Walking in the Rain: Surviving the Fall (5 page)

Later, after we settled down in our bedrolls, I let Amy snuggle up next to me and lay quiet in the dark, listening.  I heard all the common night sounds, like owls hooting and coyotes barking.  I heard the wind in the grass, and the rumble of distant thunder.  But, I never heard an engine, or any other sign that man still roamed the world.  I knew they were out there, my fellow survivors, but that absence of man-made sound still weighed heavily on me.  I was a long time getting to sleep.

CHAPTER FOUR

After a quick breakfast of honeyed rice and shredded rabbit meat the next morning, I hauled out our maps and began to plot the next leg of our journey.  The rice had been cooked the day before but still tasted fine.  I really wish we could start heating our meals onsite but my father’s admonitions about cooking smells stuck with me. 

He’d served two tours in Iraq early on in the war, back before I could even remember him being gone, and he’d talked many times about his men finding the insurgents by following their noses.  That didn’t work in the towns, but out in the wadis and rural settings, the smell of cooking could be followed for quite a ways. 

Amy had seen the maps before but this was her first chance to take a closer look at the unfolded pages.  Some came from actual gas station maps while others were atlas pages I’d cut out.  Everywhere I’d been, dots and annotations could be seen spread about the route.  I never offered to explain what the dots and cryptic notes meant and Amy never asked.

“Wow” she breathed, “that’s a lot of miles.  And look, I can’t believe we’re already in Arkansas.  I guess I missed the road sign.”

That was our little joke, since we avoided built up areas and roads wherever possible.  I didn’t have to tell Amy that bad things happened when you get people concentrated.  The major highways were bad enough, but even small towns needed to be skirted.  The big cities, well, I’d told Amy some of my experiences leaving Chicago and trying to work my way around St. Louis.  I’d left out most of the worst parts of those stories, but what I had shared made her understand.  Going into the big cities meant killing, or being killed.

Now, Amy and I had a decision to make.  West to Oklahoma, or further south into Arkansas?  Those were the two options, and Amy grasped the pros and cons very quickly.  West would add more miles to the trip, but offered a smoother passage.  South, deeper in the Ozark Mountains, meant rougher terrain and what looked like more serious rivers that would need to be somehow forded. 

“West,” Amy finally said, giving me a shy smile as she spoke.

“Yeah, that’s what I think too.  Let’s finished getting geared up and hit the road.”

“You mean the trees, right?  We haven’t seen a blacktop road in a while.”

I was gladdened by Amy’s banter as we tooled up and made for the fence line around the isolated property.  A week ago, Amy was a terrified little girl, and now she could look me in the eye and not flinch.  She could joke with me and not worry I was going to backhand her into a wall.

Now she was wearing the little chrome High Standard revolver and walked with the lever action rifle slung over her shoulder.  Amy also wore one of the fixed blade sheath knives on her left hip, and at first glance she looked a little like a badass.  She was still scared, and made no bones about admitting that to me, but now at least she felt like she was allowed to fight back if necessary.  I assured her our default setting for confrontation was to run away if we possibly could.  We had no desire to get into a shootout with anybody.  I noticed Amy had gone back to wearing her hair up under the ballcap once again to obscure her gender. 

One of my maps had shown a small gravel county road only two miles from the Turner place that would run southwest in a fairly straight line towards Oklahoma, so we struck out in that direction and made good time crossing the scrubby landscape.  Amy saw it before I did, a narrow rocky track running up and down rather than through the countryside.  The maps referred to this part of northern Arkansas as being on the edge of the Interior Highlands.  I took that to mean hills, because we sure crossed a lot of them as we walked parallel to the minor road.  We also waded a few creeks and filtered enough water to keep our containers filled.

By noon we had covered about eight miles but had to slow our pace as we started seeing more houses in the distance and increased signs of activity.  I pushed us out beyond the hundred yards to five hundred yards from the road to give us better separation.  As we neared what looked to be an intersection, I left Amy to watch our bags in a copse of trees and crept up closer to see what I could make out.  I carried the Mossberg shotgun and hoped to avoid using it since all I wanted was information.

Half an hour later I rejoined Amy and took a long drink from my water bottle before spilling the beans.

“Four miles to Harrison, just like you figured,” I told Amy.

“What do we do?”

Harrison, while not a big city, had a pre-Event population of around 12,000 according to the atlas we were using.  Amy and I had bypassed several tiny villages in our travels together but this was her first time having to skirt a larger town.  I was proud to see she wasn’t visibly frightened, just wanting to know the drill.

“We’ll start circling south once we hit that next stand of trees.  Just take it slow and easy, and stay close to the ground.  If you hear shots, do like I told you.”

My instructions for Amy, if she started taking fire, was to stop, drop, and roll.  She gave me an uneasy grin as I recited those familiar words.  Find cover and stay down.  We hadn’t had time to do much in the way of tactical training for Amy, but then what the heck did I know anyway?  Just some stuff my father taught me and things I’d read in books. 

On the other hand, I was still alive when a lot of other folks weren’t, so that had to count for something.  Some of those dead men were soldiers, and I still somehow managed to put down a few of them.  I never shared that story with Amy, for a couple of reasons, but I still had nightmares even a month later.

This close to town, stopping for a meal would be unwise so Amy and I made do with some stale crackers and washed them down with the ever-present warm bottles of water.  Not very filling and bland, but neither of us complained.  We’d both missed enough meals so that actually having something in our bellies beat the alternative.

