After his thefts were discovered and he was arrested, he had the nerve to ask his boss whether his job would be waiting when he made parole.

  Then he whined and cried that the three days of vacation time he had on the books would never be taken.

  “You owe me three days’ pay, you son of a bitch!”

  Those were the last words he said to the last boss he ever had.

  The boss’s response?

  “Sue me.”

  That was his eighth felony conviction and the judge saw no reason to take it easy on him.

  He saw no chance the man would ever rehabilitate himself.

  Rehabilitation requires a desire to come clean; to do things the right way.

  And then the willpower to do the hard things it takes to get there.

  Kristy’s dad Vince had neither the desire nor the willpower.

  He was, the judge said as he handed down a twelve year sentence, “A blight upon society.”

  He was lucky in that the prisons in California were filled way beyond capacity. He only served five years of the twelve year sentence and was paroled.

  On his first night of freedom he rolled a drunk and stole the man’s wallet.

  Then he hit the first three bars he came across, drinking to excess at all three of them.

  At the last bar someone made a comment about the crude prison tattoo he had on his arm. He broke a beer bottle over the man’s head, and when that didn’t satisfy his rage he used the same broken bottle to cut the man’s throat.

  Before he strolled out the door, covered with blood and easy to track, he took his victim’s wallet. A manslaughter charge suddenly became capital murder.

  Judges tend to deal more harshly when it comes to taking a human life. At least more harshly than they treat someone who, say for example, steals tools from his employer.

  This time the judge decided he didn’t want to see him ever again. Not on the streets, not in his court, not anywhere else.

  “I’m sentencing you to life in prison, with no possibility for parole. The next time you leave the prison will be in a box.

  “And lest you think you’ll skate out of there like you did last time, taking advantage of the overcrowding situation, forget it. I’m going to write an order for the board of corrections to send you to New Mexico.

  “New Mexico has three brand spanking new prisons. They have no overcrowding problems. They have so much space they’re taking a lot of excess prisoners off of our hands.

  “God bless ‘em for taking our trash and disposing of it for us.”

  Vince’s attorney, a slick son of a gun named Vic, started to object.

  “Extreme bias, your honor. Probably grounds for an appeal.”

  “So appeal. Do you think an appeals court is going to set this man free after all the damage he’s done to society over the last twenty years? My guess is they’ll tell you to take a hike. But go ahead and try it if you want.”

  Vince was in prison and would never get out. Never return to darken Kristy and Angela’s doorstep again.

  And as hard as life in this new world was, that was fine with them.

  Chapter 22

  The one good thing Vince ever did for his daughters was something he couldn’t really take credit for.

  A good son is typically the result of good parenting.

  A good father, though, is just luck of the draw.

  Vince was always the black sheep of the family. He had three brothers which were, respectively, a doctor, a geophysicist and a research scientist.

  Vince’s father was everything he wasn’t. He was honest and hard-working and kind.

  One of the good sons, the doctor, was so convinced Vince wasn’t one of them he secretly had his DNA tested.

  “It had to be a mix-up at the hospital, Dad,” he said. “I think they gave us the wrong baby.”

  But the results were conclusive. Vince had their blood coursing through his veins. The same DNA that made three successful pillars of the community also made a loser who’d cast a dark shadow on the family as long as he walked the earth.

  After awhile Vince’s father gave up on him and focused on his granddaughters. It wasn’t their fault their father was a dirt bag. They deserved to have a good role model and a decent father figure, and Grandpa gave them that.

  He died just three years before of a sudden heart attack. He was only fifty one.

  Before he departed the earth, though, he did what Vince didn’t. He taught his granddaughters how to be responsible citizens. How to treat others with kindness and to help people instead of hurt them.

  He did something else, too.

  He taught Kristy basic survival techniques. Self defense. Where to hit a man to incapacitate him if he tried to take advantage of her. He taught her how to hunt and how to fish and how to fire and clean a weapon.

  He focused his efforts on Kristy because… well, because he didn’t expect to die when he did. His plan was to give Kristy the tools to survive, and then to do the same for Angela.

  Then death came calling.

  It was a sad situation, but Kristy was determined to pick up where he left off.

  She was tough. And she tried her best to appear even tougher.

  But she was smart too.

  Smart enough to realize that luck had been kind to them. A lot of people as tough or tougher had gone to meet their maker by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Or coming across the wrong person and having something of value that person wanted.

  One of the lessons Grandpa taught Kristy was to always exude authority. To walk with conviction.

  He winked and said to her one day, “You may not be the biggest and the baddest, but you need to act like you are. Walk like you’re not afraid of anybody or anything. Muster up the meanest face you can and make that your war face. And wear that same face every time you go out.

  That was something she had trouble with, for she was sweet and friendly by nature.

