The Dying Time (Book 1): Impact Page 25

  “I let the livestock loose, couldn’t bring myself to kill them and there’s no one around to leave them too. Left the barn doors open in case they come back. There’s a path behind the barn that leads to a cave we lived in while the winter was on us. Our animals lived there too so you might find them there if not in the barn.

  “One last thing if it isn’t too much trouble. Mabel likes roses. If hers ever bloom again you might put some on her grave. We had a good life here and I wish the same for you.”

  Harry set down the note and brushed a tear from his cheek. “I’ll be glad to honor your request, Jonathon,” he said. He walked around opening windows before heading outside.

  “Sheila! Robby! We’re home!”

  *

  Monument, Colorado

  “How much longer before we head for the Freeholds?” Denise Lachelle asked. She stared past a gap in the plywood covering the broken window at icicles dripping from a spruce bough. Snow was melting as the rain fell, but temperatures at night froze everything and the ice was treacherous.

  “Soon, I think,” Jim Cantrell said and Jacques nodded.

  They had cleared out of Denver as fast as they could travel after rescuing Denise. Keeping a low profile and heading south toward Colorado Springs. But the weather closed in and pushing on would have been fatal so they sought shelter in the closest town.

  “Monument!” Jim snorted, and the others knew what he was thinking. Of all the towns on the front range Monument always had the worst weather. Located almost at the summit of the Palmer divide, a 7,000 foot pass, Monument got clobbered no matter which direction the weather came from. It was the last place Jim would have chosen to sit out the seemingly endless winter but as his friend Michael was always saying, “Beggars can’t be choosers.” And all that crappy weather just might have kept Monument from burning.

  They were just lucky they’d found this place before they froze. The former inhabitants had been crushed when a big Ponderosa pine fell across the cab of their SUV. Jim figured they’d been making a run for it since the back of vehicle was packed with dried beans, rice, flour and canned goods. Dogs had gotten at the bodies and there wasn’t enough left to bury. By the time he and the Lachelles arrived the ground was too frozen anyhow.

  The windows were all broken out of the house and it leaned a mite so the doors were jammed shut, but the metal roof was intact and there was a fireplace in the living room that drew combustion air from outside. There was even a large supply of firewood and a chess set.

  They boarded up the broken windows to keep the dogs and rats out, though the rats weren’t bad, baked in a Dutch oven with some dehydrated veggies. Roasted, they were tough, stringy and just barely edible. Fortunately there were several cases of spam and tuna in the SUV. Nevertheless they kept themselves on tight rations since they didn’t know how long they had to make the food last. Compared to most others they had it easy, though Jim spent too much time grieving over Jill.

  *

  “You play like Michael,” Jim said, forking the white bishop and King with a knight. “Check.”

  “Wat you mean?” Jacques slipped back into patois while concentrating on how to extricate his King without mate.

  “He means you always attack, attack, attack,” Denise said. “You try to keep your opponent off balance with lightning raids and bold forays, but you can’t play defense for shit.”

  Jim chuckled and Jacques asked, “How you get so good?” He and Denise had been playing Jim throughout the long winter and while they were getting closer they’d never beaten him yet.

  “Self-defense,” Jim said. “Seriously. Michael and I learned to play when we were ten and whether he had white or black he’d hit me with everything he had. His opening game was truly terrifying. A real blitzkrieg. I had to learn defense and a patient game just to survive. And I’m not that good. You’re just that bad.”

  Jacques laughed and studied the board carefully.

  “Two moves to mate, right?”

  “Way I see it,” Jim admitted.

  Jacques sighed and toppled his King over, resigning. Jim’s end game was deadly.

  Denise looked back out the window and a flash of motion caught her eye. “There’s something out there,” she said and Jacques was at her side in a blink, rifle in hand.

  Jim used the barrel of his pistol to push a curtain aside and look out a gap. “Where?” he whispered.

  “In the big spruce,” she replied. “I was watching the icicles drip when--there it is! Oh, my God, it’s a bird!”

  The Raven floated to the ground, jet black wings spread wide. It landed by the small puddle and took a cautious sip, it’s head flicking this way and that.

  “Caw!” it screeched, then bounded into the air.

  “A bird,” Denise repeated, her hushed tone indicative of the miracle. If such could survive then surely anything was possible, even getting home to the Freeholds.

  Chapter 27: Refugees and Invasion

  The Freeholds

  “My God,” Ellen Whitebear whispered.

  She'd never seen anything like it. They almost filled the valley. She shook her head in disbelief, but the seemingly endless string of refugees didn't disappear.

  Others had come to the Freeholds for refuge. Individuals and small groups, one or two families, but this! How could they hope to cope with this! They were already stretched so thin survival was iffy.

  No matter. The human tide threatening to engulf the Freeholds would eat up their reserves of food in less than a day.

  “What the hell are we going to do?” Michael asked from the hastily erected barricade beside her.

  Before she could answer the ominous snick-click of a shotgun being cocked reached her ears.

  “None of that, Randy,” she said to Randy McKinley, who lowered the barrel. Everyone manning the barricade was edgy, but the people walking and stumbling toward them looked more pitiful than dangerous.

