An Unkind Winter (Alone Book 2) Page 4

  “I just want an insurance policy, if you will. In case I come back and have no more rabbits, I can get some from you to start breeding them again.”

  Frank smiled.

  “Well, after everything you’ve done for the neighborhood, and continue to do, the very least I can do is agree to that.”

  -8-

  Dave had been planning to change his sleep schedule for awhile. Since the crops were all in now, and since winter would be coming soon, he’d need to sleep during the daytime, and be up at night to do his chores. He was a night person by nature anyway, and his logic was sound.

  He could only burn the fireplace in the hours of darkness. Otherwise his neighbors and passing looters would see the smoke coming from his chimney and would know the house was occupied.

  And he didn’t want to sleep at night with the fire burning. It was just too risky. Especially since his safe room was built of plywood walls. The plywood was much more flammable than sheetrock, and a stray ember floating through the air and attaching itself to the plywood walls could easily start a fire.

  He’d always enjoyed being up in the wee hours of the morning. There was something very… relaxing, about looking up at the stars and smelling the night air as the rest of the world slept around him.

  Farming at night would have been impossible. But in the wintertime there was no farming to be done. The only thing he really had to do outdoors in the wintertime was to make sure the rabbits had water and to gather firewood. He could do those at daybreak each day.

  So the answer was simple. He’d shift from being up during the day to being up all night. Just for the wintertime.

  During the daylight hours, he’d crawl into his winter sleeping bag and sleep the day away.

  The bag was made for two people. The original plan was for he and Sarah to sleep in it together on the coldest of days to help keep each other warm by sharing body heat. They also hoped to be able to very discretely make love in the bag occasionally after they were sure their daughters were sound asleep.

  That possibility was gone, at least for this winter. Perhaps the following winter they could make that happen.

  But the following winter was a long time away, and Dave had to survive this one first.

  The double sleeping bag was rated for fifteen degrees. He didn’t expect the air temperatures to drop below that very often, if at all.

  But just in case, he had another single bag he could use to double up if need be. The single bag was also rated at fifteen degrees.

  Dave never was very good at math. He had no clue what the temperature rating would be for one extreme cold weather bag placed inside another extreme cold weather bag.

  And he didn’t really care. He just knew it would keep him darn toasty.

  He looked at his watch. It was just before midnight. He figured he had time for three trips back to Frank and Eva’s house. The next night he’d make four trips. But tonight he’d already burned some time off the clock.

  Dave took his black backpack and shoved four two liter bottles of water inside it. He zipped it closed and noted that it was a snug fit. That was good. The bottles wouldn’t roll around in the bag and make noise while he was trying to be stealthy.

  But he planned to take much more.

  He took two pieces of rope about three feet long and tied a small noose on each end.

  He laughed as he remembered his best friend from high school, Rodney Pierce. Rodney was the one who taught him how to tie a noose on the night a new principal cancelled the prom because of a cheating scandal.

  Neither Rodney nor Dave had planned to go to the prom. In their minds, only nerds did things like that. And they weren’t involved in the cheating scandal either. Those were seniors trying to better their SAT scores. Dave wasn’t an overachiever. As long as his score was good enough to get him into a local college, he was good with it. He wound up going to college for only a year before deciding he wanted to join the Marine Corps and travel the world.

  But even though Rodney and Dave had nothing to do with the cheating, and had no intention of going to the prom, that still didn’t prevent the pair from hanging the principal in effigy. Then they doused the dummy in gasoline and set it on fire.

  His girlfriend at the time asked Dave why he did it, and he just shrugged his shoulders.

  “Something to do,” he’d said.

  It was just one in a long series of stupid things he and Rodney did in high school.

  And all these years later, Dave could still tie a mean noose.

  It’s funny, he thought to himself, the things one remembers.

  Dave took the pieces of rope with the double nooses and tightened each noose around the neck of another bottle of water.

  When he was done, he had four more bottles, at the end of the ropes, the ropes thrown over his shoulders.

  Out of curiosity, he carried the gear into the garage, where an old fashioned scale sat on the floor in the corner by the overhead door.

  He weighed himself with the backpack on and the bottles over his shoulders, then took off the water and weighed himself again.

  He was impressed. The water, according to his math, weighed just over fifty two pounds. Yet he knew he could carry it with ease.

  At least for the first trip.

  After the third trip, he might feel differently.

  He was glad of two things. First, that it was only two blocks to Frank’s house. And second, that he had all night to get this done. He could stop and rest between each trip if he wanted to.

  Secretly, he was hoping he wore himself out carrying water. Shifting his sleep schedule from nights to days would require him to stay up until mid morning and then sleep the day away, even though he was used to being up during the days. The only way he’d be able to do that was by being completely drained, both physically and emotionally.

  He made it back to the Castro house after his last trip just before the first rays of the sun peeked over the horizon. He’d cut it too close and almost been caught out in the daylight.

