Walking in the Rain: Surviving the Fall (12 page)

While Amy took her own clean up time in the bathroom, I sat by the one open window we left and slowly broke down and checked the CETME rifle by the light of the fading sun.  Using a small bottle of brake fluid, I cleaned the barrel and swabbed the chamber, trying to remove any build up of gunk.  I didn’t care if the rifle looked pretty or not as long as the action functioned properly.

Watching me work, Stan quickly began to copy my efforts, first cleaning the Savage and then the AK I’d loaned him.  When I explained about how the brake fluid worked as a substitute for cleaning solution, he mentioned reading that piece of information somewhere and promptly forgetting it.

When Amy joined me later on our little pallet, she curled up at my back and complained that I stank.  Ruth, sitting first watch, overheard the comment and tried to stifle a giggle.  The sound made me grin in the dark. 

“Sorry dear.  I think we all need a bath,” I tried to reply diplomatically.

“Not that silly.  The brake fluid.  I can still smell it on your hands.  One of my science teachers at school said that stuff can cause cancer, you know.”

I grunted in agreement, but I figured cancer would not be much of a concern.  Heck, I was sort of amazed I’d lasted this long.  I rolled over, gave Amy a hug and drifted off to sleep.  Amy whispered something but I was too tired to catch the words.  At least, that was what I told myself.

Love you too, I thought as my mind drifted off into a troubled slumber.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

              “So, what happened next?”

              Amy’s question from the back seat caught me off guard.  We were twenty minutes into our drive, and so far conversation in the truck cab had been surprisingly quiet over the loud purr of the engine.  All four of us adults had gotten some much needed rest by stopping early the day before, and despite my sleep being split by the three hour watch I was feeling pretty darned good.

              We’d risen before dawn; more due to little Sophia’s fussing than any eagerness on our part, and made a quick check of the store for any usable items.  I felt a bit uncomfortable rifling the shelves and cabinets since this business was owned by Ruth’s family.  Awkward, but Ruth insisted that her Uncle Sid and Aunt Joan would want us to take anything we needed or could use.

              “They’ll be at the farm, so think of it as returning the property to its rightful owners,” Ruth explained when I had voiced my concerns.  Really, I was surprised to find I still had any lines I was unwilling to cross.  That made me smile to myself, since apparently salvaging from a friend’s family was still too far for me.                

        The store really offered little in the way of items directly useful but I found a few voltmeters and assorted small electrical tools that Sid might find a use for, and placed them in a box.  Amy located a pair of one gallon water bottles stored in one of the cabinets and we added that to our meager haul.   The small house next door that belonged to the Stevensons was likewise stripped of any food, water or firearms and Ruth gave a happy little cheer when she saw the attached two car garage was empty.

              “Sid and Joan had a pair of bug out vehicles, one a Suburban and the other a pickup, with non-electric diesel engines” Stan said, “so they both likely got out with everything from their basement storage.”

              “If they were so well set up here, why leave?” Amy had asked.

              “Safety in numbers,” I said.  “This is a nice little homestead but it is on a county road and with just the two of them I bet they would be hard-pressed to maintain security.”

              Nobody had anything to say after that, so we loaded up in our same order as the day before.  I had an idea where Ruth wanted to go but I worried how close the route would take us to the state park.  Desperate people would have already flocked to the area lakes for water sources, eventually fouling them with improper sanitation, and I worried about ambushes or more barricaded roads.

              And now, Amy brings up a story that needed to be told, but I cringed at the thought of reliving those moments.

              “Yeah, Luke, what is the deal with your aversion to rest stops?  We never did hear the reason.”

“Alright,” I surrendered with a sigh as Ruth chimed in her opinion. 

“I did say I would finish the story and I will but please, don’t ask me to repeat it, alright?”

              “Amy, Ruth, if Luke thinks it’s that bad, maybe we should just let it lie,” Stan reasoned.

              “No,” I said with a wan smile I tried to plaster on my face.  “You guys need to be aware of this.  First, anyone know how long it takes a person to starve to death?  A reasonable sized person, like before?  No food but with water?”

              “A week?”  Ruth guessed.

              “Three weeks?”  Amy’s guess was better.

              “Forty days, more or less, is what I read somewhere,” Stan finally said and the two women made their guesses.

              “Yes, Stan, that’s what I’ve read too.  That forty day point is important for a few reasons, and the first is that we are well beyond that milestone.  People have already starved to death and will continue to do so.  Hard to believe somebody could starve to death in the summer, but we’ve probably all seen it.”

                 “Now, this rest stop I was talking about earlier, somewhere outside Quincy, looked pretty shady but we needed the water and water had been offered.  No food, but enough to fill our water bottles.”

              “It was a trap?”

              I could hear the question in Amy’s voice.

              “Yes, of course, it was a trap.  They had an older guy out front greeting the travelers, offering water, and ushering us on back.  The squatters also had guys flanking us as we entered but they didn’t look to be armed and I didn’t think anything about it at the time.  As soon as the three of us turned that last corner, we all knew it was a trap, but by then the escorts were trying to grab our arms and lead us further into that, well, that slaughterhouse.”

