The Remnant

    The June night air was warm and calm as Rebecca finished sweeping away the dust from the back porch.  The dull yellow of the porch light illuminated the dirt as it billowed and disappeared into the summer darkness.  Another day had finished and she was still there, she and her family living in the small house halfway up Potter's Hill.  Above the muted light and the dust, she could see the starry, moonless sky, and she thought she could see it there, illuminated brightly by the sun, a radiant, magnificent celestial body.  Shortly, very shortly, that thing up there would kill both her and her family.

    Satisfied that her porch was as clean as a porch that was situated at the end of a dirt path could be, she propped her broom against a railing and turned back towards the house.  There, behind the screen door, she was surprised to find her youngest, Tonya, the ten-year-old.

    "Tonya, what are you doing up," Rebecca asked, opening the door.

    "I - - I couldn't sleep, mom," the girl said, and Rebecca noticed the moistness in the child's eyes.

    "Hon, you've got to get your rest.  Now go back to bed."

    "Why?  Why do I have to get my rest?"

    There was no rebelliousness in Tonya's voice, she was simply voicing an honest question.  Rebecca looked down at the slim waif and felt a lump in the back of her own throat.  It was hardly fair to anyone, but particularly to the young ones.  Rebecca had lived a great deal of her life, but Tonya would have her entire existence ahead of her if not for that rock. 

    "I'll tell you what," Rebecca finally said, and a slight catch could be heard in her voice.  "I'm finished here.  Why don't you and me head upstairs and we can watch a movie together?"

    "Okay," the girl said, grasping her mother's hand in hers and leading her toward the kitchen door.

    Tonya pulled her mother through the tiny kitchen into the living room, where the boys, David and Kevin, were somberly playing a game of video football.  Rebecca had thrown out the boys' more violent games, feeling that there was enough of that on the outside.  David, the sixteen-year-old, was tall and gangly, with a mop of light-colored hair sprouting from his head which reminded Rebecca of his father.  Kevin was thirteen and more compact and stocky, his dark complexion bearing much more of a resemblence to Rebecca.  She could look at the boys and see brilliant futures for both of them, futures which would never come to be.

    "Boys, I'm taking Tonya upstairs to bed.  Can you take care of things down here?"

    "Sure, mom," Kevin said, and immediately both boys were off the couch and going about their designated chores.

    That being done, Rebecca gave into Tonya, who was relentlessly tugging her towards the narrow staircase.  The two made their way upstairs and down the hallway, past the doorway which led to the boys' room and into the diminutive pink room with cartoon characters adorning the walls.  Rebecca sat down on the edge of the iron twin bed with the thin mattress and the comforter decorated with rabbits and ducks.  The room only had the one window, which was boarded up.  On this starless night, none of the outside world could get into this small sanctuary. 

    "What movie do you want to watch," she asked, making a space beside her for her daughter.

    "I don't care," Tonya said with a shrug, but sat down close to her mother.

    Rebecca sifted through the piles of movies that littered the floor of Tonya's room and pulled one out at random.  "How about this one?  We haven't seen this one for awhile."

    "Okay."

    Rebecca turned on the television and inserted the movie into the player.  The soft illumination from the television created enough light that it felt safe for Rebecca to turn off the bedside lamp.  She then lay in bed beside her daughter, one arm cradled around her shoulders.  The nighttime was always the worst for Tonya.  During the daytime, with the sun shining and the blue sky obscuring that thing up there, she was almost like a preadolescent girl again, playing with her dolls, drawing pictures in the dirt, even occasionally quarelling with her brothers.  But at night she became sullen and withdrawn.  Rebecca wondered how much of this the girl could understand.  She had attempted to be delicate with her daughter, explaining that no matter what happened, they would be together until the end, but Rebecca had no way of truly gauging Tonya's reaction to all of this.  How could a ten-year-old understand that she was about to die.

    They lay in the bed through two films, and Rebecca inserted a third, but eventually sleep claimed both of them, first the daughter, then the mother, the two of them resting in the glow of the television light.



      The end had begun approximately two years earlier when an Arizona astronomer had discovered a set of miscalculations in the estimated path of NCX-237, a 127-mile-wide asteroid that was due to streak through the heliosphere.  Initially, it was thought that the meteor would miss the Earth by 22 million miles, a close call to be sure but a miss nonetheless.  However, in the corrected estimates of the astronomer from Arizona, the conclusions were that this meteor would actually come no further than 12,000 miles from missing the planet, a pass that would have cataclysmic effects on the biosphere.  Worse, the greater odds stated that the meteor would directly impact the Earth, potentially destroying conditions that allowed life to flourish there.

    Initially, the astronomer's findings were dismissed as a lunatic fallacy, the ravings of a man driven mad by the isolation of his studies.  However, scientists being the curious sort, one astronomer after another began to gradually examine the findings, and much to their horror they found them to be accurate.  There would be no time to attempt any sort of effective action, and thus the scientific community slowly came to the conclusion that human life on the planet Earth would soon come to an end.

