An Acquired Taste Page 9
Of the twelve handheld radios the group was using at the time of the second blackout, they were able to get three working again. Three spares in the barn were brought into service, as were spare batteries and battery chargers.
Their radio capability had been cut exactly in half.
But it was better than nothing.
Sometimes the circuit cards couldn’t be switched out.
Charles did what he could by using a magnifying glass and Exact-o knife and very carefully cutting away the bad components.
He’d then replace the bad components with identical components from other cards.
He very quickly became familiar with the color-coded components and how manufacturers used stripes and varying colors to differentiate between parts that would otherwise look exactly alike.
In the weeks since the second blackout made them want to cry, they’d come a very long way.
In addition to having six radios working, the control center was operational again. All the outside cameras were working and feeding images wirelessly into the control center’s monitors.
Only three monitors were working, their screens being particularly sensitive to the sun’s assault.
But Jordan was able to reprogram the monitors to work with split screens. The images from the cameras were all viewable, albeit smaller than before.
“Stay on your toes,” Scott cautioned the controllers constantly. “With smaller images, you really have to be focused on the monitors at all times to keep from missing anything.”
One of the best pieces of news was when Tom Haskins got his car working again.
The car was neither high end nor pretty. It was a 1963 Ford Galaxie 500. Tom had owned it for years and seldom had issues with it.
He was able to get it going mostly because it was built in simpler times. It had no electronic ignition system or on-board computer systems. It had old fashioned fuses which burned out immediately when the EMPs made contact with the car. The fuses prevented extensive damage to the wiring.
Oh, it was hurting, the car was.
But it was much easier to fix than, say, a modern car with four hundred pounds of EPA-required garbage beneath the hood.
Some of the parts Tom needed… a new battery, a new starter solenoid, and a whole pile of new fuses… were found unscathed in the storage barn.
Other parts weren’t so easy. Tom spent days scouring Junction and nearby Kerrville for a similar make and model Ford he could scavenge parts from.
In a storage room at the back of Kerrville Friendly Ford’s parts department he was able to find an ignition switch. He removed an old generator from a wrecked Galaxie 500 at the Junction wrecking yard.
It was ancient and rusty but worked.
No one was happier than Charles when Sheriff Tom got his squad car working.
For the first trip he took in the car was with Charles, to a Radio Shack in Kerrville.
Charles was on a supply run to gather microcircuits, capacitors and diodes.
And when he found them he brought them back to the compound by the boxful.
-24-
Tom, for his part, was supremely glad to get his car working again as well.
He enjoyed being the Kerr County Sheriff. Being asked to fill the role had given him a new lease on life.
Before the offer, he was resigned to sitting more or less in one place for the rest of his years and letting the grass grow around him. He’d come from a long line of farmers and ranchers who raised sons expressly for the purpose of taking over someday.
It was the Haskins way. The patriarch grew into his sixties, sometimes a bit longer, then drew the family together to make an announcement.
“I’m hanging up my spurs,” he’d say. “From now on you boys will be running the place. If you want me I’ll be sitting on the porch in my rocking chair, next to my still lovely bride. If I’m not there I’ll be down at the creek, fishing.”
Then he’d spend his remaining time on earth doing exactly that.
Tom’s great-great grandfather started the tradition, and every male child followed suit.
The problem was, Tom didn’t have a male child to pass it on to.
He’d had a son, who died many years before. So had his love of many years.
Tom was alone, but not necessarily lonely. Old cowboys don’t get lonely. They spend so much time mending fences, riding the range, and caring for stock they get used to not having human interaction. Once they get used to not having it, it becomes less important.
Then they stop wanting it.
Tom would have been content just living out his years on his forty acre spread until he dropped dead of a heart attack one day. His body would rot until somebody in town noticed he hadn’t come in for his usual supply run, and the sheriff would pay him a call to see if he was okay.
His place would be shuttered and eventually auctioned off for unpaid taxes, and somebody else would move in and work their own herd.
He’d have been content with that.
But that wasn’t the way things worked out.
A young man named Scott Harter came around, looking at the spread next door to his south.
He seemed like a nice enough fella, though a might secretive. He bought the sixty acres next door and proceeded to build several buildings on it.
Then he surrounded the buildings with a ten foot high black metal wall.
And put security cameras all around it.
Normally Tom was the “live and let live” sort, but his curiosity got the best of him.
And he made friends with Scott. Not because he needed the companionship of another human being.
But because he wanted to find out what was so blasted important Scott needed to hide it behind a high wall.
The two became best friends, and Scott finally confided he was a prepper.
“What in hell is a prepper?” Tom had asked.
“Somebody who prepares for a great disaster, so that he and the people he loves can survive while most of the rest of the world is dying of starvation or disease.”
