“Yes. I’ve worked on farms back in England quite frequently and our farmers find them as useful as your farmers do.”

  “Then certainly, Frank,” Jim said. “They’re parked around back.”

  “Gentlemen,” Steve said, tipping his hat, “we shall return momentarily, hopefully with intoxicating spirits. Please tune your instruments.”

  Lloyd was shaking his head as the men departed. “Crazy English bastards.”

  “They’re funny bastards,” Jim said.

  “They certainly are,” Lloyd agreed.

  The men heard the ATV start up out back and accelerate, then it pulled around the front of Lloyd’s building. Suddenly, there was a shout. It was hard to understand the words but it sounded like a shout of warning or alarm. Jim stood up to investigate and a loud gunshot broke the quiet of the morning. He flinched and ducked back from the picture window he’d been approaching. A second shot quickly followed.

  Lloyd waved him off. “Don’t worry, those crazy bastards must have loaded that pistol. I guess I should have specifically told them not to shoot the gun while they were delivering it across town. You’d think they would fucking know that.”

  Gary was getting up, concern darkening his face. “I think that was a shotgun blast. Not a pistol.” He drew his Glock.

  Jim reached down to his own hip for his pistol but for the second time that day it wasn’t there. He had a moment of panic before he realized that he’d left it sitting on the arm of the couch where he’d been eating. The damn thing kept poking him while he tried to eat. He took a couple of quick steps back in that direction, grabbed his Beretta, and headed toward the front door, checking to make sure a round was chambered. When he reached the door, Gary was already there, staring around the edge of a vintage window shade. Jim took the other side of the door and peered out. The glass was old and distorted, with small bubbles scattered through it, but he could see well enough to get a clear picture of what had happened.

  “Oh shit,” Gary muttered.

  Jim saw the two Englishmen lying on the ground beside the overturned ATV. It was still running, one rear wheel still spinning. About twenty feet away, an elderly man in coveralls was pointing a shotgun at the fallen men. Beside him stood the hulking banjo-toting man in a diaper that they had passed on their way into town the day before.

  “Who the hell is that?” Jim asked.

  Lloyd reached the window about that time. “Damn it!” He shouldered Jim out of the way and flung open the door, running out of the building before Jim could stop him.

  Gary and Jim looked at each other, wondering what they should do. They were torn between the safety of their position and looking out for the man who’d sheltered them last night. Jim sucked in a deep breath. Lloyd was his oldest friend. He took a quick look out the door, then ran and took cover behind a car parked along the street. The car stood as a barrier between him and the shooter, but the old man didn’t appear to notice that Jim had come out. He had no reaction at all.

  In a moment, Gary was at Jim’s side. They crouched by the front wheel, leveling their pistols across the hood at the armed man, hoping there was enough engine block to provide some protection if he turned the scattergun in their direction. If Lloyd hadn’t been there, Jim would have shot the old man by this time. On the sheer merit of the scene before him, he knew the man deserved to die. The old man had shot the Englishmen in cold blood. They were good people.

  Lloyd stood distraught in front of the old man, pointing and yelling at him. “Gerald, you fucking idiot! Why? You killed two of my friends. They were guests in my house! What the hell are you doing?”

  The old man squinted at him as if could not recall who Lloyd was or why he was there. The old man was dark and wrinkled, wearing bibbed overalls and a dirty flannel shirt that swallowed his diminutive figure. Tufts of white hair poked from beneath a crumpled cap advertising Red Man chewing tobacco. He did not lower his shotgun, keeping it pointed in the direction of the fallen men.

  Lloyd turned his back on the old man and walked over to his prone friends, dropping and checking them. He touched them, shook them, begged his maker to restore them, but it was not to be. They were dead as disco. A pool of blood steadily grew and encircled them. Lloyd was devastated. The men had been his friends for a long time.

