The Last Rebel: Survivor (6 page)

“My brother Ray told me that this gun was one of the most commonly made guns of all time. It used to be used by the Soviet army front-line forces, but no more. But reserves and militia still use it.”

Jim paused.

“I think it’s a good weapon for you. You shouldn’t be without a weapon, even though you know empty-hand combat.”

“You’re right,” Bev said.

Jim showed her how to use the gun, then loaded it and put the safety on and handed it to her. It looked large in her small hand.

“Lord,” she said, “I’m a long way from Sunday services and listening to my father give a homily.”

“You ever shoot a gun?”

“No.”

“All you have to do is point it at the person like you’re pointing your finger and squeeze the trigger.”

“How come you know so much about guns?”

“I’m from Idaho, remember?”

“Yes, but this looks like a military weapon.”

“I learned about guns from my brother Ray, who was in the Great War.”

“Where is he?”

“He got killed.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you. We were very proud of him,” Jim said, lost for a moment in the memory. “Just an ordinary mountain man, like me, like so many other guys who were very ordinary, but when war came he changed.”

“What do you mean?”

“He just . . . became great. A warrior. I remember how the Blackfeet Indians in the area used to admire him. To us, that was great praise.”

“Were you ever in any war?”

“No. I was too young. And I’m glad.”

Bev was going to ask him why. But the appearance of two homes in the wood distracted her. They investigated. Both were devoid of people, but in one of them they found the skeletal remains of a couple and a small child, all huddled together on the master bed upstairs. It was a very, very sad sight. They left that home immediately after the discovery.

They continued on, and within a couple of miles they came to a tiny town with a few stores that looked like a holdover from the 1800s, the Wild West days. Jim stopped and parked the HumVee behind the buildings, as they did when they investigated homes. Then, Jim toting the AK-47 and Bev the TT-33, safety off, they entered the stores, all of which were open. There was no one inside. No one alive. Just skeletal remains.

They had some luck. At a ladies’ fine apparel store she found some panties in their original packages on a shelf, and at a drugstore both she and Jim were able to load up with toiletry articles.

The other store they entered was a tiny gift shop. Bev picked up a small Bible and put it in her knapsack. She was conscious of Jim watching her and smiled.

“I noticed you didn’t have a Bible in your gear.”

He returned the smile.

“We do now. Good thinking. Get another one for me, will you?”

She looked surprised.

“You read the Bible, Jim?”

“Occasionally. I read anything that contains wisdom. You ready to go?”

“I’m ready.”

They pulled out from behind the stores and were soon on the main road. There was no sign of life.

“It’s hard to believe there’s no one in the town,” Bev said.

“They either all died, or fled, or were off to look for others who had escaped,” Jim said.

“Left?” Bev said. “To go where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Or maybe,” Bev said, “they were rounded up by the Rejects and shot.”

Jim nodded. Mass executions wouldn’t surprise him at all.

“We should find a junction heading north about twenty miles from here,” he said.

“Good.”

They would both be glad to get away from the Zone.

FOUR

“Look at that home over there,” Bev said, pointing to a house set back maybe thirty yards from the road. Jim had stopped the HumVee because the house was, in fact, beautiful—and unusual. They had traveled a long way down the road, and the houses, when they appeared, were either small ranches or Colonials or trailers, very much unlike this one.

The house looked as if it had come out of the pages of an architectural magazine whose intent was to show beautiful homes, as if it had sort of arisen out of the earth. It was set on a little hill, and the walls were made with individual stones that had obviously been created by nature rather than man. The roof was a dull orange concrete tile and the windows and door were made of dark wood that looked like it had been coated with some sort of dark, clear material. The house was fringed with all kinds of greenery and flowers at one end of a large pond that reflected it all perfectly. There was no fence, but the entire property was surrounded by evergreen bushes. It was quite obvious that the people who lived in the house loved nature.

“A beauty,” Jim said.

‘You want to check it out?” Bev asked.

Jim did not answer immediately. He had noticed something else odd about the house. Almost all of the other places they had seen or entered showed some exterior sign that they had been pillaged, such as a broken window or stuff strewn in the yard. And in one case, the siding and roofing had been ripped off. From the outside, at least, this one looked like it was in perfect condition, as if it were oblivious of the chaos in the world swirling around it.

It occurred to him that, as beautiful as it was, perhaps someone was living in it. Perhaps some Rejects, and that would mean trouble with a capital T.

He finally nodded, then reached down and picked up the AK-47. Bev noticed him, but seemed oblivious of its implication.

“Good,” Bev said. “Maybe they have propane and everything is still working. Then I can take a shower and wash my hair. I’m getting a little gamy.”

“I won’t argue with that,” Jim said with a smile, but keeping his eyes trained on the house. “Got your gun off safety?” he asked.

“You think this is dangerous?”

“I doubt it, but like my grandmother used to say, ‘A stitch in time saves nine.’”

“What does that mean?”

“I have no idea.”

Jim scanned to his left. There was a natural opening in the forest, as if vehicles had parked there regularly. Jim liked it. He could go deep enough into the woods so that the HumVee would be concealed.

“We’ll park over here,” he said.

He moved the HumVee into the gap, then stopped it but did not get out. Bev looked at him.

“Aren’t we going in?” she said after fifteen or twenty seconds of sitting there.

“I just want to listen to things a bit,” he said. “Where I come from, what you hear is as important as what you see. Sometimes more important.

“Okay,” he said, after another ten seconds or so, “let’s go.”

