The Most Miserable Winter Page 3

  At that point, when writing Robert’s “Notes for Living,” (as she titled the front cover of each notebook), Monica remembered she was talking to a seven year-old boy.

  She lined out the word “severed” and replaced it with something he could more easily comprehend.

  “Chopped off.”

  Monica had no way of knowing, but Robert would retain the notebooks his entire adult life. Well into his sixties he’d review the tattered and dog-eared notebooks and smile as he imagined the effort and love she put into them.

  All in a very forward-looking effort to save his life, and the life of his sister Amy. For in her absence she knew it was the notebooks, and her words, which would give them the tools they’d need to survive.

  Yes, Robert had seen his mother kill many a rabbit and had helped her enough times to have the basics down.

  But this… this would be the very first time he’d do it completely on his own, without her watchful and all-knowing eyes gazing upon him.

  It was important he do it right.

  Amy, for her part, was all too willing to help, for more now than ever they were a team. Bonded not just by blood, but by necessity. For they were stronger and more capable as a single unit. And their chances of survival were much better by working together.

  Robert found the passage pertaining to the slaughter of rabbits and held it open while he placed the notebook on a wrought iron picnic table in the back yard.

  Since it was a cold and breezy day he picked up two rocks from the ground, placing one on each of the open pages.

  It just wouldn’t do for a passing breeze to lose his place while he was in the middle of the whole procedure.

  “Would you mind holding the rabbit down for me?” he asked his sister.

  “Only if we can kill Stuart.”

  They had a habit of naming their rabbits, following a tradition sometimes used by children who grow up on farms. Even while knowing their animals are livestock rather than pets, they sometimes assign names to them to tell them apart.

  “Okay, but why Stuart?”

  “On account of that mean son of a bitch scratched me yesterday.”

  “You promised Momma before she died you weren’t gonna talk like that anymore.”

  “Sorry. I’m trying. Sometimes it slips out of me when I’m kinda mad.”

  “Yeah, me too. Okay, Stuart it is.” He looked around the yard and spotted their prey in the corner, munching on a pile of dried leaves they’d put there for winter food. He looked back at them as though he hadn’t a care in the world.

  He’d soon learn otherwise.

  Amy donned the leather gloves Monica found on a shelf in the garage. They were Sarah’s gardening gloves, and even ladies gloves were a bit too large for the pair.

  They’d eventually grow into them, though.

  Robert would eventually outgrow them, but they’d be worn out by then anyway, and by that time he’d no longer use gloves when he killed a rabbit.

  By that time he’d have thousands of dead rabbits under his belt and would have the process down to a science.

  That time, though, was a long way into the future.

  They wrangled Stuart by approaching him from two different directions, and Amy held him in place on the old oak stump while Robert crushed his skull.

  Chapter 7

  Although Amy suffered pain from this creature and demanded he pay the ultimate price for his transgression, she felt no joy at his passing.

  The new world had changed both of them in so many ways. They were now tougher. They expected less joy out of life, and received it. Their confidence grew, both in self and others. They now knew they were capable of doing many things they wouldn’t have dreamed of accomplishing months before.

  They now knew, deep in their hearts, that they could survive.

  Part of that new confidence was in knowing that taking the lives of lesser creatures was essential. It no longer seemed repulsive to them. They didn’t like doing it, but they knew if they didn’t they’d die themselves.

  That made the whole process a bit easier.

  Once Stuart was dead Amy took her hand out of the way. Robert turned the hatchet around and used the blade to cleanly cut off the rabbit’s head.

  He threw it into a hole by the fence dug specifically for that purpose.

  After a few days, when this and other remains started to stink, one of them would refill it and dig a new hole several feet away from it.

  Following the instructions in his notebook, Robert used his sharpest knife to cut the rabbit’s hide from neck to nether regions, then scooped out its guts and dumped them into the same hole as Stuart’s head.

  “I still don’t like doing this part,” he told Amy.

  She said nothing but nodded her head in agreement.

  A couple of months earlier Monica saved the heart and the liver of a rabbit and cooked them up for the kids.

  If they’d liked them, she’d have made sure they could identify them well enough to harvest them from future kills.

  But both of them disliked the taste.

  While throwing away such meat was a waste, Monica understood, for she didn’t like them either. And it made the process of dressing and skinning the rabbit so much easier.

  As Monica had shown him, and had reminded him in her notes, the boy put the sharp knife aside. She’d taught him to use a fresh knife to remove the skin from the meat, just in case the first one nicked a digestive organ which might have tainted the meat.

  “Better to be safe than sorry,” was one of the first lessons she taught her young charges, and one they knew well.

  She’d taught him how to properly skin the animal, and how to put the pelt aside. She wasn’t certain, but assumed the four fifty-pound sacks of salt she’d found in Dave’s garage was kept for that purpose.