    However, just because human life on the planet would come to an end did not mean that the human race would cease to exist.  Decades earlier, international space agencies had begun work on what would be the largest project of its sort that had ever been attempted, a subterranean space station beneath Saturn's moon Titan.  In reality a small city rather than a simple space station, the structure would be designed to house five thousand astronomers, physicists and engineers.  The station was now near completion, with plans calling for teams to begin to travel to that moon before the end of the year, first by the dozens, then by the hundreds, many assigned to what would essentially be lifelong missions.  Now, however, the function of the station had changed from that of exploration to that of survival.

    The leaders of this effort knew that they could not save the whole of the human race, nor did they have the desire to do so.  Instead, a small community of scientists, agriculturists, mechanics and other useful individuals, along with the odd politician or capitalist who had pleaded or threatened their way into the mix, began work on a project to transport the more important members of the human race, namely themselves, to the space station.  In short order, an interplanetary shuttle was engineered that could safely transport twenty-five members of this society to their survival.  It was estimated that one hundred of these relatively small crafts could be engineered and manufactured in the timeframe allowed, 2500 individuals who would then perpetuate the human race.  With the clandestine financing of the most powerful individuals on the planet, this plan was carried forth at various locations throughout the world in order to protect the security of the project.

    As had been the case throughout the history of the planet, the project's leaders had underestimated the resourcefulness of the curious.  The unfortunate Arizona astronomer's findings had not initially been protected and had been reported by many news sources, most of which were considered unreliable and sensationalistic.  However, over time more reliable and dogged news gathering sources had begun to notice suspiscious activities from members of the political, scientific and business communities.  Despite efforts to curtail the leaking of the news (for instance, the Arizona astronomer was found dead in his home from an apparent brain siezure), the news of the planet's looming demise soon became widely known, and that effectively ended civilization as humanity had known it for the past 6000 years.  People who were no longer fearful of the consequences of their actions began to openly war against those in authority, individuals who had been rendered impotent by the inevitablity of what was to come.  Millions died as governments fell and anarchy became the rule of law, but the worse was yet to come.

    A large portion of society had still held onto their thread of hope, faithfully believing that the planet's leaders would work on some form of miracle solution to mankind's demise.  That hope vanished on a March day, when, without any hint of warning, one hundred space crafts began their ascent into the atmosphere, carrying the seed of humanity's future with them.  In places on the planet where it was night the sky lit up as if it were on fire, and the remnant of the human race that was left grounded came to a standstill as they gazed at the sight.  Of the one hundred ships, twelve crashed back to the Earth or exploded in midflight, the results of hasty preparation.  Another seven were involved in midair collisions from flight plans that could not be proven.  The other eighty-one gradually disappeared from the eyesight of those below them, the future of the human race being theirs to claim. 



    From her small home on Potter's Hill just outside of Gralin Junction, Georgia, Rebecca had watched what appeared to be nine of those crafts disappear into the cool early-morning sky.  At this point news had become somewhat of a sketchy endeavor and so Rebecca had no means to learn of what was happening in the cool skies of that early spring.  Big-city newspapers had long since stopped coming to Gralin Junction and the local press had no means of investigating what was happening in the outside world.  Television stations had stopped broadcasting, and when television signals could be received, their contents were disturbing.  Nothing coherent had been posted in English on the internet for months before those crafts took flight into the skies, but even so, Rebecca could guess at the significance of the spaceships disappearing into the Georgia dawn. 

    Her house, located midway up Potter's Hill, had been an unintended gift from her former husband, Mason.  Mason married her months removed from her high school graduation and displaced her from her father and friends in Gralin Junction.  She had protested, fairly weakly, that she did not want to live so far away from her small town in a small house that few people could even find.  Now, she considered that house a godsend.  The place would offer the perfect protection for her and her children until the end.

    Two weeks after humanity's hope had left the planet, Rebecca and David climbed into her white Ford F-150 (another of Mason's unintended gifts) to make their way into the town of Gralin Junction for the final time.  The sketchy reports that Rebecca had heard before the spaceships left estimated that the earth perhaps had eight to ten weeks before the meteor's impact would be felt.  On instinct, Rebecca's first thought was her family's survival, at least until the end came, and she knew that she did not have enought food or supplies to last for two and a half months.  It was April, and the soft morning wind carried the scent of the nearby willows as Rebecca lifted both of Mason's prize Smith & Wessons from their place downstairs, loaded them and handed one to David.  Then, leaving Kevin with a loaded Glock to protect him and Tonya, Rebecca and her oldest began the five-mile journey down Potter's Hill into town. 

