Alone: Book 1: Facing Armageddon (9 page)

     In the garage, he opened one of several large cardboard boxes stacked against the wall on the side of the garage they never used.

     The box was full of dry food, and was way too heavy to lug up the stairs. So he filled the laundry basket and lugged it up instead.

     Back in Lindsey’s bedroom, he dropped the food a package at a time into the hole he’d cut in the wall, until he’d completely filled the cavity, from the floor to the bottom of the hole.

     It worked quite well. He’d been able to hide thirty boxes of spaghetti noodles, several bags of dried beans and soup mix, and several bags of trail mix.

     Then he took an old poster of the Backstreet Boys and hung it over the wall to cover the hole.

     He stood back to admire his work. There was no way a looter would discover his stash, unless he hated the Backstreet Boys so much he took a punch at them.

     And Dave imagined that looters would have more important things to worry about.

     They’d planned for every contingency. One scenario they considered was that somehow someone would discover that their house wasn’t vacant after all, and force their way in to loot it.

     It wasn’t a very likely scenario for several reasons.

     First and foremost, it would mean that they’d made a mistake. That they let the smells of their cooking drift into the street. Or one of them walked past a window and was spotted. Or someone heard them talking to each other in the back yard.

     And that wasn’t likely. They planned to be extremely careful.

     Secondly, if looters were in the house, it would mean they’d somehow gotten past Dave, and that wasn’t very likely either. Dave would carry his 9 mm handgun on his side every minute of every day. And at night, he’d have it within easy reach.

     He’d also have one of his AR-15s within a few yards at all times.

     Sarah, also, would be armed. She wasn’t a big fan of guns. But she’d use it to protect her family, and that was good enough for Dave.

     Dave considered it highly unlikely, therefore, that looters would make their way into the house.

     “I know it’s unlikely,” Sarah had said. “But we at least need to consider the possibility, just like we’re considering all the others.”

     So they’d come up with what they considered to be a brilliant plan. They’d hide all of their food in various places around the house. In the walls and attic, mainly. Also inside the oven, behind the
refrigerator and hot water heater, inside the air conditioner vents.

     In the pantry, they would leave a few lonely food items out in the open. A half used box of spaghetti, a few outdated canned goods. A stale box of crackers.

     And if the looters ever made it inside, they would swear up and down that there was no more food to be had. They would tell the looters, “Hey, we do the same thing you do. We go out every couple of days and steal what we can. This is all we have.”

     In theory, it would work, although they fully expected the looters to look around just to set their own minds at ease
.

     Dave had twelve knives hidden discretely around the house as well, in the event such a scenario ever happened.
Behind drawers, under couch cushions, above door jambs.

     When he told Sarah of his plans to do so, she asked why.

     “Well, if they make it in here, that means they’ve somehow managed to disarm us. Which means two things. First of all, we’ll be at their mercy. They can leave us unharmed, or they can kill us before they leave. Second, if they do leave us unharmed, they’ll almost certainly take our weapons with them, and leave us defenseless against future looters.

     “Neither option is
acceptable. So if it ever gets to that point, while they’re searching the house for more food I’ll be trying to get to one of my hidden knives. And I won’t have any problem stabbing those sons of bitches right through the heart.”

     Hiding f
ood in the walls was a slow process. By the time the sun set in the evening, he had worked his way halfway through Lindsey’s room. He’d only made a dent in their food stores, though. It would take him several more days to complete the project.

     But he didn’t mind. He’d convinced himself that his family was still alive. And, that being the cas
e, he fully expected to reunite with them.

     Someday.

     Somehow.

     And having made that resolution, he knew that he wasn’t just going through all this trouble for his own benefit.

     He was doing it for them.

-19-

   
 
Hi, honey.

    It’s been a few days since I’ve written. I hope you haven’t missed me too much.

    Yes, that was a joke. A lame one, sure, but it’s the best I can do under the circumstances.

    It’s been almost two weeks since the blackout. I was putting
hash marks on the calendar so I could keep track of which day it was, but there have been a couple of times when I might have forgotten.

    
I’ve been wearing myself out on purpose so I’d sleep better at night and not have as much time to lay here and miss you guys and feel sorry for myself.  

     The gunshots are happening more and more frequently now. I think that people are getting more and more desperate as they’re running out of food in their pantries. I’d like to think that the homeowners are winning the battle against the looters, but then it occurs to me that even the homeowners will probably turn into looters themselves if they get desperate enough.

     Across the street and two houses to the west, I heard a shootout two nights ago. I looked out the following morning and saw a body laying at the end of the driveway.

     It’s still there. There’s a blood trail leading from the front door. They dragged him from either the front porch or from inside the house.

     I assume it’s the body of a looter, shot by the homeowner.

     At first, I was puzzled and wondered why they didn’t just bury him in their back yard. I mean, it’s not like they
’re gonna bring an ambulance to pick up the body and take it away. It kind of pissed me off, to be honest. I figured it’ll lay out there and decompose and stink up the whole neighborhood.

