“I was,” Patty said.
“What happened? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“We found out we didn’t like each other. In fact, I found out he was a real jerk.” The lights in the restaurant flickered.
“Trees popping,” Quentin said. “New snow brings down old trees and cuts the power. How would you like to go to the movies tomorrow night? Osage County finally came to Timberline.” Quentin surprised himself with the question. But he had the bit in his mouth. He was determined to reach for Life. The girl was life, if he’d ever seen it. He’d debated which movie she might like and decided against Need For Speed in favor of the popular woman-friendly, Meryl Streep movie.
“I’d love to,” Patty said. The lights flickered again, then went off completely, leaving the restaurant in semi-darkness. The diners gasped.
“Maybe that’s the first sign of an alien attack,” Quentin said in the semi-dark. “I don’t think they’ll like Placer County, though. We got more guns here than at the Remington factory.” He heard her laugh. She still had a girl’s laugh. “I think everyone gets one the day they’re born. Girls and boys,” Quentin said. “The aliens will be shot at by five-year olds.”
“I don’t get off until six on Saturdays,” she said.
“We’ll go to the late show. Why don’t you come down to the ranch and you can see the place, have dinner and we’ll go from there. You can meet my two mothers. But they’ll probably demand you have me back by ten o’clock. And they’ll ask you how you drive. Also, they won’t let me go out with anyone who smokes.”
“Whatever they want,” she said. I’d like to have you in bed by ten o’clock, Patty thought.
The lights came back on and everyone clapped. He’d taken his first big step back into Life. Quentin Collier’s heart was pounding.
I might as well be sixteen again. It feels good to be alive, he thought.
* * *
Chuck Phelps looked behind him at his idling snowmobile. It was snowing harder than what he would have liked. He had a checklist in his gloved hand. Chuck put it down for a moment and looked at his beautiful, albeit small, log cabin. He felt a tremendous sense of pride. It, and he, were ready for Armageddon. He had done everything a man could do to prepare for what he was sure was coming. He looked at the cabin he’d built with his own two hands. It had taken him almost twenty years to finish it. No one looking at it would think it was, in fact, a modern-day fortress.
People in Timberline thought he was crazy, but he didn’t care. They would be sorry. He wouldn’t be able to help most of them, he thought as he walked toward the porch, built six feet above the snowy ground. He’d built so many traps, fields of fire, and automobile traps, that he couldn’t remember them all. So he’d gotten a computer and begun a small log of the cabin’s military-style defenses; he’d employed a lot of what he’d learned during his three tours of duty in Vietnam with the Marine Corps. The cabin was a state-of-the-art bunker disguised as a cabin.
He’d learned all about computers, their use important to the fortress’s running—that had been ten years ago. Now it was all done and ready for the battle to come. When Armageddon arrived, he would be prepared.
He walked through the snow toward the cabin’s wooden porch. Most of all he wanted to share his achievements with friends, people he liked. Many times he’d stopped his truck in front of Quentin Collier’s ranch and thought about showing Quentin everything he’d done inside the cabin.
He liked Quentin. Quentin was one of a group of friends in Timberline who never looked at him like he was just an old crazy Vietnam vet. Chuck smiled. Every year he’d been invited for Thanksgiving at the Colliers’. Every year he’d gone. Thanksgiving at the Colliers’ was his one social event of the year, and he always looked forward to it.
He’d stop his truck, turning off the engine, and fantasize about telling Quentin and Marie what he’d accomplished at the cabin, how thorough he’d been, the tunnels, the stores of food and ammo, the hidden diesel generator buried ten feet underground, equipped with its own exhaust and thousand-gallon fuel supply. But he couldn’t actually go through with it. Quentin, after all, was the town sheriff, and maybe he would have to tell someone about what he’d done—especially about his collection of fully auto assault rifles (more than fifty). No doubt he’d broken laws in collecting so many weapons of every description, and there were the highly-illegal plastic explosives, the homemade flame thrower, and the black-market hand grenades. Not to mention his newest addition: an M32 multi-barrel grenade launcher given to him by a close friend and fellow Vietnam vet who was developing the weapon for the Marine Corps, and making a fortune in the process.
But even then he’d almost gone on down the gravel road into the Collier ranch and told Quentin because he wanted to tell his friend that his family would be safe—safe when Armageddon came. He wanted Quentin and Marie to know they would be welcomed at his redoubt. He wanted them to know that they could all hold out in the cabin together, that everything for them would be all right. He would share with the Colliers.
When Quentin’s wife, Marie, had gotten breast cancer and passed two years ago, it had hit him very hard. He had cried in the cabin by himself. Marie Collier had been so sweet to him. Marie Collier was a good woman. Even now, two years later, he didn’t like thinking about her passing.
It wasn’t fair, he thought, always the good people die and the evil people live to get old: the Clintons, both Bushes, Dick Cheney, big-time banksters. They all, no doubt, would live forever.
“They all think I don’t like people,” Chuck said out loud. It isn’t that at all. It was just that I had something I had to do. I had to do this for my . . . friends, the people I will invite. He would invite them. He began to tick off the names: Willis Good and his family; the Colliers; T.C. McCauley; the librarians in town, who never charged him for late fees. Farren Webb, the cook at the Copper Penny who always added extra French fries to his order; his uncle Sam, who was in the old-folks home in Reno and had lost an arm at the Battle Of The Bulge. People he cared about. Was it crazy?
Only if I told stupid people.
“No, I like people,” Chuck said, talking to himself, climbing the steep wooden stairs to the top of the porch. He stopped at the front door and wiped his feet. He’d put up a Christmas wreath. He loved Christmas and hated to see it go. He held the wreath in his hand. He’d decorated it himself with bits of colored foil and wooden ornaments, and bits of his first Apple computer. He loved computers, and country music, and Christmas, and he loved people. It was just that people didn’t love him back, since that time in the airport on his way back from Vietnam when a girl had called him a baby killer and spit on him. He’d never forgotten that. What her face looked like. She’d meant it.
I liked people, he thought, looking at the wreath. And if truth be told, he had done things over there that were wrong. He made a mental note: Next year’s wreath would be bigger. If Armageddon didn’t come, it would be bigger and he would buy one of those big plastic red bows he’d seen in a Seagram’s ad in the back of a Time magazine. No, he wasn’t a sad ol’ Vietnam-veteran “Prepper” like he’d seen on TV. He was different. He loved people. He wanted to save his friends from the war he knew was coming.