Texas Bound: Alone: Book 11 Read online

Then she remembered seeing something else… in the garage. A partial roll of wire fencing that matched the twisted and rusty wire in the rabbits’ escape tunnels.

  At that moment Robert said “ouch!” and backed quickly away from the baby rabbit.

  He said to Amy, “That son of a bitch scratched me.”

  “Robert!” Monica scolded.

  “Sorry.”

  Robert had his back to Monica when she came outside and wasn’t even aware she was in the yard.

  Amy snickered, as she always did when Robert got in trouble.

  But Monica couldn’t hold it against him. Not when Robert was raised in a house where Ronald used the same term at least twenty times a day, and frequently much worse.

  “Robert,” she said. “Come here. I want you to help Mama work on a project.”

  Chapter 17

  They took a flashlight into the garage and grabbed a handful of supplies: the partial roll of wire fencing. A hammer and nails. Several pieces of wood left over from one of Dave’s carpentry projects.

  Then they went back to the back yard and piled everything next to the fence.

  Monica took a survey around the yard.

  Counting the baby rabbit which had scratched her son a few minutes before she saw six rabbits.

  “That should be enough,” she determined as she placed wood over the escape holes to keep them in the yard.

  Amy came over and asked, “What are you doing, Mama?”

  “I’m going to fix the fence so the rabbits can’t escape,” she said. “Have you gotten close enough to any of them to tell whether they’re boys or girls?”

  “Well, how do we tell that, Mama?”

  She started to explain the process, then said, “Never mind, honey.”

  That would likely be one of those conversations which would generate many follow-up questions.

  A conversation perhaps better saved for another day.

  “But why do you need to know if they’re boys or girls?”

  “Because we want them to have babies, honey. Lots of them. But they can’t if they’re all girls or all boys.”

  “I’m pretty sure the one that scratched me is a girl,” Robert offered.

  His emphasis on the word “girl” made plain his disdain for the bunny.

  Amy said, “Well, that black one over there by the deck is real fat and doesn’t move around very much. I think she might be carrying puppies.”

  Robert laughed.

  “They’re not called puppies, you little bonehead.”

  “Then what are they called, moron?”

  “I… don’t know. But they’re definitely not called puppies.”

  Monica went to the fat black rabbit by the deck and was happy to ascertain it was indeed a pregnant female.

  A fresh litter would greatly increase her chances of having a mixed lot.

  For the next half hour she mended the damaged wire fencing and reattached it to the wood fence. When she was done all three escape routes were sealed. Those rabbits still in the yard’s confines were going nowhere.

  Except for, eventually, the cook pot.

  As she repaired the last of the holes she noticed, on the stretch of fence the Speers shared with the house directly behind them, four slide bolts that looked conspicuously out of place.

  She overlooked it then, for she was rather busy.

  But now that she was finished securing the rabbits she had time to go back and inspect the fence closer.

  Someone… presumably Beth’s father, had cut four of the vertical fence pickets in half, then attached them together with two pieces of one-by-two lumber.

  The cuts were made in the center of the second horizontal fence rail, about three feet off the ground, so that from the other side of the fence the cut was hidden by the rail and was therefore invisible.

  The “trap door” was held into place by the four slide bolts.

  When she’d first noticed the bolts Monica was curious.

  Now she was considerably more than that.

  Now she was intrigued.

  And puzzled.

  Why in the world would someone go through all that trouble to make a hidden trap door into a neighbor’s yard?

  Was Beth’s father a pervert? Maybe a guy who snuck into his neighbor’s yard late at night to peep into the windows?

  Perhaps he was carrying on a clandestine affair with the neighbor’s wife and the trap door was to facilitate his furtive movements back and forth.

  No.

  More than likely this was another of the prepper’s tools for survival.

  After all, they’d already discovered his “security system,” where he screwed wood screws into the top of each fence slat to shred the hands and fingers of anyone attempting to climb over.

  They’d discovered his “safe room”, basically a one-man sized box in the living room made of five sheets of thick plywood.

  They could see where he fired three rounds from his rifle into the wood to make sure it was bulletproof.

  They’d seen how he had a fully stocked basement, and had attached a heavy bookcase to the door to hide the fact the house even had a basement.

  And how he’d stashed food and ammunition and all kinds of other essentials in the walls, in the ductwork, and God only knew where else that they hadn’t discovered yet.

  No, this wasn’t a trap door installed for nefarious purposes.

  This was installed for a good reason.

  But what could that reason possibly be?

  “You two stay here and shoo the rabbits away if they come too close.”

  “But Mama, where are you going?”

  “Not far, I promise. I just want to see what’s in the yard next door.”

  She opened all four of the slide bolts and put the trap door aside.

  What lay before her was a hole about three feet high and two feet wide.

