The World Ends In Hickory Hollow (3 page)

"We'll fix up the other house, Dad's place, for some of them ... the ones who won't fit into ours," I said. "Our systems can handle a lot more than we've ever burdened them with, too. We may have to do a good bit of hunting and fishing, this winter, though. Nine extra is a lot."

By this time, Mom Allie had hustled the newcomers into her kitchen and was doling out soup in any container that came to hand–teacups, small saucepans, bowls, mugs, tin cans, you name it. The soup was disappearing at unbelievable speed.

Miss Vera set down her cup with a sigh. "Alice, that's the first real food I've tasted in over a week. They swooped down on the nursing home and grabbed us up and off to the armory. Fed us on dried army rations for two days, then on cold canned stuff. I'd made up my mind to die, but Sam's folks had gone to Dallas for a week and left him with his nurse. Lord only knows what's happened to those poor children, but I walked over to the house, soon as I knew what had happened. Good thing, too. That fool woman was gabbling and babbling and getting ready to leave that child all by himself while she went off looking for her boyfriend.

"I sent her packing, took him in tow, and we were waiting out whatever is going to happen when Zack came in and offered us a chance. I may be stiff and cranky, by heaven, but I'm not useless yet."

"Well, now you'll get a chance to do some real
bossin
'," chuckled Mom Allie. "Never saw a woman in my life could get coattails to
poppin
' in the wind as fast as you can, Vera. We'll need you. You can see what's to be done and who's best to do it while the rest of us are still
wonderin
' what we ought to be
wonderin
' about."

The two old friends went off into quiet laughter, and the faces about them took on a bit of their cheer. Mom Allie had seasoned that soup with hope, more than anything else, and we all were warmed and strengthened by it.

We got the rest of the stuff loaded into the pickup in jig time. Most of our rescued crew had little but what they stood up in, so we dug out one of the "everything boxes" that Mom Allie kept for hand-me-downs from many sources and in all sizes. Moth-eaten jackets, sturdy army blankets, sweaters and scarves and boots and all sorts of useful things emerged. We bundled the whole thing up and tied it to the top of the pickup cab, wrapped in garbage bags to keep out the wet.

When we were loaded up, we looked like the Grapes of Wrath plus two. The pickup bulged fore and aft, above and below, with bundles and boxes. If there had been another vehicle (containing gas) to be had, we'd have commandeered it, but the flight from Nicholson to wherever had been nearly total, it seemed.

We crept along, the worn-out shocks letting the truck sag and sway as we rounded corners. As we rounded the last bend before hitting the state highway, we were brought up short by a stout figure in wrinkled khaki. It leaped into the center of the street and waved both arms commandingly.

"Stop that truck and get out!" came a bellow, surprisingly loud from such an unimposing man.

Zack obligingly stopped the truck, but none of us had the slightest intention of getting out of it. The round face, cross-barred by an ash colored moustache, grew alarmingly red, and the person... official? ... deputy? ... whatever... tugged at the snap of the holster at his hip and stalked over, pistol in hand.

"You the one kidnapped them old folks from the armory?" he demanded, poking his red face toward the crack of window that Zack had opened. "You're under arrest, and you've got to get '
em
right back where they belong, under U.S. Government auspices!" He exhaled the last word with such prideful emphasis that we were devoutly grateful the window was all but closed.

Zack sighed and leaned his elbows on the steering wheel. "These people are every one of them here because they want to be," he said quietly. "I'm not going to take them back to the armory to die with the rest of those numbskulls. Now you can shoot me–shoot us all–but you can't make us go back there."

"As for U.S. Government auspices," crackled a voice twice as commanding as any I'd ever heard, "I've had enough of those over the last sixty years to make me glad this mess has finally blown up in their faces. The precious U.S. Government has been made up of nitwits, timeservers, and busybodies for half my life, and they dug us deeper and deeper into debt and chaos with every year that went by. I'm glad it's blown to smithereens, Amos Ledbetter! Now you'd better get out of our way, unless you intend to add murder to stupidity!" Miss Vera Nicholson planted her short square feet on the wet pavement, crossed her arms on her sagging bosom, and glared at the bemused Amos with both thunder and lightning in her eyes.

