Gone to Ground

Copyright 2014 Cheryl Taylor

FIRST EDITION January 2014

Cover Design by Cheryl Taylor

Cover Photograph by Kathy McCraine

Published by:

CT Communications

9535 E. Marilyn Ln.

Dewey, AZ 86327

[email protected]

cherylftaylor.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission.

To Mom

Note:

The towns described in the book exist, though maybe not quite as described (it is set in the future, after all). The ranch land, where most of the action takes place, also exists, and is much as described. However, the actual ranch names, camp names and specific geological features are fictional. While it is rough land, broken by several deep canyons, the Adobe Canyon described in the book is fictional.

Unfortunately, the challenges that ranchers face from some recreational land users is not fictional, and should you decide to explore this area of Arizona, remember that we all share this land, and should do our best to care for it. Please pack out what you pack in, stay on roads, leave the waters the way you find them, do not harass the cattle (they have a right to be there, too) and please, please, please if you open a gate, close it behind you. Also, remember that not all this land is public, in spite of how empty it seems, and respect signs forbidding trespass.

The man sat in the shade of the large, shaggy bark juniper tree watching the distant rider traverse the steep canyon side, following a small group of cows and calves. He saw her horse hesitate and look up in his direction. He held his breath. His horses dozed in the shade further back in the juniper thicket where the rider couldn’t see them, even if she happened to look that way. He was fairly certain she wouldn’t be able to see him either, sitting in the deep shadows, and dressed in dark shirt and jeans, tan face shaded even more deeply by his gray felt hat.

He knew where she was heading. He’d grown up in this brush filled Arizona wilderness, ridden its many empty miles every day from the time he’d been able to sit a horse, until he left the ranch at age fifteen. He nodded in approval. The canyon would be a safe refuge. He’d been on his way there himself, sure that no one else was left alive who knew about the lonely camp. He’d been wrong, apparently.

The cattle and rider moved out of sight, heading down the narrow side canyon toward its junction with the main rift. The man rose to his feet, dusted off his jeans and headed back to where his horses were waiting. He pondered the question of the woman and how she’d gotten here. Who was she? He was sure he knew who, or what, she was hiding from, but how did she know about Hideaway? No one but the cowboys, past and present, who worked the ranch knew about that lonely little camp, hours from the headquarters, and even further from any other form of civilization. Those cowboys were all gone now. All except him.

Well, he decided, it was time to answer some questions. Maybe the woman would be just what she seemed, a refugee from a world that had descended into chaos. Maybe she’d be agreeable to having another living within the sheltering walls of Hideaway. Life would be easier with two to share the chores of survival. He’d been assuming that if he managed to get away,  he’d be living the rest of his life alone. He didn’t mind that too much, but he decided he didn’t mind the idea of company either.

If she wasn’t agreeable to sharing, well, there were ways of dealing with that, too.

2

It has been a yea
r
, Maggie thought as she rode through the rocks and brush, headed for home.
Only a year since the world came to an end. The world as we knew it. Where people had begun to believe that things like shiny cars, soda, TVs and video games were as necessary to life as food and water. Now that was all stripped away and the world came down to the essentials that had been there since the beginning of time: food, water, shelter, family.

Suddenly her horse stopped, head up, and looked alertly toward the opposite side of the narrow canyon, ears at rigid attention. Maggie shaded her green eyes and looked in the direction the horse indicated, but didn’t see anything. Probably a javelina or a deer. Stray wisps of honey blond hair, pulled loose from the thick braid dipping below her slender shoulders, floated on the light updraft from the canyon until catching in the light sweat that covered her face and neck from working in the hot sun all day. The dark gold hair stuck, giving her an uncomfortable, sticky feeling, and making her think longingly of the cool stream and water hole waiting at home. She nudged her horse into movement and they continued down the narrow canyon after the small herd. Her mind began to wander again, rambling down oft traveled roads, looking into the past.

No
, she corrected herself, thinking back.
It wasn’t just a year. The last year may have been the culmination, but the downward slide began a number of years ago. Maybe with the World Trade Center, maybe even before. We seem to have tangled the world up in truly spectacular fashion,
she thought ruefully,
and now we have to deal with the mess we’ve created.

The first two decades of the 21
st
century had been marked by increasing violence and disorder across the world. Famines, plagues, genocides, wars, terrorism, gangs, wildly changing climate, wildfires on a scale unheard of only a short time before, and an increasingly unstable economy: None of these things were exactly new, but the degree to which they intruded on the average American hadn’t been seen in an extremely long time, if ever.

Okay
, she conceded to herself,
maybe the two World Wars and the Vietnam War altered the pattern of people’s lives, and changed the direction of the country. Maybe the Great Depression left its imprint on millions of people. And alright, the Black Death in the 1300s certainly had a dramatic effect on the culture of the planet.

