The Borrowed World (Book 3): Legion of Despair Read online

  Gary had three daughters and two of them lived next door to him. He’d cut building lots off his larger parcel of property and gladly allowed them to build homes there when they were married. It was a small price to pay to keep his children and grandchildren within arm’s length. A third daughter had not yet married and still lived with them.

  As he crested the hill, one daughter’s house came into view, then the next one, then finally his own. He stopped and panted, attempting to regain control of his breathing. His heart was pounding in his ears like an oncoming train. It would suck to make it this far and go into cardiac arrest within sight of his home.

  He scanned the grounds of the three houses, looking for signs of life. The homes looked abandoned. There were no laughing children. Then he saw his son-in-law out walking around, an AR-15 cradled in his arms. Gary smiled.

  “Will!” he called.

  Will froze in his tracks, looking around. Gary yelled again and this time Will spotted him. Gary waved, wanting to make sure that the armed young man knew who he was before he started walking toward him. After a moment of shock came recognition. Will waved back and Gary started trotting toward him. He could hear Will shouting toward the house, but couldn’t make out the words.

  Will must have been announcing his arrival, though, because the front door flew open and his family spilled out. It was like a hole punched in a bag of sugar, an unstoppable pouring forth that spread uncontrollably in all directions. They were all there, all the grandchildren, all the daughters, the young men who’d married his daughters, and finally his wife. While it wasn’t the bucolic scene that he’d imagined, complete with golden light, flowers, harp music, and a chorus of angels, it was still a beautiful moment.

  He was home. He was finally home.

  His youngest daughter reached him first and nearly toppled him over backward with a hug that was closer to a tackle. Gary shrugged out of his pack, dropping it to the ground. His daughter was crying and holding him tightly while his other two daughters plowed into them. They all sagged to the ground at that point, Gary smiling, his daughters crying, then Gary crying too.

  At the rear of the pack Gary’s wife, Debra, approached with a granddaughter in her arms. Gary’s other son-in-law, Dave, was with her, carrying a child in one arm and leading another by the hand. As all the grandchildren got their feet on the ground, they joined the mass, giggling and laughing. It was more than music to Gary’s ears, refilling the void within him with warmth and life. It put back nearly everything that he’d left on the trail home. It filled the holes created by the death he’d both seen and the death he’d wrought. He felt himself becoming a human again, becoming all the things these people needed him to be.

  Debra dropped to her knees, her face streaked with tears, a sob breaking loose despite all her efforts. Gary pulled himself gently free of his brood and crawled toward his wife. He took her in his arms and she lost all the composure she’d struggled to maintain in his absence. She no longer had to be the only thing that held this family together.

  Throughout the reunion, Will, Gary’s oldest daughter Sara’s husband, stood back from the hugging mass. He held an AR-15 in a ready position and was nervously scanning the tree-line around the property. When Will turned his back to them, continuing his perimeter check, Gary noticed that he carried a pouch on his belt with two spare mags for the rifle. Anyone could sling on a rifle for looks, but the extra mags indicated the expectation of a possible fight that would precipitate the need for reloading. The rifle had been a present from Gary the first Christmas after Will had married into the family. The young man’s actions made Gary nervous. Will was not a high-strung kid. He was coldly practical. If he was concerned, there was a reason.

  Lana, the oldest of Gary’s granddaughters, climbed into his arms and covered his cheeks in her little kisses. She crinkled her nose at him.

  “You smell bad, Papaw,” she said.

  Gary laughed. “I know, sweetie. Trust me, I know. I’ve not had a bath in a long time.”

  He let her slide to the ground and she ran back to her mommy. Everyone laughed as she whispered to her mother, “Papaw’s stinky, Mommy. He need a bath.”

  “Let’s move it back inside,” Will said. “We’ve been out here long enough. I don’t like everyone being exposed like this.”

  Everyone groaned. It was a beautiful day and with the stress of Gary’s absence lifted from them, they were ecstatic and enjoying the moment.

  Gary knew that Will must have good reason for his instructions. “Will’s right,” Gary said. “Let’s move toward the house. I’m starving and need something to eat.”

  Everyone began happily strolling toward the house. Gary hung at the back, while Will continued to scan their perimeter, his weapon held at the ready. Whether it was from stress, sleeplessness, or something else, Gary had no idea, but Will was clearly ready to swing around and open fire at a moment’s notice. Something had happened in his absence. Will would not be demonstrating that level of paranoia if there weren’t a good reason.

  “What’s been going on, Will?” Gary asked.

  Will kept his eyes moving, his focus intense. He was tall and had never served in the military but was experienced with firearms. He’d trained with Gary on a regular basis. His movements were practiced and efficient. He scanned the tree line, the road, and then his eyes landed again on the backs of his family, silently urging them to pick up the pace and get inside. His attention never wavered.

  “We’ve had visitors,” he said. “Folks on dirt bikes. They came up the driveway at first, like they were lost. They looked around and then they left. That was a couple of days ago.”

  Gary could sense there was more to the story.

