by Billy Roper
In one Quonset hut turned into a bunker he had found a gun cabinet with a shotgun and a hunting rifle in it, along with plenty of ammunition for them. The nearest living neighbor said that the guy who lived there was crazy and mean, but he had died in his recliner, facing the barred door with a second shotgun across his lap, as peacefully as a lamb. He’d checked out before winter, even, from the looks of things. There wasn’t any sign of how. It was another mystery. Getting in had been a challenge. Finally, he had given up on being clever after knocking and waiting and walking all around it, and just beat the door in. Seeing the armed mummy facing him when it finally gave way had been a relief. You still had to watch out for booby traps in a place like that, however.
Danny carried the pump 12 gauge in a scabbard alongside the right pommel of his saddle, and had traded the 20 gauge and its ammunition for the cart and six ounces of silver, four of which he kept stashed in his boot. He’d spent the rest on food, a little at the time. Some of it for him, some for trade. He ate well.
The department had only enough rifles and sidearms for about half its force, so they were encouraged to carry their own if possible. He wanted to upgrade to an AR or an AK, but those were worth more than their weight in chocolate. The foster girls sure loved chocolate, or anything sweet. What they’d do for a bottle of Dr. Pepper. Or a Mountain Dew, sweet Lord.
The 30.06 rifle and its ammo were stashed back at his cabin under the bed. The second bedroom was for storage of his loot, the floor half covered by stacks of books. Books also lined both walls up to waist level, until the angle of the A made them threaten to topple. They made great insulation and tinder, and with no TV or radio for entertainment, reading had gotten him through the Winter. Bulletproof, too, if you stacked them thick enough.
The nicest house within sight of the road had been a sprawling two story ranch style monster that had ended up being disappointing in more than one way. The at first apparently solitary owner looked to have eaten every scrap of food in the house, then carried bucket after bucket of water from the swimming pool out back to fill up the tub before getting in and slitting her wrists all the way up to the elbow. They had done it the right way, but the red-rimmed tub and its dried out occupant had triggered him, just the same. She looked like a nice lady, too, for a deader. Pictures of her with her kids everywhere. On the walls, in the den. He wondered where they had been? From room to room he looked for anything that wasn’t electronic or plastic or too big to lug back. He found them, two half-sized bundles, discreetly under the covers in an upstairs bedroom. That was one story he didn’t want to know the details of. Curiosity gave the cat bad dreams.
No weapons there except for kitchen knives, one of which he left on the bathroom floor. A whole pillowcase worth of nice rings and necklaces, from an ornate wooden box in the master bedroom, where he took the dusty pillowcase so as to not disturb the children. Let them sleep late. There was lots of nice furniture he coveted, but had no way to carry. He gave one of the necklaces to his mom, and stashed the rest as a nest egg. He hadn’t been back there since. There were plenty others. Mike kept asking about more booze, so Danny made an effort to look, and turned in what he found, except for a couple he left there for later.
If he didn’t hit a new place every couple of days, he tried to at least once a week, even if he had to make a couple of trips. His badge and uniform made him someone to be respected to the normies, even if he was a rookie. His picking made him well off, comparatively. Danny didn’t realize it, but as far as the community’s young bachelors went, he was quite a catch. He could have taken his pick of the litter of local girls, or even bought one of the fosters. Truth was he had thought about it, and had his eye on a couple of them, figuring whether he could get them in. Then, before they even had a chance to pounce, the local girls got some unwanted competition, and the fosters pushed to the back of his mind.
Allie gaped at him when she next saw him at the market. The last time, the first time, he had changed into civvies while he dropped off the cookware he wanted, first. That day he went straight from patrol duty to drop off a wind-up alarm clock and two packs of AA batteries he’d scavenged to his mom. They would be hot items for barter.
“Hi, officer!” she yelled from up the street, startling everyone between them. Danny’s mom glanced up at her, then shook her head in disgust and walked away clutching the new treasures to her sunken stomach. His brothers leered from the piles of clothes nearby, giggling. Sometimes he didn’t know which of them was more retarded, the one with Downs or the one with hormones.
“Hi, Miss Allie,” he replied, smiling down at her from atop Blue. “Nice day, isn’t it?”. He bit his lip at his own stupidity. What color were her eyes, brown or green? He couldn’t tell.
“It is now that I know you’re a deputy.” she batted them at him.
“It is?” he asked. Definitely brown. And riding above freckles the same shade.
“Sure, don’t you know it’s good to have friends in high places?” Allie joked.
“Well, I can dismount if it makes you more comfortable.” Finally, he was catching up…
“No, don’t, I think I prefer you being mounted, so I can look up at you”, she hit back with. Danny felt his ears burn, thankful for the shade of his Sheriff’s department cap to hide the rest of his face.
“But you always have to look up at me, except for when you’re riding my horse!” he argued.
“Exactly!” she exclaimed, laughing. No, green, they were. Huh. What was that called, hazel nut?
