An Unkind Winter (Alone Book 2) (2 page)

     This would be his last cup of the day before he started work. As he stood at the back door, he watched the leaves fall off the peach tree in the corner of the yard. One of them floated down and landed squarely on the top of the head of one of the rabbits he raised for food.

     The rabbit was startled and jumped, running all the way across the yard.

     Another of the rabbits, this one not so timid, went to the leaf to check it out. He sniffed it, then nibbled on it, then decided he didn’t like the taste.

     He went back to nibble on the grass.

     Dave started each of his days with a designated mission. It was a way to trying to maintain a sense of order in his newly turbulent life.

     Today’s mission was to slip through the passageway he’d cut in the fence between his house and the old Hansen house and do some gardening. The Hansen house was the vacant two story directly behind his own. He was lucky in that the Hansens, when they’d lived there, were extremely reclusive and valued their privacy.

     So much so that they had an eight foot privacy fence built around their entire back yard.

     The fence had been perfect for hiding the rows of tall corn and other food he’d grown in their back yard during the spring and summer months.

     But now growing season was over. Fall was setting in, and the plants in the Hansens’ back yard were withering and dying.

     But that was okay. It was part of his plan.

     He’d already harvested all of the food he could use from the plants.

     His garage was full of dried corn, sun-dried tomatoes, and other vegetables he’d chopped into pieces and then dried in the sun for consumption later.

     And he’d filled his belly every day of the late spring and summer with nutritious food, even as many in the neighborhoods around him were starving to death.

     So the plants had served their primary purpose.

     But there was still more they could do. After he’d removed the corn and the wheat and the other assorted vegetables, he’d stopped wasting valuable water on them and let them wither and die.

     Now they made perfect rabbit food to get his furry food source through the winter months.

     He planned to cull the rabbit population considerably before the weather turned cold. He didn’t want it to get out of hand and run out of food before spring came. Also, he knew that any cooking he did in the cold weather months would use two or three times as much fuel as it would to cook the same food in warm weather.

     So he planned to use his charcoal powered camp stove to make as much rabbit jerky as possible before the winter set in.

     He expected it to be a brutal winter. The winter two years before the blackout broke all kinds of records. The previous winter broke them again. That puzzled Dave, because all over the news they were talking about the world getting warmer.

     He finally wrote it off as a bunch of angry scientists arguing with each other just for the sake of arguing. He decided that if the world was warming, it sure wasn’t doing a very good job of it.

     At least not in San Antonio, Texas, and not during the wintertime.

     So he’d do what was prudent. He’d plan for the worst winter of his life.

     And he’d cross his fingers and hope it was something less than that.

-2-

     Dave crawled through his makeshift gate and into the Hansens’ yard. He hadn’t been there in several weeks, since he’d finished his harvest.

     He was surprised to see that as wilted as the upper stalks of corn were, the lower part of each stalk was still green and supple.

     That made sense, he guessed. The first part of the plant to die would naturally be the part farthest away from the water source.

     And the late summer thunderstorms they’d had in recent weeks certainly helped.

     He checked his rain barrels against the Hansen house.

     Most of them were half full or better. He’d managed to make it through the spring and summer months without running low on water, by conserving where he could and by gathering as many of his neighbors’ trash cans as he could find.

     He’d installed rain gutters on his house and on a house next door, and made makeshift gutters out of two by fours for the Hansen house.

     He could now put his earlier concerns to rest. He was now confident that as long as it rained periodically throughout the year, he’d never run out of water to drink and to irrigate his crops with.

     He felt accomplished for that. He knew there were hundreds around him who’d run out of water, or food, and had given up.

     He could hear the gunshots on a nightly basis. And sometimes during the day too.

     But he had plenty of food, and plenty of water. He would survive, where many others wouldn’t.

     And his survival would enable him to pursue his real passion, and the only thing left in his life with any value to him.

     His being able to survive the coming winter would enable him to embark on a mission to find his family.

     Whether they were alive or dead, he was determined to reunite with them.

     It had started out as an impossible dream, really. After all, they were almost exactly a thousand miles away, and farther north where the winters were harsher. Dave thought he’d protected enough vehicle parts in his Faraday cage to get the Explorer running again. So that much wasn’t a problem.

     The problem was, Dave had no earthly idea what the world was like out there. Whether the roads were even passable now, after being littered with tens of thousands of ruined and abandoned vehicles.

     And if the roads were being used by an occasional prepper who, like Dave, had preserved the capability to restore his vehicles, then what?

     Surely they would be targets for outlaws who’d want to take their vehicles away from them at gunpoint. Would the outlaws set up roadblocks along the way and ambush the preppers, then steal their wheels?

     Or would the highways be forgotten and abandoned now? Would he be able to just cruise up to Kansas City, retrieve his family, and then come back unmolested?

     He wasn’t naïve enough to believe that, but it was a nice thought.

     What had started out as an impossible dream turned into more than that.

