Officer Of The Watch: Blackout Volume 1 (18 page)

Outside, the morning air was thick with humidity, and the clouds hung low in the sky.  Thunder rolled in the distance, but it was already light enough that he couldn't see the flashes of lightning that caused them.  Gilbert had taken a seat in one of the rocking chairs that lined the wraparound porch, and he motioned for Joe to sit in one next to him.

As Joe settled into the faded rocker, Gilbert pulled a small clay pipe from his coverall pocket.  He thumbed the bowl full of dark brown tobacco from a leather pouch.  With a single cedar match, Gilbert puffed the pipe alight and sat for a moment smoking in silence.  The smoke smelled sweet with a hint of cherries and freshly baked cookies.

"Gonna rain today," Gilbert said after a long silence, "and hard, too.  You boys headed west, you'll head right into the teeth of it."

Gilbert took his pipe from between his teeth and used it to point at the surrounding fields.  "All this used to be family land.  My great-granddaddy traded it an acre at the time for a shot o'whiskey in town.  Man was dumber than a ten dollar mule, though I guess I shouldn't be bad-mouthin the dead."

"Sorry to hear that," Joe replied, unsure of what to say.

Gilbert shrugged and took another puff on his pipe.  "Can't really miss what you never had, I s'pose.  'Cept when people think they need to tell you bout what coulda been."

Joe nodded, and silence fell between them again.  A light, drizzling rain began to fall softly in the yard and on the tin roof of the porch.  Gilbert woke him up for a purpose and he seemed to be working himself around to it.  For the moment, Joe was content to let him build up the courage to say, or ask, whatever was on his mind.  Thunder rolled dimly in the distance, and the rain picked up in strength.

Finally, Gilbert turned to Joe.  "Look, you boys talked a lot last night without really sayin much," he said around the pipe stem in his mouth. "I get that.  With the women folk and kids around, there ain't but so much you can say.  Well, now ain't nobody but you an me out here.  Whatever you might think bout the rest of em, I know what I’ve been through.  I want the truth, and I’ll know if I ain’t getting it."

"Okay," Joe said slowly.  "What is it you want to know?"

Gilbert hooked one thumb over his shoulder at the Humvee parked in the yard.  "That ain't no family van there, son, and here you are ridin around in it with at least two families packed in there worse than sardines.  Now, I don't know where you got it, or how.  An to tell you the truth, I don't really wanna know.  Just tell me this....  how bad is it?"

Joe took a deep slow breath in and let it out through his nose, trying to decide how much he could say, and how much he should say.

"It's bad," he said at last. "I mean, look...we've both been in combat.  I've spent my career in some of the worst places you can imagine.  Places they don't even mention on the evening news anymore, they're that rough.  And I'm telling you, what I saw back in Norfolk was as bad as I've seen anywhere.  And it's gonna get worse."

Gilbert nodded and puffed his pipe for a moment in silence.

"When I was in Europe," he said softly at last, "I seen things...things I spent the rest of my life trying to forget.  Some things you just can't un-see, though.  People can do some downright evil things, Joe.  And I ain't just talkin bout the Nazis, neither.  I mean people, real down to earth people.  When they get hungry and scared and desperate, people can do some bad things....turrible things..."

Gilbert's voice trailed off as the ghosts of the past revisited him for a moment.  Joe had seen many of those same things, he was sure, at different times and different places than Gilbert, but they were all brought on by the same terrible desperation.  After a moment Gilbert took his pipe and pressed his thumb into the bowl.  He tapped out a few ashes and puffed the pipe back to life again.

"The lights ain't comin back on, are they?" Gilbert asked suddenly.

Joe shook his head slowly.  "Not any time soon," he answered, "if ever."

Gilbert nodded.  "I figured as much," he said after a moment.  "I remember when I was a boy and the electric company was still runnin wires through this part of the country.  It took 'em a while to get all the way out here, but they did eventually.  I remember the day they flipped the switch and the lights come on.  My momma was so happy that she cried so hard you'd a thought somebody had died."

Gilbert leveled his pipe and his eyes at Joe.  "You mark my words, people these days ain't ready for it.  They ain't got any idea how to live without it.  You're right about this, Joe; things are gonna get worse."

