Walking in the Rain (Book 4): Dark Sky Thunder (19 page)

I went on to mention the foiled attack at the chemical weapons storage facility in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and the sheriff turned absolutely white. I didn’t have much in the way of details, but I recited what I could recall.

“Well, if this is all true, I don’t know what more we can do.”

“You can increase your watches and try to get more guns on the barricades,” my dad suggested carefully. “Also, quietly spread the word. From what Luke’s found, they like to work through surrogates where possible. They may not have huge numbers, but they do have access to storehouses of weapons and functioning, military-grade equipment.”

“Sam, I’m lucky to get half a dozen trained deputies out there per shift. What do you think they will do if a real military threat rolled into town?”

“Damnit, Paul, you have the manpower,” my father began, but the sheriff cut him off.

“Had, Sam, had. Since his last round of cholera broke out, I doubt there’s two hundred people left alive inside the city limits. We keep telling people to boil their water, but all it takes is one screw up, and you got a lot of dead people. Plus, we have almost no food left. I might be able to attract more back to work with us, but to do that, I need some help.”

“What kind of help?” my father asked, and I could tell he wasn’t going to like what he would hear next. When the harvest was in, we could probably spare a few hundred pounds of corn. And maybe the other farm and ranch folk in our area could pitch in as well, but it would be tight. And nothing fancy.

“Your kind of help, Sam. In addition to food and clean drinking water, we also need some kind of boot camp. I want you to come in and help train my new guys. Not to be cops. That part of the job is becoming less and less relevant. I need you to train them how to be soldiers, or Marines, if you will.”

Well, hell.

As the two old friends sat and wrangled back and forth, I figured there was no way my dad would go for this kind of deal. He wanted to deliver a warning and get the hell out. So, I think he was as surprised as I was when he agreed to hold a basic skills class two days a week. The location was set at the indoor shooting range adjacent to the sheriff’s offices.

“I didn’t know that was a range,” my father commented.

“It wasn’t, but we needed a range more than we needed a paint store.”

That, at least, made sense. Good thing something did. Dad couldn’t give a firm commitment on food, explaining how we now had extra mouths to feed, namely the Greenville group, but that corn harvest would see us with a surplus. He would also undertake an effort to coax extra food from the neighboring farmsteads since maintaining a stable town population was in the best interest of everybody. If their market died out, who would the farmers and ranchers sell or barter their foodstuffs to down the road? I liked that these two were planning for a future further away than just the next meal.

As we gathered in the front room of the sheriff’s department building, I saw Tom, Beth, and Kate coming back across the street. Tom looked unconcerned, but Beth appeared angry and Kate seemed close to tears.

“What’s the problem?” Dad asked, not wanting to wait around for the story to be told.

“They won’t take her,” Beth growled even as Kate cried, “I have no place to go!”

Center didn’t have any type of refugee camp. You made your own way or you left town. That was the cold hard reality.

“Why are you so set on getting rid of her?” my father asked, getting to the question that had been bugging me from the start.

“Miss Priss here is too good to work, and she’s too much of a sheep to protect herself,” Beth hissed.

“Guns are the problem,” Kate half wailed, “not part of the solution. You can’t just shoot people who disagree with you. It’s barbaric and stupid.”

“Well,” Sheriff Henderson replied, not unkindly, “if not for somebody using guns, you’d still be a prisoner of the same people who killed your husband and who intended to trade you off like an old pair of boots.”

“But it is wrong! Only the police or other law enforcement needs to have weapons. Surely, you see that, Sheriff? It is your job to protect me, not these…people,” Kate said in that tone that was half complaint, half demand.

“Ma’am, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but as a peace officer, I am under no particular obligation to protect you. The law is pretty clear on this point. Unless you are under arrest, I don’t have a duty to safeguard you. The public in general, yes. Enforce the laws, yes. But serve as your personal protector, no.”

“What? Sheriff, I know things are different here in Texas, but surely the basic law is the same everywhere.”

