The King of Clayfield - 01 (44 page)

"Nicholas? Judy?"

I went into every room. The living room was the worst, but the rest of the house had damage, too. In the kitchen, the cabinets were all open and empty of food.

I went back outside.

"The house is trashed," I said. "Looks like looters. The food is all gone."

"Were they hurt?"

"I don't know," I said. "Let's drive around and see how many houses are marked. If we find an end to the spray paint, we might find the looters."

"Do we
want
to find them?" Sara said.

"No," I said, "but they should know about the Somervilles."

Every house on Depot Street was marked, as were all of the houses on West Ridgeway
 
and North 16th Street. We found two houses marked on North 15th where it connects to West Ridgeway. We didn't see anyone out, but I was fairly certain they would be working on North 15th that day. It was still early. My own house was just two blocks over, so I headed over there to clear out anything I might want. They'd hit my street eventually, too.

Sara opened the garage door to my house, and I backed
 
the truck
 
in. We'd be able to load it without being bothered.

It felt like I hadn't been
 
there in years; it was
 
like I was in a stranger's home. I went to the sink and turned on the faucet. There was still water.

"We can fill the jugs here," I said. "There's a bottle of bourbon in the pantry, too. Don't let me forget that."

"I see you got that new game system," she said, standing in front of my entertainment center.

"Yeah," I said. "I guess I should have spent that money on canned goods and a Swiss
 
Army Knife."

"It doesn't look like a woman has lived here in a while," Sara said.

"A woman has never lived here," I said. "At least, not with me. Hence the game system.
 
I could never have had one before; my wife would have nagged the hell out of me."

"I would have never done that to you."

"Yeah, well...."
 

"So you've been living alone. Were you taking advantage of being divorced and playing the field?"

I laughed, "If I were a player, you....well, never mind."

She smiled and started filling water jugs.

I went into my bedroom. There were still clothes in my closet, I grabbed a few more things from there and put them on the bed. I heard a low noise from outside.

"Look out the window!" Sara said from the kitchen.

I peeked through the curtains. A UPS truck drove by very slowly. The back door was open, and there were at least two armed men standing in the opening, but I thought I could make out more inside.

I turned and Sara was standing in the doorway.

"No," she said. "Please let them go."

"What?"

"I know you want to talk to them about the Somervilles, but let them go. They don't know we're here. Let's just go back to the stables. I'll stay with you and Jen. I won't be any trouble."

"You're not any trouble, Sara."

"Those people out there could be like those men at Lowes. They could be
 
bad people, and I don't want them to know we're here."

"Okay," I said. "It's okay. But what about the Somervilles?"

"Maybe they got away and went to Blaine's house."

"Alright," I said. "We'll sneak away."

She came into the room and hugged me.

"Thank you," she said. "They scare me more than the sick people."

"Sure," I said.

She looked up at me. I thought she was going to kiss me again.

"I'll finish the water," she said. "See if you can find more containers."

She left me and went back into the kitchen. She'd never been any trouble, yet she was a world of trouble.

When we were sure the men were gone, we left and headed south to Broadway. We'd already accomplished two things on the list--water and alcohol--and it was only 8 a.m.

"I want to drive out toward Belfast," I said. "Jen's friend, Brian--the one with the Porsche--lives out there."

We could see Brian's wind turbine from a few miles away. It was turning slowly. When we got close enough to see the house, I stopped the truck. The house had been burned. It wasn't smoking, so it must have burned days before--probably before or during all the rain. There were three trucks, a four-wheeler, and a motorcycle parked out front. A van was parked crosswise in the entrance to the driveway to block it.

I put the truck in reverse and got away from there.

If the house was burned, and the men at Lowes had Brian's Porsche, there would be no good up there. They were probably still going to try to use the
 
wind turbine somehow. I know I would, if I could.

"Are we going back to the stables now?" Sara asked.

"No," I said. "We'll go ahead and collect the food and other supplies we didn't get the other day.
 
We'll just do our shopping out
 
away from town so we won't run into these people."

"So we're
 
going to go looting, too?"

"You have a lot to learn,
 
my dear," I said. "When we do it, it's called scavenging."

So long as we needed our water jugs filled every few days, we would need to leave the house, and if we left the house, we increased our chances of getting into some sort of trouble. I think we were coming around to Jen's line of thinking; we needed to hunker down for a while. I was going to have to find us another source of water. The cistern at the yellow brick house wouldn't last forever. We needed
 
a water source
 
of our own out at the stables.

Before heading completely away from town, I decided to go to Founder's Farm and Hardware. They were another farm supply store, and they would have chicken feed and tools just like Tractor Supply. I knew they catered to the local Amish community, too, so they might have a wood cook stove.
 
