James Rawles - Survivors - A Novel of the Coming Collapse

Hiring the boys was a straightforward arrangement, but feeding their six horses was a bit more complicated. When Lars and Beth first took over the ranch, they found that Tim Rankin had not done a very good job of maintenance. The little brush and roller painting that he had done had left copious spatters, and the spray-painting had left obvious overspray. The elder Laines’ saddles were still there, but Rankin had “borrowed” and never returned their girth straps as well as several horse pads and blankets. At least Rankin had been vigilant about poisoning the mice and pack rats, and he had done a decent job of weed control in the pastures.

Lars and Andy were both away on active duty when Tim Rankin moved into the house. When they asked about their father’s guns, Rankin said that he hadn’t found any in the house. This made Lars and Andy suspicious, because they knew that their father owned several guns. Since these guns had mostly sentimental value, they didn’t push the issue with Rankin, who pled, “Well, if they were in the house, they musta been burglarized before I ever got there. There were a lot of strangers in the house after your dad passed on: the paramedics, the cops, the coroner, and probably more. Any one of them could have lifted your dad’s guns.”

When Tim Rankin left, there were still two tons of year-old alfalfa hay in the hay barn and about three tons of baled straw in the stable loft. As soon as his job offers to the Phelps boys were accepted, Lars started to make inquiries about hay, grain, and firewood. After much searching and dickering, he bartered a mint-condition U.S. $5 gold piece in exchange for nine tons of alfalfa, five cords of Pinyon Pine firewood, seven salt blocks, and two hundred pounds of molasses-sweetened COB-a mix of cracked corn, rolled oats, and barley. Lars felt that he got the worst end of the deal, because gold was then selling for $8,460 per ounce. Since not even counting its numismatic value, the $5 gold piece contained almost a quarter ounce of gold, Lars felt cheated.

The ranch’s pair of fifteen-acre irrigated pastures were in decent shape, but to be useful to their full capacity once again, they needed to be reseeded. The local feed store still had some sacks of orchard grass pasture blend seed on hand. It took some dickering, but Laine was able to get fifty pounds of the seed blend in exchange for three silver quarters and a box of fifty .22 Long Rifle cartridges.

Laine soon put the Phelps boys to work, broadcasting half of the sack of seed with a hand-cranked broadcaster, primarily in the pastures’ many bare spots. But the more difficult work came in the next two weeks, when they laboriously raked the seed into the soil. They also had to be vigilant in scaring off any passing birds until after the seed had sprouted. Like so many other things that had previously been taken for granted, grass seed had become a precious commodity.

It was after the orphans arrived that Lars also discovered that Tim Rankin had pilfered most of the horse-care tools and veterinary supplies for his father’s horses. There was little left other than a couple of half-empty jars of Swat fly repellent. Luckily, the boys had brought with them a pair of hoof nippers, a hoof rasp, a brush, and two horse combs. Diego Aguilar had also providently sent along a sixteen-ounce bulk can of horse wormer. Instead of using a mouth syringe like the one Lars had previously used, the boys heavily coated a mouth bit with the paste and attached the bit, just as they would do for riding. Giving a horse a double-handful of sweet feed then ensured that the medicine went down. While the “Diego method” of dosing was less accurate, Laine presumed that it was effective.

Stowing the boys’ tack and moving into the bunkhouse didn’t take long, as they hadn’t carried much gear. The bunkhouse was utilitarian but well insulated. The interior walls were covered with unpainted plywood. It had two narrow rooms that sat side by side, each with its own door, off the foyer. One of them had a window at one end with some gauzy curtains, and two sets of bunk beds that were positioned end to end. The other room didn’t contain much except for about thirty boxes, most of which contained National Geographic magazines that had belonged to Laine’s maternal grandmother. Some of these dated back to the 1930s. Both of the rooms were heated by a barrel woodstove on a low flagstone pedestal in the foyer.

Soon after moving in, and starting their monthly rotating “OP” duty shifts, the boys realized that one of them would have to sleep during the day, but the daylight would make it difficult for that individual to sleep. So Shad asked Lars if they could move the bunk beds to the other room, which could be kept completely dark. Lars gave his consent. But just ten minutes later Shad returned to the house, looking confused.

“Mr. Laine, there’s something wrong with that other room in the bunk house.”

“What do you mean, ‘wrong’?”

“When the bunk beds were in the south room, they fit fine, but now, when we moved them into the other room, they don’t fit. That’s weird, because the rooms are supposed to be the same length. Can you come and take a look?”

Lars pulled a twenty-five-foot tape measure from his desk drawer and followed Shad to the bunkhouse. With the tape measure, they found that the windowless room was six inches shorter than the other. Lars chuckled. Pulling the bunk back from the far wall, he began rapping with his knuckles in various places on the plywood, listening for differences in sounds.

Lars half sang, “Methinks my dad did some creative carpentry here.”

“So it’s like a fake wall?” Rueben asked.

“Yes, I suspect that it is. Give me just a minute.”

Leaving the boys, Laine walked briskly to the shop and soon returned with his Makita cordless screw gun. Starting at the middle of the wall at chest level, Lars began backing-out the Sheetrock screws that held the plywood in place at sixteen-inch intervals. He was surprised when the first screw dropped to the floor after just a few turns. Looking down at the screw, he saw that it was just a stub.

“That’s odd. Must have broken off.”

The same thing happened with the next screw.

“What the…?” Lars exclaimed.

Reaching down, he picked up the two fallen screws. They were both just three-eighths of an inch long. Examining them closely, he observed, “These didn’t break. These were sawed off, with a hacksaw.”

Lars resumed removing the screws from the plywood sheet in front of him. He found that most of the screws had been shortened and installed just to give the appearance of functional fasteners. But only six of them-four in the corners, and two that were at the midpoint of the plywood sheet-were a full two inches in length and went through to the studs behind.

“Oh, Dad! You clever Finn. Take a look at this, guys: this panel is designed to be removed, with only six screws to take out.”

“Here, help me with this,” said Lars as he backed the last screw out of the upper left corner.

Laine and the boys bounced the three-quarter-inch-thick sheet of plywood loose and pulled it away, revealing a cavity behind that was crammed full of stacked ammo cans-mostly U.S. Army surplus cans originally made to hold .30 caliber ammunition-and several odd-shaped items wrapped in heavy black plastic trash bags, sealed with Priority Mail packing tape. Starting with the third row of ammo cans, all of the items were either held in place with hardware wire attached to screw eyes or hung from closet hooks. It was now obvious that his father had added a framework of two-by-sixes at the far end of the room, and covered it to look like the original wall. Given the dimensions of the rooms, the difference in their depths was almost imperceptible.