Against the Grain (3 page)

Chapter 3

It was around
noon when I caught the faint smell of wood smoke. By now I could have hiked back here blindfolded, but it was nice to have the little reminder that we were near. I stopped us in a shallow depression of the woods and rocks, a typical terrain feature that dotted this whole area. I wasn’t actually trying to sneak up on anyone and I didn’t want anyone watching to be surprised by two people coming in from the generally safe back side of the property, especially when they were expecting only to see one. I could usually sneak through undetected anyway, but figured this time I should give them a heads up. Pulling the small two way radio from a side pocket of my pack, I called in to the Ranch, telling them our location and number. The surprise at the “Plus one” was evident even over the small speaker in the hand held radio. Nice.

Megan and I continued on another few hundred yards until we could look down and see the back porch of the main family’s house. Breanne and her mother were in the back yard with Nick and Breanne’s two young kids, and a few of the others were ambling around, doing various farm life chores. There were three people bent over in the garden plots, taking advantage of the little bit of rain fall we had last night that loosened the soil just enough for pulling weeds. A couple of guys were out with axes, mauls and wheelbarrows, tending to the endless core of moving firewood from the spot it was chopped, to where it got stacked, then finally to a smaller spot closer to the house for daily use. It was a monotonous, laboring chore that was absolutely necessary.
 

I found it interesting and very telling of human nature that very few of the people here complained to a large degree about the hard and continual work. If I didn’t know any better, I would have thought that while probably only on a subconscious level, everyone actually enjoyed getting out of their city life and getting thrown into a situation where they had control and responsibility for their own continued comfort and survival. Seeing their own hands create something authentic and relative to daily life seemed to be good for the human spirit.
  

There were of course some grumbles and complaints, and some people enjoyed the work more than others. Some obviously missed the conveniences and ease of their old lives, but everyone did value what it was that needed to be done. This was anything but a simple way of life, but the simplicity of hard work showed what people were truly made of. That was maybe why I really liked this family.

“You okay?” I asked Megan while slinging my AK and seeing the trepidation in her body language.  

“I guess so,” s
he answered.

It was a simple question, but the look on her face betrayed her answer.

“You’ll be alright,” I tried to sound reassuring as we started down the little slope toward the house.  

Catching our motion, everyone around the house stopped what they were doing to look up at us as we made our way down.
 Finally and thankfully, Sue went back to attending to her grandchildren. That was at least one less set of eyes that was staring up at us.  

Opening the small gate that was a part of the fence around the back yard, we stepped through and I began the introductions.
 

“Bre, Sue, this is Megan. We met in town and I thought y’all might be able to help her out a bit.”

I caught just the hint of a cocked eyebrow from Breanne, probably at my feigned accent, but her mother stepped up right away.  

“Of course… Megan, I’m Sue and this is my daughter Breanne, and her kids Maddie and Wesley.” This brought the two kids out from their trucks and sand box to come over and say hello. They were excited to see a rare new face around here.

“Are you going to stay with us?” Madelyn asked.

Leave it to a five year old to cut right to the heart of the matter.

“Umm…” Neither Megan nor I had an answer ready, so Sue graciously steered us toward the picnic table.  

“Megan
, you look like you could use a hot meal… will you be joining us?” Sue looked over at me.

“Thanks Sue, not just yet. I wanted to talk to Bre for a minute, and then find Nick.”
 

“Alright,” she said, ushering Megan and the kids inside.

While very motherly to everyone, including me, Sue knew from the last year together that I usually was preoccupied with one thing or another, and that I came and went on my own schedule.

“Yeah we might want to talk for a minute,” Breanne mimicked me sarcastically once the others were out of earshot.
 

Breanne Harris was an intelligent and head strong woman. She was beautiful and passionate, and when she got angry I usually found somewhere else I needed to be. Her tall, thin but athletic frame would rise up and I would swear that her auburn red hair would get straighter and her ashen eyes would shine brighter when she finally decided to unload on someone. We were actually very good friends, but occasionally when she joked with me, I wondered just where the jest really stemmed from. She was a hard person to read.

Back in our younger lives when her husband Nick and I would do something dumb, she would laugh along with us, and she tolerated our bad jokes pretty well too. Even in her home, she accepted my propensity to always be armed, but I never got the feeling that she completely accepted the need for it. I later came to think that it wasn’t me or the world she questioned, but possibly her own role in it.

Over the last year we had spent much more day to day time around each other, and I had seen her un-reluctantly accept the ways of this new life. And where I seemed to flourish when others resisted, she herself had blossomed into a refreshed person of the cold and hard real world we now all lived in.

But now I was facing her one on one and had nowhere to go. I didn’t think it was purely displeasure that I had brought someone back to the Ranch with me, it just had never happened before. Early on we had talked to everyone here very seriously about inviting others to stay. Obviously we’d help where we could, but even if they were an asset to the group, it was asked that all the families got to talk about it first. While loath to admit it, everyone realized that too many friends, relatives, and acquaintances could become a problem in a small group like this. I was sure Breanne’s concern was based on the talks we had all had about this when first setting everything up and getting the individual families settled in. The part where Megan was another attractive young woman I’m sure did not have any significance on the matter whatsoever.  

“So what’s the deal?” Breanne asked, bringing me out of my reminiscing.
 

“I found her in town last night about to be raped by a couple of guys and recognized her… she graduated a year after me.”