  “That night, the garden got raided,” Will continued. “They took as much as they could carry and trampled most of what was left.”

  “Dadgummit,” Gary said. It was about as close to swearing as he normally got. “That’s aggravating. Not just the theft, but the waste.”

  “I know. There’s still a few things left but not much,” Will said. “The tomatoes in the planters didn’t get taken. It was too much of a coincidence, though, that those guys showed up and then the garden gets wiped out.”

  “I’m guessing you didn’t have a guard posted?”

  Will shook his head. “Up until that point we didn’t think we needed one,” he said. “We were just a few days into this whole thing and people were pretty much treating it like the aftermath of a snow or ice storm. Everyone was walking around socializing and the mood was halfway friendly, like a town sharing a crazy experience. Then the mood turned sour after the grocery stores closed and people realized this might be serious. There’s been a lot of shooting. It doesn’t sound like hunting, it sounds like gun fighting.”

  Gary nodded. He’d seen the same thing happening during his travels.

  “I thought I heard someone trying to break into the storage buildings last night. I shined a spotlight around but didn’t see anyone. First thing this morning we moved some of the important supplies out of the storage buildings,” Will said. “All that stuff is in the garage now. It’s a mess but it’s safe.”

  Though exhausted, Gary tried to process what he was hearing. “So are you thinking this is all from the people on the dirt bikes or just different, random groups of people?”

  “It’s hard to say,” Will said. “There’s a lot of people just wandering around for lack of anything else to do. Folks have been coming up here on the hill nearly every day. I think some of them are just casing the houses. They’re looking to see what we have that they need.”

  “You really think so?” Gary said. He looked out over his property and that of his neighbors. They lived on a flat hilltop of about twenty acres. Gary had about six of those acres and had cut off one each for his married daughters. The remaining property belonged to the neighboring families. The road that came onto the property formed a circle, rejoining itself before going back out the way it came in. It would have been ea
sy for those folks on dirt bikes to drive in and make the circle and then ride back out.

  “I’ve never seen so many people walking around up here,” Will said. “I think some of them are just taking a shortcut out of the housing project back there. As for the others, I don’t know who they are or why they’re here, but they all have the same look, like they’re shopping for things they can use.”

  Will kept scanning the woods. The kids were all inside now. Gary’s wife and daughters were filing through the door. With them no longer in the open, Will visibly relaxed. “The way that the guys on dirt bikes were stopping in the road and watching us, it seems like they were challenging us. It got to the point yesterday that I geared up and went outside with my AR. There were folks standing at the end of the driveway just looking at the house. I asked them if I could help them with anything. They never answered, just turned away and left.”

  “You think those dirt bike riders took the food from the garden?” Gary asked.

  “I think so,” Will said. “You can hear those machines running up and down the main road all night. I don’t know where they’re getting the gas to do that. I haven’t been able to buy any.”

  “They’re not buying their gas, Will.”

  “Of course they’re not,” Will replied. “I should have realized that. I’m just getting stupid with exhaustion.”

  “Don’t worry about it now,” Gary said. “Let’s get inside and we can deal with this later.”

  *

  The evening with his family was beyond words. Gary’s wife and daughters prepared what looked like a feast after the deprivations of the road. Gary ate until he could eat no more, but it was not the food that fed him, it was the presence of his family.

  Although Gary did not have Jim’s level of paranoia, he’d read all the same books Jim had read. The effect on him had been nearly the same as it had been on Jim. He long ago began making preparations in the way of storing food, water, weapons, and emergency power. Much of it was stored in the nooks and crannies of his home. Other items were stored in his various outbuildings. Still other items were stored in undisclosed locations because the items were expensive and he wanted to conceal the purchase. It wasn’t that he had any reason to feel guilty for making the purchases; they had the money. It was more of an issue that he was innately frugal and felt guilty about spending money. For that reason, some of his purchases were either disguised or hidden in plain sight.

  Part of those preparations he made were in the way of long-term food storage. They had clearly not reached the point where it was necessary to dig into those supplies, though. They were still eating the fresh refrigerated foods and items from their everyday pantry. This was because, like Jim, Gary had installed a transfer switch on his house that allowed him to hook a generator up to run essential circuits, like the refrigerator and freezers.

  While Jim stored his in an outbuilding and only brought it out when needed, Gary had gone the extra step of installing a permanent generator housing out back so that the generator could be left in place all the time. All Gary needed to do was go out back and start the generator, then flip a few breakers on the transfer switch to restore power to the circuits he wanted to energize. Gary had no long-term experience with this, but his theory was that alternating between running the generator for four hours and then letting it sit idle for four hours would keep the frozen food frozen and the refrigerated food cool enough that it wouldn’t go bad, as long as people stayed out of those appliances as much as possible.

  Gary had explained his theory of generator operation to Will many times and was certain that Will had been responsible for doing this in his absence. Because of the items on the dinner menu, it had obviously been working. Gary reminded himself that he’d need to check the fuel supply later and see how it was holding out. He’d had intentions of purchasing a tri-fuel generator that would run off various fuel sources, but he’d never done it. He owned a gasoline generator, which had been substantially cheaper, and he stored cans of stabilized gas in his outbuilding to run it. He kept about twenty-five gallons at all times, rotating it through his mower or vehicles as it got old and replacing it with fresh.

