The Quest: Countdown to Armageddon: Book 6 (8 page)

     He was amazed at how the group of survivors was able to make such food by a combination of great recipes and ingenuity.

     The homemade sauce was made extra garlicky to hide the fact that the lasagna noodles were three years old.

     They’d figured out how to make and cure their own cheeses from the single dairy cow the block had.

     The garlic bread was exquisite. So was the fresh salad and homemade dressing.

     “This is food I would have expected to get at a fine restaurant before the blackout,” he proclaimed.

     He was lying, of course.

     But only a little.

     Sara noticed that Rachel and Misty had gone outside to play with the other children, and thought it a good time to find out more about the shooting.

     Scarlett was happy to oblige them.

     “He was found by a passerby while he was picking flowers for Hannah. The passerby used his car’s radio to call dispatch and then disappeared. Apparently he didn’t want to get involved any more than he had to.

     “Rhett told me that initially they tried hard to locate the man, and considered him a prime suspect. But then it dawned on them that if he was the shooter, he’d have just left without reporting his crime.

     “Somebody went by and got Hannah and the girls and took them directly to the hospital. Hannah never left, but we were able to convince her that it was no place for the girls to be.”

     Tom dreaded the answer, but asked the question anyway.

     “What are his chances?”

     “The doctors say not good. He could still die from his head wound, they said. They’re monitoring him closely for blood clots, but if he has a bad one it could kill him. He could get a serious infection, and the only antibiotic they have to treat him is penicillin. And he’s allergic to penicillin.

     “They told Hannah there are a lot of different things working against him. And even if he does survive he is likely to be severely brain damaged.”

     “What did she say?”

     “She told them they were crazy. She said, and I quote, ‘If you think two little bullets are going to kill John Castro, then you don’t know John Castro.’”

-13-

      “Scarlett, you were saying something about flyers earlier. What were you talking about?”

     “Oh, I forgot. Thanks for reminding me. Let me go get Rachel and Misty and they can show you what they’ve been working on. But remember, no more talk of the shooting while they’re around. They’re having a hard enough time coping as it is.”

     A few minutes later when Scarlett returned with the girls, little Misty was beaming. Scarlett had appointed her to do the big reveal. That was only fitting, since she’d hatched the project in the first place. 

     Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. She’d gotten the idea from Zachary when he told her over the ham radio about the business cards he’d altered.

     Sara hugged Misty and said, “Okay, Punkin head, I understand you have something to show us.”

     “Yep. Sure do.”

     From behind her back she produced a handful of handmade signs, drawn in various colors of crayon on white computer paper.

     Each sign proclaimed:

STACEY

McAllister:

Sara Is Looking For You.

Please Flag Down Any

SAPD Vehicle And

Ask the Officer To

Take You to Chief

Mike Martinez

     Sara was touched.

     “Wow, Misty. This is so awesome! And so are you! How in the world did you ever come up with this idea?”

     “Well, Zachary said he was helping in your search by making you cards to hand out to people. I figured if cards would help, then maybe signs would too. So I asked Mr. Rhett if he would hang up the signs for me and he said he would. So every day I make a bunch…”

     Rachel cleared her throat, much louder than she needed to.

     Misty went on.

     “Oops, sorry. Rachel and me make up a bunch every day, and then the next day when he goes in to work, Mr. Rhett takes them and hangs them all over the place. He says he’ll hang them as long as we make them, and we’ve made over three hundred already.”

     Rachel stepped in to clarify.

     “It’s not just us. All the kids on Baker Street are helping out. And our dad, before he got shot, got the chief of police to get involved. He said that if your mom flags down a police car and gets a ride to him, he will personally bring her directly to you, wherever you are.”

     Sara didn’t know quite what to say.

     “You guys are so sweet… thank you so much.”

     Scarlett added her two cents.

     “I asked her why she capitalized each word and she said that’s because it’s how the newspaper used to do its headlines, and she wanted it to look professional. Then I asked why she always made the name ‘Stacey’ so big and… well, you tell her, Punkin.”

     Misty grinned and said, “Well, you know how you can walk past a crowd of people and not even notice any of them, and then someone calls your name real loud and it gets your attention?

     “Well, I thought the same thing might work with signs. I thought if your mom was walking down the street and not paying much attention, she might miss the sign. But if out of the corner of her eye she saw her name in huge letters, it just might get her attention just like someone in a crowd yelling out her name.”

     Sara’s eyes began to moisten. These girls, whose father was lying critically wounded and fighting for his life, thought enough to devote their time to aid in Sara’s search.

     “Oh, you guys… I don’t know how to thank you, with everything else you’ve got going on, to do this for me…”

     Misty didn’t skip a beat.

     “You don’t have to
thank
us, silly. We did it because we love you.”

     Misty ran to Sara for a hug, and Rachel and Scarlett had to wipe their eyes.

     Even Tom, the tough old Texas cowboy, had to turn away and pretend to look out the window.

-14-

     Rhett Butler charged into the room and finally broke up the hug fest.

     “Hey, what’s going on? I was wondering where the horses came from.”

