A Distant Eden (9 page)

After completing that task, he dug around in his gear and came out with a pair of walkie-talkies. He had thrown them in years ago when setting up his departure equipment. The radios were left over from a deer-hunting trip where he and another buddy drove out in separate vehicles, but had wanted to be able to talk as they drove. They worked out well, but he had not used them again.

Matt only needed one bicycle for this, but he doubted that he could have traded for just one, and ultimately the second one might come in handy. He agreed on a signal system with Kristy. He would ride ahead on the bike, scouting the road. She would be coming along behind, driving slowly without lights. Every three minutes he would give a double click on the transmit button, which made a sound that his wife could clearly hear. That was to keep continuity of communication.

If he failed to double click every three minutes it meant something had happened to him, and she was to fall back a mile and wait for him to show up or contact her. If he did neither within an hour, she was to understand that she was on her own at that point.

If he made a triple click, that signaled that he was suspicious. Kristy was to stop and wait where she was. If he saw a roadblock, he would triple click once and then triple click a second time. In that case she was to quietly fall back two miles and wait.

Matt understood that with Kristy driving slowly in the dark the family was vulnerable. Because of that, he told her that if she was attacked or menaced, to call him on the radio. He planned to be no more than a half mile away from her, and he was heavily armed. As was she, as were the boys. Matt wasn’t too worried about them, they were armed and knew how to shoot. Kristy had the judgment to know when to shoot too. But he wanted a plan for every contingency.

He did not intend to speak into the radio at all. The sound of a voice can carry a long way. The clicks would do the job, save the strain of trying to whisper and understand words in what might be a high-tension scenario. Much better to have a fall back and reconnect plan in place. It was simple and would not be misunderstood under stress; not the way whispered instructions might be.

One challenge was keeping the right distance between them in the dark. In order to do so he had Kristy follow him for a couple of miles as he rode at the pace he thought he would be maintaining. She noted how fast that was, got a good feel for it, and then fell back, counting down the amount of time it would take him to go half a mile. Then she started driving again at the pace he would be riding. It was monotonous and terrifying at the same time. She watched the dash clock between clicks, biting her lip. Each time she heard the clicks she would feel a rush of relief, which turned quickly into fast-building anxiety before his next set of clicks. Over and over and over, for what seemed like eternity this went on.

And then, as he was supposed to be making his three-minute transmission—he didn’t.

Adrian and his men walked through the frightened beggars that had piled up by the gate. As the beggars watched, Adrian and his team melted into the nearby trees and disappeared. As the beggars turned back towards the compound the next group of ex-soldiers were already coming out.

Adrian led his group across country, following a course he set by compass. He also carried a set of maps he had liberated from the briefing room. They weren’t as large scale as he would have liked, but they were good enough to indicate terrain that might present problems. With that, they could detour around cliffs and swamps and lakes or small towns. They walked steadily and silently for six hours before stopping. They were used to this, and so far this had been just a nice Sunday stroll for them.

Every ground-pounder learned early in his military career that taking care of his feet was of paramount importance. They learned this one of four ways. One: lectures in basic training. Two: first-hand from some fool who had ruined their feet—or three, being that fool. Then there was the fourth way. Sometimes they were put into a situation where there was no help for it and their feet got brutalized. Taking care of their feet was like breathing: it had become automatic.

While they were stopped, they took their boots off and wiped their feet down with clean damp washcloths that they kept in zip-loc bags. They pulled their boots wide open and exposed them to sunlight. They hung their socks on nearby shrubs to air out, also in the sunlight. They knew that the UV rays in sunlight will clean clothing to a certain extent—not as well as washing in water, but pretty well. By hanging clothing in direct sunlight and leaving it there for several hours, then vigorously shaking the clothing out, one could dry clean the clothing to a remarkable extent. It wasn’t much for spot removal though. They sat around bare footed while they heated up lunch.

In unfriendly country, or “Indian Country” as it was commonly called, they would have put on fresh socks and put their boots right back on. They would do this two at a time so that not all of them would be hampered if things went south on them. At this point, they didn’t feel like they were in Indian Country so they let their feet air out along with their socks and boots. When they finished eating, they dug a hole and buried the MRE packages. They put on fresh socks and their aired out boots and hung the socks they had taken off on top of their backpacks. They clipped their socks to the flap edge with stationary binder clips so that the socks would continue to air out. The binder clips were handy things to have, and could be scrounged from the company clerk’s office.

They set off walking again. They would walk from until almost dark. They were in no particular hurry, but they weren’t interested in hanging around either.

Just before dark, Adrian picked out a place to spend the night. It was uphill of nearby running water. An area of trees without much undergrowth. According to the map they were two miles from the nearest paved road and half a mile or so from the nearest dirt road. There were no houses nearby, so it would be a quiet night. It was cool, but clear, and with no rain due; Texas was in drought and rain had become a scarce thing. This would be a simple camp. Since they weren’t in Indian Country, they would have a small fire. There was no need to set up tents, either; they would shape their beds in the soil by scooping out depressions for hips and shoulders and piling up dirt for a headrest, before laying down a self-inflating pad—a non-standard piece of military equipment Adrian and his men had purchased over the years. This they covered with a poncho that they would lay on and pull over themselves. For added insulation on a colder night they could pile leaves up next to their “beds” and then pull the leaves up over them, covering their ponchos.

Rest was as important as food or ammunition. A rested soldier was more dangerous than an exhausted soldier. Soldiers take sleep seriously; their enemies do whatever they can to interrupt that sleep.