  “Save the pelts, because you can probably barter them later on for food or water, once the world turns more normal,” she’d told him.

  “Is the world really going to be normal again?” Amy asked her in response.

  Monica considered her words and said, “Probably not in your lifetimes. At least not the way it was before the blackout.

  “I suspect that during your lifetimes it’ll become more normal in some ways, though. Normal in that people will no longer have to kill and steal from one another. The smarter people will learn to do what we’re doing… to use our resources to grow our food or raise our meat.

  “Those who are too lazy or too dumb to do that will eventually get killed off, I suspect. Hard working people will get tired of being taken advantage of and will kill them off one by one.”

  “Do you think that’s what happened to Daddy, Momma? When he didn’t come back, I mean? Do you think somebody killed him because he was stealing from them?”

  “I reckon so, honey. Or they wanted something he had and thought it was easer to kill him than take it away from him. I suspected that’s what he did to other people, though he never admitted it to me.”

  “If he was, then he deserved to be killed.”

  Monica looked at her daughter with moist eyes. Although she agreed with Amy’s assessment, she hated the harsh world which would make an eight year old speak of her own father’s demise with such ease.

  Robert put the pelt upon a workbench on the back patio. He’d stretch the hide while Amy cooked the rabbit in the stewpot for their meals for the next three days.

  They didn’t eat much, you see, as they were still tiny tots. They got that from Monica, who used to claim she was five feet tall but had to stand on her tiptoes to prove it.

  Ronald was tall and thin, and six foot three.

  He used the children’s diminutive stature as a weapon against her more than once during their marriage by trying to disavow the kids.

  “They can’t possibly be mine,” he’d say. “They’re too damned short. We don’t have midgets in my family. We have tall people.”

  His words cut like a knife, which of course was his intent.


  She never determined whether he said such things out of sheer meanness or because he wanted to rid himself of the responsibility of being a father.

  The accusation itself was sheer lunacy.

  The height issue aside, Robert was the spitting image of his father. And Amy favored him too, though luckily not to the same degree. Ronald wasn’t a handsome man, and Amy was already a beauty at age eight.

  She had her father’s nose, yes. And his eyebrows too. But her facial structure was a mirror image of her mom’s, as was her flowing raven hair.

  Ronald’s hair, on the other hand, was kinky, curly and brittle.

  “Be glad you don’t have your father’s hair,” Monica told her one day while she was brushing her daughter’s mane.

  “If I did I think I’d wear hats every day of my life.”

  They shared a laugh in a conspiratorial tone, both glad that Ronald wasn’t home to overhear them. He had an explosive temper, and such a comment would surely call for a beating if he knew.

  It was a boon to both children that they didn’t share his temper either. Another trait they inherited from their mother was her sweetness. She was kind to everyone, and they’d learned to be as well.

  Chapter 8

  As the children busied themselves with household chores; Amy doing the cooking and Robert cleaning up the bloody mess in the back yard, a girl named Kristy searched through their old house looking for food.

  The old house was much smaller than the house they resided in now. The Spear family home was four bedrooms with a full basement. A bit on the upper end of standard subdivision homes in Bexar County.

  The Martinez family home had been a cozy two bedroom ranch style. They’d wanted something bigger, but with Ronald in and out of jail and unable to hold a steady job it was the best they could do.

  It was small but not cramped. It suited them, other than the fact the pair had to share a bedroom.

  Monica had promised them that somehow, some way, she’d upgrade before Amy became a teenager, so she no longer had to share a room with her brother.

  “Sharing a room is hard enough for youngsters,” she said. “It’s way worse for teenagers. Don’t you worry, we’ll figure something out.”

  They never had to.

  The power outage figured it out for them.

  For the first several months of the blackout they hunkered down in their tiny home, seldom leaving the house except for Ronald’s daily scavenger runs.

  When he stumbled across Dave Spear’s vacant home and laid claim to it, the kids thought they’d died and gone to heaven.

  Dave’s home, while really being nothing special, seemed palatial to two children who were tired of sharing a room.

  Amy took Beth’s, and Robert took Lindsey’s, and both were in hog heaven.

  Then their father went out one day and never came back.

  Monica sat them down and told them he was almost certainly shot for whatever he was carrying.

  All of them believed it a fitting end, for despite his protestations he’d killed several times himself.

  The first time he brought home a backpack full of food spattered with copious amounts of blood Monica believed his made-up story.

  “I found the empty backpack in an alley and used it to gather food. I think the previous owner used it to carry some game they shot and no longer wanted it once it was covered in blood.”

  She’d eyed him warily, but accepted his story as plausible and prayed he was being honest.

  When he brought home three more backpacks within the next week, all spattered with blood and brain matter, she knew the truth.

  The trouble was, she could beg and plead with him not to take what he gathered by force. But she couldn’t stop him.

  “Those are good people, just like us. It’s not right to make them gather food and water, and then kill them for their efforts.”

