Ashes of the Unspeakable, page 27
“Seeing you in that state reminds me that I haven’t seen you smoke a cigarette in days. Did you quit looking for them?”
“I quit.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. I just did.”
“I wish to hell I had one to give you. It might calm you down some.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No need to apologize. How much farther? Not that you’re getting on my nerves or anything.”
She pointed. “The blue trailer.”
They pulled off the main road onto a gravel driveway. In front of them was a mobile home with blue aluminum siding. The yard was full of children’s toys – slides, sandboxes, little tables and chairs. It was a home that was all about children.
“No cars and the curtains are closed,” Randi said. “Not good.”
“Don’t overreact,” Jim said. “There’s a note on the door. Go see what it says.”
While Randi hopped out of the truck, Jim reached for his M-4 and pulled it across his lap. Better to have it within reach if something crazy happened. There could be squatters in the house watching them right now. There could be people wanting a fueled vehicle who saw him drive by and were coming for him. In this world, those were the kinds of things you had to think about now. Not only what was going on in front of you, but all the possibilities of what could be coming up behind you.
Randi tore the note off the door and walked back. She stood in the open doorway and stared at him. “It says they went to my dad’s house.”
“See, nothing to worry about. Where’s that?”
“Not far. Back a few miles, turn off the main road. He has a small farm with a few horses, and one of my brothers has a trailer on the farm.”
“Then hop in. Let’s go.”
“I can walk, Jim,” Randi said. “Really, you driving me here was a lot to ask. You’ve done enough.”
“Don’t be silly. Get in.”
“It’s okay, I—”
“Do I have to pull a fucking gun, Randi? Get in this truck now!”
“Alrighty then.” She climbed into the truck and shut her door.
It was indeed merely a few minutes before they were pulling up in front of her dad’s farm. The gate at the road was chained and padlocked.
“Honk the horn and I’ll get out and wave,” Randi said. “He has lots of guns and poor eyesight so stay on your toes.”
“What a combination,” Jim said, laying on the horn.
In a few minutes, a side-by-side ATV approached with two armed men riding in the back, weapons laid across the top of the cab and pointed in Jim’s direction. As they got closer and the men saw Randi, the guns were lowered and one of the men called back toward the house. “It’s Randi! She’s home!”
At this, the door to the brick ranch opened and a small herd of people emerged.
“Oh my God!” Randi said. She started jumping up and down, unable to contain herself.
Jim took his eyes from the ATV and looked over at her standing in the open door of the truck. Tears were streaming down her face.
“They’re all here,” she said, counting. “They’re safe.” She bolted and ran to the gate. While her dad fumbled with a chain of keys, she got tired of waiting and climbed over the gate, jumping into the arms of a man Jim later learned was her brother. From there, she was swarmed and lost in a sea of ecstatic huggers and weepers.
Her dad, stoic and task-oriented, his eyes blurred with welling tears, continued to struggle with his keys until he finally had the gate open. He waved at Jim to drive in, but Jim declined, instead getting out and walking through the gate.
“That’s Jim,” Randi said, holding a grandchild in each arm. “He got us home from Richmond.”
Randi’s dad shook Jim’s hand, then gave up and grabbed him tightly into a bear hug. When he was done, Randi’s daughters swarmed Jim with their own hugs.
“You raised a tough and determined girl,” Jim told her father. “She could have gotten herself home even without anyone’s help.”
“Either way, we’re indebted to you,” he said. “You ever need anything, you let us know.”
Jim thanked him. “Now that you mention it, I will be needing your daughter back in a few days. My mom is sick and Randi needs to check in on her in a few days. I figured I’d come pick her back up the day after tomorrow about this same time if that’s okay.”
“Don’t worry about it,” her dad said. “We’ll bring her to you. It’s the least we can do for whatever role you played in helping her get home.”
Jim shook his hand, waved to Randi, who was still being bombarded with kisses and hugs, and went to get Randi’s pack from his truck. He handed it to her dad, then returned to his truck while the gate was shut and locked behind him. He backed out the driveway, watching the procession of Randi’s family walk up the driveway in a staggering, multi-armed embrace.
CHAPTER 31
A Neighborhood
Bluefield, Virginia
In Bluefield, Virginia, cross streets cut into the steep hillsides. On one of these streets was a neighborhood of pre-World War II homes once occupied by Hungarian coal miners. Once bustling with those large immigrant families, the houses were now showing their age, their small yards wrapped in rusting chain-link fence. Steps of hand-cut stone were slewing awkwardly. Wrought iron railings rattled loosely, balusters missing, ornamentation long savaged by neighborhood vandals.
Most of the residents on the street were older, the children of those long-dead Hungarian miners. They watched the news too much, as the elderly are prone to do, worrying as the newscasters turned the tension up one notch at a time. When the power failed, most had no idea what to do. They tried calling children or grandchildren but landlines were not working any longer. The steep hills of the city did not allow cell signals to reach them. They sat in the dark, watching their neighbors through curtained windows, afraid to leave. Most would slowly starve to death rather than leave the house.
