Charlie was a violent man, but it was to his great fortune that his current admission to jail was not the result of a violent offense. He’d been violent before and he certainly intended to be violent again in the future. In fact, he’d lain awake at night in his jell cell thinking about it. Unable to read with any comprehension, he had nothing to pass the time but his dark fantasies, thinking of the people he’d hurt simply because they’d pissed him off at one time or another. He’d rarely been caught for his acts of violence. It was the stupid stuff that got him locked up, mainly the fact that he had sticky fingers.

  He’d first killed a man in 1989 after smoking weed with him under a bridge. It was a black man who was trying to sell him some of the same weed they were smoking. They had a fire going from driftwood and Charlie realized that everyone else he knew had left the riverbank and gone home. It was only him and the black man. The fact that he was a black man would be totally irrelevant were it not for the fact that, in an area of little racial diversity, the man’s presence instantly set Charlie on edge and made him suspicious. After they finished the joint, Charlie began to feel the very pronounced and unusual effects, and the man informed him that the weed was laced with PCP. Charlie panicked. He’d heard nothing but horror stories about so-called Angel Dust.

  Charlie’s ability to process was minimal in the best of times. He was a TRS-80 in a Pentium world. Impaired by the drug, a single thought coalesced in Charlie’s mind. The man in front of him was the devil. The devil was here to collect his soul for all the bad shit that he had done. Charlie was screwed. He watched the man’s face in the firelight, flames flickering in the reflection of his wet eyes, on the surface of his teeth when he smiled. A fear gripped Charlie so deep that he felt urine running down his leg and into his shoe. He had never been so scared in his entire life.

  Charlie stumbled into the dark, found a brick, and caved in the man’s skull. He pulped the man’s head, and continued until it was unrecognizable. Splattered in gore, he rose from the body, panting in the firelight like a demon himself. He rolled the defaced corpse into the river, erasing all evidence of his crime. As far as he knew, no one had ever found the body.

  Last year, he’d taken to following church prayer requests on Facebook so he could see who was suffering from cancer. Unable to master this technology himself, he’d convinced his sister-in-law to do the work for him. She’d find the names and addresses, and Charlie would hide out near their homes and wait for them to leave for doctor appointments, and then break in and steal pain medications. He thought it was a pretty good system.

  Most recently, he had been busted for stealing from people’s storage buildings and selling the loot to buy drugs. Most of what he stole was sold for only a fraction of its actual value. It didn’t matter to him; it was all free money to him. If he only got five dollars for a three hundred dollar chainsaw, it was five dollars he didn’t have yesterday.

  The sheriff knew the nature of men like Charlie Rakes. He’d been in law enforcement long enough to read him like a book. This was a man who never learned from incarceration. He was a criminal and he would always be a criminal. Going to jail was nothing for him but a cost of doing business. Business owners sometimes had to put up with frivolous lawsuits. Garages had to deal with bounced checks. Farmers had to deal with the weather. And Charlie Rakes occasionally had to go to jail.

  With there being no hope of teaching Charlie a lesson through incarceration, the sheriff really had no choice but to let him go. The sheriff was not aware of any of Charlie’s violent crimes that may instead have prompted him to drop Charlie off at the state line as he had others of this undesirable criminal class. He knew of nothing in Charlie’s history that justified him being shot and his body hidden. So even though he despised Charlie, he had no choice but to let him go.

  “You’re a lowlife,” the sheriff told him as he opened Charlie’s bars for the last time. “But I don’t know what the hell else to do with you.”

  Charlie could not stifle an ear-to-ear grin.

  “Don’t look too happy or I might change my mind,” the sheriff warned sternly. A deputy returned Charlie’s possessions to him, then escorted him to an outside door and opened it.

  “Try to behave yourself, Charlie,” the sheriff said. “The rules are going to be a lot simpler until things get back to normal. You start being a pain in the ass and someone will kill you dead.”

  Charlie met the sheriff’s hard gaze but said not a word. He knew when to keep his mouth shut.

