Starvation Ridge
Book I: These Will I Bring
These
will I bring to my holy mountain... Is. 56:7
A
QUIET, tall, stooped, gray, unsmiling and yet not unkindly man,
Father had shared all his thoughts but kept his feelings packed away
where his face could not find them. He'd had a harried former life,
but his schedule was his own now. He'd had time to organize his plans
and act on them.
With education, he might have been an
architect; certainly a master builder. He had put a lot of thought
into the design of their basement fortress. The entrance was covered
by a sheet of steel that could be (and generally was) chained down
from inside, by means of a through-bolt in the hinged door and
another, with a turnbuckle to take up slack, in the floor beneath.
The outside of the door was covered with brush that was pinned and
glued together to stay in place as the door was lifted or dropped,
and even when it was open it could not be seen by anyone who had not
penetrated the overgrown shrubbery along the foundations of the
ruined house.
Three of the exterior walls of the former
bungalow – it had been a very large house, one that Father could
never have "owned" in that other life – had long ago
burned through and collapsed, and the back wall supported a bit of
roof and a wide soffit, so that the rain, even when it began to spill
over the edge of the rusting gutters, could not scatter the brush on
their trapdoor, nor seep into the entryway.
Below, there
were four rooms arranged in a spiral, with heavy doors to pass
through from one to the next. The interior walls were double
thicknesses of cinder block. The first room was living room, kitchen,
dining, bath, laundry, and pantry all in one – like a twentieth
century bomb shelter, which perhaps it had once been.
A very
large pit toilet, lined with brick, had been dug, which had never
needed emptying, and which was vented between the studs of the one
house wall, above.
Water poured, clean and sweet, from a
hand pump over the sink, piped from a well hidden in the basement of
an empty, burned out house up the weed-choked street. Five-gallon
plastic buckets caught sink water and bath water, and were emptied
into a laundry tub in the corner by the pit toilet, next to a bucket
of lime with a trowel in it. The water drained into perforated pipe
buried in what had been a lawn, two "lots" away. There had
been just enough slope to make it work.
Food came mostly
from cans. In her childhood Karen remembered something called MREs or
meals-ready-to-eat, but they were a distant memory. Father had
explained that a surprising sequence of events had made it possible
for them to have a steady supply of canned food over the years.
First, there had been several bumps in the supply of fuel – oil
(Karen had seen a sample) was the form of fuel that had caused most
of the difficulty. This led to a series of "economic
depressions" – people had lost their jobs and had walked away
from their mortgages. At the same time there had been, everywhere,
three or four very widespread diseases, fatal to some and
debilitating to others.
Next,
there had been a war. Complex, long, and grievous, it had involved
the peoples of many lands and, because nuclear power plants and their
spent fuel pools had been popular targets, the world as he had known
it had poisoned itself fatally.
Then had come, locally, an
earthquake, which had shattered the electrical, water and sewer
systems and caused fires which had not been put out. Hungry and
sickly people had gone away by the thousands, mostly northward.
"Early on, I decided, as I was unemployed anyway, to stay put
and raise my family on what could be gathered. Before everyone else
had quite gotten away, before, ahh, the appearance of organized gangs
– those stripped everything, then left – I made sure to be the
first to pick through the food warehouses – the grocery stores were
already empty. And I worked the hardware and clothing stores. It was
slow, because I didn't want to meet anyone."
He would
have smiled at this point in his story, if it had been his nature.
There was a hint of one in his eyes, but it faded away quickly. The
man lived under a shadow.
Father pushed his glasses up his
nose and rubbed the balding spot on the back of his head.
"If I had had time to get to the pharmacies and sporting goods
stores before they were emptied, we might have been pretty well set.
As it is, we did all right. I mean, in the sense that, ahh, we ...
well, we two at least ... are still here. It's amazing but there it
is. I mean ... if the earthquakes had not happened when they did, I
think, the canned goods might have been gone before I could get to
them. And there would have been nothing left to do but run, with
everyone else. With, ahh, really, nowhere to go."