As he got out, he looked at Bev. He liked what he saw. She did not seem that afraid, just alert, as he was. He didn’t need someone with a loaded gun who was nervous going in with him. They left Reb in the truck. Again, he was silent.

They walked across the road, glanced up and down it—nothing—then crossed it and continued until they were at the front gate. It was held by a regular latch. Jim disengaged it and they entered. Bev followed him partway up the brick path, and then was surprised when he didn’t continue to the front door. Rather, he veered off toward one side, the business end of the AK-47 raised.

He walked slowly around the house, Bev following, and as he went she was surprised. He stepped so lightly that she could hardly hear his footfalls, and she got the sense that she was following an animal rather than a man. If she hadn’t earlier gotten a sense that this man had lived in the mountains, she had now.

He stopped at every window and tried to look in, but he couldn’t. In every instance, the blinds or drapes or other window coverings had been pulled. Somebody, it occurred to Bev, did not want anyone looking in—or maybe out.

A couple of times he stopped and held up his hand for her to do the same, and once put an ear against one of the windows.

In the back of the house there was a beautiful multilevel redwood deck. It had some handsome wooden chairs on it. The woods had been cleared around it to a distance of about fifty feet and the grass was dotted with flower beds.

Jim went down the other side of the house, glanced in a window—blinds pulled as on the others—and as he approached the front of the house he raised his weapon. Bev followed suit.

They had noticed when they first came to the front of the house that the blinds had been pulled in the windows on both sides of the front door. “I don’t see any fresh vehicle or man tracks,” Jim said quietly, “so the house is probably empty. But one never knows.”

He smiled. God, Bev thought, this guy was cool. She felt nervous, but in control of herself.

He proceeded toward the front door, motioning to Bev to stop as he got within a few yards of the door, but he did not walk out in front of it. He was well aware that someone standing behind it could fire through the door. Though oak, it would not withstand a fusillade of shots, which would kill whoever was standing there.

Instead, he kneeled down and sort of scuttled up to the door. Anyone shooting would fire over his head, expecting that the kill zone would be at least five feet off the ground.

He tried the doorknob with his left hand. It turned. He pushed the door open an inch with the muzzle of his weapon. No one fired. He pushed the door back, stepping out of the potential line of fire.

He waited a moment, listening, then walked in, AK-47 leveled, quickly scanning as he entered the living room. He knew Bev was behind him. She also had her TT-33 up, both of her hands on it as she had seen in movies.

The house was not trashed outside, but it certainly had been inside. Against the far wall was a built-in unit with cubicles, like boxes, for holding a wide variety of stuff, everything from a television to knickknacks and vases with flowers in them. But the cubicles were empty. The contents had been pulled out onto the polished wood floor in an obvious attempt to find valuables.

Everything else was a mess as well. A couch and two chairs had been ripped up and virtually disassembled. The base molding had been pried off and the electrical outlets pulled out.

Jim lowered his AK-47 and Bev followed suit. Jim turned and made a silence gesture with his finger over his mouth and just stood there. She knew that he was listening for any sign that someone might be in the house.

He moved and continued his scanning of the living room. One of the walls was covered with built-in bookcases but there was not a single book in them. All had been pulled out, torn apart, apparently in an attempt to see if any money had been slipped between the pages.

In essence, the room had been reduced to a pile of junk.

Jim thought it was unlikely that anyone was still in the house, which he guessed had at least a dozen rooms, but one never knew. As he left the living room he kept his guard up, his ears peeled for sounds, just as he did when he was hunting grizzlies in the woods of northern Idaho.

They went down a long hall, off of which were a number of rooms. Everything they saw had been torn apart, reduced to junk.

At the back of the house was the kitchen and pantry, and there was a back door. Pots and pans and utensils were all over the floor, dishes and the like pulled out of cabinets and smashed.

The laundry room held a very unpleasant surprise. Someone had defecated on the floor and stuck a crucifix in it. Without comment, Jim went over and pulled the cross out and went over to the sink and turned on the water. The water sputtered, but then flowed—hot. Jim washed the crucifix, dried it off with one of the T-shirts he found on the floor, and placed the statue on a shelf above a washer, leaning it against the wall so it could stand up straight. Then he used two pieces of soft cardboard to pick the crap up and went into a nearby bathroom and flushed it away.

Bev, who had witnessed what he did, said when he returned, “Thanks for doing that.”

“It’s the least I could do,” Jim said.

“I bet it was the Rejects.”

“I wouldn’t bet against you,” Jim said.

When you’re on the road as Jim had been for weeks—the places where you can actually buy food no less find it are few and far between, so you’re reduced to your own looting of sorts. During the last few days, however, Jim had not found much of anything, so he felt doubly good when he saw, strewn all over the floor among the debris, unopened and intact, a treasure trove of canned goods, everything, at a quick glance, from tuna fish to Spam to spinach.

“Look at these canned goods,” Jim said. “We’re going to travel in style.”

“You mean we’re not going to starve?” Bev added.

“Yeah, that’s what I meant,” Jim said, his face lighting up with a smile, his teeth appearing very white against his tanned skin.

Bev’s look at him lingered. The sight of him was, she thought, doing strange things to her stomach.

They continued their search.

In a closet in a hall that she almost passed by, Bev hit pay dirt as well. It was a narrow closet, its contents intact. The looters had obviously neglected to go through it. In it Bev found a dozen clean, thick fluffy towels. She knew there was hot water, and she had found some soap. A winning trio!