Renewal – Part 2: Echoes of the Breakdown

By J.F. Perkins

Copyright 2011 J.F. Perkins

Kindle Edition

Website/Blog: http://www.jfperkins.com

Renewal - Part 2: Echoes of the Breakdown

Chapter 2 - 1

Terry was reeling from the revelations of the last two days. He and Bill were retracing their paths through the cornfields, heading back to Teeny Town. The village had been established right under the collective nose of the county government, the official local authority of the reconstruction of America. As they approached the huge defensive gate between the northern barns, Terry saw that his boss was leaning against one of the barns, spitting tobacco juice on the ground. Dusty held up his hand in greeting, and Bill gave him a meaningful nod in return.

“You figured it out, huh?” Dusty asked, watching Terry closely.

“I think I did. I’m still confused about things, though.” Terry replied in a muted voice. The confidence he felt earlier had given way to a sliding feeling of apprehension. What happens next?

Dusty seemed to read his mind. “I’ll bet you’re wondering what to do now...”

“Right... I have no idea where to go from here.”

“Well, don’t worry about it right now. We’ll have plenty of time to plan your entire life later.” Dusty smiled and tousled Terry’s hair in a way that suggested he was talking to a small child. Terry pulled his head away, and both men laughed at the reaction.

Bill said, “For now, let’s see about some lunch.”

The men led Terry back to the place they had met earlier that morning, and slid right back into the back corner booth with the solid plank walls separating them from the rest of the tavern. Terry noted, for the second time, the strange disconnect between those plank partitions, and the shiny Formica tabletop. He knew the planks were much newer, but the table looked the part of the sleek, glossy future that had been stolen from Terry’s generation.

“What’s on today, Sam?” Bill shouted cheerfully at the bartender.

Sam answered with a weekly standard. “Barbecue pork, corn, beans, and Texas toast!”

“Three.” Bill said, holding up the appropriate fingers with a friendly smirk. Then he turned to Terry.

“So, Terry... I’m sure you have questions. Might as well ask ‘em while we wait for some food,” Bill said, turning to face the young man.

“About this place? I have a million questions, but that’s not my problem right now. It’s all about the rest of the world, you know?”

“Yes, I do, but, as you might expect, my concern is what you intend to do about Teeny Town. The rest, we can figure out.”

“Well, Bill, I’ve spent the last twenty minutes trying to fit everything together in my head. I’d have to say that there’s no doubt that I have to keep this place a secret. If the county knew about everything you’ve got here, they’d be out here to ‘recover’ it.”

Bill and Dusty both moved restlessly, shaking loose some tension they weren’t even aware they were holding.

“Good,” Bill said, “I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that.” He reached across the table and gave Terry a couple of slaps on the shoulder. “Really glad.”

“The problem is, it seems to me that the best way to do that is to go back, file a false report, and keep going like nothing happened. All I really want to do now is to stay here and get to work.” Terry looked at both men, waiting for some secret formula to be shared.

Instead, Dusty said, “Well, it was easier for me. My foster parents were in on the deal, and as far as anyone knew, I was spending summers on my uncle’s farm in Bedford County. By the time I grew up, nobody even thought to worry about where I went.”

Bill added, “Yeah Terry, I’m sorry, but if you want to maintain the illusion, it looks like you’ll have to work twice as hard. You’ll have two lives to live.”

“Great. Here I thought I had stumbled into the land of milk and honey, but really, I just found another version of there ain’t no free lunch,” Terry said with a cynical twist of his mouth.

The men laughed, thought better of it, but when Terry smiled in return, they laughed even harder.

Three thick, steaming pottery plates arrived, piled high with red-sauce barbecue. Terry thought of all the dry, fired-cooked goat he had eaten in his life, every time believing it was a real treat, and his entire childhood adopted a pale gray hue in his memory.

“Dig in, boys,” Bill said, already talking around a mouthful.

As they began to eat, Sam delivered three more pottery mugs full of a red, cloudy beer. Terry hadn’t had this much beer since he and two of school buddies had found a wooden keg full of beer on a loading dock and proceeded to help themselves. They would have gotten away with it, too, if they had been able to walk when they were caught. They ended up pitching hay for three months to make up for that little adventure.

Terry washed down another mouthful of food, and asked, “Do you always eat this well?”

“Pretty much, yeah. We’re making up for lost time. We work hard for the privilege, but not nearly as hard as we did back in the day,” Bill replied.

“That’s for sure,” Dusty said. “Even after Kirk found me, I remember a whole lot of tree rat and turnips.”

“I’ll take goat over squirrel any day,” Terry added.

“Amen to that.” Dusty took another swig of his beer, and slid out of the booth. “Well, boys, I’m heading back to town. Terry, I’ll make sure that no one worries about you until tomorrow, but you need to head on back in the morning.”

“Yes, sir. I will.” Terry said between the rapid forks full of beans.

Dusty gave a sloppy salute to Bill and walked out of the tavern.

Terry set his fork on the plate, leaned back as far as he could, and burped out loud. “I feel... not full, more than full...”

“We call that feeling ‘stuffed’.”

“Stuffed, yeah... That’s a good way to put it.” Terry smiled and Bill snorted, trying not to laugh at the young man across from him.

Bill thought about how he lived his first eleven years without ever being truly hungry, and then it was many years before he ever felt full on a regular basis, much less stuffed. He found it sad that Terry didn’t even know how to describe the feeling of eating more food than he needed.

“Well, you ready for a little more tour?” Bill asked as he placed his cloth napkin next to the empty plate.

“Yes, Bill. If I can walk with this belly...”

“Alrighty then, up you go.” Bill slid out of the booth and pantomimed tugging Terry out of his seat. They were both laughing as they strolled past the bar.

“Wait, Bill. Don’t I need to pay Sam?”

“I tell you what, Terry. Sam and I have an agreement, an account. This time it’s on me. Later on, we’ll talk about how you pay, ok?”

“Ok, if you’re sure,” Terry said, then over his shoulder, “Thank you, Sam. That’s about the best food I ever ate.”

“You’re welcome, young fella. Come back any time.”

This time, Bill led Terry out through the east gate of Teeny Town, following the gravel lane towards a long spur of woods that extended from the three lakes north of the village, almost to the top of the rise to the south. The men walked through a newly sprouted field of what Terry guessed was beans until they crossed another lane that seemed to curve around the entire settlement. From that point, the road ended and they crossed open pasture until they slid into the shadows of the trees.

The land dropped sharply into a gully. Terry leaped across the trickle of water, flowing slowly north to Brewer Creek, and scrambled up the far side, following Bill deeper into the woods. Terry decided that the goal was in the pasture beyond the woods when Bill stopped at the base of a white oak, and yelled, “Hello, the lookout!”

Terry heard a feminine voice from directly overhead. “Hello, the old man!”

Bill rolled his eyes and replied, “Drop the ladder, sassy britches!” He stepped back from the tree to avoid the rope ladder that spun and leaped out of the sky, nearly clubbing Terry in the head on its final bounce. “Terry, hold the ladder for the old man, will you?”

Terry set his foot on the bottom rung and grabbed one side of the ladder as Bill scrambled up like a very not-old man indeed. Terry grabbed the second rope as Bill climbed out of reach. Bill’s legs disappeared quickly onto a platform forty feet off the ground, and then his head popped out in the same spot. He called down to Terry, “Come on up!”

Terry, without a stabilizing helper on the bottom, ended up climbing the edge of the ladder, more like a knotted rope than a ladder, and he took quite a bit longer than Bill to reach the top. When he pulled himself over the edge, and stood up panting a bit, he found himself facing a young woman, maybe his age or thereabouts. She wore leather boots and tan work pants, leather gloves, a heavy shirt with leather patches on the shoulders, and a seriously large knife strapped to her hip. By the time his eyes reached her face, centered on greenish-gray eyes, scattered with light freckles, and framed by copper-red hair, he was thoroughly intimidated. The bolt action rifle didn’t help in that regard. He was instantly entranced, and couldn’t look away.

The woman, on the other hand, was looking at his tall, strong form, deep hazel eyes, and sandy brown hair, but none of that mattered, because she could smell his fear.

“Get a good look, did you?” She said.

“Uh, well... see. I was...” Terry tried to speak.

Bill rescued him. “Terry, I’d like you to meet my second daughter, Sally. We named her after a special woman, and all we get in return is attitude. Sally, be nice to our new friend, Terry Shelton.”

Terry stuck out his hand automatically, since the autopilot was the only part of his mind still functioning. Sally just looked at him for ten long seconds. Terry was about to give up, when Bill gave his daughter a sharp look. She shrugged, leaned her rifle against the tree trunk, and returned Terry’s handshake with a perfunctory single pump.

Terry found his voice and said, “Pleased to meet you, Sally.”

“Likewise, I’m sure,” she replied, picking up her rifle and turning towards the guarded edge of the platform.

“In case you couldn’t guess, Terry...  Sally is also known as Red Sally, Sally the Red, Here-comes-Sally-run, and The Terror of Teeny Town, depending on who you ask. Somehow, I think she takes after her Uncle Kirk more than me, but I don’t ask too many questions about that.” Bill smiled. “My folks used to say you could blame these obviously misplaced children on the mailman, but I don’t think that excuse works anymore.”

Sally looked over her shoulder, and said, “You forgot Bloody Sally and Sally-so-mean-she-hurt-my-little-feelings...”

“True, but I think we’ve scared Terry enough, don’t you?”

Sally turned to face the men, and gave Terry another hard, thorough look and replied, “No, not enough... Not yet.” She smiled just long enough to make Terry’s heart leap twice in his chest, and then turned around again.

Bill said, “All right, my little maniac, you’re relieved of watch. We’ll take it until the shift change at four.”

“Great!” Sally said, “That’ll give me enough time to make some babies cry.” She handed her rifle to her father, and promptly slid over the edge. Just when Terry thought it was safe to breathe again, she stuck her head back over the edge and said, “See you later, Terry.”

“Uh, bye Sally...”

