Shortage (Best Laid Plans Book 2) (29 page)

They were alive. If an idiot like him had managed to muddle through the winter with his family those two would be just fine. They had to be.

He was perfectly certain of that, but it didn't stop him from picking up the pace.

A recent snowfall had been hard enough to drift a layer of snow under the dense trees growing up the steep slope, covering the treacherous deadfall underfoot, and although he didn't see any sign of a trail Matt thought the snow was a bit deeper to either side of the route he'd taken. The familiar one he'd hiked up with his friends a few times on fishing trips when they were much younger.

Was it possible there was a trail buried under this snow, that his friends had used to get down to the river for fishing or to draw water? If so they hadn't used it recently.

It took longer than he'd expected to reach the bottom of the cliffs and the treacherous gap that would allow him to climb up to the landing above with a bit of work. On the broken rocks there he finally saw what he'd been hoping for, the scuff of a boot print in the dirt that had gathered in one of the cracks. It was concealed from wind and snow by a slight overhang, but even so it couldn't have been there for more than a few weeks.

Grinning in relief, he pulled himself the rest of the way up to the top of the cliffs, pausing for a moment to peer down at the road below, where Jane and Tom still waited. The trees down below partially obscured his view of them, and considering that he waved and they didn't wave back it must have obscured their view of him as well.

“State your business.”

Matt was so surprised he almost fell off the cliff as he whirled and fumbled at the .40 on his belt. Then he recognized the voice and relaxed. “Seriously, guys? You almost gave me a heart attack.”

Trev popped up from behind a snowbank to his left, grinning like an idiot, while off to the right Lewis stepped from behind a bush. The older cousin started forward calmly to meet him, while Trev bounded through the snow to pull him into a crushing hug.

Matt was surprised at how healthy the two looked. Their faces were leaner than he remembered, sure, but not in a way that suggested hunger. And while Trev's winter clothes made guessing his weight impossible Matt could tell by the strength of his arms that he had muscle under there. They were both clean-shaven, Lewis with a few small nicks on his cheeks, and their hair had been carefully trimmed and combed. And speaking as someone who'd lived with seven other people in close quarters Matt also had to admit they didn't smell that bad either, all things considered.

What did you know, living up in the mountains in the dead of winter and the two were doing just fine.

He had a feeling his grin was probably as goofy as his friend's as he stepped away from Trev to grip Lewis's offered hand. That grip was also nearly crushing, suggesting strength hidden beneath those bulky clothes. “The Spirits of Huntington River,” he said, looking between the two.

Trev frowned. “What?”

Matt motioned down at his traveling companions below. “We had a group of refugees come in around Thanksgiving, and the two people with me are actually part of that group. One of the reasons they came along is because they wanted to thank you. They told us they'd been saved from bandits in this area by some mysterious figure, and since it happened on Halloween that's what they started calling him.” Matt paused. “Or in this case them. That
was
you, right?”

Lewis snorted, glancing over at Trev. “So we're dead and haunting this place, eh? Guess the townspeople prefer it that way.”

“Don't be an idiot,” Matt said, feeling a bit guilty even though he hadn't helped Anderson's group empty out the shelter. “Listen, Ferris and his FETF goons ditched us a week or so before Thanksgiving, during the Indian summer before cold really set in. They packed up the rest of the town's food supplies in bicycle trailers and pedaled off for good, leaving us to manage things on our own again. And good riddance.”

“I'll agree to that,” Lewis said. “Hopefully the town learned its lesson there.”

“Definitely.” Matt brightened, eager to change the subject, and even more eager about what he was changing it to. “And something big happened personally for me this winter.” He held up his hand to show the wedding band on his ring finger, one of his dad's old ones given as a wedding present.

The two men stared at it in shock. “No way,” Trev said, finally finding his voice at the same time he found his grin. “Sam?” Matt nodded, grinning back, and his friend pulled him into another crushing hug. “Congratulations!”

“Congratulations!” Lewis echoed, slapping him on the back almost hard enough to knock Matt and Trev over.

Trev backed away so he could also clap Matt on the back. “Tell us about it.”

Matt was only too happy to, describing his proposal and the wedding. The entire time Trev kept grinning like an idiot, and even Lewis was smiling broadly. Once he finished Trev shook his head.

“I'll have to think of a wedding present for you.”

“Are you kidding? Your cache was the present of a lifetime.” Matt hastily turned to Lewis. “And the shelter! We'll never be able to thank you enough.”

The mention of those things seemed to remind the cousins about the events last fall, and some of their good humor faded. “What about Mandy?” Trev asked quietly.

In spite of the happy reunion Matt scowled at the memory of the poisonous woman. “We caught her trying to steal food from my parents' pantry the night Ferris left, after Razor attacked the town. Caught her red-handed, but she-”

“Whoa whoa, wait,” Lewis interrupted. “Razor
attacked the town
?”

Matt nodded and quickly went over the events of that day last fall, months in the past now but still vividly etched in his memory. He finished off by finally getting around to answering Trev's question about Mandy. “So anyway when we caught her she tried to lie to us, not that any of us believed her. She was one of the first criminals Catherine exiled, and once she was gone it was a lot easier to stamp down the false claims she'd made about you. People figured that if she'd lie and steal she wasn't too trustworthy about other things either.”

Trev smiled, but Matt thought he still looked a touch bitter. “That's great. All it took to trust the person who grew up next door over a complete stranger was finding out that stranger was a liar.”

