Hell's Children: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller (16 page)

A
t Lisa’s urging
, Trisha returned with them in the truck, now crowded with five people jammed together.

The whole way back to the cabins, Jack endured the stony silence of both Lisa and Steve. Steve, absurdly, because Jack hadn’t executed Carter before they left—something he couldn’t and would never do, not in cold blood. Lisa was mad because he’d changed plans and scared her by barging in like that. He’d talk to her about it later, apologize as best he could, and explain the situation.

Greg, for his part, acted like nothing in the world was wrong.

“That dude, Carter, sure was mad, huh?” he whispered loudly across the front seat. “So your name’s Trisha? Nice to meet you.”

“Greg, not now,” Lisa said.

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Butt out.”

Lisa whipped around. “Don't talk to my brother that way! All of you, just shut up!”

After that, nobody said anything to anyone for the rest of the ride home. When they got inside, everyone was awake except the children.

Quietly, Lisa introduced Trisha to Olivia. She apparently knew Molly, because the two girls hugged and smiled and talked quietly for a bit.

“She can have my spot tonight,” Molly said.

Lisa shook her head. “I’m sleeping on the couch. We’ll figure out something more permanent tomorrow.”

“Uh, you can sleep in my bed, if …” Jack said, then quieted when Lisa glared at him. Too late, he realized how that sounded. He’d only meant Lisa could have his bed, and that
he’d
sleep on the couch. But whatever. She obviously wanted to fight tonight, and he was too tired for that.

“Night everyone,” he said and went to his cabin. Along the way, he tried to shake the feeling he was running away from her. Which was crazy, really. Nobody could run away from her. If they tried, she’d beat them up.

* * *

T
he next day
, Jack brought Brad, Miguel, Paul, and Steve with him to the farm, in two trucks. One was filled with grain, the other with wood and other materials. He also brought five more AR-style weapons with him and trained both girls, Steve, and Miguel’s younger brother how to shoot them safely and accurately.

Pete had come up with a great way of finding the military-style weapons: look for cars with NRA or pro-gun stickers on the bumpers, then search the houses they were parked in front of.

Jack wasn’t concerned about the lost ammo because he figured it was better spent on targets than fatal accidents. It helped that the bumper sticker trick had turned up so much ammo he didn’t know what to do with it all.

After the verbal lesson on rules and safety, Jack halted the live training at three thousand rounds and made them clean their guns with the new cleaning kits. After a thorough inspection of their work, he pronounced them officially fit to run around with deadly weapons.

Fit enough
, he thought resignedly.

Just like back at the cabins, the joy of shooting seemed to lift everyone’s morale. So much so that Steve made an effort at joking conversation. For his part, Jack joked back, happy to forget the bad blood of the previous night. Looked at in the light of the new day, he could even empathize with the former Dragster. If that bully had exploited Lisa the way he’d done Molly, he might not be alive today.

“Okay,” Jack said after a short break. “For the record, I don’t like killing animals. That said, we need to eat to survive, and I for one am
not
eating corn grain for the rest of my life. It’s bad for our teeth, and you just get hungry again after a few hours. You’re all still brushing your teeth every day, after every meal, right?”

Heads nodded—some guiltily, some with impatience.

“Good,” he said, gazing at the pasture stretching beyond the house. “Anyone have a problem with what we’re doing today?” He looked from Brad to Paul and Miguel, from Steve to the two girls, and when nobody objected, he nodded. “Brad and I are going to build a smoker big enough to preserve a whole cow. Much bigger than the one back at the cabins. After that …” He took a breath and let it out slowly. “I’ll be the one that does it. And I’ll try not to waste anything, I promise. We’re not like the Dragsters.”

Freida smiled at him. “We know, Jack. We trust you. You saved my daddy’s herd.”

