Against the Grain (19 page)

“Later,” I dismissed easily.

“It looks deep… might leave a scar,” she grabbed my chin and turned my head to get a better look at the minor wound.

“Bre,” I laughed, “I don’t think I was ever going to go to my grave all dressed up and pretty.”
  

Poking through what was left of the Bug’s contents there was not much to salvage. Even the stock of the old bolt shotgun in the back seat had been hit by our gunfire. The old and cheap looking AR15 that the guy in the passenger seat had used to shoot at us with was a gooey mess. One spare twenty round magazine, two boxes worth of shells that had been spilled on the floor, one nearly empty pack of mini cigars and a red plastic gas can that was half full of a putrid smelling mix was all I could find.

There were no wallets or papers with any sort of addresses on them to tell me if these guys were from around here or if they had indeed followed us from the day before. Frustratingly, there wasn’t really anything at all that gave me one clue or another about who they were or where they came from. By their lack of supplies, all I could really guess at was that they were holed up and camping somewhere within driving distance. With no food or sleeping bags with them, that was as much as I could deduce.  

“Smoke?” I offered one of the scavenged cigarettos through clenched teeth as I bounded up to join Breanne sitting on the tailgate of the 4Runner.

“So this is what you’re really like after sex isn’t it?” she said sarcastically, unwrapping one of the cheap and dried out little cigars.  

“This is my favorite time of any day, the part where I’m still alive… you’ve really gotta learn to enjoy the little things in life,” I smiled, leaning back and getting comfortable.

We sat there together, taking in the peaceful scenery, temporarily ignoring and otherwise oblivious to the carnage that was so near to us. Neither of us spoke or even thought that much, it was just a serene moment in a setting that was anything but.   

"Aren’t you ever afraid or lonely out here, being on your own, and then doing this stuff?" Breanne broke the silence.

I wasn’t surprised by her question, although I didn’t really have an answer for it either.  

“Yes and no. You more than anybody know what I’ve lost… Then I almost get killed everyday from starvation, disease, a stupid mistake out of sleep deprivation, or by a prick with a gun. I might not be able to give you my metaphysical reason to live, but I don’t have a reason to just roll over and die either.”
 

She thought about that for a moment then almost to herself muttered, “Damnit I don’t know if I should pity you or envy you sometimes. I don’t know what to even think anymore.”

“Don’t think about it, you’ll sleep better at night, just like everyone else does,” I smiled again and bumped her shoulder playfully with my own. “It’s probably one of the healthier things to keep bottled up inside of you… at least that’s what I do.”

We sat quietly again for a few more minutes until the crappy cigars burned low and the errands of the day came back to the forefront of our minds.

“What do you want to do with the bodies?” Breanne asked.

“Screw ‘em… Give the buzzards something to gnaw on,” I replied with just a hint of malice.
 

The rest of the day we spent at the three nearest neighbor’s houses recovering anything that could be of use to us or the soon to be relocated family. It was well into the afternoon when we rattled up to the gate with the newly borrowed trailer in tow. It must have been Jake’s turn at the lookout position overlooking the road and we could hear him laughing over the radio when I checked in as we pulled up. Apparently he found something funny with the sight of Andrews beloved
Toyota missing a passenger door.

“So how’d that go?” Derek greeting us after directing the trailer we had towed back to a spot where it could be easily loaded from, then looking at the newly spider cracked windshield.
 

“Same as usual,” Breanne answered him with another roll of her eyes.
 

“You making friends again?” He punched me lightly in the shoulder.

“Yeah something like that… We’re minus two assholes back on the road to the south,” I told him and tossed the two newly acquired long guns on the front lawn. “And somebody’s gone through the neighbor’s places,” I changed the subject slightly and looked up at Stan as he came out of the front door with a bin full of stuff to be loaded.  

“What do you mean?” Stan wrinkled his brow.

“Pantry’s were raided, fuel drained out of everything; we weren’t able to find much to bring back.”  

“Was it the ones you ran into?” Derek jumped to the easy answer.
 

“Could’ve been, I don’t think so though. I have a feeling these two were the guys Bre and I saw last night. They might have followed us, but something tells me it wasn’t them at the neighbor’s places.”

I wasn’t going to let on that I had now pretty much figured out how RJ and Stan had kept their family supplied out here, even after being berated by Stan for suggesting we do the very same thing.

“Well if you guys are okay then why don’t you come inside and rest for minute and have something to eat,” Karen suggested, trying to look out for our best interest.
 

“No time, too much to get done. How’s it been going here?” I asked them all.

“Actually pretty good; we’ve got most the house stuff packed up, just need to get the trailers hooked up and start loading them up,” Derek said before Karen took over again.

