Ashes of the Unspeakable, page 14
“Probably. If we top this hill and go down the other side, there’s a farm road. It goes by a pond, then weaves up around that hill. We could probably stay on that farm road and see whose house it is. We could find out for sure in about thirty minutes.”
She handed him his pack and gun. “Let’s do it.”
Pete led his mother over the top of the hill and they quickly descended the steep slope into a small, isolated valley. The valley held a pond for watering cattle but otherwise contained nothing other than grassy pastures. A farm road bisected the valley and they followed it across the pasture to where it began to angle sharply upward. The road was used for hauling hay in and out of the pasture and was poorly maintained. It was more than adequate for a tractor or for foot traffic.
After fifteen minutes of steep climbing, they were both sweating and tired. The sun had already set and a general grayness was dropping over their valley. The road began to level out, taking a sharp turn to the left, then the valley opened up before them. The paved road was clearly visible, winding its way between homes and barns for as far as they could see in both directions. They could also see the home of one of their neighbors, the Kaisers, was now a heap of smoldering rubble.
Pete pulled his spotting scope out and quickly set it up. He lay prone and scanned carefully. “I don’t see anyone. No people at all.”
“If they’d been home when the fire started, they probably would have tried to get their belongings out,” Ellen said. “Do you see any sign of personal items in the yard or anything like that?”
Pete looked. “No. The yard is clear. It looks like all their cars are still there.”
“What about their barn? Any signs of life up there?”
Pete redirected the scope, adjusting the focus for the new distance. “No. Nothing.”
Ellen couldn’t put it all together. Or maybe she could, and didn’t like where it was leading her. “It’s getting dark. Let’s get out of here.”
Chapter 12
The Appalachian Trail
Smyth and Tazewell Counties
When Jim came to a sign on the trail indicating that they were near the Mount Rogers National Recreation Area Headquarters, he could not resist taking a quick look.
“You guys can stay here in the woods if you want, but they may have fresh water and bathrooms,” he said. “We need to clean our dishes and refill our bottles anyway. It might be a good place to do that.”
“Hurray for bathrooms,” Randi said.
“Fine with me,” Gary said. “Let’s take a look.”
They took the branch trail and entered the field between the forest and the headquarters building. Across the field, they could see that there were no cars at the headquarters. Under current conditions, Jim didn’t really expect the place to be open but he hadn’t expected it to be abandoned. There were no other backpackers that he could see. There were no staff being paid to stick around and guard the place. There were no stranded car campers. There was nobody.
They approached the place cautiously, walking down the trail, listening for any sounds, watching for any movement. As the amount of violence around them increased, so did their wariness. The next attacker could come from anywhere and could be anyone. Anyone, no matter how innocent they looked, could be waiting to kill them.
When they reached the building, Jim tried the front door to the welcome station, which was locked. He was not surprised that it was locked as much as he was surprised that no one had yet broken in. It was only a glass door and there were a lot of rocks laying around the place.
He walked around to the side of the building, where he knew from previous visits that the restrooms were located. He pulled the handle on the men’s restroom door. It was unlocked and came open with a squeal. In this new world, opening a closed door did not always spell opportunity. It could spell death. Jim removed a light from his pack and shined it into the room.
Nothing.
He moved to the women’s restroom and tried that door. It was unlocked. He held the door open with his body and shined his light around inside. There were no people, but the floor contained some empty food wrappers, empty water bottles, and some discarded clothing.
Randi and Gary were standing by another door. “They left the vending area unlocked,” Randi said. “They obviously didn’t know you were in the area.”
Jim gave her a look. “Next time I’ll keep my stolen candy bars and jerky to myself. You can eat shoe leather and grubs.”
She laughed.
“As long as you’re standing there, is there food in the machines?” Jim asked.
Randi winked at Gary. “I told you he wouldn’t be able to stay out of here.”
Gary shined his own flashlight into the room. The vending area was surrounded by glass walls and a full-glass door but not enough light penetrated the shaded interior to allow them to see into the vending machines without flashlights. “I see Oreos.”
Jim walked inside, stood in front of the machine, and sized up his opponent. He drew his Gerber LMF knife and shattered the machine’s Plexiglas window with the sharp steel pommel of the knife. He grabbed two packs of Oreos and left the room.
“You shouldn’t have mentioned the Oreos.”
*
They gorged themselves on vending machine loot, trying to throw calories at the insatiable voids their stomachs had become.
“It’s getting late,” Jim said. “We should probably find a place here to bed down for the night.”
Randi had removed her socks and was rubbing her bare feet. “Fine with me. Everything from the neck down aches.”
Jim placed his headlamp on his head and disappeared into the nearby men’s bathroom. Gary fed Mike & Ike candy into his mouth at a steady pace, like he was stoking a coal furnace.
A crash from the bathroom got their attention. It sounded like a fight.
Gary stood, drew his Glock and approached the bathroom door. “Randi, pull this door open and stand back out of the way.”
There was another series of crashes that shook the building. Randi got to the bathroom door, pulled it open wide, and held it while standing with her back against the wall of the building.