He heard a zipping sound, a quiet thud as she hit the ground, and tried to figure out how to watch her walk away without being obvious about it in front of her father. In the end, he couldn’t find an excuse to go to that particular side of the platform and had to settle for her tiny silhouette walking across the bean fields.

Bill, of course, missed nothing and smiled quietly to himself as he quickly scanned every approach to the watch.

“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.

“Arturo, I hate to bring up a tough subject, but what’s your plan? Are you going to try to get down to Florida?” Dad asked quietly.

“I just don’t know, man. I’m smart enough to know it’s going to be hard to do, but I’m not smart enough to know how to get there, or if it’s even possible.” Arturo replied.

“I wish I could tell you. Hell, I wish I could tell you anything useful. Orlando is one big city now, right?”

Mom rounded up Jimmy and took him with her to the second tent. Dad had made a pile of gear on one side of him, and empty retail packing on the other. He looked at both piles, and heaved a sigh.

“Yeah, David, one big urban sprawl. The crime is terrible down there too. I haven’t really had a chance to think about it, but it seems impossible right now.”

“What kind of car do you drive?” Dad asked

“2009 Sorento, but it won’t start. EMP.” Arturo replied.

“Yeah, but I was thinking about it, and...” Dad stopped talking, picked up something from the gear pile. It made a ratcheting noise before he threw it at a tree and listened to it break with a plastic crack. “You know what really pisses me off?”

Arturo opened his mouth to ask the obvious question, but closed it instead.

“It pisses me off that I’m sitting here in woods, faced with survival, and my survival gear is cheap Chinese shit that I only need because of the goddamn Chinese!” Dad realized he was yelling, and closed his mouth as well.

“Yeah, David,” Arturo said cautiously, “But at least you have Chinese shit. All I have is a wallet, a lighter, a half pack of stupid cigarettes, the clothes on my back, and this big freaking knife.”

The two men sat in silence for a minute. During that minute, we were wide awake in the tent, trying to wrap our little heads around the idea that Dad was worried, really worried, upset enough to yell and break things. That just wasn’t our dad. Then they started to laugh, quietly at first, but it grew into something wild, loud, almost hysterical. Soon, with a few last hoots and wheezes, it was over.

“There’s never a good surplus store when you really need it.” Dad said.

Dad quickly stowed his new pile of Chinese doodads into a pack, left the trash on the ground, and led the way to the tent. We heard them rustling into bed, the slithering of synthetic sleeping bags and the sharp crinkling of aluminized emergency blankets. Strange sounds at the time, but destined to become all too familiar.

I snapped awake in total darkness. No, not total. I could see the beams of flashlights outside through the tent cloth, and two low voices, just barely audible over the loud crunching of dry oak leaves. I heard the zipper on our other tent, very slowly, more like a growl than a zip, and whispering from that direction. A flashlight beam crossed the wall of our tent, slid away to the other, and then it sounded like the time raccoons raided our camp in Pickett State Park. Someone was knocking the packs over and going through them. I could tell it wasn’t one of us, but I don’t know how. All I really knew was that I was suddenly afraid.

Then I heard my dad say, “Who’s out there?” It was the loudest voice I had ever heard, right at that moment. Then there was a shotgun racking into ready mode. I heard another mechanical clack, and then running from behind us. By this time, we were all awake, and Kirk was unzipping our tent door. I heard the sound of two bodies hitting the ground and then a weird, wet tearing noise.  I stuck my head out just in time to see Arturo rising from the ground, and swinging his arm at a man with a gun. Another tearing noise, and the stranger was off and running. My dad was standing there with his shotgun, aiming at the guy who ran into the woods, but he couldn’t shoot, since Arturo was running right after the man. I was holding Kirk’s arm to keep him from following, the idiot.

Dad yelled, “Arturo! Talk to me!” Nothing except the sounds of running steps through the leaves returned. The steps became faint. We heard a three round burst of gunfire, a huge thud and nothing else.

It seemed like an hour before we heard steps coming back towards us. In reality, it was probably about three minutes.

“It’s me. Arturo. All clear.”

I could see my dad sag like the jump house at Tommy’s birthday party when Dad turned off the air supply. Arturo entered the clearing with a military rifle and what looked like a kid’s school backpack strapped to one shoulder. When he reached the cone of my dad’s light, it was also clear that Arturo was covered in blood.

“Don’t worry, folks. It’s not mine,” Arturo said, reading our minds, or more likely the looks of horror on our faces.

Dad asked, “What kind of Army did you say you were in?”

Arturo grinned and replied, “The kind we don’t talk about much.” He leaned the rifle against a tree, and set the little pack beside it.

Dad looked like he could not physically remove his fingers from the shotgun. Arturo stepped over, took it from Dad, and with clearly practiced expertise, safed the weapon and set it next to the military rifle. It almost looked like Dad was using that gun to hold himself upright, but before he could settle to the ground, Arturo said quietly, “We’ve got a body to move.”

Dad was careful to keep his flashlight pointed away from the corpse, but in the light of a half moon, we could see everything. He and Arturo each grabbed a booted foot and dragged the body well away from our camp. It left a broad black stain on the leaves and dirt, and a channel carved through the leaves into the darkness.

The rest of our group was standing around the tents, too shocked to move, but looking in every direction. Since the unthinkable had already happened, I’m sure we believed that there was no way it could possibly be over. It took a long time before it made sense to me.

Dad and Arturo came back after about five minutes, carrying another combat rifle, a handgun, and a camo military pack. My dad looked much steadier by then. Whoever those guys were, they obviously had gotten the best of some guardsmen. The confiscated gear set aside, Dad and Arturo sat down against another tree, both still breathing heavily.

Arturo finally said, “I’m sorry I didn’t suggest a watch earlier. I really didn’t think we would need it yet.”

“It never occurred to me,” Dad said, “This morning I thought I was prepared. Hell, I almost shot you. I guess being prepared has more levels than I thought.”

“Yeah... Listen, David, you did well. You held their attention while I moved in, and you didn’t panic with that shotgun. I figured it was about fifty-fifty for me getting shot in the back. As for the rest of it, well, things are changing fast. You’ll just have to change with it. We’ll talk about it more in the morning. Why don’t you get some sleep? I’ll keep watch.”

“No way I’m getting to sleep anytime soon,” Dad said with a snort.

“Me neither. Wide awake on the chubby Mexican side of the tree.”

Chapter 2 – 3

It was gray daylight when I woke again. I think it was the sound of someone taking a leak that did it. I unzipped the tent flaps, and stood up outside. Dad was asleep against the tree, and Arturo was walking back from his ‘nature’s call’ in the woods.

“Good morning, Bill.”

“Good morning, Mr. Arturo”

“Aww, it’s just Arturo.”

“Ok, Arturo. What happened last night?”

“Well, when everyone is up, we’ll talk about it, ok?”

“Yes, sir.”

Just then, Dad woke up and leaned his neck side to side before his eyes began to focus.

“What’s going on?” He asked Arturo.

“All quiet. You ran out of adrenalin pretty fast last night.”

“Yeah, I was wide awake, and now it’s morning.” Dad said with a bewildered look.

“It’s a hard drop the first few times... I suspect, sad to say, that you’ll get used to it.”

Dad’s face took on a look of sober understanding, and he got to his feet by turning around and walking his hands up the tree. “Sucks to get old...”

Arturo laughed and said, “I say that, and I’m only 34.”

Dad looked at him, groaned, and replied, “Don’t ask.”

“Yes, ma’am. Lady’s secret.”

This got Dad chuckling. He rummaged around in Kirk’s pack and came out with three breakfast bars, tossing two in our direction. It was a magic moment for me, I recall, sharing the quiet pre-dawn with men. For a little while, I was an honorary man too.

Dad spoke up, “Listen, Arturo, I was thinking last night, before all the excitement, that we may be able to get our car running. I replaced the ignition with a newer solid state unit back in the 90’s, and it’s probably fried, but if we’re lucky, we can find an older car with something that might fit. That way, you can at least make a decent try at finding your wife. We can keep Jimmy here with us.”

“You’d do that?” Arturo asked.

“Well, I figure we owe you our lives right about now. The least we can do is give you a chance to put yours back together. Don’t get me wrong, though... I’d be more than happy if you wanted to stay. Somehow, I doubt you will be satisfied until you find Juannie.”

“Thank you.” Arturo’s eyes were shining.

“No, seriously, we owe you, ok?”

“Ok, we’ll give it a try.

“Good, I’m lousy at combat, but I’m good at machines.” Dad said, closing the deal.

“Why wouldn’t I just take the car with the working parts?” Arturo asked.

“It may work out exactly that way. Depends on the car, and the location in the yard, but I know my car inside and out, and I would trust it to get you there and back, as long as we can get it to run,” Dad replied. Then he added, “Plus, it’s a freaking tank. Early 70’s station wagon...”

“Ah, yes. Point taken.”

“Good. We’ll head over there after breakfast.”

The breakfast was more oatmeal and granola bars, which had my dad talking to himself about food. He regretted that his rampage through the Wal-Mart wasn’t a little better planned. At least we had food. It didn’t mean much then, but it became more important every day.

When we finished eating, Dad gave Mom the shotgun, and told her to fire it in the air if anyone approached. He reminded Kirk to leave the assault rifles alone until there was time to learn how to use them. He and Arturo made their way back across the field, carrying Dad’s original rifle and two handguns. They talked about carrying one of the captured military weapons, but decided that it might draw more trouble than it was worth. If things were bad in the schoolyard, the plan was to retreat back to camp and rethink the plan. We watched until they faded into the woods closer to the school. Once they were out of sight, we settled down to play with little Jimmy, while Mom and Kirk kept a watch for anything threatening.

We talked around in the camp, speculating on what had happened, and why, and what the future might hold. In the end, we knew almost nothing. All hell could have been breaking loose five miles away, and we wouldn’t have a clue. Eventually, I got tired of throwing rocks and scratching games in the dirt. I decided to do a little exploring. Mom warned me not to go too far, which normally would have earned her an eye roll and an exasperated sigh, but not on this day. The world itself seemed to crackle with a new sense of danger.

