The Borrowed World: A Novel of Post-Apocalyptic Collapse (5 page)

She put one leg out the car and rose up out of her open door.  I ran over and took her by the arm.  “We have to go.  Lois is dead.  This car isn't going anywhere.”

“My stuff is—”

“Forget your stuff, Alice, we have to go
now
.”

She looked at me, wild-eyed in fear and shock, then snatched her purse from the front seat.  We ducked and ran past the front door where shots still rang out, though they were tapering off.  Gary and Rebecca were already in the car with the engine running when we got there.  Randi had jumped in the back seat when the shooting started and still had no idea of what was going on.  I got in the front seat while Alice crammed in the back with the other two women.  They were unable to speak, except for Randi who kept asking what had happened, but she wasn't getting any answers. 

Gary reversed the vehicle, and drove quickly around the back of the store, hoping to avoid the chaos around front.  Truck drivers were running back and forth between vehicles, some with pistols in their hands.  Others were getting their rigs moving and hoping to get out of here before things got any worse.  Gary cut around the slow moving rigs but got caught in a bottleneck trying to get out of the parking lot.  Cars were streaming out onto the road, but there were hundreds of cars still in this parking lot, with only one way in and out.

“Come on, come on,” Gary whispered, as if he could urge a clearing in the traffic.

Out of nowhere, a man ran up to Gary's window and began beating on it.

“Do
not
lower that window,” I said urgently.

The man was screaming at Gary.  “My car is out of gas!  I need a ride out of here.  This is a government vehicle and my damn taxes paid for it!”

Gary held up his hands and yelled back, “We don't have room!”

In the back, Rebecca started crying, the shock of seeing Lois killed beside her and the continuing chaos becoming too much for her. 

“Open this damn door!” the man screamed.

Gary tried to inch the car forward but was pinned in and couldn't go anywhere.

The man pulled a lug wrench from his back pocket, drew back, and shattered Gary's window, showering Gary and I with glass fragments.  Gary leaned forward and was brushing them from his hair and face, trying to keep them out of his eyes.  Without thinking, I threw open my door, drew my LCP, and pointed it at the man as he drew back the lug wrench again for what I assumed was to be a fatal blow to Gary's head. 

There was no time to say anything.  I leveled the pistol, fired twice.

The .380 rounds went through the man's right pectoral muscle and into his chest.  He grabbed his chest and dropped from sight.  It was the first time I'd ever shot a person, and time slowed.  In my peripheral vision I saw the car ahead of us pull onto the road.  To my left I could see the car behind us, a man and woman in the front seat, staring wide-eyed in horror.

“In the car!” Gary yelled.  “Let’s go!”

I ducked into the seat, hearing glass fragments grind beneath me.  I still had the LCP in my hand. 

Gary hit the gas and the tires squealed as we sped onto the road and took the on-ramp for I-81 south. 

The women were silent.  Even Rebecca's crying had stopped.  Gary kept looking over at me. “You may want to put that away,” he said after a moment.

When Ellen and the kids arrived home, she sent Pete for Jim's Simplicity lawn mower and the garden cart that he towed behind it.  They set the propane tanks, Coleman fuel, gas cans, and diesel cans out of the vehicle.

“Store the gas and diesel in the mower building,” Ellen said.  “Just leave them in the middle of the floor for now until I can add fuel stabilizer to the gas.  Then I need you to come back for the propane cylinders, the Coleman fuel, and the camping stuff.  Put it the new storage building and make sure that it's locked when you're done.  Got it?  Ariel and I are going to take the groceries inside.”

Pete saluted.  “Got it, Mom.”

While people like Jim were called “preppers” today, he came from a long line of hillbillies that knew that hard times were always just around the corner.  His father and grandfather had been people who never threw anything away and tried not to own things they couldn’t fix themselves.  While she shook her head at the various junk and scrap piles that Jim maintained around the property, she never complained about them.  There would have been no point in it for one thing.  Jim was his own man and probably wouldn’t get rid of his personal junkyard for any amount of persuasion.  But beyond that, there’d been countless circumstances where he’d repaired something using material scavenged from his piles or built something he needed from scratch simply using those salvaged or discarded materials.