Gary played his light over the room. “Jim!” He stepped into the room, checked each corner, then ducked and ran the light beneath the stalls. No legs.
He went to each stall, kicked open the unlocked doors, and looked into each as the door clattered within the tight confines of the stall. “He’s not in here!”
Randi poked her head around the corner. “He went in there. We both saw him.”
“I know what we saw but he’s not in here.”
A hand from nowhere grabbing Randi’s shoulder made her scream. This startled Gary, who appeared suddenly in the doorframe, gun at the ready. He found Jim laughing at Randi as she clutched her chest.
“You scared the fucking shit out of me,” she said.
“How did you get out of there?” Gary asked, holstering his weapon. “There’s no sign of anything and I didn’t see another door.”
“I went in through the ceiling, kicked through the firewall, and came down in the staff bathroom inside the building.”
“Inside the locked part of the building?” Randi clarified.
Jim walked to where they had all been sitting and grabbed his pack. “Let’s get in there and lock the door behind us. I think a night of sleeping behind a locked door would do us all a lot of good.”
Once they were all in the building Jim locked the front door behind them. “We need to get out of sight of these windows in case other people show up.”
They moved deeper into the building and found an employee lunchroom that had no windows. While Jim was sliding the folding plastic lunch table to the side, Randi began opening wall cabinets. “Oh. My. God.”
“What’s wrong?” Jim asked in alarm.
She turned slowly. The first thing he noticed was that she was grinning ear-to-ear. The second thing he noticed was that she held a jar of peanut butter in one hand and a can of Folger’s coffee in the other. “The gods have smiled on us.”
He gave a low whistle. “Shit. That’s a good find.”
She swung open another door. “There’s more. All kinds of stuff.” It was the same kind of stuff you find in a lot of office breakrooms –cans of soup, cans of tuna, crackers, hot chocolate, and all the other things people bring for lunch and don’t eat for one reason or another.
“How about we make some coffee,” Gary suggested. “Then we can do a thorough search of the building and see what else we can find.”
Gary quickly whipped out his stove and filled a pot from their water bottles. He added a couple of scoops of coffee to the water and brought it to a boil. He then took a coffee filter from a pack in the cabinet and folded it into a funnel shape. When the coffee was boiling, he placed the cone filter in a Styrofoam cup and poured the coffee through it. Since the filter quickly lost shape when used in this manner, he had to make a new one for each of their cups, but within a few moments all three of them had a steaming coffee before them.
“There’s even creamer and sugar,” Randi said, her voice reverent. “I am so happy right now.”
Gary picked up his full cup and took a sip, then closed his eyes. “I think I’ll go ahead and start a second cup for each of us. The more we drink now, the less we’ll have to carry.”
“There’s more water bottles in the bottom cabinet,” Jim said. “That’ll be plenty of water for what we need tonight.”
Gary adjusted the flame on his stove. “I’m hitting on all cylinders now. I didn’t even realize how much I missed coffee.”
“I realized it. Every time I’ve missed a cigarette I also missed the cup of coffee I would have been having with it.” Randi placed her empty cup beside Gary, ready for it to be refilled.
“Randi, if you’re desperate enough, there’s some of those big ashtrays outside of the bathrooms,” Jim remarked. “There are probably some nice fragrant butts in there with a hit or two left on them.”
Rather than frown, Randi considered the idea, then said, “I’m not that desperate…yet. But don’t tempt me.”
*
Although the building was primarily an informational center, there were a few offices and a storeroom in the building. They started at one end of the building and worked their way through. It was clear that the building had been locked since the very early stages of the disaster. There was no disarray, no indications of chaos or that anyone had closed up in a rush. Everything was in its place. It looked like people had closed down one evening with the full intention of re-opening the next day.
The offices yielded nothing of value or interest. They looked to be the kind of offices that different people used, depending on the day of the week. There were no personal photos, no half-empty cups of old coffee, and no food in the drawers. The storeroom was a different story. There were two backpacks hanging on hooks with Search & Rescue patches on the back. On a shelf beside them were a dozen handheld radios sitting in charging cradles.
Jim picked one up and turned a knob. “Dead.”
Gary held out his hand. “Let me see one of those.”
Jim tossed him one.
Gary opened the battery compartment. “We pull out this battery pack and it will operate off two AA batteries,” he said. “Let’s take one of these for each of us. Maybe one more as a spare.”
“I didn’t know you could switch out the batteries,” Jim said.
“I told you several times over the years that you should learn more about radios, didn’t I?”
Jim nodded, rolling his eyes at Randi as he did. There was a shelf of flashlights with spare batteries. There were some headlamps in the stack and Jim took one.
“Switch this out with the one you have, Randi. It’s better.”
He got some spare batteries and shoved them into the backpacks. He didn’t bother exploring the backpacks yet. He would do that when they returned to the break room. There were some spare blankets and sleeping bags on another shelf, but they ignored those. There was a case of eight-ounce bottles of drinking water. Randi picked one up and carried it to the break room to refill their water bottles, probably envisioning a morning cup of coffee.