  “They're starving,” Michael said.

  And it was true. Everyone was emaciated, especially the children, their clothing in tatters. Only a few weapons were visible in the approaching crowd. Her heart went out to them at the same time she hardened it. As much as she wanted to let them all in, to feed and shelter them, she understood the hard truth. If she and her neighbors even tried to save them all, they would die with the refugees. Too many people. Too few resources. A heartrending story, ancient as time itself. Still, they could help some.

  “Triage,” she whispered, a single tear tracing a path down her cheek.

  “Maybe we can help them homestead around Buena Vista or Salida?” Michael said.

  “Look at the condition they’re in, Michael. They’re too weak. They’d die before their crops came up.” She shook her head, her eyes downcast. “No,” She said, her voice firm. “We’ll save as many as we think can help us and offer to help resettle the rest.”

  *

  “You can't do this!” The man waved his arms back toward his family. “My children are starving.”

  Ellen Whitebear felt like she was dying inside, but she met his desperate look and held it.

  “I truly am sorry--”

  “Please!” he begged, falling to his knees. “We can't go back to Denver. You don't know what it's like there. The gangs, thugs really...” He shuddered and lowered his voice. “They're eating us!”

  “Please get up Mister...” Why did she ask that? She really didn't want to know his name. So far they'd only admitted eight families out of more than one hundred and those rejected were turning sullen.

  “Haley,” the man replied shakily. “Don Haley. I was a lawyer. I don't know how to live in these mountains. I thought hunting was a sport for barbarians.” He shrugged helplessly.

  “Don,” Michael Whitebear stepped in. “Do you have any other skills? It's a blue-collar world now. We need construction workers, farmers, machinists, craftsmen, butchers--”

  “My hobby was hydroponics,” Don Haley interrupted, sensing a ray of hope. “I grew o
rnamental house plants but I could grow food if I had light and some fertilizer. I mean, I have a green thumb and the principles are the same.”

  Ellen looked at the other members of the selection committee. Many heads, a majority, were nodding. If it didn't stop raining soon they'd all have to learn to grow food in water. And the man was obviously honest. Several had tried to lie their way in.

  “Welcome to the Freeholds Mr. Haley.” And as the grateful man and his family were allowed past the barricade she turned back to the crowd and said, “Next!”

  A large man, gaunt but still strong, set down the handles of a two-wheel cart and stepped forward, erect, head held high. He was alone.

  “Emil Smolensky, Master Sergeant, United States Army, retired,” he announced. “I'm a gunsmith. There's powder, primers, casings, and bullet molds.” He gestured to his cart. “And more where that came from.”

  “We’ve been waiting for someone like you, Mr. Smolensky,” Ellen said without a glance at the others in the selection committee. Even with a prosthetic leg Emil Smolensky was obviously Freeholds material.

  “By the way,” Emil said as he hoisted his cart and marched past. “Those cannibals down in town know about you. They'll be coming. I don't know how much ammunition you have stockpiled but you'd better make it a priority.”

  “He’s right you know,” said a familiar voice.

  Ellen gasped and Michael spun back toward the crowd, a smile as big as Pike’s Peak stretching across his face. Jim Cantrell, Jacques and Denise Lachelle stepped from the throng and into joyous hugs.

  “You always could make an entrance,” Ellen said, kissing Jim’s cheek.

  “Once a performer…” he said with a shrug. “But seriously, Emil was more right than he knows. Viper has four or five thousand to feed and food is low in Denver. He’ll probably head for Colorado Springs first, but that’d just be a detour on his way here.”

  “He’s called Viper?” Michael asked.

  “And other things less flattering,” Jim replied. “But we’ll cover that later. We all need food and Denise needs a doctor?”

  Michael jerked a thumb over his shoulder and said, “See Doctor Fariq in the medical tent and the soup kitchen’s open at the Meeting House.”

  “Where’s Jill?” Michael almost asked, but he knew deep down she’d be with Jim if she was alive.

  As they started off, Denise called back, “Viper will be here soon!”

  Great, Michael thought. As if we don't have enough problems. He turned to Ellen, but she was already talking to the next applicant, concentrating on the immediate problem, refusing to get sidetracked. His thoughts turned to maintaining some semblance of order among the mob of rejects. It wouldn't take much for them to turn violent.

  *

  The Refugee Camp

  “Alexi,” Ramona Federov asked, “what will we do now?”

  Alexi Federov glared through the flames of their tiny campfire into the darkness and rain at the mouth of the mine. Beyond that darkness was the Freeholds, the Promised Land that spurned them.

  “I must think on that, Ramona.” And when she opened her mouth to say something else his anger flared and he slapped her.

  Maybe they should have stayed in Denver. No! They would have all died there. His job with the Fire Department had vanished when government collapsed. Even then his unit fought the blazes for almost a week, expecting help from the outside to arrive any day. But help never came. When the quakes shattered the mains and the water gave out the battle became pointless.

  He and his men went home to try to help their own families. In that he’d been lucky. Their house, built in the fifties during the atomic war scares, featured a fallout shelter that the previous owner kept stocked and maintained. It was there they hid while cannibal gangs ransacked the house looking for food, slaves, and fresh meat.