There had been some boom times in central Appalachia where they lived, but far more “bust” times, so people were never that far from raising their own food, home canning, and hunting.  When he'd built this house on fifty acres of overgrown farmland, Jim had taken all those things into account, even though farming and hunting were not activities he actively pursued now.  There were deer, turkeys, and squirrels on the land.  He had a pond stocked with bass, trout, catfish, bluegill, and several other species.  He had a garden, which could easily be expanded if the need arose.  There was also a spring that could provide fresh water year round.  If things ever got desperate enough, there was even a cave at the back of the property that could serve as an emergency shelter. 

As a weekend project, Jim had taken pallets of old cinderblocks he’d salvaged from buildings that were being torn down and walled up the entrance to the cave.  After laying the blocks most of the way up, he threaded scraps of rebar and old steel fence posts down through the block cores to lock them together.  Then he filled the voids with a wet concrete mixture to grout them solid, and had installed a salvaged steel door in the wall.  With the door’s metal frame also grouted with concrete, it was a very solid entrance and would be impenetrable to most things that might try to gain entrance.  When he ran out of room for cinderblocks, he filled any irregular voids with mortar, sealing his wall tight to the rock outcropping.

*

It took them nearly an hour to unload and put away the purchases.  As part of Jim's design, the house had a large pantry near the kitchen door that allowed them to store their food in an easily accessible location.  There were also shelves in the basement for long-term stored food, bulk foods, and some of the home-canned items.

“I'm going to go lie down and watch TV,” Ariel announced when they were done, her voice weak with feigned exhaustion.

Ellen reheated a cup of coffee for herself and took Jim's red binder to the porch.  She sat in the porch swing, and opened the book to where she'd left off:

If you still have power, you need to charge all items that can be charged in case you lose power down the road.  In the mower shed are a couple of boat batteries and old car batteries.  You should charge these, since they can be a good source of 12 volt power in an emergency.  The charger is beside them and the instructions are printed on the charger.  There is also a solar charger hanging on the wall by the batteries.  If the power goes out, you can use this charger to charge these batteries but it takes a lot longer.

Charge all phones, entertainment devices, and the radios.  The walkie talkies can use AA batteries in a pinch but you might as well charge them if you have power.  Also, charge the batteries to the power tools.  They are on a shelf in the basement.  They charge in about fifteen minutes, so try to charge all of them if you can.

In the new storage building is the device I used to jump start dead batteries. It has an air compressor, a USB charger, and a radio built in.  Make sure this is charged; it is the easiest way to recharge a cell phone if the power is out.

If the power does fail, use duct tape to seal the chest freezers in the basement.  They will keep for about a week or so if you don't open them.  You can extend this if you use the generator and run them for a couple of hours a day.  Remember, though, in an extended power outage, the sound of a generator running carries for long distances and can make you a target, so be aware.  If you do use the generator, it needs to be chained up, and you should cover it with a tarp when it’s not running.  There are rolls of black plastic in one of the outbuildings.  It might not be a bad idea to cover the windows on the front of the house with this plastic to prevent anyone from seeing that the house is lit when theirs is not.

Items in the refrigerator won't last more than a day if you are opening the door at all, which is hard to avoid.  If the power is out and there is no indication of when it will be coming back on, load all of the refrigerated items into boxes and take them to the spring house.  There is a 12 volt cooler in the storage building that can be hooked to one of those old boat batteries.  It will allow you to keep a few refrigerated items in the house for convenience.  You will have to switch the battery out and recharge them using the solar charger.

Since their property had a spring on it, Jim had insisted on building a spring house like his grandmother had.  It was a cinderblock building set back into the hillside with a shallow concrete trough inside.  Cold spring water flowed from a pipe in the wall and into the trough.  At the other end, a drain allowed the water to flow out, providing a constant level of cold running water.  By setting items that needed refrigeration into the trough, they remained at a cool temperature year round.  With the spring house set back into the hillside, with three walls mostly buried, the spring house also didn't freeze in the winter, so it made for near perfect storage in the case of a power failure.  They used it for storing garden potatoes and other root vegetables mostly, but it was there for refrigeration if they needed it.

