Alone: Book 1: Facing Armageddon (12 page)

     He also bypassed
The Searchers
, knowing it would hit too close to home.
McClintock
wouldn’t work either. Too funny.

     Dave finally decided on
Rio Bravo
. A classic, and one of his favorites as a kid. He loved the way the Duke interacted with the Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson characters. He liked that there was a little bit of music in the movie, and recalled having a crush on Angie Dickinson as a kid.

     He chuckled, remembering how his father paid rapt attention to the television whenever Angie Dickinson appeared wearing a black corset. It never dawned on him at the time, but perhaps his father was enam
ored by her too.

     As he put the movie in and pressed play, the bell on the microwave announced that it was finished. Dave took the plate out,
shoved a thumb into one of the corn dogs, and decided they needed to cook a bit longer. He rearranged them and punched two more minutes into the keypad.

     Then he sat on his bed to wait, while listening to Dean Martin croon the
opening theme to the movie.

     For the next ninety minutes, he’d try his best to forget the world outside, and go back to the days of his youth. The world was a far better place back then.

-25-

     Dave dozed off just before the climactic shootout and missed the end of the movie. He woke up an hour later to find the television darkened, and two houseflies sitting on two of the five corn dogs left on his plate.

     “Dammit,” he said while shooing the flies away. He put the dogs into a zip lock bag and left them on top of the microwave for later.

     He went to the back yard, where he’d taken the ladder and sections of rain gutter the evening before, and set to work.

     Like the outhouse and generator box, the gutters had been pre-fitted along the back eave of the house. All the holes had already been drilled, and it was just a matter of holding the pieces into place while screwing in the wood screws that would hold it into place.

     Sarah had been around to help him during the pre-fit, and Dave was worried that it might be difficult without a second person to help. But it was actually a piece of cake. He simply left one end on the ground while he pulled the other end over the first hole, then screwed it loosely into place. Once the first screw was in place, he was able to lift the gutter up and screw the opposite end into place, then insert the additional screws between the two ends.

     It helped that the aluminum gutter was very light and very flexible. Old fashioned galvanized steel gutter would have been a lot harder to deal with.

     The new gutter system drained on each corner of the back of the house. He installed two down spouts that didn’t go all the way to the ground. Rather, they terminated about four feet above the ground.

     Beneath each downspout, he placed a fifty gallon Hefty trash can. Each can had a snap-on lid, which he’d remove the next time it looked like rain.

     Dave was aware that the rainwater pouring off the roof and into these containers would carry tiny bits of the asphalt shingles as well as chemical residue. But that was okay. He had no plans to drink this water. Oh, he could in a pinch, by boiling it and using it only if he had to. But his plan was to use this water only for irrigation for his crops. His drinking water would also come from the sky, but would never touch the roof.

     Once he was finished, he stepped back and admired his work. It looked good, and during a heavy rainstorm both of the trash cans would be filled within twenty minutes.

     But he wouldn’t stop there. He spent the next hour hanging additional gutter on the end of the covered deck. He’d built the deck himself, and had covered it with a corrugated steel roof. Rainwater typically ran down the grooves in the steel and fell off the end of the roof into the lawn below. But not anymore. Now it would be captured and channeled into a third Hefty can.

     Once the gutters were up, Dave counted the extra pieces he had left. He had enough to line the
back of the Hansen house as well.

     He knew he could use tw
o by fours to set up a makeshift runoff system at the Castro house next door if the family didn’t return. When he’d seen them leave he was conflicted. Half of him wanted to pray for them and wish them well on whatever journey they were going on, and to see them return safely at a later time.

     The other half of him, the selfish side, was hoping it was a one way trip and that they’d never be back. Because even though they would surely leave no food behind, he might be able to make use of other things. Chiefly, he could use the back of their house as an additional water source.

     He took a break and sat on a folding chair on the deck. The afternoons were getting much warmer now. He’d start planting crops soon, but not just yet. He wanted to build his water supply first. It wouldn’t do to start growing things just to have them die from thirst because he didn’t have enough water to irrigate them. He could use some of the drinking water he’d saved from the faucet if he had to, but it had to provide for his own needs as well.

     No, the smart thing to do would be to wait until after the next hard rain, fill all the barrels and empty bottles, and then plant.
By then, the odds of a late freeze would be gone too. It was still cool at night, and some mornings Dave wore a windbreaker until the sun was high in the sky. Just as tragic as planting crops before he had enough water, only to watch them wither and die, would be the chance a late freeze would kill them.

     He’d wait a couple or three more weeks before he planted anything. Just to be safe.

     As he rested, he watched the rabbits frolicking in the yard, and happened to see Thumper riding one of the females.

     “Go ahead, you old rascal. You’re making my supper in a few months. It’ll be nice when there are enough of you guys to allow me to just come out here and grab one of you by the ears and wring your little necks. One by one. You’ll make some pretty good stew.”

     Then it occurred to him that Thumper was getting more sex than he was, and it made him a tad bit jealous. 

