The Most Miserable Winter Page 4

  Bexar County had dropped the ball when it failed to protect its generators from the EMPs. But it was lucky, in that the Bexar County Sheriff was also a colonel in the Texas Air National Guard.

  He not only knew people in high places because he socialized with them and worked with them frequently.

  He also wasn’t averse to pulling strings when it would serve his interests.

  Getting a working generator for the jail would definitely serve his interests, and the Air National Guard just happened to have some to spare. The military, you see, has known about the threat that EMPs posed for a very long time.

  And they’d stored what they called “spares,” or excess equipment, in and around San Antonio for almost as long.

  It was stored underground, where it was protected from the EMPs.

  The sheriff had two of them delivered on the back of a military truck, which was also protected from the waves.

  Now, two nineteen kilowatt generators were nowhere close to what was needed to support the incredible energy demands of the Bexar County Jail. He had to implement other things as well.

  But by locking down the inmates twenty four hours a day he was able to make do. Each pod was provided electricity for four hours per day on a rotating basis. It was during those four hours the inmates were fed, given exercise time and shower time, and let out into common areas to socialize.

  The rest of their day was spent lying on their bunks sleeping.

  Or, perhaps, regretting the things they’d done to land them there.

  Civil libertarian attorneys cried foul, of course.

  They said such conditions constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

  They found a judge who agreed with them, and who ordered the sheriff to set everyone free within seventy two hours.

  The sheriff found an appeals court judge who disagreed. He said the inmates put themselves in the situation they were in. Further, he ruled the inmates had it better than most. They didn’t have to search and scratch to find food each day like San Antonio’s citizens were doing. Other people, employees of the county and state, were doing that for them. He ruled the inmates should stay in jail for sake of all concerned.

  Including the inmates.

  The legal wrangling went on for six months before it finally made it up to the Texas Supreme Court.

  And there it finally died, for the justices decided long before they were in recess until the power came back on.

  For everybody.

  Angela and Kristy’s mom had by now been freed from her second prison, the prison of drugs. She was off them not because she wanted to be, but rather because they were unavailable to her in jail.

  She’d already gone through withdrawal, which is its own kind of hell. Her mind was clear once more, and she was able to examine her life and the things she’d done.

  For hours each day she stared at the ceiling of her jail cell, completely dark except for the sunlight coming through a tiny window.

  For every one of those hours she cried, expressing regret for the things she’d done to herself and the life she’d forced her daughters to live.

  For every one of those hours she was remorseful, wanting so much for another chance to make things right.

  But she wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

  Chapter 10

  Kristy had been the de-facto leader of her family for a long time, so it wasn’t hard for her to transition into the official role.

  It was Kristy who left the house each morning with an empty backpack with the hopes of finding a day’s worth of food.

  It was Kristy who searched through abandoned houses in search of anything edible.

  It was Kristy who made a decision which would have repulsed most people: a decision to focus her efforts strictly on death houses.

  The death houses were, as the name aptly applies, houses where people died. Usually by suicide, but occasionally murdered by people who wanted something their victims had.

  Early on such victims were removed from their houses and buried in their yards by thoughtful neighbors.

  More recently, though, there had been far too many deaths and far too few thoughtful neighbors. In many cases those same neighbors had given up and killed themselves as well.

  Now there were death houses all over the city, sometimes three or more per block.

  The vast majority of looters and scavengers avoided such houses at all costs.

  It was easy for them to say it was the putrid smell which drove them away. For it was easy to tell which houses held the rotting corpses. One could smell the stench from half a block away.

  Kristy believed there was more to it than that.

  She believed the others wouldn’t go into the houses because the horrific sight of the corpses rotting away to nothingness reminded them of their own mortality.

  She thought the sight drove home to them that they themselves could just as easily be in the same state.

  She imagined that those who saw the corpses likely had nightmares about them; perhaps were driven mad by them.

  Kristy considered herself much tougher than most people.

  She’d already lived a life of hell, and had already seen things no child should see. The sight of rotting human bodies being consumed by maggots didn’t shock her as it should have.

  She took the sight as just more proof that the world is a very ugly place.

  And she already knew that.

  She walked past the corpses and searched the house they haunted. It was something most people wouldn’t do. Most people would smell the stench and bypass the house in search of one which didn’t smell so horrid.

  She, therefore, knew something they didn’t know; couldn’t have known.

  She knew that in many cases those corpses which were once human beings didn’t commit suicide because they were out of food or water.

  She knew that many or most of them committed suicide because they were out of something much more important: hope.

  The first time she searched a death house was out of desperation.

  She’d looked through houses that day for hours and all she had to show for it was a can of lima beans.

  A can which was almost a year past its shelf-life date, no less.

