An Unkind Winter (Alone Book 2) (9 page)

     It was equipped with a thermostat which told what the temperature inside the oven was at any given time, and merely had to be checked every few minutes to keep the temperature at the desired level.

    He used Sarah’s recipes for sweet bread, whole wheat bread and zucchini bread. At first he had trouble getting the bread to rise, until he figured out he wasn’t letting it sit on the counter long enough for the yeast to do its work. Once he conquered that problem, it turned out he was a pretty good baker.

     Sarah would have been proud of him.

     One of the last things Sarah had bought before she and the girls flew to Kansas City was a bread slicer.

     It was basically a rectangular cutting board, with pieces of slotted plastic mounted to each side. It came with two bread knives, and the operation was so simple even Dave could handle it. He merely let the two loaves from each batch in the oven cool. Then he put them into the slicer, one loaf at a time, and used the grooves in the plastic plates as guides to cut the bread into slices.

     He learned not to press down on the knife, because it tended to crush the bread easily. He also learned that the cooler the bread, the easier it sliced.

     He’d spent a good potion of the summer baking bread on the back deck, two loaves per batch, three batches per day. Once it was sliced, he put two slices into each of over two hundred sandwich-sized zip lock bags, and then stacked them neatly into his freezer. It would be enough bread to get him through the winter, and he’d kill the rest of it before setting out in the spring to find his wife and daughters.

     In his safe room, Dave placed the bag of frozen meat next to the fireplace to thaw, if the daytime temperatures rose above freezing. He filled the stew pot full of water and dumped the dried vegetables into it to soak.

     In the night, after he restarted the fire, he’d combine the meat and the vegetables and let the pot simmer over the fire for a several hours. The stew in the pot would be enough to feed him for at least three days, maybe four. It could be reheated quickly in the microwave during his generator time, and would keep quite nicely in the cool temperatures of the room.

     The can of Vienna sausages and four slices of bread would be his breakfast when he awoke in the evening.

     He tossed them under the comforter on his bed to take the chill off of them. His body heat would do a great job of keeping them at an edible temperature. He’d try not to roll over onto the bread as he slept.

     But if he did manage to crush it, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

     It would still taste the same.

-17-

     Mikey had waited a few days before coming back. Before he left the Castros’ house the day he saw the mysterious stranger, he’d snuck into the back yard to see what was in the black bag.

     He was disappointed to discover that it just contained empty soda bottles.

     Still, the stranger intrigued him. Why would a man go out to pilfer food and water, and come back with empty bottles? Why would he go through all the trouble of cutting a secret gate into his neighbor’s fence, when he could easily have come and gone through his own gate?

     And finally, what was in the stranger’s house that was so valuable he’d go through all the trouble of installing screws along the top of his fence to keep others out?

     He’d seen the rabbits. Was that enough to go through all the effort? Or was a man capable of raising rabbits under everybody’s noses capable of hiding something else as well?

     It all boiled down to one thing… that wasn’t a normal house. If somebody went through all that work to protect whatever was inside of it, it must be pretty valuable.

     Whatever it was.

     It had taken Mikey longer to get here than he thought it would. He’d forgotten what street he was on that night he tried to hop the fence and gotten his hands skewered. In the dark, most of the streets looked alike.

     He’d waited outside the Castros’ house for over two hours, waiting for the stranger to come out the door and go do his looting.

     Finally, just after two a.m. he decided the man had already left.

     But just to be safe, he’d proceed slowly.

     There was another team of looters on the block. He could hear them a few houses down. They were talking as they made their way between houses. What fools. It was just a matter of time before someone heard them and shot them. He hid in the bushes until they worked their way past him. Then, finally, he went into the Castros’ house again. The front door was unlocked, as he knew it would be.

     He turned the knob slowly, quietly, and eased the door open. There was no noise or movement from the inside.

     He peered around the corner into the house.

     There was a full moon on this night, and it cast an eerie orange glow into the Castros’ living room.

     There was no one there.

     Mikey crept into the house and closed the door behind him.

     He’d learned that looters were creatures of habit. He’d observed many other looters at work in the previous months. They, like Mikey, had set routines they followed from night to night.

     The stranger would be the same way, Mikey decided. He’d go out early in the night, and come back just before sunrise carrying his black bags full of stuff.

     That gave him several hours. He could go through the stranger’s house at his leisure.

     He’d have to do it in the dark, since he wouldn’t have the option of waiting until daylight. But he’d looted houses in the dark before and was pretty good at it. And the full moon would help light his way as he worked from one room to the next.

     Looking for whatever treasures the stranger was trying so hard to hide.

     Dave had had a fitful sleep. He woke up the first time in mid afternoon because he was thirsty. So thirsty he downed two small bottles of water.

     And then, perhaps predictably, he woke up a second time a couple of hours later, desperately needing to go to the bathroom.

     Going to the outhouse in the chilly temperatures woke him up, and he had trouble getting back to sleep.

