Surrender the Sun: A Post Apocalyptic Dystopian Thriller (8 page)

She looked up at him with a blank stare. “Uh, I think there’s some bullets in a box upstairs.”

He let out a somewhat frustrated breath.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t pay attention to this kind of thing. Roger took care of all of that.”

He nodded as if he understood. “Still, you need to keep the ammunition with the weapon, near you at all times, so that you don’t have trouble getting to it in a time of crisis. I can clean the Glock and show you how to reload the magazine and make sure it’s in good working order while I’m here if you’d like.”

It was the most words he’d strung together at one time, and Maeve stood there with her mouth slightly open when just earlier she’d been pondering how to deal with the man of few words.
So he can talk…
She smiled at him and said, “Yes, please. Honestly, I know next to nothing about the weapon, though Roger took me out to the range several times.” Finding him staring right into her eyes, she had to look away. “He just always took care of the maintenance. I don’t even know how to load the magazine.”

“It’s no problem. I’ll show you. The fact that you know it’s a magazine instead of a clip, is a good thing.” With his voice lower than before, she realized he too had a difficult time remembering or talking about Roger.

“I’ll be right back then,” she said, dropping the cleaning towel on the counter. She ran upstairs to retrieve the kit Roger kept for her Glock and the few boxes of the 9mm bullets she had in her possession.

When she returned, she found Bishop had knelt down with Ben in the living room, showing her son how to fix the axle of one of his toy trucks. “See, you can snap it back into place if you push right there.”

“It hurts my thumb when I try,” Ben said.

“Then use something like the edge of the bricks near the woodstove to add more force. Go ahead and try.”

She waited before interrupting them. Rare was it that her son had a man like his father around, and Bishop was the closest possible person fitting that description.

Taking his toy truck to the woodstove, Ben held the axle in place and levered the metal bar over the opening of the tight plastic axle. He used his hands to push down and leaned in to add more force. An audible snap was heard, and he quickly picked up and turned over the truck and spun the wheel. He beamed. “Hey, thanks! It worked.”

“Don’t thank me. You did all the work, buddy.”

Then something miraculous happened. The corners of Bishop’s mouth turned up as Ben gave him a high five.
The man can smile.

The fact that instead of quickly fixing the toy he took the time to teach her son how to fix it himself was endearing. If she’d had doubts about inviting Bishop into her home before, she no longer did now.

As her son rolled the repaired red truck over the rug, she brought Bishop the cleaning kit and bullets for her handgun.

They sat at the kitchen table as he showed her how to release the magazine and unloaded the weapon. Then she watched as he cleaned and oiled it, taking care to answer any of her questions. Finally, he showed her how to reload the magazine. And like her son’s dilemma with the truck axle, she had a hard time popping the bullets into the magazine very well with her slender fingers.

Though, this time, he had no easy tips. “You’ll have to work at it. Get used to the feel of sliding them in. Practice,” he said as he stood and then went to the front door and put on his outerwear and boots.

“Are you going already?” Ben ran up and asked him.

“Honey, if Bishop needs to go, we won’t delay him. He was very kind to bring us the elk meat.”

“I’m going to change the tires and take a look at your mom’s truck, and then you can help me with changing the lock on the back door,” he said to Ben, who looked elated with the prospect of helping him.

“My keys are right there on the side table,” Maeve said.

“Keep these hidden,” he said to her, and by now she was used to him warning her about what to do. She smiled at him and nodded while she continued to clean up the kitchen.

The last thing he said as he went through the garage door was to Ben. “Always lock this door with the deadbolt to keep you and your mom safe inside.” He knelt down to Ben’s level. “You’re old enough to do that now. Keep the doors bolted at all times. That’s your job, OK?”

Ben nodded with a somber expression. “I will.”

For a minute as she watched the two, it was like Roger was here again, and she had to push that image away quickly. Bishop was not Roger. Roger always had a perpetual smile on his face, and Bishop wore the opposite most of the time. No doubt that was probably a result of the war, and had Roger returned, she was sure he too would have lost his smile, but in time she would have helped him find it again.

Bishop stood and patted Ben on the head. His eyes were sad as he went back through the garage door.

She heard him lift the garage entrance manually and rummage around in there.

Meanwhile, she warmed a cast-iron skillet on the woodstove and cooked two of the steaks, seasoning them with only a little salt and pepper. She’d added another log to the fire, and soon the smell of frying meat permeated their senses. When Bishop arrived earlier, they’d not even had lunch, and now it was already dinnertime.