Breanne had graduated high school a year before me, which put her two years older than Megan.  

“Oh man, I thought she looked kind of familiar. Did they… did she get hurt?”
she asked.  

“No, she’s okay,” I replied simply.

While we didn’t really talk about the things I had done, Breanne was smart enough to read in between the lines and not press for details.

“She walked from the other side of the state to find the house she grew up in empty, her mom long gone, and then she got jumped to top
it all off,” I continued on.

“You’re not usually one for pity,”
she commented absentmindedly.  

“Yeah well she’s got some medical training and grew up working in a plant nursery too.”

“There it is…” Breanne again semi-mocked me.

I was maybe leaving out a few details and embellishing others, but the truth was that while I thought Megan was a good person, it didn’t hold much of an argument as to why she would be a good addition for the household. Knowing that, I chose my next sentence carefully.

“Hey, if you guys can help get her on her feet and find some work for her to do for a few days around here, I’m sure she’d appreciate it. I know you could use the help.”

She hesitated on this new, factual line of reasoning, and then replied, “Of course we’ll see what we can do. How about you, you need anything?”
 

“Where’s Nick at today?” I asked.

“Out watching over stuff I think. There’s been some noise on the radio so he wanted to make sure we saw anybody coming down the road. Oh hey, your buddy Clint dropped some stuff off for you the other day,” Breanne said and ducked her head inside the back doorway.

“Sweeeeet!” I exaggerated when she reappeared. She had a cheap book bag on one shoulder and a green and gray rifle in her hands.

Clint Fenner was a longtime friend and shooting buddy of mine who just happened to live a few more miles further on down the road. Clint and I had met a very long time ago, his son and I used to play together as kids. When his son left home, Clint and I remained close. Our families spent the holidays together and we hunted and fished and ended up spending some time working together in an official capacity too.  

My grandfather may have been the man who taught me to shoot, but Clint was the one who got me learning and improving, then eventually he found a way to put those skills to use. While I was an amateur garage gunsmith by necessity, a.k.a. lack of funds, Clint was a garage gunsmith pro, just because he loved to do the work himself.
 

I had given him this rifle as a bare bones gun with a bag of parts and he had worked magic on it. Built on another AK action, this 308 caliber Saiga rifle was not your normal marksman’s rifle. Then again, I wasn’t your normal marksman. It had sat in my safe for probably four years as I slowly bought and collected parts to build the short, scoped, mag fed, full power rifle I wanted. In all that time I never did get around to putting the pieces together myself as one thing or another pushed it to the back burner. Finally two months ago, I dusted it off and turned it over to the expert.
 

Being more of a traditionalist and always opting for the longer is better theory, to Clint’s horror and chagrin, I had him chop the barrel down to 18 inches. The length was the perfect balance of weight and handling while still maintaining the velocities needed to optimize the large caliber bullet that would pass through it. The action was smoothed and polished, and the upgraded trigger was set just right, not too heavy, not too light. It was maybe not as rugged as a FAL or HK, and not as accurate as a traditional bolt action rifle, but it also weighed considerably less than most other “battle rifles” and would shoot “minute of man” as well as anything could in a bad situation.

“You shot it yet?” I jokingly asked Breanne.

Part of living in the days we now lived in meant everyone at the Ranch had learned to shoot, and Breanne especially had flourished compared to some of the others. She had shown a natural gift for not just being accurate, but being able to engage her mind and really put a gun to use. She could quickly work out solutions to difficult shots at distance and close in, and she shot with confidence at multiple targets. She didn’t have the long term experience of handling weapons, and maybe didn’t know the finer attributes and manipulations of various types of firearms, but she was a talented and competent shooter.
 

Breanne, like most of the others, had not fired a single round from the time she was a young teenager until just a few months ago. Early on in their lives their dad David had taught all his kids the basics with an old bolt action .22, and then later on with his hunting rifle. Under my renewed tutelage, the others didn’t exactly learn precision marksmanship, more like practical, good enough shooting, but Breanne had taken to it all. I figured it must have given her something to focus on when everything else in the world was so out of focus. Whatever it was, it was clear that she was a natural and she seemed to enjoy being good at it too.

“I put it to my shoulder and tried the trigger a few times, seems nice, but I don’t really know how to use the scope that well,” she told me.  

“Neither do I,” I said looking it over and running the bolt a few times. “I always was decent enough with irons and had good enough eyesight that I didn’t
need
a scope,” I finger quoted, “but this should let me get quicker and more precise shots in at longer ranges. Once I get it broken in and learn to shoot it, I’ll get you behind it and see what you think.”

“That thing is going to be loud as hell isn’t it?” Breanne asked.

“It doesn’t have to be," I unscrewed the flash hider on the end of the barrel. “There should be a suppressor in that bag with the mags and extra parts… but yes, it’s still going to be pretty loud. I just hope the impact doesn’t change too much with the suppressor on it.”

Actually I really hoped that with the suppressor fitted to the front end of the gun, that it wasn’t going to make it feel completely unbalanced.

“Clint said he had sighted it in on his little range and there was no big difference,” Breanne supplied.

“Awesome, I’ll have to hit him up on the CB tonight.”

“Does that mean you’re staying here tonight… with your new friend?” she added.  

I had an open invitation to stay in the spare bedroom of the main house, and I did stay the night every once in a while, but this was one of those times I thought the small tent in my pack may be a better option.