The Storm: War's End, #1 Page 15

  David grinned up at her, his lips and teeth stained red, and juice dribbling down his chin, “It isn’t too bad, y’know?” She found herself agreeing. Who would have known that canned beets could taste so good?

  “What’s that you’ve got?” He asked pointing to a plain white book she had on the top of her stack of books.

  Erin looked over at the book and held it up so the boy could read the title—“Wild Edibles of Missouri,” Erin shrugged, “This canned food is catch as catch can. Who knows when we’ll have it or when we won’t? So I figure we’ll supplement with wild plants along the way. Jess and I ate plenty on the way here. Some of it isn’t bad tasting at all. But I only know of some plants, not all of them, so this’ll help.”

  David looked stunned at the idea, and began to look suspiciously at the greenery surrounding the ruined building. The grass was patchy, mostly weeds and high growth now that summer had come and there was no one left to even care about mowing.

  “Like what? Do you mean like...weeds?” he asked, looking hard at the landscape, as if expecting them to tell him their secrets.

  Erin smiled and obliged him by opening up and thumbing through the book. She murmured to herself for a moment and then said, “Dandelion. You can make tea with it, and you can put the leaves into a salad or cook them. And it says that dandelion leaves are very nutritious and is a liver cleanser. We ate them on the way here, but I didn’t know about the liver cleansing part of it.” She paged to the front of the book, scanned some of the pages and raised her eyebrows,

  “Huh. Amaranth. Well, I’ll be...I’m sure I’ve seen that along the way.” She turned the book so that David could see a picture of the plant; the blooms were heavy with seed. “It says here that you can eat the seeds, shoots and leaves of the plant.”

  David looked around. Over in one corner there was a huge clump of dandelions and plenty of other unfamiliar plants he would have previously dismissed as simply being worthless weeds. He smiled,

  “That’s cool. Can I read that book too?” She grinned back and passed him the book.

  By the end of the day they had a decent stack of books on a variety of subjects. It would have taken several trips to bring all of the books they had set aside back but David led the older girl to a trailer buried in the high grass down the street. It was small, the kind you hitch to the back of a car.

  “It’s kinda like a big wheelbarrow,” he commented as he dumped an armful of books into it. It had sidewalls, about one foot high, that held the books with plenty of room to spare. Once they had loaded it up, they each grabbed a part of the chain looped around the handle and headed back towards the hidey-hole and shed.

  Twice on their way back they saw other people rummaging through the rubble of houses. Erin looked over at David each time and asked, “Do you know them?” He just shook his head. “Best we keep going then.” And they walked on, ignored by the survivors who seemed intent on salvaging any remnant of their lives that they could.

  Erin and Jess knew they had to move on, and discussed it the fifth night following Jacob’s birth as they lay under the bright full moon. David and Tina had retreated to their hidey-hole for the night, burrowing underground where they felt safest. “We need to move on,” Erin began, “it isn’t safe here.”

  Jess had been dozing with Jacob nestled in the crook of her left arm, steadily nursing at her breast. “Hmmm,” she murmured sleepily, “it isn’t safe anywhere.” At the moment, here in their little bed of blankets, under the stars and moon, it felt safe enough, but she lay there and thought about home and became more alert. “We could try and go home. Maybe some managed to escape or hide out.”

  “Maybe.”

  The pause lengthened into minutes as they both lay there staring at the sky. Neither one of them wanted to voice the hope out loud—the persistent niggle in both of their brains that suggested that perhaps some of their family or friends had survived the enemy assault. What if in just saying it out loud they jinxed it? Hope was almost a painful weight, a yawning need for normalcy. This past week had been so beautiful, so peaceful after the fierce storm.

  The sun had shone bright and full each day, the air thick and hot and full of the earthy smells of plants growing and blooming. The earth had continued to turn, despite the chaos in the land, and now the dog days of summer were at their peak. It was hard to believe that it was late August already. If it weren’t for the shattered remains of houses all around them it would have been a normal summer day.

  Jess spoke first, “We used to camp out in your backyard on nights like this.”

