Home Fires Burning (Walking in the Rain Book 2) (4 page)

“I hope you guys can hang on here.  I’m afraid the mobs won’t wait for the corn harvest before they start swarming the countryside.  They can’t.  Their empty bellies will drive them.”

“Well, sounds like we might need some more help.  You willing to stick around for awhile?  You said you were looking for a place to hunker down.  Now that you have Amy, I guess that goes double.”

Nick sounded sincere, and his comment about Amy wasn’t off base.  I had feelings for her, feelings I wasn’t sure were returned.  Sure, she liked me and felt beholden to me for rescuing her, but other than that, I wasn’t going to presume.  Also, Amy was tough, and sweet, and yes, still really a kid.  She didn’t deserve what happened to her already, and I would not want to expose to the same threat again if I could help it.  Maybe I could earn her a place here.

“I can help out for awhile, Nick.  I surely don’t know what to do with Amy.  She would want to go with me, if I left tomorrow, but maybe a few days here might change her mind.  Like I told Stan, the road is no place for anybody you care about right now.  I’m sorry for Gary’s son and for Gary that way as well.”

“Great.  Let’s get together in the morning.  I can give you a tour and we can talk more.  Dad’s put me in charge of security, which includes my brother Mark, my Uncle Scott, and Bruce Collins, one of the hands here.  They’re all military vets, Army or Marines, and the rest of the men and most of the women can shoot and are considered our backup.”

“That sounds pretty good.  One more thing.  Your Mom mentioned a HAM radio.  Do you guys have a transmitter, too?  My grandfather is a HAM and I’d love to try to get a message to him one night.  I know my family has to be worried about me.”

“Sorry, Luke.  Dad meant to get one, but he ran short of money, and time.  Those things can get expensive and my father was holding out for the best he could afford.  We can listen but not transmit.”

Well, I thought, it didn’t hurt to ask.  I thanked Nick again for the offer and finally managed to get to sleep.  That’s too few men, I decided before sleep claimed me.  We would need way more shooters to hold this farm. 

Before long, the Keller family would need everyone trained up and ready to fight.  Amy was getting there, and I knew Stan could pull the trigger.  The same with Nick and Mark.  The problem was just in the raw numbers.  Everybody needs to be willing to fight and defend the crops and supplies gathered here.  Either that, or every soul sheltering here would wind up dead.

CHAPTER FIVE

Morning comes early on a farm, but I was accustomed to the hours and the lifestyle and I was up before dawn.  Amy met me at breakfast, which was held outdoors on some wooden picnic tables the Keller’s used for family reunions.  I wondered if this qualified, and Nick laughed when I suggested it.

“How did you sleep?”  I asked Amy when Nick wandered off to fill his plate.  Breakfast was pancakes and milk, and after last night’s conversation I knew the milk was fresh squeezed.

“Okay, but I missed having you next to me,” came her shy reply.  Amy looked fresh scrubbed and pretty this morning, and I was feeling good after a shower and shave.  The water was cold, but the pressure was decent and I also took the time to change into one of my cleaner sets of clothes. 

We were both rail skinny and I only noticed when compared to the other residents here.  Our clothes hung loose on our bodies, and I noticed how much my ribs showed when I stood in front of the mirror to shave.

Both of us were assigned bunks in the bunk house and Nick took the time to show us our respective spaces.  The bunk house was really a refurbished storage building with a plywood partition separating the space down the middle.  Ladies on one side, gentlemen on the other, with a primitive bathroom facility tacked on both ends of the structure.  Along with a bunk, we also got a large metal footlocker of our own for storage.

Nick explained the bunk beds and lockers came from military surplus auctions, and that his father was a sucker for a good deal.  Our guide also explained the bunk house might only be a temporary thing since winters would be miserable in the uninsulated, tin sided structure.  For now, the bunkhouse helped ease crowding in the main house.

After breakfast, Amy hurried off to assist Ruth and her mother with household chores and I stopped back by the bunkhouse to gear up.  Nick watched me with a curious eye as I pull on the vest, then strap on the chest rig and tapped my spare magazines.  Finally I clipped on the small patrol pack to the wide leather belt I used with the holstered Glock 21 pistol and magazine carriers I always wore.

“You always wear all that to take a walk?”  Nick asked as we exited the bunkhouse.  He carried a slung PTR-91 and a twin magazine pouch on his belt.  No pistol that I could see.

“Heck, no.  I just salvaged most of this stuff just the other day.  Until I met Amy, all I had was that P95 pistol and scrounged up ammo I carried around in a plastic bag.  But, now that I have it, won’t do me any good sitting in my footlocker.”

Nick shook his head in a placating gesture and he continued my tour of the farm, starting with the homestead.  The Keller family owned two hundred eighty acres of bottom land, with most of the property cleared for crops.  Two fifty acre fields were planted in corn, another fifty acres in soybeans and a fourth fifty acres being planted in grass and being used as pasture for the cattle.  The fifth fifty acre field was being rested this year in rotation and was planted in clover as a cover and to help improve the soil.  All of this came from Nick in a few quick sentences as he first showed me the various equipment sheds where his father had everything from a modern corn combine to an antique two row ear picker.

“Dad and Uncle Sid are working on the combine but the old row picker still works.  No electrical parts to mess with.  Same with the tractors.  The old Massey Ferguson tractors still run fine.  But the new big John Deere he bought five years ago needs replacement parts.  For the electronic fuel control system, no doubt.”

That reminded me, and I told Nick about the tools we’d “liberated” from Sid’s store and Nick got a laugh out of my obvious discomfort at looting from Ruth’s family.