              “What did you do?  How did you have enough ammo to get clear?”  Stan asked urgently, caught up by the story despite my best efforts to make it sound like some mundane chore.

              I shook my head and realized most of my fellow travelers would not have seen the motion.

              “Guys, this was two weeks after the lights went out.  And I was coming out from Chicago.  I didn’t have a gun then, just my club.”

              “What kind of club?”

              “The kind you make out of the wooden clothes hanger rod from your hotel room.  Or at least, that’s where mine came from.  I wrapped one end with some skateboard tape I found and tried to sharpen the other into a point but all I had at the time was a piece of a kitchen knife to scrape at the wood.

              “Anyway, what I saw in that restroom is what I wanted to warn you guys about.  Forty days to starve is what we agreed, right?  This was day fourteen or fifteen and they were already eating the dead.”  

              “What do you…oh, shit, you are kidding, right?” 

              I couldn’t see Stan’s face but from the way he was breathing hoarsely, he got it.  In a moment, Amy did too.

              “I’d heard, but that was like an urban legend, isn’t it?”

              “What are you guys talking about?  Eating dead what?”  Ruth was having to pay more attention to the road and the full impact of my words did not seem to sink in at the moment.

              “Honey, what he means they were eating…the other travelers.  The ones they were ambushing at the rest stop.”

              “If one of the guards hadn’t gotten a little anxious and moved ahead of me, I don’t think I would have gotten out.  They had men armed with machetes waiting just inside the doorway, and the guy to my left caught the blade right in the throat.  The guy assigned to take me hesitated.”

              “What did you do?” Stan blurted.

              “I froze up, for just a split second.”  I closed my eyes, trying to clear the image from my mind.  A nude body, strapped to an overhead rope hung in the corner like a deer being processed.  Standing around the partially dismembered corpse were three creatures in rubber boots and dark coveralls, all intent on their butchering chores.

              “Then, I just started fighting to get out of there.  I used the club, swinging it like a baseball bat and not really caring who I hit.   The other guy with me, I never knew either of them by name, he had a knife and a piece of rebar and we fought together, but there were nearly twenty of them running at us.  I know at least one had a gun because my new partner went down with a bullet in his belly.  Everything was a blur after that, but somehow I got out and back to the road.  Bloody and bruised, I somehow made it out.  I didn’t stop running for at least a mile.”

              What I didn’t say was that was the first time I ever killed anybody.  After I broke my club I got my hands on one of their machetes, and I just chopped my way out.  I’m pretty sure I killed several somebody’s that day and if I had the chance, I would have killed them all.

              “So, the moral of the story is to avoid traps whenever possible.  For me, that means staying away from rest stops, but everybody who lives for long on the road has their own pet paranoia.  And that was only the first time I saw it going on out there.  Not the last.”

              “It” being that pinnacle of taboos in Western culture, cannibalism.  Sorry, lazy, worthless assholes that were too clueless to hunt game animals or figure out how to properly use a fishing pole, so they started in dining on their fellow humans.  The other, other, white meat.

We drove in silence after that, eyes peeled for any sign of ambush or threat.  Funny how the thought of ending up on the menu will sharpen a man’s wit and stoke his courage.  I thought our little group might need that stiffened spine and a good dose of real fear before this leg of our journey was completed.  We still needed to skirt the state forest and shoot the gap between two of the larger cities in Arkansas.  Only time would tell if we succeeded.

Telling that story might have been a painful experience for me, but strangely I felt better after sharing the gruesome tale.  For once, I wasn’t alone, and being with these new friends made me feel something deep inside that had been long absent.  Hope.

I might not make it to my journey’s end, but at least I was traveling with people who made the trip worthwhile.     

END BOOK ONE

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This first book is just the beginning of Luke’s adventures.  The next book, twice as long and filled with bloody action and gripping suspense, will offer readers a wider view of the world, and a nation rapidly spiraling into even deeper chaos.  Also, learn more about Luke’s story from those lost months, and what the future holds for friends both old and new. 

HOME FIRES BURNING

Walking in the Rain

Book Two

Coming soon, exclusively at Amazon.

And here is a sneak peek at the first two chapters of the next book:

CHAPTER ONE

Threading the needle between hostile, desperate camps of armed and highly suspicious survivors was not as much fun as it sounded, I quickly decided.  Our new friends Ruth and Stan knew the route, sort of, from living in the area, and Ruth grew up just up the road.  So, we relied on their native knowledge to navigate the tangle of gravel tracks and dirt roads over which we traveled.

              Some places, though, required us to use the larger thoroughfares (another SAT word, that one), and there’s where the trip got dicey.  The first barricade we had to negotiate turned out to not be so bad, in the end.  Just a guard party maintaining security on one of the access roads into the Hobbs State Park.