    Rebecca's father had been a mechanic at a local garage in Gralin Junction and she had spent her entire life in the community, never leaving other than a trip to Atlanta for her honeymoon and a couple of trips to Florida for vacations, both of them before she gave birth to the children.  For its part, the town had never really changed in the four-plus decades that she had lived other than a few cosmetic differences, such as Cramer's Gas becoming a Winn-Dixie or Shorty's Bar being sold to someone from Macon who changed the name to The Getaway.  New houses occasionally sprouted around the edge of town, particularly after the glass plant was built six miles out of town.  But over the years the town had kept its same basic shape, with the blue cylindrical water tower with the words "Gralin Junction" written on it in the plainest black letters possible being the most impressive sight when one first caught a glimpse of the town while driving down Potter's Hill.  That is, it had been the most impressive sight until now.  Now, the small flames of various sizes and acrid smoke seemingly rising from everywhere caused the most indelible impression of the town.

    As Rebecca slowly directed the truck through what had been the town's main drag, she felt as if she had left her body and were driving through some lunatic's conception of Gralin Junction.  The street was an obstacle course for the truck as it was littered with every form of debris, both organic and inorganic.  Some of the buildings still burned and this caused doubt to cross Rebecca's mind as to the success of her mission.  But she mostly felt a sense of horror as she came closer to the human debris lying about the streets and the sidewalks, much of it apparently having laid there for some time.  As she slowly made her way through, she became aware of who some of these people once were.  Jimmy Lutes, for instance, who Rebecca had dated briefly in high school, had been the town's school bus driver for the last twenty or so years.  Now his body lay on the curb, his right side a pulpy mess, as if it had been hit by a large vehicle and left to rot.  Judy Dyer, a teller at the bank, sat with her back against a building that had not been burnt, dried blood staining her neat white blouse and her red skirt, her lifeless eyes still staring into the unknown.  Ben Fries had apparently been in the futile process of  mailing a letter because he now laid on the street beside the mailbox with no less than five knives in his back and legs, an envelope in his hand.  The smell of human decay was everywhere, and Rebecca had to grab an old shop cloth from the seat and place it over her nose and mouth to keep from vomiting.

    Rebecca looked over at her oldest son and though he was also masking his face with a shop cloth she could see that his eyes were wide and moist, his complexion pale.  She began to wonder if it had been a mistake to bring him along.

    "David," she asked.

    "Y - - Yeah," he answered, his voice cracking a bit.

    "Are you going to be okay?"

    "Yeah," he said in a barely audible voice.

    "Come on, David, Kevin and Tonya are counting on us.  We've got to do this for them, okay?"

    David closed his eyes, then opened them again, staring staight ahead.  "I'll be okay, mom."

    "Just a couple of hours and we never have to come here again."

    "I said I'll be okay."

    Rebecca decided to let it go.  She had to concentrate on getting to the Food & Liquor Mart on the other side of town and she had to do so without running over something in the road, being that she was certain that they would not survive a flat tire.  At length, the two of them arrived at the food store and she parked the truck in front of the jewelry store next door.  Grabbing their weopons, the two of them left the vehicle and stepped onto the sidewalk.  As she walked past the jewelry store Rebecca caught a glimpse of herself in the reflection in the broken store window.  She was in her forties, plump and graying, with wire frame glasses on the bridge of her nose and a Smith & Wesson in her right hand.  Mrs. Butterworth merged with Rambo.  Ridiculous, she thougt.  Most of the rest of the store's windows had been broken and most of the merchandise had been removed by whoever had destroyed the town.  Still, there was a few trinkets left.  A pricetag on a diamond-encrusted silver watch read $500.00.  Worthless now, Rebecca was thinking.  She took it anyway.

    The Gralin Junction Food & Liquor Mart was a diminutive store with two large storefront windows surrounding the automatic sliding glass door.  The store was dark, but all the glass had been broken, with the door and the left window being broken inward and the right window being broken outward.  A mixture of smells came wafting from the store, smells of decaying meat and vegetation.  Rebecca's hopes dimmed as she walked towards the store, but she was determined to continue with her course.

    "David, bring me the big flashlight from the truck," she instructed her son.

    David went back to the truck and pulled out a blocky yellow flashlight with a handle.  He turned it on and moved slightly ahead of his mother past the broken glass into the store.

    Rebecca knew the owner of the store in a way as he had been in his senior year of high school when she had been a freshman.  His name was Dieter Franks, a second-generation German whose parents had been farmers who had relocated to Georgia to assist some relatives and who had decided to stay in Gralin Junction and buy out the original owners of the Food Mart.  Dieter inherited the store, taking over when his parents retired and moved to Florida.  Rebecca only had a passing acquaintance to him in high school as he had been the priviledged son of a merchant and she had been the lone daughter of the town's lowest-paid mechanic and they did not gather in the same social circles.  Still, twice a month she had made her way to the Food Mart to pick up groceries and supplies since she and Mason had been married, and though she rarely spoke to Dieter when she was in the store, she always saw him there in his black slacks and his red dress shirt with the matching navy bow tie and grocer's apron, the uniform of all employees of The Gralin Junction Food & Liquor Mart.  He was an immaculate man, with his grey-dark, thinning hair combed back neatly on his scalp and a carefully-groomed salt-and-pepper goatee adorning his tapered chin.  A lean man even in his late forties, he was the picture of what a southerner may consider European dignity as he assisted his employees or greeted his customers.

