Walking in the Rain: Surviving the Fall (10 page)

CHAPTER NINE

We rode for a long time in silence, each of us occupied with our own thoughts while at the same time maintaining a high level of readiness.  I watched the green world flash by outside my window and mulled over what I had learned.

Torture, as it turned out, had not been necessary to get the wounded man to talk.  Heck, once he started the hard part was getting him to shut up.  Mainly about the gruesome wound in his thigh, where my rifle round had apparently broken his femur as well as blowing a huge chunk of muscle and tissue out of the middle of his leg.  The bandit cried and moaned a lot as I tried to staunch the flow of blood but one look told me this guy did not have long.

Stan asked the questions and I stood there with my knife in hand, ready to start carving if the well ran dry.  Before the dying man lapsed into unconsciousness, we had what we needed and I set about scavenging the dead.  The last of the bandits expired before I finished with my chores. 

Stan watched me work for a moment before walking back to relieve his wife from her watch duties.  He seemed a little green, like all the blood and death might be getting to him, but every time I checked he was still maintaining a good lookout.

Stripping the dead took about fifteen minutes and in the end we added three AR-15s, a pair of twelve gauge shotguns, and what appeared to be a select fire Colt M4.  The Oklahoma National Guard emblem made me wonder briefly how the weapon had ended up here, but I set that thought aside and grabbed all of the magazines and ammunition I could find.  The magazines and ammo for the M4 and the AR-15s were interchangeable, so that was a plus.

“What about their truck?” Amy asked.  She had kept watch on our back trail while Stan focused on the road ahead.  So far, neither had reported any sign of traffic, pedestrian or motorized.

“We can’t take it with us,” I replied sadly, “we don’t have enough of us to properly protect the one we have.  Splitting up is not a good idea.”

“What about taking it with us a ways and hiding it?”  Stan suggested.  “There’s plenty of old dirt roads and logging trails along the way.  Just go until we find a likely place, pull off and conceal it for later.  Maybe we can come back for it with some men from the farm.  Just having a running vehicle these days is a valuable asset.”

Since the dying bandit had assured us they were not herding us into an ambush, Stan’s idea made some sense.  We decided to at least try to stash the truck for later recovery and I drug the bodies into a convenient ditch and let gravity dictate their final resting places.  With the plan being to run us off the road, rape the women and kill us men folks, I wasn’t feeling like wasting any time digging graves.  For his part, Stan offered to help but I wanted him off his bad ankle and back in our truck.

“I think I might know a place,” Ruth finally volunteered.  “There’s a turnoff about four miles up the road.  Leads to an old private cemetery that nobody has used in years.  The locals know about it but since there’s only a tumble down old shed nearby nobody would think to salvage from there.”

Stan gave his wife a funny look and Ruth laughed despite the tension of the last hour.

“No, honey, it’s not an old make out place from when I was in high school.  One of my great, great uncles is buried out there and I went to see if I could find the tombstone.  You know, helping mom with her genealogy research.”

We all agreed this sounded like a decent plan so I volunteered to drive the captured one ton farm truck while Ruth followed with Stan, Amy and little Sophia riding with her.  I repeatedly warned Ruth not to slow down near the rest stop and for everyone to be ready to fight.  Despite some funny looks, nobody said anything at the time.

Before we started out, I laid a feed sack down in the driver’s seat and tried to squeegee the inside of the windshield with a piece of shirt salvaged from one of the dead to clear the glass enough to drive.  Both the driver and passenger had been struck in the head by Stan’s shots and the truck cab resembled the inside of a blender when I pulled out the two corpses.  A blender set on high and used to puree brains, I thought to myself.

So our little convoy of two vehicles rumbled on down the road, and I felt that familiar touch of ice on my spine as we drove past the roadside rest area ahead.  Splitting my attention away from the asphalt strip was bad practice, but I’d insisted I could make it on my own and I was determined to do just that.  Most of the rest area was hidden by a row of bushes and I could just make out the shape of metal canopies through the twisted limbs. 

Nothing moved, but I kept my hand tight on the pistol grip of the M4 resting on the seat next to me.  I’d reloaded the carbine and kept three spare magazines handy next to the weapon.  At the first sign of trouble, I intended to point this bullet hose in that direction and open the spray. 

Only after we were a good half mile past the turnoff did I relax enough to turn my attention fully back to the road in front of me.  I resolved not to make that mistake again and listen when Amy insisted she could ride shotgun for me.

The cemetery was just as Ruth described it, an overgrown wide spot next to a dusty dirt road that looked undisturbed since well before the lights went out.  I pulled the rig up next to the only structure around, a dilapidated shed squatting in a second clearing behind and adjacent to the tombstone dotted piece of property.

Ruth said the shed was left over from when the tiny cemetery association still maintained the property and the last members had probably died off back before any of us were born.  Now, usually such a building would have been appropriated by one of the many wandering meth cooking gangs that roamed the rural landscape but Stan expressed doubts any would have bothered the cemetery.  Meth heads were, by definition, idiots or they wouldn’t be poisoning themselves in the first place, but they were also highly paranoid and setting up shop next to a bunch of dead bodies might make them even twitchier than usual.

Stan and I cleared the shed and found it to be completely empty except for signs of raccoon scat on the dirt floor and what might have been the scattered skeleton of a rat in one corner.  I drove the heavy duty work truck, carefully, into the narrow space and killed the engine. 

A quick check of the glove compartment and under the seat revealed no useful items, just random receipts and other useless pieces of paper, so I slid out the driver’s side door and carefully maneuvered myself out of the tight confines of the shed.  Fortunately, the truck’s heavy pipe bumper just cleared the rusted sheet metal tin of the shed’s door.