Luckily, I found a nice old sugar maple about 120 feet from our camp. I jumped to clasp my fingers over the lowest branch and kicked my feet up to wrap my ankles around it. I hung there for a few seconds before I decided my next move. I shimmied out the branch until I reached a fork and used the twin limbs to lever myself up into the tree. Once I had the first branch mastered, the tree offered a million good options for climbing. Like any young boy, I immediately headed upward to get as high as I could go. I was thinking that I might be able to see what Dad was doing if I climbed high enough, but that was not the case. When I reached the highest point I could, I wedged myself into another forking branch, and pushed the leaves out of the way. All I could see was the next grove of woods, and the very top of the school roof.  The chimney from the school’s old coal fired furnace extended well above the roof, and from my perch, looked like it was trying to blend in with the trees. Oh well, it was a minor disappointment compared to the triumph of climbing the tree. As a bonus, my mother was probably freaking out, expecting my limp body to come crashing down any second.

I started looking in other directions, and noticed some dark pillars of smoke rising into the sky. I didn’t know it then, but I was watching Manchester in full meltdown mode. There were other, smaller columns rising here and there, and a general dark haze in the opposite direction from Manchester. Mostly, I heard the kids talking below, and the breeze causing a flutter through the leaves, but occasionally I could hear the faint cracks of distant gunfire. Once I had that realization, the tree was no longer the supreme retreat I thought it would be. It was just another way to watch the Breakdown in progress.

I was about to start the climb down when I heard the unmistakable rumble of our station wagon from the direction of the school. I immediately tried to climb just a little higher, and when that didn’t work, I tried to extend my neck like a snapping turtle. That didn’t work either. Just as well too, because the engine stopped in about 15 seconds. What the heck?

There was no way I was giving up my observation post. If the car started, then something was going to happen. Nothing did. I waited. My disappointment was getting heavy enough to bring me down from the tree. I was almost halfway down when I heard the engine start again. I listened hard, expecting it to stop, but it revved a few times and sounded like it was starting to move. I scrambled back up the tree, reaching the top just seconds before the car rounded the other patch of woods and rolled straight across the field, into the woods below.

The family burst into animated conversation, but I couldn’t really hear it as I descended the tree at breakneck speed. As I dropped off the bottom branch, I could see the old green station wagon sitting just outside our camp. Something about seeing the car there made me feel secure, like everything would be just fine. I ran over and slapped both my hands on the front fender, convincing myself that it was real, and by extension that everything was back to normal. Half of that was true.

Kirk was asking rapid fire questions. “How did you get it started?”

Dad answered, “Well, I think it was about twenty percent scrounging parts, and eighty percent luck. It was easier than I thought.”

“How did you get it out?”

“No way we were going to get out the front, so we cut a big hole in the fence and drove it out the back,” Dad said with a grin.

Mom asked, “So we can go home?”

“No, Honey... For all the reasons we talked about before. Nashville is too dangerous,” Dad replied.

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“Actually, I do. There are still people in the school. They told us the sheriff was sending men out in old trucks, and the deputy said that Nashville is in flames. Nothing but rioting and looting.”

“Oh.” That was all Mom could say. She sounded more like a small, distant child than our mother. She gathered herself. “What are the people doing?”

“Nothing. It looks like they’re just sitting in the dark and eating cafeteria food. I guess they’re still waiting for help. The sheriff’s men have actually been delivering some supplies to the shelter. Maybe it’s not the worst idea to wait for help. I doubt that it will last long, though.” Dad said with a faraway look. “Anyway, that reminds me...”

Arturo walked to the back door on the passenger side, opened it, and reached in to help an elderly lady out of the car. We couldn’t believe it. I’m sure, in our excitement I guess, that none of even noticed another person in the car. When she appeared in our midst, all of our mouths dropped open on cue. Arturo introduced her. “Everyone, this is the nice lady I told you about. Her name is Francine.”

We all said our chaotic hellos and looked at each other in turn. Dad made a classic Dad announcement. “Francine is the lady Arturo told us about, from the schoolyard. She has had an especially rough day, so let’s all make her welcome, and help her out.”

Mom gave him a weird look that I guessed meant something like, you gotta be kidding me. Then she held out her hand to the lady and walked her over to the campsite. Francine was completely passive. She seemed blank to me, but that’s just because I hadn’t put the facts together. I learned later that she was the lady on the see-saw with her husband. Well, apparently they sat on the see-saw until he died, sometime during the night. She went to check on him, discovered he was gone, and then went back to her side of the see-saw. She was still bouncing his corpse slowly up and down when Dad and Arturo found her.

“Ok, boys,” Dad said, in a tone that suggested we were going to Disney World, “Let’s get this car unloaded.” He opened the tailgate, and the back of the car was stuffed with cans and boxes of food. It looked like enough food for an army, but that might have been because it was food for the Army. We stacked the supplies between the tents while Dad quickly organized them, and Mom watched in amazement.

“Where did you get all that?” she asked.

“From the school. We tried to ask for it, but no one seemed to care, so we just started loading it up. Should be enough to keep us for a while.” Dad replied. “I guess those folks are shell shocked or something. They’re almost catatonic.”

The new pile of food seemed to lift the weight from Mom’s shoulders. She started looking at the labels and talking about her meal plans. Apparently, the granola and oatmeal from Wal-Mart was never enough to kick start her Mom-motor.

Dad added, “We may try to get another load, if we can. First, we need a safe place to put it.”

Lucy spoke up. “Daddy, Bill was climbing in that tree. Maybe we can put the food up there.”

“That’s a good idea, Sweetie, but I was thinking it might be better to put us up there, and the food in the ground.”

“Eww! The food will get dirt and worms on it!” Lucy whined.

“Worms are good protein, so that’s no problem, and I remember you were quite the little dirt eater when you were three.”

“Daddy!”

Dad laughed. He loved to get Lucy worked up into her frequent fits of outrage. Then he turned serious. “Listen, Lucy. Things are going to be different now. We’re going to have to work to get food, and some of it won’t seem all that great. Domino’s Pizza is going to be hard to come by.”

Lucy put on her power pout and said, “Ok, Daddy.”

Kirk, Arturo, and I finished getting the car unloaded, and sat down with our backs against the big trees around the campsite. It had only been hours, but we were gradually claiming certain trees as our own. In any case, I found myself thinking wistfully about the family collection of folding chairs, back at our house.

Dad set the last huge can in place, and selected another one out of the stack. He spooned about a gallon of chili into a big aluminum camp pan and balanced the whole thing on both little stoves.

“Lunch coming up,” Dad said, digging a box of Saltines out of Mom’s pack.

While we waited for the chili, Jimmy entertained himself by singing songs from his favorite cartoons. I wish I could still remember them. We all leaned back and enjoyed a show that would have felt tiresome and stupid only a few days before, but now it was a pure and valuable way to pass the time. At the time, it struck us as a truth that no matter how crazy life gets, it’s always a good time to sing. Then, it spurred the realization that all of our iPods and phones and computers and CD players were all fried. I wondered how long it would be before I could listen to music again.

Dad and Arturo were huddled up with Mom, on the other side of the tents, having one of those adult conversations that were too sensitive for young ears, but that was fine. We had little Jimmy. Tommy jumped up in the middle of the third song and decided to add his own strange brand of interpretive dance to the show. Pretty soon, we were too busy laughing and pointing to worry about anything at all, especially when Jimmy started smacking us on the head, duck-duck-goose style. When he tapped us, we were supposed to join in. This worked fine for me and Lucy, but Kirk refused to play, and when he did, Jimmy stopped singing. He refused to sing anymore. Then we spent our time calling Kirk foul names for ruining a good show.

I wasn’t tuned to notice at the time, but thinking back, I remember how odd it was that Francine, sitting on the far side of our camp circle, had not said a word since she got out of the car. She was not part of the adult huddle. In fact, she seemed completely oblivious to everything that was going on. She sat back against her tree and stared into space while our tiny world flowed around her.

Dad broke away to give the chili a stir, and went right back to talk some more. I watched, but all I could tell was that Arturo was doing most of the talking. He used a lot of gestures when he was talking in my Mom’s direction. I figured he was telling her things she did not want to hear. They were deeply involved in the conversation, so they did not notice when Francine silently raised her arm and pointed in the direction of the school.

I looked in the direction she was pointing, and saw four men emerge from the woods behind the school. From their position, it looked like they had come around the back side of the school from the right and they were using the woods as cover to circle the schoolyard. They must have seen our car, or our tents, because they turned their heads in our direction, and started walking our way. I slapped Kirk on the shoulder and pointed. He looked and didn’t hesitate.

“Dad!” Kirk called out in a stage whisper. “Dad!”

The huddle stopped talking and looked at Kirk, following his pointing finger, and when they had the picture, Dad looked at Arturo, who took charge.

“David, I’ll take the little ones and find a cover position. If anyone shoots for any reason, then you shoot any strangers still standing. Lucy, you and Bill take Tommy and Jimmy. You guys are with me. Kirk, you stay here with your folks. Francine...” Arturo paused and looked at her. “Never mind, Francine. You’re good.”

Arturo snagged one of the assault rifles and headed out. We followed him, stumbling and trotting to keep up. He told us to lie down behind a fallen log about fifty yards from the camp. We were looking at the camp from the side. The school, the car, and the approaching men were slightly to our left, and the tents just slightly to the right. It felt like everything was coming right for me. Arturo positioned himself behind a large tree right next to us, angling himself to be invisible to the men.

“Stay down and be very quiet,” Arturo told us.

Dad had his handgun, and Mom was holding the shotgun. Kirk was standing to the side and I realized with a shock that he was holding the other handgun. My first impulse was a little brotherly jealousy, but then I realized the danger and started to worry about him. Francine still hadn’t moved.

The men looked serious as they approached. Arturo crouched down and leaned out from behind his tree, just enough to watch with one eye. The men spread out as they entered our woods. They were thin, spidery and rough looking characters with wispy beards and dirty caps pulled low over their eyes. They could have been brothers, and they were armed with hunting rifles and shotguns. It looked like they had handguns on belt holsters as well. The apparent leader and another walked into our camp while the other two circled out to the sides. Even then, I could understand how that put my parents in a bad tactical position.

