I’d given myself an arbitrary deadline of next Monday to leave for Ohio and search for Sarah and Taylor. That meant I had a lot of work to cram into the next few days. I needed food, clothes, and gear for at least two weeks, based on what I saw on my way up from Jasper. I assumed that some communities would be recovering, but I had no idea what that was going to look like. And given the almost-ambush I’d run into in Virginia, I wasn’t holding my breath that everyone I encountered was going to be friendly.
But I also wanted to help everyone get the farm sorted out. We needed to get the station wagon and truck running again, which I hoped would be as relatively simple as replacing the spark plug wires and refilling the oil. Plus, we needed to get any crops we were going to grow planted, and that meant finding some way to till the soil. A number of nearby farms certainly had the equipment, but we’d have to find it, make sure that we could take it, and then actually transport it.
I’d also come up with the idea of documenting as much as possible about the people who’d survived, along with the ones who hadn’t. I wanted Renee and Paige and all of the girls from the church to record as much as they could about their families so that they’d have something to look back on in ten or twenty years, if we survived that long. Karen and I had talked about the whole long-term survival thing last night, and while we agreed it would be horribly difficult to predict anything, she was fairly hopeful about society surviving. “I think the first five or so years are going to be the most difficult. If we can get past that, I think we’ll make it longer,” she’d said. I decided I’d hold on to that hope as long as I could.
I’d spent part of yesterday fiddling with the radio gear and getting the base station set up. Doug had taken the antenna book home last night, and came over this morning to announce that he’d have a seventy-five foot tower up by the end of the week. That would probably give us enough range to talk to anyone we’d reasonably want or need to talk to.
This morning, Karen and I were driving around checking on the neighbors who hadn’t answered Jason and Laura’s phone calls in the first few days. I took a notebook along, making notes about who lived at each of the fifteen farms we checked. For each farm, I also noted what farm equipment or animals they had.
The second farm we checked, the former home of the Alan Miller family, had a small chicken coop that Karen thought we could fit in one of Doug’s trailers. “They’ve only got three or four hens. With a dozen people living there now, we’re going to need more eggs.” The Millers were a family of four. Their daughters looked to be around ten or eleven.
As we left the house, I told Karen what I’d seen in Leesville, where they were already checking and marking houses just a few days after the dying-off. “Think we could print something like that off and put them up?”
“That’s not a bad idea. I’m sure Jason or Laura could do it.”
“Why can’t you?”
“Because I don’t have a computer or printer in the house. Ben wouldn’t allow it.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Why? I mean, I gathered that he was kind of a Luddite, but you guys had a TV and a couple of game consoles.”
She shrugged. “I think it was a part of how he controlled me. And he wasn’t so much a Luddite as he was a prepper. He was convinced something like this was going to happen and figured we wouldn’t be able to rely on technology, so why rely on it now? He had a way of explaining it that made perfect sense, really.”
“But you said the other day that he sold stuff online.”
“He did, sort-of. He has a simple web page up, really just a placeholder that talks about what he can do. People would email him what they wanted, then he’d make it and go to the post office to ship it out. No receipts or anything. He ran everything from his phone.”
The next farm belonged to the Daniel Herndon family. Mom and dad and five kids. The oldest, Jennifer, was seventeen, according to her driver’s license. None of the others were old enough to have an ID or license. They had four horses that Karen was interested in. We took time to set out two bales of hay to tide them over until someone could come back for them.
A mile later, we stopped in at the Eller home, a small farmhouse on what looked to be an acre or so of land. Katherine answered the door and welcomed us in. She was a lovely older lady, maybe in her seventies, moving slowly, but still clearly independent. She said she hadn’t heard from her home health nurse in several days, and no one was answering the phone at the office, either, and could we help her with a few things around the house?
I mentally shut down right there. Just switched over to autopilot and did whatever she or Karen asked me to do. How many more people like Katherine were there in the county, or state? Nationwide? Worldwide? I thought about Paige’s sister and almost lost it.