  *

  Charlie didn’t have a place of his own. He’d rented a trailer for one hundred dollars a month prior to getting locked up. It had all the amenities you’d expect of a hundred dollar trailer, which was exactly none. It was little more than a long camper that dated from the 1960s. The outside was painted in a thick coat of brown paint. Inside, the floor was spongy and an old car wheel sat in the stove to hold pans near the broiler element. A blue tarp lay on the roof with old tires holding it down. The trailer was miserably hot in the summer and freezing in winter. Still, it was home, and Charlie had lived there about six years. It was where everyone knew to find him, including the law, and that was his downfall. Once he got locked up, he couldn’t pay the rent anymore and lost the place. It was hard to sell enough stolen weed eaters from jail to pay your bills.

  His brother lived in a trailer park in the country outside of town. His wife was the one who hooked Charlie up with sick people off Facebook. He’d have to make his way out there and see if his brother could put him up for a little bit. He’d never measured the distance but assumed it to be seven or eight miles to the trailer park where they lived. He could walk it in a day if he had to but he hoped to hell he wouldn’t have to. Walking was for kids and drunks, and he felt too tired to be one and too sober to be the other.

  There weren’t any cars moving that he could see. He’d been in jail for eight months this time and only knew the current state of the world through secondhand reports. The world was strange with no moving cars. It was a much quieter than he remembered. Less hectic. He did not have to worry about stepping into the road and being hit by a coal truck. He moved from the sidewalk to the center of the street and looked both ways. Not a car moving anywhere. On this empty road he could walk wherever the hell he wanted, so he turned north and started walking.

  In about a mile and half, he approached the outskirts of town. Over the course of his walk, he’d passed people walking, children playing, and men moving about engaged in various tasks. No one paid much mind to him, the presence of a man walking up the middle of the road being more common now than it was a week ago.

  He noticed a lot of businesses were closed. The fast food places he passed had signs in the window that read: CLOSED, NO FOOD. He saw a convenience store that was still open. They had a sign indicating that there was no fuel available, but he could see that they still had an inventory of candy, magazines, and some odd food items. He saw an old can of peas, a can of deviled ham, potted meat.

  He walked up to the door of the BP station and peered inside. With no lights on, the store didn’t appear open but a man that Charlie didn’t recognize sat on a chair behind the counter. Charlie cleared his throat. “Got any Tahoes?”

  The clerk was morbidly obese and about Charlie’s age. He had long hair and a hillbilly beard.

  “Ain’t got any smokes,” the man said. “They went fast.”

  “What about roll-your-owns? Drum? PA?”

  “No Prince Albert, but I got Drum. Surprised it ain’t all gone yet.”

  “How much?”

  “I’ll take thirty dollars.”

  “Thirty dollars?” Charlie replied. “I reckon you would take thirty dollars. That’s three times what is used to be.”

  The man chuckled, shaking his entire body. “In my daddy’s day it was a dollar,” the man replied. “Inflation, you know.”

  Charlie stepped through the door. “I ought to whip your ass and take it, you smart-alecky bastard.”

  The man drew a stainless revolver from beneath the counter with a casual movement. He thumbed back the hammer and pointed it right at Charlie’s face. Charlie froze and looked at it, spat in the floor, and walked out.

  A little further down the road he encountered a teenage boy driving a golf cart. The boy was driving it in a lane like a car while Charlie walked the middle of the road as if he owned it. Charlie stuck his thumb out like he was hitchhiking, grinning like a good-natured rube. The boy was about fourteen, as best as Charlie could tell.

  “Sorry, dude, I’m only going a couple of streets over to check on my grandmother. She’s about out of food. My dad said I had to go straight over there and back.”

  Charlie smiled. “That’s nice of you to check on your grandma.” He looked over the golf cart. “This here is what a man needs,” he said admiringly. “It run on gas or batteries?”

  “Gas,” the boy said. “It gets pretty good mileage. You can drive all day on a tank of gas.”

  “That right?”

