Against the Grain (5 page)

Chapter 6

I elected to hike the four and a half miles back to my place all that night instead of making a camp and extending it out. I might have been exhausted, but I wanted to get it over with. Plus it was a nice night with a good moon that showed plenty of light to walk by. My path took me through the heart of the woods north of the Harris’s houses, and it was treacherous in all the right spots if you didn’t know where you were going. Fortunately, I had done this a lot. I tried not to go by the same path too often so as to create a trail, although there were a few spots that it was unavoidable. There was only one area narrow enough to jump the little creek to keep your feet dry, and you had to drop through the bit of a canyon at just the right point or otherwise be redirected for an extra couple of miles around. I knew the way well and from the time I had spent back here in these woods, I also knew that there were no other occupied houses for miles and miles all around. A hunter would have to really be lost to make it all the way out here, no matter where they had started from. That’s what I always hoped anyway.

My walk that night gave me time to reflect on what I had heard Megan and Breanne discussing. I usually tried not to over think the part I was playing, but now it was fresh in my mind. Unintentionally, I had developed a certain persona around the others. Part of it was scripted for show, and part of it was just born out of the differences between me and nearly everyone else living there.  

I tried to keep them in the dark about the grizzly things I had had to do in the last couple years, but not so much as to let them naively believe it was safe beyond just a few miles from their front doors. None of them needed to hear the gory details from behind the gun sights, some things couldn’t be hidden though, and the rest was apparently guessed at.
 

Coincidentally, a bit of a legend had grown up around me. And perhaps I did start to play into it that a bit too, for a good reason. While I had found a balance in my life with the world, I seemed to be an exception. During the height of the economic crumble and then the harsh winter after it all really had fallen apart, there was little to no hope. There had been plenty of panic, lots of suicides, and many people took it as a freeing of the burdens of laws and morals… which all meant that the good people who were left were rapidly losing everything they had ever known, including hope. People needed hope to continue on living, it was their underlying purpose. Hope for a better car, better salary, better relationship, or nowadays, a better crop of food.
 

The truth was that I wasn’t that special or different than anyone else. I had never served in the military, I wasn’t some civilian contractor and I never wanted to be a cop, I had just been plugged in. With camping and shooting there was a natural connection to some survival related discussions and unlike most of the other basement dwellers who read and talked too much, I had put what I was doing and hearing together, and tried things out.
 

Clint Fenner had been very similar to me, in our interests anyway. We both lived out of town most of our lives. We camped, hunted, and shot at a few competitions together and we were traveling partners for the instructional classes that we attended… and we were friends. It all had just fallen into place with us.
 

He had been around longer than I had, and he had a dream, or maybe more accurately a nightmare, of what would be needed to be done if things ever did go south in our country. A country tearing itself apart was not unheard of; it was just usually on a smaller scale. A full blown civil war, revolution or invasion was not logistically ever going to happen to us, but a slide into decline, into third world hardships and general lawlessness driven by desperation, he and I both knew that was a very real possibility. All a person would have to do was actually pay attention to past and current history to put the pieces together and see what path we were on. Clint believed it. I believed it too, and our lifestyles helped us to be able to ease into the transition we found ourselves in when things started sliding downhill faster than most could keep up with.
  

We had also used it as a victimless hobby. We put tactics and gear to use when we went out into the woods or played paintball, but we never took it, or ourselves, too seriously. We enjoyed hiking around and staying out in the woods overnight with just a small pack and rifle, crossing through land with no one ever the wiser. We mapped routes and role played a little and it was fun... up until it wasn’t just for fun anymore.
 

A few years back we went to a climbing and mountaineering emergency medical workshop. The way we conducted ourselves, our approach, familiarity, and comfort didn’t go unnoticed. The local Search and Rescue and Sheriffs office’s each had representatives attending the same training, and a dialog was established. A few handshakes and business cards later, we went on our merry way until a month afterward when we were contacted to assist in a rescue in our area.
 

We ended up helping out with a handful of different issues, with a handful of different agencies, but the unpaid volunteer status for what was essentially a part time job, never sat well with me. Still I played nice for a while longer. We never received much respect from the official paid guys, which I didn’t like, although I could understand it. They didn’t like needing guys that knew the land or could read a map when they were used to having the budgets for updated electronics, helicopters and dog handlers.
 

More and more though, I caught on to what others in the underground media buzz-worded as the “militarization of the police.” I essentially had no qualms witnessing a no knock, warrant-less search of a cabin with a meth lab in the front yard, or the rough handling of a escaped convict, but after a while, too much got to be too much for me and I started having other things to do when the next call to volunteer would come in.
 

And it was the truth. Between still having a real job at a small local company that was on life support in what was left of the economy, building a house, and having to work harder and harder just to have food to eat, there wasn’t much free time left for me anymore. The calls for volunteers slowed down and eventually stopped when lost, missing or escaped people stopped being looked for.
 

The country’s slide down was slow, the decline was happening, but life had gone on and we adapted as best we could. Jobs were lost and crime went up. Gasoline and oil prices rose and deliveries of food, along with everything else, started being less and less consistent. The power grid, along with all the other utilities, was old beyond its years, stretched by an exploding population and an outdated system with no money to make the needed upgrades. Patches in the water and sewer lines were made in the largest concentrations of urban centers in exchange for letting other systems that fed less inhabited areas fail altogether. There was no budget for road repair, and most utility companies didn’t have enough new and trained employees to replace their retiring workforce anyway.