After the smoker frame was built—an hour’s work—Brad, the tallest, wrapped it in oiled painter’s cloth with a hole in the top like a chimney. Then he and Jack stacked a big pile of hardwood next to it, as well as four logs and kindling underneath it in a shallow pit.

When everything was done to their best ability, Jack found one of the smaller cows and brought it down with a 5.56 round between the eyes, which seemed like the best place to do it.

As awful an experience as it was—way different than shooting a deer from two hundred yards—he didn’t mess up. Somehow, in a way he couldn’t explain, shooting that poor, defenseless cow felt even worse than shooting those kids back at the Welcome Center.

Though he felt rotten, he took comfort in the fact that he hadn’t embarrassed himself by throwing up or crying.

Chatter-mouthed Paul felt no such restraint. After demanding to watch, when it was done, he bawled like a baby with no sign of letting up. The girls did their best to comfort him, with many a “there, there” and “that ol’ cow didn’t feel a thing” and other reassurances as they led him into the house. Even Brad was affected, coming over to pat Jack on the shoulder and offer a brave smile.

“I’m fine,” Jack said, then set about getting his knives ready.

Unlike a deer, cows had a tremendous amount of fat, and thick muscles and bones. After cutting its throat to drain the blood into the cold ground, sudden and violent retching sent Steve to join Paul in the house, leaving only Miguel and Brad to help position and hold the big animal. Because they couldn’t hoist it up over a tree to gut it like a deer, they balanced it on its back.

It was all a learning experience, which was why Jack had picked the smallest one. The less meat wasted on mistakes, the better.

The hide was much thicker than deerskin, and tugging and cutting with a knife sized for deer was a great way to slice open a finger. His one lucky break was the additional fur provided useful grab-holds to stretch the skin taut for safe, clean slices. Sawing through the tendons around the hooves was a chore. The back hooves were especially trying, and he ended up scoring them with his knife and then breaking them off with a hammer.

“Sorry, man,” Brad said, his face an unhealthy shade of green. “Call me if you get uh, stuck or something. I just … I gotta go, man.” Then he fled to the safety of the house.

When he was gone, Miguel offered a sickly grin. “Bunch of wimps, huh?” He looked around, as if checking whether they were really alone. “You know, I’ve been thinking. You and me make a good team. We do the things we gotta do and we don’t look back. People don’t understand us because we’re different. With all them grownups dead,
we
gotta be the parents. Like I am with Paul.”

“Yeah,” Jack said, wondering where he was going with this.

“The Pyros didn’t understand me. That’s why I left.”

Jack paused and looked at him. “I thought you said you and your brother were kicked out.”

Miguel glanced quickly at him and then laughed. A bit too loudly, Jack thought.

“Well yeah,” he said. “But, you know, it was sort of um … you know …
mutual
. Screw those guys. Bunch of freaks, if you ask me.”

Jack nodded and wiped his brow. Cutting up cows wasn’t just tricky, it was physically taxing. And standing around talking wouldn’t get it done any sooner.

“Let’s get this over with,” he said, and pushed ahead, determined not to squander the animal’s sacrifice by doing a less than thorough job.

After they’d skinned it, he learned very quickly he couldn’t get through the breastbone without something more serious than his knives. A quick check in the house yielded an axe and a hacksaw. Jack chose the saw, and soon he opened the chest for easy access to the lungs, heart, and liver. These he placed in clean buckets and set aside—disregarding the carefully extracted intestines, anus, and gal bladder, which he’d separated first to keep from spoiling the meat. Another bucket was used to hold the hard, white fat surrounding the organs, which Freida had said could be cooked down, stored at room temperature, and used as cooking oil.

He would have liked to hang the carcass to drain, but couldn’t think of anything big enough to hoist it onto, even if they’d had the strength.

“I don’t think we can do two of them,” Miguel said, looking between the carcass on the ground to the sky. “Time to go chill out for a while. Maybe get Freida to make us some of them eggs.”