  The first time she challenged him he slapped her across the face.

  When she did it again he punched her with a closed fist, knocking her unconscious.

  For her own self-preservation she dropped the subject, praying each night instead that he’d see the error of his ways.

  There were a lot of families like the Ronald and Monica Martinez family. Families which didn’t have the resources or the inclination to plan, as Dave had, for a mysterious cataclysmic event that would probably never happen.

  Only it did.

  Dave and his prepper friends had prepared for years, determining their post-apocalyptic needs and setting them aside.

  When the stuff finally hit the fan Dave had set aside and stored enough food, water, fuel and ammo to last at least eighteen months. Two years if they conserved it well.

  He had seeds to grow sustenance crops. Rabbits to provide an endless source of protein. Ammunition to hunt for other food.

  They say even the best laid plans sometimes go awry, and so it was with Dave Spear.

  He and Sarah thought they’d planned for everything. But the one thing they had no control over was the timing of the event.

  Instead of gathering their family and hunkering down they were split apart. A thousand miles separated them.

  Their best laid plans turned into mush.

  Still, they were better off than most.

  There were thousands of families wandering around San Antonio, scavenging daily for anything edible.

  One such family was a small one, consisting of only two sisters.

  The youngest was Angela, who’d gone to school with Amy and Beth Spear. She wasn’t close with Beth at all. But she considered Amy a friend, though both were shy and kept mostly to themselves. Amy was one of the few people at the school Angela could relate to, since both of them came from dysfunctional homes.

  Angela’s older sister was Kristy, who for a long time had been more a parent than a sister.

  That was because the girls’ father was in prison for life after killing a man in a bar fight. Their mother was a junkie who prostituted herself to buy her dope, and food if there were a few bucks left over.

  Just before the power went out and cast the world into darkness their mom was arrested. It was her sixth arrest for prostitution. This time she happened to have drugs on her and went down for possession as well.

  Normally when her mother didn’t come home for a day or two Kristy walked the seedy part of town until she stumbled across Luther, her mother’s pimp. She hated doing that because Luther always tried to talk Kristy into following in her mother’s footsteps and turning a few tricks for him. Of course she never did, but she was typically able to talk him into bailing her mom out of jail.

  Not out of the kindness of his heart, for Luther wasn’t equipped with such a feature.

  Rather, he considered the bail money a loan, which Kristy’s mom had to pay back in her usual way.

  This time was different, though, and Luther refused to help.

  “When your momma was arraigned the judge said he was tired of seeing her and decided the only way she was gonna change was if she saw the inside of a prison for awhile. He set her bail way outa my reach.

  “The only way you’re gonna make enough money to get her out, baby girl, is to take her place for a coupla weeks.”

  That, of course, was never going to happen. And as a consequence Kristy’s mom was still sitting in the Bexar County Jail when the power went out.

  Chapter 9

  Staff at the Bexar County Jail weren’t overly concerned when the power went out.

  Power outages happen in every city from time to time.

  They had procedures in place to switch to auxiliary power whenever such blackouts occurred.

  It was as simple as flipping a switch to turn on the jail’s standby generators to take over its electricity requirements.

  It wasn’t until flipping that switch failed to turn on the generators that the jailers started to worry.

  The electromagnetic pulses which caused the blackout damaged them as well because, as was the case in almost all
government facilities, nobody saw the need to protect the generators from surges or from EMPs.

  The jail’s engineers couldn’t really be faulted, though, because on the day of the EMP onslaught very few people had ever heard of them. Even fewer people thought they were a threat.

  The Bexar County Jail learned the hard way that not only are they a real thing, but that they are as unpredictable as the south Texas winds.

  Jails in Texas are not linked in any form of organizational structure. There is no big sheriff in the sky who controls all the county jails and tells them all to operate or behave in a uniform manner.

  Each of the jails is controlled by the sheriff of that county, who’s responsible for his jail’s operations and policies.

  They are a tight-knit community, though, in that each of the sheriffs belongs to an association of sheriffs which meets several times a year to discuss best practices and tell war stories.

  And to play golf.

  Most of the sheriffs, unless they’re newly elected, know each other quite well. They’re not shy about picking up a phone and asking for advice about how to handle this situation or that.

  Problem was, when the power went out the phones stopped working too.

  So did the cell phones.

  And the ham radios most of the jails maintained, since they too ran on electricity.

  Since each jail runs independently of the others, each of them was in the same pickle: what do they do with the inmates when the power goes out and seemingly won’t come back on for awhile?

  Every county handled the problem in their own way.

  Some let everyone loose, and warned them when the power came back on they must report back to the jail within twenty four hours or be considered a fugitive.

  Others let everyone go with no such warning, convinced the power would never return.

  Some let most of their people out, but held onto the murderers and rapists and child molesters. No sense letting the worst of the worst out into the community and making a dreadful situation even more so.