Ellen’s reading was interrupted by a loud shriek of frustration. 

“Mom!” Ariel yelled from inside. 

“What?” Ellen asked.  “What’s going on?”

“My TV just quit working!” Ariel yelled back.

“Well shit,” Ellen said.  She felt free to curse when the kids weren’t standing around her.   She got up and went through the screen door into the living room.  She flipped the switch on the wall.  Nothing.  She was starting to get worried now.  She went back outside and walked around the house to the electric meter mounted on the wall where the power came in.  The digital readout was blank.  She knew exactly what that meant.

No power.

She couldn't help but think she may have jinxed herself by reading the power failure instructions in Jim's binder in advance.  This changed things significantly.  Now she knew she would have to finish that section.  There would be preparations to make before darkness fell.  Without electric lights, life was about to turn into an extended camping trip.  She hoped she was up to it.

“Kids!” she yelled, entering the house.  “We have more work to do.”

“Ya'll, that was some seriously fucked up shit,” Randi said, plainspoken as always.  “What the hell just happened?  What happened to Lois?”

No one spoke.  As the magnitude of the events settled in, we dropped into a collective state of shock and numbness.  The radio was still playing and I leaned forward and turned it off.

Rebecca turned to Randi and took a deep breath.  Her voice shook as she spoke. “Lois is dead.  She was shot while we were leaving.”

“Are you sure she was dead?” Randi asked.  “Maybe she was just wounded.”

“She was standing right beside me,” Rebecca said, her voice rising in anger and frustration.  “I saw the bullet take out part of her skull.  I am wearing her blood and brains.”

Randi stared at Rebecca for a moment, as if just noticing her state, then spoke to her softly.  “Honey, you do have blood all over your face.”

Rebecca started crying again and scrubbed at her face with her jacket sleeve.  Randi dug in her purse and removed a pack of baby wipes. 

“I have grandkids,” she said.  “You have grandkids, you always have wipes.”  She removed one and began wiping the blood from Rebecca's face as if it were nothing more than chocolate.

“You don't look old enough to have grandkids,” Rebecca said absently, still tearful. 

“I got an early start,” Randi said.  “Had my first child at sixteen.”

No one said anything while Randi finished cleaning Rebecca's face.  When she was done, she had about a half-dozen bloody wipes in her lap. She stared at them for a moment.

“Would anyone be offended if I littered?” she asked.  “I don't feel like riding home with this mess in my lap.”

“Go ahead,” I said.  It was the first thing I'd said since shooting that guy.

“So, okay, someone please tell me what happened,” Randi said again.  “Why did someone shoot Lois?”

Gary started telling the story and left out nothing.  No one interrupted.  When he was done, Alice took out her cell phone and dialed a number.

“I've got to try to call Bill,” she said.  Bill was our Executive Director, the head honcho of our state agency.  “I've got to let him know what happened, that Lois is dead, and that we've had to abandon a vehicle.”

“And that I had to shoot someone,” I said. “You may want to mention that little detail.”

“You had no choice,” Randi assured me.  “Did you see the way he had that tire iron drawn back?  If you hadn't shot him, Gary would have been toast, and we'd have had two dead people instead of one.”

“I can't believe we had to leave her there,” Rebecca said to no one in particular.  “How will her body ever get back to her family?  How will they bury her?”

No one answered, all of us thinking about what she had said and not having an answer.

“No offense, Jim,” Randi said, “but if you can carry a damn gun in this car then I think I should be able to smoke a damn cigarette and I need one about now.”  She pulled one from her pack, cracked her window, and lit up.  No one protested, or quoted the policy manual.

A loud dinging noise startled all of us.

“I was waiting on that,” Gary said, his voice full of dread.  “We’re low on fuel.”

Things were quiet for a moment and then the dinging started again.

“We could try this next exit,” I said.  “Try a small town gas station.”

“Maybe,” Gary said.  “It's possible they wouldn't know yet that they're not supposed to be selling gas.  Or maybe they’d sell us some anyway if we pay a little extra.  I can’t imagine they’d be able to put cops at every single gas station in the state.”

