An Unkind Winter (Alone Book 2) (7 page)

     He never noticed the dried blood on the door knob, or the red spots all over the porch and the living room carpet.

     It was just too dark.

     The last time he loaded up, Dave noticed a missing bottle.

     The night vision goggles he wore made it a little easier to see in the room, so he didn’t have to feel around like Mikey had done a couple of hours before.

     Dave simply stood up, looked around, then decided he must have miscounted.

     No big deal. So his last load would be a little bit lighter than the first four loads.

     All in all, a problem he could deal with.

-11-

     Half an hour later, Dave tucked the last of the water bottles behind the shrubbery at Frank and Eva’s house, and went around the side of their garage to retrieve four large black trash bags.

     These bags were a heck of a lot lighter than the loads he had been carrying, and were a welcome relief.

     Dave considered himself in pretty good shape, under the circumstances. But even a strong man can get tired of lugging water, especially when making several trips in one night.

     Inside the four bags were the soda bottles that Dave had brought the previous night. Only now they were empty and light as a feather, after Eva and Frank emptied their contents into their bathtub for others in the neighborhood to use.

     He cautiously made his way back to the Castros’ house.

     By his reckoning, he had half an hour before the sky started to lighten by the morning sun.

     He wouldn’t have to rush, but he had little time to rest, either.

     From shrub to shrub, from abandoned car to abandoned car, he made his way the two blocks to the Castros’ house.

     And walked in with ten minutes to spare.

     It was still just dark enough to miss the blood on the doorknob and living room floor. And once he was in the dining room, there was simply no blood to see. Mikey hadn’t been in there.

     Mikey had gotten in a good nap, and was no longer sleeping soundly. He was a fairly light sleeper anyway. Especially in a strange bed, in a strange place, where he might hear noises he wasn’t used to hearing.

     His eyes opened at the sound of someone shuffling around downstairs.

     The sound he heard was very distinctive, yet he couldn’t place it. It was the rustling of trash bags full of empty soda bottles.

     Mikey was out of bed in a heartbeat.

     He had no gun. He’d come across several of them in previous months, hidden under pillows or behind couches. But he’d always left them behind.

     His logic was sound. Since his deeply religious mother had never allowed them in the house, he’d never fired one. He just didn’t know how.

     Oh, he could have figured it out. He was a smart guy, after all. But it was during that initial learning phase… when he was trying to figure out how to aim and fire the darn thing, that someone might blow him away with their own gun.

     So he traveled light, and relied on his quick feet and the darkness to help him get out of tough situations.

     Still, as he hid behind an open closet door in the master bedroom, he wished he had a gun in his hand to even the odds.

     He assumed two things. First, that whoever was downstairs shuffling around was another looter. Second, that he was armed.

     Mikey remembered that the stairs were made of hardwood. They wouldn’t hide footsteps, as carpeted stairs would have. Rather, they would announce it when whoever was downstairs made his way up to the second floor.

     But then again, something else he’d learned over the previous months was that many looters never went upstairs.

     After all, he was the exception. Nearly all of the other looters these days weren’t looking for valuables. They were looking for food and water.

     And nobody stores food and water in their upstairs bedrooms.

     So unless the looters are drug addicts wanting to rifle through medicine cabinets, most of them simply went through the kitchen and pantry, and then moved on to another house.

     He made his way from behind the closet door to the window.

     His plan was simple. He’d ease the window open and stand ready to jump.

     As soon as he heard footsteps on the staircase, he’d toss his bag to the ground below and jump. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time he’d escaped out of a second story window. With any luck, he’d be over the fence by the time the looter made it to the top of the stairs.

     But then he heard another sound. One he could definitely identify. For he’d heard this particular sound a thousand times before.

     It was the sound of a sliding glass door opening.

     Suddenly Mikey’s brilliant plan was shot all to hell.

     He couldn’t jump out of a window onto a prowler who was in the back yard.

     So instead, he just watched and waited.

     The looter was apparently finished. Had already determined there was nothing to eat or drink, and was moving on to the next house.

     Mikey didn’t understand why the man didn’t just exit through the front door. That would have been the easy thing to do.

     But then again, he knew that some looters had a different m.o. Instead of going through the front doors, they went from one back yard to the next, hopping the fences between each yard, then trying the back doors to see which ones they could get into.

     Mikey stood at the window, watching. If the bastard next door who put the screws in the front fence did it all the day around the property, the looter would soon be screaming out in agony.

     It might be fun to watch, and the light was beginning to peek over the eastern horizon now.

     So it was the fence between the Castros’ house and Dave’s where he cast his attention.

     What he saw next was Dave, releasing the slide bolts that held the section he’d cut of the fence into place. Dave was lugging four black trash bags full of… something, and Mikey wondered what it was. Obviously some kind of loot the man had stolen from wherever he’d gone during the night. But what?

     Mikey might have gone on wondering forever, except that when Dave opened his secret gate and tossed the bags into his own yard, he was distracted by a rabbit that tried to bolt through the hole. And while shepherding the rabbit back to where he belonged, Dave managed to leave the fourth bag in the Castros’ yard.