  “Why did you kill them?” Lloyd asked, turning back to the old man, his voice cracking with emotion. “I’ve always been good to you, Gerald. Who gave Lawrence there his banjo?” Lloyd was pointing, indicating the giant intellectually disabled man standing beside the shooter. He wore only a diaper, cowboy boots, and t-shirt. His large paw gripped an old banjo by the neck. He must have been in his mid-fifties and looked like a banjo-toting cherub, with his diaper and shape.

  The man, apparently Lawrence, held his banjo up to show Lloyd and smiled broadly. “You gimme it.” When Lawrence smiled again, Jim could see that every tooth in his head was missing.

  “Didn’t know they was your friends, Lloyd. Didn’t really mean to kill them,” the old man said, his voice like cold water over stones. “Tried to ask them a question and they started to drive off. I’m too old to chase them so I had to shoot them.”

  Lloyd shook his head in disgust. “What question was so damn important that you killed my two friends over it?”

  The old man considered this, his shotgun still raised and pointed towards the bodies as if they might rise and need to be shot again.

  “That four-wheeler they were riding belongs to my grandson. He didn’t come home yesterday. My family went looking for him and now they ain’t come home, neither. I’m feeling like something bad has befallen them. I intended to ask these two sons-of-bitches what they knew about it, but they went and got all froggy on me. Tried to drive off like they had something to hide.”

  Those words hit Jim like a ton of bricks. This was his fault. The old man was a relative of the people that his group had clashed with over the past two days. It had started when they met up with some hunters on the Appalachian Trail. One of their group had gotten all high-and-mighty with the hunters that they were damaging the trail by illegally using their ATV there. Jim deescalated the situation, but he was still left with an uneasy feeling that they’d see those hunters again so they left a decoy camp that night and slept deeper in the woods.

  While most of the group was sleeping, the hunters returned in the middle of the night, shooting into a tent and then setting it ablaze. Randi killed one of the men but the other got away. In the aftermath, the dead man’s family came looking for Jim’s group and killed a young couple that had been traveling with them. In that fight, they were forced to kill their attackers and hide their bodies on the side of the road. After patching up their wounds, Jim and his friends took the ATVs and used them to reach Lloyd’s place. It now appeared that this may have been a mistake and that this mistake may have killed two innocent people.

  Jim stood up from behind the car, his Beretta leveled on the man. “Tell me about the people you’re looking for.”

  The old man turned to Jim and squinted. “I don’t know you, son.”

  “You don’t,” Jim agreed. “You probably don’t want to, either, so don’t turn that gun in my direction.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or I drop you where you stand.”

  The man kept the shotgun pointed away from Jim, but a fury grew within his eyes. “Other night, my grandson didn’t come home. Yesterday, the rest of my people went looking for him. They didn’t come home, neither. Then Lawrence, my son here, saw one of our four-wheelers coming into town with someone else driving it. I come to find out why. That’s it yonder.”

  “Those men had nothing to do with it,” Jim said. “You murdered innocent people.”

  “Ain’t no one innocent,” the old man said. “I’ve been on this Earth long enough to know that fact.”

  “Your people weren’t innocent. They died trying to kill us. We fought back and they died. It was their fault. Their choice.”

  The man’s body shuddered as if he could not control his physical response to the news that had been dropped upon his shoulders. His family was dead. “I’ve lost everyone. You killed them all.”

  Lloyd stepped toward him. “Gerald, you haven’t lost everyone. You’ve still got that boy that needs you. Who’s going to take care of Lawrence if you die here? You know he can’t take care of himself. You told me once that the only reason the Lord put you on this Earth was to take care of Lawrence.”

  The old man’s eyes never left Jim’s. “I might just have to kill you.”

  “You’ll die if you try,” Jim warned.

  “He’s going to shoot,” Gary whispered.

  “Stop it!” Lloyd yelled at the old man, his frustration at the breaking point. “Stop it! You’ve already lost everyone, you dumb bastard. Tell him, Lawrence, tell him to put down that gun and go home with you.”

  Lawrence looked toward his father and spoke softly, oblivious to the seriousness of the situation but becoming scared by all the yelling. He stuck out his hand toward his father. “Go, Daddy. We go home.”