    Rebecca had hoped that Dieter may be able to help her, but she had not imagined the severity of the warfare that had taken place in the streets of Gralin Junction.  Whoever had laid waste to the town had sought to destroy everything material and human and she was fairly certain that very few who had wandered into the town's main drag had left alive.  A sting of adrenaline shot through her body as she realized that the hooligans were probably still present, either resting or awaiting a victim to step into their trap.  She readied her weopon and her son repeated her movements as both moved through the darkness of the store.

    As she feared, the front shelves of the store were empty and wrecked.  She directed her light down one of the aisles and quickly learned that the smell was not entirely from spoiled food as three corpses lay there, each surrounded by dried blood.  David stepped back and moved away at the sight, and that stopped him from having his head blown off by the fire of an automatic weopon.

    Rebecca and David both lay flat on their faces as gunfire came from the back of the store accompanied by wild, incoherent screaming.  Despite the fact that shelving and pieces of flooring were exploding all about her, Rebecca became keenly aware of the filth in which she was laying face-down, and the various types of vermin that had come to populate the floor of the food mart.  At length the gun blasts stopped and the screaming ended and Rebecca was surprised to find that she still breathed.

    "David," she whispered, barely lifting her head above the floor.

    "M--mom," David whispered back, barely audible.

    "Are you okay?"

    "Yeah--yeah.  Let's get out of here."

    "We can't, David."

    "But they're gonna kill us. . ."

    "And we're going to die, anyway, if we don't get some supplies.  Besides, I have a feeling about the person firing the gun. . ."

    She slowly raised herself off the floor, telling herself that she needed to be calm despite the fact that her entire body was trembling wildly.  She took her rifle in her right hand and gripped it tightly in order to keep it from shaking.  She had a suspiscion about who it had been that had fired ths shots as she thought she could recognize the distorted voice behind the screaming.  With her left hand she grabbed the flashlight and aimed it down the aisle, her nerves causing the light to dance wildly over the corpses laying there.  Her breath was ragged and her throat ached as she gasped for air while trying to breathe as shallow and as quiet as she could.  David had stayed behind, and she knew that her oldest son would be useless in this situation, that Kevin would have been a more appropriate choice to accompany her.  It doesn't really matter now, Rebecca thought, inching her way down the aisle, walking gingerly over the corpses and finally reaching the end of the aisle.  She timidly moved around the corner, flashing the light past the far end of the aisles, and when she did so she illuminated a caricature of the man who had once been Dieter Franks.

    The light both surprised and blinded Dieter, and it was this that saved Rebecca's life.  It took a second for him to ready his weopon and start screaming again, and in that second she had instinctively ducked behind the shelving, her heart racing wildly and her breath coming in quick gasps.  Dieter seemed to be wildly shooting rather than aiming at anything in particular, nor did he seem to be chasing her.  Still, more than one shot hit the shelving beside her.  Rebecca sat on the floor, her back against the shelves, her rifle clutched to her chest, knowing that she would not win a gun battle against the maniac who had once been a grocer.

    Once again the attack lost its energy, and the shooting and the screaming stopped.  This time, Rebecca could hear Dieter's breathing once he had finished, and each breath seemed to end in a cross between a whimper and a sob.  She felt she and David could probably leave quietly now and Dieter would not hear them, but she had come too far to give up now.  She also knew that challenging him in a gun battle would probably end in her becoming one of the corpses on the floor.  She decided to take a gamble that there was still something in Dieter that was still the amiable grocer.

    "Dieter. . .," she said in a breaking voice.

    Once again, the gunfire and the screaming came, but this time the attack was shorter and much less intense.

    "Dieter, you know me," she started again, and she could hear her own voice tremble.  "I'm Rebecca.  Rebecca Ramsey.  I come in here all the time."

    This time there was silence, and the only thing that let her know that Dieter was still there was his muted whimpering.  Finally, with a slight German accent, he said, "Mason's wife?"

    "Ex-wife, actually.  I--I'm here with my son, Dieter.  We were hoping you could help us."

    "You come in here every couple of weeks to buy groceries, correct?"

    "Yes, yes I do."

    "You use your support check, cash it here, right?"

    "That's me, Dieter."

    "You know that some of those checks bounced, right?"

    "That would be Mason.  Dieter, Ineed help.  My family is on Potter's Hill with no supplies.  We were hoping that you. . ."