“We’ll finish off the last minute stuff in the morning, then we just have to load the animals and their stuff, and then…” she trailed off.

Karen was doing an excellent job of mediating for her family, but even she was slow to plainly speak of abandoning this place. They might have known the reality of needing to leave, but this was still their home.

“Have we given any thought to dinner tonight?” Breanne asked her.

“Drew and RJ are down getting some fish now,” Derek supplied.

“…yeah, alright.”

I was actually excited at the prospect of the drastic change in meals, but I somehow had a hard time justifying two guys sitting at the edge of a lake fishing when we had so much work to do.  

“What do you want to do about a lookout at the road tonight?” Breanne asked me quietly when we walked over to retrieve our bags from the 4Runner.
 

“I’d like to try to get as much packing done as we can, even if we have to do it by candlelight…and I don’t know about you, but I’d love to kick my boots off tonight and have some fun for a change.”

“Hmmm, you want to do that right here or a little more privately out at the road?” Tiffany asked mischievously from the front door.

Everyone else was busy going back and forth with boxes and bags of stuff to be loaded, and I erroneously had thought that no one had been listening.
 

I noticed Breanne stiffen slightly at the naturally flirtatious nature between the two of us, but Tiffany had caught me off guard and I didn’t try to smother my quick laugh.
 

“We can probably get away with no watch out there tonight. A little fish fry, and god willing if there is a drop of booze left anywhere around this place, it would go a long way,” I said to both of the women.
 

“We actually might be able to do something about that,” Tiffany said thoughtfully and retreated back into the house for another load of stuff to be loaded and moved.

“You might want to be careful with that,” Breanne cautioned once she was sure Tiffany, and everyone else, were really out of ear shot and we had started walking back towards the trucks.

This was really not something I was in the mood to talk about, especially with her right now, but it looked like I was going to have to.

“I know, its just old habits with her, really meaningless… but I do know the problems this type of thing could cause,” I looked around again to make sure we were away from prying eyes and brushed a thin streak of hair away from her face. “We are just barely hanging on in a fragile enough society and this type of thing could tear a group apart.”

I chose the words deliberately, trying not to ramp up the very dangerous game being played between us. The air was electric and to give in to the ever growing indulgent temptation would have been not just easy, but justifiable.

It wasn’t as simple as saying this was something I wanted or didn’t want, it wasn’t as clear cut or defined as that. I was as much of a victim as she was of succumbing to the situation we found ourselves in. Neither of us could deny that there was a connection between us, but the bigger picture of her family, my friends, played a more important part in everything than listening to our own selfish desires... like possible happiness.

Only a relative maturity that belied the situation itself kept us in check. We were each able to look into the other’s eyes, smile, and shake our heads in resigned understanding. We had come to the silent consensus that although what was going on was possibly just the result of a victim of circumstance, what we wanted was not to be in this lifetime. “Maybe in the next one though,” we said to each other silently.

For the next hour we helped pack and load and were inside trying to make a list of what the empty houses had, so as to not bring any extra items, when we heard a sudden long stream of expletives coming from the front yard.  

“Drew’s back,” I said without looking up from my pad of paper.

“Should we go out there?” Breanne asked with her eyes still closed. She was sitting on the floor with her head back against the wall, arms draped lazily across her bent knees, and taking advantage of the small moment of peacefulness.

“I wouldn’t,” Derek peered through the drapes of the front window.

Chapter 19

“You guys got lit up just a few miles from here?”
 

I had pulled RJ aside to talk with him privately away from all the others. I was hoping to glean a little, for lack of a better word, “better” information, than what we had been hearing and seeing.
 

“Yeah and I wanted to get your take on it. There was nothing with an address or anything else on it in their car. They didn’t have any supplies to speak of, and we didn’t find anything fresh at any of the neighbor’s houses, so I’m trying to figure out where these guys came from. You and Stan, away from the others, haven’t seen anything like these two before, have you?”

“Not for a long time. We killed some guys that were headed up to the Burke’s place a while ago, back when people were still using the roads, but it’s been six months since we’ve seen anyone walking, riding, driving… anything. Before that, we had to turn some families and groups away, and there were a few that thought they could push their way in, but we’ve been alone out here for a long time now.”

That somehow jogged my memory and I dropped my backpack to unzip the top pocket and retrieve the little notebook I had been scribbling in on the drive here.

“I tried to write down the stuff we saw when we came through that little dinky Wilcox rest area town, and I wonder…” I paused as I checked my notes, “nope, nothing on a little blue VW. Course that doesn’t really mean anything. They had to have followed us out here. There’s just no other reason they would be exploring this far out.”

“Um, can I ask you why
you
are out here?” RJ’s question surprised me.