"But Miss Vera," he pleaded, "my orders is to keep all the old folks in the armory. And to keep out-of-town looters"–here he glared at Zack and the loaded pickup--"out. I'm just
doin
' what I was told."

'You poor ninny," Miss Vera crackled. "You haven't seen anybody capable of giving an order in over a week. They're all gone, and they've taken most of the foodstuff out of all the stores with
em
. They left enough there at the armory for a few weeks, maybe, then they took off. You'd better scrounge up some way of living for yourself and let the rest of us go about surviving. " She turned her back, and unseen hands hauled her back into the crowded truck bed.

Zack smiled sympathetically at Ledbetter and eased the truck into gear. "Ill be coming back to town for the rest of my mother's stuff," he said. "Don't think I'm a looter and shoot me." And he pulled away, leaving the damp khaki-clad shape to dwindle in the distance.

The day hadn't improved a bit. The mist seemed to be on the verge of freezing on the windshield as we retraced our way, still looking for some sign that people still lived in the countryside. When we topped the long rise west of the
Nagache
Creek, and the long sweep of bottomland spread itself before us in shades of gray, we could see, away off to the left, a spiral thread of smoke.

Mom Allie gave a satisfied sort of grunt. "Cindy Howard got her whole crew over there into the woods at the Pioneer House," she said. "'Maybe now they'll realize that she's worth more than a
potful
of Ph.D.'s. That gal moved '
em
right out of that all-electric brick veneer monstrosity they built and put '
em
right back in the tight old log house they grew up in. They'll live to bless a fireplace with cranes and that artesian well that flows out of solid rock."

"But how do you know?" I asked her.

She snorted. "What I'd do myself, given a bunch of slack-twisted
gumps
like hers. Lucky I've got a couple of kids with something under their hats besides hair."

She settled back. Her face, which had been so grayed with sadness and worry, seemed to be smoothing and brightening. "You know, it's not going to be near as bad as a lot of folks might think. We're going to be so busy we won't have time to get depressed and so tired we'll just purely have to sleep when we hit the bed. It's not going to be any cakewalk, but I think we're going to get stronger, smarter, tougher ... or else we're going to die, every man jack of us."

CHAPTER THREE

That was the most
concentratedly
hectic afternoon I've ever spent. Our house, with the best will in the world, just couldn't hold nine extra people, plus Mom Allie. Two downstairs bedrooms, with the sleeping loft for the children, would have been wall-to-wall people. My Dad's house, though we had fixed the windows with tight shutters and mended the roof, was cold through, with no supply of wood to hand to feed the fireplace and
cookstove
. That could be remedied with little trouble, but not in time for this night. Then I had a bright idea.

As we jounced along the last few miles, I suddenly gasped and caught Zack's arm. "Mrs.
Yunt
! If she's home, she'll be tickled pink to have some of these people with her, and if she's gone, she won't mind a bit. She's got bottled gas, as well as that good wood stove she cooks on when she's in the mood.. And we hauled her two cords of wood up there, ourselves, when we cleared the new garden ground. There's plenty of food right here in the truck, so if she took most of hers with her, that's all right, too. They can stay the night there, all or part of them, and then tomorrow we can get to work fixing up Dad's place for them."

"See what I mean?" murmured Mom Allie. "Brains to burn, that one.."

There was nobody at Grandpa
Harkrider's
, still, and no smoke curled from his stovepipe. As we went by I peered around the house and saw that his '71 Valiant was gone from the shed. Wherever he and his son had gone, I wished them well, though I questioned their judgment in leaving the river for the uncertain pickings elsewhere.