     Scarlett did the introduction.

     Rhett, you remember Sara. This is Tom Haskins, Sara’s friend from Junction, and the Sheriff of Kerr County.

     He hugged Sara and shook Tom’s hand.

     “Nice to meet you, Sheriff.”

     “Call me Tom, please.”

     Scarlett went on.

     “Honey, I was telling Tom and Sara that you were taking me to see Hannah after you ate. Would you mind if they tagged along with us?”

     “No. I don’t mind at all. I can fill you all in on the latest news about the investigation.”

     “Good,” Tom said. “I’d love to hear it.”

     While Rhett ate, Scarlett and Sara took Tom on a tour of Baker Street. Once a strong middle class neighborhood, it now resembled a small commune.

     Half the houses in the two block compound had been torn down. The concrete slabs were still there, the only visible signs that structures had ever existed.

     The slabs were now used to store farm equipment and other miscellaneous things. Wheelbarrows, rakes and hoes, water hoses and plastic baskets once used for laundry, more recently used to harvest crops.

     The front and back yards of the demolished homes now boasted a wide variety of crops in various stages of growth.

     Some lots were completely covered with lush growths of subsistence crops, like corn or wheat or soy. One house at the end of the street even had a rice crop, although it didn’t seem to grow well in the dry heat of south Texas.

     Other plots were laid out in a more traditional backyard garden form, with rows of beans, peppers and watermelons.

     By working together, the twenty two surviving residents of Baker Street were able to grow plenty of food to sustain everyone, and to trade for clothing and medication and other essentials from bands of traveling merchants.

     “Why trade with merchants?” Tom asked. “Why not just scavenge for goods yourself?”

     “Well, sometimes we do. I mean, it all comes from the same place. Sometimes Tony and a couple of the guys put backpacks on and ride their bicycles up and down the highways and root through the abandoned trucks for goods, just like the merchants do.

     “And sometimes they bring back some good stuff. But as time goes by, more and more of the trucks they find have been picked clean. The only things that are left are the things nobody has any use for. Cases of paper clips and pallets of kitty litter and that kind of stuff.

     “The traveling merchants, on the other hand, have developed a network of sorts. They hire teenagers and young men with lots of stamina, who travel farther to the trucks that haven’t been picked clean yet. Some of them have pack horses now, and they’ll go on a two or three day ride, and then come back with eight or ten pack horses loaded down with anything and everything.”

     Sara asked, “What they’re doing is technically stealing. Does anybody have any heartburn with that?”

     “Not since the proclamation.”

     “What proclamation?”

     “I guess you guys were so isolated up there in Kerrville you never heard about it. About a year or so ago the United States Congress passed a law that declared anything abandoned since the blackout was now community property and free for the taking. The same applied for businesses like supermarkets and department stores that had closed when the blackout occurred and still had stuff on their shelves.”

     Tom scoffed.

     “Well, it was darn nice of Congress to legalize what the people were already doing anyway.”

     “Right. And people would have kept on doing it even if Congress hadn’t passed the law. They essentially made it legal to loot, as long as you didn’t hurt anybody doing it.”

     Sara was confused.

     “And that made things better how, exactly?”

     “Well, in several ways, actually. For the police, it freed them up from having to arrest everyone they saw leaving a deserted supermarket with a can of soup. That allowed them more time to work real crimes, like murders and assaults and rapes and such.

     “And crimes against people actually went down tremendously. People stopped stealing from each other to a large degree.”

     “Really? How so?”

     “Well, put yourself in the marauder’s shoes. He could break into somebody’s house and hold them at gunpoint while his buddies ransacked the place. And he’d run the risk of the homeowner pulling out a hidden gun and blowing them away. Or, he ran the risk of getting the stuff they were after and going outside just to get arrested by the police.

     “Or… he and his gang could just go up the street to the abandoned supermarket, or to the abandoned tractor trailer three blocks away, and take the same stuff without the danger. And if the cops showed up, they were likely just looking for their own meal.”

     “Interesting.”

     “Oh, it gets better. Congress put stipulations on things, like for example nobody was allowed to lay claim to mass quantities of stuff, unless you were permitted to do so.”

     “Permitted
why
?”

     “Well, say for example, you came across a truck full of flour that was once destined for a bakery. Pallets and pallets of fifty pound bags. That would be way too much for any single person, or any single family, to use.

     “But if the people of Baker Street got together and went to City Hall, they could say they had a plan to open up a small bakery in one of the houses here, and would bake bread until the flour ran out. Then they’d trade the bread to other residents of the city in exchange for something they were making or growing.

     “In that case, City Hall would evaluate the request, and if they deemed it was for the public good they would grant it. And we would set up our bakery and bake our bread and trade it for other goods and services.

     “In that way, the law has encouraged small businesses to take root. We still don’t have a dollar yet, but they say that trade is the first step in reestablishing the economy.

     “And in the meantime, nobody starves. Even those who live too far away to scavenge themselves from the trucks and stores can barter for goods from the traveling merchants, as long as they have something to trade.”