Medical care was only looked for in the most serious of cases as insurance companies dissolved. Doctors and hospitals started requiring payment prior to treatment. Simple aliments became deadly, and those unfortunate enough to require long term or maintenance type care or medications for things like diabetes, blood pressure and heart disease, they no longer had the options available to continue their treatment.  

Break-ins for living essentials by desperate, but still essentially good people just trying to feed their families, matched the number of drug and alcohol motivated robberies by addicts trying to find some tiny relief from their self induced toxic pain.
 

Clint and I found ourselves slowly having to live more and more in the side life we once had enjoyed as a hobby. Being armed, well armed, every second of the day was a given. Having to quietly procure an extra meal from wild game was more and more common. Some people had stores of food, but they relied on them solely or too early, not using them to merely supplement a garden or what wild game could be harvested.

What riots happened were quick and destructive, but ultimately futile. Hopeless people were driven to the streets as they called for reform and assistance, but there was none to be given. In their frustration, the mobs trashed the last bastions of those people that had held out through all the turmoil up to that point. Stores were looted only for people to find that there was nothing to take that would give them a chance to live more than one more day. The hopeless took their aggravation out on everything and everyone within reach. The chaos fumed, consumed, and then withered away once there was nothing left to destroy.

Try as we did to avoid it, even in our own small town we were caught in the anarchy and bedlam. Clint lost his son, my best friend, and I lost my way. I retreated into solitude until I found myself time and again in a position where I not only had something to offer in a bad situation, but I was forced to act.
 

Friends I had damn near forgotten about, like Breanne and Nick’s family, needed help, and by chance I was able to give some assistance. Situations unlooked for time and again popped up, putting me where I didn’t want to be. Mostly by blind, stupid, dumb luck, I kept coming out on top. During that time I found I had to adopt a certain persona for myself and others to rally around.
 

It was a strange thing, finding that others needed some sort of a justification to go along with what I saw as simple and reasonable. People who had not been as exposed to the ways of this new, sad and hard world seemed to require credentials, qualifications or verification before they would then follow the lead of someone who obviously got it better than they did. Although if the roles had have been reversed, I can’t say as though I would have been any different.
 

I did,
hinted, and said what I had to. Not just for their own good, but for mine as well. They needed a pillar of strength and hope to rally around and I was determined to make them their own pillar. It was a slow building process though, and I had my own inner demons yet to be dealt with. I didn’t want to be or deserve to be an idol. I could nudge and steer, but I would resist leading others at all costs.

I would like to say the choices I made were like consciously saying “I want to help people,” but my choices were usually victims of circumstance. More often than not, I was in the right place at the right time. Or wrong place and wrong time, depending on how you looked at it. To an extent, I could have sat back and watched everything crumble, but I had to live in this too and I was forward thinking enough to see that being alone did not have a high probability for survival.
  

I was no hero and I sure as hell was no savior. I did want to see good people like the Harris’s outlast the chaos. I seemingly had what it was taking to survive in this world, but I was no leader, never wanted to be one. Truth be told, I didn’t even like being around people all that much. The Harris’s were good people and if what was needed for them to survive was for me to play a role, then I could do that.

The example I thought back to was a movie called Crocodile Dundee. Dundee was a hard core outdoors man, but he played into the image a bit too. He would be shaving away with his nice disposable razor until someone was watching, then he whips out his big over sized knife to finish the “shave.” It suited his image well… and that was me. I could live in the bush okay, and hunted better than some maybe, but I missed drive thru fast food and not having to make decisions that meant if a group of people would live or die.

And I was tired. The families still relied on me far too much, and as much and as I was trying to “teach them to fish,” instead of handing it all to them, it was a slow process. Living semi-primitively like this was just a step or two away from the way I previously had lived before the rest of the world crashed down around us. I might have had the nerves to stalk and kill both animals and men, but I was learning that those abilities were not easily transferred to or quickly learned by others.
 

If the Harris’s had have known more of the truth I don’t know if they would have laughed or cried. I didn’t even know what the real “truth” was sometimes. I worried that letting them in on just how much I was winging it everyday would just be a big let down and discredit everything we had built thus far. I wanted and they needed to keep things moving in the right direction, and so I kept the image alive.
  

It was still before
midnight when I crested the last ridge and reached my destination. The place I called “home” more or less was actually legitimately mine. Come to find out if they ever saw it, a few of the people at the Ranch would probably think that I had killed the owners and was now squatting in this place. I don’t know why I was holding onto the descriptions and guesses that I had overheard Breanne tell Megan. After all, I was the one that created that guise. Maybe I really was tired of being seen as my character. I needed to remember that a few of them knew that there was more to it than that. Whatever, I needed a break, that much was obvious.   

As much as I wanted to rush right on inside, throw my gear down, and fall asleep, I took my time and walked around the perimeter of the house. It was only smart just to be sure that everything was still in place and that there were no new tracks or signs that anyone else had been here while I was away. Ideally I should have gone out farther, but it was dark enough that the chances of me actually catching something out of place were slim anyway. I’d just have to trust to the seclusion that had kept this place safe for a long time now.