    "Don't talk to me behind there.  Come out and--and drop that weopon."

    "I can't do that, Dieter.  How do I know that you're not going to kill me when I come out there?"

    "You don't, I suppose.  But then I don't know that you're not here to kill me, right?"

    "Wh--why would I do that, Dieter?"

    "Because it doesn't matter anymore.  Because there's nothing stopping you if I let my guard down.  Because all humanity has gone to hell and hurting each other seems to be our way of coping with it."

    "I--I don't know about all that.  All I can give you is my word.  I'm going to come out now, Dieter, with my gun in my hand.  I'm not going to try to hurt you, I just want some help.  Okay?"

    No answer came, and with her heart in her throat, Rebecca decided to take a chance.  She moved around the corner, aiming her flashlight towards Dieter's feet in order not to blind him and set off another shooting rampage.  The man she saw bore only a passing resemblence to the Dieter she had known.  His hair was unkempt and wild, his beard was ungroomed and mottled.  His eyes were glassy and dim.  His generally immacculate red dress shirt was stained and unbuttoned, revealing his gaunt, wiry physique adorned with wisps of grey hair on his chest.  His black pants were torn beneath both knees.  He appeared as if he had received little rest recently, and he shook violently, as if he were more nervous than Rebecca was.

    "What's going on, Dieter," Rebecca asked simply to break the silence.

    "Hell is going on," he responded.  "You might already know that, no?"

    "What--what happened here?"

    "Some people saw an opportunity, or at least they thought they did.  I suppose it didn't really work out for them."

    Dieter was responding to Rebecca's questions, but she felt as if, in his mind, he was not really speaking to her.  He was disoriented, perhaps a bit confused, but she also knew that he was very dangerous.

    "How long have you been here, Dieter?"

    "A week, perhaps more.  One really loses track of time, you know.  I had, I had heard that there was disturbances here, came down to make sure the store was alright.  The store had to be safe.  I left my wife, told her I would be back, I would be back as soon as I was sure everything was safe.  But nothing was safe.  I was here when they attacked, in the store, making sure it was safe.  They didn't even know me.  They just broke in, started to tear and break and destroy and--and. . ., and I suppose they weren't aware that I could defend myself."

As he said this, he took a quick glance at his weopon.

    "How--how long did this go on?"

    "Again with the time.  How do I know?  It just kept happening.  They would come and I would shoot, then they would retreat for awhile, then come again, and I would shoot, and it kept going like that until it stopped."

    Rebecca's stomach churned as she imagined the maelstrom that took place in the town over the past two weeks.  She wondered how Dieter could survive, then wondered about what could be happening at her small home midway up Potter's Hill.

    David had left his position at the far end of the aisle and had slowly made his way towards his mother.  Now, Dieter could hear the boy moving and quickly readied his gun to fire.

    "Dieter, no," Rebecca said quickly.  "It's just my son, just David.  He's here to help me, that's all."

    "How do I know this?  How do I know that you're not like the others?  That you're here to destroy everything that my father and I built up. . .?"

    "No--no, we're not.  I just want to get some things for my family, that's all.  Can you help?"

    Dieter closed his eyes, appeared to be listening to something.  He relaxed the grip on his weopon, and Rebecca wondered if he had not fallen asleep.

    "Why," he finally asked.

    "Because.  Because it's my children.  I have the boys to take care of, them and my ten-year-old girl.  They need to eat. . ."

    "Why?  So they may be better prepared to die?"

    Rebecca began to feel that the grocer may be beyond reasoning.  A sense of desperation grew in the back of her mind.

    "Listen, Dieter, we have a truck outside.  We can get you out of here, get you back to your wife.  At least you can be with her when things begin to happen."

    "My wife is no longer alive.  Neither are my children.  These--these butchers murdered the entire town, hacked down everyone they could find, burned everything.  I tried to call them when the phone lines still worked.  One time someone answered.  It wasn't my wife or my children.  Whoever it was screamed into the phone.  Just screamed.  Then the call ended, and I knew that I would never see them again."

    "But if you survived. . ."

    "No.  And I only live momentarily.  They will get me as soon as they are interested enough.  That is, if I let them.  If you wish to survive awhile, you should leave quickly.  I'm sorry I can't help you."

    Another voice, female and much younger, suddenly came from behind Dieter.  "Why not, Dieter?  What does it matter?"