  Just big enough for a full-sized man to squeeze through.

  She was a lot smaller than a full-sized man.

  She didn’t have to squeeze.

  She crawled through the hole and stood up in the yard directly behind the Speer home.

  And she was amazed and puzzled by what she saw.

  Chapter 18

  Before her was one of the largest back yards in the neighborhood. Close to half an acre, she reckoned.

  It made Dave’s yard, and the yards on either side of it, seem very small by comparison.

  The yard seemed to stretch forever to a once-elegant house, now seemingly half demolished.

  It was once the biggest house in the neighborhood, built on not one but two plots of land.

  But it was sold to the wrong people.

  Fake people, who pretended to be something they weren’t. Envious people, who wanted to be counted among the more elite of society, although the elite society didn’t want them.

  Unscrupulous people, who falsified their financial and loan records to make it appear they made a lot more money than they actually made; far too little money to actually afford the house they were living in.

  And lastly, vengeful people, who refused to turn the house back over to the bank in the same condition they’d gotten it.

  They were finally served with an eviction notice which said they were subject to arrest if they still occupied the property after thirty days.

  They continued to live in the house for twenty nine of those days.

  On the thirtieth they went on a rampage.

  They flushed powdered cement down each of the toilets and each sink.

  They took a sledge hammer to the kitchen cabinets and pantry.

  They used that same sledge hammer, and a size thirteen boot, to kick or beat holes in each interior wall, sixteen inches apart and roughly centered between each wall stud.

  They shattered every single window in the house.

  They ran a water hose from the water faucet in the front yard, up the stairs and into the attic, then turned it on full force.

  The water first destroyed t
he second story ceiling, then the first story ceiling, then all the carpet on the first floor.

  Oh, and all the baseboards to boot.

  Lastly, as a parting blow they spray painted obscenities all over each side of the house, including crude images of the bank’s CEO performing carnal knowledge with a goat.

  The bank’s estimators determined the cost of repairing the house exceeded its value.

  They put a “FOR SALE” sign in the front yard anyway, hoping against hope some handy man with a lot of time on his hands would make them an offer, though knowing full well it wasn’t going to happen.

  In the meantime the house was tied up in litigation as the bank decided to go after the family who’d destroyed it.

  All that took place a year before the blackout began.

  Everyone in the neighborhood knew the sad story and most, like Dave, had actually gone into the house to see for themselves the extent of the damage.

  After the blackout Dave used it as his second base of operations: his “bug-out” location, should he ever be forced from his home.

  He hid extra food, water and ammo in the destroyed interior walls, to use while he waged war on the people in his house and retook it.

  That never happened, but the hidden provisions were still there should it happen in the future.

  Once the blackout took hold and it became apparent it was going to last forever, Dave and everybody else needed firewood.

  The blackout happened in the spring, and the spring was very short.

  The summer was exceedingly hot, and old-timers in San Antonio said that foretold a protracted and very bitter winter.

  And it was. The winter broke all kinds of records both for its length and its ferocity.

  To keep from freezing Dave needed firewood and lots of it.

  But he had a resource most people didn’t: the destroyed two story almost-mansion directly behind him.

  The bank had followed every other bank and gone out of business.

  He figured they no longer cared.

  So he began dismantling the house one piece of wood at a time.

  The wooden shingles on the back of the house burned especially hot in his fireplace once he broke them into pieces.

  The exterior studs came next.

  The tar-paper-covered exterior plywood?

  He put that aside for another purpose. One he did in the dead of winter, away from the prying eyes of anyone else who might happen along.

  For only the insane and foolhardy were out and about in thirty degree temperatures and twenty degree wind chills.

  He wasn’t sure himself which applied to him: insane or foolhardy.

  Perhaps both. But he had a project to do in front of God and everybody and figured the colder the weather the less likely he’d be spotted.

  Once the back wall of the house was down to bare studs and wiring he collapsed it into a heap.

  Now the entire house, or what was left of it, was sagging.

  Only the interior walls kept it from collapsing, and he’d started work on those.

  But he was smart about it.

  One piece of wood at a time he pulled down from the attic until the roof was nearing total collapse.

  Then he started taking every third stud from the second floor.

  He’d have to be careful, for he knew that at some point the entire structure would come crashing down, save the façade at the front of the house he was carefully preserving.

  It was that façade, that front face of the house, which would be left standing to block the growing operation he was planning for the back yard.

  Chapter 19

  Monica’s first thought, when seeing the shambles the rear of the house was in, was that a bomb had gone off.

  Then she noticed, off to the side, several piles of materials that someone had separated.

  There was a pile of two-by-four wall studs, which Dave was planning on burning as winter firewood.

  There was a pile of broken pieces of sheetrock, which Dave could not use and would therefore be disposed of somehow, somewhere, at some point.