My dad said, “That’s far enough,” in that voice he used to stop us from doing something really stupid.

The leader didn’t stop. My dad raised his pistol, and the man responded by stepping to the side instead of towards my dad. They didn’t seem afraid of Dad’s gun at all, and no one else had raised their weapons. The man was clearly looking the camp over, and when he had seen enough, he did stop moving. My dad lowered his pistol to his side.

“Looks like you folks is pretty well set up,” the leader said, sounding like a raspy weasel when he spoke.

“Well, we got kids to feed.” Dad replied in a deep voice.

“Don’t we all, Mister. Thing is, this here’s my land, and you’re trespassing on my land.” He smiled a sneering sideways smile, and spit on the ground. Then his face turned hard. “See, the law is stretched a little thin around here, so I reckon it’s up to me to enforce the law on my land.” Then he raised the shotgun towards my dad.

“What’s your name?” Dad asked the man.

“What’s my name? It don’t matter what my name is,” the man replied.

“If I don’t know your name, then there’s no way I can know if you’re the owner of this land,” my dad said. I couldn’t see his face from where I lay in the leaves, but I can imagine his face was set pretty hard by the tone of his voice. “Turns out, friend, that I know the owner of this land, and he doesn’t look a thing like you and your boys here.” Dad was lying, but he was doing it for a good reason.

“I said this here’s my land, and if you and your pretty wife there don’t want to be buried on it, you’re gonna walk away now, and leave all your stuff here.” The man was sounding a little anxious now. I guess he never expected anyone to argue with him.

My dad had another trick up his sleeve. “I’ll tell you what. Since this is your land, where’s your house? We’ll trade you some of our food if you have anything we can use at the house.”

“I ain’t trading nothing!” the man was getting upset. “I’m taking it.”

“What’s your address? I’ll send you the rent when I get home.”

“Rent? What the...”

“Ok, tell me this then. What’s the name of that road?” Dad asked, pointing towards the school.

“You son of a bitch! Just walk away!” The man was practically screaming now. His boys had their guns up, pointed in my family’s general direction, but not really aimed. They may have been confused by someone who would not be intimidated.

“Not gonna happen. Like I said, I got kids to feed.”

I don’t know if Dad was trying to humanize us by referring to his kids again, or if he was just helping my mom to harden her resolve, but that part was working. She had her shotgun pointed squarely at the second man, and her barrel was rock steady.

The man took a look around, gauging the situation, and he suddenly sagged. “Well, shit. I had to try, right?” He laughed like the whole thing was a big joke. It was a crazy, dangerous laugh. No one was fooled. “Me and my boys will just be going now.”

The man half turned away, and then snapped back quickly, bringing his gun to bear. Dad shot him twice, and Kirk, with a second’s delay, hit the man in the hip. He crumpled instantly. In those two seconds, we jumped as Arturo’s rifle cracked twice in rapid succession, paused as he retargeted, cracked twice again. Somewhere in the middle was the boom of Mom’s twelve gauge shredding the second man. The intruders were all down without firing a shot.

The leader was surely dead, as well as the two outliers, but the second man wasn’t. His chest and lower face were a red meaty mess. He was writhing on the ground and screaming something I couldn’t understand. My mom took one look, calmly set her gun down, and threw up all over the ground at his feet.

We started to get up, but Arturo snapped at us, “Stay here until we tell you.” He was trotting back to camp as he gave a look that would have kept us rooted until we starved. Before he reached the scene, Kirk looked at the gun in his hand, looked at Mom, and then walked over to the man on the ground. He was facing the other way by then, so I couldn’t even guess what Kirk was thinking when he raised his pistol and shot the bleeding man in the head.

“Dammit, Kirk!” Dad yelled. “What are you doing?”

Arturo arrived at Kirk’s side, and asked him for the gun.

“No. It’s mine now.” Kirk said in a scary tone.

“Well, listen kid,” Arturo said. “If you’re gonna carry that gun, you’d better learn one thing. You don’t kill a disabled enemy until you ask him some damn questions!”

By that time, Mom was sitting on the open ground, hunched over. She was either panting or sobbing, I couldn’t say. She had lost everything in the previous five minutes. Her own innocence, her husband’s, and worse, her son’s, but most of all, she had lost the ability to pretend that she lived in the same world she had before.

Chapter 2 – 4

Terry looked up from his idle scanning of the horizon. He figured that if he was going to stand watch, he might as well watch. Bill was staring into the distance as he spoke, and refocused on Terry when he sensed the young man’s sharp change of position.

Bill took a quick look, just in case, and asked, “That’s hard to understand, isn’t it?”

“It is. What did your mother lose? Seems to me that she should have been happy that ya’ll won,” Terry said.

“You have to understand that, before the Breakdown, good people never had to kill anyone. Mom had a lifetime of thinking that only bad people did what she had just done.”

“I can see that, I guess... It’s just that I grew up never knowing a single adult who hadn’t killed someone, or at least tried to kill someone.”

“That’s what I mean,” Bill said. “In a few short days, Mom went from a life where the biggest worry was getting us kids to school on time, and making sure the house was in order, to having to fight for our lives three times...” Bill pushed his gray hair back. “And that’s not counting everything that could have happened in the schoolyard.”

“Ok. I can see where that would be a shock. I just don’t have any idea of what it was like before. I mean, I’ve read about it, but most of the books had at least some danger and killing, so I thought that was normal.”

Bill laughed a bit and said, “No. That’s the thing. Our lives were so safe and boring that we all loved to read that kind of thing to get some excitement.” He leaned against the tree and continued, “Real life had none of that stuff. Imagine that you were safe from all the dangers we face. Imagine that if you followed the rules, the worst thing you had to think about was a car accident, or if you were really unlucky, you might get robbed once in your life. There were bad people, of course, but they always seemed to be someone else’s problem.”

“It was really that safe?” Terry asked.

“Sure. My dad was one of the rare people who even imagined it could ever change. I guess he spent a lot of time thinking about different situations and how to deal with them. He was always ready to claim incredible good luck, but I know for a fact that you make your own luck, and he made ours by being able to think one step ahead of most everyone else.”

“What about Kirk? He seemed well prepared,” Terry asked.

“Well, Kirk’s a special case. I think it’s easy for us to look back and consider him part of the good luck, because he was willing to do things that no one else would do. He could pull that trigger and just consider it part of a day’s work. Most people can’t do that. In my mom’s case, on that day, she was watching her fourteen year old son go from a good kid, the kind of kid that other parents admired, to a cold blooded executioner. It’s hard for a mother to see something like that in her babies.”

“What about your kids?”

Bill sighed deeply and replied, “It’s a new world. They grew up scrambling for cover like the rest of us. Aggie and I didn’t have to make the same giant leap that my mother did. Our struggle is different. We take the fact that they were born knowing that killing had to be done, and we try to temper that with a conscience that understands that there are better ways, and killing is usually the worst option.”

“No offense, but I’ve only met one of your children, and she seems all too ready to take a head off at the shoulders.”

“Well, if you knew how many times Aggie and I have had that conversation... We may have learned to regret all that time she spent with Uncle Kirk.” Bill grinned like a proud papa. “Of course, until this country gets back on its feet, we believe she’s better off with her mean streak.”

“Maybe so,” Terry said.

Bill added, “One thing I know for sure. No matter what we had to do from that point on, Mom took it as reality, not some wild theory of my father’s, and she performed every last necessity as if her family’s life depended on it. That was good, because all too often, it did.”

Chapter 2 – 5

Arturo and Dad did the weapon collection and corpse dragging, taking the bodies off in the same direction as the first two, and kicked dirt onto the drying blood in the camp before they called us back from behind the log where we were hiding. We came back to find our mother sitting almost as catatonic as Francine, who still hadn’t moved an inch. I never forgot that she pointed out the men, but I doubt if anyone else even knew. Lucy went to Mom, and sat down next to her. I talked to keep Tommy and Jimmy distracted from the mood of the place. I don’t know what they saw, but they seemed unaffected after they got over the shock of all the guns going off.

“We made a lot of noise, so everybody keep a sharp eye out, ok?” Arturo said.

Dad was staring into the distance for long seconds, but managed to shake himself out of it. He quietly passed around paper more bowls and plastic spoons. He walked around with the huge pan, and spooned chili into our bowls. I sat in a little triangle with the boys, and showed them how to crush saltines into the chili. We ate hungrily, while the rest of the party didn’t eat much at all.

Finally, Dad picked up his bowl. “Let’s not waste good food, people,” he said, and started mechanically shoveling chili into his mouth. One by one, everyone else followed his example. All except Francine, who ignored her chili until it grew cold beside her.

After lunch, a little bit of life began to stir in our group again. Dad and Arturo made a quick plan to try for more supplies from the school, and rumbled off in the station wagon. He had left us with a small ax, and told Kirk and me to cut down some of the little saplings on the edge of our woods. He had shown us the type of trees to cut, and warned us not to cut anything else. Kirk had the ax of course, being the oldest, and headed over to the trees Dad had indicated. We were in boy heaven. Like all young boys, axes presented a terrible temptation to us. We had never really used one, since cutting down anything in our yard back home would have meant a fate worse than death, and we knew that instinctively. Here, we had a whole grove of potential ax targets and a license to kill trees. Awesome, at least until we learned the next stage that any boy with an ax learns. Cutting down trees is hard work!

We chopped and chopped on the first tree, taking turns as our flabby suburban arms grew tired. The tree was only about three inches in diameter, but it could have been the size of a house for all the progress we were making. Kirk went at it with a vengeance, chopping straight into the side of the tree with all his might. I was more deliberate, taking swings and trying to figure out why it wasn’t working. My pace made Kirk impatient, and he began to give me a hard time about doing half the work he was doing. He didn’t complain too much, though, because it took me longer to wear my arm out, and he got more rest. Eventually, out of pure frustration, I took a wild swing, coming down on the tree at angle, and the ax sank in almost an inch. We looked at each other with the same basic thought. Eureka!

