Hell's Children: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller (14 page)

M
iguel was
thirteen and his brother was twelve. Definitely leadership age, though Paul seemed a bit … well, it wasn’t a crime to be happy, but did he have to be so chipper about it?

The younger brother blinked and looked around, smiling so wide Jack’s face hurt in sympathy.

“Wow, this is a really cool place!” Paul said. “Look at all these cabins! Are they made of real logs? Does everyone have one or just some of you? Oh, it’s just four. Still cool, though. Who sleeps in the trailer? What’s with that school bus? You guys have a boat to go in that pond? You should totally get a boat. That’s what I’d do if I had a pond.”

“Paul,” Miguel said with suffering patience, “for the love of everything, would you please shut up? They’re not used to your noise the way I am.”

“Sure, yeah I know, sorry,” he said, pausing briefly for a breath. “Miguel, why do you think I talk so much? Sometimes I’m quiet for hours at a time, but nobody knows unless I tell them. Hey, Miguel, why’s Tony staring at me like that?”

Tony was staring at Paul with a familiar look, reminiscent of when he and Pete were going at it all the time back at the Welcome Center.

“Man,” Tony said, “tell this fool to shut the h—”

Jack said, “Quiet, Tony.” He turned to the newcomers. “Go on in and get warm. Pete, take Paul with you. Get him settled on one of the empty mattresses. If you can’t find an empty one, move someone. And keep your voices low.”

“Sure, sure,” Pete said, glaring at Paul. “Another job for me tonight. Come on, you. And stop talking so much. You’re driving everyone crazy.”

Lisa raised a hand and said, “I’m going to bed. It’s been a long night. I’ll show you the books in the morning. Better than the first time.”

Moments later, it was just Jack, Miguel, and Greg standing outside. Beautiful night, lots of stars. Jack had seen satellites up there while waiting for them to return. It broke his heart that humans wouldn’t go back to the Moon or visit Mars or far off solar systems like in the books he’d grown up with. They’d lost so much.

“Sorry about Paul,” Miguel said sheepishly, pulling him from his musings. “He’s a good guy, not a bad bone in his body, but he goes on and on. He used to be on Ritalin, but it didn’t help.” He coughed a quiet laugh. “Because of him, we spent one day in the Pyros before they kicked us out.”

Greg said, “He’s talking about Blaze, Jack. The guy you told us about. They call themselves that.
Pyros
. Everyone’s got a gang name now. We should totally get one, too. My vote? Lava Demons. Nobody messes with lava demons.”

Miguel seemed unsure whether to laugh or nod. “Uh, yeah. That’s a good name.”

“Horrible name,” Jack said. “So, tell me about Blaze—what did he look like?”

Jack knew, but felt a certain degree of caution made sense.

“Red hair, tall, lots of zits. Asked us right off if we had pills, then threw us out as soon as Paul started up. I hope my brother’s not gonna be a problem here—he’ll be fine once he calms down.”

Jack smiled. “Your brother seems nice. How’d you run into Blaze?”

“We were heading south from Herndon, passing through Centreville in my parents’ car. They came up behind us honking, so we pulled over. Probably a dumb move, but I didn’t want them ramming us or whatever. Next thing you know they’re saying we need to join or get out of the area. They said they had food and a warm place to sleep.” He shrugged helplessly. “That guy, Blaze—he made me swear an oath never to betray him.”

“What’d you do?”

Miguel laughed. “I swore the oath! It was funny—he didn’t have anything memorized. He just made it up as he went along. Stuff like,
You will always be loyal to me and my sister, no matter what, or you’ll burn in Hell forever. Now say it!
” Miguel shook his head. “That’s what he said after every line.
Now say it!
”

Jack smiled because it was expected, but he didn’t feel happy. “You and your brother have any guns? It’s sort of a gun world now.”

Miguel shook his head. “Would have been nice, but my parents didn’t have one. Because of Paul, you know? My bro’s in a different world half the time.”

“So how did you meet my friends?”

Unlike Steve and Molly, Jack didn’t feel any sort of concern about the two new recruits. Totally different situation. Being kicked out of Blaze’s group may have had something to do with it—a mark in their favor. And they hadn’t come calling on the promise of a bigger gang.