  They escaped detection twice before their supplies ran out. Forced from their home out into the cold and dark of this vicious new world Alexi, Ramona and their three children fled west, joining hundreds of other refugees who were slowly learning that no one wanted them, no one would help them. They were just another problem to people who already had more than they could handle.

  They were forced at gunpoint to edge past barricades at Golden and Idaho Springs. Georgetown was the last straw. The locals fired at them, shouting to keep moving, herding them with rifle butts and threats off I-70 and on to a narrow ruin of a track that led south over Guanella pass.

  They tried to return and the locals shot into them, killing Alexi’s son Pietr among others, turning them back into the mountains. They forged ever upward over the pass through waist deep snow. As they climbed they died. Exposure. Starvation. Avalanche.

  Some fashioned snowshoes from evergreen branches and the others soon caught on, allowing them to go a little faster. But now they were too weak. First their thoughts turned toward eating their dead. Then survival drove them to do it, chewing slowly, eyes averted in silent shame.

  They crested the pass above timberline and started down the South side. Here the trees were charred stumps, the forest incinerated. Finding firewood became a challenge, then frustrating, finally impossible. Frostbitten fingers fumbled at the simplest tasks. And though they were still dying, they weren’t dying fast enough to feed everyone. Starved eyes began drifting to those who were weakest, weighing the life left in them. Why don’t you die so I can live?

  Those among them who had no families to protect them at night disappeared.

  Finally, they wandered out into the valley of the North Platte River at the foot of Kenosha pass. The town of Grant, straddling highway 285, greeted them with structures half-burned, but repairable, its only inhabitants wind and ash. In unburned willows by the river they had a steady supply of fuel wood. By melting river ice they had water.

  With the strength of the desperate they patched holes in the Grant Hotel and moved in to wait out the winter. Singed tins from the restaurant tasted like manna from heaven. But in the end blind luck kept them alive when Alexi stumbled upon a herd of deer lying broken at the foot of a precipice. God only knew how the mule deer got there--fleeing from a predator or possibly a storm, but the Federov’s and their colleagues in hardship didn’t care. They built a fire and feasted on half-thawed venison.

  Throughout the endless winter they held on, growing thinner, dying. When spring arrived only nine people were still alive and none of those were children.

  As the weather warmed and endless snow turned to endless rain more refugees drifted through until the tide of homeless rose higher than the river. Hundreds, then thousands fled Denver and among them a few whispered of a magic place. A place where people still lived in heated homes, grew food in greenhouses, raised livestock, and produced hydroelectricity from the river and natural gas from compost piles. A place where you could go to bed with a full belly. A place where you could be safe. A place called the Freeholds. A siren song of hope.

  They’d seen it on TV. It must be true.

  *

  Alexi Federov, whose Russian accent thickened under stress, smashed one fist into his other palm and glowered through unruly locks of black hair, some plastered to his skull from the unrelenting rain. The crowd he faced was growing by the minute. It had been raining so long everyone ignored it.

  “They think they can condemn us to die? Who elected them God? We ask only that they stop being selfish and share their bounty with us.”

  He spread his arms to the masses and stood tall on his boulder/soapbox. “We came in good faith, asking only for what is rightfully ours, asking only for that which no human being should deny another. Food and shelter. But do they offer food? No. Shelter? No. Instead they say they will help us build homesteads someplace many miles from here. And how many of us will survive that journey? And how many will be alive for the first harvest?”

  He pointed to the barricade. “They only want for us to go away and die without bothering them.”

  He paused, seeking the mood of the crowd a
nd reading anger.

  “WILL WE?” He roared.

  “NO!” Cries and head shaking came from those spread before him.

  “Instead of helping they greet us with guns and barricades! They humiliate us with interviews. You over there. You are worth saving. The rest of you kindly go away and die.”

  The taste was so bitter he spat.

  Alexi threw out his hand, index finger pointing, like a master dismissing a slave. “You go die. And you. Oh! You’re a doctor. Well, we have food for you. Come on in. But you. I’m sorry you’re just a fireman and we already have too many firemen. We’re very nice people you see, but we just don’t have enough food for all of you.

  “That blonde witch says this mounted on a horse that would feed ten of us for a month!”

  The crowd rumbled.

  “Will you let them kill your children?”

  “No!” the crowd growled.

  “Of course not.” Alexi clapped his hands together and silence reigned. “I think they should have been better Christians. Don’t you agree?”

  “Yes!”

  “And since they were not, I think we will kill them and take what they have, okay?”

  “YES!” the crowd roared.

  He waved his arms for silence until they settled down.

  “But this will not be easy. They are armed and nervous about us. They wonder what we will do.”

  He smiled broadly and said, “I have a plan.”

  *

  Aaron Goldstein didn’t bother to wipe the grease off his palms when he shook hands with Terrel Johnson because Terrel’s were just as dirty. The small, wiry Jew, a former stunt pilot and the large black helicopter pilot/mechanic had just finished overhauling the engine in Jim Cantrell’s gyrocopter. A gasoline powered generator chugged away in the background powering the single overhead light by which they worked.