A somewhat uncomfortable silence fell. “Catherine was on your side the whole time, and so were a lot of other people. And I'm sure those that weren't feel bad about it now.” Matt squared his shoulders. “Anyway conditions in the town were much better with Ferris and Razor both gone. I forgot to mention that Catherine also invited the refugees to come live in the town that day. Since we had no food there wasn't any reason to keep them out anymore, and anyway the Mayor figured if she made the refugees citizens of Aspen Hill that would stop the growing hatred between them and us “townies”. And it did, for the most part. We put aside our differences and turned our focus to surviving the winter.”

“How bad was it?” Lewis asked. From his tone he wasn't expecting good news.

Matt shook his head grimly. “Bad. With Ferris confiscating and “redistributing” what little food we had among the refugees, no one had enough. Our estimate is that over a third, closer to half, of Aspen Hill's population, refugees included, died during the winter. Of starvation, cold, or illness. And to survive even as well as we did we had to slaughter almost all our livestock, including horses, as well as most of the pets.”

Lewis sucked in a breath. “That's a lot of vital future usefulness wasted. Historically one of the most common signs of prosperity was the size of a community's herd.”

Matt nodded. “The horses are the real tragedy. Not just because they're majestic, faithful, hardworking creatures but because now in a world without fuel we're back to horsepower, and we had to eat ours just to live. But either way we're limping along, barely surviving, and we need all the help we can get.”

The cousins exchanged a look and Trev cleared his throat. “So we see. No offense, Matt, but you look like you're almost too weak to stand. We've got some boiled wheat and strips of rabbit for you and your friends down below.”

“They didn't come all this way for a meal,” Lewis stated, looking a bit annoyed. “What help did you think we could give, Matt?”

Matt sighed. He'd sort of been hoping to stretch the reunion out a bit longer. “Well it's like this. I know you, Lewis, and you've got caches on top of caches on top of caches. You had a lot of food in your underground shelter in Aspen Hill, and when you found out about FETF you dragged some of it away to put in a new hiding place so it wouldn't all be stolen.”

Lewis stiffened and turned to glare at Trev. “You told him?”

“I swear I didn't!” Trev replied, waving his hands frantically.

“He didn't,” Matt hurriedly cut in before Lewis could really start to rage. “I just saw Trev looking all dirty and sweaty and even more exhausted than when I'd left him, earlier that day when we got back from our trip to get April's family. And then even though you guys had just lost everything he gave my family all the food from the cache up by his car. I figured you guys had started caching stuff the moment you heard about FETF and managed to squirrel a lot of your supplies away before Ferris got to you.”

“Good to know our friends are thinking that much about our private business,” Lewis grumbled.

Matt did his best to squash his annoyance, as well as the guilt that came along with it. “We spent this winter starving . . . food was the number one thing on our minds.” He waved at their waistlines, even though they were all bundled up. “On the other hand you seem to have weathered the winter well by the looks of it, meaning you managed to haul some supplies up here. But we were sort of wondering if you didn't manage to cache more food than you two could carry up into the mountains, so maybe there's a stash still down there that could save lives.”

“We could be planning to go down and get it ourselves,” Lewis said flatly. “Our food. Our lives.” He paused. “Assuming we had any extra.”

“You do though, right?” Matt demanded. “We've got children down there, women, men who can't lift a shovel to plant a field or a gun to defend the town. Whatever you have could mean the difference between life and death for dozens, maybe hundreds of people.”

Lewis waved at the mountains around them. “See where we are? It's a bit hard to be sympathetic when almost everything we owned was stolen from us, to the point where we decided we'd rather spend the winter freezing in ten foot drifts than stay in Aspen Hill.”

Matt sighed. He hadn't expected this to be easy, and he'd had a feeling the cousins would feel this way. “We know you guys got the short end of the stick, but you can't really blame the town for that. Ferris is the one who took all your stuff.”

“You went along with it,” Lewis shot back.

Matt took personal offense to that, until he realized his friend meant the town in general. Still . . . “He took our weapons!”

“You went along with that, too. Actually most of you willingly gave them up for some food and the threat of being put on a naughty boy list. Besides, Ferris didn't loot our shelter all by himself.

“Nobody in my family helped with that,” Matt protested, although it irked him that he was being put on trial. He supposed he should've expected it while representing the town. “Plenty of other families didn't help either, like the Watsons and Tillmans and a dozen others I could name. Besides, Anderson's the one who organized that and he's not in charge anymore.”

Trev shook his head, looking more tired than anything. “We were watching the people with Anderson empty the place out, you know. They weren't really too quiet about celebrating as they robbed their neighbors blind.”

Matt fidgeted helplessly. “Come on, that's not quite fair. Nobody felt good about what happened to you. But at the same time it
was
a lot of food, and if Ferris was confiscating it anyway that meant the town was in that much better a position to survive the winter. You can't really blame them for being happy about that.”

“Why not?” Lewis demanded. “They got enough to feed the town and all the refugees for what, a single day? And how many of those people ended up dying anyway? I had enough in there to survive for about 4 years, and Trev had about a third of that of his own! Let's say we go back down there and give you what we cached because you said “pretty please”. If we work ourselves half to death and manage to scrape together more food storage will you come running to rob us blind the moment things look bad for the town again?”

He was doing this all wrong. Matt rubbed at his eyebrows. “Look, I told you Catherine's in charge. She's got one major rule the town lives by now: a person's property is their own. No one, not even the government, has the right to take anything from anyone. We've exiled people, sent them out into the cold in the heart of winter, for theft.

“As for saying “pretty please” or expecting you to just give away anything you have, you should know me
and
Catherine better than that. I'm here to buy the food on behalf of the town. I probably should've mentioned that in the first place.”

Trev gave him a doubtful look. “Buy with what? Nothing's more valuable than food these days.”

Matt waved at them again. “You look like you guys can feed yourselves if need be. There's other things you can't get for yourselves that the town can offer you. Ammunition for one.”