  There was only one house left on the street she hadn’t searched yet. Her last chance to find something else to eat. Something that didn’t threaten to poison her and sister Angie.

  It was the corner house.

  The house which reeked of death.

  She didn’t want to go in.

  She knew she would see something which would likely haunt her for the rest of her days.

  But as she saw it, she really had no choice.

  She broke the front window, a bit surprised it hadn’t been broken before. And of course, as soon as she broke out the glass in the frame the stench came rushing out with even more force.

  She threw up the first time, right there on the porch, but didn’t let it stop her.

  Her resolve was more than her fear of what she’d see. It was stronger than the stench. She wiped a bit of vomit on her shirt sleeve, summoned up her courage, and climbed headstrong through the window.

  That first time she’d seen the carnage in the living room as she passed through it.

  She’d tried to ignore it; to keep the ugly vision in the periphery. She purposely never looked directly at the corpses.

  Once in the kitchen she tried her best to focus on the task at hand.

  With the bodies in the other room, her main enemy now was the terrible stench. It was overpowering, almost breathtaking. And it actually burned her nostrils and made her dizzy.

  Her only hope was she could make quick work of the house, meaning she’d scurry from room to room, grab anything of value she might come across, and get the hell out of there.

  Never to return.

  She opened the first of the kitchen cupboards and knew immediately her plan was foiled.

  She’d expected absolutely nothing in the cupboard.

  She was shocked to see a bounty of canned goods and dry stock. Even three packages of cookies.

  She was so stunned she gasped.

  That was a mistake, for as she did so she filled both lungs with the putrid air surrounding her.

  “But why?” she said out loud, though there was no one around to hear her.

  Except for the corpses in the other room, of course. But they were no longer listening.

  It didn’t take her long to come back to her senses.

  It didn’t matter why. What mattered was that she hit the mother lode.

  She quickly put several items into her backpack and left from the back door.

  She’d be back, as many times as it took, to retrieve all the food a backpack at a time. But for future visits she’d enter and exit from the rear.

  She didn’t want to walk through that living room ever again.

  Chapter 11

  It took almost a week for Kristy, going out twice a day, to empty that house of all its food and valuables.

  Each time she entered the house she wondered why, if the family inside had so much food, they chose to commit suicide.

  Even as messed up as her own family was, she knew the value of human life. She knew it was a precious gift which is only given once. She could never see herself taking her own life as long as there was even the slightest chance things would get better.

  “Why did you do this?” she even asked once, out loud, as though the dead father could hear her and answer her call.

  She finally reasoned, because nothing else really made sense, that they’d stopped believing that the world would get better. They’d decided the kinder and gentler world they’d come to know was gone forever. That things would never be the same again.

  The
y didn’t like that prospect and decided to take an easier path.

  Once she realized why Kristy summoned the courage to go back in that living room, to take a closer look.

  The family was all sitting together on the couch, and a love seat pushed next to the couch.

  They were holding hands, and the mother had an open Bible in her lap.

  None of them suffered any obvious damage, other that the decay. Except, that is, for the father, whose skull was destroyed by a gunshot. He still held a .45 caliber revolver in his lap.

  She tried to summon the courage to remove the gun from his grasp. She could trade it at the Saturday Open Market for a couple of pounds of food. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

  She could see, in her mind’s eye, what must have taken place here.

  She saw a family at peace. A family who’d decided together that ending their lives was their way to freedom from a world gone mad.

  She saw the mother, reading from a Bible while the poison took effect. Reading from the Bible in the hopes that God would forgive them for their last dreadful act; for suicide is just as much a sin as murder.

  She saw the father, who saw his role as the head of the family to make sure no one was left behind to suffer alone. It was his role to make sure everyone else was dead before taking his own life. He didn’t partake of the poison himself. He chose a much more violent way to go.

  Once Kristy solved the riddle; once she figured out what had happened in that house, she was more at peace herself with it. It was more than a father losing his mind and his self-control and murdering his family. It was a family who wished to stay together in death as they had in life. And who decided as a group that death was the better of the two.

  Once she found her own peace of mind Kristy prayed for the family, though she’d never known them. She prayed that God would overlook their final sinful act and forgive them. And then welcome them to His Kingdom as his own.

  Kristy learned several things when going through that first death house.

  She learned that she was much stronger than she’d thought. For she’d done something few other people would dare.

  She learned that death doesn’t always mean horror and sadness; that sometimes, for some people, it means freedom. A new start. An escape from a painful and agonizing life.

  She learned that by visiting only houses of death she could feed herself and her sister. That by going places few others would dare, she could find things in minutes which might take her all day scavenging through dumpsters and other abandoned houses.