One nondescript house, with dingy white siding and aluminum awnings over each window, housed a younger resident. While not exactly young, he was younger than the neighborhood average of seventy-two years. For the majority of his life, the young man had been in and out of institutions. The newer generation of antipsychotic medications worked for his symptoms most of the time. When they didn’t, his mother had him committed against his will. He resented those commitments, feeling that she sent him away every time he was beginning to enjoy life again, every time the veil of depression was lifted. He did not see that he ever did anything that bad. Nothing really bad, anyway.
With each commitment, a med regimen would finally be settled upon and he would stabilize. If that stability continued and he displayed the blunted, cooperative personality that was expected of him, he would eventually be released. He had been sent away on an inpatient commitment again several weeks ago, before the terror attacks, but had responded favorably to treatment. Ideally, he would have remained for several more weeks to make sure all of his symptoms were alleviated, but he’d been discharged on the morning of the attacks. He was on his way home when his bus ran out of fuel, could not obtain more, and had ended up in a FEMA camp.
He had finally arrived home in Bluefield last night. He’d brought a guest. His mother was not glad to see him. Had the phones been working, it was likely that she would have called her boyfriend to come throw him out. Since the phones weren’t working, he and his mother worked things out between themselves.
*
In a dark, cold basement of cut stone, Alice began to stir. Her head throbbed. Her broken nose lay pressed against the gritty concrete floor. She went to touch it but her hands would not move. She rolled onto her back and found her numb hands trapped behind her. Craning her neck, she could see they were zip tied, with a tie around each wrist and one connecting her two wrists.
She tried to think back. She had a hazy memory of waking up in a car. She remembered being excited after being close to home, the prospect of being only days from her family. Then she remembered being yanked from her feet and hitting her head on the pavement. There was nothing else beyond that point.
She was badly dehydrated and could feel that blood had crusted around her mouth. She could taste it. When she blinked, she could feel that her face seemed swollen. She struggled to sit upright. A dim light came in through filthy hopper windows, too small for her to climb out of even if her hands were free. She looked around but her mobility was limited. She was too foggy to look for anything that might help her cut her bonds.
To her left she saw a shape. As her eyes adjusted, she could see that it was a woman. A blanket was thrown over her head and there was no sign of breathing. Cold chills ran through Alice.
A door opened above her in the darkness. The sound of a solid wood door and an old lock reminded her of her grandmother’s house. Then there was the sound of creaking stairs and slow, cautious steps.
She twisted her body but could not get a good look. The pale light did not reach the foot of the stairs. The sound of the steps changed when the person reached the bottom. There was a gritty sound, smooth soles on dirty concrete. The steps were coming toward her. Alice panicked but there was nothing she could do. She could not get up, she could not fight back. She tried to scream but the pain of opening her mouth was excruciating.
The figure stepped into the light and smiled down at her.
“Hello, Alice,” the man said.
Alice’s heart sank. Tears welled in her eyes.
“Boyd,” she whispered.
CHAPTER 32
Jim’s Home
Russell County, Virginia
Two hours prior to the appointed time, Jim gathered his gear into a small daypack. It was a hot, sunny day and he packed four bottles of cold spring water, his radio, and a spare set of batteries for the trip. It was the same radio he’d taken from the ranger station on Mount Rogers. It seemed like years ago that they’d made that journey, although only a few days had passed. He took his spotting scope because he wanted to examine their valley from higher ground. When he’d driven Randi home, he’d seen indications of what had gone on in his absence, but he’d not gone out again since; there had been too much to do at home. The most important thing being simply basking in the love of his family. It was what he had walked hundreds of miles for. It was what he’d killed for.
The final gear he gathered was his weapons. He could not imagine that in the immediate future he and his weapons would be far apart. The world was too violent now, the personal risk too high, to be unable to defend yourself. He took the M-4, his Beretta pistol, the SOG Twitch pocketknife, and a Gerber fixed-blade knife taped to the strap of his pack. In the back of his mind, he thought that he was going to need to have a conversation with his wife about weapons in the future. Like many men, he loved guns and knives. Like many men, he sometimes bought more of them than he actually told his wife about. While she and Pete had done such a good job of transporting the weapons to the cave for safety, they had only taken the weapons they knew about. Jim had other guns stored in various locations. Those guns were going to have to come out of hiding and then Jim would have some explaining to do. Somehow, with the current state of the world, Jim didn’t anticipate too much argument about having a few extra guns and a few extra cases of ammunition.
Pete had asked to come along on this short trip, and Jim saw no problem with that. Things at the house had been quiet since they’d dealt with Charlie Rakes. They’d seen people on the road occasionally but there’d been no trouble. The trailer park that had been such a source of worry now sat empty, home to only a few feral cats and a herd of rats.
