May flashed a sentimental smile.
“You’ve always taken such good care of me, Winston.”
“Well,” Winston lobbed a crooked grin, and returned to his plans.
When Medusa was felled, the live oak produced a considerable amount of good, strong wood — too good to burn, in Winston’s opinion, so he paid Scotty to haul his portable milling saw over to the house, and together they milled Medusa into stacks and stacks of usable lumber. Scotty took the raw lumber back to his mill to kiln dry, and May utilized the enormous mountain of sawdust to mulch around her shrubs, trees, and ornamentals — Medusa continued to give precious life to the Wellbeloved property even in death.
For the entire week following Medusa’s transformation from three-hundred-year old shade tree into kiln-dried dimensional planks, Winston designed an architectural plan to build a barn to replace the tattered sheds that so unpleasantly squatted to the rear of their driveway. Medusa provided more than enough lumber to frame and floor a barn that measured thirty-two feet long by twenty feet wide, and with a tall gabled roof for storage. As far as wood materials went, Winston only had to purchase the tongue-and-groove boards for the barn’s exterior walls and plywood sheathing for its roof. He prepared the tough Georgia clay, leveling it precisely, and poured fifteen three-foot Sonotube footings with cement at each eight-foot interval. This was the barn’s foundation, which was set twelve inches higher than grade, and provided an easily accessible, cool hiding spot in summer for Amadeus. The work was tough and fulfilling for a man who had spent his entire adult life, before retirement and after a tour in the U.S. Army, as a structural engineer up in Atlanta, where he helped to construct the city’s tallest buildings.
Scotty and a few of his men helped Winston erect the barn’s framing, roof, and floor — it took just three days — and Winston, with May’s assistance, completed the barn together over the course of the late summer and fall, transforming the barn’s skeletal framework into a work of beauty and craftsmanship. The barn’s long side, with two windows, faced the house, the driveway in between, and a single window faced the woods to the side of their property. There were no windows on the short ends of the barn; the side facing Robin Lake was used to stack two cords of firewood left over from last winter under an overhang in two neat rows and covered with blue canvas tarps. An entry door was placed next to a large traditional double barn door between the windows that faced the house. The barn was elegant in its simplicity — Winston was pragmatic with the design, which was strictly utilitarian, except for the hinged ornamental cupola on the top of the roof — that was May’s creative touch. Atop the cupola, which could be opened from the inside for easy egress to the barn’s roof, was a weathervane adorned with a flock of wrought-iron sparrows. They were May’s favorite bird, and the weathervane, with its poll of darting sparrows in perpetual flight was the barn’s highlight.
The inside of the barn was stark — its walls unfinished and littered with an assortment of lawn tools, and the miscellaneous bric-a-brac one collects in barns, its ceiling rows of parallel joists with a plywood loft to store larger items, and its floor a creaky layer of Medusa’s knotty limbs. To Winston, the barn was perfect in every way — including the exterior color, with eight-inch wide pine boards painted traditional barn red. May had insisted the barn be painted to match the house — colonial white, but Winston asserted that barns of such southern gentry must be painted barn red. It was an argument that had lasted for several weeks after the barn was completed, with the barn standing in gray primer until Winston finally caved in to May’s insistence of a color that matched the house. He begrudgingly drove down to Calef’s General Store and bought four five-gallon tubs of the same colonial white paint that colored the house. The paint went on when May was out of town for the day visiting friends over in Lafayette, Georgia, a forty-minute jaunt due west of Johnsonville (much like her father, May was the social butterfly of the house, while her husband was the introvert). Winston got halfway through one side of the barn and changed his mind — the barn just had to be red. So, he drove back to Calef’s and exchanged the three unused tubs of white paint for barn red and hustled back home. He managed to paint the entire barn — two coats — by the time May returned home later that evening. She said nothing when she saw the color of the barn, and would have been more shocked to see the barn painted white. Winston was stubborn — it was his worst quality, but May grew to accept the hideous color. Now, five years later, the barn — Medusa — would be called upon to save their lives. Color no longer mattered.
T Minus Two Days
The early morning dew and sweet Georgia breeze gave no indication that the United States was a nation at war — on its own turf this time. For only the second time in contemporary American history, war had broken out on its own soil. A conglomerate of Soviet, Middle-Eastern, and North Korean armies had attacked with the finest of military, logistical, and tactical precision. They called themselves The People’s Liberating Army (PLA). The U.S. had finally pissed off its enemies one too many times, and its allies were mute as a result of the current administration’s inability to commit to the UN and NATO, after several nation members were attacked by the PLA, and the U.S. had withdrawn its support of a number of global initiatives and treaties. In short, the world left America on its own to fight a war that could have easily been prevented had its leaders governed with respect and dignity.
The PLA systematically and violently dismantled the U. S. government. A sniper’s deadly accuracy blew the president’s head off while he gave a last-ditch effort speech in Geneva, pleading for the UN to intervene, but his relentless criticism about the organization’s legitimacy and authority over the course of two perilous terms in office sealed the fate of the American people — the UN simply would not intervene. The vice president and the speaker of the house were both beheaded on live television. Ranking members of Congress were either gunned down or killed by suicide bombers as they attempted to flee Washington or their home states. Massive conventional explosions rocked the Capitol and the capital cities of every state, the national power grid went offline, and transit systems were methodically sabotaged. Even the U.S. military wasn’t immune, with worms and viruses infecting many of its computer systems. To seal the deal, electromagnetic pulses rendered the complicated U.S. military infrastructure blind, its systems of communications stripped down to nothing more complex than walkie-talkies. The U.S. was thrown into such a state of chaos and confusion that its usually law-abiding citizenry simply could no longer endure the anxiety. Rioting and looting became the order of the day, with conservatives and liberals blaming each other for the array of military and political blunders that allowed the attacks to happen, further propelling the country toward a new civil war. Americans became their own enemies, turning on each other with little hope of recovery. And while the U.S. unraveled from within, the PLA advanced its directive to march right onto its soil with nary a defensive strategy to stop them.
At least the war wasn’t nuclear — yet.
To get further into their heads, the PLA had systematically placed radicalized sleeper cells into hundreds of tiny American towns spread throughout the country, from rural Kentucky mining towns to upscale Californian beach communities to Mississippi delta villages and every place in between. No American was safe from the PLA’s reach, and no American intelligence agency had discovered the PLA’s cunning strategies until the bombs started to detonate and it was too late. Radicalized martyrs sacrificed themselves at crowded shopping malls, post offices, grocery stores, travel hubs, and other public gathering places, taking with them thousands of civilian casualties. The PLA’s scheme worked exceptionally well — Americans took to their homes, hunkered down with their loved ones, hoarded whatever food and supplies they could find, and prayed that the war would soon be over, hoping the invasion would stay clear of their town, wishing the fight on their neighbors, be they some other local township or a state they would be hard pressed to identify on a map.