  “Oh, Grandpa… won’t I win more friends with kindness? Like catching more flies with honey than vinegar?”

  “It really depends on the situation. And I can’t say for sure that honey and kindness wouldn’t be in order sometimes.

  “The trouble is, you’ll have to evaluate each situation as it comes up. Use your war face as your default position and be ready to fight if need be. Then, if your foe seems a decent fellow, you can moderate your stance a bit. Not too much, for sometimes people can be tricky.

  “You have to remember that thieves and men who’d do women harm are nothing more than lowlife cowards. They prey on those who are weaker than themselves.

  “If you exude strength and act tough, they’ll see it. They’ll leave you alone and search for someone weaker.”

  “But is it right, Grandpa, to do that?”

  “I don’t follow, honey.”

  “I mean, if I don’t deal with him, he’ll go find someone weaker and more vulnerable to deal with. And I’ll be sending that person to the wolves. Or rather sending the wolf to them.

  “If I’m stronger and more capable of dealing with the threat, don’t I have a responsibility to do that? I mean, you’ve told me that bullies stop being bullies when someone finally finds the courage to stand up to them and defeats them.

  “If I’m stronger I think it’s my job to be that person.”

  She had a point. A point Grandpa couldn’t argue.

  So he didn’t even try. Instead he reached out to her and held her.

  “Honey, I have never been as proud of you as I am right now.”

  Chapter 23

  Kristy was a crack shot at one hundred yards with her AR-15. But that was with a man-sized target which didn’t move.

  Game doesn’t always stand in one spot and wait for you to shoot it. It’s nice when it does, but any hunter worth the ammunition he expends doesn’t depend on that happening.

  Most of the deer were gone from Bexar County now.

  One had to hike for fifteen, twenty miles just to get a shot.

  And that was a long way to carry a carcass.

  Hunters didn’t go out alone anymore. They went in groups, and typically divided the venison equally among them regardless of who took the shot.

  Any hunter foolish enough to go out alone had a one in three chance of not coming home again.

  Oh, he’d likely get close. A bandit chooses his line of work because he’s lazy. Too lazy to work hard and earn an honest day’s wage. He finds it easier to steal from others instead.

  A lonely hunter carrying the flank of a whitetail deer over his shoulder or dragging a tarp which is rolled around eighty pounds of meat is a soft target.

  He turns from hunter to prey, for he’s almost certainly being watched.

  Followed.

  Stalked.

  The outlaw isn’t going to strike too early, though.

  Because then the workload will fall upon him.

  He’ll be the one shouldering the flank or dragging the tarp.

  And there’s a good chance he’ll become the prey of another bandit. For as the old saying goes, one who lives by the sword often dies that way.

  No, the bandit, if he happens across someone too dumb to team up with a hunting partner or two, will wait until his victim is as close to his home as possible.

  Only then will he take his shot.

  So, deer were rarely seen anywhere near the house Kristy shared with her sister.

  Squirrels too were spotted few and far between. They hadn’t been able to reproduce in the same numbers they were being taken since the blackout started many months before.

  Rabbits hopped along occasionally, but Kristy sometimes went for weeks without spotting one.

  They were usually jackrabbits anyway, with stiff ears which reached for the heavens.

  And meat as tough as shoe leather.

  Kristy no longer fooled herself into thinking she was carrying her rifle for hunting.

  The only thing it was good for these days was scaring bad men off.

  Now, to be sure, that was a very good thing.

  Kristy had seen their faces, recognized their hunger.

  She knew damn well that if she didn’t carry her rifle at the ready, and a handgun on her hip… well, she’d have been robbed and raped a dozen times over. Maybe even killed.

  She had no illusions why it was so important to survive each of her missions.

  If she were killed, so too would go Angela. For she was too young. She was far too little and frail to hunt and gather. The wolves would tear her apart if she tried.

  She was ready to leave this particular home.

  Her backpack was half full. Four boxes of macaroni and cheese, three cans of spaghetti and meatballs. That in itself was a premium find, for it was the first canned food still in date she’d seen in months.

  It would feed them for a couple of days.

  She’d be back for more.

  There was plenty more treasure in the house. At least a week’s worth of food. Half a case of bottled water too.

  Her mouth watered at the thought of clean water rolling across her tongue.

  They’d had nothing but rainwater or river water for months now.

  Oh, it was safe to drink. They were always careful to strain it and boil it for ten minutes.

  But boiling only made it safe.

  It didn’t take away the nasty.

  She could boil river water for ten days and it would have the same putrid smell, the same terrible taste. She’d still be reminded constantly that this was the water fish lived and died in.

  And pooped and peed in.

  Rainwater?

  A little better, but not much.

  At the Saturday Market in the park not long before she’d taken a gold bracelet she’d found in a death house, to see what she could trade it for.

