Pilliars in the Fall (4 page)

Clint was his usually quiet self on the drive back to their home. While I wasn’t exactly a chatterbox normally either, my silence was a little more noticeable and seemed out of place. I dwelled on it for just long enough to know that things were bad for everyone and there was nothing I could do about it, and then I started to integrate myself back into the conversation.

Blake and Danielle were telling us about the out-processing from the Army with duplicate forms and irritating triple checks of belongings and gear that had been signed out to them years before. It was nice to hear a story about mundane problems that I had no first hand experience with and I got lost in their long answers to my few polite questions.

It was mid afternoon when we finally pulled back into the Fenner’s driveway. The blinds in the front room were open and a wisp of smoke was trailing out of the fireplace chimney.
 Kathy must have been waiting at the window because she was outside and hugging Blake and Danielle before the truck could roll to a stop. Clint and I made way for their reunion as we grabbed the bags out of the back and took them inside.

That evening we enjoyed a nice, if somewhat meager dinner, lit by the phenomenon of real, honest to god electrical power from the utility lines, a more uncommon than common occurrence these days. After the plates were cleared, the dishes got washed quickly not knowing when we would lose the
 unreliable power to heat the hot water tank or run the well pump. Afterwards, we all sat around the dinning room table sipping on hot tea, cold water, or in my case, coffee.

I again was doing more listening than talking until Danielle asked me directly about the current events happening around us.

“I don’t know,” I responded to her thoughts on the way things were going. I wasn’t just blowing her off, I really didn’t have an answer and there must have been a cue in my voice though because she pressed me again.

“Well, you have to have an opinion.”

“Oh I have plenty of those, I just don’t know about the big picture stuff, don’t much pay attention to it anymore,” I laughed and answered her a little more clearly.

“
You
missing the details or not paying attention to something, I doubt it,” Blake laughed. He knew how much I valued being informed if nothing else.

“No really,” I smiled, he knew me too well. “I stopped paying attention to the big political stuff a while ago and feel better for it. No need to worry about something when it really doesn’t affect you one way or the other,” I finished, or thought I had finished, but Danielle looked disapprovingly at me.

“Don’t you care what’s going on in the country or the world?”

“No, not really,” I answered without giving it much thought. It wasn’t completely accurate, but at this point I thought I’d just play this angle and see where the conversation went.

“How can you not care?” she asked skeptically.

“Because we have plenty to worry about righ
t here. The country is crashing; heck, it has been for a while. It might all unravel or this might just lead to the restart that some people think is needed. None of that puts wood in the fireplace or food on our plates though.”

She didn’t have an answer ready for that so I trudged on.

“The lady yelling at Jack today is a perfect example. I know everything I need to about the way most people think and what that will them into when times get tough. Whether the country Balkanizes or not, it doesn’t change the general ignorance about what the US was and how far we’ve declined.”

“You think the country could really break up? You think it will get that bad?” Kathy sounded more than a little afraid of the idea.

“I can’t tell the future beyond what we’ll have to eat for the next meal,” I tried to lighten the mood a little for her sake.

“But you still have hope,” Kathy stated wishfully.

“And compassion,” Danielle finished for her. “Or else you wouldn’t have tried to help that guy at the train station.”

“That was just bad judgment,” I deadpanned. “Honestly that lady that was yelling at Jack had a point. There is a reason we are where we are."

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve gone downhill as a whole. There isn’t going to be an
EMP to kill all the power, the stock markets haven’t closed, they just crashed and are bouncing along the bottom. We didn’t get invaded by a foreign superpower; we got invaded by idiots from our own country.”

“Well okay, but those are still national problems that are affecting us in our day to day lives,” Danielle said, thinking she had somehow scored a point.

“Kind of yes, kind of no. The thing is there isn’t going to be one event like Pearl Harbor to unite the nation and at some point, if there is another Pearl or Nine Eleven, we will be too far gone from who we were when those things happened to cowboy up and fight the enemy.”

No one said anything, so I continued on.