But never before had so many disasters happened in such a short amount of time. They crushed and wrenched the pattern of people’s lives across the world to such an extent that it would be a profoundly long time, if ever, before the pattern would return to a semblance of what had been considered normal such a short time earlier.

Maggie let out a huge sigh that caused her horse to twitch and swivel its ears back in her direction. She didn’t dare become so caught up in her reverie that she lost sight of her small group of cows in the bush. She’d spent most of the day finding them and getting them headed in the right direction, and the constant stress of watching for the cattle as well as keeping an eye out toward the skies for seekers, the small orb-like, silvery electronic drones used by the Enforcers to monitor more remote areas, had caused her neck and shoulders to tighten and a headache to play behind her eyes.

It was unlikely that seekers would be sent out this far into the unpopulated wilderness, but you never knew. The Enforcers took their jobs seriously, and their job was to make sure that the people left populating the country stayed where they were told to stay. She couldn’t be the only one who had decided to escape from the ever tightening militaristic governmental fingers, and surely some of those others had tried to make their escapes by heading into empty rangeland in hopes of living off the land.

She was positive, however, that the greatest concentration of seekers would be around the perimeters of the Authorized Population Zones or APZs; those places where the government decided to concentrate the people left alive. The official explanation was simple; there were too few law enforcement agents and soldiers to protect and guarantee safety to the population if everyone was living in far flung areas. The authorities maintained that people were not being deprived of their homes and property, only being relocated temporarily until a reliable form of law enforcement and government could be reestablished.

Maggie let out a short laugh that again startled her horse. Concentrated for their own good,
yeah, right
. Every journalistic fiber in her body rebelled at the thought. Throughout time people had been locked away for
their own good
, and frequently absolutely no good came of it, except for the people trying to control them. Even then it often backfired. Just look at the Japanese internment camps of the early 20
th
century for goodness sake.

The problem was that many APZs quickly became hotbeds of chaos and crime in their own right. Food and goods were still in short supply and those ruthless enough to take what they wanted had a ready crop of people, shell shocked from disaster and grief, to prey on. In order to maintain control, the Enforcers had to enact rigidly structured systems of operation and stomp hard on any of those inhabitants inclined to buck the system. On top of it all, heaven help the APZ held under the iron fist of a corrupt commander.

It was for this reason and others that, when the orders came for Maggie’s area to be “concentrated,” she had decided to take her son and escape if at all possible. Not that she had any experience in living off the land. Her idea of camping was a well appointed motor home with running water and electricity. But the idea of raising Mark in the increasingly hostile and dangerous environment of an APZ, especially without the help of Mike, her husband, dead for the past three months from the modern version of the plague, had been too much for her to take. 

The cows reached the bottom of the canyon and began running and shoving each other to be the first to reach the water that ran along the surface of the stream bed at that point. Maggie’s horse, Hank, picked up his pace as well. It had been a long, hot day on the plateau above, and water had been in short supply. Maggie was jerked back to the present; a present where she’d been living for a month in a primitive ranch camp, miles from anywhere.

For the next few minutes Maggie had her hands and mind busy ensuring that, once everyone had their fill of water, the cows headed in the direction she wanted; which was, as always, opposite the direction that the cattle wanted to go.

Why was it
, she thought irritably,
that anytime a cow had two choices in a path, it always took the wrong one?
She gripped her saddle horn and bumped her horse in the sides, hustling up and around the animals to keep them from heading down the canyon instead of up stream as she wanted. Pulling Hank to a stop, she hooted and hollered, slapping her leg with her hat, trying to convince her four-legged adversaries that they really didn’t want to go that way. The black and white cows and their young calves jerked to a stop and spent several minutes pondering the best way to circumvent the yelling human in their way. Then, with some shaking of heads and bovine curses, they turned and headed in the other direction.

For a brief instant Maggie’s heart thumped into her throat as it looked as though the cattle would take the narrow trail back out of the canyon and return to the pasture where they’d started the day. The lead cow, a huge black specimen with a white face and one horn that curled down toward her right ear, reminding Maggie of a extra large Blue Tooth set, hesitated, took several steps in that direction, then suddenly changed her mind again and decided to play along. She turned and headed upstream with the remainder of the herd following her along the canyon bottom trail, aiming straight for Hideaway.

Maggie felt a wave of relief wash through her body with a burst of adrenaline. Her learning curve had been a steep one after moving to the camp, but she still didn’t feel comfortable if it came to real all out cowboy style riding. If the cows had headed back up out of the canyon she would have had to go off trail at a run, scrambling through the rocks and brush in an attempt to head the cattle off before they got too far. While Maggie was pretty sure that Hank would make the scrambling run in good shape, she wasn’t at all confident that he would arrive with her still on board. She was equally convinced that if she
were
to perform an unplanned dismount, the mother of all prickly pear cacti would just happen to be rooted right where she landed.