Ben was trying to sneak peeks at Bishop through a crack in the window while she cooked.

“Is he still out there?” Maeve asked him, though she had no idea how he could see in the pitch dark.

“Yeah, he’s working on the tires. I can only tell because of the flashlight moving around once in a while.”

By the time the steaks were done, she had heard the engine to her FJ start outside. He pulled the truck into the garage, and then she heard the rattling sound of him closing the garage door again. She had no doubt he wouldn’t forget to latch the door manually as well.

He came through the door leading into the house and handed her the keys to her FJ. “It’s running fine now. The engine was probably just cold. I put it in the garage,” he said and then picked up his pack and pulled out a deadbolt lock with a set of keys and headed to her back door off of the kitchen with Ben trailing him.

He soon pulled out a multiuse tool that she thought he must have brought along with him and replaced the flimsy lock with the deadbolt. Ben watched him the whole time, and Bishop handed him things to hold for him as he worked quickly and carefully to keep the cold air out of the house.

When he was finished and was about to leave, he said, “Maeve, if you’re going to go somewhere, please don’t go far, and do it tomorrow but no later than that. After tomorrow, even your kind neighbors, those you’ve known since you moved here, will start to become desperate, and desperate people are very dangerous. I’ll be around. I’ll check on you and Ben in a few days.”

Those words of warning made her stomach tighten. She was just beginning to become scared before he came, and now she was utterly scared through and through, and perhaps that was his point. She should be afraid. Fear enabled survival; that was a concept she was learning.

“All right. What if…what if something happens and I—we—need your help before you check in on us?” She felt stupid for uttering those words as soon as they left her mouth.

“I’ll be back,” he said and opened the back door and shut it just as quickly to keep the cold outside in the dark with him. Ben rushed over to the door and locked the deadbolt behind him. Her son was now the keeper of the house locks and seemed to take the job seriously.

She stood there silently for a moment watching the locked door and looked down to the tile where the marks from his boots were the only proof he’d been there.

“I’m hungry, Mom,” Ben said, and she was too. Her stomach growled in protest of the savory aroma, and yet she knew Bishop had to have been starving but still wouldn’t share this meal with them when she’d asked.

“OK,” she said. Near the woodstove, Maeve served their simple dinner of elk steaks and pinto beans, which turned out to be a feast for kings.

Beginning the long trudge back to camp, Bishop untethered Jake from the back of Maeve’s property. He didn’t think the boy had spotted the horse hitched just past the tree line. He found himself taking in deep breaths of sharp cold air as he rode back to camp.

Being in Roger’s house brought back many memories. He’d noticed the pictures on the walls of his friend holding his newborn son, of Roger in uniform soon after recommission, of Roger at his wedding with Maeve in her dress. It was as if he just lost his friend, not knowing until recently that Roger had died over there like so many others.

Bishop had died over there, in a way. Part of him had at least, and he knew he would never be the man he once was. He would take care of Roger’s family and do his best to ensure they survived this. He owed him that.

When he arrived in camp, it was snowing again, adding yet more on top of what would eventually compact and become ice; it wouldn’t melt, not for a long time. All the snow that fell now would become another layer to dig out of for years to come. They would have to continue to dig in order to survive.

He dismounted from Jake and led him into the makeshift stable. Bishop was cold and hungry and so was his horse. He knew Maeve was just kind when she offered the meal and a chance at a real shower, but he couldn’t stay there for longer than necessary. There was something about her that bothered him. She was kind and gentle and totally vulnerable there by herself, and Ben was a good kid.

He hated to think what might become of them if someone with bad intentions happened upon them. Even just thinking about the possibility he found his fists balled up in anger.

Bishop laid out feed for Jake and used a clean towel to wipe away the moisture from his hide while he ate. Instead of going down to the stream for water, he scooped up buckets full of clean snow and set it on his kerosene stove to melt. After he had given the first bucket of water to Jake, he continued to add snow to the large pot. When the melted snow had begun to boil, he used some of it to warm a few main entrees of the MREs he had stashed away. Typically, he ate them cold, but for novice partakers of the prepackaged meals, he went the extra step. He didn’t even look at the name
du jour
on the package any longer; they all tasted the same. If he didn’t have a source of fresh meat or was out of time and hungry like today, he just grabbed one of the hundreds of these he had stashed away in boxes in the cave. Some of them were expired, but he still ate them with no ill effects.

The peanut butter and cracker packages were a treat he often used around midday if he was working especially hard. Otherwise, he seldom ate more than two meals a day.