     It didn’t help that every time he closed his eyes he had horrible visions of a big blue and white airliner crashing nose first into the woods south of Kansas City. And of his wife and daughters screaming in their last moments of life.

     So when Dave finally got to sleep, it was understandable that he slept right through sunset, and even past midnight.

     He did wake up once and saw it was pitch black in his safe room. But he wasn’t concerned.

     He had no place to go on this particular night. Nothing to do except cook his stew and read books, maybe watch a movie or something.

     And he had all night to do that. There was absolutely no hurry.

     So he let himself drift off to sleep again.

-18-

     Mikey moved slowly, cautiously, through the Castros’ house and into their back yard.

     He paused at the fence, next to the black trash bag the mysterious stranger had left behind, and listened for sounds coming from the stranger’s house.

     Nothing.

     It was as Mikey had expected. The stranger was already gone, doing his nightly looting. He likely wouldn’t be back until just before daybreak.

     He carefully removed the slide bolts holding the passageway into place and opened it.

     He left it open as he crawled through it, and was momentarily startled as two rabbits hopped past him and into the Castros’ back yard.

     The deck was well built and sturdy. It was made of good wood, too. It didn’t creak or pop as Mikey made his way across it and to the sliding glass door.

     The door was unlocked.

     He slowly slid it to one side, making practically no noise at all.

     Mikey slipped into the house and slid the door closed once again.

     Then he paused for a full two minutes, listening. Letting his eyes adjust to the darkness of the house. Trying to get a feel for the house’s layout.

     He already knew the downstairs front bedroom was completely empty. He’d snuck a peek into it as he passed it by on his way to the Castros’ house a few minutes before. The light from the full moon had shown into the bare window, and Mikey could see the room completely devoid of furniture.

     The moon also helped him notice the “foreclosure” sign on the front of the same window.

     “Well played, dude,” he’d muttered under his breath. “Well played indeed.”

     Now that he was in the house, the only question was, were there people upstairs? Did the stranger have a family he left behind every night when he went looting?

     Mikey crept silently up the stairs. If there were others in the house, he’d work his way back down, silently relieve the kitchen of whatever silver it might contain, and call it a night.

     If, on the other hand, the upstairs was empty and the stranger lived alone, he’d rifle through all the drawers and usual hiding places upstairs as well.

     He took off his shoes and proceeded slowly up the stairs in his socked feet, a single step at a time.

     He never noticed the safe room in the den around the corner from the stairs. Wouldn’t have been able to see it anyway. The den was completely blacked out, with heavy insulated drapes pulled tight across all the windows. Even in the daytime it was dark in there. At nighttime it was blacker than the devil’s heart.

     At the top of the stairs, Mikey paused again. He slowly looked around. Every one of the bedroom doors was open. Another good sign.

     From his vantage point he could clearly see into one of the rooms. The bed was empty.

     Had Mikey been tired enough to lay on the bed, he likely would have noticed it felt a bit… unusual. It might have caused him to investigate further, and if he had, he’d have discovered the cuts Dave had made into the underside of the mattress, so that he could pull the stuffing out of it and replace it with bags of dried food.

     But Mikey wasn’t tired. And he was on a different mission. So what most people would have considered a treasure worth more than gold or silver was passed by.

     He stealthily made his way through the second floor, carefully peeking into each room. The next room he came to appeared to be an office. There were two computer desks, facing one another, each with its own computer.

     In a different time, the computers might be worth something.

     But not now.

     He passed the room by, knowing that people never stashed their valuables in computer desks. They were always in more intimate places. Places their kids would never look, for example. Like underwear and lingerie drawers. Nightstands. Under the bed in the adults’ rooms.

     He stepped into another bedroom only long enough to see that the entire room was lined with posters.

     A kid’s room. Adults didn’t hang posters in their bedrooms.

     He stepped back out and made his way to the largest room on the second floor.

     Once upon a time it had been Dave and Sarah’s room. It was the room where Dave and Sarah once lay together and talked long into the night, sharing their hopes and dreams for the future. It was where they’d had many arguments, far from the ears of their sleeping children. It was also where they’d made up from those arguments. It was where both of their daughters were conceived.

     But Mikey didn’t know that. Moreover, Mikey wouldn’t have cared. To Mikey, this was just the room with the king size bed. And therefore the room most likely to contain the treasure he was searching for.

     He noticed the blinds were completely closed in the room. The stranger’s attempt to make the house look vacant, he assumed.

     Screw that. A little bit of moonlight would make it easier to conduct his search.  So he opened the blinds and bathed the room in an orange-tinted glow.

     He went first to the jewelry box on top of the dresser, of course. Burglars always make that their very first stop.

     He found what could have been a diamond brooch, although it was hard to say for sure in the dim light. He tossed it into his bag, along with a couple of gold chains and a pearl necklace.

     Next, to the dresser drawers, where he went strictly by feel. Early in his career, he did his raids only during the hours of darkness. He got very good at finding things of value hidden underneath socks and underwear. Later, after he’d refined his technique and simply waited in an empty house until daylight, it became possible to do a more thorough search.