Renewal 2 - Echoes of the Breakdown (2 page)

“Sorry about my daughter, Terry. She’s a good girl, but a little too tough for her own good, if you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, she’s tough all right.” Terry said, just a little too wistfully.

“Anyway, this is one of our standard watch platforms. There was a time when we actually lived on platforms like these, for safety. My dad figured out ways to make them hard to spot from the ground. You can see the inside is organized, flat and square, and pretty well protected from gunfire, but the main trick is that we cover the outside with limbs and twigs and anything else we can find that makes cheap, easy camouflage. It’s easy to see out in all directions, but it’s hard to see us until you know what to look for. Even then, it’s really hard to see where to aim.”

“It’s impressive, sir. Even when I knew what to spot down by the lakes, I couldn’t see all of them.” Terry said.

“Yep. Now take a few minutes and tell me what you see.”

Terry watched the 180 degree arc facing out from the village. Bill noted that fact approvingly. No need to watch areas covered by other platforms. Then Terry pointed almost due east.

“I see movement in the scrub, about 500 yards out.”

“Keep watching.”

The movement progressed slowly to the north, until Terry saw a figure stand up, and raise his right hand. “The guy just waved,” he said.

“Yep. For today, the right-handed wave lets us know that it’s our people, and that everything is clear. We have a set of hand-wave signals that we change frequently to keep it hard to guess, and different signals for trouble. Our biggest emergency signal is gunfire, of course. If that occurs, the whole community goes into defensive mode in less than five minutes. When you first showed up, the front watch gave us a signal, and we cleared out everything visible from the main road. We had a good idea that it was you, though, thanks to Dusty. Aggie and I were waiting for you all day. Anyway, we always have patrols out, just in case. You’re looking at one of two close patrols. We also have two long patrols that go further afield. They’re tasked with keeping an eye on the neighbors. Each patrol contains at least one experienced adult. The rest are usually younger than you. We do that to train our young people to be alert for danger.”

“How do you spare all the manpower?” Terry asked.

“It’s not so hard now that we have a good-sized community. It allows us to divide up the labor more than we once did. We have a lot more specialists now, where we used to get by with a bunch of people who could do most anything, but none of it particularly well.”

“I still can’t believe what you have built here. It seems too good to be true.”

“Well, now... That’s a long story.” Bill said, with a laugh.

“Seems like we’ve got some time...” Terry looked hopefully at Bill.

“True. How about I pick up where I left off?” Bill asked.

“I was hoping you would say that,” Terry replied.

Chapter 2 – 2

We sat behind that rotten log for a very long time, listening to human chaos laced with sporadic gunfire. My dad, never one for idle chatter, kept talking to us in that low voice. After a while, we began to think that he had either lost his mind, or he was just thinking out loud. Even if he was having some sort of fit of insanity, we had already seen too much to doubt his thinking.

I could feel the powerful waves of emotion sloshing around inside. My mom went from panic to resignation to sadness to anger in an endless cycle. Kirk was just angry, seething, probably too young to discern the reasons for fear. Lucy was crying quietly into the hand she kept over her face. Tommy and I were watching everything, too young to understand the implications beyond what we could gather from our family and the activity around us.

We saw groups of people walking north, down the road we had driven when we had arrived the day before. We saw other, smaller groups walking the road in the other direction. According to my dad’s rambling words, they were most likely trying to walk back to Manchester, where they expected the opportunities for help to be better. They were still thinking in terms of delay rather than disaster, hotel rooms instead of wandering homeless through the end of the world.

Dad was wondering out loud if anyone would notice the escape hatch he had cut into the fence wire, when someone finally did. We saw a short, stocky Hispanic man and his young boy emerge from the brush behind the school. Dad whispered for everyone to get down and be quiet. The man looked around, and apparently came to the same conclusion my dad had. He and the boy trotted across the small field of tall grass and into the woods where we were hiding. The man was looking over his shoulder, back toward the school the entire way, so it was no surprise to us when he almost tripped over Dad’s shoulder. He didn’t make contact, but the shock of seeing us was enough to make him lose his footing, falling in the dead leaves just behind my father, dragging his young son down with him.