“Like I said, we are in a steady decline headed towards third world nation status... and that's in the good areas. In other places, it won’t just be third world standards, it will be no standards. It’s the new and more vicious Wild West. We’re looking at a new standard of living everywhere. There will be a new definition of normal, and out here, just being able to put food on the table and not freezing to death may be the new day in, day out job for everybody."

“So where does it all level out?” Clint spoke up for the first time, asking the intelligent and leading question that I could expect only him to come up with.

“Like I said, I don’t know. I think the best anyone can do is try to avoid slipping back into the eighteen hundreds where the majority of your family that hasn’t died from disease or starvation doesn’t then get killed off in a land or cattle feud.”

“Oh that can’t happen, we’ve advanced too far past that,” Danielle announced optimistically.

“I personally think we’ve seen how the more advanced a society gets, the more fragile it is,” I said looking down into my empty coffee mug.

“So if it gets that bad, can’t we just hide? You know, stay low and ride it out?” Kathy asked. “Hasn’t that always been the plan with you guys?”

“If we’re lucky,” I tried to smile confidently, feeling it fall short. “Laying low doesn’t always work when you have needs like running low on food, or God forbid
somebody
gets pregnant...”

I gestured towards Danielle hoping they’d play off the joke and we could lighten up a little, but she managed to take my meaning wrong.

“What's that supposed to mean? Now having girls around is a problem?”

“Clint you’ve been married the longest, you want to answer that?” I laughed, trying to relieve some of the pressure off of me again.

“You’re on your own on this one buddy,” he got up to stoke the fire, grinning evilly as he went.

“No,” I frowned at Clint’s timely departure, “I was just throwing out scenarios.”

Thankfully that seemed to be answer enough for her, but Blake on the other hand, like any good friend, wanted to capitalize on my discomfort.

"Hey!
Let's talk about women in combat next, you start!" he nudged me with a big tight-lipped grin.

"What! You don’t think a woman belongs in a war?" Danielle took the bait that Blake had hung out for me. I rolled my eyes at him as he doubled over laughing.

“No really I want to hear this!” she ignored him.

"It makes no difference to me," I relented.

"What does that mean?" she was hot on the subject now, and thankfully I had a quick answer ready. I was actually just happy to be away from the doom and gloom subjects that were making Kathy upset.

"It means that big guys like me are screwed regardless. You're not going to drag someone my size out of danger, but neither is some five foot six, hundred and fifty pound, eighteen year old private. So I'm pretty much out of luck anyway."

"I know some strong girls, and there are requirements for this stuff..."

"The physical requirements are fine, as long as the mental stuff is in check, what's the difference?"

"Mental stuff?" she zoned in, ready for the kill. I should have stopped talking a long time ago.

"What I mean is, and this applies to a few different women badasses I've met or been involved with, I'd be afraid that if you get a chick pissed off enough, she won’t
stop
pulling the trigger. You people get worked up and it’s a goddamn whirlwind, an unstoppable hurricane."

Her face flushed, but I caught the kink in her gaze just enough to know that she was actually considering the legitimacy of what it was that I was saying.

Blake meanwhile was slapping the ground, laughing too hard to even make sounds anymore, tears pouring out of his eyes as he tried to force words out that sounded like "Stop... just stop..."

With that, the lights flickered and went dark. Our luxurious line power was gone again.

“Great, now he’s found a way to piss off the power company too, way to go,” Clint’s voice pronounced through the darkness.

Chapter 6

The next day Blake and I spent chopping and stacking firewood and doing the few things around their house that two guys could do easier and faster on their own than a whole group of well meaning people together could accomplish. We were a team again and when there was no one to get in the way, we could just push through a project and beat our way to the end.

We laughed and joked, and got reacquainted.
 In the conversation lulls I realized I hadn't completely shaken off last night’s conversation. It was different for me; everyone else wondered what was happening in the outside world. The newscasters when they could be heard by radio, talked about events in countries like Great Britain, Spain, Italy, Japan, even Russia, China, India and the Middle Eastern nations, places nowhere near to us, and I wondered if it was by design.

Clint listened to the shortwave and Ham radios, and through him I caught snippets of reports and conversations a little closer to home. News of our neighbors,
Mexico and Canada, was a laughable notion, and personal communication was a joke. Depending on how the radio waves were bouncing, we could go weeks on end without hearing from people we used to know who lived in our own region, let alone our own country... if we even were still a country.