  He’d have to be more careful in the future.

  Through the Castro house he went, into their back yard, then through his secret passageway in the fence.

  The two rabbits, Lindsey and Beth, were waiting for him in his own yard, and gave him a look not unlike that of an angry wife.

  Sort of a “Where the hell have you been all night?” kind of look.

  -9-

  A few nights later Dave was in his back yard just after sundown, looking toward the heavens. He’d hoped for a moonless night, so he could finish moving the water bottles to Frank and Eva’s. Instead there was a crescent moon in the sky. He had to admit that it was pretty, even though he didn’t want it up there.

  It was getting considerably cooler at night now, which didn’t bode well. It probably meant winter was coming early.

  He still had twenty seven bottles to deliver to Frank’s house. If a freeze came before he could move them, that was twenty seven bottles that would burst and go to waste.

  That was a lot of water to waste when someone who was desperately thirsty could be making use of it.

  And that, in Dave’s eyes, would be a dreadful sin.

  There was considerable cloud cover. Enough to mask the moon most of the time.

  He decided to go.

  He dressed all in black, as was his habit. Now that it was cold enough, he could comfortably wear his black watch cap, without it making his head all sweaty. And the night vision goggles were black as well.

  So was his backpack, and the plastic bags full of empty bottles he’d be lugging back from his last delivery.

  Screw the crescent moon. He wouldn’t be invisible in the darkness. But he’d be damn hard to see.

  He started a little after eleven p.m.

  He quietly slid the glass patio door closed behind him. The last thing he needed was for some of the rabbits, seeking shelter from the cold, to scamper inside the house when he was gone.

  The second last thing he n
eeded was for the rabbits to follow him into the Castros’ back yard. So just before he slipped through the secret gate he’d made in the fence, he raised his arms and looked menacingly at the rabbits. Then he stomped his feet a couple of times.

  The rabbits all scattered.

  All of them except for Beth and Lindsey.

  They held their ground and just looked at him, obviously wondering if he was nuts.

  With the small gate open, he reached over and grabbed all the bottles of water that he’d lined up against the fence just before the sun went down.

  One by one, he rolled them through the fence and into the Castros’ yard. Then the backpack and the two pieces of rope he’d use to shoulder some of the water.

  He was glad these were the last of them. He didn’t like going out in the open, even though the night sky and goggles gave him a distinct advantage over anyone else who might be out there.

  Once this project was done, he vowed to himself, he wouldn’t venture out again for a long while.

  Once in the Castros’ yard, Dave moved slowly. He was well aware that many looters roamed the streets at night, and that he chanced running into one of them in the Castros’ house.

  But he didn’t.

  He breathed a sigh of relief that the house was empty, and spent several minutes moving the water from the back yard into the living room.

  Once all the water was staged and ready to move, he filled his backpack, tied the nooses at each end of the ropes around four more bottles, and held his breath.

  He peeked out the window next to the door, didn’t see anything, and slowly slipped out and onto the porch.

  Four houses away, Mikey was making a door to door sweep, looking for an abandoned house to loot. He’d been at it for a couple of hours now, and his eyes were well adjusted to the darkness.

  Enough so, that he was able to see movement a few houses away. A dark figure coming out of a house and then pausing on its front porch.

  Mikey was already in the bushes next to a house. He went to the ground and hugged it. The combination of his lying low and being under cover allowed him to go undetected when Dave scanned up and down the street.

  Dave saw nobody, and after a few more seconds deemed it safe to go.

  Mikey watched the shadowy figure disappear up the street, then moved on. He figured the man in black was just another looter out looking for food.

  Hopefully he left the gold and silver behind.

  Mikey had been doing this for months now, and he had it down to a science. The first few times he broke into houses was a hazardous proposition. He simply broke a window and listened to see if somebody on the inside screamed.

  The problem with that was that a couple of times he heard gunshots instead of screams.

  In one case, a bullet whizzed by within a few inches of his head.

  Then he got smart, and started breaking into houses that had already been broken into.

  Because he was young and agile, he was able to clear the six foot tall fences with ease. His new habit was to check the front of the house to see if any windows had been broken. If all the front windows were intact, he jumped the fence to check the back windows.

  His logic was sound. Broken windows almost always meant this house had already been looted. Which meant there were no homeowners to shoot at him.

  Almost all the looters out these days were looking for food or water. They almost always left the good stuff behind. It was a gift Mikey couldn’t pass up, and he considered himself far superior to anyone who’d been through this neighborhood in the past. For they were just living day to day.

  Mikey was planning for his future.

  As Dave made his way from bush to bush, abandoned car to abandoned car, Mikey did essentially the same thing. Except he went from house to house.

  The first house he went to was occupied. He could actually hear people talking inside. He passed that one up.

  The second house had no broken windows in the front.

  It was a maybe.