Now that they were heading in the right direction, Hideaway was only a half hour’s ride away.
Good
, she thought. She hadn’t wanted to leave Mark by himself at the camp, but she didn’t have much choice. She had to gather a group of cattle into a pasture that was unlikely to be patrolled by seekers. These cattle would be providing them with food - 
if
she could figure out how to butcher and preserve the meat without inducing lethal levels of botulism, salmonella, or any other nasty little bugs.

Ten-year-old Mark was a tough customer, but this past year had been hell on him, and the past five months had been especially rough. With his father dead from influenza, then catching it himself and the long illness that followed, the last thing he needed was to be subjected to his mother’s incompetence in food preservation.

The Center for Disease Control in Atlanta said that the flu ravaging the country was the H5N1 strain that people had been dreading for years. Its virulence, however, turned out to be even more severe than the most sensational of the doomsayers had predicted. Some said that this was because the failing economy put so many people out on the streets, or caused them to put off health care until things became desperate. Others, more suspicious, thought that the severity of the bug was courtesy of a bioengineering lab somewhere in the middle east (or Korea, or north Africa, or, for all she knew, right here in the good old US of A, hidden behind the local Starbucks) that souped up the virus to maximum strength. Still others said that it was the result of the drastically changed climate having unsuspected effects on all life forms, including viruses and bacteria. 

Whatever the cause, influenza spread across the planet in a tsunami, infecting ninety-nine out of every hundred people it encountered, and killing eighty-seven out of every hundred infected. Then came a wave of secondary infections, turning the morbidity to nearly one hundred percent. Less than one percent of the population didn’t contract the illness at all. Maggie had been one of the lucky ones. For whatever reason, her immune system was able to block the virus before it replicated. Mike, her college sweetheart, and husband of nearly fifteen years, had not been so lucky.

As a paramedic, Mike had found himself on the front lines when people started getting sick. He and his teammates had repeatedly been called out to people with deadly fevers and floundering respiratory distress. He moved in and out of the hospitals, delivering those who couldn’t make it on their own, and in the end, had been enlisted to help the shorthanded doctors and nurses when the disease began eating away at their numbers like a ravenous lion tearing into a tender gazelle. Finally, in spite of all the precautions he’d taken, he was infected. Within four days he was dead.

Their son, Mark, had also been infected, but he apparently had inherited a little bit of his mother’s immune strength, and had been able to fight off the influenza and the multitude of secondary infections that plagued him even after the virus ran its course. His luck was even more extraordinary considering that by the time he contracted the illness, most of the hospitals were over run and the majority of health care workers were gone, in spite of rigorous quarantine  and antiseptic procedures.

Once having decided on a direction, the cattle meandered steadily up the canyon, pausing here and there to grab a mouthful of the green grass growing on the banks of the stream. There were four cows, either black or black with white faces, and three calves ranging from a tiny little thing with big knobby knees and a squeaky bawl, to a strapping big bull calf nearly half the size of its mother. One of the cows, a tiny little black individual, was hugely pregnant, and when she walked her butt jiggled as though it had been given extensive plastic surgery by the makers of Jell-O.

Funny, Maggie thought, she’d never been a connoisseur of cows’ butts before. In fact, the only thing she knew about cows’ butts before her exile was how to fix them: rare, medium rare, medium and well done. When she stopped to consider things, looking at a cow’s butt and seeing a walking steak was disconcerting. What happened to the gal who got queasy when picking a lobster to throw in the boiling water. Watching your steaks wander about added a whole new dimension to your dietary choices.

The air in the canyon was warm and small gnats swirled in the stifling air. Hank’s tail swished in a steady metronome and the only sound was the buzzing of the insect life, the swishing of the tails and the soft thud of the horse’s and cows’ hooves as they trod the bare earth trail. Occasionally one of the cows would turn back and let out a low bawl as she checked up on her offspring. Maggie had been up since well before dawn, and gradually the warm, still air lulled her back into her memories.

She remembered vividly the day she came home from town to find a pair of Enforcers on the front porch facing a frightened looking Mark through the front door. As she walked up the steps to the redwood deck, the taller of the two men turned around, addressing her by name.

“Mrs. Margaret Langton?”

“Yes,” Maggie replied, “I’m Margaret Langton. Can I help you?”

The Enforcer looked stiff and stern in his navy blue uniform, starched to the point that she wondered how he could move. His face was so immobile that she questioned whether the same person who cared for his clothes had added extra starch to his face as well. His black hair was ruthlessly cut to within a quarter inch of his skin and his blue eyes were cold, devoid of emotion.