Again, no mention of Mother. Karen knew, by now, that it would be
useless to ask. Something, longer ago than she could remember, had
happened to leave this man with one other human being to talk to than
herself.
There could be no question of fire. Their warmth
came from the insulating he had done, over time, with found
materials, and from sweaters and knit wool hats – sometimes gloves
and lap blankets as well. Not often, though. Their world was, on the
whole, more hot than cold now. The basement was a help in summer,
when so many things were scorching in the harsh world above.
The second room, even larger, was a workshop. Father and Karen kept
regular hours there She became familiar with tools, metalwork,
carpentry, rudimentary sewing, plumbing, and leatherwork. The door
from there to the living room was the heaviest, flanked by a closet
of the second room from which a disguised gun slit covered the
outside of the door.
This room doubled as the schoolroom and
gymnasium. It was here that teaching and training occupied most of
their days.
The third room was Father's and was little more
than a walk-through closet with a bed.
The fourth was
Karen's and it was the only home she'd ever known. A futon, a dresser
with a cracked mirror, a few plush toys, including Doll, her
one-eared pink rabbit – not much else. Makeup and jewelry were
unknown to her, except in theory. Feminine hygiene was an issue that
had come early; she had been left to work it out on her own.
Father could be counted on to provide for almost all
contingencies, but there were, apparently, lines he could not cross
in his mind. Gaps had appeared in his "shopping"
accordingly.
The dresser and a closet held clothes, yes, but
a lot of these were mostly jeans and microfiber hoodies, all the same
style and either green or desert camo. Where they'd come from she had
no idea; every couple of years Father would announce a "birthday"
and she would move on to the next size of everything, as needed. If
Karen had been deprived of a sense of style, she did not miss it.
There were books and magazines at hand, but the people in them and
their activities made little sense to her.
Each room's door
could be (and at night was) bolted and barred from within. The few
weapons Father had collected were taught and shared.
As
there was no electricity, kerosene, or propane, lighting was
restricted to daylight mostly, which came thinly enough through
brush-covered Plexiglass window-well covers. Father knew these
skylights were a weakness, but reasoned that he and Karen could not
just sit in the dark. They had few candles and no batteries. There
was also vodka, which could be burned in an alcohol lamp, but it was
reserved for medicinal use – as a topical agent, mostly.
Ventilation had been provided for the original bomb shelter, but
Father's ingenuity had not extended to resurrecting it, and they
depended on cracking the door and windows from time to time to
freshen the air.
In the schoolroom, Karen learned all that
Father could think to teach, racking his fading memories and
ransacking his small library for a smattering of history, geology,
anthropology, geometry, and physics. Father had been college-trained,
but then had mostly worked, he said, as a "bus driver." His
weaknesses in formal mathematics and in languages became hers as well
– but biology he taught her thoroughly, and geography from a
topographic atlas and a relief globe. He stressed physical geography
especially; he felt she should be able to forecast weather from cloud
formations.
Father saw that she learned physical culture,
health, sanitation, first aid and anatomy, and, though he had no
military or police background, such lessons in strategy and tactics
as he had learned while foraging. In some things she was drilled
constantly so that they would be second nature – no, first nature.
Bone deep.
Gaps could not be avoided. Karen was not certain
of her age, and could not have told anyone the year. Rudimentary
political science had been discussed, but civics had gone by the bye
– there was no flag to pledge allegiance to.
Though she
was mostly a shut-in, Karen was no stranger to map-and-compass, and
to archery of a sort, within the confines of the training room. She
understood firearms as a last-last resort; the noise could bring even
more unwanted attention too easily.
Her few excursions, all
closely supervised, had been into a wilderness in which there were
coyotes and other animals, but no people, and in which the landmarks
– shells of burnt-out homes, mostly – made less impression on her
than did the mountain ranges and river valleys in her atlas.
Dry-country trees and brush had sprouted up everywhere; each year all
places began to look more and more alike.
:::
At
four in the morning, the night of March 11th, 2048, Karen swam slowly
up from an interminable dream with a vague sense of alarm. Doll and
frogs and a puddle – what? Dawn usually was what roused her, but
there was no light through her small Plexiglass window. What had
wakened her?