“We've got to do something,” Randi said.  “This car ain't going much further without gas.  I’ve been noticing a lot of cars pulled over like they’re out of gas and I don’t want to be one of them.”

It was true.  We were passing more and more cars stopped on the shoulder of the road.  Some had people inside or milling around outside.  Others appeared abandoned.  The surrounding traffic had thinned out considerably, too.  There were a lot fewer moving vehicles.  It was likely that the fuel restrictions were starting to have an effect.  There were still convoys of National Guard and army vehicles passing on the other side of the interstate heading north, as well as the occasional police car going by with lights flashing.

Alice gave up on her phone call.  “I can't get through,” she said.

“Did you try texting?” I asked.

“No, but I will,” she said, and started thumbing a message on the screen of her phone.

This reminded me that I had not tried to contact my own family since leaving Richmond.  I pulled out my cell and composed a quick text: 

On 81.  Can't buy gas anymore.  Hope you guys are safe.  Be home as soon as I can.

I wanted to say more, but didn't want to worry them.  How do you text your wife that you just had to kill someone in a parking lot?  How do you tell her one of your colleagues got shot waiting on the restroom?  I was going to have to snap out of this.  I knew it was just the aftereffects of adrenaline, but I’d been in a funk since shooting that guy.  I knew I was only doing what I had to do, but there’s a physical reaction that first time and you never know how it’s going to go.

This is what I trained for when I practiced shooting, though – being able to respond automatically in times of stress and danger.  You create muscle memory so your body knows what to do.  I’d performed just as I had to.  With the man's arm drawn back, there was no time for a warning.  The lug wrench was a deadly weapon and I’d responded with deadly force.  There was nothing to be worried about.  If things got as bad as I was afraid they might, then I’d be lucky if I only had to kill one man.  That was not an encouraging thought. 

It was at this time that I heard my grandfather’s voice in my head telling me I needed to harden the fuck up.  He’d died when I was fifteen but he’d always been an icon of toughness to me.  He’d lost his father and older siblings in the Spanish Flu epidemic and at age ten had become the man of the house, assuming responsibility for his mother and four younger brothers and sisters.  He’d been forced by circumstance to go to work in the coal mines of West Virginia as a slate picker, sitting with other children atop wooden boards that were placed over the conveyors of coal.  Their job was to pick chunks of slate out of the coal that moved down the conveyor belt.  It was hard, dirty work, and a man with a long stick stood ready to strike them if their attention lapsed. 

There were child labor laws in place at this time meant to curtail these practices, but these were circumvented by putting the child’s hours on an adult relative’s paycheck.  That relative would then split the money with the child’s family.  My grandfather kept this job until he was twelve, when he was promoted to leading mules down into the mines, pulling coal carts on narrow steel tracks.  This, too, was dirty, dangerous work.  As a child living in an adult world, he was forced to fight his way through life early.  With his fists at the beginning, then later with a knife.  And later yet, with a gun.

When I turned thirteen, my grandfather, without my mother’s knowledge, began recounting to me the stories of the men he’d killed and wounded over his lifetime.  There were many and these experiences had made him a hard man, physically and mentally.  I still remember the stories of all those men and I remember him telling me that I had to be a hard man, too, because there were men in the world who needed killing – men you could not turn your back on.  Men you could not leave behind to ambush you when the odds were better in their favor.

“There’s an exit,” Gary said. “A minor one with no hotels and no fast food.  Just what we’re looking for.  Probably fewer people stop because there’s not much there.”

Gary took the exit.  A sign pointed right and told us that it was three and a half miles to the nearest gas station.  Gary turned in that direction.

“You guys sure this is a good idea?” Rebecca asked.  “The interstate seems safer.”

“No,” I said.  “I’m not sure it’s safe at all.  Do you have a better idea?”

No one said anything for a moment.

“Maybe we should have just gone as far as we could on the interstate,” Alice said.  “We could have stopped at an exit with a hotel and stayed there until we could get help.”

“I’m not sure we’d be better off,” I said.  “I am afraid those exits will become dangerous as more and more people gather there and become desperate.  If no help comes, people will turn on each other.  The cops are all tied up and you can’t depend on them for help.”