Now Sheriff Henderson had to fight off a chuckle. Other folks might not have caught the twitch of his lip, but the sheriff was a frequent guest at our house before these recent troubles and I’d seen that expression before. Usually when the man was listening to my mother and father debate some political point or other useless trivia.

“That is the opinion of the United States Supreme Court, ma’am. There is a whole line of cases I could quote to you, but I left the list in my office. What Mr. Messner and his family engaged in is what our district attorney, if he was still alive, would call a proper use of deadly force. That is, an appropriate level of action in defense of themselves or others.”

That seemed to stun Kate for a moment, and Dad picked this as a fine time to wrap up the conversation. “So you won’t work and you won’t fight? Can’t say I have any use for you at the ranch, ma’am. Good luck finding someone else to take care of you. Come on folks, we’re done here.”

“Wait!” Kate shrieked. “I never said I wouldn’t work. I’ll do whatever you need. As soon as I heal up from this wound. I just need some time to get better. That’s all.”

“Singing a different tune than yesterday, are you?” Beth nearly snarled. “Too good to work then, but now you figured out there’s no more free lunch?”

I understood why Beth might be angry. Even with the men and women from the Greenville group helping, we were still hard at work trying to harvest and preserve all the bounty coming out of the big garden plots.

Mom and Dad had made a point of stocking up on cases of canning jars and ten times that number of very expensive and hard-to-get Tattler reusable canning lids. Picking and processing vegetables might be hard work, but standing over a wood stove waiting for another load of glass jars to finish was hotter-than-hell work. And we’d all been drafted into the assembly line. When we weren’t working with the stock or manning our newly increased security obligations.

So, Beth was tired and cranky, and according to the grapevine, just found out she was pregnant again. That was the rumor, according to Amy, who heard it from Lori, who overheard it being discussed by Beth and my mom the other day. No, it wasn’t eavesdropping if you lacked intent. Or at least, that’s what I told Amy.

And here was this fool lecturing us about the proper role of firearms in the post-apocalyptic world. Great.

“She can stay,” my father said with a meaningful sigh. I figured he was getting a headache. First, he let himself get roped into helping the sheriff and now he was committed to taking in an extra, potentially useless, mouth to feed.

Her turned and gave the thirty-something woman a cold stare before addressing her. “Kate, you are on probation. If you will work and not complain, then we will have a place for you. If I hear one word of complaint from you, or about you, then you will receive two days’ worth of food and be shown the door. Is that understood?”

Kate licked her lips nervously and gave a cautious nod.

“Then let’s load and head home. We’ve wasted enough daylight.”

Jeez. I planned on riding in the truck bed on the way back home. I could cover more threats from there, I told myself. And I wouldn’t have to sit in the middle of that stew of anger and resentment. Maybe Kate would straighten up and contribute. Possibly even begin to understand the gift of life she had been given. Like lots of things, only time would tell.

We spent the next two weeks at the ranch in a blur of working in the fields, training for the defense force and gradually integrating the Greenville group into our projects. As I had warned, the survivors under the guidance of Paul Sandifer were slow to trust and seemed wary of our motivations. I think the thing that impressed the Greenville folks almost as much as our willingness to share food was the existence of electric power in our homes. Seeing a light bulb burn after all these months powerless seemed almost a religious experience for some of Paul’s people.

With the added manpower, we were able to get the garden harvest completed except for a few late-bearing tomatoes and the leafy vegetables, which Mom assured the other ladies would be fine in the garden up until the first frost, which was still months away. Dad got out the antique two-row ear picker, a big metal device that looked sort of like a three-pronged spaceship when viewed from the front, and harvested the corn crop without any difficulty. I told Amy it looked like we had a lot of cornbread looming in our future.

Since he was busy working those two days a week in town on top of his other duties, he got Uncle Billy up on the tractor’s seat and showed him how the machine worked. He then sent Billy out to harvest the corn crop for some neighbors who in the past had contracted with commercial combine companies. Billy grumbled that his brother was determined to turn him into a farmer, but Dad just laughed.