"Listen, Gilbert," Joe said, leaning in towards the old farmer, "my family has a farm.  It's not huge, but we've got space and fields and fresh water.  It's about six...maybe seven hours west of here, and you and your family are welcome to come with us."

Gilbert snorted hard and shook his head.  "This house and the thirty acres attached to it's the last piece of my family's land we got left," he said, "and I'll be damned if I'm gonna walk away from it.  My girl and her young'uns...well, if things get bad enough I'll see if I can talk them into goin, but she's dang near as stubborn as I am, to tell the truth.  I appreciate the offer, Joe, but we'll stay for now."

Joe nodded, but didn't know what to say, and so silence fell between them again.  Thunder rolled in the distance, closer than before, and the western sky had gotten dark with the building storm.  After a moment, Gilbert stood and stepped to the porch railing.  He tapped the remnants from his pipe out into the wet grass and turned back to Joe.

"I thank ya for talkin to me, Joe," Gilbert said.  "Some men woulda tried to make things sound better than they were, but that's no way to get people ready for what's comin.  You're a good man, Joe, and you and yours are welcome under my roof any time."

The whole thing had a very formal, almost ceremonial feel to it, so Joe stood and shook Gilbert's outstretched hand solemnly. 

"Same goes for you and your family, Gilbert," Joe said, "and I'm serious about that offer.  If things get bad...well, I'll leave you directions on how to get to where we'll be.  It helps to have people around you that you know and you know you can trust."

Gilbert nodded, and a sudden smile split his face.  "Come on, Joe," he said, slapping Joe hard on the back.  "Let's go wake these lazy heads up and get some breakfast."

Without waiting for an answer, Gilbert turned and stepped inside the front door, and Joe followed close behind him.  He had a lot of road ahead of him, and suddenly Joe very much wanted to be home.

Ch. 38

A Dirt Road Home

Chatham county North Carolina is big; Joe had always known that.  He had grown up here, among the trees, fields, rivers, and creeks.  He had seen aerial survey and satellite recon photos of the entire area before, so he knew just how large it was in a cognitive sense.  However, that knowledge did very little to ease Joe's frustration as he drove across nearly the entire width of the county in the early afternoon heat. 

He came into Chatham Country from the East on Hwy 902.  It was a small state highway, and seldom used.  The black top was pitted with potholes and partially patched cracks.  In some places, the lines were only visible as slightly raised matches of pavement down the center line of the road; the reflective paint and tiny plastic reflectors had long since eroded away. 

Joe had grown up as a boy out here in the country with hundred acre fields and nothing but forests in between.  But he'd grown up on the western edge of the county, in a small community hugging a river that, in places, seemed little more than a deep creek.  He knew the ten square miles around his parents' and his grandparents' land like he knew the back of his hand, and he doubted he could ever get lost there.

The eastern half of the county, however, was a different story.  He had been to this side of Chatham county so few times that even now, as an adult, he would still find it difficult navigating the small side streets off the highway.  Thankfully, he could get most of the way where he was going without turning off of 902W. 

Twice Joe slowed down and passed through a dense cloud of smoke that covered the road in areas where the woods on either side looked charred.  In one pasture that stretched more than a quarter of a mile of road front, two hillsides were littered with the debris from a downed passenger jet.  From the scar across the hills, it looked like the airliner had hit hard and fast.

The fires were all out, though, quenched by the thunderstorm he'd been driving through all morning.  Steam rose in thick pillars from the blacktop where the smoke didn't hide the road, and the heat was sweltering.  Already, to the west, new cloud towers were rising hot and humid from warm lakes and rivers.  It looked like there would be another round of thunderstorms this evening and tomorrow morning. 

"You were right," Tom said, softly.  They were the first words spoken in the cab since leaving Gilbert's farm.

Joe blinked at him.  "I usually like to think so," he admitted, "but what are you talking about in this particular instance?"

"Leaving the guys on that list," Tom said after a long moment of silence.  His face was twisted into a sour grimace as he said the words, as if he didn't like the taste of them in his mouth.  "You were right, and I shouldn't have questioned you like that," Tom finished.

"Look, Tom," Joe said, "I'm not in command here.  You don't have to feel like you're jumping the chain if you disagree with me, okay?"