He had no good excuse to ride back to the fairgrounds with her this time, or to not let her ride behind him, her hands resting on his hips and the front of her thighs transmitting heat to him with every four-legged step. That’s what happened, though, with him answering her questions about why he didn’t have the cart with him (he kept it at his cabin, and didn’t take it on patrol) and how long he had been a Deputy (about three and a half months). She had tried to climb up first and wiggle in front, but he had known better than to let that happen, at least.
When they got to the Dupree family space Danny was introduced to her father as “Officer McCleary”. He shook hands respectfully with the tall, rangy man in the tattered windbreaker and gray cap. The way the two younger girls ran up to him was proof to the head of the family that he had been here before, even if neither the mother nor Allie had mentioned him. Suspicion clouded Mr. Dupree’s lined face. Danny knew he expected the local cop had shown up to take advantage of his daughter, but there was nothing he could do about that. Not when Allie asked him before he left if she could see his place the next day that he was off duty. Nothing but look questioningly at Mr. Dupree and ask if he would allow it. That did some good. The older man gruffly asked him how old he was, and when Danny said “nineteen”, nodded his approval. Allie squealed with joy and spun around before curtsying to them both ironically. Her mom rolled her eyes and went back to washing clothes in a bucket.
As it turned out, his next day off was three days later. He’d been thinking about this for a while, now. Three whole days of whiles, in fact. When they rode up into his yard ten minutes’ horse walk from the fairgrounds, he helped her down, noticing again that she had redone her hair and was wearing a pretty skirt instead of shorts or jeans. That couldn’t have made the ride very comfortable, but it sure looked nice as she slid off.
It didn’t take him long to give her the grand tour. The place was kind of in chaos even though Danny had straightened up as best he could, but she recognized the logic of his order, and flattered him by pointing it out, room by room. Allie admired the volumes of books, fiction on one side, nonfiction on another, and said how she loved to read, too. She gawked at the neat little kitchen, with every hand-powered utensil known to man, the piles of quilts and blankets for furniture, and all the other little treasures he had collected.
“My goodness, you have more clothes than anybody I know!” she exclaimed. “All of this stuff…you found, you salvaged?” she asked, wonderingly.<
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“Sure. Lots more than that I’ve traded or given to my mom and brothers. And, there’s this, too…”
Allie’s eyes turned from brown to green and widened up considerably when he opened up the box to show her the new black dress, with the tag still on it, that he’d gone back for from the rich woman’s closet. It would be a little long on her, longer than the mini-skirt it was meant to be, but she’d look good in it, he knew. She made him go out into the kitchen while she changed into it to show him. He’d been right. She thanked him with a quick kiss that was enough for right now.
To keep her dad’s good graces, Danny took Allie back a couple of hours later, after showing her the outside of his place and talking about how they’d survived the last half year. She slid down and yelled to her mother, eager to show off the dress, before turning around and running back to grab his hand and press it to her cheek, kissing his palm with her eyes closed. Before he could say anything she was gone again, leaving him to return her father’s grudging wave goodbye.
While he rode away, he thought about how different they were, and how the same.
When the Balk began, Danny was just a blue collar redneck kid who had graduated High School but didn’t have the money for college, and, to be honest, even though he had been offered scholarships, with his dad in prison he needed to stay and help take care of his mom and two brothers. Especially with David being special and all. So, he’d been stuck. He made enough money shoeing horses to pay most of the bills, barely. The world coming apart was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He remembered watching the news and seeing the reports on his phone as the first riots and protests turned violent, then deadly. Once the shooting started on both sides, everybody had to get on one or the other. It had never reached them directly, but it still had brought the rest of the world to a screeching halt all around them.
Allie had been a sophomore cheerleader in a private school, and lived in an upper middle class cul de sac. She hadn’t known what was going on, really, until the teachers started talking about lockdowns and evacuations and her dad had called a family meeting to plan an “extended vacation”. At the state line their luxury SUV had been commandeered by the black militia there, but they were allowed to pass through on foot. Her dad’s hidden gold coins bought them a stinky old truck that turned wood into burnable gas from a shady pawn shop guy, and that had gotten them further north. By that time the stations were all empty of gas and there was no more coming, anyway.
And all of that, whatever else it had done, had brought them together.
That night was the weekly City Council meeting. The Sheriff was technically a County official, but since the Balk the summer before things had eroded down to a shared local level of governance. The actual City Council members stopped showing up when they saw they didn’t have a say no more, and the Sheriff kind of rode over the Mayor, bit by bit, as the months had passed.
The last word from the Federal government had been a shortwave radio transmission requesting local National Guard units to regroup at their respective state capitols for future orders, last August, a directive that many of them seemed to have ignored. The few Guardsmen from the area who’d been deployed had trickled home by early fall telling stories about officers being fragged and whole units mutinying and cities burning up north and back east. Where there were differences between people, those differences seem to have become enflamed into a grinding civil war on a guerrilla level. There wasn’t any Federal government any more, not on this side of the Mississippi, anyway.
Washington, New York, and a few other places had been hit by bombs, nobody knew if it was Muslim terrorists taking their chance or who. Most had been on the ground, but a couple of high up ones had done EMP damage on both coasts. Some folks said the Chinese or Russia or the North Koreans, some said Israel or Iran had done it. There’d been counter-strikes against all of the above suspects, except Israel. The military had pulled back from the border when plague broke out in Mexico and California had seceded, in Spanish. After that, they hadn’t heard much.