     “Okay. Something to trade like what?”

     “Well, in our case, we grow four times the amount of corn we need in a given year. Word has gotten around that we have extra corn to trade, so when the traveling merchants come around, we look at the goods they have and barter with them.

     “They all take gold or silver or gold coins, of course. That’s their bread and butter and why they’re in business to begin with. But say we have no precious metals to give them. They’ll still deal with us for something we have that others may be looking for.

     “So, maybe they have some winter coats, and a couple of our people are looking for some. We’ll barter with them. We’ll say we have no gold or silver, but we can trade fifty ears of sweet corn for the coats. The merchants know that on another street, where they haven’t been able to raise corn as well as we have, they might actually have some old silver coins they can trade for the corn. So they’ll give us the coats for the corn, and then they’ll go back to the other street and sell our corn for the coins.”

     “That’s actually a pretty good idea,” Tom observed. “Probably the only good idea the United States Congress ever had.”

     Scarlett laughed.

     “I’ve heard that a lot. I guess it was inevitable, that eventually they’d stop thinking of themselves and do something good for the country.”

     “Yeah. It’s just a damn shame it took a worldwide blackout to make it happen.”

     Sara asked, “So, is that why you grow so many different crops? So you have extra to trade?”

     “Yes. But that’s only part of it. We also have a couple of businesses set up. Tony’s got his bicycle shop, and Jessika and I have our sewing shop. Word has gotten around this part of town that anyone needing bicycles or alterations can come by Baker Street to barter for our services.

     “Tony used to repair bicycles as a hobby, and he can basically put a bicycle together using a bunch of different parts.

     “So right after they made the proclamation, he commandeered one of the abandoned houses we were getting ready to tear down and claimed it. He put a big sign out in front of it that said,
Tony’s Bicycle Shop
.”

     “I saw that when Scott brought me by for the barbeque,” Sara said. “I was going to ask Tony about it, but he wouldn’t stop talking about how pretty my eyes were.”

     Scarlett laughed.

     “That’s our Tony. The only thing that interests him more than bicycles is trying to get into everybody’s pants.”

     “Scott told me he’s particularly bad after he’s been drinking.”

     “Yep. After he’s been into the whisky you want to steer clear of him. Sober, he’s a great guy and a good friend.

     “Anyway, after he claimed the house as his bike shop, he petitioned the city for a permit to build and trade bicycles for other goods. They gave him what they call a ‘rolling permit’ which allows him to go around and search abandoned houses for old bicycles and bicycle parts, and he collects them and brings them back here.

     “He refurbishes them and trades them for stuff we need, like shoes and clothes and medicine and ammunition. Sometimes he trades with the traveling merchants, and sometimes with people from other neighborhoods. Word has gotten around that anyone in southwest San Antonio who needs a reliable bicycle should come to Baker Street and ask for Tony.

     “And Jessika and I are doing the same thing with our clothing repair and alterations business.”

     “How so?”

     “Jessika had an old Singer sewing machine her grandmother left her. It was a real antique, and Jessika never used it before the blackout.

     “But she’d grown up watching her grandmother use it, and she figured out how. It operates with a foot crank, so you don’t need electricity.

     “Anyway, she taught me how to use it, so we got a permit to raid the fabric stores. All the department stores had been cleaned out of clothing by that time, but nobody took the bolts of fabric because there wasn’t any way to do anything with it.”

     Sara finished the thought.

     “Unless you had an old Singer sewing machine.”

     “Exactly. Word got around that we could repair torn clothing for bartered goods, or even make some clothing from scratch.”

     Tom, being a man and not knowing the value of such skills, asked, “But why would someone barter to repair a shirt when they could just barter with a traveling merchant for a new shirt off the back of a truck?”

     “Well, they could. But if they had limited bargaining power, or not much to trade, they might want to save their own goods for something more important than a new shirt. They might just have their shirt patched and tolerate it a little bit longer so they could barter their own goods for food, or medicine, or ammunition.”

     Sara’s face took on a mischievous tone.

     She said to Tom, “You know, Tom, it’s like when you were a boy growing up back in the great depression. Your parents might have had a few pennies and they could have bought a sack of potatoes to feed your family for a couple of days. Or they could have bought you a new pair of those blue denim coveralls you seem to like so much.

     “Which one do you think they’d have chosen?”

     Tom started to say something in retaliation, but Sara smiled so sweetly he decided to let it go. Instead he just smiled and said “I wasn’t born until the 1950s.”

     “Was that before or after the great depression?”

     “
After
.”

     “Okay. World War I then.”

     “Pardon me, little smart aleck. I had you confused with someone who wanted to be my deputy.”

     Tom had her and they both knew it. Sara wanted to be a sheriff’s deputy so much she constantly begged him for the job.

     So she surrendered.

     “Tom, have I told you lately how really young you look? Oh, and handsome, too.”

     “That’s much better. Go on…”

     Scarlett laughed out loud and said, “I hate to interrupt this little lovefest, but there’s Rhett. It looks like he’s ready to take us to see Hannah and John.”