  Lastly, she found out that despite all the pain and misery her mother had caused her over the years, she’d left Kristy with an amazing gift. One she never intended to leave her.

  But one which would prove extremely valuable nonetheless.

  You see, Kristy’s mom had been a drug user for many years. About as long as Kristy could remember.

  Junkies aren’t good at many things.

  They’re terrible employees, because they typically work only until their first paycheck comes in, and then spend it all on dope. After that, the odds of them showing up for their next shift are iffy at best.

  They’re terrible family members, because they lie at every turn, blame other family members for their problems and ridicule those trying to help them.

  They’re lousy friends because they’re constantly trying to borrow money they have no intention of paying back. They’re constantly asking for rides to buy drugs and when one summons up the courage to finally tell them “no” they’re cursed at and condemned to the fiery pits of hell.

  They’re horrific parents because they’re too high to change diapers, too high to feed their kids and too high to protect them from the miscreants who tend to hang around.

  Plus, they tend to put their own needs first, and spend the family food money on dope.

  So then, junkies are terrible at most things. Nearly all things, in fact.

  But one thing they’re very good at is hiding things.

  Since she was a very young girl, she’d seen her mother hide things of value.

  “Things of value,” as the term applies here, means mostly drugs and related paraphernalia, like needles and pipes and such.

  It also meant things which could be sold or traded for drugs. For Kristy’s mom that meant clothing she’d stolen, for she was a voracious shoplifter. Any time she wasn’t high she was in stores, taking four items of clothing into dressing rooms and coming out with two, having placed the other two beneath her own clothing.

  Since she was a young girl, Kristy had seen her mother hide things until she could turn them into money for drugs. She knew all the best hiding places.

  Now, much later, she would use that knowledge to her own advantage. Because it turned out that in a lot of the death houses she visited things like jewelry and weapons were still there, hidden in some of the very same places.

  Chapter 12

  Kristy went out once a day with an empty backpack. She went directly to any house with the stench of death, knowing that other scavengers shied away from such houses.

  She didn’t shy away from them. Not anymore.

  She knew they often contained treasures that sweeter-smelling house didn’t.

  Her primary target in such houses, of course, was food.

  She cleaned each house out of anything edible. Even things she and Angela would never dreamed of eating, like canned spinach which they both despised. The spinach could be traded at the Saturday Open Market for something more edible.

  “Somebody with no sense at all will eat this stuff,” she once told Angela. Angela scoffed at such an idea until a woman appeared from the crowd and traded a package of oatmeal cookies for it.

  The cookies were stale and hard, but still better than canned spinach.

  Once the kitchen cupboards were bare, Kristy searched each house thoroughly for valuables.

  Not just the ordinary places: the drawers, the closets, the pantry.

  To be sure, she did look at each of those. But then she went several steps farther. She searched places she’d seen her mother stash things for years.

  She removed paintings from the walls, looking for wall safes or holes punched in the wall which could used to secrete small valuables.

  She moved furniture away from the walls and examined each electrical outlet closely, knowing some of them could be fakes.

  She looked beneath mattresses and behind and beneath dresser drawers.

  She searched attic crawlspaces, beneath the insulation. At one house she found several gold coins and a diamond bracelet there.

  At another house she turned over a mattress and found it was cut open with a knife, some of its stuffing removed.

  In place of the stuffing the homeowner had placed an AR-15 rifle and two boxes of ammo.

  That was one item Kristy chose not to barter at the market. Instead she kept it for her own use, even naming it “Betsy.”

  Carrying Betsy with her made Kristy feel badass, and kept some of the dirt bags away from her. Especially once word got around she always kept it locked and loaded, the safety off.

  Each Saturday, when the preppers and others made their way to Higginbotham Park for the Saturday Open Market, Kristy and Angie almost always had something to barter.

  They’d barter gold jewelry for fresh venison shot the day before or fish caught that very morning.

  They’d barter the cigarettes Kristy found for packages of Ramen noodles or dried pasta. Cigarettes in particular were rising in value, for they weren’t making them anymore. Those on the streets and in warehouses on the day of the blackout were largely depleted.

  Those which were turning up now were old and stale, but still highly sought after by those who missed the rush of that first drag of the day.

  Because of Kristy’s fearless efforts, she and her sister were living far better than most.

  And that was good for them.

  But in a way it was very very bad.

  They were attracting a lot of attention.

  Kristy noticed men following her sometimes when she went about her daily gathering.

  All it usually took to scare them off was unshouldering her rifle and waving it in their general direction.

  For a couple of stubborn cases she’d actually fired a round into a tree or abandoned car very near her stalkers. She was fast becoming a good shot, though she’d never gone so far as shooting anyone.