Tom didn’t abandon his new friend, although he thought him to be totally nuts.
When the world went black he admitted that Scott wasn’t nuts. He was a proactive thinker.
He was right.
In the two years since the first wave of EMPs the two grew even closer. Tom became a member of the family. He even married Scott’s former wife.
He missed his old days on the ranch, working the stock and sleeping beneath the stars. Birthing new calves and wielding his branding iron. Mending fences and growing his own tobacco.
He missed being a cowboy.
Being named the county sheriff gave him something to do again. It was the next best thing to the old days.
He had a mission each day when he got out of bed. A renewed purpose in life.
The thing was, it was damn hard to be a sheriff on a horse.
He didn’t mind horses, not really. They were better than humans in a lot of ways, and a cowboy’s best tool.
But in a county which encompassed almost a million acres a horse just wasn’t a reliable means of getting around.
So he was glad to get his car back.
Especially since there was a serial killer on the loose in Kerrville.
-25-
Tillie had been within sight of the big brown truck which might have contained her lifesaving medicine.
She hadn’t taken her blood pressure meds in several days.
And those days had been brutally stressful in so many ways.
She’d once complained to the doctor she hated taking the meds.
“What’s the worst that could happen if I just quit taking it?”
“The worst that could happen? You’d die. And I’d lose a patient.”
As she’d gone down she’d caught a glimpse of the German shepherd standing nearby. And just before she blacked out she thought, “This is it. This is what it feels like to die.”
But she was wrong.
She felt something warm and wet upon her cheek.
It didn’t register, for she was still in a state of semi-consciousness.
She wasn’t sure what she was waiting for, exactly. Perhaps a light. Perhaps the hand of God Himself, offering to help her up.
Gradually, though, she began to realize she was still very much alive.
Well, actually not very much. But alive nonetheless.
Her body was still frozen in place, unable to move, in the shadow of a lumbering Ford Expedition.
She was in the shade now and mercifully so. For two hours the sun had beaten down brutally on her tender skin. It was now blistered and flushed.
The dog standing over her, keeping guard, seemed to sense she was damaged and did what dogs do in such circumstances.
He tried to lick the wounds away.
In a haze of conscious thoughts mixed with inky blackness Tillie caught brief glimpses of the conscious world outside her head.
The moist sensation upon her cheek confused her.
The continued blackness worried her, when she was most cognizant. Half the time she wasn’t bothered by anything at all.
Besides the wet warmth on her cheek, she occasionally caught other brief glimpses of the outside world.
The sensation of burning on her face.
The thousand needles telling her that her arm had fallen asleep beneath her body.
A sound… what was that grating sound?
No. It wasn’t grating. It was something else entirely.
It was the sound of a dog growling.
Had she been conscious she’d have been terrified. She’d have run from the sound, even at the risk such action would result in her being chased. Perhaps dragged down.
Perhaps killed.
In the state she was in, though, her phobia was kept at bay. She wasn’t terrified. She was just curious.
“Why would a dog be growling at me?”
The thought was fleeting, the question never to be answered, for she disappeared again into the blackness.
When she came back she was a little bit closer to regaining consciousness.
She got the sense somehow she was on the cusp… on that line between consciousness and sleep. As though all she had to do was open her eyes to rejoin the rest of the world.
As though it were that easy.
She struggled mightily.
Her fear of dogs started to return, and she remembered the growl.
Surely she’d imagined it, she tried to reason.
Or perhaps not.
With the fear came the paranoia she was so familiar with. Since childhood the two came and went, hand in hand together, teaming up to terrify her.
Not only were dogs dangerous, they also conspired to kill her.
She never knew why. She’d certainly never done anything to deserve their wrath. But they’d kill her nonetheless if she gave them the slightest opportunity.
She had to get her eyes open… she was in full scale panic mode. She’d associated the growl with a pack of dogs getting ready to tear out her throat and devour her.
Her body still paralyzed, she managed to get one eye partly open.
And what she saw almost made her faint dead away.
There was a mountain of a dog standing over her. A German shepherd, she thought, not unlike the one who’d mauled her as a young child.
She couldn’t run. Couldn’t even move.
She could only watch.
She watched as the dog looked angrily at something behind her.
Something she could not see.
She watched as the dog growled a deep, guttural, menacing warning.
He was telling the others in his pack to stay back. This kill belonged to him and him alone.
Could this be the ghost of the devil dog who’d haunted her all her life, come back to finish what he’d started so many years before?
Then there was a new sound.
Or maybe one she’d just been too terrified to notice before.
Human voices.
But not a conversation. Not in whole, anyway.
What she heard were snippets. Just bits and pieces of a conversation between two… no, three people.