  *

  Later, as they were cleaning up from the meal, Gary asked Will if they’d been maintaining a watch at night.

  “Like I said, until recently, there’s not been any indication that we needed to. There just hasn’t been any trouble.”

  “We’ll need to look at that,” Gary said. “It might be time to start one. We just need to be careful. With everyone scattered out over three houses, I don’t want anyone wandering around outside where they could be shot by mistake.”

  Will nodded as he considered this.

  “How’s Dave dealing with all this?” Gary asked.

  “He’s doing pretty well,” Will said. “I don’t know if he’s completely onboard yet, though.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I’m not sure if he’s grasping the seriousness of it all. He’s still worried that he’s going to be fired for not showing up to work, even though there’s no fuel for getting there. You and I have talked about disasters ever since Sara and I started dating. We’ve always thought alike. Dave never had any idea how fragile things were until he and Charlotte got married and he started listening to our conversations. He’s trying but I think he might still be in shock or something. He just seems to think he’s going to wake up one day and everything will be back to normal.”

  “There’s a lot of people that think like that. Had a couple on our trip. I’ll talk to him,” Gary said. “Check in and see how he’s doing.”

  “That’s probably a good idea,” Will said. He looked at Gary seriously. “You know that I would kill to save anyone in this family. I would not hesitate to pull the trigger to save any one of them. I am not sure Dave is there yet.”

  Gary yawned and rubbed his eyes. “I’ll have to deal with him tomorrow. I’m exhausted right now. I think I could sleep for a week.”

  “Do you want to start a watch tonight?” Will asked.

  “I’m not sure it would do any good tonight,” Gary said. “With us scattered out in three houses, we’d need someone awake in each house to cover all this ground. We’ll figure something out tomorrow. For tonight, everyone just needs to make sure their house is locked up tight and that weapons are as accessible as they can safely be kept. And no one should come out after we’re all home for the night. Like I said, I don’t want any friendly fire incidents.”

  *

  Not long after dinner, Sara and Charlotte left with their families. The children needed to be bathed with baby wipes and those tasks were best done while there was still some remaining daylight. After that, stories would be read and the children would be tucked in for the night. While Jim’s home in Russell County had a backup water source in the way of a spring, and had a well that could provide water under generator power, Gary really had no water source other than what they stored. Their property had public water which had saved the expense of drilling a well when he built the house. It had seemed like a good thing at the time. Then, as Gary started making emergency preparations a few years back, it began to seem like a liability that would be difficult to overcome.

  For three years now, Gary had kept every two-liter soda bottle that had come his way. He carefully washed them, then refilled them with water and stored them in his basement. He had hundreds of them sitting on shelves with the fill dates written on them. His plan was to refill them when they got to be around five years old. There was no real science behind that number, it just sounded like a good idea to him.

  He had also purchased a blue plastic drum in which he could store larger amounts of water. A hand-operated pump allowed him to pump water out when it was needed. He had the materials on hand to collect water from the guttering on his home too, but he’d never put the system in place. That would have to go on his list of things that needed to be done pretty quickly.

  As he thought about the long-awaited fantasy of
settling into his own bed that night, the thing that he wanted almost as much was to take a long, hot bath. If he had an unlimited supply of spring or even creek water he could have heated it over a fire and gradually filled a tub, just as people had done in the old days. Without any immediate idea of how he was going to replace the water that he used from his supply, Gary did not feel like he could do anything so frivolous. Feeling guilty and wasteful, he took a single two-liter bottle, poured it in a pot, and heated it on the burner of his gas grill.

  He went to the nearest bathroom and lit a battery-powered lantern. By that light, he peeled off his crusty clothes and washed the miles from his body. It took a while. He continued scrubbing long after any dirt was gone, as though trying to scrub away the things that couldn’t be seen, the experiences he no longer wanted to have in his head. The bath did not help with that, though. Only time could wear such things away.

  When he was done, he looked at the pile of clothes in the floor. He knew that he could never again wear them without remembering the smell of death on them and the images of where that smell came from. He emptied the pockets and removed the belt from the pants, carefully held the reeking pile of clothing away from his body and carried it out the back door to the fire pit in the backyard. There was a bottle of charcoal starter fluid sitting on a nearby pile of firewood. He squirted some on the clothes, then struck a grill lighter to it. As the flames rose, Gary imagined the whole nightmare of the past weeks rising into the sky with the black smoke. He wanted those memories to leave him but knew they never would.

  While the physical trials of his trip home had been enormous, his group also found themselves experiencing additional stress from the lack of information. Rumors and conspiracy theories were rampant in everyone they spoke to. Even those with official connections to public information knew very little. Gary had thought constantly of getting home and digging out his Baofeng HAM radio and speaking to other HAM operators. In a disaster, they were always the most reliable source of information. No spin, no cover-your-ass denials, only pure person-to-person shared information.