Greg said, “Lisa found them outside the library. They seemed cool, so we invited them back.”

“Let’s go inside,” Jack said. “My place. It’s freezing out here.”

The three boys went in and Jack got the fire going. They talked a little more, mostly about the organization of Blaze’s gang, the Pyros. Despite only being there a day, Miguel had a lot of information about them: who the key members were, their personalities. Bullies, mostly. The only thing troubling was they were in contact with some of the other gangs in the area, trading things they had too much of for stuff they didn’t.

Greg grinned at his friend’s troubled frown. “He’s just a bully with red hair, man, stop worrying.”

With more heat than he’d shown all night, Miguel said, “Bunch of morons.”

They talked a little more about this and that. When Miguel started yawning, Jack told him to sleep on the couch and wished Greg a good night. Then he went to bed.

* * *

T
he scavengers were hauling
in new stuff every day, not all of it practical. They brought fun stuff like board games, remote control cars, and art supplies. Jack wasn’t very popular when he told them to get rid of the fireworks they found, but that was fine. Someone had to be the adult.

At Jack’s instruction, they also brought cars full of fuel to stack up in the meadow near the Skyline. With so many different vehicles coming in, Jack established a signal where they beeped their horn upon entering: two long blasts followed by two short ones.

They seemed to like the work, taking to it so enthusiastically Jack was actually jealous he couldn’t tag along.

Everyone had requests.

Molly wanted maternity outfits and baby stuff.

Brad needed work boots and socks—size twelve—and toys for his brother.

Paul wanted a boat for the trout pond, but nobody listened to him.

Greg asked for more wood and some wire mesh to build rabbit hutches. On the second library trip, Lisa had found another book about rabbits. Her brother was sure he could raise them—even hares, if he had to—figuring modern food rabbits had to have been domesticated from wild stock thousands of years ago.

Olivia wanted compasses for the children, and white paint for marking trees. During one of their kindling expeditions, a little boy named Teddy had gotten lost. Everyone had to stop what they were doing to search for him, risking yet more lost people. It took over an hour before they found the boy curled up next to a log, shivering in the cold.

Jack was growing to hate their reliance on the technology of their parents. He wanted them getting used to doing stuff themselves, like Greg and his rabbits. To that end, following a diagram in a hunting book, he and Brad quickly built a rudimentary smoker and used it to smoke their first deer, which Brad had taken early one morning.

The older boy hadn’t enjoyed shooting it, and his disgust was quickly multiplied when Jack showed him how to field dress it.

“Ugh … how can we live like this?” Brad said, staring at the spilled mess of blood and guts after Jack slit it open with a specially hooked knife.

Jack grinned at Brad’s expression when he said they’d also be preserving—and eating—the liver, kidneys, and lungs.

“They’re tasty, once you get used to them,” he said. “A hundred years ago, we’d eat the brains, too. These days, it’s supposedly not safe anymore. I don’t know if that’s true, but why take the chance?”

Brad nodded, his face a sweaty shade of green. “Yeah. Good call.”

The smoker worked great. Basically, a wooden lattice with a tarp over it and a hole at the top. After slicing the meat, they hung it in strips while burning a slow, smoky fire beneath it using hardwood collected from deadfalls. The point of smoking wasn’t simply to get smoke onto the meat, but rather to mildly cook it while sucking out as much moisture as possible in order to halt the growth of bacteria. Or so the book said. The book also recommended salt for preservation—same principal.

When Jack tried it, the meat tasted okay, but there was an odd plastic taste at the end. He blamed the plastic tarp. He didn’t think it was dangerous, though, so they kept using it.

For the next few days, Brad took down deer after deer in that field behind the cabins.

“Eventually they’ll stop coming around,” Jack said while dressing Brad’s latest buck for him. “Kind of like staying away from a wolf’s den.”

“So what do we do? Drive somewhere?”

“We could do that. But I’m thinking of something bigger. And tastier.”

Later on, he caught up with Tony and Miguel, who were hauling down an old-fashioned bathtub from the back of the new truck.

“Hey, guys.”

“Hey, man,” Tony said. “What’s up?”

“You said you found a farm with live cattle. How close is it?”