Then it hit me—

"Why didn't we think of that before?" I said aloud.

"What?" Sara asked.

"We should relocate to one of the Amish farms. They're already set up for no electricity. They'll have wood cook stoves and heaters. They'll have hand-pumped wells. It would be perfect."

"But they're out past Belfast," she said. "And I would think that other people would have the same idea."

"We didn't," I said.

"You just did," she replied. "If they haven't thought of it yet, they will as soon as their generators and windmills quit working."

"You're probably right," I said. "But if we can't find a wood cook stove at Founder's then we should drive out there and take a stove from the Amish."

"We should take an Amish," Sara said.

I laughed, but it wasn't a bad idea. If we found an Amish survivor, they would be helpful by teaching us what they knew about living without modern conveniences.

"Yes," I said. "Let's put an Amish on that supply list."

Founder's Farm and Hardware had been in Clayfield for decades. It was tucked away on a side road away from the big chains. It didn't get as much traffic as the other stores, and it had been overlooked by looters.
 
We were able to get
 
the same stuff we'd gotten at Tractor Supply, just more of it. They also had
 
three 40-pound bags of oats. It was for horses, but I figured that like the corn, we could eat it if we had to.
 

We were going to need a truck to haul it all in. We got everything we wanted near the door, and then we went
 
out to the pickup so we could drive around and find a bigger truck.

To the side of the building, where they kept fence posts, landscaping timbers, concrete blocks, and other things that didn't need to be indoors, were several large plastic
 
tanks.
 
I didn't know what their purpose was--maybe to hold
 
large quantities of herbicides or pesticides for farmers to spray on their fields. Regardless of their intended purpose, they
 
would make great cisterns. They were new,
 
so it wasn't like they'd had poisons inside them yet. They even had attachment at the bottom for a hose or spigot.

I was never good at those math problems where we had to find
 
volume, but these tanks were
 
a little over four feet tall and their diameter was around ten feet. They would probably hold several hundred gallons.

"We're getting one
 
of
 
those, too," I said. "We'll need a flatbed truck or a trailer."

"How are we going to lift it?" Sara said.

"We'll worry about that after we find the truck."

I'd seen a flatbed delivery truck parked behind Lowes, but I didn't want to go back over there if I didn't have to. It would probably have a little forklift with it so the delivery driver could unload building materials. That would be helpful, too. It would have really been helpful if I'd followed the masked woman's advice and read up on how to drive a forklift.

Instead, I drove out away from town on Havana Road. We traveled five or six miles before we found what we were looking for. It was an old hay truck parked between a barn and a silo. It was painted powder blue, and it was eaten up with rust.

"It probably won't even run," I said. "It must be fifty years old."

"It'll run," Sara said. "They knew how to make them fifty years ago."

There was a
 
ranch-style house on the same property.

"While we're here, let's
 
see what they have inside," I said.

The doors were locked on the house. We searched for a spare key, but never found one. We wound up
 
breaking a dining room window.
 
I lifted Sara in, and then she opened the door for me.

It was a good score.
 
The family must have just gone to the grocery,
 
because they had enough food to last us for at least
 
two weeks. There was a gun case, too. We found two .22
 
rifles, a 12 gauge shotgun, a .30-30, and my favorite--an AR-15.

"Cool," I said
 
taking it out of the
 
gun cabinet.

"Bad ass,"
 
Sara said. "Let me hold it."

I handed it to her.

"How do I look?" she said, posing with the weapon.

"Like you're holding my gun," I said.

"I don't know," she said, "I seem to remember something
 
about possession being nine-tenths of the law."

"What law?" I said.

"Well," she said, "I guess as long as I hold this,
I
am the law."

I grinned, "Yes, ma'am."

I knelt
 
in front of the cabinet and opened the drawer at the bottom.
 
Half of it was full of ammunition,
 
and the other half had
 
two handguns--a Glock 9mm and a .45 revolver, both with holsters.

"Thank God for gun owners," I said, strapping the .45 to my hip.

There were two gun-cleaning kits and a very large, very sharp fixed-blade knife in the cabinet, too. We took it all.

I still hadn't had a real
 
lesson in the use of semi-automatic weapons, but I'd done some reading during our down time when it was raining.
 
I knew how to do it, but I'd never actually done it. Jen would be able to show me how to use the Glock and the AR-15.

"Let's check the garage for gas and kerosene, and then let’s go get the stuff at Founder's."

We loaded everything in the pickup truck. I had to drive it and Sara had to drive the hay truck. The hay truck had a manual transmission. That was another thing I needed to learn how to do. Sara kept telling me how easy it was, so I hopped in. I drove for about a quarter of a mile, grinding the
 
gears. Then
 
the engine stalled. Red-faced, I
 
got out and told
 
Sara to take over.