Nathan Jones - Shortage

She slipped her arm through his. “I’m sure we can think of something. People were wooing each other long before technology showed up.”

He abruptly snapped his fingers in annoyance. “You know, the cousins had hard drives full of books, movies, and music in their shelter before Ferris took it from them and stripped it of anything of value, including the solar panels. We could’ve watched a movie there!”

Sam leaned her head against his shoulder. Terrifying as the confrontation had been, now that she was with Matt and Razor was long gone it was already starting to feel like just a bad dream. “It doesn’t matter what we do as long as we’re with each other. How about we spend the rest of the day doing our chores together?”

“I’d love to,” Matt replied. He shifted his shoulder slightly under her head, trying to make the motion seem casual, and with a start she realized she was putting weight right where Razor’s thug had kicked him.

“Oh, sorry!” she said, yanking her head back. She immediately began fussing over him again, tugging at his shirt collar so she could see the shoulder beneath where a large bruise was forming. “Are you going to be all right? Do we need to talk to Terry?”

Matt shook his head, but he seemed pleased with her ministrations and let her fuss over him all the way home.

Trev stood near the northern end of the cliffs a couple hundred yards from the hideout, staring northward at Highway 31 at the point where it meandered into view in the direction of the earthen dam that formed Electric Lake.

Just coming into sight was a small huddle of dispirited refugees. There were thirteen as best he could tell, mostly women and children shivering beneath blankets, coats, and anything else they had to protect them from the constant flow of cold early morning air pouring down from the mountains all around.

He didn’t know the signs well enough to guess whether it would be a harsh winter or a mild one, but he knew for sure that even a mild winter up here was going to be brutal. He really hoped those poor people managed to find their way through to the other side before they were trapped by the first major snowstorm of the year, or failing that managed to find a place of shelter and could gather enough food and firewood to survive.

The soft rustle in the undergrowth behind him turned him around to see Lewis approaching. He nodded as his cousin came up alongside him behind the thin screen of foliage he stood behind, which allowed him to see anyone below but effectively hid him from sight.

“Things must be bad down in Sanpete Valley if they’re sending refugees over the mountains,” Trev said quietly.

His cousin grunted. “Where else can they go? Without vehicles south is a death march into desert wastelands and so is west. North takes them back into the chaos of the cities and whatever violence is still happening there. That just leaves east by whatever way they can make it over the mountains.”

Trev nodded. “Nowhere else to go, but they’re going to be disappointed if they’re hoping for anything better when they reach Huntington on the other side.”

Lewis was silent for a while as they watched the refugees make their slow progress along the highway. “What a mess,” he finally muttered. “We could just as easily see refugees coming the opposite way, fleeing Emery and Carbon counties for Sanpete. Larger highways have a steady flow of refugees fleeing population centers, but along 31 they’re going from nowhere to nowhere.”

“They won’t be going anywhere for long once the snows really start to fall.” Trev felt deeply saddened by the sight of the poor people below, but he couldn’t look away.

“We should scout around our hideout,” Lewis abruptly said after a few more minutes of watching. “They might not all be down there, and however peaceable their intentions running into people can only be trouble, if for no other reason than they might tell other people where to find us.”

“You think starving refugees would trailblaze across steep slopes covered by dense forest and deadfall when they’ve got an easy road below?” Trev asked. But he was mostly pointing it out for conversation since he agreed that they should definitely be looking around just in case.

In the week since they’d arrived at the hideout they’d been steadily building supplies, fishing and gathering edible plants and keeping an eye out for more game to bring down. Progress had been good and Trev was feeling optimistic about having enough to survive the winter, but if bandits managed to steal anything, whether those bandits be lawless criminals or desperate starving refugees, they could find themselves in as desperate circumstances as the miserable group below.

Lewis seemed to understand his unspoken agreement, because he abruptly turned to their right. “I’ll swing around the southwest, you take the northeast. Meet you on the other side.”

Trev nodded. That would take him along the mountainside in the direction of the refugees for a bit, before it was time to loop up towards the logging road above the hideout and follow it to where he’d meet his cousin. He got out his binoculars and began scanning the slope, pausing every now and again to check the refugees, then picked his way around the end of the cliffs to a vantage point that would allow him to check spots he couldn’t see before.

Everything seemed normal as he worked his way around, then began climbing his way up the steep slope to the road above, still pausing to listen and to scan the area with his binoculars. He’d almost reached it when the faint sound of unfamiliar voices made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

Trev went completely still, then slowly eased down behind the log he’d been walking on to get over a particularly rough patch of deadfall, eyes riveted on the slope above. He could only see a small strip of the logging road farther north from this position, the rest obscured by the trees around him or the shoulder of the road itself. As best he could follow the voices they were talking at a normal tone, which meant they were close, and coming from somewhere above which almost certainly meant the logging road.

To his dismay he wasn’t able to get a view of anyone approaching from the strip of road he could see. The voices continued to get louder until finally he saw a head and shoulder appear through the trees on the road almost directly above him, less than thirty feet away. Trev had been still before but now he froze, gripping his rifle in preparation to bring it to bear, as the head passed out of sight and was replaced by another, then another, and the barest view of another man walking beside the third on the other side.

Please hear them coming, Lewis , he thought, dreading the thought that his cousin might already be heading up the road and would walk right into them. That fear spurred him to action, and once he was sure they were past him he began slowly picking his way up the hillside, doing his best to make no noise. He reached the road and poked his head up enough to see along it in time to watch the group rounding a bend up ahead.

Seven men, assuming they didn’t have hidden scouts out. Three were carrying visible guns, two rifles and a shotgun, while another had a machete hanging from his belt and the man next to him had an axe strapped to his backpack. The other two men weren’t armed that he could see, which could mean pistols. Then again they were loaded down with the heaviest packs so they might’ve been muling for the group.

Luckily they didn’t seem to be scouting the area at all and there was small chance of them discovering the hideout: from what Trev could see before they disappeared their eyes were on the highway below and the refugees walking along it. Although Trev couldn’t really call that lucky, at least for those poor souls.