“I can’t bring you back no cow,” he said laughing. “And I ain’t gonna shoot one and bring it back in pieces, neither. That’s just gross.”

Jack smiled indulgently. “We need more meat to get through the winter. I think we can all agree the grain’s pretty nasty. Now that we can smoke our food, we don’t need to carry it back uncooked. We’ll slaughter it where we find it, smoke it there, then hang it up in the Abe Lincoln to keep cold.”

“Problem is bringing it back. We could find some trash bags,” Tony said. “Real big ones. Cows are pretty big.”

Jack nodded. “Good idea. Make sure they’re unscented. How long will that take?”

Tony paused, scratching his chin slowly, as if enjoying his sudden importance. “I dunno. Maybe tomorrow if we hold off looking for them rubber sheets the girls keep asking about. Some of them little ones keep peeing the bed. Where we supposed to find sheets made of rubber? That’s a lot of driving. Closest stores are in that crazy town.”

“I’ll talk to Olivia,” Jack said. “Maybe we can rig something with trash bags for now. Two birds, one stone.” He patted him soundly on the back. “Thanks, Tony.”

He turned around without waiting for a reply. A leader had to do that. If everything was constantly up for a vote or waiting on opinions, nothing would get done, and it’d undermine his authority. He needed to maintain the illusion that he actually
had
authority, or everything would fly apart.

With nothing else that needed attending, Jack returned to the Paul Bunyan and got his backpack out of the closet. At the bottom, wedged beneath an unused roll of toilet paper, his camping stove, and his mess kit, was a copy of Winston Churchill’s
Memoirs Of The Second World War
. His dad had bought it for him more than a year ago, but Jack hadn’t read it. The huge book had sat on his desk with a bookmark strategically placed so his dad would think he was making progress. Every day, then every week, the bookmark moved a little farther along. Now, looking back at what he’d considered a pretty clever ruse, he felt ashamed.

His dad had said, “You want to know about leadership? Shackleton’s fine, but he only had about twenty people to keep alive. Try dealing with forty-six million starving countrymen, with bombs dropping out of the sky night and day.”

Feeling like they were finally making some progress, and concerned about his leadership skills, Jack retired for the evening and continued reading the book.

T
he next morning
was so cold a puddle in front of the Skyline had skimmed over with ice. Also, it had started to snow. Not much, but enough to get the youngest kids’ hopes up. Everyone else was worried.

With the onset of snow, the group’s scavenging took on a sudden urgency. So much so that Jack sent out a second team—Greg, Steve, Miguel, and Olivia—to see what they could dig up in Gainesville, to the east, while Pete, Tony, and Mandy scouted Warrenton, to the south. Priorities included: trash bags, soap, brand-new AGM car batteries (Steve’s tip), more flashlights, more candles, air mattresses for the bed wetters, spices for Lisa, ammunition (as always), blankets and sheets, more vitamins, and iodized salt.

Olivia had freaked everyone out, saying they needed iodine or risk growing something horrible on their necks called a
goiter.

Jack hoped they could eventually get their vitamins from plants and animals. Before the Sickness, his mom told him prehistoric humans got almost all their nutrients from organ meat, with the occasional infusion of seasonal berries and tubers. It wasn’t just academic theorizing, at least not for her—the Ferris household had organ meat several times a week. They never got scurvy, and they passed their physicals with no signs of vitamin deficiency. The downside was Greg and Lisa had always declined their invitations to dinner.

With deep winter almost upon them, the group had no choice but to rely on the old world and its abandoned stuff. He reminded himself with every shake of salt or DVD on movie night that, as a matter of policy, it was all just temporary. That said, he hoped to keep the movies going as long as possible. The children had surprised everyone by mostly ignoring the cartoons and puppet shows in favor of films with adults in them. They’d sit wide-eyed, excitedly pointing out which ones looked most like their mommies, daddies, grandparents, or whoever they used to know.

The children weren’t the only ones affected this way. Everyone showed up for movie night, regardless of what was playing.

* * *

W
arrenton was free of gangs
, and a spooky sight by Pete’s account, with only the occasional whiff of wood smoke in the air. There were no cars or survivors of any age on the mostly blocked-off streets.