  Erin smiled in the moonlight, “Remember how Chris and Toby came over and scared us one night? I swear I peed my pants, I was so scared!”

  Jess giggled, they had been about eight years old and their older brothers had snuck into the backyard wearing hockey masks. This after all four of the kids had watched a horror flick in the basement that night starring some bad guy named Jason who wore a hockey mask. “Remember how loud I screamed? Your mom and Dad thought we were being murdered! And then we were all in trouble for watching that awful movie!”

  They both giggled like little girls at the memory and fell silent, lost in the memories of those that they had lost. Across the night sky a satellite moved steadily, the Big Dipper was clear and easy to see. Moments passed, and then they both spoke at once.

  “I miss them so much.”

  “Let’s go home.”

  A sigh and a deep breath, and Jess spoke again in the silence, “Yeah, let’s go home.”

  Come With Us

  “I asked Jess once why they didn’t leave me and Tina there in Clinton. We were a liability, as was proved just a few short days later. I asked her why, and she just looked at me and said, ‘We were family, even then, and family doesn’t leave family.’ I’d like to say that was the moment I fell in love with her. But truth be told, I’d been a goner for a lot longer than that. She never blamed me for what happened to Erin, not once. I wonder if I would have felt the same.” – David’s journal

  The morning dawned, the temperature rising quickly, making each of the small group wish desperately for the good old days of electricity and air-conditioning. Except Tina perhaps, who had no real memory of such luxuries. The sun wasn’t even up above their heads and it was already miserably hot. The cicadas thrummed noisily, filling the air with rasping waves of sound.

  Jacob whined fretfully at Jess’s breast, suckling half-heartedly, his skin moist and slightly flushed. Erin had found a can of evaporated milk and handed it to the children to drink. Tina drank a lion’s share of it before handing it to David who drained his portion in two huge gulps. A can of pears disappeared almost as quickly.

  Erin had foisted Spam on Jess, along with a handful of dandelion greens. “I found out we can make tea out of the flowers if we find a safe place to have a fire.” Jess simply raised an eyebrow and grimaced at the bitter taste of the leaves in her mouth. She balanced Jacob with one hand and tried rolling Spam inside of the leaves—that seemed to cut the bitterness substantially. Their eyes met over David and Tina’s heads.

  Erin spoke first, “We used to live north of here, you know.” Tina was busy licking the inside of the pear can but David looked up and nodded. “And we’ve been talking about heading back there.”

  David froze, looked scared. “You’re going to leave?” Tina had been oblivious to the conversation until the word ‘leave’ was uttered and she began to whimper, her eyes big and fearful.

  “Well, Belton, that’s the town we used to live in, has lots of houses and they aren’t all bombed out like here,” Erin said. She said it, hoping it was true, hoping she wouldn’t return and be proved a liar.

  “We want you to come with us” added Jess, “You can’t stay here. There’s not much food left, and the house is in pieces, no roof. What would you do when winter comes?” From the startled look on David’s face it was obvious he hadn’t thought that far ahead. “If my house is still there, my family might even still be ali
ve, and we’d be safe,” she went on.

  For a moment she allowed herself to imagine the shock and surprise on her parent’s and brother’s faces when they saw Jacob. It would be a hard thing for them to accept—to know how he came to be. But they would look at him and see he was a baby, innocent, and besides, he had her eyes. In the end they would love him! She let the daydream carry her away for a moment before returning to reality and the work of convincing the two children to accompany them.

  “Come with us.”

  Tina had stopped whimpering and now had a grubby, syrup-covered thumb stuck in her mouth. Her eyes were fastened on David, waiting for reassurance and direction. Erin and Jess watched as he looked back over his shoulder at the mounded grave of their parents. Grass had begun to grow on it, poking out of the piles of drying, limp flowers that Tina heaped on the mound each morning and night. The crude cross David had fastened out sticks and twine, listed to one side. It seemed wrong somehow to leave them here, but he knew the older girls were right.

  He nodded. Jess smiled at him and hugged Tina close to her with her free arm. It was settled.