A muffled thump came from Father's room. And
another. And another. Then quiet.
Karen rose from her futon
and tiptoed to the bolted and barred steel door. Placing her ear
against it, she heard someone speaking – and another answered.
Neither voice was Father's!
The shock froze her momentarily
to the spot. Then the voices were quite near the door and she could
hear them plainly. They must think the sound could not carry so
well.
"Never mind that, it's steel and you can bet it's
locked six ways from Sunday. See the other door? He must have been a
clever old shit. Been here decades, it looks like."
He
must have been.
"I'll go get the sledgehammer. Them
concrete blocks won't hold up long."
Time to go.
Karen knew where everything was in the dark; not that it was
entirely dark. Light flickered underneath the door. A torch? Padding
softly back past the futon, Karen slipped off her hoodie, put on a
tee shirt and a man's wool shirt with double pockets, then squirmed
back into her hoodie. Her jeans, belt and sheath, with an old Schrade
skinner, well honed, she already had on, having long ago learned to
sleep in them. She put on the socks that lay across her homemade
boots, then the boots, double laced, and went to her dresser.
Her hands were shaking so badly – how could she do this?
Remembering her training, she breathed deeply three times.
From behind her came the sound of iron against cement. Pieces of
cinder block were falling into the inside of the wall.
From
beside the dresser, the girl picked up her bow – a child's model,
they'd never found better. Twenty pounds of draw would be sufficient,
however. She strung it and pulled a handful of arrows from the quiver
on the floor. She laid the arrows on the dresser. She felt for, and
found, her wool cap. Gloves into hoodie pockets. The heavy little
pocket holster to the right front jeans pocket. Last-last.
Backpack, always ready, with food and full water bottles, down from
wall peg. Over to window-well, lugging backpack in one hand, bow and
a couple of arrows in the other. Six more were clipped to the
backpack.
The door rattled, and with a crash the wall
cracked and cement fell and skittered across the floor. Must gain
time! Karen turned and nocked a broadhead as she did so. Her
hands were steadier now. The hammer struck again, and its head showed
briefly in the hole. As it withdrew to strike another blow, she
loosed the arrow into the gap.
There was an audible gasp,
and then someone began screaming. One or more others were shouting.
Remember not to stay and fight if there is any way out,
Father had said. Defense, other things being equal, generally does
not turn out well. Your choices are to go on the offensive or run. If
you can find a way to run, run!
Karen reached up and cranked open the skylight as quickly as it
would go. Cold air poured in from the night as she shoved the
backpack out. Feeling her exposure to the open hole in the wall
behind her – only the darkness of her room offered protection –
and the risk of the night above – what if there were more of them
up there? What if they had dogs? She'd never seen one, but she had been taught they could be among the worst an intruder could bring. She pushed her bow out and
tossed the arrow after it.
Committed
now.
Doll, her beloved one-eared pink bunny, was sitting on
the top step of Karen's step ladder. With a sweep of her arrow hand,
the girl knocked her childhood onto the floor, then hauled herself
out the skylight behind her gear.
Fog. And a new moon.
Those would help. But the sky was already lightening, and a few
sleepy birds were testing their dawn notes.
The young woman
swung her pack up, shrugged into her shoulder straps and snapped her
hip belt's buckle, then took up the bow and the arrow. Some instinct
or bit of training made her choose to go left instead of right, past
her father's window, instead of directly away, which they could guess
and follow. Yet another risk; she would be briefly illuminated. Only
surprise would avail, and her relatively greater knowledge of the
terrain. Had they found his revolver yet?
Someone was
already climbing up to the window. She faced her silhouetted foe for
only a brief moment, and loosed the arrow into the shadow. Something
fell backward into the faint light, and there were curses. There!
That would hold them for a bit.
Not waiting to see the
effect of her shot, Karen Rutledge, age fourteen, turned and ran from
what had once been Davis, California.