Rebecca had quit crying but was still absently wiping the side of her face, where the blood had been, as if some invisible remnant remained.  “We survived the 9/11 attacks and things didn’t get that bad then,” she said.  “People weren’t shooting at each other.”

“Those attacks killed a lot of people, but we didn’t lose resources,” Gary said before I could answer.  “This attack has damaged concrete resources along with a significant loss of life.  It could take years to recover from this.  If those attacks destroyed enough transformers, it could take two years to replace them.  If power isn’t available to manufacture more, who knows how long it could be?”

“I think you’re overreacting,” Alice said.  “There’s no need to scare people like that.”

“We’ll see,” I said skeptically.  “I hope we are overreacting.”

We drove less than a mile before the Impala rounded a corner and encountered a roadblock consisting of two sheriff’s department cruisers parked nose-to-nose blocking both lanes of traffic.  Gary slowed as we approached and a deputy with what looked like a Remington 870 shotgun moved from behind the barricade, eying us carefully.  When we came to a stop, the cop stared at our local government tags, the same type his cruiser carried.  The deputy approached cautiously.

“What can I do for you folks?” he asked.

“Just looking for some gas,” Gary said in his friendliest tone.  “We’re on our way back home from Richmond and are getting pretty low.”

The deputy lowered his head a little and got a good look at each us, then lowered his gun, not perceiving us as a threat.

“You might not have heard,” the deputy said, “but the Governor has locked down the gas supply.  All available gas is for official emergency response only.”

I leaned over toward Gary, to where I could see the deputy’s face.  “Any chance of a tank out of professional courtesy?” I asked.  “We’re local government, too.”

The deputy considered this.  “What branch?” he asked. “Where you guys from?”

“Mental health,” Alice spoke up before I could answer him.  “Russell County.  Near Bristol.”

I’d been prepared to say Emergency Services or county government on our way back from a conference.  Something that sounded more official –more critical –anything but mental health.  Cops didn’t give a crap about mental health workers.

“Mental health?” he sneered. “Not a chance in hell.”

“What difference does it make that we’re mental health?” Alice asked.

“Do you know how many times we call you guys to get someone committed to a mental hospital and you say that they don’t meet the criteria?” he asked.  “It happens around here every day.”

“Sorry,” Alice said.  “This isn’t our area.  You can’t blame us for what your local agency does.”

“No dice.  You folks will need to turn your car around and go the other way.”

“Why the roadblock?” Gary asked.  “I’m just curious.”

“We were getting overrun by folks trying the same things you folks were trying – looking for someone to sell you gas.  When they couldn’t find anyone who would sell them gas, they started trying to steal gas.  My own mom called me and said she saw someone drive up to her house and cut off a section of her water hose and then use it to siphon gas out of her Buick.  When I got there, the guy looks at me as if he was doing nothing wrong.  He told me he was doing what he had to do.”

“So you’re not letting anyone else come in?” Gary said.

“Damn right we’re not,” the deputy said.  “Local traffic only.  You’ll find that a lot of towns off the interstate are doing the same thing.  I’ve heard talk of it on the radio.”

“We’ll be getting out of here then,” Gary said.  “Good luck.”

“You folks will be the ones needing luck,” the deputy replied.  “Russell County is a hell of a long way away and travel just got a lot harder.”

With little choice, we drove back to the interstate.  Each ding of the Low Fuel alert hit me like a blow to the stomach.  What the hell were we going to do?

“I guess we might as well try to get as far as we can,” Gary said.

No one had any other comments or suggestions.  We were all getting hungry and more than a little scared.  Most business trips sucked but this one was off the charts.

We ended up being able to travel another fifteen miles or so before the gas tank was dry.  In a curve, the fuel pump sucked air and the engine missed.  It smoothed out again when we came out of the curve and we all started breathing again.  Then the engine stuttered again and the car stalled completely.  Gary put the car in neutral and coasted to the side of the road, off the paved shoulder and onto a level grass spot beside the road.

“Maybe if we leave it here they won’t tow it,” he said, scrounging for a piece of paper.  “I’ll leave a note in the window.”