  They didn’t leave that day or the next—it would be five days before they were ready. It was still very soon after Jacob’s birth and Jess was slow and tired easily. Belton was nearly sixty miles away. That wasn’t much when you considered how far they had already come, but there were five of them now, not two, and the going would be slow.

  “We need a plan on what to do if we run into any troops,” Erin said later that day. They had stopped to rest in the shade after scouting nearby houses for rope and backpacks. The jackpot, a tent big enough to sleep all of them had been discovered in Mr. Pierson’s shed. The Pierson’s had a son close to David’s age. Joey was a year younger, but they had played together regularly.

  The Piersons hadn’t run, like so many others did. The main house had burned, and David poked through the ruins a couple of weeks later and found skeletons. He didn’t stop to puzzle it out, or figure out who had died there. It was just a jumble of horror in his memory. He’d run like the devil himself was after him and not returned.

  David had pulled out the now tattered and worn book, “Wild Edibles of Missouri.” He had been reading it obsessively since Erin showed it to him at the ruined library. The once pristine white cover was now grubby with dirt, beet juice, and God knows what else. The pages had been dog-eared and little slips of ragged paper tucked into the special sections. She gazed at him a moment and then shrugged and turned back to Jess. At this rate the kid was going to be an expert on edible plants.

  Jess had leaned back against the tree; Jacob was sleeping contentedly against her side in a sling they had rigged from the remains of an old sheet. Her eyes were closed, sweat trickling down her face. “We could take Highway 7, then Highway 71 after we reach Harrisonville. That’s the only way I know.”

  Her friend sighed in exasperation. Jess wasn’t good for much these days. She was still weak and sore, and the baby woke up every couple of hours wanting food. Asking her for advice was rather pointless. If Jess had been any more exhausted she would have probably volunteered to return to the enemy camp some 200 miles or more behind them. Erin rubbed her eyes, she wasn’t getting much more sleep than Jess was.

  Each time the baby cried at night she too was instantly awake, terrified someone would hear him. Now that they had thought of the sling he cried far less, especially during the day when the sling rocked him to and fro. He seemed comforted by that. She rubbed her eyes and desperately tried to think about crossing miles of grassy fields out in the open for anyone to see. She closed her eyes, stretched back in the grass and tried to will a solution into being.

  David’s words took her by surprise, “We need camouflage so we can’t be seen.”

  “Huh?”

  “You know, we need to look like the ground we’re walking through and we should only travel at night or early in the morning when no one is out and around.” Erin sat bolt upright and stared at the kid. For only being eleven years old, the kid was damn smart. He continued, ignoring her stare, “I read this book where it said that if you were goin’ through forests than you wear green, and in desert you wear tan, ‘cause it makes ya blend in. I can see pretty well in the dark, y’know, I could lead.” He looked up then and studied her, “What? Did I say something wrong?”

  Erin couldn’t speak. She just stared at him and shook her head, “Damn kid, you are something else. C’mon, we sure have some work to do.”

  She turned to Jess who had fallen asleep, the baby cuddled against her chest and Tina’s tangled head of hair resting against one leg. Quincy lay at her feet, tiny puppy paws twitching in time to some doggy dream. They looked kind of cute, in a ragged, half-starved, and filthy sort of way. For the tenth time that day she wished for a hot shower and handfuls of scented shampoo and conditioner.

  “C’mon, they won’t be going anywhere soon.” And the two of them headed off to find spray paint.

  Leaving Clinton

  “Can you put a price on family? Can you put one on sacrifice? Tonight my thoughts are on all of the ones who are gone...Mom...Dad...Chris...Erin. They say that, when someone dies, they don’t truly die if you keep them in your heart. Those words seem so trite, so small and insignificant. War, death, knowing what gunfire sounds like and how it feels to be so damned hungry you think you’re gonna die. Those things seem real to me. They aren’t some stupid platitude that no one really understands. Not anymore, at least.” – Jess’s journal

  When Jess opened her eyes, the sun was sinking. A red-orange ball of heat occupying the horizon to the west. She was disoriented, her mind still foggy with sleep and the heat of the day. A handful of wilted dandelions thrust in her face did not help matters.