“What do you mean?” I sincerely wasn’t sure what he meant, or worse, where he was going with the question.

“Well from the sounds of it, you guys are set up pretty well back at your houses, why risk it all to come all the way out here?”

“I grew up with these guys,” I answered truthfully. “Derek and I played ball together and were drinking buddies until he left to go fight fires.”
 

“And you knew Tiffany too?”
 

“Sure,
Sydney too. It’s a small town and we all went to school together more or less. Tiffany and I had some of the same classes and we hung out a little bit, but not a big deal,” I downplayed.

“So what’s the deal with you asking her about me then?” RJ finally broached the subject.

“Oh that, I wanted to know your experience and what type of guy you were,” I answered, again being completely truthful.

“Why didn’t just you just ask me then?”

“Mostly because I don’t know you, but I do know her… and I trust her,” I told him frankly. “Have you ever asked a combat vet if they suffered from PTSD?”   

He cocked his head to the side and waited to see where I was going with this, and probably getting ready to punch me right in the jaw too.
 

“Well I don’t figure that waiting till I’m out in the field with someone is the time to find out for myself,” I finished my thought. “If you ask a guy if he suffers from something, he’s either going to lie to you, or get pissed off, and one way or the other, I didn’t want to find out the hard way.”

“The field?” He asked, picking up the one important nugget in my little spiel.  

“I’m thinking about taking off on foot from the convoy on the way back towards the farms to check out a few places. If I decide to do it, would you be up for the trip?”

“Dude no offense, but I don’t know you either. I’m not going out in the woods alone with someone I don’t know… or trust.”

“Exactly, and I’m glad to hear it,” I said, again answering the question of why I had been talking to Tiffany about him. “I feel the same way, but really it would be an easy and low key hike. I kind of want to check out a few spots, specifically a family I used to know, and then maybe get lucky and shoot a deer or something on the way back to meet up with everyone else.”
 

“Just what was it you did before all this anyway? Army?” He asked me, starting to warm to the idea.

“I just shuffled papers for work most the time,” I tried to sound indifferent, testing to see what he would take on faith and what he needed an answer for.

“Oh so a REMF
POG?” he said with exaggerated loathing.   

“No, I never served.”
 

“Oh come on, you obviously have experience, who were you with?”

“Look, let’s just say I played a lot of paintball okay?” I joked one last time.

His look told me that if I wanted his help, I was going to have to give him something more to go on. “How well do you know your post war history for the last fifty years or so?”
 

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“You know about Korea, Vietnam, both Iraq’s… maybe even Bosnia, North and South Africa, the Latin American conflicts… well nobody ever really hears what happens after the main force troops leave those places.”

He thought about it for a moment then replied, “And that’s where you come in?”
 

“That’s where the guys that I used to run around with came in… in a manner of speaking.”
  

“Agency spook then?” he again summarized.
 

“Hell no, those guys screw up just getting us into wars, and they don’t give a crap about what happens after.”
Or so I had read in a book one time...
“We did some stuff with mostly the Sheriff's and Border Patrol but played with some Marshall’s, a little Homeland Security...”  

“So what, like mercenaries?”

“No, mercs are psychos, and they got paid a hell of a lot better. It just ended up that I was someone that the different departments could put to use. We did some instructing and went to a couple different schools, and then when the locals or other agencies needed us, we rolled in and helped out… quietly.”  

“And I’m guessing that Stan doesn’t know any of this does he?”

It looked as if RJ was starting to get the picture and put some of the puzzle pieces together.

“No, I’m still just some delinquent high school punk in his eyes, but that’s between him and me so if you could keep this to yourself, I’d appreciate it,” I confided in him and got us back on track. “Anyway, I haven’t decided yet on dropping out and scouting around or not, and I haven’t mentioned it to the others either… so if I do and you want to tag along, keep your gear handy.”

The open campfire that evening was a bittersweet event. The meal of fresh fish and grilled vegetables from the garden was excellent, and the stories were mournfully cheerful. As Tiffany had hinted at earlier in the day, somehow, someway, a quart of pure moonshine from a mason jar was offered to anyone willing to partake and subject themselves to it.  

Most everyone from the Meehan family shared an account of growing up out at this house. Even Stan told some heartfelt and moving anecdotes from the kid’s early lives. There was a loll in the conversation when Tiffany broke the quiet with a question to the group.

“Can anyone here play the guitar at all? I found Sydney’s guitar in her room today, does anyone know how to play?”

“Jake? Drew? You guys feel up to it?” I asked of our resident ex (wannabe) rock stars.
 

The two took turns needling for a while and tried singing some, but surprisingly to even his own family; it was Stan who seemed to be the most talented. He strummed a few notes and it took me a second to realize that I recognized and remembered the song he was playing. I’m sure it was just blind dumb luck, but the song he was playing strangely captured some of the strife I had been going through for the last couple days.
 

