Walking in the Rain (Book 4): Dark Sky Thunder (17 page)

Beth needed to go. Kate was wounded in the fight, taking a round in the upper chest that was ugly and bloody but not immediately life threatening. We didn’t know who shot her, but I suspected it was one of us. That was a sad but likely occurrence when the bullets started flying.

Regardless, she needed antibiotics and Beth was adamant about not depleting our own stocks more than necessary. She was a healer, but Beth was also skilled at triage, too. Kate was not staying, and she wasn’t one of us. I didn’t know the reason Kate wasn’t getting to stick around, but Beth made her pronouncement and I didn’t raise a stink. Anyway, no sense wasting valuable, nonrenewable resources on such a person. Hard truth, but still the way of the world these days.

The other woman rescued, actually a teenage girl I knew slightly from school, begged us to let her stay at the ranch even before Uncle Billy stood over her to help her stand. The shooting had barely stopped at this point and I could hear the moans of the wounded over her pleading.

Her name was Maggie Cartwright, and she would have graduated in another week if the lights had not gone out. We weren’t really friends, but she recognized me. Probably not by name, but as the sophomore with the big brain.

“What are you doing here?” she’d asked.

“I live here,” I had responded.

“Well, then I want to stay here too,” she announced, and started laughing and crying at the same time. Delayed stress reaction, Beth later called it. I knew the feeling, though, and I didn’t need a health care professional to give me the explanation. Against the odds, and all reason, she was still alive.

We sat around the expanded dining room table at our house, eating a late breakfast. Beth had whisked Kate away to the Big House to treat her wounds and probably debrief the woman while Maggie seemed to have latched on to me. I expected Amy to fuss, but she just gave me a tolerant smile as Maggie clung to my arm.

Maggie barely stopped eating long enough to talk, but the story she told was as horrifying as it was predictable. When the lights went out, she was at school and thought the whole thing was just another power outage. When nearly all of the cars in the parking lot refused to start, Maggie said she felt a little anxious, but eventually the school administrators got everybody home, one way or another. For Maggie, it was riding home on an overloaded school bus that barely rolled to a stop in front of her house before continuing on down the dirt road.

At home, Maggie tried to make her parents understand the magnitude of what had happened, but her parents and older brother thought she might be exaggerating the threat. Then, when her father tried to start the truck for a trip into town, only then did he begin to recognize just how much damage this power outage might cause.

“Stewart and Mom didn’t get why Dad was so upset at first, but as the days went on and we didn’t hear anything, my mother started getting worried, too.”

She paused, taking a long sip of her glass of milk and gave a satisfied sigh of pleasure.

“We lived in a little house about five miles outside Center, back towards the forestry road, you know? We didn’t have many neighbors close by, just a couple of retirees that lived on their Social Security checks. Dad and Mom would go by each day and look in on the Mitchells, but neither one said how the old folks were doing. That is, until one day when Mom came home crying. I guess it was about two weeks after the lights went out. She said Mrs. Mitchell was dead. Dad and Stewart headed up first and dug a grave and we all went to pay our respects. She was the first. Mrs. Mitchell, I mean. The next week, Dad found Mr. Mitchell. He was dead, too. Dad dug the grave himself and buried Mr. Mitchell next to his wife.”

I nodded as Maggie paused again. She seemed to be searching for how to tell this next part, as if embarrassed by the likely revelation. I decided to help her out.

“If the Mitchells had anything useful in their house, I’m sure they would have welcomed your family to use what they left behind. That’s been the way of it in places I’ve seen, anyway.”

Usually after killing the family in the house, I didn’t mention. No need to add that caveat. I figured things went down just like Maggie described, or she wouldn’t have even mentioned the old couple in the first place.

“Yeah, well, they had a lot of canned food in their pantry still,” she allowed, “and Momma couldn’t see letting the food go to waste. We were just about out at our place, and the garden wasn’t producing enough to keep up.”