:::
The
sleeping sixteen-year-old woman opened her eyes and, for a few
moments, thought of nothing at all. She had always been a light
sleeper, and that had, in the last two years, served her well. But
waking was her weak point – it took time, and one could not always
expect to have that on one's side. Daylight filtered down through the
low-sweeping boughs of the ancient cedar.
She could hear the
little river, talking softly to itself over there somewhere. Thoughts
began to bubble up. Well, nothing had come to eat her in the darkness
– or had really even tried, in all this time – except maybe that
one night. Hundreds of miles from here. So long ago. She felt
a kinship with her father's silence about her mother. If anyone had
asked Karen about him – could she speak?
She wondered.
Would she ever cry?
:::
Pulling
together her gear, Karen eased out from the deep shadow of the old
cedar and stood in the warm sunshine, looking, listening, and
sniffing. She stretched.
All clear. Maybe. Keep
checking.
But a chance to do some bodily functions, wash
her face, and take inventory.
The inventory was worrisome.
She'd managed to either hold onto or replace most of her backpack
items – spare jeans and pullover, trash bags to use as rain gear,
her father's compass, a treasured and tattered "space"
blanket, a flint-and-steel gadget with a handle made from a deer
antler (where had Father found that? or did he make it?), dryer-lint
and candle-wax tinder, some other things, including, notably, her
ceramic filter straw.
But food was in worse than short
supply.
She'd started her journey two years ago. In the
Sacramento Valley, food had been a constant concern. All grocery and
convenience stores had been cleaned to the walls. Gardens were long
gone, though she did discover Jerusalem artichokes, a few other
volunteer vegetables, and some neglected fruit trees. Farming seemed
to have ground to a halt in many places; equipment sat abandoned in
the open, and brush and saplings had invaded the fields. Fences were
down everywhere, and few farm or game animals were to be found.
Along the freeway corridor there had once been horrors. First,
there had been a traffic jam. And it had stayed jammed. Then the cars
were abandoned and everyone had tried to go on, on foot and badly
equipped. Remnants of high-heeled shoes lay among thistles.
People had died in droves; of what, she generally had no idea. It all
seemed to have happened more than a decade ago. Some animals –
coyotes? foxes? perhaps even wolves? humans? – had scattered
bones far and wide. The bones had then begun to blend into the
vegetation, turning green with algae.
She would always
remember one pair of long bones, a radius and ulna, lying across a
truck tire in the hot sun. They were held together by a golden
watchband.
"Traffic" had begun to pick up again
along there, though. People were passing through, in small groups,
almost all of them coming from the south and heading north.
Karen had managed to avoid most of them, by choosing a parallel route
in the foothills of the great river valley, first on the west, then
crossing under the freeway along a creek, and working her way up past
a series of abandoned reservoirs. Water was running over the tops of
the dams, between tree trunks piled up every which way.
She
was mostly lucky in such people as she did meet. Here in the hills
they mostly weren't a blood-thirsty lot. Men, she was
learning, were often a clear and present danger, so she sought out
women. Some offered temporary shelter in a barn or outbuilding, and
well water. But few offered to share much food.
That was
fair. She had little to offer herself.
She had become adept at
exploring out-of the way houses for caches of food. Often, for
whatever reason, the occupants had gone away without finding a way to
take it all with them, or bothering to hide it well in case they
might return.
Most was useless. Everything in freezers,
refrigerators, plastic bags or bottles, net bags, and cardboard boxes
was a total loss. No one seemed to have stockpiled anything
freeze-dried and foil-packed. The stuff in the occasional pantry full
of ranks of filled Mason jars was of very uneven quality and some of
it had become dangerous. Most tin cans were still reliable, however,
though in many cases they had had paper labels that had fallen off
and disintegrated.
One never knew what was for dinner.
Sometimes beets, beets and beets. Or cat food, beets and refried
beans.
She didn't complain.
:::
In the two long winters, Karen holed up in cabins tucked into box
canyons on the western slope of the mountains. She added to her
skills. Grouse, which had exploded in population, and mule deer,
which were making a comeback, became available.