We left the house thirty minutes later, and I couldn’t tell you a thing we did. I didn’t really come out of my funk until I realized Karen had stopped at an intersection and was watching me. “You okay?”
I shrugged. “Maybe. Don’t know. You?”
She sat back in her seat and sighed. “I don’t know either,” she finally said. “I told myself before we left it was going to be rough. That one little girl at the second place really messed me up.” The youngest daughter at the Miller home was on the floor in her parents’ bedroom, just a few feet from their bed.
I nodded. “All I could think of was Paige’s sister. How many people like her and Katherine Eller are out there? We can’t save them all, either. Do we try to save some? How do we choose?”
Neither one of us spoke for a long time, or even looked at each other. Finally, Karen pulled out, turned right, and headed for the next farm. Apparently, we’d chosen not to decide.
We got back to the farm around one. Neither of us really felt like eating, but Laura pushed us to split a sandwich. We’d checked four other farms and two houses without finding any other survivors. On the other hand, we had quite a list of equipment and supplies we’d be able to make use of.
Doug and Jason had spent much of the morning showing the girls what farm life was all about. They’d all taken advantage of morning milk time to take a turn at milking one of the dairy cows the Sands kept. In the afternoon, Jada, the oldest girl and the one who’d rescued Hannah, went out with Doug to check the fence line and repair a couple of breaks. Jason took the other girls to the south end of the property to start clearing some trees so they’d have more pasture.
Hannah and Ciera spent the day working on the station wagon and the truck. While Karen and I had been checking on the neighbors, they’d found an auto parts store in town that had the right wires they needed, along with plenty of motor oil. By dinnertime, both vehicles were up and running.
We all met over at the Sands’ house for dinner. I told Laura I felt bad that she’d been cooking for all of us since we’d arrived. She smiled. “Don’t you worry about it. It feels good to be able to do something like this. I’ve never been much help out there on the farm, but I do know how to cook. And you’re welcome to help out sometime, or have us over to your place.”
After dinner, the kids worked on cleaning up while the adults discussed the day behind and the days ahead. We knew we needed to get some crops planted, and soon. We were near the end of April, which was pretty late for some things. Laura said she’d be able to can almost anything we grew, assuming she had the supplies. Their house had a gas stove, so we’d be able to work even if the power went out, at least for a while. I wondered if we’d be able to put a wood-burning stove in the house if we had to. After a lot of discussion, the plan seemed to be that we’d section off some of Karen’s land for crops, and leave about half of it for the horses she wanted to find. Doug and Jason would work on expanding their land in two areas, and bring in some of the cattle we’d seen at neighboring farms. Once we got that planned out, Doug asked me about Ohio.
“I’m thinking about heading out Monday. Figuring on ten days to two weeks at this point, just to be safe. There’s a direct enough route to Ohio from here, but who knows how bad the interstates are? And there’s not really a pretty way to get from Wheeling to Portsmouth, so that could take a while, too.”
Jason studied his coffee cup for a minute before speaking. “Son, are you sure you need to make this trip? I understand why you want to, but do you need to? I’m just kind of playing devil’s advocate here. That’s a long time to be gone, especially alone.”
Before I could answer, Karen responded. “I’m going with him.”
We all turned to look at her. I didn’t know what to say. We hadn’t discussed this at all. Then again, we hadn’t discussed any of the stuff we needed to yet.
Doug looked at her. “Same question for you. Why do you need to go? I mean, Adam I can understand. He’s going after his wife and daughter. Well, ex-wife. But you get my point. Why you? Don’t we need you here?”
Karen leaned forward. “He shouldn’t make the trip alone. They may be hurt, and if so, he’ll need someone to help him take care of them. And remember what happened to him in Virginia?”
That was the ambush I dodged at the big crash on I-81. It hadn’t been a huge shootout. Heck, I didn’t even return fire. Would a second person have made a difference? Maybe.