     Dave went through the small passageway, secured the gate from the other side, and tossed the bags of empty bottles onto his back deck.

     It never dawned on him he was a bag short.

     He left the bags on the deck. Hopefully the freeze was still several weeks away. He had plenty of time to take his full bottles and pour some of their water into these.

     And besides, lugging the full bottles for most of the night wore him out. All he wanted to do was rest a bit, do his normal morning routine, and then get some sleep.

     Mikey stood in the window next door for awhile, waiting to see if the strange man who lived in the house with the spiked fence was going to return. And he wondered what in the world could be in the bag.

     He was tempted to go down and have a look. It might be something he wanted. But he’d wait awhile.

     Something else that piqued his interest was the rabbit that almost bolted into the yard, along with other rabbits he’d seen through the open gate.

     His mouth watered.

     He hadn’t had fresh meat in months, since he came across a live rooster on the outskirts of town and chased it down. It had taken him twenty minutes of chasing the bird before he finally wore it down, then cornered it between houses and was able to catch it.

     Even then, it hadn’t given up without a fight, getting a death grip on Mikey’s little finger.

     Finally, Mikey pulled his finger free and wrung the rooster’s neck.

     Looking back, that was the last good meal he’d had.

     He sure would love to have some fresh rabbit.

     But Mikey wasn’t a fighter. Nor was he the kind of guy who’d break into another man’s house with guns blazing, killing everybody in sight to get what he was after.

     No. Mikey was a more subtle looter. Now that he knew the man spent his nights looting, he’d come back again. When the man was gone. And instead of trying to climb over the fence again and tearing his hands to shreds, he’d enter through the Castros’ house, go through the secret passage, and enter the man’s home. Then, while the man was out looting from others, Mikey would be looting from the man.

     Tit for tat, so to speak.

-12-

     The previous evening, before Dave lugged all those bottles over to the Castros’ house and then taken them to Frank’s house a few at a time, he’d raided his stock of dry foods. He put three cups of dried vegetables into a pot of water to soften overnight, with the intention of slaughtering a rabbit and cooking up a big pot of stew for his meals for a couple of days.

     Seeing the dried carrots floating to the top of the water gave him an idea. Maybe he could use them later to coax Lindsey and Beth to come a little closer to him.

     But right now he needed coffee.

     He tried to boil some water for coffee on his small camp stove, but the propane ran out before the water came to a boil.

     He stuck his finger into the water to see whether it was hot enough for coffee, and immediately regretted it.

     “Ow! Damn it!”

     It was definitely hot enough.

     He poured it into a cup and mixed in two teaspoons of instant decaf coffee.

     The only thing Dave despised more than decaf coffee was instant coffee. But he wanted to sleep through the day when he laid down a couple of hours later. And the only decaf he had was instant.

     Actually, it was Sarah’s coffee, and what she preferred to drink, but he didn’t think she’d mind. And it was only a couple of teaspoons, because he sure as heck didn’t expect to drink any more.

     He carried the nasty concoction to the garage and shone a flashlight into the corner where he kept his propane bottles.

     He was down to sixteen. But that wasn’t a problem. He’d already boiled enough water to get him through the winter. He knew he had to prep his drinking water during the hot weather months, because boiling the same amount of water when it was cold would have used three times as much fuel.

     So really, the only thing he needed the propane for was for coffee and cooking, and he’d only have to burn the little stove for an hour a day, tops.

     The sixteen bottles would be plenty to last him until the weather got cold enough to start cooking his food in the fireplace.

     He grabbed a bottle and carried it back to the deck, then unscrewed the old bottle from the camp stove and connected the new one.

     Lindsey and Beth were there, still giving him the same look.

     “What?” he said. “I don’t have to answer to you two. I’m not married to either one of you. I don’t even know if you’re my type. And that reminds me…”

     He stood up and walked toward the back door.

     “Don’t go away. I’ll be right back.”

     A minute late he emerged from the house again, to find the two rabbits sitting in the same spot, still watching him.

     “Well now, it’s a shame you guys aren’t my type. You’re much better behaved than Sarah ever was.”

     The rabbits looked at each other, then back at Dave.

     He could only imagine what they were thinking.

     “You guys want some carrots?”

     He held a carrot out in front of them. They stuck their noses up and sniffed the air, but they held their ground six feet away from him.

     “Okay, then. Gonna play hard to get, huh?”

     He broke off a couple of small pieces of the carrot and slowly walked toward them. They backed away as he approached.

     He placed the carrots gently on the ground, perhaps a foot closer to him than they had been. Then he sat down in the lounge chair again.

     The rabbits slowly came forward, ate the carrots, and decided they liked them. They looked to Dave wanting more.

     This time he placed the carrots just a couple of feet in front of him, on the edge of the wooden deck.

     It took a couple of minutes, but they finally felt safe enough to hop up onto the deck.