Once he was finished with his meal, the boiling water had cooled to warm. Bishop removed his clothes. By candlelight, he stood naked near his stove and brought out a bar of soap and a rough hand cloth. He started at the top of his head and first washed the sweat and grime from his hair and face and then worked his way down past the back of his neck and his chest and finished at his feet. His muscles were sore and glistened with moisture in the golden candlelight. Once he had rinsed away the soap, he fished out a new set of clean clothes and dressed in another set of camo pants, clean socks, underwear, and a long-sleeve thermal tee. His metal dog tags were the only thing he wore continuously.

Once dressed, Bishop slipped on his boots once more and scooped more snow into the pot and added his dirty clothes. He didn’t care about stains; his only concerns were the germs. Once the water came to a boil, he left them there for another ten minutes and then turned off the heat. Once cool enough, he wrung out each piece and hung them by the woodstove to dry. By morning, they would be stiff as cardboard but sanitized. It was an efficient system he’d developed over time.

Adding another log to the fire in the woodstove, he heated both sides of the cabin wall, the stable lean-to area as well as the inside of his home. Then he slipped inside of his sleeping bag, set up on a cot with his AR-15 by his side, and fell asleep.

A few hours later, Bishop woke to the sounds of the war he once knew. By now, he’d learned to tell the dream to go away no matter the gore he found himself in, whether it was him reliving the time he found a mutilated Chinese child gored by a fellow soldier, her hands clinging to a stuffed bear, or when he discovered that same soldier a day later missing the lower half of his body from a well-placed grenade. None of it ever made any sense to him, and there wasn’t a single night that he didn’t relive some part of what he’d gone through. The nightmares were always right there waiting for his return, but it was more than that this time.

Now, Bishop was freezing cold in the dream, and when he acknowledged the dream, it began to fade away. First, the blood muted and then the forested terrain gave way to darkness, though the shivering did not. He woke himself and found that not only was he cold, but the temperature had plummeted drastically. Opening his eyes, he discovered white ice crystals had encroached well into his cabin through the cracks in the walls.

“Jeez!” Bishop said, alarmed at the drastic change, and he immediately jumped up from his cot and started a fire in the woodstove that heated both sides of the cabin wall leading to Jake’s stable. He quickly put on his outer gear and opened his door, finding another two feet of fresh snow blocking his way to the stable side.

After breaking his way through, knowing his horse was in jeopardy from the extreme temperatures, he found Jake lying on his side, ice crystals formed around his muzzle near the warmest corner of the stable.

“Get up, buddy,” he urged the animal. Urging him to walk and move his blood through his arteries was the only way to save the animal. If he let him lie there, he would surely die of exposure in no more than an hour’s time. “Damn, I should have known better,” Bishop cursed to himself.

Then he thought of Maeve and Ben. If only he’d known the temperature would make such a drastic drop he would have prepared them, but right now they were more than likely all right since she’d had the woodstove going when he left. It was near morning outside, just barely; only a faint moon lit the sky behind the clouds.

He pulled on Jake’s harness and had to yell, “Get up, Jake!” Only then did the animal finally make the effort to do so. He wasn’t steady on his legs either. Bishop walked him around the small stable to get his blood pumping. When he finally seemed as if he would survive, Bishop gave him a little hay, not enough to fill him full but enough to keep him interested.

Then Bishop went back to his cabin and loaded more wood into the woodstove. Generally, he only fueled it enough to avoid freezing in order to limit the amount of smoke coming from his chimney, but this was unavoidable. He let the wood burn high, and soon the ice crystals that were invading his space began to retreat.

As an additional effort, he grabbed two large stones to heat on the woodstove and then alternated them in Jake’s water trough every few hours to keep the water from freezing over. They conducted a lot of heat and helped to keep the stable area warmer as well. Now he saw a need to enclose Jake’s stable area completely. The lean-to wasn’t going to work in these kinds of temperatures.

As soon as the sun began to rise, Bishop had confined most of the structure so that the snow could not enter by covering every chink in the wood slates with scrap pieces and then tacking a tarp around the exterior. Jake could rest safely from the elements. “There you go, buddy. Not a bad place,” he said, and Jake answered him with a shake of his head.

Bishop’s last task was assembling a gate, and he was thankful he’d scavenged useful items left in the woods over the years. He was able to build everything from the scraps he’d found.

Once he was finished, he added more wood in the woodstove to keep up with the extreme cold and realized he now would have to continue to keep it going around the clock.