A week after the national power grid collapse had led to the final, devastating wave of refugees, in other words right before they had last heard from the government out of Cheyenne Mountain, the state government had sent a representative up with a list of requisitions, including non-perishable food items, which were to be confiscated from “hoarders” and delivered to the state police headquarters for regional redistribution. The local highway patrol Colonel had stood at the barricade with his neighbors a few days earlier, and seen how desperate things were down south. He and his troopers reported to the Sheriff that their true orders were to deliver the food to the state capitol via 18 wheelers, not distribute it locally as promised. They resigned from the highway patrol and applied for positions with the Sheriff’s office, where they were sworn in immediately, all four of them and their fuel, vehicles, arms, and equipment.
Then a half dozen returning National Guardsmen and twice as many local young veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan sandbox wars followed suit, joined by the ShieldWall Network Phalanx and some other militiamen. Now, eight months later, Danny was part of a force of nearly a hundred “deputies”, most of them like himself wearing uniforms of camouflage with bits of officialdom thrown in from the storage lockers. They were the largest military force within a hundred miles. The adjoining counties had also devolved down to Sheriff’s department dictatorships, but they were smaller in manpower and knew it.
For this meeting, Danny was on mandatory attendance rotation even though it was his day off of regular duty. Newbies got all of the crap shifts. Nine other deputies shared his misfortune to maintain order and put some muscle behind whatever the Sheriff said, so he wasn’t suffering alone, at least. A couple of them he knew would be there to talk to.
The other half of the city council chamber was occupied by the Mayor, the City Clerk, the County Tax Collector, the three surviving County Judges (two had died and not been replaced through election or appointment, yet), the former Newspaper Editor who still served as the media, the President of the School Board, and the City Chief of Police, who really just operated a substation of the Sheriff’s department and served at his pleasure, after the Winter’s deprivations. He had been a secret ShieldWall supporter before the Balk, just like Mitchell, anyway, so he went along with the Network.
First, after the obligatory opening prayer by the Mayor (who was also a local Baptist Pastor) and the pledge of allegiance which had twice faced motions in the last month for being done away with as being pointless in light of the circumstances, both motions being tabled due to the heated debate which followed, the Editor gave his news report, not for public knowledge.
The county’s FEMA trickle charger running off the clunky diesel/vegetable oil generator kept the batteries up for a few essential items, including the lights for the meeting and the former State Police’s shortwave transceiver, now kept at the courthouse. From it, news of a sort sometimes came through from the outside world. It sounded crazy out off. Danny always hated hearing about it. He listened, though, to use the news for trade barter next time he made his rounds.
Mandarin language broadcasts from the West Coast were indecipherable without a Chinese translator, but it sounded like they were the only ones broadcasting from there. A Canadian station was still on the air in Nova Scotia, discussing fishing forecasts and tides. A transmission from London calling itself The Voice of the Saxons claimed that a new King had been enthroned in Liverpool, and called on the rest of Great Britain to acknowledge him. They said he had the British Union of Fascists’ support, as well as a treaty with the Governor of Northern Ireland. Moscow and Berlin and Paris were still on the air, all discussing the removal of Muslims, one way or another, from their countries. And crops. Everybody was talking about food shortages, everywhere in the world.
Two different American broadcasts, one from Omaha and the other from Salt Lake City, both claimed to be the legitimate United States government, but the latter sound
ed more like a LDS program, and probably was. The Air Force General in Nebraska wasn’t even in the line of succession, but from what they could tell nobody else was, either. He didn’t have much fuel left for his planes, they figured, but by God, he still had them. There were a few state channels, also in the Midwest, Iowa and Kansas and Wyoming and even Idaho, but all they had was local news which was of little use to their present predicament. They were talking about getting the corn planted this year using ethnanol they made themselves.
The Appalachians were doing okay, but focused on their own troubles, too. Everything from Texas was in Spanish, but there was still fighting going on in the north parts, it sounded like. The Editor said the New Afrikan station in Atlanta had gone off the air, he guessed because of another revolution. This was their third, or maybe fourth.
All of it was kind of interesting like a movie used to be, but it didn’t have anything to do with his life if it wasn’t happening within twenty miles of where he sat. Their information about closer events came from contacts with traveling trade caravans and merchants, plus exchanges with neighboring county governments. Mostly they were worse off, less organized, and hungrier than they were.
There had been some progress with gaining information from the University of Wyoming in Cheyenne about how to get the hydroelectric dams north and south of them going again. The City Clerk took over at this point and talked about how she had found fourteen local linemen and power company employees for an expedition to the closest dam to inspect it, if the Sheriff approved of the mission.
The ruler of the county stood, having waited to be summoned in this manner into the conversation. He was a big man, past middle aged and gone to seed, but with muscle under the flab and hard steel in his eye. He’d consolidated his power ruthlessly and efficiently, and everyone in the room knew who the ultimate authority was. He could afford to be genial, from his position. That’s why he winked at the City Clerk before he nodded and spoke.