking in and seeing the ceiling of that place covered. We probably wouldn’t make it out alive,” Jared said.
He and Bradley picked up the tools they had been using and put them away. He waved at Hank, and they went in to grab a bite to eat. He wanted to find Anna as well. He was worried about her.
“Where is Anna?” he asked Juan and Maria, who were at the table with the boys.
“I think she’s in the bedroom,” Juan said before shoving a spoonful of rice in his mouth.
He took off his dirty boots and walked through the house. It had become home to all of them, and now he was likely to get yelled at by Violet and his mother for tracking dirt onto their clean floors. He never in his life thought so many people would be living here with him, his mother among them.
He knocked on the closed door and heard a reply. He pushed it open and saw Anna on the bed. She was looking at a picture in her hands.
“Your mom?” he asked, kneeling in front of her on the floor. He didn’t want to dirty up the bed.
“Yep.” She looked depressed and he didn’t like it one bit. He spent years cracking jokes to make her happy and now he couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
“Everything is going to be okay,” he said. “We’re going to be fine. We’ll make it through this, and one day things will be more normal.”
“That’s pretty much what Jimmy Don said yesterday,” she said with a dim smile.
“Oh? Jimmy Don the Oracle? Seems legit,” he teased quietly, hoping to get her mind off of whatever was upsetting her.
“He and Sten went around town when this stuff first happened. They were looking for survivors, I guess. They found kids, babies, abandoned and alone. He said they were all okay and are being taken care of, but it hurt me. It hurts so much to think of all the other kids out there who didn’t…”
She covered her eyes, and he felt his gut clench when she started crying. He got it then. He shifted his mind away from what she had said. There wasn’t a thing in the world they could do to change that. He would have given up his own life if it meant those little ones could be saved. He clenched his fists and sighed.
“Baby, it’s over now. There is nothing we can do about it. Dwelling on it won’t change a damned thing.”
She sniffed and nodded, still covering her face. To hell with being sweaty and gross, he pulled her down into his lap. She clung to him and cried against his neck, and he felt so helpless. He hated it.
He kissed her head and rocked her like a baby until she calmed down.
“What we can do, is make sure we’re secure here. Then, when we come across people that need our help, we can help them. Understand? We have to focus on what we can do, what we can accomplish.”
“I know,” she said, her voice muffled against his neck. He felt a light kiss on his shoulder, and he was ashamed of his body’s reaction. It had been a very long time. He was going to have to move her off his lap. Soon.
“Babe, let me go get cleaned up. I’m all dirty and gross,” he murmured.
She shifted until her legs were on either side of his hips and he felt heat and pressure where he wanted it most. She tightened her legs and shifted against him.
Damn. He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against hers. “You’re about to get it, sweetheart,” he whispered.
“Promises, promises,” she whispered back and tugged his bott
om lip between her teeth gently.
He gripped her hips tightly and rocked against her.
“Let’s go to the shower,” she sighed into his ear.
He picked her up and walked into the bathroom. They only had cold water in the rigged-up shower, but it would be heavenly after the heat outside. He wasn’t sure he’d even notice the temperature.
He would make her forget everything for a little while, if he could. Maybe he would make her forget everything two or three times. He would have to see.
◆◆◆
He opened the door and winced as the hinges creaked. They had to leave the bedroom sometime, but it was a little awkward knowing there was a crowd of people most likely sitting around the table eating lunch. His mom would know. He clenched his jaw and went for it though. This was his damned house, and she was his woman, and if they were uncomfortable with that then they could leave.
He didn’t look back at her as they walked into the dining room. She was probably red-faced and embarrassed as hell. He stopped and turned when they got to the kitchen area. Yep, he was right.
He reached out and put a hand around the back of her neck. “What do you want to eat for lunch, babe? Beans and rice or…rice and beans? Or hey, we could have just rice or just beans. Completely up to you,” he said.
She grinned and he stroked the side of her neck with his thumb.
“No steak and potatoes?” she asked with a fake pout.
“Nary a one,” he said.
Beans and rice sound excellent. Just what I wanted actually.”
“Well, hell. It’s your lucky day, Mrs. Collins-Carson.” He smiled really wide, and her eyes narrowed in suspicion. He winked and turned to the table where the others were eating.
“Oh hey, Ma. I didn’t tell you about me and Anna, did I?”
“Jared,” she warned.
“We are unofficially officially married,” he said and pulled Anna to his side and squeezed. He heard her groan, and she covered her face with her hand.
“He’s just joking, really,” she muttered, and his mom frowned.
“That’s not what the preacher man said,” Jared putting a confused look on his face. “I mean, you cooked meals for me, you moved in with me, you bought me my butterscotch candies when my rheumatic knees were—”
The Salvation Plague | Book 2 | The Mutation Page 13