TEOTWAWKI: Beacon's Story (25 page)

Beacon gave the horses pulling the wagons a short breather in front of an abandoned auto parts store. He went in just long enough to relieve its shelves of all their axle grease for future use on the wagon's wheels. Then they continued their race to the hills.

Beacon was taking advantage of people's natural albeit subconscious desire to stay within their comfort zone. The gangsters would have little trouble following the trail left by the horses off road or on, but the further the city boys got from the familiarity of their home turf the less sure of themselves they'd be. As city boulevards turned to suburban streets and then country lanes he hoped virtually all of their city slicker pursuers would remember urgent business back in the city.

Just to be sure Beacon, Gail, Randy and Jackie set up an ambush just outside of their camp that night at a place where the road curved around a hill after climbing up a long straight incline. Their fields of fire covered the incline while the hill hid and protected them.

As the other's circled the wagons, hobbled the horses, arranged security and set up a cold camp the four friends lay in ambush between the town and the camp. Beacon made sure the sergeant of the guard knew their location.

He and Randy took the first two hour shift while the women cold camped a few yards behind them with the horses. By pairing himself with Randy he made sure the young man would be staring at their back trail and not Jackie's eyes. Of course it never occurred to him that the same logic applied to him with regard to Gail.

At dawn the wagons decamped but Beacon watched their back trail a few more minutes to be sure they weren't being followed.

Molly's Marauders were experienced horse riders, but they'd never driven a horse drawn wagon before. To add to the difficulty their horses had never been hitched to a wagon before. Despite advice and encouragement from Pete, Gail and Old Bill; getting a pair horses to allow themselves to be hitched together was still a daunting task.

Getting a pair of hitched together horses to go the same direction, at the same time at the same speed was a challenge for the teenagers.

Pete took the lead wagon since he knew the area near the city better than anyone else. Beacon stayed up at the front of the column because he didn't trust Pete's ability to spot trouble brewing. Gail drove the third wagon with Old Bill's wagon pulling up the rear.

They were on a paved road skirting a hillside flanked by thick brush and trees on both sides when the ambush occurred. As amateur ambushes go it wasn't badly planned, but is was poorly executed.

Beacon spotted movement on the uphill side of the road. Pulling his pistol he rode to investigate. That wasn't part of the ambusher's plan. While the man he'd spotted agonized over what to do Beacon spotted another of the ambushers near the first. As the first ambusher raised his gun Beacon shot him.

All hell broke loose.

The horses, still nervous about being hitched to wagons went wild. The first team took off up the road at a dead run with Pete trying to rein them in. The second team followed at a full gallop slowed slightly by the time it took for the first wagon to get moving.

Gail's horses reared causing Molly to fall out without her rifle. The fourth team tried to run around Gail's wagon and almost ran over Molly who jumped up grabbing both by their bridles and pulled them down. They'd have carried her off swinging between them but their wagon's left front wheel got caught behind Gail's wagon's rear right wheel.

Finding themselves also blocked the fifth pair of horses tried to run uphill but were blocked in by brush and reared.

Evidently the plan had been to steal the last wagon. Several more men and women opened fire at the front of the wagon train while two men jumped out from behind cover and ran out to grab the reins of the horses pulling the last wagon while a third man, apparently assigned to take out the driver, found a tree blocking his shot.

Old Bill pulled one of his long barreled Peacemakers from its cross draw holster and shot the first reins grabber before the man reached the horses. He thumbed the hammer back on the single action pistol and shot the second one as the man reached for the reins. Then the shooter stepped out from behind the tree.

The two men saw each other at the same time. Both fired a rushed shot at the other. Both missed but Old Bill had to thumb back the hammer on his single action revolver for another shot. The man with the semiautomatic pistol only had to squeeze the trigger to fire again. Old Bill's revolver fired a split second after the other man fired. Old Bill's shot was true, but so was his attacker's. Old Bill fell into the wagon box with a bullet in his chest.

Had they been on foot the teamsters and the Marauders riding shotgun on the wagons could have charged their attackers disrupting the bad guy's plans and getting out of the ambushes kill zone at the same time. But the wagon drivers were trying to remain in their wagons while fighting to control the horses and the passengers were hanging on for dear life.

Beacon did his best to disrupt the ambush. The ambushers were strung out along a line. Riding back along the line of ambushers slightly behind them he rolled up their line firing with one hand while controlling his horse with the other.