The structure built onto the cave entrance was large enough to fit a woodstove and the kerosene stovetop along one wall and to hang items on pegs on the other side. The chimney was vented through the roof there. The walkway opened to a table area, and then beyond that was the cave room where several cots were lined up. He slept in there, and that was also where he kept all of his supplies.

The only problem with his setup was that there was only one entrance and one exit. That was something that had always bothered him—one should always have more than one exit from any particular dwelling.

By then it was only early evening, and he was wondering how Maeve and young Ben were faring with even colder temperatures and the extra snow on the ground. S
he wouldn’t try to drive in this deep snow, right? There’s no way they cleared the roads.
But his mind kept telling him if there was a will there was a way, and if Maeve wanted to take the truck out to get to the store she probably would have tried to chance the trip no matter the conditions, which worried him.

He found himself saddling up Jake with the excuse that he needed to get the horse moving and told himself he would just swing by Maeve’s house to check for tire tracks and come straight back and that was all.

Bishop took a different trail than the one before so that he wouldn’t mark a clear path through the trees between her property and his hideout three miles into the woods.

Not long after he set out, he smelled not only pine logs burning but something else as well. It was pitch dark by then, but as he and Jake meandered through the forest, the smell became even stronger. By the time he was only a mile away from camp, he began to see a glow through the trees coming from the direction of Maeve’s home.

“Oh no!” he said and urged Jake to hurry through the deep snow. As he traveled closer, he found it wasn’t her home set ablaze but that of a nearby neighbor’s. He rounded the house in a hurry and found Maeve and Ben standing in the front driveway.

“Ben, get back in the house!” she yelled, and then she looked up at him, startled. She didn’t recognize him at first. He pulled his hat away. “It’s all right, Maeve. Get inside. I’ll go check it out.” He could see she was concerned about what was happening to her neighbors a half mile down the road.

“There was a truck there. They had guns. We heard shots. There are children in that house!” she screamed.

“I said get inside the house and lock the doors, Maeve! Do it now!”

He took off as she headed inside. He hated to yell at her, but she wasn’t going to listen to him otherwise. He’d seen that same stunned look in soldiers as bullets flew. You had to get their attention and fast, or else they’d die.

From his point of view atop Jake as he neared the burning house, at least three men were pulling items out into the front yard. He stayed just outside the glow of the fire to try and discern what was taking place. That’s when he noticed a body of a man out front in the driveway. The snow around his head was crimson red. No doubt he’d been shot execution style.

Maeve had said there were children inside, but he saw no young people around the place.

Bishop crept around the side of a barn. He intended to take the one man on watch by surprise but needed to stash Jake in a safe place. If there were people still inside the house, then they were either dead or dying by now. “Stay right here, Jake,” he said as he tethered him to a post safely out of sight. Then he pulled his rifle out of the saddle and slung it by the strap around his back.

Peeking around the side of the barn, he counted again and found only three men, all armed, two of them moving what looked like ammo cans and rifles out of chests they’d hauled from the house and loading them into a pickup truck while the third man stood watch.

“Damn looters already,” Bishop whispered and then took advantage of the lookout’s damaged peripheral vision. He’d been staring at the fire for some time, and since Bishop knew his field of vision was compromised he ran along the periphery in the pitch dark until he was nearly on top of him.

“Preppers never learn to keep their damn mouths shut,” the guy on watch said. “Loose lips sink ships,” he said and spit into the snow near the dead man.

Bishop lost all doubts that these people might be the owners upon hearing the leader’s slur. The two additional men were still busy loading items into the back of the truck when the spitter said, “Hurry up. It’s damn cold out here.”

He’s right about that much,
Bishop thought and then raised his AR, sighted the spitter. He took a breath, let it out and held, then squeezed the trigger. The shot hit the man right in the temple. He never saw it coming and fell to the ground in a heap alongside the owner.

The other two men leaped from the back of the pickup to the other side and took cover. Bishop was already on the move, having anticipated their actions, and ran around the front of the truck before they even had a chance to aim. With two successive shots from his AR, he caught them both—one in the chest and the other in the neck.

Then he heard a child’s scream coming from the second floor of the burning house, and when he looked up, he saw a young girl with blond hair standing in a window staring down at him in fear.

“Oh, Jesus!” he screamed and immediately looked for options to get her free. There was no way to enter the house from the front entrance. The entire first floor was engulfed in flames. There was only one way to get to her, so he climbed the outside of the front porch and pulled himself up onto the roof. Since the first floor was an inferno, he knew he was taking a chance with his life and traversed the edge of the building to keep his weight on the outer walls.