    The figure that moved out from the shadows was that of Carrie Mumphries, a girl that Rebecca had known from gossip that went on about the town.  Carrie was a high school dropout who was barely out of her teens.  She was the daughter of one of the down drunks and had been in bars since she was an infant.  She had been arrested several times for illegal possession of alcohol since she was thirteen and five time she had been in the paper for having possessed marijuana.  Rumor had it that she had three abortions before her eighteenth birthday and that another baby had been given to a relative.  She was short and busty, with tightly-braided blonde hair, dark lipstick and the type of heavy black eyeliner that Rebecca thought made her look positively evil.  When she wore the various tank tops that were generally part of her attire, one could see part of a tattoo of some sort of bird of prey, and Rebecca thought that it looked as if it might cover her entire back.  She had retained a girlish figure, which meant that the tight tank-top-and-jeans fashion that she wore looked better on her than on the overweight harlots with which she generally frequented the bars, looking for men to sneak them drinks and perhaps take them home for an evening.  It had been the consensus of the respectable people of Gralin Junction that Carrie was destined to become a fat town whore herself, and Rebecca, being one of those respectable people, had agreed with this.

    Until now.  Now the eyeliner was gone and the hair was unbraided and straight, plastered against Carrie's fragile skull.  She was wearing one of Dieter's dress shirts which covered her down to her knees.  She looked delicate, innocent and frightened.  Like a little girl.  Like Tonya.

    "We've got all that stuff in back and we're never going to use it," the girl continued.  "It'll help them out, if just for awhile.  C'mon, let them have it."

    Dieter looked at Carrie as if he were seeing her for the first time, but eventually recognition was expressed in his eyes,  and then consent.  He put a weary hand on her shoulder and nodded, eyes closed.

    "Of course, I suppose it would be right.  Come, follow me."

    The group made their way past the disheveled deli section and through the meat cutting area, Dieter in the lead and David taking up the rear.  Electricity had obviously been cut some time ago, and with it refrigeration, and the various cuts of meat laying in various cases had become poisonous and rancid.  Once again Rebecca put her hand up to her face to ward off the odor, but a hand did not work as well as a cloth, and she felt herself becoming ill.  Mercifully, the group quickly came up on a double metal door.  Dieter took a set of keys from his right pocket and, with his hand shaking noticably, he unlocked the door and ushered the group in.

    The doorway led to a storage area for dry goods, a simple room with corrugated walls and four metal shelves stretching to the back of the room.  While the shelves were not as full as the might have been before, they were still stocked with plenty of cereals, canned soups and vegetables, soaps, bottled water and other necessary items.  Enough to keep up Rebecca's family for as long as they had left.  In a corner on the far side of the room, Rebecca noted a pile of blankets and some flour sacks laying on the floor that seemed to have served as makeshift pillows, the area being surrounded by empty bottles of a variety of alcoholic beverages.  She wondered whether this had been the first time Dieter and Carrie had been out of this room in the past two weeks.

    "Take what you need," Dieter said as he entered the room.  "There are crates at the end there for you to carry it out with."

    "I'll start getting the stuff," David said, walking down towards the crates.

    "I can help," Carrie said.  "It shouldn't take us very long."

    Rebecca and Dieter remained where they were as the younger ones carried supplies out to the truck.  They both held on to their weopons, but neither gripped them very tightly.  Rebecca could think of nothing about which she would speak to Dieter, and he still seemed to be disoriented, so they stood there in silence for some time.  She suddenly became aware of how fatigued she was, the day's efforts and the shock of seeing the town in the state that it was in affecting her more than she thought it might.  She thought that she could use some rest, but knew that she could not, so she decided that she had to say something to stay alert.

    "How much do you think you'll need," she finally said, certain that she could not take nearly half the goods there.

    "It doesn't matter.  You can take all of it."  Dieter sounded as if he could use some sleep himself.

    "You need something.  At least until. . ."

    "We need nothing.  You were fortunate to come today.  If you would have waited until tomorrow, this room would have been locked and you would have had no way to get in."

    "Why?  You're not thinking of trying to make it out of here?"

    "To what?  You're not really paying attention, are you?  My family is dead, in a few weeks we'll all be dead.  Frankly, I find what you're doing here to be quite futile.  To each their own, however.  Who am I to decide how you spend your last days?"

    "Then what, Dieter?  What are you planning to do?"

    Dieter sighed and finally let loose the grip he had on his rifle.  He leaned back against the wall, his head inclined upwards, his eyes closed.

    "It's all futile, isn't it?  Do you know that, for my father, this store was his life?  Every thought he had was dedicated to this store, how to make it better so that he could make a better life for my mother and me.  I was raised with the ideal that everything I did needed to somehow enhance this business, to make it better and more profitable so that I would have a legacy to leave my children, and then I needed to bring up my children to understand that legacy and pass it on to their children.  Now, what of it?  When you realize how mutable everything is, how important does it become?  How important is life?

    "The young lady and I have had a plan.  We've had it for a time, but even when you're certain of what your path needs to be, you sometimes need to build up the courage.  But the time is right and their is truly no reason to put it off.  We had planned to enjoy each other's company through this day, perhaps give ourselves one last chance to express those desires and hopes we had yet to express so that at least they were voiced.  We had planned to drink, the girl heavily, me not as much, at least not as first.  She felt that it would be easier for her this way.  Then, when she is senseless from alcohol, I will put the barrel of my gun up to her temple and fire.  A clean shot, she will never know.  Then, after perhaps a few more drinks myself, I will put that barrel in my mouth and fire.  If it goes as planned, I will never feel it."