Jim had walked to Henry’s house the day after he’d dropped Randi off and found it abandoned, as he’d hoped. Henry’s truck was gone and the house had been ransacked of all useful items, but the body of Charlie Rakes lay where Jim had dropped him. He was now in a condition offensive to both eye and nose, bloated and gnawed upon. Jim assumed that if he gave it a week under these warm and humid circumstances, there would be nothing left but a blackened crust on the dirt floor. Maybe he would come back then and see if he could find any remaining diesel fuel for his truck. He knew that Henry would not have minded. When Jim had left Henry’s barn that day, he’d left the doors wide open to give coyotes easier access the decaying corpse.
Jim and Pete climbed the steep shoulder of Clinch Mountain using logging roads, eventually reaching the rocky crest near the old fire tower. It was an area now known as The Channels, named for the polished stone passages cut by ancient seas hundreds of millions of years ago. To walk through The Channels was like walking through a cave with no roof. When you climbed to the top of the rocks, you could see for hundreds of miles. People had once come from all over the country to hike there and see this geological feature. Now, with recreational walking probably a thing of the past, this scene would be a rare treat reserved for the strong hunter or explorer who came upon this trail and wondered where it led. It may even become the lodge of some half-crazed man of the mountains, unable to accept the world as he now found it, determined to discover a burrow where he might live out his days in separateness.
Jim and Pete climbed a rock perch near the decaying fire warden’s shack. The disintegrating shack had once been the summer duty station of a young man named Jack Kestner, who would go on to become a newspaper reporter. His articles about Clinch Mountain and his love for The Channels would become a driving force for its preservation. Jim could not visit the site without thinking of the teenage fire warden spending his summer in such isolation, braving intense summer thunderstorms alone on this mountain peak. Children these days, and most adults, were not cut from that same stuff.
From the rocks where they sat, Jim and Pete could see Beartown Mountain, Paintlick Mountain, and House and Barn Mountain. Hopefully, somewhere among all those peaks, Gary sat with his radio.
“Gary, this is Jim, do you copy?”
The reply came almost immediately. “Jim, it’s Gary. Reading you loud and clear.”
Jim grinned. “I won’t say I missed you guys, but it’s damn good to hear your voice.”
“Randi, you with us?” Gary asked.
“I’m here,” Randi said. “There’s a little static, but I’m getting most of it.”
“Gary, I know Randi’s doing okay because I dropped her off, how are things up your way?”
There was a hesitation. “Tolerable, Jim, but far from ideal.”
“Was everyone okay when you got home?” Randi asked.
“Everyone’s fine,” Gary said. “We’re too darn close to town. There was a lot that went on while I was gone.”
“Problems with the neighbors?” Jim asked. “We had a few of those as well.”
“Definitely,” Gary said. “I’m right next door to a public housing complex and it’s been a constant problem. My son-in-law kept everyone safe while I was gone, but our gardens were raided and my outbuildings have been broken into. I lost my generator, my solar equipment, my chainsaw, and most of my tools. There was no way they could watch everything.”
Jim knew that one of Gary’s three daughters lived next door. That would mean one large family trying to guard two properties, not an easy proposition.
“Are things safe, Gary?”
There was a long pause.
“For now.”
“Do you need help?” Jim asked.
There was another pause.
“My plan had always been to bug in instead of bug out,” Gary said. “I’m having second thoughts, now. The problem is my location. I don’t think we can bug in here. It will be a constant battle and we don’t have the numbers to keep a constant patrol. I bought this place before I became interested in preparedness. If I knew then what I know now, I would have kept looking.”
“We might need to look at joining our groups,” Jim offered. “There are a lot of empty houses in my valley. I’ll try to speak with what neighbors are left. I’m sure we can come up with something.”
“Give me some time to talk to my family, Jim. Can we do this again forty-eight hours from now?”
“We can,” Jim said. “All good with you Randi?”
“We’re fine, Jim. My dad is going to bring me down there tomorrow to check on your mom.”
“Good. I’ll see you then. Be careful.”
They all signed off and Jim stowed his radio in his pack. The whole time that Jim was on the radio, Pete sat on a tall rock, reclined against his pack, staring out at the hills that surrounded them. A favorite writer of Jim’s had once described the Appalachian Mountains as looking like a rug that had been kicked up. Jim had always thought that to be about as accurate a description as he’d ever heard.
“What are you looking at, Pete?”
“The hills,” he said. “It’s amazing to think of all the things that have gone on down there in that valley. There was probably a day when you could sit in this same spot and see wooly mammoths walking in those fields and drinking from our creek. Then one day they were gone and it was the Native Americans living down there in their villages. Then it was us, riding tractors and raising cows and living in houses. I was just imagining what would be next.”
Jim smiled. He had sat on that same rock and thought those same thoughts. There must be something about that spot that invited reflection, or maybe it just stood as a balcony overlooking this borrowed world, allowing you to look down on the stage of man and see all the possibilities.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Franklin Horton lives and writes in the mountains of southwestern Virginia. He attended Virginia Intermont College and Virginia Commonwealth University. He holds a B.A. in English. In his spare time he pursues outdoor adventures with his wife and two children, including camping, kayaking, backpacking, mountain biking, and shooting. His first published novel, The Borrowed World, was published in May of 2015 and quickly became an Amazon bestseller. You can follow him online at www.franklinhorton.com.
