Legion of Despair: Book Three in The Borrowed World Series by Franklin Horton Read Free Book Online

her latest boyfriend for several months. He was of a cut that Buddy didn’t care for. He drove a banged up late-model Camaro in an unattractive teal color. He was forty but seemed to think he was twenty, running around with girls Rachel’s age and partying when he should have been working. Buddy wondered if he was a drug dealer, but he didn’t know enough about such things to know what the signs were.
    Then one night, Rachel died outside of the Emergency Room doors at the local hospital, where she’d been dumped like garbage. She was not immediately noticed, laying there in the dark, but a nurse on a smoke break eventually found her. They tried everything they could, including administering opiate blockers, and were unable to bring her back from the dead. The police never figured out where she’d been or who she’d been with. No one was talking.
    Buddy wasn’t talking. He knew who she left home with and he knew where to find him. There was some justice better administered by a father than by the court system. It was a matter of love and of honor.
    Her funeral was on the very day that the lights went out. With the condition of the country and the concern about more terror attacks, no one but Buddy showed up. They buried her on a sunny day in the cemetery in town. Buddy gave her his plot, right beside his wife. He figured he’d just have to buy another for himself. He’d never counted on needing more than two.
    On the way home from the funeral, Buddy stopped at the local Chevron to fill up his truck. When he pulled in, he found the pumps roped off with yellow crime scene tape. A deputy was sitting in his car, watching Buddy. A sign on the bank of pumps said: Pumps Closed.
    Buddy got out of his truck and approached the deputy. “I hear the generator running,” he said. “Why ain’t they selling gas?”
    “Haven’t you been watching the news?” the deputy asked, squinting up at him.
    Buddy hadn’t had his television on since the police came and told him about Rachel. “No, don’t reckon I have.”
    The deputy frowned at this, unable to imagine anyone who could not know what was going on in the world right now. “Terrorists are blowing shit up all over the country. They say it’s ISIS or Al Qaeda. They blew up the big refineries and it’s going to take a while to get them back online. The president has stopped all fuel sales except for police, military, and other first responders. It’s for emergencies only.”
    Buddy nodded. He didn’t have the words left in him that day to argue or ask questions. He was too numb. He walked back to his truck, started it and drove off toward home.
     
    *
     
    Buddy’s family was not originally from Russell County, but from nearby Wise County. His father had been a coal miner for most of his life. In 1958, Buddy’s father saw his own brother crushed when a slab of un-cribbed slate dropped from the mine roof. The two men had been discussing going deer hunting the next day. As they walked in the stooped posture required by low coal toward the shuttle car that would take them out of the mine, there was a thud that shook the ground and a puff of displaced air that pushed gently against Buddy’s father’s back. He turned and found that his brother was no longer behind him. Only a hand and forearm extended from beneath the car-sized chunk of slate. He dropped and took the hand in his, but despite its warmth there was no life left in the limp flesh. Buddy’s father left the mine that day and never went underground again.
    Shortly after that, Buddy’s father bought an abandoned house on an empty stretch of dirt road far from town. He spent several months gutting and remodeling the house until he had fashioned it into some semblance of what was locally known as a “beer joint.” When the interior of the building was done and all that remained was repainting the old house, a mining friend stole ten gallons of yellow safety paint from his job. Buddy’s father painted the house