     He lay in bed at night trying to imagine all the various scenarios he might encounter along the way. What would happen if the Explorer broke down, and he had to proceed on foot? What would happen if he was shot and wounded, a hundred miles from nowhere? What would happen if he was stopped and held up at gunpoint, and was left stranded on the highway with no food and water?

     One by one, he went over the scenarios in his head.

     And one by one he found a rational solution.

     To every single one of them.

     Sometimes the answers came to him quickly. Sometimes he woke up in the middle of the night, having dreamed of the solution he’d been looking for. And he’d scramble to turn on his flashlight, to write the answer down, lest he forgot it by morning.

     And sometimes he struggled for days, until the solution to a particular problem just appeared in his head.

     Like it was waiting there all along, just teasing him.

     It began as an impossible dream, and over the course of several months morphed into a mission. A mission that was achievable.

     And a mission he was looking forward to. Because the payoff for the mission would be the chance to finally reconcile with his wife and daughters and to bring them home again.

     Or, to confirm once and for all that they hadn’t survived.

     He tried not to think of that possibility. But he was a realist before anything else. And he had to admit it was a likely scenario.

     That scenario was the only one he couldn’t fix. The only one he had no answer for.

-3-

Hi, honey.

     I know I haven’t written for a few days. I’m sorry about that. The truth is, I’ve been kind of bummed out. All the harvesting is done. I dried out most of it, using the stew pots in the sun, just like you taught me to do. I had to put a folding table in the middle of the back yard and put the pots on top of it. I knew the rabbits would knock them over and have a great feast if I’d just left them on the deck.

     Anyway, the rabbits seemed to sense there were vegetables in the pots. I watched out the window and saw a dozen or more, gathered around the table, sniffing with their little rabbit noses, and trying to figure out how to get up there to check it out.

     I finished drying the last two pots a couple of days ago. I bagged all the dried stuff in zip lock bags and dated them with what I think is the right date, although I’m probably a day or two off by now.

     Then I added them to the dry stock hidden in the walls.

     And I’m pretty impressed. By my calculations, we have more dry stock here now than we had the day you and the girls left. I was able to grow way more than I ate.

     It’s obvious to me that we can actually sustain ourselves by growing our own food and raising our rabbits. To hell with the supermarkets that aren’t there anymore. Who needs ‘em?

     We surely don’t.

     I named two of the bunnies after Beth and Lindsey. For some reason they just seem extra friendly. They’re almost always together and they follow me around the yard whenever I go outside.

     At first I didn’t know what to make of it. Then I had a nightmare that maybe you guys didn’t survive. That somehow the girls were reincarnated as rabbits and are here with me now, trying to tell me I don’t have to go looking for you. That nightmare bothered me so much I tried to stay awake all night the following night. I was afraid it might come back again.

     Whatever the reason they follow me around, I kind of like it. They’re really the only family I have here now. I’ve begun talking to them sometimes. I hope that isn’t a sign I’m going insane. They seem to respond to me when I speak. One of them turns his head to one side.

     Or her head. I don’t really know whether they’re boys or girls. They’re still too timid to let me pick them up.

     Oh, I could grab them. I’m getting pretty good at catching the rabbits when it’s time to kill them.

     But these two, they’re a part of me now. I don’t want to scare them. So I’ll keep trying to coax them over to me so I can pick them up and check out their undercarriages. In the meantime, I just don’t know what sex they are.

     Of course, they both have girls’ names now. I suppose if they’re boys I could rename them. Or not. I doubt if it matters to them one way or another what I call them.

     In any event, I told them I had no plans to kill them like the others. I told them they’re free to live and breed and to have little bitty bunnies. And to frolic and hop and do whatever else bunnies do.

     What do bunnies do, anyway, besides make babies and poop? There was so much rabbit poop in the back yard it started to smell. About a week ago I dug a hole in the middle of the yard so I could rake all the rabbit poop into it. And some of the rabbits (not Lindsey and Beth) started playing in the hole. They thought I dug it for them as a playhouse, and refused to get out even as it was raining poop pellets on top of them. I couldn’t help but laugh, and I really needed it.

     As I said, I told Lindsey and Beth that they were safe from my fillet knife, and they seemed happy. One jumped over the other and then they chased each other around in circles. I think they were relieved.

     That’s when I started to wonder for the first time if they could somehow understand my words. Does that make me nuts?

     I’ve decided for sure that I’m going to come for you and the girls. I can’t do it over the winter months, though. If anyone takes the Explorer from me, or if it breaks down, I’ll have to do the journey on foot. I figure ten miles a day, maybe fifteen at best. That’s two and a half months minimum.

     I obviously can’t carry two and a half months worth of food on foot, which means I’d have to forage for food along the way. And I doubt I could find enough food in the wintertime to sustain all the strength I’d need for a thousand mile trek.

     My intent is to spend the winter getting into shape. I can jog in place every day with twenty pounds of weights on my back to build my stamina and my strength. In the springtime, I can fix the Explorer, fill the back of it with food and supplies, and then set out.