Then I looked down the road again, watching the ditches, now well filled with water, slide by in a splatter of mud. That slush, which had seemed so normal and winterish when we came, was suddenly suspect, now that I knew what had happened. What contaminants were falling all over our land, our river, and our woods right now? Without a Geiger counter there wasn't any way to know, so I shut it out of my mind and tried to exist, for this little time left, without thinking.

Too soon, we arrived at the oak-arched turnoff to Mrs.
Yunt's
drive. The door of her mailbox hung open like a dropped jaw, and already there was a litter of dead leaves and oddments collecting in its empty recess. No more mail! For a long time. Maybe forever. The thought was cold and lonely, and I mentally said good-bye to the few far-scattered friends with whom I corresponded on an infrequent basis.

I wondered, as we bumped gently around to the back door, why we hadn't thought it odd that our own box had remained so stubbornly empty, here in November when bright little catalogs seem to sprout in the box like fungus. The few times Zack or I had thought to check it, we had been unconcerned that even the meager light bill hadn't come. Well, if nothing else, it was the end of bills, junk mail, and government forms. That alone was worth a lot.

Mrs.
Yunt
had carefully locked her house and left a note for us under the clip on the screen door.

"Must go see about Julie," it said. "Know you'll come out in a while and check on me, so I'm asking you to take care of the place until I get back. Key's in the usual spot. " It was dated October 28, which meant that poor Mrs.
Yunt
was probably in Houston when the bombs fell, for her daughter had lived there. She had been the best sort of neighbor, not much on visiting back and forth, but ready to lend a hand when she was needed and not too proud to accept help when she had her own difficulties.

However, we said nothing to our guests, just fished the key out of the well on its all but invisible fishing line and opened the house. We lit the gas heater in the living room to drive off the chill and the damp. Then Mom Allie and Miss Vera supervised the unloading of some of the canned stuff while Zack and I brought in armloads of wood and put it on the porch to dry.

When the wood-fired
cookstove
was well alight, the fire muttering away like a purring cat, the kitchen began to warm up, too. Miss Vera set about making supper for the nine refugees, who had decided to stick together, at least for that night. There was a quilt box full of handmade covers and a closet full of blankets. Three double beds in two big bedrooms were made up, together with the twin couches in the living room. Then Zack, Mom Allie, and I headed out for home, well pleased with our day's work.

The children were at the big window as we drove up. Their faces, pale from their long bout of sickness, brightened when they saw their grandmother, and they met us at the door in a rush of "What took you so long?" and "Is
Gramma
going to stay with us always?"

We avoided distressing details, as we unloaded the necessary part of the truck's cargo and stowed it away in the spare bedroom that we had set aside for Mom Allie, if and when she decided to come to us. The kids, though, picked up distress signals out of the air. Their antennae would put radar to shame. They knew that we were unhappy about something, and I knew they knew. But I had had all I could take for one day. The world would have to end for them tomorrow. I simply could not tell them now, and I knew that Zack and Mom Allie felt the same..

Jim and
Sukie
are fine children. They still didn't feel well, but they had potatoes boiling for supper, the cold chicken from yesterday stripped off the bones and simmering in browned gravy, and a jar of corn ready to be frittered in the black iron skillet. That's another thing we held against the world we'd turned out backs on. It carefully trained its young to be incompetents – or worse. In the four years we had lived on the farm, our now eight-and ten-year-olds had grown into far more effective people than most of their teachers.

That was a strange supper. I kept trying to realize that the world had ended, but for us it hadn't even changed to any marked degree. The things we had brought back from town on our monthly trips had been, literally, unnecessary luxuries. I could find it in my heart to regret only smooth, effortless toilet paper. Even the electricity had been expendable for Zack and I had studied our Mother Earth News for years and had adapted many of their scrounged-part, homemade methods for generating heat and electricity to our own needs. We distilled our own fuel alcohol, built pedal-powered tools. Our systems, as they were, could give us much of what we needed. With a bit of work they could supply far more energy than we were presently in the market for.