This Shattered Land - 02 (3 page)

The
rest of the hike back to the cabin passed in silence. We didn’t run into any
infected for a change, which was nice. Chores around our property kept us busy
and our thoughts occupied us for the rest of the afternoon and on into the
evening. Just as the sun was beginning to set, I grabbed a fishing pole and a
tackle box and spent an hour fishing in the stream that flowed around the base
of the mountain. A couple of fair sized brook trout took the bait and gave me a
good fight before I landed them. That put a smile on my face; brook trout are
good eating. The fish went on the grill over the fire pit in the front yard
after Gabe helped me scale and clean them. My big friend was more pensive than
usual as we ate.

“Something
on your mind?” I asked.

Gabe
pulled a bone from his filet and tossed it into the fire. “It just seems like a
shame for those folks to sleep out in the cold tonight, what with them having a
kid and all. We got plenty of room here. Maybe we should let them stay with us
until we leave for Colorado.”

I
looked across the fire at him. “You sure that’s a good idea? We just met those
people. I’m not sure we should trust them that much yet.”

Gabe
was quiet for a moment before he replied. “They seem like good people. I don’t
think they would try anything stupid. Besides, we ain’t gonna need this place
much longer.”

Deep
down, I agreed with him, but I still wasn’t willing to take an unnecessary
risk.

“We’ll
see how things go tomorrow.” I said.

A
little after dawn the next day, just as we were making breakfast, we heard a
single gunshot reverberate around the hills to the south. Birds took flight in
the distance under the hazy yellow light of the early morning sun. A few tense
seconds went by as we listened for the two follow up shots that would indicate
a distress call. They didn’t come. We both let out a sigh of relief.

“I
hope he got something.” Gabe said.

“If
he did, I hope he gets to it before the dead show up.” I replied. A shot that
loud was bound to attract the infected.

We
spent the rest of the morning taking stock of what we needed to raid from
Marion. Medical supplies were at the top of the list, as well as clothes, new
boots, and toilet paper. I never realized until the collapse of civilization
how much I took the little things for in life for granted, like toilet paper.
The stuff is like gold if you can find it. I think there is a certain amount of
irony in the fact that at the end of the world, one of the most valuable and
treasured commodities a person can hope to come across is a roll of ass-wipe.
Maybe that says something about the human race in general.

By
ten in the morning we were finished taking inventory, and our stocks of food
were down to just a couple of week’s worth. After that, we would have to delve
into one of the four plastic buckets of freeze-dried provisions that Gabe had
stockpiled a few months before the Outbreak. The desiccated food lasts damn
near forever if kept in its original packaging, and one bucket would be enough
feed us both for fifty-five days. We would not have to go hungry anytime soon,
but the freeze-dried stuff constituted our emergency rations. We wanted to save
it for the trip to Colorado. As for water, our rain cisterns were full, which
gave us a little over four-hundred gallons of fresh drinking water. That would
keep us stocked for a good long while if we were careful with it.

Most
of the rest of the day saw us doing mundane work around the cabin. We rotated
out the repetitive day-to-day tasks so that we didn’t get too tired of having
to do one thing or another. It was my week to clean the cabin and do laundry.
Gabe had wood chopping, water hauling, and dishwashing duty. Bringing water up
from the stream at the base of the mountain was the most important of these
tasks. We only used the water from our cisterns for drinking and cooking. Any
other use and we got it from the stream.

There
was nothing difficult about cleaning the cabin. Running a broom across the
floor and giving the smooth concrete a once-over with a mop was usually enough
to keep it livable. Other than that, all I really had to do was dust and shovel
ashes out of the wood stove. Laundry, on the other hand, was a different story
altogether. Without the benefit of a washer and dryer, it was an extremely time
consuming, labor-intensive task. This is especially true during the winter
months when it is too cold outside to dry laundry on the clothesline. During
that time, we have to wash clothes a few items at a time and hang them up over
the stove to dry. Now that the weather was finally warming up, we would be able
to do laundry in larger quantities, and do it outdoors. That would save us a
lot of time. After I finished cleaning the cabin, and hanging our clothes and
linens out to dry, I took a few minutes to look over our weapons.