They sat around the fire for a while and talked quietly. Adrian was telling them about his uncle and the setup he had. “Roman...he’s different. For one thing, he doesn’t care what people think of him; he just does whatever he wants to do. He has been obsessed with the end of the world since he was a little kid. Not in a bad way, mind you. He always said that the odds were high that something bad would happen that could destroy civilization, and in some cases mankind itself. He can sit there and reel off what seems like a dozen doomsday scenarios and make them sound so plausible that it scares the hell out of anyone listening.

“One time he was talking about the chances of a giant asteroid slamming into earth at thirty thousand miles an hour. Just the dust in the air would block out the sun for years and cause a major ice age. Someone challenged him on that, saying that, ‘it was really unlikely it would ever happen, wasn’t it?’ And Uncle Roman just looked at him and said, ‘Look up at that moon. What do you see? You’ve been looking at that moon your whole life and yet you can ask that question? That moon is covered with craters on top of craters from the impacts of asteroids and meteors. Look at the size of some of those craters. Look how many craters there are. What do you think now?’

“Man, you could have heard a pin drop. We all sat there staring at the craters on the moon and visualizing a huge mountain screaming at the earth ten times faster than any jet could fly. I don’t think any of us slept that night. He didn’t mean to scare us, but he sure didn’t mean to coddle us either. Because of his fascination with doomsday, he was fascinated with survival of a doomsday event. It was his hobby. He would get interested in one aspect of surviving and then he would study it until he had it in his hands, knew it inside out. He would buy weird tools, lots of them antiques, and stash them in a tool shed—‘might come in handy,’ he would say.

“I’ll give you an example. He got interested in long term survival and studied lots of things that you would have to be able to do and to know. One of those things was trade goods. He said that, ‘Once things settle down, folks are going to need to trade. Trading will be a big deal. Having valuable trade goods will be important. Being able to trade for things you don’t have, that will be a necessity. There are obvious trade goods, such as bullets, that a person should stock up on. There are some things not so obvious though, like a bottle of good whisky. A bottle of whisky will probably fetch just about any price a person cares to ask, because the liquor stores will have been cleaned out way early.’

“So, what does Uncle Roman do? He builds himself a still and learns to make whisky—by actually making whisky. He got to where he was making some of the best tasting, smoothest sliding, mule kickingest whisky you ever drank. He was making whisky that was a hundred times better than the best whisky you could buy. It took a lot of man-hours to make that whisky; it wasn’t something you just did like cooking dinner. It took work, and lots of it, but damn that was the best whisky you ever drank in your entire life. Once he got it down to an art, he put the still away and when I asked him about it he said that was for ‘Someday. My whisky is so good that I am scared of it. A man with an unlimited supply of that could get bad hooked.’”

Adrian said, “Tomorrow we’re going to come up on Waco. We can go around it, or through it. I want to go through it—I figure to do some shopping for some things that uncle Roman might find handy.”

With that, they rolled into their ponchos and were asleep within moments. Except for the two on guard duty. Even in friendly country, you set guards.

Three hours after daylight, they came to the south outskirts of Waco. They stopped for a few minutes. Adrian said, “We can go in now or wait until dark. Each has its own positives and negatives, all of which you guys already know. What I am looking for are medical supplies, specialized doctor tools and antibiotics. I expect all the drugs that can be used for pain are gone, as the local druggies will have looted every hospital and drugstore in town by now. Just over that hill is Interstate 35, and just across the interstate there’s a large hospital. I’m guessing that there might still be some medical staff there that have holed up. I want to trade MREs to them for stuff that can be useful to Roman and the people that stay with him.

“These MREs are mighty valuable. We don’t need them because we can live off the land. Plus, we are only a couple of days’ easy walk from Roman now. We can walk that without eating if we need to. Either way, we should be able to get want we want and still have enough left over for the rest of the walk.”

The entire medical campus, a big new modern hospital, appeared to be deserted. They walked into the emergency room doors to find the place a shambles. Windows broken, chairs broken and flung around, dry blood on the floor. As they worked their way deeper into the hospital, they saw the same things over and over again. The hospital had been raided—people had been killed. There were no bodies; someone had removed them. That fact alone told Adrian that someone was living in the hospital. Perhaps several someones.

Adrian thought about it. Where would he hole up in this building if he were going to stay here? He thought that whoever it was must have some food and water or they wouldn’t stay. That meant that they had to stay completely out of sight, as new gangs would hit the hospital on a regular basis. Adrian would want to be up high were he could see trouble coming, and he would have several places to hide. They took the stairs to the roof, and as expected, found the lookout up there. The lookout hadn’t thought anyone would come up on the roof, so she had stayed and was trapped. It took Adrian a couple of minutes to convince her that he meant her no harm and in fact could offer food in trade for supplies. Items that the hospital must have an endless supply of, as not too many raiders would be looking for surgical tools and kits.

The lookout’s name was Alice. She looked as if she had been through hell. She was clean, but thin and bruised. Adrian thought she might be attractive under better circumstances.

Alice said, “We’ve been raided on a nearly daily basis. Twice we’ve been almost caught. There are eight of us women here. None of us have families, so we came to work during the crisis. A lot of the staff had come in, but it soon became apparent that the crisis wasn’t going to end; it was just going to keep getting worse. Within a couple of days, the raiding was really bad—twenty of us were killed.”

Alice took them to the room where the other seven were hiding. Adrian and his men had wanted to trade the food, but seeing the women were obviously starving, they set them up with a hot meal immediately, which the women wolfed down without embarrassment. Adrian then got down to business. He said, “Ladies, we came here to trade food for medical stuff. We want items that we can carry that will be useful for a survival community to have; tools and antibiotics and painkillers. I can guess that there aren’t any painkillers left here, but maybe there will be some antibiotics, and surely there must be a ton of tools here. Here’s the deal—we will give you all the food we have if you will help us select the most useful things we can carry. Deal?”