“We all good?” Stan asked, limping back over to our truck.  Sweat covered his tanned face and I knew the ankle had to be killing him but he kept going without a murmur of complaint.  The more time I spent with the man the more I realized he was just that solid.  Stan Schecter was the right guy to be watching your back on a trip like this, and I was glad he was watching mine.

“Yessir.  Just took a last look but I think we got everything worth taking.  Let’s fuel up and be on our way.”

“Disabled the truck already?”  Amy asked as I approached.

“Nah, just took the key.  Heck, I could barely squeeze out on the driver’s side.  Let me get the fuel can and top this baby off.”

Taking care of that little chore quickly, I restrapped the fuel containers in the back of the truck and slid into the front seat once again.  I estimated we had about twelve gallons of diesel left in reserve split between three cans in addition to the full tanks on the truck.  That should get us to Siloam Springs even if we had to take every dirt road and goat path between here and there.  I decided to use some of that extra fuel and I asked Ruth to head further up the dirt road for a little ways.

“Does anybody live back here?”  I asked her.

“Don’t know.  I just came out the one time but the road looks pretty overgrown.”

When we came to a spot in the road where the trees overlapped the road to form a canopy overhead I asked Ruth to stop and she braked without hesitation.  I hopped out and glanced around, clocking my surroundings like a gopher popping out of his hole.  I saw thick stands of waist high and better saplings growing all along the side of the road and went to my backpack to retrieve my hatchet.

“You going to try covering our tracks?”  Stan asked, observing from the back seat as I hacked down a dozen leafy saplings.  He was watching around us, his eyes moving constantly like I had done earlier.  Ruth had backed up and turned the truck around, facing the direction we needed to go, and I was almost finished weaving the drag into place.

“If it works, yeah,” I replied.  “If not, I want to make it look like we drove out on this road but not in, especially around the cemetery.  Mess up the tracks, anyway.”

Using a few scraps of rope, I secured the saplings into a rough spread and tied off to the truck’s trailer hitch.  Ruth smiled at me when I said, “Punch it.  But softly.”  She knew what I meant.  After a few miles of sweeping the dirt road, we pulled up to the hardtop road as a blistering twenty miles per hour.

Once I cut loose the drag and dismantled the sad looking collection of tree limbs, I tossed the rolled up rope in the back and hopped into the cab.  Ruth took off again, and this time brought the speed up to a more respectable forty miles per hour. 

I had the CETME rifle wedged against the door frame of the truck but now the M4 sat in my lap, barrel barely protruding out the window.  I really wished we could have brought the other truck as well as backup transportation if nothing else, but our numbers dictated the decision.  Maybe Stan or some of Ruth’s family could come back for it if the world ever settled down a little.

“That thing fully automatic?”  Stan asked.

“Yeah.  One of the guys back there must have stole it from a National Guard unit.”

“You ever fired one of those before?”  Amy asked from her seat behind me.

“Yeah.  Something like this, anyway.”

“That must have been some kind of Boy Scout troop,” Stan said with a laugh in his voice.

I just smiled and said nothing.

Actually, my father had one but I kept that part to myself.  Dad had some friends still in the Corps when he retired, and one of them must have supplied the rifle my father kept buried in a metal tube out behind the back fence.  It was a full length M16A3 with select fire capability rather than the three round burst setting as seen on the M16A2. 

Of course, my father did not explain this, but Wikipedia is a wonderful learning tool.  Was, I reminded myself.  Now we were back to printed reference material.  Crap.

Then I laughed and got weird looks from everybody in the truck cab, as usual.

“What were you thinking about?”  Ruth asked, almost like she was scared of my answer.

“Just thinking that now I am going to have to do all my school research papers using actual paper reference sources.  Instead of the internet.” 

“What?  Who’s going back to school?  Luke, school’s out forever…”  Amy sang that last little bit, echoing an Oldies rock song I could barely recall.

Ignoring Amy’s comment, Ruth asked the question I had been quietly dreading.

“Luke, what was it about the rest stop that had you so, well, tense?”

“Sorry about that.  My paranoia sometimes gets the best of me,” I replied sincerely.  I worried about that at times, now mainly late at night after Amy fell asleep.  If the world ever somehow got back to normal, what would I do?  Finish high school and go off to college?  Study engineering like I planned?

I couldn’t sleep through the night without nightmares and I woke up every few hours to check the perimeter.  I literally slept with a gun in my hand, and if the lights came back on tomorrow, what would I do then?  My paranoid mind was fully engaged, and I worried about ever being able to normal.  Living like an animal can do that to you.

“What happened, Luke?”  Amy voice, soft and caring, suddenly broke though my dark thoughts. 

“Alright, I guess it is story time.  But everybody needs to keep their watch up, since we will be getting close to Berryville pretty soon.  Eyes out.  That includes you, Sophia.”

From the soft gurgle I heard, the baby was awake now, too.  Hopefully she would not understand the words coming next.  I sighed, but figured they needed to hear this story.

“About two weeks after I left Chicago, I was out of food again and nearly out of water as well.  I’d been scavenging what I could find along the way but pickings were real slim because everybody else was doing the same thing. 

“I think it was around Quincy, Illinois but I’m not really sure.  The little road I was on had some foot traffic and I was real wary of some of the folks I was traveling with.  But we were all headed the same way, so I tried to be polite and just kept my distance.  Those with families were the most dangerous and unpredictable.”

“Why was that?”  Amy asked cautiously, as if unwilling to offend our newly minted friends.

“They had the most left to lose, I guess.  Anyway, we are all just about out of water when someone noticed the sign for a rest stop ahead.  There were five or six of us walking close together at that point, not together but, you know, we just happened to be near each other was all.  I’d learned earlier that some of the older rest stops still had hand pumps, so we could at least fill up our water bottles if this one did.”