From that marvelous breakthrough, akin to the discovery of fire as far as we were concerned, it only took us a few minutes to work out a technique that involved chopping at alternate angles, cutting a deeper v-shaped notch until the ax broke through to the other side. With our new skills in play, the small trees came down at respectable rate, and we had twenty or thirty of them stacked up when we heard the station wagon rumbling and slithering back through the tall grass. We grabbed the ax and ran the seventy yards back to meet them at our camp.

Arturo and Dad got out of the car with smiles on their faces. Apparently everything had gone well. As evidence, there was a big green wheelbarrow tied on the roof. The first thing I did was to look in the back seat for any new people they may have found, with thousand yard stares or not, but the back seat was full of tools, shovels and picks, rope, buckets, and a whole bunch of other devices I didn’t recognize. The cargo area had another load of the same kind of food they had brought before. We set about unloading, using the wheelbarrow to speed things along.

“There’s a maintenance shed in the corner of the schoolyard. We broke in to find all the tools. It was better than we hoped.” Dad said.

“What are we going to do with all of this stuff?” Mom asked.

“You’ll see. Everything is useful to us.” Dad replied.

It was odd that the conversation was so normal again. During lunch, I thought nothing would ever be the same, and here they were, two parents playing the typical question and answer game. It was reassuring, and proof that people can adapt to almost anything. Dad rounded up the food supplies in the same mysterious way, the stacks of food already looking like a monument to the past.

“Ok, men,” Dad began. We knew that meant he was going to make us work. “We have a hole to dig.” Again with the we’re-going-to-Disney tone. It never fooled any of us, except maybe Dad.

He and Arturo picked up a collection of tools, and walked towards my tree, the one I had climbed. Every male in the camp followed. We all preferred to include ourselves in the “men” category, even if it meant we would have to work. When we were close, Dad picked a spot as far from any trees as possible, while still under the shade of my big maple. He was marking a rectangle by sweeping the leaves aside with his foot, while Arturo went back to get the wheelbarrow. Once the area was cleared to the soil underneath, Dad took a square shovel and dug a little trench around the outside of his rectangle. This was going to be a big hole.

“Everyone grab a shovel, and start digging inside the lines. The dirt goes in the wheelbarrow.” Dad announced in the tone of a sports announcer. That guy could get excited about anything.

Dad and Arturo had the biggest shovels. Kirk and I were using shorter, gardening style shovels with a flat handle on the end. Arturo gave the young boys their own special hole to dig with some little trowels, to keep them out of the way. We started digging, and once we got below the top layer of dirt, we discovered that the soil underneath was about ninety-nine percent rock. Not big rocks, just lots of them. Our process slowly evolved into Dad working with the pick to loosen the rocky soil, and the three of us shoveling the loosened dirt and rock into the wheelbarrow. Dad would rest while we did that, and then would take the full wheelbarrow to a place on the opposite side of the tree, where the land started to slope sharply downward. There, he would dump the dirt over the edge. Occasionally we would hit a root from one of the trees and Arturo took the job of cutting it off at the edge of the hole with a bow saw or an ax. Surprisingly, the young boys were making good progress on their hole as well.

By the time we were four feet down, the sun was getting low on the horizon, and Dad called it for the day. Kirk and I were astonishingly glad, since we had never worked this hard in our entire lives, and we were trying to decide whether the blisters on our hands were worse than the pain in our muscles. From the look of it, Dad was feeling about the same, but Arturo was taking it in stride. He told us he had dug many holes in his life.

“Ok, boys. We’ll finish it in the morning.” Dad said, this time sounding like we were coming back from Disney. I dreaded the morning, I can tell you.

With my mother living in a new reality, we walked back to camp to dinner waiting for us. We ate chicken noodle soup with cornbread my mom had somehow made over the camp stove. When Dad asked her how she did it, she simply said, “Aluminum foil.”

It was the best food I had ever eaten, after a day of hard work and danger. To this day, I still marvel at how a hard day affects the taste buds. We talked about whatever came up, and learned that there were still over forty people living in the school lobby. Dad said it was getting bad in there since the water had stopped working, and the people were not clever enough to do anything but to keep using the facilities without flushing. Dad and Arturo had spent some time trying to convince them that it was time to move on, that help was not coming, but they refused to believe it. They figured that they just needed to be patient, and the government would get it all straightened out. When Dad explained that the government couldn’t fix the situation, for a whole range of logical reasons, they began to get agitated, like he was speaking some kind of heresy, and he and Arturo decided to leave before things got ugly. Arturo was surprised that none of them seemed to notice the significance of the running station wagon parked just outside the doors. No one even asked for a ride. Some people never learn, was his observation.

Arturo was getting anxious to go in search of his wife, but he wanted to make sure things were in order here first. “I owe you guys, for keeping Jimmy safe, and for the chance to go at all,” he said.

After dinner, Dad and Arturo agreed on a watch schedule, and sent us to bed. We were more than happy to go. Since Arturo had the watch, Dad went into the tent with Mom, and we could tell that a serious, tearful talk was going on. We had Jimmy wedged in with us, and Arturo wrapped Francine in two layers of space blanket. She never moved.

Chapter 2 – 6

I woke up early, to the sound of little Jimmy snoring directly into my right ear. The little fellow could scare a bear away. I winced at my first movements and literally staggered out of the tent to find a convenient place for a morning pee. With that need satisfied, and a few minutes to find my brain, I noticed Dad sitting on the log we had used for cover the day before. I went over and sat down next to him, and he gave me a hug around my shoulders.

“Morning, son. You did good work yesterday.”

“Thanks, Dad. You did too.”

Dad smiled and said, “I’m feeling it now.”

We both rolled our arms around with exaggerated groans and enjoyed the bonding that comes from such shared pain. Smiling, he asked, “You doing ok, with...” He made a wide gesture that encompassed life, I guess. “... Everything?”

“Sure, Dad. It’s different, but not so bad.”

“You know, it’s probably going to get a lot harder. People are upset and taking advantage of things now, but soon they’ll start to get really desperate.”

“I sort of figured that.”

“Arturo and I are going to look around the area today. He calls it recon. We’re going to see if there is anything obvious to worry about.”

“That’s a good idea. Maybe the people who live around here are nice,” I said.

“Maybe. Hopefully... Anyway, if there’s no real problems, we’ll probably stay here for a while. We’ll have to do some work to make it safer, but we’ll be ok.”

“Ok, Dad. I’m up for anything.”

“Good. Let’s go see about breakfast.”

We ate our morning bowl of oatmeal before anyone else emerged from the tents. Lucy was out first, followed by Mom. Then Arturo walked in from the woods, wearing his space blanket like a cloak. Dad explained that he slept out there where he could hear anything coming in from the back side of the camp. Arturo looked bleary-eyed and ragged.

“I’m getting too old for this sh... crap,” He said.

“I appreciate it, Art. We probably would have been dead about three times over if it weren’t for you.” Dad replied, handing Arturo a bowl of oatmeal and a box of raisins.

“Well, that’s true, which is why you and I are going on a little recon slash training hike today.”

“Great. I hope you can talk really fast, because you need to get on the road before regular old crazy turns into full-on ‘tango uniform’ out there,” Dad said, looking concerned.

“What’s tango uniform mean?” I asked. I expected the men to ignore me, since they were in the middle of grownup talk.

“True, true. Unless something changes, I’ll head out tonight, or early in the morning. Bill, tango uniform means really messed up.” Arturo chuckled.

“Ask me when you’re older, Bill. Is it better to drive at night, you think?” Dad asked Arturo.

“Hard to say. It might be harder to navigate, and harder to see problems ahead of time, but it may also make it harder to see me. If I need to worry about cops, they’re usually easier to out-think when they’re tired.” Arturo replied.

“Voice of experience?”

“I was young once,” Arturo replied with a grin. “Even better, they probably won’t have working radios. All I have to do is outrun them.”

“Well, you have the right car for that. This side of a Corvette anyway.”

“The hard part will be finding gas.”

“Yeah. That’s one reason to take the back roads, through Alabama and the panhandle. Less traffic and no news means you may find some mom and pop places that will take cash.”

“I hope so,” Art said. “I sure would hate to hike to Florida and back.”

“Don’t forget there are about 30 million dead cars out there now. There’s a siphon pump in the back, so you don’t even have to use gasoline for mouthwash.”

“I like the way you think, David.”

Dad held up three fingers in the Boy Scout salute and said, “Be prepared.”

We started the day with digging. At first it was painful all over, but eventually our muscles loosened up and only the blisters continued to bother us. Dad said, only about two hundred times, that he wished he had thought to buy work gloves. Tommy and Jimmy, with Mom’s help, decided we could handle digging without them, and so it was just the four of us. We made good progress, especially when we got past the six-foot mark. At that depth, the rocks began to thin out and made way for solid greenish-tan clay. We were using buckets on lengths of rope to lift dirt out of the hole, and I was in charge of dumping them into the wheelbarrow. It fell into a rhythm. I would empty five buckets, push the wheelbarrow over to the slope, dump it, and come back in time for two more buckets. When the hole was nine feet deep, Dad and Arturo took some time to scrape the walls straight and even. We dumped that dirt and then we all stomped around on the bottom of the hole until the floor was fairly flat and hard packed. Then Dad dug a small, deep hole in the center of the floor and threw some rocks into it to fill it up even with the larger hole.

“For drainage,” he told us.

“Clever,” Arturo said.

“You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Dad used the square shovel to cut tall steps into one end of the hole, starting at the bottom and working each one in a little farther into the wall. By the time he finished, Kirk and I could walk right out of the hole. We were thankful because we had no idea how we were going to get out. Then, Dad had us over the crest of the slope, throwing dead leaves on the dirt we had dumped there.

“The idea is to be hard to spot. All this fresh dirt can be seen from a distance.”

Arturo went back to camp while Dad gave us our jobs for the day. We were to drag our cut saplings over to the hole, cut the limbs off, and lay them across the top of the hole. If we didn’t have enough, we would have to cut more. Then, we would put the leafy branches back on top of the trees. When we had everything tightly covered, we were to cover everything with more dead leaves. Hard to spot, we were reminded.