My dad rolled over quickly and was trying to bring his rifle to bear on the man. The man held up one hand while trying to scoot backwards away from Dad with the other.

“No! No! We’re ok. We’re just trying to get away.” The man said, the hand still in the air while the other was now trying to get his little boy behind him.

My dad had the rifle aimed by then. He held it on the man for a few seconds, saw that the man was scared, unarmed, and that the boy was clinging tightly to his father, and let the muzzle swing away.

“Sorry. We’re a little jumpy... Sorry about that.” Dad said.

The man dropped his hands to his sides to support his awkward position on the ground. “You think you’re jumpy? You should see what it’s like in there.” He pointed toward the schoolyard with his chin.

“Yeah, I can imagine from the sound of things. I wish we had a better view. Anyway, sorry about the gun. I had no idea who might come out of the bushes. My name is David.” Dad set the rifle down and held out his hand to the man.

“Arturo, and this is my boy Jimmy.” Arturo shook Dad’s hand and let little Jimmy take Dad’s hand as well.

“This is my family. Beth, my wife, Lucy, Kirk, Bill, and Tommy.” Dad pointed to each of us in turn.

“Pleasure to meet you all.” Arturo smiled and nodded all around.

“Well, you’d better get behind some cover with us. No telling who’ll come out next,” Dad said.

“David, I don’t know if you need to worry too much. Not too many people left in there.” Arturo said with a grim look.

“What happened? We’ve been out here for hours, trying to decide if it’s safe to move.”

“When did you guys leave?” Arturo asked.

“We snuck out the back, right after the lights went out. We saw the crashes at the gate, and the guys trying to climb the fence. When things seemed to be getting really crazy, that’s when we left.” Dad replied.

“Good move. Me and Jimmy have been hiding behind the building all day, inside the fence where they keep the dumpsters. A couple of times, I was tempted to get
in
the dumpsters, but no one ever really looked. Must’ve been the smell.” Arturo made a show of sniffing himself, and we had our first real laugh of the day.

Arturo continued, “Anyway, I didn’t really see much until a little while ago. When it got quiet, I looked out and saw no one in the yard. Jimmy and I were heading around to the front, on the side with the playground. There was an elderly couple sitting on the see-saw, swaying back and forth. The man spotted us walking over and waved to us. He told us they were from Atlanta, and that they were going to wait for a while, to see if help was coming. His wife looked a little more alert, and she shook her head as if to tell us she thought that was a dumb idea. They told us what happened while we were hiding.”

Mom was listening intently now. “What did they say?”

“They said the guard outside the gate tried to keep people from leaving, some people got shot. Then the guardsmen inside the gate got swarmed by the angry mob, some more people died, but eventually the guard was overrun. When the outside guard saw that, they took off, towards the highway. People grabbed the guns and gear off the dead soldiers, and most of those people left too. The man said that there were some fights among the remaining people over scraps, flashlights and whatever else, but eventually the only people left were the ones who had not been fighting at all. Right now, they are huddled in the front lobby of the building, waiting for help. When the man was done with his story, he handed me this...”

Arturo carefully pulled a big combat knife from the back of his belt, in a nylon sheath. “The man said he wouldn’t need it. I asked him if he was sure, and told him that he might need it himself before the night was over. He said, ’Son, I’m dying of cancer. I’m on my way back from my last family visit to my daughter in Kentucky. I’ve got no fight left in me.’ I looked at the woman, thinking that she might have a different opinion, but she just said, ‘I’m with him.’ I thanked them and started looking for a way out. I know the lady was watching us when we escaped through the fence.”

Dad looked at the knife and knew it was from the soldiers. “I wonder how the old man ended up with that knife.”

Arturo shrugged and said, “Hard to say. Maybe he found it while everyone was fighting.”

“Maybe,” Dad replied.

The sun was starting to sink behind us, and Dad was thinking about setting up camp. He got us up and back into our packs. We still were amazed at how heavy they were.

“Arturo, you and your boy want to camp with us tonight? Safety in numbers.” Dad said.

“Yes, David, I would appreciate that very much.”