  He hopped the fence and was working his way around the house when he smelled the distinct smell of a scented candle.

  Lilac, he thought.

  He wasn’t sure if the scent was coming from an open window at this house, or was wafting in on the breeze. But he didn’t need to take the chance. There were too many other unoccupied houses out there to take risks.

  . He went back the same way he came in.

  The third house he came to was Dave’s. A bank of clouds obscured the moon as he walked up to it, and he lost what little light he had. So much so that he failed to see the bogus foreclosure notices Dave had placed on the house the night of the blackout.

  Mikey felt his way along the front of the house, checking each of the windows. They were all intact. But the house was completely quiet.

  Another maybe.

  Mikey tried to scale the fence, but immediately came down again in great agony. He winced and tried not to call out. Something had ripped the hell out of his hands as he reached up to grab the top of the fence.

  He couldn’t see what it was. The screws Dave had put there months before were black in color and blended into the darkness quite well.

  All Mikey knew was that there were two puncture wounds in his left hand and another in his right.

  The one in his right hand, his dominant hand, was quite deep. And all of them hurt like hell.

  He sat back for a moment and regrouped.

  And decided to bypass this particular house.

  Cursing under his breath and wishing the bleeding would stop, he made his way to the Castro house next door.

  The front window of the Castro house had been shattered. Mikey knew instinctively that this was his target. He just hoped there was something inside to warrant the pain he’d just endured.

  Something else Mikey had learned while becoming a master looter was that previous looters always left the doors unlocked behind them. After all, what was the point in locking them?

  In almost every single case since Mikey started his new career, a broken window meant that either the front or the back door would be unlocked.

  It was almost like a big welcome mat.

  -10-

  Mikey was puzzled by the array of what appeared to be bottles of Pepsi strewn around on the living room floor. He quite literally stumbled over one of them in the darkness and almost went down a second time.

  This, apparently, wasn’t his night.

  Or maybe it was.

  He was thirsty, after all. And here at his feet was a gift from God Himself, it seemed.

  Mikey picked up one of the bottles, took off the cap, and sniffed it. It definitely wasn’t Pepsi. In fact, it had no smell at all.

  He sipped it.

  It was water.

  So he guzzled some of it.

  The curtains in the living room were open, and the cloud cover had moved away from the moon. There was just enough moonlight coming in for Mikey to look around.

  He took his bottle of water with him.

  First, he went upstairs to the master bedroom. He’d been doing this long enough now to know the usual hiding places.

  He checked the jewelry box, and underneath the mattress. Then he rifled through the dresser drawers one by one, knowing that was a favorite place for stashing jewelry.

  Especially, for some inexplicable reason, the very back of the lingerie drawer.

  The cuts on his hands were slowing him down. They hurt like hell, and one of the puncture wounds very stubbornly refused to stop bleeding.

  Finally, he went to the bathroom and opened the medicine chest.

  There was no window in the bathroom, so he went strictly by touch.

  It took a while, but Mikey was finally able to find some gauze and medical tape, and wrapped his hands. It was a crude job, but it seemed to work. At least his hands were cushioned somewhat, although they still throbbed.

  He found what he thought was a bottle of Tylenol, which he carried into the adjacent bedroom and h
eld up to the window.

  He was right. Damn, he thought. He must be getting good at this.

  He swallowed four of the tablets and put the rest into his pocket for later, cursing the drug addicts who’d almost certainly ransacked the house before him and got all the good stuff.

  The only treasures he found upstairs were an old pocket watch and a few gold coins. Still, not bad for a few minutes’ work.

  Maybe there would be a nice silver set downstairs.

  But that could wait. He was exhausted, he was in pain, and he was in no mood to stumble around in the dark trying to separate fine silverware from the cheap stuff.

  He’d wait until daylight, and then do a more thorough search, at his leisure. He’d been through this drill many times before. The gold coins were an indication that this family did indeed keep valuables hidden around the house. In the past, he’d missed things in his initial sweep that he’d found when he made a second search during the daytime.

  And this would be his temporary home until the night came again. He’d have all day long, with nothing to hurry him in his quest for booty.

  Might as well rest until morning.

  He laid down on the king sized bed and found himself wondering who it was that used to sleep here. Was the woman old and wrinkled? Or was she young and desirable?

  He didn’t ponder that particular question for long. Within minutes he was sound asleep.

  Apparently looting was a very taxing business.

  It was perhaps a testament to Dave’s ability to move quietly that he was able to enter the Castro house three more times that night without waking up the intruder sleeping upstairs.

  Each time, he loaded his backpack with more soda bottles of water, and tied additional bottles onto the ends of his ropes.

  And each time, he snuck back out the same way he’d come, through the front door.

  He never noticed the dried blood on the door knob, or the red spots all over the porch and the living room carpet.

  It was just too dark.

  The last time he loaded up, Dave noticed a missing bottle.