  The boy never saw the fist coming. Charlie struck him in the side of the head with a blow like a pile driver. The boy was stunned. Before he could react, Charlie grabbed him by his long hair, dragging him from the seat. The boy staggered in a circle, restrained by his hair. Charlie hit him three more times – sharp blows to the head that pushed the boy to the edge of consciousness. He fell, crying and trying to cover his face. Charlie started kicking, aiming his blows at the boy’s head, his back, his groin, whatever he could reach.

  When the boy no longer attempted to get up, Charlie got in the golf cart. The boy quivered and cried, his face covered to ward off any more blows. Charlie watched him for a second, disgusted that the boy had no more fight in him than that. He studied the floor for a second, found the gas pedal, and accelerated out of town.

  At twenty-five miles an hour he drove toward his brother’s trailer. The drive was scenic. Having not seen much of the world since entering jail, Charlie enjoyed the warm breeze, the sunlight playing on leaves, and the squirrels and chipmunks that flitted into the road. He swerved at a few but didn’t connect. In one of those maneuvers he almost turned the cart over. It scared him and for the rest of the drive he followed advice his granny had given him that he’d been unable to apply to the larger context of his life: he attempted to straighten up and fly right.

  Chapter 4

  The Cave

  Russell County, Virginia

  Pete sat back from the table, folded his hands over his stomach, and smiled. “I’ve been thinking about this and I guess I’m technically a caveman now,” Pete said. He was enjoying the fact that his family now lived in a cave.

  Ariel frowned at her mother, obviously disturbed by the thought. “Is Pete really a caveman, Mommy?”

  “Of course I am,” Pete crowed. “Look where I live. Can’t you smell me? Best of all, that makes you a cavewoman.”

  Ariel tightened her lips. “I am not a cavewoman.” She saw herself as more of a rising tween sophisticate, although that mode was harder to adopt with no television, no internet, no cell phone, and no places to go and be seen.

  “If we stay in this cave you’ll have to put a bone through your nose,” Pete said. “Then you’ll look like a cavewoman too.” He began laughing at his fuming sister, unable to restrain his glee.

  Ariel grabbed a nearby stick and drew back to whack her brother with it. Ellen intervened, grabbing the stick and tossing it back into the wood pile. “If you don’t want to be a cavewoman then don’t act like one. Beating people with sticks is how cavewomen act, not sweet little girls.”

  Ariel scowled and stomped off. Pete laughed.

  It did seem as if they really were becoming cave people, though. One of the things that had sold Jim on this long-neglected farm was the large cave at the back of the property with a good spring flowing from it. Utilizing equal degrees of both foresight and paranoia, Jim saw the cave for its potential as an emergency shelter. As a young Boy Scout, his troop had gone to the Lost Sea Caverns in Sweetwater, Tennessee. At the time, in the 1970s, the cave was still designated as a nuclear fallout shelter. There was a steady supply of fresh water and large chambers that would hold thousands of people. The government stocked it with pallets of survival crackers.

  Ever since that day, Jim had maintained the thought in the back of his head that he’d one day like to own his own cave. This cave had several things going for it. There was a gentle spring flowing from the mouth of the cave, but the water flowed to the side of the entrance. That meant you could enter the cave without having to walk through the water. It had a dry floor in the first large chamber. Some spring caves have submerged floors and Jim was pleased that this was not the case with his cave.

  Over the years, as he came upon the time, materials, and spare cash, he’d made improvements to his cave. He cleaned up a lot of the loose rock on the floor of the entrance chamber. The rocks that he couldn’t move by hand were pulled out of the way with a winch and pulley so that he could create some floor space. He rented a jackhammer that he could run off his generator and used that to further shape the interior to suit his needs. With his generator and a concrete mixer, he’d formed up small areas of the floor and over time managed to pour a decent concrete floor in the main entrance chamber. This made walking through the main part of the cave much easier and contributed to the sense that it was actually a room and not just a hole in the ground.