As the day wore on, I kept us angled even further to the south as we kept bumping into more homesteads.  This slowed our progress but Amy agreed that we did not want to accidentally run into anyone out here.  Any homeowners who saw the pair of us might shoot first, without question. 

That thought barely had time to settle in my brain before I heard the shooting start up.  I hit the ground without ceremony and glanced to my side.  There was Amy, sprawled out on her belly trying to look inconspicuous.  The shots weren’t incoming, but closer than I liked.  By the sounds of reports, I gauged this was two or more rifles.  Trying to guess the location of the shooters and their targets while cowering in the grass was harder than they made it look on TV.

“You alright?”  I asked.

“Yeah, I’m okay.  I..I think I peed my pants a little,” Amy replied.

“Me too.  Don’t sweat it.”

Other than the tall grass, we didn’t have much working for us in the way of concealment.  Despite our best efforts, sometimes there wasn’t any choice but to cross these fields and try to stay low.  The closest cover I could see without “prairie dogging” it was roughly thirty yards to our left, and it was only a pair of straggly crepe myrtle bushes.  Really, not much cover at all.  Still, small limbs beat blades of grass, so I oriented my body in that direction.

“Amy, we are going to crawl over there,” I gestured slightly with my head, nodding.  “Elbows and toes, and keep your butt down.  Take your time.  I don’t think the shooters have even noticed us, so let’s keep it that way.  You good to go?”

With her grunt of a response, I started off, cradling the shotgun in my arms like an ugly baby as I drug my body forward on protesting elbows.  The urge was there to use my knees, but I knew that doing so would lift my rear in the air, exposing not only my backpack but my rear to scrutiny.  This was something my father taught me, a skill he’d learned in training and used in wartime.  I hoped I was doing it correctly, but I feared a bullet would let me know if I failed.

Once we gained the dubious cover of the bushes, which were on a slight rise, I could finally understand what I was hearing.  Raising my binoculars cautiously, I made out the drama unfolding just a few hundred yards away.

The house looked rundown and uninviting; a brick faced ranch style lacking even the hint of a porch or any decorative touches in front.  Just a front door, wooden and sun faded, flanked by a pair of windows, and cement steps leading up from the graveled driveway.  Out front, I could just make out three men hunkered down, rifles in hand, crouched behind a rusty old King Cab pickup.  From my position, offset to the left, I watched the men take turns leaning out from behind cover of the truck to take shots at the house.  Whoever was in the house did not waste shots returning fire, but with my binoculars I thought I saw a rifle barrel through one of the windows.

  They did not seem to be in a hurry, and I wondered at their plan.  Either the three would try to wait out the people in the house, keeping the house under siege, or they had others in their party working their way around to flank the defenders.  Or something else entirely was going on, and I couldn’t see it from my vantage point.

Whatever the case, none of this was any of my business.  Glancing over at Amy, I shook my head and eased back from the vantage point, slow and easy.  No need to attract attention with quick movements, and this was something Amy and I could just crawl away from and get back on track.  Bad things were going to happen at that house, and I felt sympathy for whoever might be trapped inside, but none of it was my doing or responsibility.  Heck, maybe that was the local militia and the people trapped inside might be outlaws, I tried to tell myself. 

I would not risk Amy’s life, or my own, for that of a stranger.  I hated to make the call but I was outnumbered here, and outgunned.  I couldn’t exactly see what they were using, but it sounded a heck of a lot more powerful than a lever action rifle shooting pistol rounds.        

Then the baby started crying.  The sound was faint across the distance, but I could tell it was coming from inside the besieged house.  I felt a small hand latch on to my pants leg.

“We have to help them.”  It was a statement, not a question.  Her voice came out in a hiss, nearly vibrating with tension.

“There’s too many.”  I replied.  “Plus, they have real rifles, not like that little popgun.  We don’t even know what’s going on, and I just can’t risk it.”

“I’ll help, Luke.  You know I can shoot.”  Amy pleaded.

I shook my head, glancing back at her face, now red with exertion and tension.  Maybe anger as well.  She had come a long way in just a short time from the frightened little girl I first met in that terrible bedroom.

“Amy, honey, I know you might want to help. And if we could do something, we would.  We don’t have anything with the range here to make a difference.  Neither that rifle nor this shotgun has the range to take them on without just getting too close to them.  You can take pot shots all day with that pistol, but you might as well be shooting straight up for all the good…”

That stopped me in midsentence as an idea suddenly came to mind.  Maybe we could do something to even the odds, and Amy could do her part to help, if she was willing. 

I quickly sketched out the framework of a plan and of course the girl agreed to do her part.  Now I just needed to make this scheme work without getting us both killed.

As I crept back with Amy in tow, I saw where I could place Amy, and a trail that might take me where I needed to go.  That baby never did stop crying as I ghosted off into the treeline skirting the little homestead, reminding me the clock was already ticking.

CHAPTER FIVE

At the first crack of the little pistol, I dropped my head and waited while Amy slowly emptied the cylinder.  On the third shot, I looked up to the see all three of the home invaders turning their attention to the north.  Since I’d moved in a semi circle around the trees bordering the yard, I was slightly behind the three men sheltering near the truck. 

As a bonus, I now finally managed to make out what I presumed was the fourth member of their little team.   He was low crawling through the scrubby grass of the back yard, and doing a poor job of it given how much of his body he left exposed.  Four bad guys at least, maybe more if they had posted an overwatch, and I knew this was a bad idea.  But, it was better than letting Amy get herself shot, I told myself.