    Rebecca had listened in horror as Dieter revealed his plan, began to attempt to say something, anything that would dissuade Dieter from this course of action.  But she could think of nothing to say, no reasoning that he would not find impotent.  So she stood there, leaning against her gun, unsure of herself.

    Carrie opened the door quickly, a look of worry on her face.  "Dieter, Richard Strachan's at the end of the street, and he's got a group with him."

    "Richard Strachan," Rebecca asked.  "The truck driver who used to live on March Street?"

    "Yes," Dieter answered.  "He is a leader of sorts."

    "Mom, we've gotta get out of her," David said.  "There's a whole bunch of them and they're taking a good look at the truck."

    "Why," Rebecca asked as she turned to Dieter.  "What do they want with us?"

    "What did they want with any of those people out there?  They have nothing more to live for, they mute their pain by causing pain in others.  Nothing different than what has transpired through most of our history, I suppose, but magnified with no law to speak of and no reason to fear consequences."

    "We've got everything we need, mom," David said.  "We've got to go, those people won't wait for long."

    "Show your guns," Dieter said as he walked towards the double doors.  "They will not have had time to go for their weopons yet, and that could buy us some time if we hurry."

    The quartet moved quickly through the store and out of the broken doors.  The truck was still sitting where it had been left, untouched except for the payload in the truck bed.  Two blocks down Rebecca saw them, a group of shadowy figures making their way slowly through the debris as if they were hunters stalking a kill.  David climbed into the truck, but Rebecca took notice of the sporting goods store across the street.

    "Dieter, can you stay here a moment," she asked.

    "As long as you need."

    Rebecca moved as quickly as she could across the street.  The door was open, nearly ripped off of its hinges.  She knew that all the weopons that had been in there were already gone, but that was not what she desired.  Mason had forced her into this place every time that they were in town, so she knew the store fairly well.  The hooligans may have taken all the guns, but they may not see the use of some well-placed animal traps.  Sure enough, there were four unused traps still hanging on their hooks, their razor-sharp teeth snapped shut.  Rebecca grabbed four of them, as much as she could carry, and rushed back our the door towards the truck.

    "Thank you, Dieter," she said as she entered the truck, but the grocer said nothing, just stood at the door, his gun ready.

    Rebecca turned on the ignition and began to gun the truck as fast as she dared through the street.  None of the hooligans seemed inclined to move, and she hoped that she did not have to run one or two of them down, but she realized that, if they stood in her way, she had no choice.  She finally came close enough to hear them yelling, shouting something unintelligible.  She could see their faces.  They were not taunting faces, as she thought they would be, but angry faces, faces full of rage and fury that frightened her thoroughly.  At the very last instant, though, they did duck out of the way, and Rebecca's path through the town was cleared.  That would be the last time Rebecca would ever set foot in Gralin Junction.



    Rebecca's house was situated midway up Potter's Hill, down a half-mile dirt road, and could not be seen through the pines from the main road.  It was surrounded on three sides by Potter's Stream, which Rebecca had always thought was much more of a river than a stream.  By happenstance her house was situated in a location in which she could easily protect it from the outside world, a thought that would not have occured to her in years past, but was currently her top priority.  Mason had left a lot of things behind when he left Rebecca and Gralin Junction.  He had planned a small farm, though he never truly possessed the ambition to carry through with that plan, but he did purchase enough barbed wire to fence in an area for small farm animals.  Upon returning to her home and unpacking the supplies, she, along with Kevin and David, began constucting a fence that would cut the house off from outside traffic.  Mason had left several animal traps in the metal shed in which he kept all of his farming and hunting supplies, and Rebecca endeavored to place those traps around the grounds as strategically as she knew how.  She boarded up all of the windows in the house, leaving small slits in the lower windows to fit gun barrels through.  Within three days time  Rebecca's house had become a fortress.

    Also fortuitous for Rebecca, Mason had been a gun collector of sorts.  He had taken most of his collection with him when he escaped to West Virginia, but there was still several miscellaneous pieces that he considered to be of the least value that were locked away in the basement.  Along with the Smith & Wessons that she and David had taken into town there were two Winchesters, a Springfield, a Remington shotgun and a Glock pistol along with enough ammunition for them to hold off the Georgia National Guard.  Rebecca and the boys took all the weopons from their place of safe-keeping and placed them in the living room.  With this, Rebecca felt that her family was as safe as they could ever be, which was to say not safe at all.