Jack had no problem with spooky. With just a little work clearing the barricades, the town was ripe for the picking.

Though the adults in their final days had eaten through whatever food they’d had, the boys and Mandy found a small hoard of canned goods in the basement of a church, making them the heroes that night at dinner. Everyone was already sick of grain and plastic-flavored venison, and were overjoyed with anything different.

Gainesville
did
have gangs, it turned out, but they didn’t do more than drive by and stare. As a precaution, Jack nonetheless added Lisa to the Gainesville group and reassigned Miguel to Big Timber’s security rotation, after checking him out on guns. This left Big Timber guarded by four leaders during the day, one of whom was pregnant. Five, if you counted Paul, which nobody did.

While the others were out on their daily runs, Brad took on the brunt of the hard work, and Jack helped whenever possible. Over dinner one night, the older boy had admitted to clearing all the deadwood in a twenty yard ring around the property starting at the tree line. Though they now had three cords stacked away—enough to last them all winter—he was busily hunting for living trees to fell.

“That green stuff we tried made too much smoke and soot,” Brad said. “It’s also harder to light. I think when people build furniture, they use something called
seasoned wood
.” He grinned. “I guess it means they leave it out a season to dry. Anyway, if we don’t want to keep cleaning the stove all the time, we gotta prepare some for next winter.”

And so it went, day after day, with supplies coming in and nothing more troubling from other gangs than hard stares. Perhaps they preferred the warmth of their cars to the chilly weather, which had plummeted into the low teens. Or maybe Lisa’s policy of leaving two armed guards outside each store they looted kept them at bay. Whatever it was, it was a relief.

One day, Jack took a ride with Tony and Brad in one of the trucks. Loaded in the back was a bunch of lumber they’d snagged from a hardware store, a box of nails, a toolbox, a gallon of vegetable oil found in a fast food place, rolls of twine, and a painter’s drop cloth. Everyone hated the way the plastic tarp had made the deer meat taste. His solution was to soak the drop cloth in vegetable oil to prevent too much smoke from escaping out the sides. Then they’d hang the meat in strips beneath it from twine.

Unlike most of the farms in the area, the one Tony brought them to didn’t grow crops. It was a cattle farm. Black Angus cattle, Jack assumed, because the cows were black. Other than that, he didn’t know much about cows.

The cows weren’t fat, but they weren’t skinny, either. What grass he could see through the snowmelt was meager in comparison to the growth outside the fence. The pastureland seemed to go on forever, disappearing behind a hill at the farthest reaches, with lots of little fences sectioning it off throughout and keeping the animals together.

“So what do you think?” Jack said, alternating staring between the cattle and the two-story white house with the plume of blue smoke billowing from the chimney.

“Could be anyone in there,” Tony said.

“How’d you find this place?” Brad said. “I’m totally lost.”

Brad hadn’t ventured out since their arrival at the cabins. He was only there now because Molly had agreed to watch Tyler.

“Just driving around,” Tony said.

Jack kept staring at the house. Tony was right—anyone could be in there. Then he saw something that brought an instant smile to his face.

“Is that a chicken?” he said.

“Look at that!” Tony said. “Man, I’m getting hungry.”

Brad said, “Think maybe we could raise some chickens?”

That would be amazing,
Jack thought.

“Sure, if we play our cards right,” he said. “You two cover me. Beep first so we don’t surprise whoever’s there. I’ll go up with my hands raised.”

Tony pressed the horn down and held it for five seconds. Jack wished he’d done a peppy little
beep-beep-beep
, but didn’t say anything. Tony would just brush it off, eroding his authority a little bit more.

“Be careful,” Brad said.

Tony smiled arrogantly. “Man, go on. We got you.”

Jack nodded, got out, and approached the front gate unarmed, hands in the air. He paused there a moment, as if admiring the house: two stories, old-fashioned gables, decorative white columns, and a wraparound porch. A few seconds later, he couldn’t believe it when a big dog came running around the side barking at him and scattering chickens in its wake. Jack leapt back automatically. He hated dogs … well, he hated big, angry, slobbering dogs that could rip him to shreds. Thank goodness the gate was latched.