They got by on collected rainwater and what they could carry from the stream at the back of their property. They carried water in five-gallon buckets and used a garden cart to do the hauling, she explained. They always boiled their water for drinking and kept a separate supply for the garden. The Cartwrights were losing weight, shedding those extra pounds we all carried before the lights went out, but making it all the same.

Maggie said she hadn’t seen another soul outside her family for nearly three months after the Mitchells died. She admitted with some dark humor how she was going stir-crazy from the isolation at first, but two weeks after the lights went out, her father hiked into town, hoping to find answers and maybe some additional supplies.

He returned that evening empty handed and only gave terse responses to the questioning by their kids. Maggie figured whatever he found was too disturbing to want to share. She decided being lonely was preferred to being dead. I thought she must be pretty smart to have figured that out on her own.

From the beginning of the emergency, they heard gunshots at all hours, day and night, but after a while, her father created a roadblock of sorts about a half mile up the dusty dirt road to further protect the family. He pulled down a couple of old trees, cutting them carefully to make the fall look like a natural break. After that, they managed to sleep a little easier at night.

So they hunkered down and tried to make the food stretch. She was worried about trying to make it through winter with so little, but in the end that didn’t matter.

“They came in the night, breaking down the doors and screaming into the house like animals. They reminded me of rabid pit bulls, eager to tear something apart. My folks, they killed my parents without even saying anything. Just hauled them out of bed and drug them out in the yard. I didn’t see it happen, but I heard the screaming, my momma’s screaming, and the shots. Then the screaming stopped.”

Maggie looked down at her empty plate and didn’t say another word. She made no mention of her brother, or of what happened to her after the gang hit their house. I didn’t want to think about it, and whatever Dad found out from the raiders, he kept to himself.

I was thinking about Maggie when we were driving, and something about her story reminded me of something I meant to ask a while back.

“Hey Lori,” I called out, just loud enough to be heard over the wind and the engine noise.

“Yeah?”

“How come you guys were already out of school? I mean, I just remembered what Maggie said about getting home. We still had another week of school left when the lights went out, but I recall Helena saying she and Scott got their diplomas from high school. And you all were in Arkansas at cheerleading camp. How did that work?”

“Uh, because we got out of school before you guys did,” Lori responded with a curious tone. “And how were you able to go to Chicago if you still had school?”

“I already took my exams before I left, and we were only going to be there for three days. Friday, Saturday and fly back Sunday. I was planning on seeing some of my friends graduate, you know.”

“Like Maggie?”

“Hah!” I replied, but not bitterly. Much. “She seems like a nice enough girl but I didn’t know her or her group of friends. Not more than to just say hi. Remember, I didn’t grow up here. Outsider and all that.”

“Was it really that bad?” Dad asked, breaking into the conversation. Maybe not smoothly, but he was a father. They did things like that.

“No, not really,” I replied, hedging away from being totally honest. I was accustomed to being the new kid, but a small town like Center, and the even smaller community of Ripley, regarded newcomers with more than a touch of standoffish attitude.

“We were in different grades is all,” I continued, “but I had some friends from sports I wanted to see graduate. Some of the guys from the football team and all that.”

Which was true. There was a camaraderie shared by the student athletes that bridged cultural and racial differences. I was still regarded as the new kid for several years, but since I worked to fit in and not make waves, I was gradually accepted.

As I was speaking, I saw a house approaching on the right side and glanced hard at the burned-out shell. Dana used to live there, I remembered, and I wondered idly how her family was doing. Probably not well, I figured. What happened to their youngest daughter tore her parents apart, and they moved away even before the lights went out. I felt an old familiar pain well up inside and I fought to suppress the hurt.

Dana was gone and in the end, there was nothing I could do to protect her, or even avenge her memory. Instead, I repeated my silent vow to help where I could. I thought about my “three bandit” rule and realized I had been trying to help all along without admitting it to myself. Taking on too many was an invitation to assisted suicide, but with surprise and a commitment to killing the bad guys first, I might do a little more good for those left in this shitty world. Something one of my dad’s friends mentioned one time in passing now made much more sense. “Get your retaliation in first.”