How long would there still be a president, a congress
or a government people wondered. I wondered how long it would take for the decisions made by big named political positions to trickle down to us.

I actually hadn’t stopped caring or completely cut myself off, a long time ago I had just stopped paying much attention to the national matters and concentrated on things that could and would directly
affect me or insulate me from the indirect effects of national matters. So to me, not knowing what was going on in the outside world didn’t mean a whole lot in my everyday life. It didn’t help me to know what tree would be good to take for next year’s firewood stash. It didn’t inform me on how the pheasant flocks in the fields were doing or where the deer had been hanging out. I had more important things to occupy my time than worrying about politics and a bunch of bureaucrats doing bureaucrat things.

“So when do we get to see this house you’ve been building?” Blake asked once we had come inside and washed up to sit around the wood stove and get warmed back up.

“Yeah, I haven’t even seen any pictures of it,” Danielle added.

“There’s not much to see. Tomorrow if you guys can give me a lift I’ve got some stuff to work on over there so you could check it out.”

“Sure, we’ll drive you over. I want to take a look at some of those things you’ve piled up for this 308 build you’re dreaming up too, “ Clint said, then got up to check on Kathy who had gone to bed early. She had said that she could feel a cold coming on and wanted to get some rest to help ward it off.

“I bet the gun room was done before anything else, am I right?” Blake kidded me.
 

“Well…”

“Ha! I knew it. Speaking of which, check this thing out,” he ducked into his bedroom and came back out with a full sized pistol in his hand. Dropping the magazine and checking the chamber, he held up his prize.

“Is that a damn
Raffica?
” I exclaimed.

“Kind of
but not really; it’s not a true 93R anyway. It’s built off a standard 92 and doesn’t have a burst option, so it’s either full auto or single shot. A buddy of mine built it and was getting deployed so he slipped it to me for safe keeping. Pretty awesome huh?” he handed over the big handgun for me to survey.

“So it only breaks like every single one of the federal laws then?” I asked somewhat hesitantly.

“Coming from a guy that punched out two cops a couple days ago…” Blake retorted.

“I never threw one punch and how the hell did you hear about that?” I asked him, wondering just when it was that Clint had found the time to tell him about
that
little escapade.

“Whatever man. Look I’ve got two twenties and one thirty round mag for it, plus a handful of the standard capacity ones,” he proclaimed, opening the top of his backpack to showoff the supporting gear for his cherished, completely illegal, machine pistol.

It really was a beautiful and deadly looking gun. All matte black except for the dark wood grips, I felt like I was holding something with a soul, and somehow that soul was dark and ominous. The thing looked like a coiled snake or a pining horse before a race; an attack dog just waiting to be let off its leash.  

“My buddy put on the compensator and milled a fore grip but never got around to doing a butt stock. I like it like this better anyway,” he said extending both hands to mimic a shooting stance.

“How’s it shoot?” I handed it back over to him.

“I’ve only tried it out a couple of times and it’s a handful. But it’s reliable, fun as hell, and puts out a lot of lead at one time.”

“Yeah, a good close range, break contact gun.”

Or a
kill everyone in the room without worrying about who’s on what side gun
, I thought to myself.

“Well either way, I’d keep that thing out of sight, especially in town.”

“No way man, that’s where I might actually get to use it,” he said with a big alarming smile as he walked over to check the tea kettle on the stove.

Clint reappeared in
his and Kathy's bedroom doorway and before he got the door completely closed, we could all plainly hear the sound of a wet, hacking cough from inside. Clint's eyes blinked a fraction slower and longer than normal.

"Coughs getting worse," he told his family.

Kathy had been fighting a good head cold for a week or more and it wasn’t getting any better despite all the over the counter and medicinal remedies that she had been trying.

"She's had pneumonia before, like two or three years ago right?" Danielle asked him.

"Yeah, the docs treated it but they said once you’ve had it, you're pretty susceptible to getting it again. I hope it's not going there," he answered her.

Blake stared off as if he hadn’t heard either of them.