An Unwelcome Homecoming Read online

  ALONE

  Book 15:

  An Unwelcome Homecoming

  By Darrell Maloney

  This is a work of fiction. All persons depicted in this book are fictional characters. Any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Copyright 2020 by Darrell Maloney

  This book is dedicated to:

  Pete Sanchez

  True integrity is an honorable thing.

  Perhaps the noblest thing of all.

  The Story Thus Far…

  The world was in transition, from fall to winter. And those in the know, the National Weather Service, had good reason to believe this would be one of the worst winters on record.

  The problem was there was no reliable way to spread that word. Communications were still spotty at best in the larger cities. And most of America still lived in smaller towns or rural areas.

  Those rural cell towers and wireless systems were given the lowest priority, for it was determined they had less of a need for such things.

  A few television and radio stations were up and running again. But few televisions and radios still worked. Few people had power with which to run them.

  Bottom line was the nation’s meteorologists had gotten the word they were in for a killer winter. But they lacked the means to spread that word.

  John Q. Public didn’t know.

  For the Spear family: Dave and Sarah and daughters Lindsey and Beth, they had a warm and safe place to ride out the winter. They’d wanted to make it back to San Antonio, to the house they’d left a year before, and settle back into their comfort zone.

  They only made it as far as Blanco.

  Now make no mistake, Blanco was a great little town. Quaint and warm and friendly and all.

  But it wasn’t home.

  Lindsey and Sarah had been injured while they walked from Kansas City to Texas. Lindsey had a badly broken leg.

  Sarah accidentally drank tainted water and was near death from dehydration.

  Call it luck, call it divine intervention, call it a coincidence. It doesn’t really matter much how it happened. But it did.

  Somehow a lone cowboy on horseback happened by and found the family along the highway, struggling mightily.

  He rode ahead for help, to the doctor’s office in Blanco.

  And help came running.

  Doc Matlock was an ornery old cuss who retired from a practice in Austin and was pressed back into service in the tiny town. For they had no doctor of their own and desperately needed one.

  Despite his sharp wit and sharper tongue and old country ways, Doc knew his stuff.

  With the help of Red Poston, who happened to be an old friend of Dave’s, Doc brought Sarah back from the brink of death.

  He set Lindsey’s badly shattered leg and announced both of them would fully recover.

  In time.

  But they weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

  Dave more than anyone else was crushed. For he more than anyone else wanted to make it back to San Antonio in time to gather firewood and make the other preparations they needed to button themselves up in their home. There they’d ride through the winter months and get a fresh start with the spring.

  Now that was impossible.

  By the time Sarah and Lindsey were given the green light to travel they’d be well into winter.

  Walking ten miles a day on ice would be miserable indeed.

  They had to scrap their travel plans until the warm breath of spring blew over the land.

  They were disappointed, but it was what it was and they accepted it.

  It wasn’t as though things had ever been easy for them.

  The Spears didn’t know that house in San Antonio they were so desperate to get back to was no longer vacant and waiting for them.

  For several months now it had been occupied by another family. A family diminished, one person at a time, until it now consisted of a pair of children. A brother and a sister; Amy, age nine, and Robert, age eight.

  The family had no ill intent when they started squatting at the Spear house. They’d happened upon it and honestly thought it was abandoned.

  It was a reasonable assumption to make, after all. Though well stocked with food and water, there was no sign anyone had lived there for months.

  And in fact no one had. They were in Kansas City.

  Or, in the case of Dave and Beth, were traveling the country.

  Amy and Robert’s father was murdered while retrieving a book from their previous home. Their mother Monica recently died from cancer. Now they were all alone and struggling.

  But they were tough little buggers and would survive. It wasn’t easy, but they’d make it to spring and beyond.

  They’d still be there and still be alive when the Spear family returned.

  After that? All bets were off.

  Lastly, a third family was ready to make a move. This one also originally a family of four. This one also cut in half.

  Actually, Kristy and Angela’s parents were still very much alive, though they hadn’t seen their father in many years. He was in prison for life for murder.

  Their mother was a sad case, addicted to heroin and forced into a criminal world to support her habit.

  By chance she happened to be in jail when the EMPs struck the earth and cast everything into chaos. The courthouses closed, the justice system was on hiatus.

  In one way things worked out horribly for her. For a minor offense she’d serve an impossibly long sentence. For it would be a very long time before a judge would hear her case and set her free.

  On the other hand, though, it was the best thing which could have happened to her.

  For one, she had no choice but to get clean. When she eventually did get out she’d walk into freedom with her head clear for the first time in years.

  Also, while the rest of the world was out there struggling to survive, she had two hot meals a day and a warm bed to sleep in. All courtesy of others who did the legwork to find the food and prepare it for her.