    She knew that they could not handle any organized effort from the town, thus she gambled that no one would remember that her place was there or perhaps consider it insignificant.  After all, the wealthier families lived further up Potter's Hill and there were enough houses that could be seen from the road to keep any hooligans busy enough for them to endeavor to explore the Georgia backwoods.  Still, she knew that chances were great that someone would eventually wander down the road and discover their abode, and therefore Rebecca planned extreme measures to ensure that any discovery would not lead to her family destruction at the hands of these vandals.

    For years, Kevin had been her problem child.  He had only been four when Mason left and barely remembered his father.  Throughout school he had been brooding and friendless, a brooding boy with a quick and fiery temper.  Three years earlier he had been suspended from school for beating and bloodying another student with a pencil sharpener he had torn from the wall because the victim had not allowed Kevin to sit near the window.  He had no reservations about striking his sister when Rebecca was not there, and his first reaction in an argument with his older brother was to punch him.  While David was not intimidated by Kevin, he could not win a prolonged fight with his younger brother as he was not nearly so prone to violence.  David was far more nondescript than Kevin, and while he was neither a scholar nor an athlete, he did receive passing marks in school and stayed out of trouble, in spite of what the Taylor Jenks girl had said about him (she refused to get a DNA test, so she could not prove that she had David's baby).  Over time,  Rebecca thought that she may have a fight on her hands in raising Kevin, not so much with David.  But David would never be able to help her now in the way that Kevin could.

    Rebecca had laid her traps in areas that she hoped would be the only paths to her home.  During the daytime, she could easily see or hear anyone coming towards the house, and she or Kevin were always on the alert.  But during the night the traps were necessary.  Rebecca or Kevin would wait for any strangers who wandered down the path until they were close enough that they could not be missed, then they would shoot them.  If the first shot was not a killing one, they would come from behind the fence and finish the stranger off, then drag his body to the river to dispose of it.  In the night, either she or Kevin would take turns keeping watch, the porch lights illuminating the yard on all sides well enough, the traps hopefully dispatching what they could not see.  More than once she had heard a trap snap closed in the middle of the night, followed by the unbearable screams and moans of whoever had happened upon it.  In the morning she and Kevin would search for whatever trap had been tripped.  Sometimes, if the trap was sharp enough, the victim bled to death and all that was left for them was to carry the body to the river.  Other times the victim had survived through the night and Rebecca or Kevin would have to shoot him before dragging him to the river.

    Rebecca considered that perhaps once, at least once, they may have murdered and innocent, someone who had sought to escape the outside madness as they had.  She knew that, in any civilized court, she and her family would be branded viscous, cold murderers.  It was not a civilized world, though.  She pondered how many people in Gralin Junction had been butchered as they were attempting some act of kindness or mercy.  That would not happen to Rebecca's family.  No one else mattered anymore.  Everyone would die soon, anyway, so Rebecca thought that perhaps she was providing an act of mercy.  But she and her children would be with one another until the end, living their lives as normal as they ever had.  As far as she was concerned, there was no world worth mentioning outside of the tiny piece of real estate on which she and her children existed, and no one who lived outside of that world would be welcomed in to destroy it.



    The morning sun seeped through the boards of the windows to Tonya's room, waking Rebecca.  Tonya still dozed with her head nestled on Rebecca's breasts, a tiny pool of saliva having escaped from her mouth onto Rebecca's shirt.  Rebecca raised her hand to rub some of the mucous from her eyes, and this stirring woke the young girl.

    "'Morning, hon," Rebecca said attempting a smile.  "Are you hungry?  Do you want some breakfast?"

    Tonya moaned something vague and rolled her head off of Rebecca's chest, settling down further in the bed.

    "I'll take that as a yes.  I'll be downstairs when you're ready."

    Rebecca moved herself stiffly off of the confining bed, stood up and attempted to stretch aching muscles and joints.  She could hear stirring downstairs and thought that Kevin must already be up and getting things ready.  She moved through the door and down the stairs, finding Kevin sitting at the kitchen table cleaning his Winchester.

    "Did you hear anything last night," she asked as she began to search through the cabinets.

    "No, but I was going to go out anyway.  Are you coming with?"

    "Yes, but just hold on.  I'd like to make sure David's awake first to take care of Tonya, and there's no sense in doing anything without food in our gullets.  Pancakes and oranges okay with you?"

    "Sure," the boy said as he returned to caring for his weopon.

    Rebecca grabbed a box of dry, "only-add-water" pancake mix and a can of mandarin oranges and set about to prepare her family's breakfast.  Outside the sky was blue and the air was warm, the robins and the bluejays were singing and Rebecca could not help but think what a wonderful day it was.  The brightness of the skies obscured anything that may be out there, and Rebecca thought that perhaps, if she wished hard enough, that the doom-thing would not exist, and that she and her children could go on living in this neat little world that ended at the barbed-wire fence.  In the back of her mind she knew that it would all end, perhaps very soon.  But for right now, for today, everything was perfect, and that would have to suffice.