“Great. We can probably spare some food for you. I want to get farther from the main road first, just in case.”

“Good call, I think.” Arturo looked west, shading his eyes from the sun.

We hiked about a quarter mile across another fallow pasture and into a larger patch of woods. We kept going until we were well inside, under the canopy, deep enough to keep the undergrowth down. Dad found a flat spot among the trees and set his pack down. He had to help mom get her pack off, and then they both helped us to do the same. We crunched around on the old oak leaves until we found a place to lean the packs against the trunks of the trees. My dad started digging through the various packs until he had unearthed the tents,  sleeping bags, and other gear Tommy and I didn’t really recognize.

Arturo helped Dad with the tents, which kept the ‘no-words’ to a minimum. They discussed the situation as they worked, and seemed to come to easy agreements on how the camp should be set up. Dad apologized for the lack of extra sleeping bags, but offered Arturo his and Mom’s ground pads for the night, along with a couple of emergency blankets. Arturo told Dad that would be more than enough in the mild weather.

Mom was trying to arrange some kind of dinner, and failing miserably. Dad had always done our camp cooking during our twice-yearly state park campouts. Dad rescued her as soon as the tents were set up and Kirk was on the bed-making detail for us kids. Arturo and Jimmy would share the tent with our folks that night. Dad set up two tiny camp stoves between the tents, threw stainless steel pots on each, then dumped a dry mix of some kind in one, and a different dry mix into pot number two. Both pots received a long splash of water from a plastic bottle, and a quick stir before Dad set the tops on both of them. He pulled a squashed loaf of bread out of Lucy’s pack and spread peanut butter on half the loaf.

He handed these out in rapid fashion and announced, “No need to wait. Eat up!”

That first round of peanut butter bread lasted all of fifteen seconds. Dad repeated his peanut butter job with the other half of the loaf, and the second time, we ate for almost a full minute. After that, we were still hungry. We waited for more. Dad proceeded to hand out disposable paper bowls and plastic spoons to all of us. We were seated on the ground in a ragged circle, looking at each other like
where’s the picnic table
?

When he decided the masterpiece was done, he asked everyone, “Chicken noodle, or vegetable beef stew? Fresh from Wal-Mart...”

He half poured, half spooned the food into our bowls, and we ate greedily. I could see that our family, at least, was thinking this should be pizza night, and
what was this crap
? By the third spoonful, it no longer mattered. It’s amazing how being terrified can make you so hungry.

Arturo was ridiculously grateful, from our young perspective. Food was everywhere, as far as we knew. Grocery stores, takeout, sit down restaurants, pizza, drive-thru’s, you name it. We were soon to learn how wrong we were.

After dinner, we sat in the dark for a little while. Dad and Arturo had decided that a fire was a bad idea, until we knew more about the local situation. They took the opportunity to swap stories while Dad was sorting through gear with the help of a very small light. Dad finished sharing how we ended up here, at this random place, on this dark night. Then it was Arturo’s turn.

“Me and Jimmy were on our way to meet my parents, in McMinnville. They’ve been working at a nursery up there for years. After the Army, I was down in Florida hanging out with some buddies from our unit, and I met my wife, Juannie. After that, I never found a reason to leave. We live in a little place outside Orlando. We got married in 2003, and had Jimmy the next year.”

“Ah, Jimmy and Tommy are the same age. Tommy was a bit of a surprise for us,” Dad said.

Arturo chuckled. “Yeah, Jimmy was a surprise too... A good one,” Art replied, smiling at his boy. “Anyway, Juannie has a job at Universal. With the tourist season coming on, she couldn’t get away, but my folks were really laying it on thick, so right after school let out, we headed up for a visit, you know, so the grandparents can spoil the baby. This is how far we got. Another twenty-five miles and we would have made it.”

Jimmy got up, stepped over to his father, and gave him a symbolic punch on the shoulder for referring to him as the baby. We all laughed. So, far Jimmy hadn’t said anything really, but he was clearly aware of everything around him. With full night upon us, Dad took that as a good opportunity to send us kids to bed, while he continued to talk. I guess he didn’t realize we could still hear him from the tents.