“And as for why me? I can shoot, I can drive, I can help him with first aid, cooking, or almost anything else he needs. Most of the girls are too young. Ciera and Hannah are still healing from being apart when this happened and don’t need to be separated right now. Plus they can learn from you guys while we’re gone. I’m not exactly disposable, but out of everyone here, it makes the most sense for me to go.”
I let her reasoning rattle around in my head for a moment, then shrugged and nodded. “She’s got some good points. This isn’t the kind of trip for me to take one of the younger girls along to teach them everything. I could take Ciera, because she’s probably the best all-around person for a trip like this, but she should stay here with you guys just for that reason.” We talked the idea over for another fifteen minutes. Doug was worried about a quarter of the adults in the group being gone for two weeks, and it was a completely valid concern. Karen was worried about me being gone alone for two weeks, and that was a valid concern, too, even though I’d safely made a weeklong trip by myself. Could Minion and I make the trip by ourselves? Sure. I thought Karen was questioning if we should go by ourselves though, especially if we had someone to spare.
We decided in the end that Karen would go with me, leaving me wondering what it was going to be like spending two weeks alone with my ex-wife. We’d never really addressed our divorce, but it had become obvious over the last week that she was a completely different woman than she’d been twenty-plus years ago. She probably wasn’t the same woman she’d been when she and Ben got married, for that matter. But we hadn’t really talked about any of that since she arrived in Doylestown, and we’d been busy enough since we got back to the farm that we’d never been alone long enough to have any real discussion.
That didn’t change much over the next few days. Thursday morning, a bunch of us worked on clearing a spot for the new chicken coop. Then in the afternoon, we went back to the Herndon farm to pick up the horses we’d seen there, and it was quite a production. Ben and Karen’s trailer had a flat tire which took us an hour to fix because the lugnuts were rusted onto the studs. We also figured out that someone – probably Ben – had taken the hitch ball from their truck hitch. Doug and Jason didn’t have the right size, so while they were working on the tire, Karen and I drove into town to an AutoZone for a hitch ball. We ended up actually paying for something for once because they had an employee in the store.
When we finally got to the farm, the horses wanted nothing to do with us or the trailer, which made sense to Karen. “Their humans aren’t around, and this is a strange trailer, and they don’t know us. I’m surprised they’re not fighting us more than they are.” As it was, the male, a big Arabian, led us on a twenty-minute trot around the pasture. The fourth horse walked right up to the trailer when we came back for her, apparently figuring out we weren’t going to leave them alone until we had them all loaded up. We didn’t get her home until just after dark.
The chicken coop was easier than the horses, the biggest hassle being driving a tractor over to lift the thing, because the tractor topped out at just over fifteen miles an hour. But it wasn’t like we had a lot of traffic to worry about. Karen stayed home to work on getting the horses settled in a little better, so we didn’t have any time to talk then, either.
I suspected she was trying to stall the conversations as long as possible, which didn’t exactly thrill me. But I couldn’t tell if she was stalling to completely avoid the topic, the way she’d done through a large part of our marriage, or if she was trying to wait until we were alone to deal with it. I hoped it was the latter, but her track record suggested it was the former. Then again, Hannah told me Friday night that Karen had made some time to talk to her and Ciera. Karen had apologized for the way she’d treated her, she’d said, and the three of them were on even better terms than they’d been after our initial reunion a few days ago.
Saturday, Doug took Paige and Ciera to pick up the parts he’d need to get the radio antenna put up. He seemed to think it’d be pretty simple, but I had my doubts, given that he was talking about a seventy-foot-tall tower. I couldn’t see how to do it without a big lift truck or a helicopter, but Karen told me not to worry about it.
In the morning, she and I visited Katherine Eller to see how she was doing. She was fine for now, but wondering why she hadn’t heard from anyone in her family who usually called, and why her home health service hadn’t sent anyone over. It seemed like she’d been watching some of the news, but didn’t really have a grasp of the scale of what had happened, or make the connection between the news stories and her personal life. I was in better shape than I’d been after the last time we visited, but I was still worried about her.