“Leave the steps uncovered for now,” Dad said. “We’ll find something to use as a door later. If you get all that done before we get back, start moving the food over here. I’ll arrange it in the hole later.”

“Ok, Dad,” Kirk said.

Arturo had a small pack ready when we got back to camp, along with the hunting rifle and the shotgun. Dad had already made a habit of carrying his handgun with him, while Arturo had picked the best of the bandits’ pistols for himself. We were amassing quite a collection of weapons, but hadn’t had time to work through all of them. I was hoping that one had my name on it, but I wasn’t too convinced that would happen any time soon.

Dad gave Mom a kiss, and he and Arturo hiked out to the west, which was the back of our camp, as we figured it. Mom watched them go until they were lost to sight in the woods. After a few more seconds, she walked over to Francine, sat down next to the old woman, and started talking to her, trying to get any kind of response. I picked up the ax. Kirk grabbed one from the new pile of tools, and we got to work.

Chapter 2 – 7

I was proud of our little show of woodcraft, when it was done. We had covered the entire pit with strong saplings and woven them with branches into a tight roof. When we had it covered in leaves, Kirk and I were convinced that no one would even know it was there. We even put together a woven panel for a door over the steps, after Kirk had the clever idea of using vines to tie it together. Extra credit, we called it.

We guessed it was around four in the afternoon when we got back to camp, and we were starving. Mom had made a bunch of peanut butter crackers for us, and kept them in the cooler until we got back. While we munched and sipped water, we noticed that she kept looking to the west, obviously beginning to get worried about Dad and Arturo. We were surprised when they came back from the north, looking tired, but no worse for the hike. Dad was carrying a red metal gas can in one hand, and the rifle with the other.

Mom gave Dad a hug, and squeezed him hard enough to get a grunt in return as he clumsily set the gas can down. Arturo was carrying the pack, but it was clearly heavy now, the thin straps cutting into his shoulders.

“We met the real landowners,” Dad said.

“You did?” Mom asked, with an open mouth of surprise.

“Yeah. George and Martha Carroll. Nice old couple. Their family has been around this area for generations. We told them our story, and asked if it was ok if we stay here. Mr. Carroll said it was fine, on one condition.”

“What condition?”

“We’re supposed to blow these horns if any trouble comes our way, so they’ll know to get ready. And, if they blow their horns, we’re supposed to come running to help out.” Dad turned Arturo around and pulled a little canister air horn out of the pack.

“Well, that seems nice of them,” Mom said.

“There’s more. They also gave us a big bag of nails and a bunch of ammunition that George thought would work when we told him about what weapons we had. He also gave us a rundown on where to hunt for deer, and other animals.”

“Wow. You must have really been charming.”

“Aren’t I always?” Dad asked with a wry grin.

Mom rolled her eyes and ignored the question. “Where are they? How far is it?”

“About a quarter mile that way,” Dad replied, pointing northwest. “But it’s closer to a half mile when you take the easy way. No fences to cross.”

“Did they know anything about what’s going on?”

“Not much, but they do have a great nephew who’s a deputy. He told them things were bad, and to stay at home, no matter what. For them, it seemed like the normal thing to do anyway, so they aren’t really convinced that things are bad. If the power weren’t out, they might not even know,” Dad answered.

Arturo chimed in, “They know about the nukes that went off in DC. They don’t know why the power is out, even though their nephew, Rodney Barker, explained the EMP to them. They do know he was very upset when he came by to check on them, and they know that the whole sheriff’s department is running on commandeered old diesels, since they survived the EMP pretty well. Rodney was driving a ’78 Chevy truck when he stopped by. He told them one piece of news, that Nashville is a mess, but not nearly as bad as bigger cities, like Atlanta. His command pipeline said that nationwide martial law is being discussed. He said he would look in on them as often as possible.”

Dad added, “George reminded us not to shoot any deputies that show up, just in case Rodney comes out to see who’s on the back forty. He said that we should shoot anyone else, but he was half joking. He was seriously “old school” about his property. Oh, and Martha said she could probably spare some of her canned food if we needed it. Nice people.”

“Yeah,” Mom said. “Very nice. And you liked them?”

“I think we got incredibly lucky again,” Dad replied.

“Me too,” Art said, nodding his head.

“Well,  I guess that makes me feel better. At least we are allowed to be here... I do feel better,” Mom concluded.

Kirk and I were practically bursting to show Dad our work, and he agreed to come and see it. When he did, he was full of praise. “That is excellent work, boys. Just great. I couldn’t have done it better if I tried.” We were beside ourselves with pride, and practically skipped back to the camp circle.

Arturo and Dad had apparently worked out the details on their hike, and immediately started loading the car for Arturo’s trip south. They put in some food, water, one of the assault rifles and ammunition for it. Arturo kept the handgun he had chosen and set it on the passenger seat with a matching box of ammo. He wedged the big combat knife into the gap between the dash and the under-hanging CB radio. Dad gave him a quick tour and set the red gas can in the very back. It was empty, but Arturo would fill it at the first opportunity for an emergency backup. Dad pulled the siphon pump out of the spare tire storage and set it next to the can. He didn’t want Arturo to waste time looking for it and getting it out. Arturo had the maps out where he could reach them on the fly, and a couple of bottles of water at hand.

“Ok, David. It’s time to hit it. Remember everything I told you, and you should be fine.” Art said, holding out his hand for a shake.

Dad leaned in and gave Arturo a hug. “Good luck my friend. We’ll take care of your boy, and we’ll stay here as long as it takes for you to get back, or as long as it’s safe anyway. In any case, we’ll be close by. If you can’t find us, honk the horn and we’ll find you, ok?”

“Sounds good,” Arturo said. He put on his best terrible Terminator voice. “I’ll be back.”  He squatted down and gave Jimmy a long hug, and whispered, “I love you, boy. I will be back.”

Arturo stood up and slid into the driver’s seat, as Mom held Jimmy back from the car. Arturo took a minute to adjust seat and mirrors, then turned the key. The big engine rumbled to life, and idled roughly with its mismatched parts. The car clunked into reverse, and backed slowly out of the woods. Arturo never took his eyes off of his son, until he reached the grass, waved once, and pulled away to the north, aiming for the gravel entrance to the road. We heard the car idle, smoother now that it was warming up, as Arturo worked the gate, and the faint metallic rattle the gate closing behind him. The car accelerated away to join the road heading south, and we were all feeling strangely empty. We were hoping, maybe praying, that we would see him again.

Chapter 2 – 8

“Hello, the watch!”

Terry felt a sharp disconnect when the new voice intruded on Bill’s tale. Bill seemed to be expecting it.

“Hello, below!” Bill called.

“Is that you, Bill?”

“Yep. Bill plus one. Come on up.”

The twin ropes of the ladder rattled against the platform as the newcomer climbed up and vaulted over the edge in athletic fashion. He was a young man, in his twenties, long limbed and rangy, with dark hair and tanned skin. He was dressed in the typical work pants and work shirt.

Bill made the introductions. “Terry, meet Neil. Neil, this is Terry Shelton.”

“Ah. Hey there, Mr. Shelton. You’re the talk today. Good to meet you,” Neil said, looking Terry in the eye as he extended his hand for a handshake.

Terry clasped the offered hand. “Pleased to meet you, Neil.”

“What do you think so far?” Neil asked.

“It’s all so incredible. I’m still trying to think what to think, you know?” Terry replied, looking around to show the scale of his incredulity.

“Yeah, I know. I was new here not so long ago. It’s a long way from the trout farm. We ate fish every damn day.”

Bill explained. “We did a lot of trading with Neil’s family, until Tullahoma decided to take the Nut Cave Trout Farm by force. His parents sent Neil and his little sister into the woods to hide, and we picked them up later on our normal run to buy some fish. We brought them back here.”

“Those bastards had my parents working as slaves, since no one else knew how to work the fish farm. Kirk and his crew rescued them after a couple of months. They live here now, too. The Tullahoma crew killed my uncle, and two cousins,” Neil said, looking away.

“Well, thanks to a little help from our friends in Bedford County, they got what they had coming.” Bill said.

“Amen to that.”

Bill handed the rifle to Neil, and said, “The watch is yours, Neil.”

“The watch is mine, Bill.”

Bill stepped over to the edge, and executed a daring exit from the platform. Terry couldn’t see how he did it, but the ropes thrashed wildly until he heard Bill’s boots hit the ground.

“Neil, it was good to meet you. I’m sorry about your family,” Terry said, as he considered how he would get down the ladder.

“Likewise Terry. I’m sure I’ll see you later. Hey, two helpful tips for you. One, just step off the edge and let your feet snag on the way down. Let your hands guide you on the ropes, but don’t try to hold on. Two, watch your back. Sally has been talking smack about you all afternoon.” Neil grinned and winked at Terry. “Enjoy your brief life as an eligible bachelor.”

“Uh... Great, I guess,” Terry replied, clearly uncomfortable. “See you later.”

Terry looked over the edge, and thought Neil’s advice was suicidal, but he figured it was another test he couldn’t afford to fail. He stepped off, turning 180 degrees as he did. His right foot snagged on the fourth rung of the ladder; his hands hooked loosely around the ropes. He alternated feet every few steps, snapping the rope ladder around wildly, until almost before he knew it, he hit the ground hard and fell on his butt.

Bill laughed and said, “Not bad, wild man. Takes practice is all.”

Terry laughed too, surprised he didn’t break an ankle. He got up and dusted himself off, rubbed his friction-heated palms together, and the men headed back to the little town.

As they emerged from the shade of the trees, Bill said, “I’m about talked out. Haven’t said this much since... well, yesterday.” He laughed. “It’s about 4:30 now. We’re going to have a little gathering tonight around 5:30 or six. Until then, feel free to do whatever you want. Wander around, talk to folks, it’s up to you. We’ll gather in the town center, ok?”

“Ok, Bill. I can go anywhere I want?”

“Sure, just don’t wander into anyone’s bedroom. That might be a big surprise.”