For the folks in Center, Dad got together a couple of truckloads of fresh corn as well as several hundred pounds of potatoes left over from our harvest. It wasn’t enough to feed that many people, but Dad said he was also getting some help from several of those neighbors Uncle Billy was assisting.

My father, being smarter than your average bear, gave over all the food to the sheriff and let him decide how to handle distribution. The county commissioners and the county judge would have been consulted, if any had survived, but for now, Sheriff Henderson was the sole remaining figure of authority in Shelby County.

To his credit, the sheriff made a point of sending food supplies to several of the smaller communities in the county rather than hoarding everything in Center. The outlying areas, those not destroyed by the starving masses from the Metroplex, had fared better than the larger towns, but the gesture did not go unnoticed. Even when the state and federal government had failed to provide aid, the locals began to realize they might be able to count on each other.

I know Sheriff Henderson wanted to do more, we all did, but the limitations on transport and a lack of additional foodstuffs meant many people would still go hungry this winter. We would save lives where we could and help to the limits of our community, but it had to be our decision on how much was enough.

From what little we were hearing on the HAM, things seemed better here than in a lot of places, but Dad could pick up no mention of the Homeland thugs even as word began to spread of FEMA finally beginning to mobilize in some of the northeastern states. Word was sparse, but apparently real camps began to sprout up as the military began to move out from their enclaves in support. Maybe, just maybe, the situation had turned. But, we heard next to nothing out of our friends in Oklahoma and Arkansas, and that remained a troubling indicator.

That was all the bigger picture news I heard during this time. Most of it gleaned from my father’s observations when we weren’t going ninety miles an hour. In addition to the time I put in on projects close to home, I also found myself in the woods with Carly and Wes. Carly knew some about edible plants, and I explained as best I could about what we had in abundance in these parts.

Wes, on the other hand, wanted to know everything I could teach him about trapping. He’d overheard Amy and me discussing the topic and became nearly obsessed with being able to better forage for food. Like Carly, he took notes and wanted to learn all I could teach. Not a lot he didn’t already know, as it turned out, except for the design of some traps my grandfather taught me.

“This stuff is barely enough to keep a person alive,” I’d explained to my two much older students. “The greens are good for some things but are low calorie and don’t provide all the nutrition our bodies need. Same problem with the animals we can trap. Most are so low in body fat that you need to make use of every part. Like eating the bone marrow, when you can.”

That day, we were standing near a small creek that meandered through the forest about a mile from the old Skillman place. “We ate grubs and worms more than once,” Carly confessed. She seemed to be embarrassed by the admission, but I just nodded.

“Not much for taste, but you did what you needed. Hell, one day the only thing I could find was a mess of minnows, like down there,” I said, pointing into the shallow water.

“What did you do?” Wes inquired, but I gathered it was for Carly’s benefit, not his own.

“I scooped up as many as I could catch and made a soup. Tasted…well, not that great, but gave me the fuel I needed to get through to the next day,” I admitted. “Sometimes, the trap is empty and you’ve got to get something in your belly. Foraging for greens and hunting can take up most of your day as you travel, so you need to balance out the time as best you can.”

“So you really did this? I mean, survived for months eating only what you could find? While on the move with that big old group?” Wes asked, something like disbelief in his voice.

“Oh, heck, no. That was before I met the Thompsons. Or Miss Connie and Helena. Back then, it was just me and Amy. Two is much easier to feed than eight or ten. Well, much easier is a stretch, even.”

“So Amy has been with you from the start?” Carly asked, seemingly confused by something I’d said.

By agreement, my friends and family agreed to share what we knew about conditions outside the immediate area, but only after we’d become comfortable with the new people. That comfort level was rapidly building, but some of us weren’t quite there yet. Still, folks talk, and I wondered what Carly might have overheard.

“I met Amy on the way, but before I bumped into Lori and her family. Amy and I got to know each other on the road, and only after a good while did I realize I had feelings for her.”