  In that regard the inmates of the Bexar County Jail were living like kings compared to the poor shmucks who weren’t having everything done for them.

  Kristy was the older of the two who went out in search of food every day.

  She left Angela at home so she’d be protected from the cold and cruel world in which they now lived.

  Kristy was successful because she applied two tactics no one else tried.

  She only looted death houses: those which were rife with the stench of decomposition. Houses with decaying bodies; occasionally murder victims, but more often dead by their own hand.

  Most gatherers stayed as far away from such houses as they could, lest they be haunted for life by what they saw there. As a result those were generally the only places which still had food and other valuables for the taking.

  For those with an iron stomach and nerves of steel, that is.

  The other tactic she employed, when finding a large stash of food or valuables in such a house: was to only take a few items.

  She hid the rest wherever she could, secreting them inside interior walls, duct work or in upside down box springs.

  Her reasoning was sound. Many people were too lazy to gather food themselves. They preferred to be predators. They hid in bushes or behind abandoned cars for someone to come by after several hours of gathering.

  And they robbed them of everything they had.

  Kristy wasn’t up for that.

  By only taking a few items home on each mission; enough for a day or two tops, her backpack appeared nearly empty. Robbers let her pass because she wasn’t worth their time and effort.

  The plan worked well until recently, when Kristy was forced to ki
ll a man in self defense.

  No jury would convict her, but she was devastated nonetheless.

  So devastated, in fact, that she was brought to her knees for days. She was finally shocked back to normal when they ran out of food and little sister Angela went out on her own food run.

  That was when Kristy decided it was time for a change in tactics. She very easily could have died if she hadn’t gotten the upper hand with the robber.

  Then she’d have been dead herself, and Angie would be left to the wolves.

  Kristy’s new strategy:

  To try to find others like them. Orphaned or abandoned children or disadvantaged adults who’d do better in a group.

  “Not exactly a gang,” Kristy was careful to explain.

  “A gang sounds so… thuggish, if that’s even a word.”

  “I don’t think it is, but I get your meaning,” Angie responded.

  “It would be more like a group of people who band together for mutual protection, and because there’s strength in numbers.”

  Angela countered with, “More people meets more mouths to feed.”

  “Yes. But it also means more gatherers. And people to protect the gatherers from being robbed.”

  When we last saw Kristy and Angie they were trying to come up with names of people they knew who might be interested in joining them.

  Then the recruiting process would begin.

  And now… the 15th installment of Alone:

  An Unwelcome Homecoming

  Chapter 1

  “Do you know of anybody else, Angie? Anybody who might be having a rough time of it who might want to team up with us?”

  Angela thought for a minute and almost shook her head.

  Then she remembered another classmate. A classmate the school bus driver used to drop off just before she dropped off Angela. One block over and two blocks up.

  “There was another girl. Beth Spear. She was always nice to me and shared her lunch with me sometimes when I had nothing to take because we were out of food. I always lied and told her I forgot my lunch, but I think she knew. She always said she wasn’t hungry and that her mom always packed way too much for her and told me to eat as much as I wanted.”

  “Did she have any brothers or sisters?”

  “I know she had a sister. About your age. Sometimes she’d be sitting in a porch swing with her boyfriend when Beth got off the bus.”

  “Okay, we’ve got a list of several candidates. I want to get a group together before the winter storms come, and it’ll be soon. I saw ice crystals in our water supply the other morning when I went outside to start the boil. Do you remember where your friends Amy and Beth lived?”

  “Sure. I think so.”

  “Okay. Tomorrow we’ll make our run to the death house a little early. Then we’ll drop the food here so it’s safe. And then we’ll get back out and see if we can find some people to team up with.”

  Kristy had struggled for days about this issue. On the face of it, the shift in strategy made great sense. She’d seen other groups of kids, and sometimes kids mixed with adults, out and about on their own scrounging missions.

  The thing that struck her the most about such groups is that nobody messed with them. They had enough additional bodies to post guards outside the houses they went into. No one could surprise them by jumping out from behind walls or bushes when they emerged.

  That told Kristy there really was strength in numbers.

  And while being in a group meant more mouths to feed and an inherent requirement to share, she strongly suspected they gathered plenty of food to feed everybody. Otherwise they wouldn’t do it.

  Besides seeing the way they swept through a whole block of houses in no time flat, she’d also seen them walking home after a day of gathering.

  Two people in front, weapons locked and loaded and carried in a ready position.

  Two people in back the same way.

  The rest in the middle, carrying the day’s catch.

  It seemed to Kristy to be a very efficient, and very bold, way of operating. They were telling the world, in essence, “Get out of our way. We don’t fear you, and if you dare mess with us you’ll pay a heavy price.”