     But then the more I thought about it, the more I decided it’s a brilliant move. I think our neighbor is sending a message to other looters that he is armed and does not play. And that if other looters don’t stay away, they’ll end up the same way. Talk about a very effective message.

     I’ve been watching a lot of home movies lately. I’m running my generator about an hour and a half a day, always in the daytime. While it’s running, I take a break from working and eat my lunch, and watch the videos on the small TV from the Faraday cage. Today I watched Beth’s first soccer game. I caught myself smiling when she went the wrong way and kicked the ball into her own goal. Then she jumped up and down, all proud of herself because she didn’t realize what she’d done.

     I miss the little angel. I miss all of you.

     You may think this is really bizarre, and it probably is, but a couple of days ago I picked up one of your scarves and held it to my face.

     It still smelled of you, and I closed my eyes and pretended you were there with me. I don’t know what type of perfume it was, but it was very comforting.

    I know, that’s weird, but I don’t think I liked it because I’m crazy or anything. I hope you don’t think so either.

     I think I liked it because, well, it made me feel just a tiny bit closer to you.

     I took the same scarf and tied it around my bed pillow. I know the scent will eventually fade away, but in the meantime I think it’s helping me sleep better. Like maybe my subconscious mind thinks you’re there beside me while I sleep.

     Whatever it is, I’ve been sleeping much better since I started sleeping with your scarf.

     I look forward to the day when I have you next to me for real. I hope and pray that’s not just a pipe dream.

     Kiss the girls for me and tell them I love them.

-20-

     He was finished hiding his provisions now. Most of it was stashed within the walls in the upstairs rooms. The rest was in the attic, hidden beneath the blown in insulation, and at various other hiding places throughout the house.

     Dave was still working to empty the chest freezer in the garage. He hadn’t touched the dry stock yet.

     Running the freezer for only an hour and a half per day was preserving the food, as he’d hoped it would. He figured that before the blackout, the freezer’s condenser probably ran off and on for just a couple of hours a day.

     Now, running off t
he generator, it ran constantly for the entire ninety minutes or so that the generator was running. The food in the freezer was no longer frozen solid as a rock, but it was icy and would last until he ate it all.

     He couldn’t help but chuckle at his strange new diet.

     Sarah had always been a stickler when she prepared their meals. She always made sure that they had a meat, a vegetable and a carbohydrate. Always, without exception.

     The girls had grown up having
three things on their plates. Meatloaf, masked potatoes and stewed spinach. Or pork chops, macaroni and cheese, and sliced carrots.

     Always three things.

     Dave, on the other hand, didn’t care what he ate, as long as he got the two thousand calories he needed each day to preserve his strength.

     And he was determined not to let any of the food go to waste. So one day he might eat an entire
three pound bag of frozen broccoli and cheese, and the next day he might eat half a bag of frozen chicken wings.

     Most of the food packages had their calorie counts right on the package, so all he had to do was a little bit of math. Once he determined what would equal two thousand calories, he cooked it all the same way. In a sauce pan over his small cam
p stove. It didn’t matter what it was… frozen vegetables, fish fillets, onion rings. It all got simmered in the pan, with just a little bit of Wesson oil to keep it from sticking.

     There was nothing sophisticated about Dave Speer. He sucked at cooking or keeping a tidy house. He’d always been that way. Sarah would be aghast at his eating habits now.

     But in his mind, it didn’t matter. With Sarah gone, food was no longer something to enjoy or savor. It was merely something to keep his body functioning.

     No more, no less.

     To stretch his food as far as possible, he’d eat the things that would spoil first. That’s why he was working on the freezer.

     After the frozen food was gone, he’d work on the canned good
s next. His goal was get rid of all the cans before winter came around again. Except the spaghetti sauce, tuna fish and Vienna sausages.

     His logic was sound. They’d experimented a lot with various types of foods in the two years leading up to the blackout.

     Dave always volunteered to be the guinea pig. They would test various canned goods by putting them into the chest freezer for a couple of weeks until they froze solid. Then they’d thaw them out again, and Dave would eat them to see if they were tainted.

     They found that most of the cans expanded at least a little. Those cans with a lot of water, like green beans and sweet corn, expanded a lot.

     In fact, both of those items expanded to the point where the cans broke open in the freezer.

     It didn’t make too much of a mess. The contents of the can were a very thick and icy goo at that point. But it did convince Dave and
Sarah that storing large quantities of canned corn and green beans would be a bad idea.

     Conversely, they found that certain other items froze and thawed extremely well. Among them were jellied cranberry sauce, which everyone in the house loved and which would s
atisfy their desire for sweet foods, condensed soups, Vienna sausages, beef stew and tuna fish.

     The tuna packed in oil, anyway. Tuna packed in water swelled considerably and even Dave was afraid to eat it.

     After they’d determined which canned items could be frozen and thawed and were still safe to eat, they knew where to focus their hoarding efforts.