  “Everybody calm the fuck down!”

  It was Randi. No guns moved, but all eyes moved in her direction. She stepped out from Lloyd’s apartment and slowly walked between the cars, into the street. She had her hands out in front of her, showing that they were empty.

  “You all are scaring him,” she said, approaching Lawrence, smiling at him.

  “What do you know about it?” the old man spat.

  “I’ve worked with people exactly like Lawrence every day,” Randi said. She continued moving closer to him, closing the twenty feet between them.

  “Do not get near my son!”

  Randi held her hands up. “I’m only trying to help.”

  The old man laughed bitterly. “Every time somebody said they were there to help, they ended up trying to take my boy away from me. Nobody ever helped him but us. He’s my responsibility.”

  Randi continued to get closer to Lawrence. “I just want to take him somewhere safe. I want to get him out of the middle of all these guns. You don’t want to see him get hurt.”

  The old man swung his gun toward Randi, his finger on the trigger. All it would take would be the slightest of flinches and Randi would be dead. “I told you once. Do not touch my son!”

  Gary couldn’t take it anymore. “Get back here, Randi. He’s going to kill you.”

  “It’s okay,” Randi said. She was not talking to anyone but Lawrence now, her voice low. She made eye contact with him and smiled. She took another step and reached out her hand to him. “It’s going to be okay.”

  The old man was quivering with anger. His face was red, tears rolled from his eyes as if squeezed from his core by an immense pressure. “I told you...”

  “He’s going to do it,” Gary said. “He’s going to do it.”

  The old man shifted his aim from Randi, raised his gun toward his disabled son, and pulled the trigger. Buckshot sprayed the man-child from mere feet away, the concentration of pellets shredding completely through his neck and exiting in a cloud of gore. Randi was enveloped in the gruesome spray and fell backward.

  Lawrence collapsed instantly, his spine severed and his head rolling awkwardly to the side. Without pause, the old man continued an awkward rotation toward Jim, racking the pump on his shotgun to chamber another round.

  He was not fast enough. There was no way that he could have been with both Jim and Gary already holding him in their sights. If his first shot had been in Jim’s direction instead of his son’s, he might have had a chance. Jim sent three 9mm Hydro-Shock bullets into the old man’s center mass before his rotation was complete. He didn’t intend to shoot him that many times but the wiry bastard wouldn’t drop. Gary fired as well, not counting his shots but aware that there were several. The old man was dead before his body hit the ground, his old Winchester 97 clattering away onto the paved street. Blood seeped from his wounds, mixing in the dirty street with the blood of the dead Englishmen.

  Gary holstered his Glock and sprang around the car, rushing to Randi’s side. She was spitting and wiping blood from her face. Gary took off his shirt and wiped the blood from her eyes. She grabbed the shirt with both hands and began wiping her mouth. When she was able to see, she opened her eyes to the gory scene before her, then exploded into sobs. Lawrence’s body lay at her feet, the wound gaping at her, the blood soaking into her pants and shoes. She began kicking violently, trying to scoot away from the pooling blood.

  “Is she hit?” Jim asked, joining Gary.

  “I don’t know yet,” Gary said. “I can’t tell.” He put his hands under Randi’s arms and dragged her back to the sidewalk, out of view of Lawrence’s body.

  “Are you hit?” Jim asked.

  Randi was gasping, unable to cry, talk, or breathe. Her eyes were wild, manic, those of a trapped animal.

  “Randi!” Jim snapped. “Are you hit?”

  She finally held up a hand in a gesture that indicated they should give her a minute.

  The normally unflappable Lloyd had not yet been exposed to anything like this. He’d spent the first week of America’s collapse in a drunken stupor playing “Sally Ann” and telling lies. He’d not seen the violence that had wracked the lives of normal people caught up in this disaster. He dropped to his knees in the street – cursing, crying.

  “I didn’t see that coming,” Gary said. “I knew he’d shoot at you and I was waiting for it. I didn’t think he’d kill his own son.”