“Me, too,” Karen offered after a minute. “Maybe we can talk to Jason and Doug and see what ideas they have.”
“Maybe. But we’re running tight on space as it is. We’ve got ten people in your house, and that’s bulging at the seams. I doubt they’ve got much room to spare either.” Doug and Vickie lived with Jason and Laura even before the event, and Vickie was three months pregnant. It was a big old farmhouse, but it was still just a three-bedroom place.
“Yeah, but that big storeroom in the barn was designed to be a bunkroom. We might be able to move Ciera and Hannah out there. It’d give them some privacy, at least.”
She’d definitely gone through some major changes if she was thinking about giving the girls their own room. The woman she’d been when Hannah had come out wouldn’t even have wanted them in the house together.
We headed on into town, carrying a list of things we wanted to pick up both for the farm and our trip. I still had quite a bit of the freeze-dried stuff I’d grabbed from Jasper, but it wouldn’t be enough for the two of us for two weeks. We wanted to pick up some more ammunition for the guns, especially .22, so we could start teaching the older girls to shoot, along with holsters for the Glocks we’d liberated from the dead Bucks County deputies. Karen needed some more clothes, despite what we’d picked up in Doylestown. That had been mostly necessities to get her feeling human again. Once we’d made it to the farm though, she realized that most of her clothing had ended up in the wagons with Ben.
It took us about an hour to wend our way through Walmart. We skipped most of the frozen or refrigerated foods. It’d been two-and-a-half weeks since everybody died, and I didn’t trust much of anything perishable. We didn’t see a single person or body the whole time, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
“It’s not all that surprising if the survival rate is as low as we think it is. This place isn’t all that busy on a normal day,” Karen said. She was sorting through jeans when I made my observation.
“Okay, I’ll grant you that. But where’s the crew? Did they all survive and leave? Nobody died in the store at all?”
She stopped in mid-motion, a pair of jeans in each hand. “Yeah, now that you mention it, that’s a little weird.” She dropped the clothing back in the pile and looked around the store, turning a slow circle. “There should be, what? At least a couple of dozen people working here in the middle of the night, and at least that many shopping?”
I nodded. “And not a single body, or any indication that anyone died in here. Even if someone had picked up the bodies, I would have expected. . . evidence. Fluids or something. It doesn’t even really smell in here. At least not what you’d expect.” Outside still had a strong smell of death, like what you’d get if you drove by some fresh roadkill with the windows down, but it wasn’t as overpowering as it had been a week ago.
“Yeah. But it’s been two weeks. Maybe someone cleaned up already.” She didn’t sound very confident about her suggestion.
“Maybe. But where did they take them? There’s no pile out front. We’ve barely seen half a dozen cars and trucks moving, and none of them looked like government vehicles picking up bodies.”
She tossed both pairs of pants in the buggy and moved over to some t-shirts. She barely glanced at them before heading into the main aisle. “Let’s get over to sporting goods and see what they’ve got. You managed to get me nice and spooked.”
I smiled, making sure I was standing behind her when I did.
Sporting Goods and Lawn & Garden had a few things we could use, but it didn’t take us long to get through the area. We didn’t even bother with the checkout lane, so the security alarm went off when we left. We both jumped, even though I was expecting it.
A couple of hours later, we’d been to the gun shops in town with moderate success. One was open and staffed, so we actually paid for our purchases, since I still had some room on my credit card. I was surprised that they accepted it though. I wasn’t betting on them getting their money any time soon, but then again, a lot of that stuff was automated, so who knew? They didn’t have as much ammo as I would have liked, but we got holsters for the Glocks along with some spare magazines. I felt a little paranoid getting so much self-defense hardware, but I deflected that by calling up memories of a highway in Virginia and a church in Philadelphia. Not everyone who survived was the good guys.
Copyright © 2019 Bob Mueller
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