When his Colt forty-five ran dry he transferred the reins to his teeth and dropped the empty magazine from the gun with one hand while pulling another magazine from his belt pouch with the other.

In less than a minute all the ambushers had died. It appeared their only casualty was a boy who broke his arm falling off a wagon. As they calmed and sorted out the horses Beacon was congratulating himself for breaking up the ambush, when he noticed there was no driver visible on the last wagon.

Old Bill was getting a bit old to be jumping off of wagons to charge the enemy and Beacon intended to remonstrate with his old friend about that. Then he noticed Old Bill wasn't standing anywhere near the wagon either. Spurring his horse to a gallop he hurried over as one of Molly's Marauders came over to calm Old Bill's horses.

Old Bill managed to tell Beacon to give his guns to Buck then he coughed up blood and died.

The next day they buried Old Bill on a hillside overlooking the mountains he loved.

The following spring Beacon and Gail were married. They teamed up with Buck and Molly's Marauders to patrol a trail that paralleled a small river flowing through the floodplain below the two city states. The river was fed by both the castle's pond runoff and the lake below the Settlement. After a year of patrolling together Buck and Molly were married.

As trade grew, Beacon and Gail established a freehold in the valley several miles below the castle at the confluence of the stream flowing from the castle's pond and the river.

The trail beside the river had become a track and then a road as trade between the castle and the Settlement was joined by traders from outside the watershed.

To help jump start civilization the Castle Corporation released its claim on half of the areas they'd cleared on the side of the stream away from their holdings. At a small rapids Pete and the Castle corp. cooperated to build a small dam.

Pete and his sons established their own waterwheel on their side of the stream to power a trip hammer in their blacksmithing shop. Pete's place complemented Gail's farrier shop. Pete and sons also farmed raising crops that astounded everyone with the size and quality of the harvests.

On their side of the dam the Castle corp. built their own waterwheel and a grist mill.

The original log cabin forts eventually became two story stone buildings covering each other through loopholes in their upper floors. The two shops stood corner to corner in sort of a figure eight on opposite sides of what would become an intersection so that each building could cover two sides of the other building.

The beauty of this arrangement was that shooters firing from one building at attackers alongside the other building would be firing obliquely from the openings. Like Jackie had been when shooting across the street from behind the corner of that building in the city, the shooter would have both cover and concealment being invisible to everyone but the target.

The castle corp.'s mill helped cover the two Settlement buildings as they helped cover it.

Maybe it was because of the obvious strength of the fortified town or perhaps the die off had run its course, for whatever reason Fort Old Bill was never attacked.

Families grazed sheep and cattle in the areas cleared by the Castle corp.'s wood gatherers and cleared more land as well. In fits and starts civilization began to claw its way out of the abyss.

Survivors had a great advantage over their ancestors who'd clawed their way up from savagery in that these people knew what they'd had before the Blowup and many of them knew how to go about rebuilding it.

Down in the flatlands hundreds of miles away oil field roughnecks eventually managed to get crude oil flowing to a small refinery whose few remaining workers "cracked" it producing gasoline, diesel and kerosene which in turn powered one of the generators of an electric utility plant. Using that fuel trucks carried gasoline, diesel and kerosene to trade for food with an ever widening customer base.

With electricity the town around the utility flourished. Water pumps worked so toilets did too and sewers flowed again. With electricity barter could be carried on far into the night. Like a spider web the expanding network of lights lured survivors from the mountains to the towns.

But without skilled maintenance, spare parts and a steady supply of fuel the infrastructure of civilization stumbled from time to time.

Labor was in short supply, especially skilled labor. Middle managers who knew how to run an auto assembly line or insurance company, found they knew precious little about fixing a broken fan belt or rebuilding a bridge. Executives became manual laborers or retrained into useful professions.

Non food supplies were often abundant, but the skilled laborers to put them to work weren’t. Everybody thinks they know how to mount a new tire on a wheel rim, but few actually do. Those that had hands-on skills found themselves in demand; paper pushers not so much.

Everywhere food was the driving force. Housing was abundant but cleaned out kitchen larders meant farming and ranching became the primary occupation of most. Truck gardens sprouted everywhere once bandits had been chased away. Chickens, ducks, goats, sheep, guinea pigs, llamas and alpacas vied with grains, fruits and vegetables to become the new currency.

Beacon and Gail named their first son Bill.