Terry chuckled and said,  “I’ll try not to do that. I’d be the most surprised one there.”

“Depends on the bedroom, I guess. I’ll see you in a hour or so.”

They crossed the gravel perimeter lane and Bill turned right, heading towards the creek. Terry walked straight into town, feeling conspicuous and not quite at home. He realized this was the first time he had been left alone. He stepped into the little open area in the middle of Teeny Town. It wasn’t quite a town square, but he could tell that was the idea. The gravel was tightly packed and free of dust and debris. All four of the corner buildings had deep porches and at least a bench or two for sitting and talking, except for the church, which had a simple facade. Four broad wooden steps led up to a small porch painted battleship gray. Two large flower pots full of pansies adorned the entrance and framed the white double doors. The side held a row of simple double hung windows, no stained glass to be seen. The church’s only other mark of pride was that, in a town full of rustic brown buildings, the whole church was painted white, from the stone lower walls up to the galvanized metal roof.

On the opposite corner, the northwest, there was a more typical building. In fact, it was the mirror image of the tavern he had visited, which was on the northeast corner. Its porch was lined with benches, where the tavern had small round tables out front. There were no signs on any of the places, so Terry could only guess at what was inside, but the last building on the square had a vaguely official look about it that he couldn’t quite identify, but if he were to guess, he would have called it the town hall.

As he surveyed the square, a stout older lady with rosy cheeks and curly silver hair burst out of the double doors across from the tavern. She saw Terry standing there and waved vigorously in his direction.

“Hi!” The word was drawn out into about four syllables. “You must be Terry!” she said, trundling over to where he stood.

“Hello, ma’am,” Terry replied, shaking her hand with a little bow of his head. “Yes, ma’am. I’m Terry Shelton. I’m pleased to meet you.”

“I’m Eleanor Tate. Call me Ellie, please. I’ve heard so much about you,” she said, practically gushing over him.

“You have?”

“Oh, sure. It’s a very small town.” Ellie laughed at her own joke.

Teeny Town. Got it. “Well, I hope it wasn’t all bad,” Terry said, joining in the fun.

Ellie threw her head back and cackled, a full belly laugh that had her entire body shaking. Terry caught a whiff of her breath and realized that she had either gotten an early start on the celebration, or she just liked to drink. From the visible blood vessels in her cheeks, he would have guessed the latter.

“Well, Terry. It was a pleasure to meet you. I have to finish up my work before the gathering starts.”

“Uh, Ellie, if you don’t mind me asking, what is it that you do?”

“Oh, not at all. I’m in charge of the records, over at town hall.”

“Oh, I see.”

“It’s boring, but somebody has to do it, right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, I’ll see you in a little while. Go in and say hi to Aggie. She’s been saying nice things about you.” Ellie looked him up and down with a look that was approaching a leer. “I can see why.” She winked at him and pinched his cheek like a long lost aunt. She paused for one more look and scuttled over to the building he had guessed was the town hall.

Terry’s next guess was that the store must be the place Ellie had just left. He walked over, stepped up on the porch, and tentatively opened one of the broad French doors. Sure enough, Aggie was standing behind a polished wooden counter ten feet in from the front doors. The counter held a mechanical cash register that could have been easily 150 years old, and a row of large jars holding a variety of foods and other tidbits.

“Hello, Terry. Did Bill talk your ears off?” Aggie said, smiling at him.

Terry stepped inside and let the door close behind him. “Yes, ma’am. He did, but it was interesting, so I didn’t mind at all,” he replied, smiling in return. “I also met Sally. I think Bill said she’s your second daughter.”

“So I’ve heard, but I really don’t know where she came from. Maybe the stork brought her.”

Terry responded with a confused expression. “Uh...”

“Never mind. Old story... Anyway, I heard that you have met. She was in here earlier telling me all of your flaws.”

“I’m not surprised. She told me a handful too.”

“What about her? Did you see any flaws to tell? Here’s your chance to get even.”

“Except for her being mean as a rattlesnake, no. She seemed fine to me.”

“Seems like you figured her out. I don’t know where she gets it. We think she spent too much time training with her Uncle Kirk... or eating gunpowder; we’re not sure.” Aggie’s smile grew into a slightly evil grin, which infected Terry as well, until he realized it and felt sort of stupid for sharing this private moment with Sally’s mother.

“Terry, why don’t you wait out on the porch while I close the store? Then we can watch the setup for our gathering. Won’t be long now.”

“Ok, Mrs...” Terry said. “I just realized I never caught your last name.”

“We didn’t mention it. We were waiting to see what you decided. Until then, we thought it better to keep it a little mysterious. Anyway, it’s Carter. See you in few minutes.”

Terry turned and stepped out the front door, waving as he went. He was mildly shocked to see that the square had already changed. A group of people were setting up long picnic tables in rows across the open space, and younger kids were carrying a bunch of folding chairs, setting them in place on each side of the few tables without built in benches. Those were placed in a row along the tavern and church side of the square.

Terry decided to pitch in, and took two steps off the porch when a man with a huge mustache said, “No, no. It’s not your turn. Have a seat, Mr. Shelton.

Ok, that was a little creepy, Terry thought. Everyone knew his name, and he only knew a bare handful of people. He went back to the porch and plopped down on the bench nearest the doors. He sat for a few minutes, watching all the activity, before the weight of all the changes started funneling through his mind, and his eyes began to stare blankly into the distance.

He vaguely noticed the footfall on the steps, when he heard, “Hey there, Lazybones. You just gonna sit while everyone else does all the work?”

His attention popped back to the moment and he looked up at Sally, standing there with a hand on her hip, which was jutting out in a fetching fashion. He was ready for her this time. “No. I was busy watching all the crying babies crawl by. They can’t even walk yet, but they can still scream your name.”

Sally seemed to approve of his response. She took three steps over and leaned on the rail in front of him. “They can also climb a rope ladder faster than you.”

“Well, sure they can, when they’re running from the Terror of Teeny Town.”

Sally was struggling to keep her face locked in a stern expression. “I could throw one out of the watch post, and they would still land on their feet.”

“Wow. Word really gets around in this place.”

“It’s all in who you know,” she said, smiling with impending victory.

“So far, almost everyone I know is related to you. They’re are such nice people. What happened to you?”

“Dropped on my head as a baby... twice.”

“That explains it. Were you climbing a rope ladder at the time?” Terry asked.

“No. I was putting the roof on the barn, with a hammer bigger than your head.”

“Well, at least it didn’t break any of your cute freckles when you fell.”

The smile fell away from her face as her mouth dropped open and her cheeks turned bright red. Insults, she could handle. Compliments were another thing altogether.

“Ok, well... you... have big feet,” she said, knowing it was weak.

Now Terry was grinning at her, amazed that his conversational victory came so easily. “All the better to run when I see you coming, my dear.”

“Don’t call me that. I’m not your dear! And I’m sure as hell not CUTE!”

“True, Sally. Cute doesn’t cover it.”

Her face found a deeper shade of red. She gave an audible huff, and strode angrily off the porch and across the square. Just before she disappeared around the corner of the church, Terry called, “See you later, Sally!” People pretending not to watch were smiling and whispering to each other.

He heard a shuffle over his shoulder. Aggie was standing in the doorway; he didn’t know how long she had been there.

“I see you two are getting along,” Aggie said, wearing a crooked smile.

“Famously.”

Aggie walked around him and sat down on the bench next to him.

“She’s not used to a challenge. She comes on so strong; it’s a rare thing when she doesn’t get her way.”

“I’m sure we could have traded insults all night. She’s really good at it.”

“Yes. Let’s blame her father for that trick, shall we?”

Terry looked in Aggie’s eyes and replied, “If you say so.” He smiled to let her know he was joking.

Aggie face turned red then, not unlike her daughter’s reaction. She even had freckles that showed when she blushed. “Hmmm. Can’t fool you, Mr. Shelton.”

“Can I ask? Was your hair ever red?”

“What do you think?”

Terry just kept smiling.

Aggie decided to change the subject. “Look there.” She pointed at the southern barn. “She always ends up there when something is bothering her.”

Terry could see Sally’s slim silhouette leaning against the back rail of the fighting platform on the barn roof. Maybe she wasn’t kidding about roofing the barn as a baby. She was looking south and pulling her fingers through her copper hair.

“I didn’t mean to bother her,” Terry said.

“Oh, I didn’t mean it like that. She just goes up there to think. It’s been her special spot since the first time she climbed it.”

“Ah. What does she think about?” Terry asked, mostly thinking out loud.

“Who knows? But if I had to guess, she spends a lot of time thinking about the world beyond our  little place here. We teach history, and she knows what was lost during the Breakdown.”

“Yeah, she probably knows better than I do. They don’t teach much history in town, either from before or after the Breakdown.”

“The word is that they only teach what they want you to know.”

“I figured that. I was lucky. My grandfather was kind of a bookworm. We spent hours listening to him read out loud, and then later, I was always getting in trouble for reading when I was supposed to be working.”

“Good for you, Terry. You can’t learn too much,” Aggie said thoughtfully.

“So far, every time I think I know something, it turns out I knew nothing, really.”

“That only gets worse, I’m afraid.”

“Great,” Terry said, applying a healthy dose of sarcasm.

Aggie smiled, “Well, it looks like they’re about ready...”

“Oh, I meant to ask. I wanted to help out, but a man told me it wasn’t my turn. What does that mean?” Terry asked.

“We have everyone divided into teams. The teams take turns with town functions. The teams have an unofficial competition to see who can throw the best gatherings. That’s one reason.”

“What’s the other reason?”

“You’ll see,” Aggie replied with a devilish grin. “Let’s go take our seats. Bill is here.”

Aggie led Terry across the square, which was rapidly filling with people. She showed him a chair at the center table in the row with actual chairs, rather than picnic benches. Bill gave him a nod, and placed a polished wooden box on the table. No one was seated yet. They hovered around the tables chatting in twenty different conversations. Terry stood behind his chair, smiling at everyone who looked his way.