It had
become necessary to use fire. The second winter, that column of smoke
had led to a very close call, and she'd had to abandon her freehold
in the middle of a snowstorm. She'd come, limping and bleeding, to a
house in another valley, where a woman was willing to take her in,
tend her wounds, and – most miraculous of all – share food.
The woman had been dying, slowly, and perhaps this, along with the
loneliness, had spurred her generosity. Karen understood that the
nursing and the feeding were not entirely gratis – in return for
these, she would provide hospice nursing and then a "proper
burial." Something to do with a terror of having one's body
gnawed and scattered by "critters."
Once Karen was
alone again, she packed as much high-calorie canned goods as she
could well carry, and, thinking she might try her luck on the east
side of the mountains, had gone over a pass.
It had not
turned out well. People on this side had horses and dogs, and they
seemed to be into hunting other people. So here she was, a little
farther north, coming west again, and out of food. She'd only been
able to re-cross the mountains by arriving at the right season; red
and blue huckleberries were having a banner year, and small
long-unfished lakes and ponds teemed with relatively easy protein.
Were it not for the hordes of mosquitoes, which bit her
unmercifully as she walked along, she could have appreciated her
advantages more. She could only hope they would not make her sick –
she'd read that they could.
But other game, and other fruit,
seemed hard to find in the high places, and it would not be good for
the cold to find her here. Small maples of some kind were blushing
beneath the canopy along the streams and the overgrown roads.
Evenings were chillier; mists hovered over the little lakes in the
mornings.
By now, she knew to heed these signs.
With her staff in one hand, and strung bow in the other, she padded
back down to the sandy stretch by the little river. It probably had
once had a name, but was too small to show on the highway map, torn
from an old road atlas, that she had with her. She checked the sand
for tracks – her own she had wiped away before retiring for the
night.
Nothing but a raccoon had been by, apparently. Not
that Karen would have worried much on finding bear or even cougar
tracks. Cougars seemed to like tracking her – feline curiosity? But
most everything seemed mostly to be on a live-and-let-live basis.
Down there – wherever the stream led – things might be
different.
Humans, though very seldom
encountered, were always the wild card.
Karen parked her
backpack under cover and checked the stream for fish and crayfish,
but not much was doing, in spite of the cleanliness of the water. She
doubted she could keep herself fed with caddis larvae and the tiny
black water snails that were crawling about on the round underwater
rocks. There was nothing for it but to head downstream with a
growling tummy, and keep an eye out for late thimbleberries. She'd
already drunk the last of her emergency bottle of Karo syrup two days
ago.
Hoisting her pack onto a fallen log so as to shrug into
the straps and buckle up, she began the trek. Keeping to the hillside
above the riverbank, she used deer trails, walking whenever possible
on logs, small rocks, or tufts of bear grass. She didn't know what
the plants were called, but knew they helped make her harder to
track. Not unless she heard dogs would she take to the water. Too
much danger of falling, of re-injuring her leg, of getting wet and
losing needed body heat. What with stopping every few hundred yards
to look, listen and feel out her surroundings for any hint of
malevolence, it was going to take all day to get down from here.
:::
It
took three days.
Fortunately the weather held. The
moon was getting brighter each starry night, so she made long days of
it, but these mountains, such a gentle, unimpeded climb on their east
slope, were, on the west, steep, dark, gnarly with vegetation, and
covered with loose scree that delighted in turning underfoot. It was
slow and exhausting going.
With what few berries she'd
found, and one small trout that she had spotted stranded in a tiny
side pool of the riffles and eaten on the spot, Karen was feeling
bone-tired and giddy when she struck a trail too regular to be a
product of the skittery activities of deer. No longer able to watch
with her customary care, she trudged along, as the stream at her
right hand, which been rattling with rapids and rumbling over small
waterfalls, quieted down and lilted over the roots of large mountain
alders and towering cottonwoods.
This would be the valley.
So nice of the people here to make a trail that she could travel
without constantly stooping and climbing under and over the
vegetation – oh!
How long have I been like this? Better
pay attention!
She stopped; looked, listened, and
"felt." She believed, after many otherwise inexplicable
experiences, that her skin knew not only touch, but another sense
akin to sight – one could almost "see" around the next
bend; certainly one could tell if there were watchers. But on so
little food, this sense became unreliable. She would just have to try
harder.