     Even after all the years that he and Sarah had been married, she was still the most beautiful woman he knew. And the only one he desired.

     He missed her in a lot of ways. But one of the biggest things he missed was picking her up, giggling in anticipation, then carrying her to the bedroom. They were a good fit in every way. Sexually too. And he missed the feel of her naked body next to his. He missed giving her pleasure, and getting it in return. And he missed the way she lay on his chest, breathless, when it was over, telling him how much she loved him.

     Once again, he had to shake the thoughts from his head. That kind of thinking would only
make him miserable.

     And he already had enough problems to deal with.

     He looked at his watch. He’d forgotten to wind it again. It was stopped at just past nine o’clock. It was way past morning, and long before dark. Dammit.

     From the position of the sun, he figured he had maybe three hours or so of daylight left. That should be plenty of time to get the post holes dug and the posts set.

     He looked around, and discovered that winding his watch wasn’t the only thing he’d forgotten. He’d left the post hole diggers in the garage when he pulled out the other materials.

     Dammit. He wondered if the stress was getting to him.

     It had been a full three hours now since the generator ran out of fuel and died. In all likelihood, the carbon dioxide fumes in the garage had already dissipated, escaping through the cracks in and around the overhead doors.

     But just to be safe, he’d
try to avoid breathing the fumes. He paused in the pantry, picked up his flashlight and turned it on. Then he took a deep breath, held it, and walked into the garage.

-26
-

     The holes had been pre-dug many months before and then filled back in. It was just another way Dave and Sarah had planned ahead to make it easier on them when the world went black. They’d installed screws on the top rail of the fence on both the east and west sides of the yard. Then they attached one long side of the rain tarps onto the fence rail by merely placing the metal grommets over the screws.

     Once one side of the tarp was attached to the fence, it was just a matter of rolling the tarp out to see where they needed to place the posts. And once that was done, Dave had used the post hole diggers to dig the holes, twenty four inches deep.

     There were two holes for each tarp, on opposite sides of the yard. They were twelve feet away from the fence, and nineteen feet apart from each other.

     The idea was to stretch the 12 by 20 foot tarp completely out, to catch as much
rainfall as possible, but to leave a slight crease on the middle of the open side, to allow all the water to channel to the center, and then run off in the same spot.

     For that to happen, there
needed to be just a little slack on the open side. That’s why they dug the post holes nineteen feet apart, instead of twenty. Whenever it rained, they would hang up the tarps on each side of the yard, roll them out and connect them to the tops of the posts. Then they’d take a Hefty can and place it below the crease, so the water landing on the tarps would fall into the can instead of into the yard.

     Once the water was in the can, the idea was to
take the empty soda bottles and submerge them beneath the water level to fill them, then to cap them and put them aside. Dave would work the trash can on one side of the yard and Sarah would work the one on the other side, so they could stay ahead of both trash cans and keep them from overflowing. Lindsey and Beth would feed them the empty bottles and take away the full ones.

     That had been the plan, anyway. Now that he’d be working alone, Dave would have to modify the plan a little bit, and would likely still have a hard time preventing the cans from overflowing and losing precious water during a heavy rain.

     But he’d find a way.

     He took the post hole diggers to the spots where he’d dug the four holes months before and then refilled with the loose dirt. The reason he’d pre-dug the
holes was so that the dirt wouldn’t be packed and would come out easily. Having to pound the diggers into hard packed ground would make noise, and could draw attention. It was the last thing he needed.

     Thus far, as far as he knew, he was successful in carrying out the ruse that his house was vacant. He didn’t want to do anything to change that.

     As he removed the loosened dirt from the holes and set it aside, he noticed one of the female rabbits watching him.

     “No, I’m not digging a hole for you. Don’t even think about it.”

     Then he felt sheepish and looked around, to make sure no one had seen him talking to a rabbit.

     Then he felt doubly stupid, knowing full well that no one could see him.

     Once he dug all the loose dirt out of the first hole, he placed one of the four fence posts into it, letting it fall all the way to the bottom. Then he opened up three bags of Sacrete and poured it into the hole around the post.

     The Sacrete was premixed concrete. It was a mixture of cement and gravel, and only required water to set. Once water was added, it would slowly dry and the post would become a permanent fixture in the yard.

     It would have very easy for Dave to take two or three of the bottles of water he’d filled from the tap, and to pour them onto the Sacrete.

     But Dave had other ideas.

     Water was much too precious to waste in such a manner. So instead, he took one by twos and fastened them to the base of the post to keep it upright.

     The same rain that would allow Dave to fill the rest of the empty soda bottles would also mix with the Sacrete. Then it would dry, and by the time the second rainfall came around, the posts would be sturdy enough to remove the braces.

     By the time Dave finished placing the third post, the female rabbit had lost interest in what the stupid human was doing and had moved on to another part of the yard to munch on grass.

     Once again, Dave was all alone in the world.