Aggie leaned close to speak into his ear. “Get ready for a lot of hand shaking. Also, be sure to remember every single name. There’s a quiz afterwards.”

Terry looked shocked, and felt a surge of panic rise up.

Aggie leaned back in. “I was just kidding, Terry. Relax.”

Terry laughed softly at himself. He saw Bill look at Aggie, and she just shrugged in return, turning her head towards the barn.

“Ok, folks! Let’s take our seats and get started!” Bill spoke over the buzz of the crowd, waving both hands in a “down” gesture. The crowd ignored him. He tried again. “Come on, people! Plenty of time for gossip later.”

Finally they began to sit down and the chatter faded to the soft crying of a baby in the corner of the square. Bill stood quietly for a few more seconds, looking over the people waiting expectantly in front of him.

Finally Bill began to speak, in a different tone than Terry had heard yet, more formal, deeper, bigger somehow.

“Ladies and gentlemen, citizens of Teeny Town, brothers and sisters, we gather tonight to welcome our newest member. Please welcome Mr. Terry Shelton into our community. Stand up, Terry.”

Terry couldn’t move for a moment. Bill grabbed him firmly by the upper arm and hoisted him to his feet. Terry spent the next ten seconds nodding and smiling as the crowd clapped and cheered.

“Terry comes to us through the recommendation of Dusty, who has watched his education and training very closely. He is sponsored for membership by me and my wife. To protect our community, Terry has agreed to be a part-timer, and carries the tough burden of maintaining two lives, one out in the world, and one here among friends. Everyone, please take the time to welcome him personally this evening.”

Another round of cheering broke out, and Terry was afraid that his smile muscles were about to cramp up.

“As is our tradition, let me formalize his membership with a gift. By accepting this gift, Terry becomes a full-fledged member of our community, with all the rights and responsibilities of that membership. Terry further agrees to put the needs of our community first in any case where his other responsibilities come into conflict.”

Bill lifted the wooden box from the table, turned to face Terry, and asked, “Terry Shelton, do you accept these terms and your inclusion into our group?” He moved the box a few inches towards Terry, offering but not yet delivering the gift.

Terry placed his hands on the box, and responded. “I am proud and honored to accept membership in this community.”

Bill smiled, and released the box to Terry. The crowd exploded into wild applause, cheering, whistling, and hooting. Terry held the box close to his chest and turned to accept the acclaim. The sounds merged into a 3-beat chant of “Open it... Open it!”

Terry, fighting a sense of overwhelming attention, placed the box on the table. He released the latch and slowly opened the lid. The crowd dropped into silence. When he saw the contents, he sucked in a sharp breath. People were smiling at his reaction. Inside was the most perfect handgun he had ever seen, along with a matching leather holster, and that was not all. Above the gun was a beautiful belt knife with a Damascus steel blade, folded many times and worked until the  two-toned metal of the blade mimicked the grain of the hardwood handle. The knife, end to end, was a versatile 11 inches long, six of those inches in the gracefully curving blade. The knife had a leather sheath, tooled to match the gun holster. It was truly beautiful to him.

Terry looked up with tears in his eyes, and said, “Thank you all. This is the nicest gift I’ve ever received.” Another round of cheering erupted around him, as he reverently held the knife and watched the blade glimmer in rare electric light.

Bill waved the crowd to quietness again, and said, “You are welcome, Terry. Most welcome... Don’t worry, though; you’ll earn it before it’s over.”

The people chuckled knowingly.

“Sit down, Terry. We’re done embarrassing you.” Bill said, and waited until Terry was seated and the box was closed. “I want to say thank you, for myself, to all of you. The reason we can produce such nice gifts here, with our own skills and our own tools, is that all of you have worked so hard for so many years, and adding quality young men like Terry to our numbers is our guarantee that we will continue to grow, and improve, and enjoy the fruits of our labors. Thank you all.”

A more sedate round of applause spread through the square, proving that it’s always easier to cheer others than oneself.

“A special thanks to Geoff Hill, our master gunsmith, and Larry Roper, our bladesmith for their fine work, and to our shop supervisor, Henry Hall, for getting the heck out of their way so they could finish in time,” Bill said, pointing the craftsmen out in the crowd as he spoke, and performing an exaggerated nod as the people laughed at his dig at Henry.

The shop boss had a reputation for treating the machine tools like his own personal spoiled children. Rumor had it, he slept on the shop floor to keep the machines safe at night.

“All right people. Thank you all for coming. Let’s eat!” Bill finished with a flourish, waving the waiting team into action.

Within seconds, giant platters of steaks, baked potatoes, rolls and steaming vegetables were hoisted onto the tables. They ate family style, with plates being passed, filled, and sent back to hungry owners. The roiling waves of conversation churned into high gear, and the celebration was on. Terry said a silent prayer of thanks at his good fortune to be among these new friends on this fine clear evening. Only one thing was missing to make it perfect, and she was nowhere to be seen.

Terry dug into the feast as Bill told him details about his gift. The gun was a hand-machined copy of a Springfield 1911 in 45 caliber, with a few subtle modifications to make it faster and a touch easier to keep on target. Bill explained that Terry had access to the armory and ammunition supplies, but that Bill had selected some special ammo for Terry to use for carry purposes. He promised that the selected ammunition would only take one round, if Terry could hit his target. They would work on that later.

As the meal wound down, beer and whiskey replaced water and tea. Men brought out pipes and hand rolled cigarettes, and women moved into groups to talk and to avoid blue clouds of tobacco smoke. Children were sent home to bed, and a band began to assemble. Tables were moved to the sides of the square to make room. By the time everything was rearranged, there were two guitarists, two fiddle players, a bearded man with a huge upright bass, a collection of ethnic drums, and several different horns, none of which were familiar to Terry.

He perched on top of his table, now positioned on the corner of the tavern, and sat with his hand on the box. He kept jumping off the table to greet the stream of people who came by to introduce themselves and to welcome him into the community. He was glad Aggie was only teasing about the test because he would have failed badly. He had met more people in the past hour than he did in half his life in Manchester. The stream rapidly dwindled to a trickle and then, just as quickly, he had met everyone at the gathering. He took a deep breath and settled in to listen to the music, left hand still resting on the box.

The band started with a lively song, and seemingly random people stepped up to sing the lyrics, something about the end of the world and feeling fine. There seemed to be a race to see who could sing the fastest; the band picked up the tempo for each new singer. Meanwhile, most of the crowd was dancing around in wild circles, stopping at the railings for another swig of beer. Terry sat through several more songs, enjoying the rare treat of live music, or any music at all, for that matter.

The band stopped mid song and changed tunes to something about cold as ice, willing to sacrifice our love, when a finger tapped him on the shoulder.

“Think you can stop fondling your gun long enough to dance with me?” Sally asked him, all big eyes and pouty lips.

“Frankly, I’m better at rope ladders.” Terry replied.

“Well, I’ll take it easy on you, ok?”

“I didn’t know you knew, ‘take it easy,’ but sure, I’ll give it try. Just don’t blame me if my huge feet step all over your little dainty ones.”

Sally took his hand and dragged him out in front of everyone, away from his precious new box. He wasn’t sure which was worse. As soon as they stepped toward the center, the band transitioned into a new song, something slow and romantic, which was vaguely embarrassing but good, since Terry wasn’t lying about his dancing skills. Sally worked with him for a few minutes, until aside from his complete lack of rhythm, he was holding his own. Her feet were relatively safe anyway.

“See? It’s not so hard,” she said.

“I can’t hear you. I’m too busy concentrating.”

“Well, I’m happy enough that I got you away from that box. I was getting jealous.”

“It’s a nice box, with the polished wood and all.”

“Terry, I’m sorry I missed your gathering.”

“It’s ok, Sally. I was playing dirty with the freckle comments.”

She stuck her tongue out at him.

“Besides, it was pretty nice just seeing you up on the barn,” he added.

“I’m afraid of you,” she said into his ear.

“Why? You’re twice as tough as me.”

“I think you know what I mean.”

“Let me guess. Your parents have me picked out for you, and you don’t want to be forced into anything.”

“You knew that?”

“It wasn’t too hard to notice, all those little looks and gestures, coincidental meetings, your mom trying to explain you to me... Plus, I felt like I was getting the royal treatment. I doubt that most new people get that.”

“Well, aren’t you the smarter-than-you-look boy?”

“Don’t tell anyone. Makes it hard to sneak up on folks,” Terry said with a smile.

“Our secret, but I think my folks already know. They’ve been singing your praises for two days.”

“Well, ignore them. I can’t say I don’t like the idea, or that I’m not flattered, but I figure it’s up to us to decide if we like each other, and whatever that means.”

“Really?” Sally asked, looking up at him with hope in her eyes.

“Yeah, really.”

Sally gave him a relieved smile, and Terry pretended that it didn’t tear his heart wide open as she leaned her head in to rest on his shoulder. He happened to be facing her parents at that moment, sitting on the tavern porch. He also pretended he didn’t see Bill and Aggie give each other the shining smiles of victory as they held hands and watched their daughter do something they never believed possible.

The rest of the evening was a terrible conflict for Terry. He was as close to pure happiness as he had ever been, but a few short hours from this perfect moment, he was heading back to town, and the empty existence he knew was there for him. Manchester was waiting with dread and hopeless hunger on its side.

End Part 2

About the Author

This is my second Kindle title, Part 2 of the same story, and I thank you for reading it. The story is my response to the feeling of precariousness in American life right now. I’m not a survivalist and I don’t live in an abandoned missile silo. In fact, I live in a suburb in Washington State with my lovely wife, five dogs (all of whom are rescues and brilliant furry idiots) and two cats that encompass both ends of the cat social scale.

Connect with Me Online

I have a sadly neglected blog at http://www.jfperkins.com but if you bug me enough, I may decide to give it some love. I have another blog related to a fundraising bicycle trip I took with my dog a couple of years ago at http://www.bigdummyproject.com. I am also on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/videojimmy but I’ll be honest. I mostly use it to post pictures of the dogs. I don’t use Twitter, because frankly, I’m way too wordy.

*Car adventure, Humvee radio, combat speech*