There was a bit of watching up and to the left,
among the Douglas firs there – but it was almost certainly deer,
waiting for dusk to come out and feed. No use checking; she'd passed
the point of no return for strength and patience to hunt, and they
were on to her anyway. She scanned ahead.
Ah, there's
the problem. Too much light there. A clearing.
And very
likely artificial.
No help for it, then. Must go up to the
ridge and reconnoiter.
Halfway to the place she'd chosen,
Karen knew she was in trouble – not able, on the low-calorie regime
of the last week, to climb with the loaded pack. She'd have to stash
and retrieve. And in this tangle, it was possible to miss her way and
lose everything.
Slipping off her pack, she dropped it amid
a patch of dead bracken. Marking the spot and her route with bent
twigs, and taking her bow, two broadheads, a half-empty water bottle
and her monocular, she scrabbled and clawed to a rocky point near the
Douglas firs. Yes, there were deer, two or three. They snorted at
her impertinence and moved off along the saddle to the east.
It
would take more reserves of strength than Karen had to track them.
She ignored them and eased up the back side of the point. The late
afternoon sun slanted through a mackerel sky – rain soon? –
throwing a long purple shadow behind her on lower ground as she
squinted at the unaccustomed brightness, then studied the scene
before her.
First use the naked eye, Father had
taught her. It's wide angle. Notice any movement first, then
notice points of interest. Use the monocular only when you feel you
have to. It gives you tunnel vision – cuts off peripheral vision,
and you need as much of that as you can keep.
Okay, it's
a clearing. Two clearings. Some more cottonwoods, then the stream
cuts around the foot of the ridge out of sight to the left –
Well! That's a sight.
Someone has been
farming. And there are buildings.
And I smell smoke.
She'd have to make camp on the saddle, watch, and think. It
would be a close thing. How was she going to get anything to eat? And
how keep warm? Rain was likely coming; and after that, a full moon.
:::
Tomma
James and Vernie Watkin walked into the milking house. Mrs. Ames
looked up, smiling. She liked these boys. Tomma, summer-tanned, slim,
lanky, blue-eyed, braided blond hair, cheery and bumptious. Vernie,
stocky, quiet – reserved or bashful, she was never sure – much
shorter, with brown, frizzled, closely cropped hair, brown eyes,
brown skin the same summer and winter, serious. Not alike in any way,
except, which was always important, that they were both willing
workers, these two had been best friends since both were two years
old. And that was – oh, my! Fifteen years ago.
Neither had
married, though most did nowadays by the time they were thirteen.
Close friends. Starvation Creek's elders might not openly care
for that; they put a premium on child-rearing just as they did on
stock-rearing. But these two made a strong team and had opted for
patrol work. They had earned the respect of a mostly conservative
community.
"Somebody reach me a bucket." She
chuckled. "I always seem like I sit down before I have it with
me, and I'm not as spry as I used to be."
Vernie
put the milk bucket beside her as she groped underneath Florence, a
small, placid Devon cow. Mrs. Ames – she still liked to be called
that, though she'd been long widowed – noticed that he wasn't
smiling. Neither was Tomma.
"Something's up?" she
asked. She pushed aside a strand of gray hair that had escaped the
bun at the back of her head and looked at them expectantly.
Tomma made a long face. Whatever that meant, Vernie nodded his
agreement. Mrs. Ames looked from one to the other. This was taking
them longer than usual.
"There's somebody out on
the spur," Tomma suddenly blurted.
"On th' Ridge?"
She dropped her hand; it struck the bucket, which skittered
underneath Florence unheeded.
"We, uh, think it's a
girl. And, umm ... " Tomma glanced at Vernie, who calmly gazed
right back, leaving the ball with Tomma.
"Been there a
coupla days. We think she might be by herself. And – that
maybe she's come down the creek."
Mrs. Ames'
eyebrows shot up. She rocked back on the milking stool with her hands
on her knees. "From th' east?"
(To be continued)