“That’d be nice,” Jack said, wondering if he’d ever feel comfortable saying things like
chill out
. “We still have to smoke it.”

The skin was valuable, or would be one day as they became more self-reliant. For now, he was only concerned with saving the meat, fat, and organs. One day, when they had a bigger herd, there’d be room for experimentation. He was particularly looking forward to making
pemmican
—a Native American food Lisa had dredged up from a book on homesteading, and which could last months and even years without refrigeration, or so the book had said. For now, though—with so many mouths to feed—he sliced the animal into manageable pieces.

“We’re gonna need another smoker,” Miguel said while they were hanging the meat in thick strips. “There’s just too much cow, man.”

Jack sighed. “Yeah, I know. Wait here while I talk to Brad.”

So long as he didn’t have to see the cow, Brad was more than happy to quit the house and help out. He used the remaining wood and some lampposts from inside to build a separate, smaller scaffolding. They didn’t have another drop cloth, so they draped it in old, wet blankets. This smoker, they reserved for the organs and extra meat. They barely got it all in before running out of room.

A half hour later, Jack said, “I’m worried about our wood supply. Think we’ll run out?”

Brad shrugged. “Hard to say. I can probably get more.” He eyed the bloody remains of the carcass dubiously, clearly wanting to get as far away from it as possible.

“No need. I’ll call back for more.”

Thanks to Lisa’s research, the farm was easily in range of the cabins through use of a handy feature called
sideband
. Very useful, and he maintained a rule that someone had to be next to a radio at all times. In this case, that person was Lisa.

“Heya, Lisa,” Jack said, making it sound casual. In truth, he worried she was still mad at him. “How’s it going?”

“How’s it going
over
,” she said. “I’m telling Greg.”

Jack smiled. If she could joke around, he was off the hook. “You know me. How is everyone?”

“Better, now that steak’s on the menu. Is the smoker working okay?”

Jack filled her in, glossing over the slaughterhouse scene, then asked how Olivia and Molly were doing with the children. Lisa confirmed today’s lesson was science, with an emphasis on plants. At the end of every lesson, each child had to stand up and say what he or she learned that day, reinforcing the new knowledge and spreading it to those who may have missed something. The next day, they’d go over it again quickly before moving on.

“That’s awesome,” Jack said. “So hey: we need more wood.”

Lisa just laughed at him.

“Very funny,” he said, blushing a little. “Can you see if Tony can bring some out? Actually, wait, send Pete.” He remembered the scene with Tony and Carla on the couch. The last thing he wanted was more babies on the way.

“Sure,” she said.

Jack said goodbye, then went to check on the smokers.

The meat and organs seemed to be coming along fine, in that they didn’t look burnt. Beyond that, he didn’t know what constituted a proper smoking other than general dryness. With the deer, he’d managed to keep the meat edible for two weeks before they’d eaten it. In theory, smoking the meat should make it last the whole winter. Come February, if they were still alive and not dead from food poisoning, he’d know how he did.

Two hours later, when Pete still hadn’t arrived with the wood, Jack got back on the radio.

“You there, Lisa?”

He had to try a few more times, but eventually she picked up. “Go ahead.”

“Has Pete left yet? We’re running really low on wood and I’m about to start raiding the house for furniture.”

Lisa didn’t reply immediately. When she did, her voice sounded troubled. “Um … Pete left over an hour ago. With Mandy. She wanted to see the chickens.”

Could just be a flat
.

He forced a laugh he didn’t feel. “I’ll see if I can find them. Probably just car trouble. Remember about his driving.”

Lisa sounded concerned. “Be careful, Jack. Just in case. You know?”

“Will do. Thanks.”

He left Brad in charge of the smokers, with instructions not to let the fires die down even if he had to pull apart the patio railing, then left with Steve to find Pete and Mandy.

They followed the likeliest route the boy would have taken. Halfway there, they found Pete’s car in the middle of the road. Beside it on the ground was a dark shape, lying flat.