“Just shoot him, he’s a menace…”
“…could have killed her but didn’t…”
“…I’m going to get my gun…”
“…no, wait…”
“…look at him. Is he rabid?”
Then the wet warmth returned to Tillie’s cheek.
Only now she could see its origin.
The dog… the devil dog… the dog that was certainly getting ready to snuff out her life and tear her body to shreds…
He was very tenderly licking her cheek.
-26-
Tillie was in disbelief. Despite the terror she felt she had to admit the dog didn’t seem to be threatening her.
He appeared to be nursing her wounds.
She was slowly beginning to regain control of her body, one little bit at a time.
She moved a leg, and the dog jumped back as though startled.
She could see fear in his eyes, and the thought a dog might be frightened of something she did puzzled her.
In her world, dogs were fearless and mean.
Every last one of them.
“Look. She moved. She’s still alive.”
The voices were clearer now.
“What should we do? He won’t let us near her unless we shoot him.”
“No. We can’t shoot him. He’s just trying to protect her. He thinks we mean her harm.”
“But if we don’t shoot him we can’t get to her.”
As Tillie’s senses returned she was finally able to turn her head away from the dog.
Not for long, but long enough to get a glimpse of the people behind her talking.
Two men and a woman. Nomads, no doubt, who’d happened upon her.
The dog finally sensed she was more afraid of him than the other humans. He backed away, putting several feet of space between Tillie and himself. He placed his head upon the ground and whimpered faintly.
He gave in and accepted the help the humans were offering.
Tillie managed to sit up, still dizzy and a bit nauseous. She sat against the wheel of the SUV, facing the dog. Curiously, she wasn’t afraid. She got the sense she was in no danger.
She felt a firm hand on her shoulder and heard a man’s voice.
“Are you okay?”
“I… I think so.”
“Were you attacked?”
“No. I… I passed out.”
The woman spoke.
“You’ve been out for awhile. I can tell because half your face is blistered from the sun. Here, I have something that’ll help.”
The woman’s face suddenly appeared in front of her. She was forty something, thin and blonde. She smiled broadly and said, “Don’t worry. We know you’ve gone through a lot. We’re not going to leave you until you’re well enough to be alone.”
Tillie smelled the scent of aloe and felt something very cool against her burning cheek.
She managed a “thank you.”
“Don’t mention it. My name is Amanda. My friends are Mason and Spencer.”
“I’m Tillie. Thank you for coming to my aid.”
“Oh, we’re not your hero. That distinction belongs to your dog. What’s his name?”
“My… dog? I don’t understand. He’s not my dog.”
The answer seemed to surprise the woman.
“Really? He stood guard and protected you from the others.”
“The others?”
“There were two other dogs when we walked up. A boxer and a mutt. They were trying to get to you to sniff you, to see if you were a potential food source. He kept them at bay. Snarled and barked at them and let them know he meant business. They finally gave up and left.
“He must have seen us as a threat too, because he kept us away fro
m you for another half hour until you started to stir.
A second face appeared at her right side and handed her a bottle of water.
“Here you go,” said the same male’s voice she’d heard before. “Drink slowly. If you guzzle it you’ll probably throw it up. It’s a reused bottle, but the water is safe. We boil up a batch every morning.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it. Now then, are you hungry?”
“No thank you. Do you know what time it is?”
The man looked up at the sky, at the sun which was about sixty degrees.
“It’s between two and three in the afternoon. How long do you think you’ve been out?”
“I’m not sure. Since about ten a.m., I think.”
The man whistled beneath his breath.
“Well, that explains the sunburn. You’d better drink two bottles. You’re almost surely dehydrated.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
“And the dog isn’t yours?”
“No. I’ve never had a dog. I’m… afraid of them.”
Amanda smiled and said, “It looks like you might have one now. I think he’s pretty much claimed you as his human. I thought from the way he was licking your face he was a close companion.”
Tillie’s mind went back to the soft wet feeling on her cheek when she was starting to regain consciousness. Was that what she was feeling? The dog licking her? It was a sensation she’d gone nearly a lifetime without experiencing.
Amanda seemed to read her thoughts.
“Dogs do that to heal their own wounds. And they’ll do it to their humans as well. There are those who swear by the healing properties of a dog’s saliva.
“A lot of Indian tribes used dogs to fight infections in their own wounds. They claimed that when a dog licked a wound they healed faster and kept away what they called ‘the fever.’
“As a minimum it keeps a wound clean so it can heal. As for preventing infection, who knows? The Indians are very smart people.”
“But why?”
“Why what?”
“Why would he protect me?”
“Dogs are a great judge of human character. They can tell whether a person is good or bad much better than another human can. My guess is he came upon you, sensed you were a good person who was in trouble, and couldn’t pass you by. He had to protect you and try to nurse you back to health.”