Jim unfolded the lid of a cardboard box. “Jackpot.” The box was full of freeze-dried Mountain House meals.
“Ziti and Spinach in Alfredo Sauce,” Gary remarked. “These must have been for search and rescue missions.”
Nearly everything remaining in the room was clothing of some type. They found some raingear to replace what Randi had lost when they were attacked at the corral. There was a box labeled ‘Lost and Found’ that had some spare socks, a couple of shirts, and a cap with North Face written across the front. Jim tossed the box to Randi, who had just returned to the room, and she started going through it.
“You can have one of these packs for carrying your gear once we go through them,” Jim said. “They’re decent packs and will hold a lot.”
“So you’re going to go through my pack and steal all the good stuff first?”
Jim looked at her, unsure if she was joking or not. “No. I’m going to see what’s in here and we’ll share anything good. There’s probably a lot of crap in there that you don’t need to carry and we can get rid of it so you don’t have to haul the extra weight around.”
“So you’re going to go through my pack and share my stuff? You’re a communist aren’t you?”
Jim gave up and drew back to toss the full pack at her.
She held her hands up. “I was only joking with you. It’s fine. Really.”
The only other item of interest was the display of maps they found in the information center. Jim already had a Virginia Gazetteer which was very detailed, but the map kiosk had a National Geographic map of the entire park. There were other maps of the local sections of the Appalachian Trail, the Jefferson National Forest, and the George Washington National Forest. Jim took these.
“I want both of you to stick these in your pack. If we get separated for any reason, these maps will save your life. I know we’re close, but things can happen. You know where we are at and you know where you need to go. Sunrise and sunset will orient you if all else fails.”
Jim made one more pass through the storage room while Randi and Gary sorted the gear in the packs. The two went to the break room and started sorting through the gear.
“Jim told me what you did back there with the light stick,” Gary said. “He said you saved his life.”
“I did what I had to,” Randi said, not looking up from what she was doing. “It was the only weapon I had handy.”
“It was still pretty hardcore,” he said. “Are you doing okay with it?”
She looked up at him. “Remember, that’s not the first person I’ve killed on this trip. Technically, I didn’t even kill him, I only wounded him. Jim finished him off.”
“Even so, it was still pretty brutal. I wanted to make sure you were okay with the whole thing.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Randi said sarcastically. “You worried about me?”
Gary shrugged. “Just want to make sure you’re doing okay. I have daughters and I can’t help but think of them being in that same situation.”
“I’m fine, thanks for asking. I’m definitely too old to be one of your daughters. Anyway, I pretended that guy was my ex-husband. It was easy.”
Gary laughed, but Randi didn’t crack a smile. “I’m serious. That’s exactly what I did.”
“So, obviously marriage wasn’t for you?”
“Definitely not.”
Gary wasn’t sure what else to say. He shifted uncomfortably.
Randi picked up a compass from the pile of gear that they had dumped from the Search and Rescue packs. She balanced it on her leg and watched to see which direction was north. “It wasn’t the marriage particularly that didn’t work out for me. It was the choice of husbands.”
Gary picked up on her tone. “Sorry I mentioned it. Awkward topic. We can change the subject.”
“No, it’s okay. He was an asshole. A serious asshole. And we’re not together anymore. He’s yesterday’s news.”
“I feel like a jerk now,” Gary said.
“He was a jerk. You’re not so bad. You don’t have to feel bad about it,” Randi said. “I’m tough because I made it out of that marriage. There were times I thought it would turn out different. I was young and dumb and he was older, louder, and liked to drink. We fought a lot.”
“Yelling fights or physical fights?”
Randi spun the dial on the compass. “Definitely physical fights. He was always threatening to kill me. The final straw was when my kids were seven and ten. I’d taken them to church one Sunday because I hoped that by taking them to church they wouldn’t turn out like their daddy. When we got home, he was laid up on the porch completely shit-faced drunk and looking for a fight. I told the kids to go inside and change clothes before I started dinner. He asked my oldest daughter to come give him a hug. She wouldn’t do it because she was scared. They knew by then that, if he was drunk, they didn’t know who they were getting. He could be sweet or he could be a jerk.”
“Did that piss him off?” Gary asked. “That she wouldn’t come to him?”
“Oh yeah. He got up and slapped the fire out of her. Then he started telling me that I was wasting my time taking the kids to church because there wasn’t any God. He started hollering and acting like an idiot, telling my daughter that he could beat her to death and God wouldn’t come help. Then he decided he was going to slap her again and I completely lost it. I grabbed a stick of firewood from the stack on the porch and I started beating him in the head with it.”
“Really?”
“I beat him until he was unconscious and I kept beating him. There was blood all over the porch, blood all over him, and blood all over me. Then I went in the house, lit a cigarette, and called 911. I told them I had killed my husband and they needed to send somebody out. I told the girls to go upstairs and get changed. I didn’t want them seeing me go to jail.”