“Luke, Sid showed up with a truck load of computer and electronic gear from his store that survived the pulse, or whatever.  Apparently being powered off and stored in his metal sided shop saved most of his inventory from damage.  Whatever he left behind must not have fit in the boxes Aunt Joan let him bring, but I’ll be sure to pass the word.”

I said that would be fine.  I had the little box of tools in one of my bags in the footlocker.  Right next to the one full of spare pistols and magazines.

“That reminds me of something else, Luke,” Nick started as we approached the chicken house for a quick turn around the cinder block structure.

“What’s that?”

“I remember last night you said EMP, CME or something else, but you never said which way you were leaning on the subject.”

I gave Nick a slow, calculating look before answering.

“Why would you ask me?  I’m just a kid.”

Nick chuckled before answering.

“Yeah, just a kid, who knows a lot of things about a lot of things and is a proven survivor.  What was the science competition for?  The one that brought you to Chicago?”

Now it was my turn to give a little grin.  “I was playing around with some batteries and came up with a way, maybe, to make charge controllers work a little more efficiently.  Without increasing the cost to an arm and a leg.  I had a big display and everything to show my results.”

“For a solar power system?  We have some panels here but the pulse burned out the controllers Dad had in place, and he is leery of replacing them yet.  Uncle Sid says he can do it, but for now we are just using the trickle chargers for the radios and some lights.”

“Well, I’d be glad to help out with anything like that but I’m just an amateur.  I helped my Dad install the upgraded panels he picked up and I pay attention.  That’s all.  To answer your other question, I don’t know.  I thought high altitude electromagnetic pulse at first, since we had no warning, but where are the North Korean troops?  What happened to
Red Dawn
?”

We both laughed at that.  Of course, I’d seen the original version too with Patrick Swayze.  My mom loved his movies.

“What if there was a warning?  What then?”

Nick’s words threw instant ice water on my mood.

“I got a call that day.  Actually, at like three o’clock in the morning.  From a buddy I’d served with who’d gone to work for the government when he got out.  Not some spook, mind you, he worked for the Department of Energy for a while then went into private security for the bigger bucks.

“Anyway, he said the word had gone out to shut down the nuclear power plants.  Shut them down, all the way down, and secure the facilities.”

“Well hell,” I whispered.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.  Heck, at first I thought the lights went out because the grid was simply down.  Now, Kenny didn’t know why they were securing the reactors.  I got the impression his people thought there was a terrorist threat of some sort.”

The implications made my head hurt.  So somebody knew something, after all.

“I don’t guess Kenny lives close by, does he?”

“Arizona.  He was running one of the security teams at Palo Verde.”

“Well, good thing the nuke plants were offline, but I wonder how they are dealing with the radioactive materials?”

“Got me, but here’s something else to think about.  A while after the lights went out, our radiation survey equipment started registering fallout.”

“Crap, this just gets better and better,” I whispered.  The idea had crossed my mind while I was traveling, but given the circumstances I had little way to protect myself.

“Calm down.  This was pretty low levels, not much above background.  And it started about ten days after the pulse.”

I walked over to the cement block wall of the chicken house and leaned back against the solid surface, letting my legs go loose for a moment as I adjusted the small pack I carried.

“So, what do you think?” Nick asked.

“Guessing here, but maybe from Asia?  Those Japanese tea kettles never really got fixed and lord knows what the Chinese had for contingencies on their reactors.  I would have to see the charts and the numbers to plug in the 7/10 spreadsheet. ” I answered offhand, thinking more about what Nick’s latest revelation suggested than what I was saying out loud.  If those reactors really did melt down, I was thinking this was some confirmation that whatever the pulse was, it had affected the whole world.

When I looked up from my musings, I saw Nick giving me a peculiar look.

“Wow, you really are the Boy Scout of the Apocalypse.  That’s what Stan said, and he meant it with the utmost respect, but I really didn’t get it until now.”

“That Stan, he’s a character.  So, what do you ‘get’ now?”

“I get that you know way more than most men twice your age, and your parents spent some time teaching you how to live in an unfriendly world.  To be honest, I asked you to help out around here because I figured having another gun hand might not be a bad idea.  I had no idea know knew all this other stuff.”

I figured Nick deserved a little more information, since he was trusting me to help protect his family.  I remembered how Ruth tried to be evasive about her family’s preparedness and decided to just lay it all out for Nick.

“Dad is a prepper from way back.  Grandpa got him started.  My mother always thought they were a little nuts but I’m sure she has since reevaluated that opinion.  She attributed some of my father’s preparations to PTSD but didn’t pitch a fit when Dad started teaching me to shoot.  So I got some training at an early age, mainly in the form of camping and hunting time.  A lot of the other, well, I like to read and tinker with stuff.”

“Didn’t leave you with much time to be a kid, did it?” Nick asked, and I could hear the real concern there.  He was a father, after all, and as much as he might try, sometimes he would still regard me as a youngster.

“Oh, sure.  I had tons of fun growing up.  We have a working ranch and I have my own horse.  He’s just a saddle horse, no fancy breed or anything, but my Dad let me pick him out at auction when I was twelve.”

“Gelding?”

“Oh, no.  He’s a Palomino stallion, but pretty mellow except of course when one of the mares comes in season.  Dad raises mainly American Quarter Horses but we have a few other breeds including the Palominos.  His name is Archer.  I’d show you a picture but my phone went black like everybody else’s.”

Talking about home made me ache with the urge to get back.  At least now I could spend the next few days resting and trading off some spare weapons and ammo for a few necessities before starting out once again.  For now, we had work to do.

“Alright, Nick.  Show me that hog enclosure but let me hold my breath first.”