Then we were getting closer to town and I saw more destroyed houses and torched outbuildings.
Lord, I can’t believe I didn’t notice this on the way.
This side of Center looked like a war had taken place, and the winners were not immediately evident. At least I saw no unburied bodies left in the streets.

As we came around a curve in the road, I saw the roadblock set up in a choke point, this one much better situated than the one on the other side of town. Further out, for one thing, and bordered by a wall of stacked, wrecked cars on one side and a sturdy barricade of what looked like concrete dividers arranged in a series of overlapping lines and terminating against the side of a large brick building. The old post office, I remembered. The pockmarked face of the structure reminded me of the war zone the world had become. Even here.

Suddenly, I felt sick to my stomach. The whole trip from Chicago, I kept my mind off the horror by telling myself that things would be different back home, and that everything would be all right. Well, nothing was all right and I was still taking lives to stay alive.

“Let me ease up a bit,” my father said, creeping the big truck forward until one of the sentries gave the wave to halt. He stopped and then cast a quick look my way. “And you might want to keep that cannon down below the level of the window, too.”

I had been in favor of bringing the Hummer back, with Scott manning the machine gun, but Dad vetoed that idea. Too much, he said simply. Now I understood. None of the men at the barricade looked familiar to me, but Dad’s truck fit in much better than the military vehicle.

“Oh, good. It’s Tom,” my dad said, and I could see him relax ever so slightly.

“Tom?” I asked, looking again at the hard faces of the men slowly closing in on the truck.

“Yeah, Tom Radalak. He is one of Sheriff Henderson’s lieutenants in the department. Good man. I was hoping he made it.”

“Well, we are going to find out in a few seconds if he is still a good man,” I muttered to myself and checked the magazine in my rifle. I did it carefully, keeping the weapon out of sight.

“Everybody watch your sectors,” I said conversationally, and I could hear Beth and Lori moving around in their seats. “Look for snipers but don’t engage yet.”

“Luke, these are the good guys,” my father objected, but kept his voice down.

“Yeah, supposed to be. And so were the city guards outside Harrison. Or the National Guard troops running the rape tents in Jefferson City,” I replied coolly. I would not be taken off guard again.

“Just let me talk to Tom,” my father insisted, and I didn’t disagree. Maybe he was right. I know the sheriff was a good man, back before the lights went out, and he had treated us right when we came through before. Of course, I was holding one of his dumber deputies hostage, but he didn’t change the way he treated us even after I let the idiot go free.

But that was then and the situation may have changed. Maybe I was turning paranoid and emotionally disturbed, but I was also alive and a lot of other people, trusting and rational, were not.

I had a reason to stay alive now, and I intended to take every precaution I could to get home safe to her.

Center still looked like a ghost town as we rolled slowly down the trash-littered streets, with a few curious citizens acting like haunting spirits as they dared peek out their windows. The old park where I used to play near the center of town was now one of the few locations showing any activity as I saw dozens of men and women toiling away under the morning sun, weeding rows of crops with the dedication only seen in people who were critically dependent on those fragile plants surviving.

We’d picked up another passenger after Dad conferred with the guards at the checkpoint and Tom Radalak. “Rhymes with Cadillac,” he said by way of introduction. He said it in a way that told me he’d done it hundreds, maybe thousands, of times in his life.

“Luke,” was all I said in reply and gave the man a respectful nod. That he’d remained on the job when so many others fled to see to their own either meant he was totally dedicated to the job or he had nowhere else in particular to be. Or a little of both, which I figured was closer to the truth.

He was now riding in the truck bed along with our two hogtied prisoners. He’d been a little hesitant at first, as had the other three guards on duty at the barricade. Dad might have been a known quality before the lights went out, but here we were, four heavily armed civilians arriving in town with a pair of bloodied and bandaged men and a bedraggled looking woman trapped in the rear seat.