  She thought a couple of times about stopping one of the groups. To inquire about joining.

  But then she thought better of it.

  She didn’t know any of them. Didn’t know if they were good or bad. Didn’t know if the men could keep their hands to themselves. Didn’t know how they treated one another, or what their internal rules were.

  If they were going to join a group, she wanted it to be a democratic one. Not run by a dictator who made the rules and used force or coercion to enforce them.

  Or a group in which some members got more than their share of the food and let the timid or the small or the weak go hungry.

  Kristy learned after the run-in with the man in the alley that she could kill. It messed with her mind for awhile, but she was confident she had no choice and would not be judged harshly for it when she stood someday before St. Peter’s golden gates.

  That experience taught her something else as well.

  Life really is a gift. And in the world they now lived in it could be taken away in the blink of an eye.

  Had the man with the knife been a little faster, a little less careless, it would have been her who died that day.

  And that would have doomed Angie to death as well.

  For as brave as she was when she went by herself on that run, as tough as she thought she was, she was just a tiny girl in a world of big, mean, angry men.

  She wouldn’t have had a chance.

  She might have been lucky and made a few runs on her own before her luck ran out.

  But she’d be living on borrowed time.

  So yes, Kristy decided a change was in order.

  They needed to be part of a gang. A gang which, in the event of Kristy’s death someday, would continue to keep Angela in their brood. Would protect her as one of their own.

  The thing was, though, Kristy wanted to form a group of her own.

  Not necessarily so she could take a leadership role and run roughshod over the others. That wasn’t it at all.

  But if she was in charge, at least at the start, she could make sure that only good and decent people were invited to join.

  In her mind it made much better sense to ensure from the beginning that only quality people got in, instead of letting anyone join the group and having to cull them out again later on.

  She wrote down a short list.

  The first name Angie gave her, Amy, was a classmate from a home as dysfunctional as their own. Amy’s father, as Angie recalled, was a dirt bag of the highest order. And she seemed to remember Amy saying something once about her mother having leukemia.

  She also gave up the name of Beth Spear, who lived nearby as well. Beth lived in a loving home with both a mom and a dad, and wasn’t particularly close to Angie. But Kristy didn’t have a problem with adding adults to her new group, as long as they were good and decent and didn’t try to take over.

  At the top of the list, though, were Kristy’s own friends.

  Ashton was a loner and an outsider she met at a high school football game.

  Melissa was another troubled teen she’d befriended in school.

  “Okay,” she announced. “That gives us a place to start. Tomorrow we’ll go back to that same house and get a little more from the food stash. And we’ll also knock on a couple of doors and see if we can recruit some people.”

  Chapter 2

  The next day, as it turned out, was rainy.

  As though that wasn’t bad enough, the bitter north wind made the rain feel more like ice than water.

  Winter was right around the corner, and while that made the girls want to stay home where it was dry and relatively warm, they couldn’t afford to.

  The more food they gathered now, before winter hit, the fewer times they’d have to go out in deep snow.

  Most
people, in an effort to spend as little time in the weather as possible, would have gone straight to their food stash and come straight back home again.

  They’d have saved the visit to Ashton’s house for another day.

  A drier day.

  But not Kristy.

  Kristy was one of those people who, once her mind was made up about something, charged full steam ahead.

  Her logic was that usually when it rains in San Antonio it rains for several days. There was no guarantee it wouldn’t rain harder tomorrow and even harder the day after that.

  In addition, as close as they were to winter, there was no guarantee the rain wouldn’t turn into snow or sleet at any time. They could wake up the next day to find an inch of ice coating everything.

  Or several inches of snow.

  “We need to go see him today,” Kristy told Angela. “I know it’s miserable out there, but we need to suck it up and tough it out.”

  She could tell by the look on Angela’s face that she didn’t want to get out.

  “You know, I can leave you here and go alone like I used to,” she told her little sister. It’s not like I haven’t gone out alone five hundred times before.”

  “No,” Angie replied. “You promised me I could start going with you. We can carry twice as much that way and get more food before the streets get bad again.

  “Besides, if I’m going to be sharing my food with this Ashton guy I’d kinda like to meet him first. I want to make sure he’s not a sleaze.”

  They zipped up their raincoats and put their empty backpacks upon their backs, then walked through their back yard and into the alley.

  It was the safest way to get to Gillette Road, the main thoroughfare which led to their target house. If anyone saw them leave from their front door there was a very good chance their house would be looted in their absence.

  And while Kristy was an expert at hiding their food and other valuables there was no guarantee a looter might not have the same expertise.

  And anyone adept at hiding things is, by default, equally expert at finding them. They merely look in places they themselves would use.