"Yeah," Tom said with a genuinely warm smile.  "You keep telling yourself that, JT."

"Anyway, what changed your mind?" Joe asked, trying to change the subject.

"That guy with the beard," Tom said, pointing to one of the bullet scars in the bullet-resistant wind screen in front of him.  "Didn't matter how many kids we had with us; if that mob had gotten hold of us we'd all be dead.  So, you were right about getting the kids out of the city being priority number one.  Any one of those guys on that list, in our place, would have done the same thing."

"It's not an easy thing to do," Joe said, gripping the steering wheel until his knuckles were white.

"I know it isn't," Tom agreed.  "Listen, when you go back to get them, I'm going with you."

"What makes you so sure I'm going back to get them?" Joe asked.

Tom smiled again. "We've known each other too long, Joe.  You couldn't leave those guys in enemy hands any more than I could."

Joe didn't speak for a long time.  Finally, he said, "And what is your wife going to say about this, Tom?"

"What's yours going to say about it?" Tom shot back.

Joe couldn't help but chuckle.  "I guess we'll both find out when we get back, won't we?"

Tom winked back at him and they both laughed long and hard together.  It felt good after the past two days just to relax, and drive.  Joe rolled down his window to get more air flow as the Humvee chewed through the miles, and the landmarks slowly began to grow more familiar.

Ch. 39

End Of The Road

Eric stood just inside the doorway to one of the bedrooms in the front half of the small brick house.  He flipped the switch on the wall and watched as the LED bulb in the ceiling fan overhead came on and went off.  It was such a simple thing to watch as the light turned on and off, but it held such a power now that he couldn't look away from it. 

Christina was still asleep in the last bedroom in the front left corner of the farmhouse.  The trip had been hard on them all, but it had been harder on Christina than Eric had realized at first.  When she finally fell into Eric's mother's arms on the porch, she was trembling and close to collapse. 

Eric let her sleep.

He stepped into the living room and looked out the large bay window that took up more than three fourths of the front wall.  The glass was slightly thicker at the bottom of the window frame, giving the view through it an odd and distorted look, as if it were seen through the shimmering waves of heat that rise from open fields in the dry summer sun. 

Bill and Imogene were on the front porch, laying damp clothes over an impromptu clothes line strung between the brick walls.  The two laughed and chatted as they moved around each other.  Even in a completely new and strange environment, they seemed at home at each others' side.  They had been married so long that one was an extension of the other, and they had truly become one flesh and one person, it seemed.  Eric hoped one day he would have that kind of bond with Christina.

The sound and smell of frying chicken drifted through the double glass French doors behind him, and Eric smiled.  It smelled like Sunday morning at Nanny's house, a smell that had always meant home to him.  Eric leaned his head back in the faded yellow arm chair and closed his eyes.  He enjoyed the small glimpse of normalcy in the chaos of the last few days.

The front storm door slammed open hard enough to make Eric jump, and he bolted out of the chair.

"Eric," Bill said, out of breath, "someone's coming!"

Eric didn't pause to ask questions; he simply reacted.  In three steps, he had one of the M-4 carbines in his hands.  He turned to his mother who'd stuck her head through the kitchen door, a worried frown creasing her face and her forehead.

"Take Nanny, Granddaddy, and Tina into the front utility room," Eric said firmly.  "Take the twelve gauge, and if anyone other than me opens that door, you start shooting and don't stop, understand?"

Mom nodded and moved immediately.  Eric and Bill stepped out on the porch, and Bill pointed towards the overgrown timber cut that formed the front edge of the broad, flat yard.  A small, sandy dirt road ran along the northeast edge of the yard, separating it from the fifteen square acres of field.  The dirt road served as his grandparents' half mile long driveway, connecting their small farm with the rest of the world. 

Once the driveway cut through the dense underbrush of the cut-over for two hundred yards, it opened up again to fields on both sides that bordered Cutler's Run Lane.  The Run, as it was called, had been red clay dirt and gravel when Eric was a boy, but it had always been a 'state' road, unlike the dirt driveway that was maintained by the family.  Now, that road was paved with faded and cracked asphalt, making it much more difficult to hear the cars that passed back and forth along its length.