  There was a third pile of wall insulation, which Dave would use to further insulate his own attic once he got the initiative to lug it all home.

  When he left in early spring to go to Kansas and collect his family, he put all his projects on indefinite hold.

  In the meantime his firewood was getting weathered; but that wouldn’t hurt it.

  The sheetrock was starting to swell and get brittle after being rained on several times.

  The insulation was now infested by a nest of field mice, who for whatever reason loved to bed down in the stuff.

  It was also being slowly eaten by squirrels, who considered it a tasty lunch.

  Monica noticed something else, too.

  Something really weird; as though everything else wasn’t bad enough.

  All the exterior plywood; the plywood with tarpaper stapled to it as a moisture barrier, had been removed from the back of the house.

  Someone had leaned it up against the six foot privacy fence on each side of the back yard and then screwed it to the privacy fence.

  Screwed, not nailed.

  That in itself struck her as odd.

  Why would anybody take the time and energy to screw such wood into place instead of nailing it?

  Hammering nails was so much easier.

  And why put it up at all?

  And if whoever put it up wanted to cover two sides of the the fence, why not the third? Why not also cover the back fence; the one the house shared with Dave’s back yard?

  “This is all absolutely crazy,” she mumbled to herself.

  Or perhaps not.

  A prepper… any prepper, not just Dave… does things sometimes that others might find odd or just plain crazy.

  But… they always have a reason for doing the things they do, even if only they know what it is.

  Dave did indeed have a reason for saving the plywood.

  He did indeed have a reason for mounting it over an existing six-foot privacy fence.

  And he did have a reason for using screws instead of a hammer and nails.

  Dave planned to use this yard, upon his return, as his grow space: a large garden, if you will.

  But he didn’t want the neighbors on each side of the demolished house to know what was going on there.

  The six-foot privacy fence would not do.

  A very tall man could peek over the top, see Dave’s crops growing there, then come into the yard at night and help himself.

  Even a short person could peek through the fence between the slats. The fence builder left a gap of one eighth of an inch between each of the slats to allow for expansion when the wet slats swelled after a rain. That in effect took the “privacy” out of the privacy fence, but it was pretty much accepted as standard practice.

  By fastening the plywood to the existing privacy fence, Dave not only raised the fence’s height to eight feet.

  He also covered up the gaps the neighbors on each side of the house could peek through.

  As for not covering the third section of fence: the one the house shared with Dave’s yard, that would have been pointless.

  For Dave already knew what was going on in the yard behind him. He had no reason to keep secrets from himself.

  He installed the plywood using screws for the same reason he chose to work on the project on the coldest of winter days.

  Because he wanted to do it discretely.

  Working on icy cold days ensured there would be few people out and about who might hear him working and go to investigate.

  If anyone saw him raising the fence they’d understandably wonder why.

  If they figured it out, or came back at a later time to see what he was trying to hide, his crops would be in jeopardy.

  Hammering the hundreds of nails required to erect the plywood would likewise have attracted a lot of unwanted attention.

  Screws were much quieter.

  Dave had a
generator which was located in his basement but vented to the outside.

  He ran it at night, when the exhaust would be harder to trace in the event someone walking by smelled it.

  And at night, while the generator was running and charging his small battery bank, it was also charging the battery for his cordless and very quiet Black and Decker drill.

  It took him nine long days to complete the project.

  Nine days when he braved the bitter cold; some of the coldest days he’d ever experienced.

  Each day he went out and used the drill until the battery went dead.

  That was his ticket back into his house, which wasn’t warm by any means but was much more comfortable than being outside.

  Now, months later, Monica stood before the plywood fence wondering who would build such a monstrosity and why.

  Then she smiled.

  Ronald had found the bags of corn marked “seeds” in the garage but couldn’t figure out why it was there.

  Monica was far and away smarter than her missing husband.

  She knew exactly what it was for.

  Chapter 20

  Dave looked into the mid-morning sun.

  He’d wasted two hours by underestimating the length of the new fence he was stringing around the forest clearing.

  He could have walked to town to get the four additional posts he decided he needed after all.

  But as a last minute lark he decided to take Sal’s rig instead.

  And he was glad he did.

  For the decision he made would make the journey back to Texas much easier.

  In their previous visit to town he and Lindsey searched a shuttered day care center and found five baby strollers in a back room storage closet.

  Since they’d be afoot for roughly a thousand miles, anything they could do to make their journey a bit easier would be a godsend.

  The strollers would carry most of the food they’d gotten in exchange for the cattle. All they’d have to carry in their backpacks would be their personal items and clothing.

  It wouldn’t be an easy trip by any means.

  Then Beth, bless her little pint-sized heart, came to her father’s rescue.

  “This is dumb,” she said.

  Sarah asked “What’s dumb, and why?”