His fingers stumbled when my voice joined in the song, my eyes staying fixated, staring into the fire. He caught up and kept going until I finished the part of the song that I knew the best.
 

“You know Johnny Cash?” he looked across the fire at me.

“Nope, but I know Dave Matthews,” I antagonized him.  

Actually I knew them both and had never really known why it was that the song Long Black Veil had always spoke to me like it had. It was an old duet from Johnny Cash’s days about a man wrongly accused of murder, and unwilling to defend himself to keep secret the affair he and his best friend’s wife were having.
 

Once finished, I kept my eyes down, hoping it wasn’t obvious that I was avoiding eye contact with anyone else around the fire. It was time to toss another log on the fire and another wall across my psyche.
   

The next morning was an early start for all of us. We had a lot left to finish before we could head out on the road and I was doing a final walk around the property to see if there was anything else that I thought should be included in the move. Just down the hill from where I was surveying, I saw
Sandy coming up from collecting the morning’s eggs with Stan trailing not far behind her. I continued walking to meet them half way, when something behind the garden shed caught my attention.

“
Sandy, please tell me that is what I think it is,” I asked when she got closer.

“Of course it is; we’re Irish,” she said easily, as if the statement was an all encompassing answer to any non-notable question.
 

“Does it work?”

“Sure, but we haven’t used it for a while; couldn’t spare the potatoes and sugar and stuff,” she answered.

Stan had caught up to us now and was standing close by, listening in.
 

“If we have the room, we have got to take this with us. It would be huge for trading or just … we have got to take this with us,” I told them excitedly.

Sandy gave me a motherly good natured look, and said simply, “I’ll see if RJ and Derek can get it moved before we get the animals loaded.”

Then leaving Stan standing beside me, she continued walking up the little hill.
 

“You guys have a still.”

The possibilities this opened up were making me want to jump up and down. Stan the hard line, disapproving father and retired Air Marshall stood there studying me in all my wonder for an extra moment, then shrugged and repeated his wife’s answer of “We're Irish,” then followed Sandy back to the house with her basket of eggs.

It took another five long hours until it looked like we may be ready to get on the road… in another hour. I was personally glad that as we got ready for the return trip, I wasn’t being bombarded with questions and I had a little time to myself. I had my map and notepad out and had been examining the routes to get to the other places that I had wanted to explore ever since we started out on this trip the first time around.

“You still want to break off from the herd?” RJ asked as he walked by my spot on the grass where I was leaning against the side of the old farm house.

“I think so. It looks like everyone is pretty squared away so I shouldn’t be missed.”

“Well if you still want the company, I’m in,” He informed me.

There was a solid tone in his voice that spoke to his history as a professional soldier.
 

“Good deal, let’s go let them know.” I got up slowly from my spot and walked over to the trucks where everyone was busy with the final loading.

“Alright, everybody listen up and gather round, plans have changed… new mission,” I said, tossing my jacket across the hood of Drew’s 4runner, then laying my AK74 on top of it. “We convoy to this point here,” I indicated an intersection on the map of a side road with the main one that we would be traveling on, “where RJ and I will drop out by foot, and you guys continue on the planned route.” Then looking towards RJ, “Gear up for a good six day lurp, meet here in twenty to go over the details.”

“You got it,” he confirmed.

His confidence was music to my ears and I felt a welcome rush of excitement and energy flood through me.

“You’re not coming back with us?” Breanne asked as she pulled my attention to her. “When were you going to tell m…us?”

“I just did. There are a couple of places I still want to check out while we are out this way, like that trading post we passed, and there was one other family I used to know along the way too. With RJ along, I’ll be better off than I have been in years. Plus you’ve got a lot more important stuff to worry about now.”

“Like what?” she asked, taking a few steps away from the others.

“Like getting your convoy home. This is your gig now. You need to get with whoever you want to work with as your Second and set the route, positions, shooters, check your fuel…”

She didn’t look overwhelmed, but she didn’t look too pleased either.

“I don’t know the first thing about…” she tried to argue, and I cut her off.

“Sure you do. Just do what I did, or if you have a different way that will work better, then do that. Whoever you have backing you up just has to do what you did for me. Now you might want to get everybody moving if we’re going to get out of here at a decent time. Don’t worry, you and I’ll talk again before we head out… you’ll be alright.”
 

I wasn’t trying to intentionally distance myself or place a barrier between us, but we each had a lot of important stuff to attend to and not much time to do it in. Our vacation was coming to an end and she obviously knew it too because she jumped into action and started getting her people organized. After one last look between us from across the yard, I moved off behind the garage to get my personal gear in order.