  A couple of years later, he came across a deal on some rejected cinderblocks from the local block plant. He got them cheap and was able to purchase enough to wall up the entrance to his Hobbit Hole. It took a lot of cutting and chipping to make the perfectly uniform blocks fit the random curvature of the cave mouth. He drilled holes with a large hammer drill into his concrete floor and into the rock walls at the sides of the entrance and epoxied rebar pins into the holes, using them to anchor his cinderblock wall to both the floor and sides of his cave. Longer pieces of rebar ran down the hollow cores of the block and tied them all together when he grouted the block cores with concrete.

  For a door, he bought a used commercial grade steel door with steel jambs off Craigslist. The jambs were filled with mortar when he installed it, which tied the door frame to the block wall very securely, making it very difficult to remove. The door itself was installed on ball bearing hinges that carried a lot of weight. In his paranoia, Jim imagined that there might be a day when this door was all that protected him and his family from violence. Not trusting the door itself to block heavy rifle rounds, Jim had installed a second crude steel door on the inside. He ordered heavy hinges that were customarily used for installing iron gates at a property entrance. He tied those hinges to his block wall with strong expansion anchors. The door was made of square tubing and quarter-inch steel plates that Jim tack welded onto each side. When the door was swung into place behind the commercial steel door, a simple hasp held it closed. After all, it was only intended as a ballistic shutter and not as the actual door.

  Once he managed to secure the entrance to his cave to his satisfaction, Jim worked toward making the interior more hospitable. Caves were by nature damp, but there were things that could help combat this. One such thing was to install heavy mil plastic against the ceiling in the entrance chamber. He held the plastic in place by using a powder-actuated fastener tool. It was essentially a gun that you placed a hardened steel pin into, then used a .22 rimfire blank to propel the pin into rock, concrete, cinderblocks, or mild steel. It was a very useful tool. Jim placed large vinyl washers against the plastic sheeting as he held it to the ceiling and fired the pin through the washer. That helped distribute the weight of the plastic over a larger area, preventing the pin from tearing through the plastic.

  Once he’d covered the entire ceiling of the entrance, the steady stream of dripping groundwater that had been bouncing off his head now ran off to the sides of the room. Next, he focused on putting a low budget solar system in place. He bought two solar trickle chargers for around twenty dollars that kept two used boat batteries charged. The 12-volt boat batteries powered a few automotive lights that hung from the ceiling. It was a crude system but it worked, providing enough general light to find your way around the place. When people needed better lighting, they could use headlamps or lanterns.

  While the underground temperature in the cave was generally around 58 degrees, the entrance received more outside air and could become quite cold in winter. For that reason, Jim made an enormous wood stove from an old heating oil tank and installed it in the cave. It definitely didn’t meet any EPA efficiency standards but you could feed four-foot logs into it and heat it cherry red. A chimney constructed of thick steel casing from a water well directed the smoke outside.

  Ellen fed wood into the stove to knock off the dampness, following Jim’s advice to use the driest wood they had because it produced the least smoke. The smell of wood smoke carried, though there was nothing she could do about that.

  The woodstove had a homemade water jacket made from a clean steel drum. It was a primitive system, utilizing pipes and buckets to add hot water to the drum and to extract it. Close to the woodstove was the bathroom. It had actual walls constructed of pressure-treated lumber and lined with corrugated steel panels for privacy. A pipe from the hot water jacket allowed a person in the bathroom to add water to a large plastic tub for washing. There was a camping toilet in there but it was the last resort for most of them. Jim had built a primitive outhouse near the mouth of the cave and they all preferred it to the camping toilet.

  The whole family thought the cave was a neat place to visit but no one had ever wanted to live there. Well, maybe Pete had. Jim had pitched the idea to Ellen that it could serve as a tornado shelter for the family during those rare tornado warnings that they had in this region. Ellen had known that in his ever-present paranoia, Jim had built this to be their bunker. Now, despite her reservations and eye-rolling, that was exactly how the family was utilizing it. They needed a safe, nearly impenetrable home and this was it.

 

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