  Jim crouched at Randi’s side, placing a hand on her shoulder. Though her breathing was calming, tears still burned their way from her eyes, washing grisly paths down her blood-spattered face. “Are you hit?” he asked once more. “We need to know.”

  Randi began patting her body. She looked down her shirt. “I don’t think he hit me. It’s not my blood.”

  “Thank God,” Gary said. “I don’t know how he missed you.”

  “It was close. I felt it,” Randi said. “I’ve got to get out of these clothes, get cleaned up.”

  Jim and Gary helped her up and she walked toward the door to Lloyd’s apartment. She turned around and looked at the scene. “I won’t shed another tear the entire way home. I know the rules now. You can be completely innocent and it won’t make any difference. It doesn’t fucking matter.”

  Jim couldn’t think of anything to say. He knew that he was selfish. Selfishness was at the very heart of survival. He was grateful to have another day.

  However, this was not a proud moment. The world was changing around them and it was becoming a place where a man would kill his own son so that he would be free to try and kill you. When Jim replayed the situation and tried to understand how things might have turned out differently, it was hard to make any other decisions than those he’d made at the time. Each day had been built upon the one before it. Decisions he’d made days ago would affect things that took place weeks from now. All he could do was keep going and hope that there was a day when things got getter.

  He felt vaguely uncomfortable that he understood the perverted logic of why the man did what he did. It was uncomfortably similar to when his own grandfather was dying in a hospital and he took him the gun that he used to end his life. Love wasn’t always about hugs and warmth. Sometimes it was about exposing yourself to the infinity of pain and darkness. Sometimes it was about opening up your own well of blackness and letting it spill out upon the world.

  Jim had gotten through the first days of this journey drawing on the strength of his grandfather and the stories he knew of him. He was a different breed of man who had lived a hard life in West Virginia, growing up early and having to work in a man’s world when he was little more than a child. Over the course of his life, he’d killed several men, telling a much younger Jim that each of them had needed killing. Jim could hear his grandfather’s voice whispering in his ear for him to harden the fuck up. Jim had been hearing that since he left Richmond and those words had gotten him this far. Hopefully they would get him home.

  “Let’s get out of here, Gary,” he said.

  “What about him?” Gary asked, looking toward Lloyd still kneeling in the street.

  “Lloyd, you coming with us?”

  Lloyd looked up slowly. “Is this what’s out there? Is this what people are doing to each other?”

  Jim wasn’t sure Lloyd really wanted the answer so he did not give one.

  Chapter 2

  Lloyd’s Barber Shop

  Crawfish, Virginia

  Everyone pitched in to move the bodies from the street. Lloyd had a stack of old moving blankets in his garage and they used them to wrap each body. It was gruesome work and more than one of them spewed their breakfast into the gutter. The whole thing was a pointless misunderstanding, but how did that change anything?

  They piled the bodies in the bed of Lloyd’s truck, which still had enough fuel to take the bodies somewhere. Lloyd really didn’t know what he was going to do with them yet. He wanted to give the Englishmen a proper burial; he wasn’t sure about the others.

  In the end, Lloyd chose not to leave with them. Jim had explained to him that the violence he saw this morning was only a taste of what the world had to offer.

  “You may see that every day,” Jim cautioned. “Or worse.”

  Lloyd did not like the sound of that. “I just want to be left alone to play the banjo. I think I’m going to wait things out here and see what happens.”

  “Things will probably get worse,” Randi said. “I’m trying to stay positive, but I keep getting disappointed.”

  “If things do get worse, I’ll worry about it when it happens. Maybe I’ll pack up then and head to my parent’s house.”

  “If you do, find me,” Jim said.

  Lloyd insisted on giving them some of his food, despite the fact that he was staying behind. Jim tried to talk him out of it but Lloyd would not listen. He packed two large coolers into their trailer of gear, then slipped in another box of packaged and canned food.

  “I appreciate it, Lloyd,” Jim said. “This will give us enough for the final push home.”

 

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