  She jerked back and focused on Tina’s grubby face smiling proudly, “I found dinna’.” She waved the dandelions, still sporting a clump of dirt and several terrified ants which were running pell-mell back and forth across the leaves trying to escape their doom. “See Yess, I found dinna’.”

  Jess couldn’t help but smile at the child. Grubby face and hopelessly tangled hair notwithstanding, she was an adorable child. “Oh sweetie, you did, you found dinner! Thank you, Tina!” She took the wilted greens from the tiny, nearly black fist and looked around for the others.

  On a level patch of land Erin and David had erected the big tent they had found and were at one edge of it, obviously exchanging heated words. “What are they doing?” She asked it aloud, but hadn’t really directed it towards the little girl.

  “Dey’s arguing,” the little girl replied apprehensively, “Brother wants big stripes and Erin made small stripes and den dey started yellin’.” Her face took on a knowing expression, “Dey’s need a nap.”

  As she finished, David walked away from Erin, huffing and mad. He stomped over and sat down nearby, practically shaking with anger. His face was red and he looked close to tears.

  Before Jess could utter a word, Jacob woke with a wail of hunger. She busied herself with adjusting layers. She shifted the infant so that his tiny mouth could reach her breast and he greedily began to nurse. She winced, her breasts were sore and painful still—when would her boobs get used to feeding this little guy?

  Erin came over and flopped onto the ground near Jess and the baby.

  “Good lord, strip me naked and tie me to a friggin’ anthill. I give up.”

  She snuck a peek at David who was looking the other way, shoulders stiff and back hunched, desperately trying not to let the tears show. “I think that we are all hungry and need to eat. And as for you, kid, I’m sorry I didn’t listen, ‘cause you’re probably right about the damn stripes too. You’re right about damn near everything else these days.”

  David let out a small but audible sniffle, “Kid, I’m sorry, okay? We’ll do it your way, all right?”

  “My name’s not kid, it’s David. I’m named after my dad,” the boy’s voice cracked with emotion despite his best efforts to sound dignified. He wa
s tired, exhausted and hungry, and worn out from the late summer heat. He was, after all, only eleven.

  Tina cuddled up to him and patted his hand, “So-kay, brother, s’okay.” She looked over at Erin reproachfully, “You was swearin’, that’s not nice.”

  Jess grinned at Erin, “She’s right, y’know. Be nice or we will strip you naked and tie you to an anthill!” Her smile belied the threat and it seemed contagious. Before long even David was smiling tentatively through his tears.

  Erin looked defensive, and then apologized again, “I am sorry, David. Let’s stop for now and rustle up some grub for everyone, okay?”

  The boy wiped his eyes and nose with the back of his hand and just nodded, still unable to speak. He reached for their small stash of canned goods and located a can opener. The group dined on cold pork and beans, some surprisingly tasty Vienna sausages, one for each of them, and a large jar of spiced peaches. Out of politeness they each tried a wilted dandelion flower, after removing the ants, and praised Tina loudly for her efforts. The little girl beamed with pride.

  As the last of the light died, Erin and David went back to the tent and finished the painting. The tent was now camouflaged for the forest and the two returned speculating on how they could camouflage it for the plains that they would also be crossing through.

  Their plans were interrupted by the sounds of sporadic gunfire. Both Erin and Jess’seyes turned to the distance – the shots were coming from the southeast. Shit! Their eyes turned to the tent and recognized it would be akin to a flashing beacon that someone was around. They needed to be hidden...now. In what seemed like seconds the tent was down. While the girls disassembled, David and Tina ran and gathered personal items, hiding them, and doing their best to erase the evidence of their presence from the grassy lawn. The basement of the children’s ruined house seemed more than attractive at the moment, despite the dangerous descent over the broken stairs. Jess and Erin had learned the trick of it in the last two weeks – hug the wall and hope to God the supports didn’t break loose. With little words and black terror in Jess and Erin’s eyes, they made their way into the dark, cluttered basement. It was dark outside by now, thank God, and that would hide them better than anything else.