Gabe
had quite a number of firearms before the Outbreak, which we had supplemented with
my own collection and a few other scavenged items. We had a wide variety of
weapons to choose from, but mostly we just stuck to the ones that we could fit
suppressors to. Less noise equals fewer encounters with the undead. Even though
there was enough ammunition on the shelves in our underground shelter to outfit
a small army, we were always on the lookout for more. We could only carry a few
thousand rounds with us on our journey west, but it was still nice to know the
location of a large stockpile, just in case. We had also cached a few boxes of
ammo in the mountains around the cabin along the paths that we traveled the
most frequently. We might never need it, but it was good to know it was out
there if we did.

 I
took a little time during the day to inspect my rifle. As I feared, the barrel
was nearing the end of its service life. The rest of the rifle was still in
good shape, so I stripped it for parts and left the barrel in a scrap metal
bin. It didn’t bother me too much to get rid of it; I had two more just like it
on the gun rack. I grabbed one of them and took it down to the firing range
Gabe and I set up in a clearing at the base of the mountain. Breaking it in
cost me a couple dozen rounds between sighting it in and zeroing my optics.
When I got back, Gabe was sitting on the front porch running the blade of his
big stag-handled Bowie knife over a whetstone. Judging by his posture, and by
the fact that he was honing a knife already sharp enough to shave with, I
surmised that my large friend was getting impatient to go and visit with our
new neighbors.

“You
about ready to head out?” I asked, stopping to talk to him on the porch.

He
nodded. “Ready whenever you are.”

“Okay.
Let me grab a couple of things and then we can get going.”

Anytime
I plan to go more than a mile away from home, I always run through a quick
checklist to make sure I have the bare minimum of equipment needed to survive.
First, I checked my web gear. Both of the one-quart canteens were full. My
multi-tool, LED flashlight, and the suppressors for my pistol and rifle were
all in their pouches. Next, I checked my weapons. The fighting knife was in its
sheath, and my long-handled hatchet sat in its harness. I loaded a thirty-round
magazine into my assault rifle, and worked the charging handle to put one in
the chamber. Four more mags went into pouches on the web belt. I did the same
for my pistol, a Kel-Tec PMR-30 chambered in .22 magnum. The magazines for the
pistol also held thirty rounds each. Five mags for each weapon gave me three-hundred
and sixty rounds loaded and ready to go. With the web gear squared away, I
turned my attention to my rucksack.

If
you pack carefully, a military issue three-day assault pack can hold everything
you need to survive with room to spare. Mine had a slot for a water bag, a
first aid kit, three pairs each of socks, underwear, and t-shirts, two hundred
spare rounds for my rifle, three hundred for my pistol, fishing line,
para-cord, a wool blanket, and a small roll of trash bags. The side pockets
contained toilet paper (lots of that), an aluminum half-liter water bottle, two
day’s worth of MRE’s, and a small flask of hard liquor.

 Yes,
liquor. Cut me some slack, I’m Irish.

The
last item in my pack, secreted in a pocket just under the flap, was a Sig Sauer
Mosquito and a suppressor for it. The Mosquito is a pistol chambered for .22
long rifle, which is much smaller and less powerful than my Kel-Tec’s .22
magnum. I brought it along because I could pack five hundred spare rounds
without adding too much weight to my pack, and because I liked knowing that
even if I lost my other weapons, I had the means to defend myself and bring
down small game. I sincerely hoped I would never need to rely on it, but it was
nice to have anyway.

