She grabbed her keys and rushed out, ignoring Becky’s question of where was she going. She had no idea what was in that backpack, but her dad had promised that it was full of things that would help her get home if she was ever stuck somewhere. And boy, was she stuck.
Graysie practiced her sad, pitiful look on her way down the stairs to the front door where the security guard sat. She had an idea to get past him. The dude was middle aged—like her dad. If he was anything like Dad, then she had a story for him.
6
GRAYSON SWUNG the axe too hard again, getting it stuck. Just a few days without power or communications and his nerves were shot. He could barely focus on anything without worries intruding of his wife, Olivia, stranded out of town with her sisters; not to mention his daughter a hundred miles away at college. He wanted to drop everything and go after them. Bring them all home. But he couldn’t. He was stuck, too.
Yesterday—when the power still hadn’t come back on—he’d driven into town. His fears were confirmed. He found two stations that still had gas and a generator to pump it, but to get it you’d need to wait in line two to four hours and pay a hundred bucks a gallon. Not many people carried that kind of cash around and they couldn’t get it from the ATM; those weren’t working and the banks were closed. Not a good time to close the banks when nearly everyone was demanding cash only.
In the short time he’d trolled the different stations, he’d witnessed a dozen fights amongst the angry, scared people. At the first sign of guns being flashed, he’d hauled ass. He had fuel prepped at home, with enough in the tank to get back there, so he wasn’t going to waste his time sitting in line, hoping they didn’t run out by the time his turn rolled around. He’d gone on to the grocery store.
It was packed.
With people—not food.
The shelves were nearly empty. The cold items were totally gone. The registers all had lines a mile long and people were arguing with the cashiers over their SNAP welfare cards and debit and credit cards not working. While he wandered around looking for anything to add to his preps, panic built in the waiting crowd. The cashiers were frustrated with adding up totals on paper with calculators, and their progress was constantly thwarted by not knowing the price of most items or by the non-cash paying customers. The two cashiers that had stuck it out were near tears. Another small crowd had formed around the store manager, who finally relented. He announced he’d allow thirty dollars’ worth of merchandise for anyone who had at least two forms of picture identification as well as their cards, and that it would be a slow process, as he had to write down all the information so that he could run the cards later, when the power came back on.
Grayson doubted that would ever happen.
He heard people talking, too. Rumors were flying; blue-collar workers from the power company were sent home. Nothing they could do to get power going again from outside the main office; this was internal. Verizon and other cell phone service offices locked their doors and hung signs out: Cell Service out until Further Notice. Prices were already being gouged at the gas stations, both for the limited gas, and the meager remains of food and drink supplies inside. All government offices were closed.
He passed a group of men furiously kicking an ATM machine. At another bank, he saw an out of control man had run his car into the front door and was forcing his way over the hood and broken glass to get in.
Wouldn’t do him any good. Any money there would be in a tightly locked vault.
He’d driven through town, only making the one stop at the grocery store, and saw nary a cop. Not one. This piqued his interest so he drove by his brother’s house. Dusty was a city cop. He wasn’t home. Wherever he was, Rickey surely was too. He was too young to be on his own, and the schools were closed. Dusty’s truck wasn’t there, so he hoped they were on their way to the homestead.
He’d hurried back to meet them, only to arrive at an empty house.
The rest of the day was spent waiting on Dusty, Rickey and Jake to arrive, and wondering if he should forfeit ‘the plan’ and go after the women at the beach. The risk was that they were already on their way back home and they wouldn’t cross paths. No telling which way they’d drive home—if they drove. His wife, Olivia, had driven up there, and she was notorious for running her tank to empty before filling up. He hoped and prayed that wasn’t the case this time.
After hours of beating away the loneliness and panic, he’d made his mind up. He was going to get the girls. He had gas. The tank behind the barn held plenty of gas, and the rule was if you used it, replace it. But it rarely got used, so since Jake was the mechanic in the family, Grayson had assigned him the task of keeping it treated with stabilizer when needed to keep it from going bad.
He should have done the job himself.
After he’d pulled his truck around back to fill up the tank, he’d taken a big whiff only to find it smelled rancid. He’d poured some out to double-check and sure enough, the color was off. Jake hadn’t treated the gas preps.
He’d swarped and cussed up a storm.
He was housebound. He didn’t even have enough gas to get back and forth to town again. With no way to communicate with them, he had to hope for the best for Olivia, Gabby and Emma. And especially Graysie. They were on their way. They had to be.
At least that’s what he kept telling himself to keep his own panic at bay.
Not to waste a day, he decided to stick to his own plan. Getting the house ready. First necessity was water. If the power came back on, well then, it was good practice.
He hunted through his shipping container several times but couldn’t find his hand-pump. They’d be needing that to use the well. He remembered paying somewhere in the area of $700 bucks for the damn thing. He knew he had it, but it wasn’t there, in his shipping container he kept behind the barn, where he’d put it.
He was reaching the point of exhaustion. It’d now been two days since the power and communications went out and he’d been keeping himself in high gear waiting for his family to return while preparing to bunker down with no power for a while. He planned to build a wooden tower to elevate a 275 gallon, caged IBC water tote onto. He would run the gutters from all around the house for rain water to run into it, and let simple gravity drop it into the bathroom for a working toilet, and easy access to water for bathing or cooking. That of course would require rain, but the upcoming months were notorious for showers and thunderstorms in their area—if the outage lasted that long. But for that project, he needed some help.
At least he still had fuel in his tractor.
He also had another trick up his sleeve to easily get water out of the well with no power. It wasn’t as good as the pump, but it’d get them unlimited fresh water with a very limited amount of labor. For that, he’d need to find the Amish well bucket he’d bought. It too was somewhere out in that mess of a container. It was a long skinny galvanized bucket that looked nothing like a bucket; more like a pipe. For less than a hundred bucks, it would be a life saver. A little over four-foot-long and four inches in diameter, he could pop the pressure switch off the top of his well-head, pull the pipe out and drop the long bucket in. It had a valve that opened at the bottom to let the water in, and then closed when it was full. Then he only had to pull it up. That bucket and one long rope would let them keep using their well, even if they were only able to get two gallons of water per scoop. He might even build a tripod over the well head to hook the bucket to, and add a pulley and crank handle. It would make it much easier to pull up the amount of rope that it would need to drop to the actual water in the ground, and make it convenient to let the bucket hang when not in use.