His first instinct was to run back to the truck, but worried his friends—his
subordinates
—would see that as cowardice and lose respect for him. Then he wondered if that really mattered if it meant keeping his face from being torn off.

“That’s far enough!” a girl shouted from the porch.

Jack looked up and saw a tough-looking girl pointing a rifle at him. She was in that general age range of teenager he’d hoped to find more of. She moved aside and another girl came out, a little younger, wielding a meat cleaver.

He shook his head. Not a year ago, the sight of two girls brandishing guns and meat cleavers would have prompted a call to the police. These days, it was the definition of sanity.

“I’m unarmed!” Jack shouted, hands raised. “No guns, see?” He turned in a circle so they could get a good look.

“You best get back in your truck and leave, unless you wanna die!” the first girl shouted, pointing over his head. Then she fired.

BANG!

Though his instinct was to flee—stumbling and falling and blubbering as he went—Jack controlled himself and took a step back. The girl hadn’t shot him, which meant she still retained some basic respect for the dignity of human—

She worked the bolt and fired again:
BANG!

Ditching all worries about his subordinates—both visibly laughing at him from the front seat—Jack ran stumbling and blubbering back to the truck, opened the door, and shoved in beside Brad.

Tony—still laughing, really laying it on—edged the truck into a turn and took them back to the cabins.

* * *

T
he next day
, shortly after dawn, Tony and Jack returned without Brad to the house with the homicidal girls and their mutant dog.

“Man, all you gonna do is get shot,” Tony said for the tenth time. He even sounded bothered by the prospect.

“We’ll see,” Jack said, tired of his constant needling.

Tony was only slightly less irritating than Pete—half the reason he’d given them the bulk of the scavenger duties, so they’d be out of his hair. Despite that, there was truth in his words. He
could
get shot. He would have done this alone, but if something happened, he wanted Lisa and Greg to know. For some reason, this was vitally important, his friends knowing how he lived and how he died. He didn’t want to be forgotten like so many others who’d wasted away on their death beds, or starved to death in the city streets, alone and unmourned.

Jack turned the lumpy rock over in his hand, studying it. About as big as a baseball, he’d sealed it in a freezer bag with a neatly folded note inside proclaiming their intentions. Namely, to trade food and other supplies in exchange for one of their cows. Lisa had written out the note the night after they’d gotten back. He and Brad agreed she was a natural diplomat and praised her sparkling penmanship. Lisa—nobody’s fool—called them out for being lazy and foisting more work on her after a long day in Gainesville.

“Here goes,” Jack said as they approached the house. “Hit it.”

Tony pressed the horn as they passed, loud and long (despite being told to make it sound peppier), and waited for the front door to open. Jack threw the rock onto the lawn, then ducked down as they sped away. Nobody shot at them, and a minute later they were far enough that they could stop and turn.

“Now what?” Tony said, breathing heavily for some reason.

“Now we wait. The note said we’d be back in an hour to talk. Why don’t you put on some music?”

The younger boy snorted. “Thought you hated that stuff?”

Anything’s better than listening to you right now,
Jack thought glumly.

“It’s growing on me,” was all he said.

Tony laughed and turned on his pop music, then leaned back and closed his eyes. Jack leaned back, too. Instead of closing his eyes, he took Churchill’s memoire from under his seat and continued reading. It was pretty good. He admired how the man had pulled the country together during their national crisis. He’d organized supply-lines from the United States, an island-wide communication network, an underground command center, and rallied the civic defense against day and night air raids by German bombers—all while launching attacks and counterattacks in Africa and plotting with FDR and Stalin on how best to defeat Hitler.

As awful as the war had been, the events had been made more tragic by the Sickness. All those lives lost, all that struggle, and so many accomplishments and inventions—all of it swept away like it had never happened.

“Tony,” he said after closing the book. “Ever hear of Erwin Rommel?”

“Nope.”

“Churchill? Stalin?”

“Still nope.”

“The battle of Stalingrad?”

Tony looked at him sideways, frowning as if sensing he was being talked down to. “No, and don’t care, neither. We doing this or what?”

Jack nodded. “Sure, man. Do what I said and drive off a ways. We don’t need you getting shot, too.”

Putting it in drive, Tony said, “First smart thing you said today.”

A minute later, they were at the house.