The
best thing about my pack is that it connects to the web gear harness. That
makes putting everything on and taking it off much faster and easier than if
the two items were separate. Once I had checked and double-checked my harness,
I slid the straps over my shoulders and buckled it on, making sure everything
rested comfortably in its place before going back outside. Gabe’s MOLLE vest
sat on the planks next to his chair. He glanced up at me to see if I was ready
to go in the wordless way by which men often communicate with one another. I nodded.
He put the whetstone down on the table next to him and stood up to return his
Bowie knife to its sheath. It took him all of about fifteen seconds to buckle
on his vest, slip on his pack, and grab his SCAR from where it leaned against
the cabin wall. He shot me a brief, meaningful glare that said I should stop
using old-fashioned equipment, get with the twenty-first century, and use the
damn MOLLE vest he gave that was currently collecting dust on a shelf in the
bunker.

Yes,
he said all that without actually speaking. Guys can do that.

I
frowned at him to let him know that I
liked
my old-fashioned web gear. I
had been using it for years, and I had no desire to switch to something I
wasn’t used to this late in the game. He rolled his eyes and shook his head in
the universal symbol of ‘whatever, dude’ and stepped off the porch to trudge
toward the main gate. I scowled at his back as I followed.

Gabe
set a fast pace on the hike to the Glover family’s camp. The widening gap
between us forced me to jog several times to keep up. Gabriel has a much longer
stride than I do, and when he is in a hurry he can really move. I didn’t want
to give him the satisfaction of asking him to slow down, so I simply sped up.
About forty minutes after stepping off the front porch, we climbed atop the
high ridge that overlooked the campsite. Gabe immediately started picking his
way down the steep hillside, but I stopped for a moment, surveying the area to
see what protection it offered against the infected.

The
ridge I stood on surrounded the camp on three sides. It looked like a giant
hand had scooped out a half-acre section of the mountain a hundred feet from
the peak. Only by approaching the camp from the northeast could one find a
pathway that permitted passage down into the basin. The side not protected by
the ridge was, for all intents and purposes, a cliff. It had trees and shrubs
growing on it, but their angle to the mountainside was a steep one. A skilled
climber might be able to make it up to the edge of the camp, but the infected
would have absolutely no chance. All in all, it was a pretty good spot to build
a home. If Gabe and I had not chanced to see these people on the road, we most
likely would never have known they were here.

That
was not a comforting thought.

 Who
else might be out there among the hills and valleys, unseen and unknown? The
world was living in desperate times, and desperation makes people notoriously
unpredictable. With winter loosening its grip on the high country, I had a
feeling that I might find out who else had taken up residence near my home
sooner rather than later. I resolved to reiterate my concerns to Gabe, and
started down the hillside.

When
I reached the camp, it was immediately obvious that our neighbors had been very
busy since yesterday. The fallen limbs that littered the ground the last time I
visited were gone. A couple of newly felled trees lay nearby, one of them
trimmed for layering on the cabin, and one partially broken down for firewood.
A wide tarp they had spray-painted in brown and green woodland pattern
stretched across poles in a broad tent over the first few layers of the cabin.
It wasn’t exactly an ideal shelter, but it was certainly better than nothing. I
nodded to myself in approval at the family’s ingenuity.

“Good
to see you again.” Tom called out to me, smiling.

He
stood over his makeshift barrel-grill roasting what looked like a couple of
whole venison tenderloins. My mouth watered at the smell. Nearby, smoke curled
around the edges of a fifty-gallon drum that I hadn’t noticed the day before. I
assumed that they were preserving the meat that they could not prepare for
immediate consumption. Smart.

“I
can’t tell you how good that smells.” I said.

Tom’s
smile broadened. “Told you I’d have dinner waiting for you.”

I
smiled back. I had to admit, I was starting to like the guy. “Anything I can do
to help?” I asked.

“You
can help me set up seats for the two of you.” Sarah said from behind me.

I
turned around to see her and Brian rolling a short section of log toward the
fire. It was about the right size to use as a stool. I walked over to help
them.