  She’d seen a man of some ingenuity demonstrating a contraption he’d made to purify water.

  It reminded her of a moonshine still she’d seen on one of those cable shows, so long before now it was just a vague memory.

  This contraption didn’t make moonshine, though it probably could have given a sufficient number of corn cobs or potatoes.

  No, this contraption, with its coiled copper wire coming out of odd places and going back into other, equally odd ones, was meant to turn river water into vapor.

  At the end of the process the vapor turned back to liquid and dripped, one delectable drop at a time, into a collection tray to cool.

  He’d allowed Kristy and Angela each a tiny sip.

  And for the first time in a very long time they closed their eyes. For it was the first time in months they’d tasted water so tasty and pure they could savor it as they drank.

  For the first time in a long while they could close their eyes and pretend, if only for a moment, that they were in a better place.

  Kristy had a hard time deciding whether to buy the contraption. It would be nice to have, but that same gold bracelet would buy her ten pounds of venison, with enough change left over in gold scrap to buy her another ten pounds on her next visit.

  What finally helped her decide was that the woman inside of her came out and took charge.

  She was on the cusp of womanhood, yet still acted like a little girl sometimes.

  The little girl part of her wanted the still, for the distilled water she drank tasted oh, so good.

  But the woman inside of her convinced her the venison was a much better buy. And they needed nourishment way more than they needed fancy drinking water.

  Chapter 24

  In the end they passed on the still. They talked about it on the way home that night, and agreed it was the right thing to do.

  It turned out the money wasn’t the only factor to consider, though Kristy didn’t realize it until Angie brought it up.

  “The man said it took three logs to make each gallon of clean water,” she said.

  “But we can lay a cook pot full of water directly into a campfire, on top of one of the burning logs.”

  “Okay. So?”

  “So the water boils for ten minutes long before that single log is used up.”

  “Again… okay. So?”

  “So, we would need three times as much firewood as we’re using right now to run our dirty water through the still. And right now we’re already spending half a day each week gathering and cutting firewood.

  “Seems to me the last thing we need to do is to spend three times that many hours, when we don’t have a lot to spare already.”

  It was a very mature thought, and Kristy was proud of her sister.

  It was at that moment Kristy realized that it wasn’t only herself who was turning into a woman.

  Angela wasn’t far behind her, and in the months and years ahead would start taking a larger and larger role in helping them stay alive in a world which had become very cold and very mean.

  So, then… many things had been helping Kristy mature since the blackout.

  Dealing with shady people at the open market was one of them. Being wary of her competitors when scavenging for food and supplies was another.

  And yes, even hanging out with her little sister and watching her mature in her own right was helping as well.

  The point was Kristy was a lot more capable now to make the right decisions and take care of herself than she was just a few months before.

  As she left the death house and headed toward her own, she’d carefully secured the food she was leaving behind.

  She’d been careful to pack her bag with a couple of days worth of nourishment; but also careful not to pack too much into it.

  For too full a bag would have placed a very big target upon her back.

  She left the house in a tactical manner, meaning not the same way she’d entered. She entered through a broken front window accessible from the front porch.

  She left through the back door and exited through the back gate, walking toward home down the alley.

  Her logic was simple, yet sound.

  If someone had watched her enter the house, with plans to ambush her when she left, they would set up for their shot at the window where she entered.

  They’d assume she’d leave the house the same way she went in.

  Depending on how determined they were, they might watch that window for an hour, maybe two.

  By the time they realized they’d been had, she’d be a mile ahead of them.

  The following day when she returned to the same house to get more of the food? She’d go through the alley, through the back door, and exit out the window. By that time anyone who had designs on ambushing her for her food would have gotten frustrated and left. By then they’d have given up on her and gone in search of another easy target.

  By then they’d be focused on someone else.

  That in itself was unfortunate, for what Kristy had essentially done was trade another innocent victim for herself. She knew that men who roamed the streets shooting people for the food they carried wouldn’t stop until they’d done so, for they had to eat too.

  But as bad as she felt that her would-be attacker moved on and would likely shoot someone else in her place, she couldn’t let it change the way she did things.

  She had more than herself to think about, after all.

  She knew darn well that if she let herself get killed she’d be dooming her little sister to death as well. And it was very likely Angela would die a far more miserable death than Kristy.

  If Kristy’s assassin was worth the powder in the bullet he fired he’d take her out in a single shot. A head shot, most likely.

  Kristy would die instantly, without suffering or pain. She’d already be gone, long before the killer ripped the backpack and ran away like the miserable coward he was.

  Angela, on the other hand, would likely linger for many days.

  As soon as it became apparent that Kristy wasn’t coming home that day, Angela would likely cower in the corner of her bedroom, hiding beneath blankets, listening for every little sound.

  She’d stay awake all that night, spending half her time praying for Kristy’s safe return.

 

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