The Borrowed World: A Novel of Post-Apocalyptic Collapse by Franklin Horton Read Free Book Online Page B

and time slowed.  In my peripheral vision I saw the car ahead of us pull onto the road.  To my left I could see the car behind us, a man and woman in the front seat, staring wide-eyed in horror.
    “In the car!” Gary yelled.  “Let’s go!”
    I ducked into the seat, hearing glass fragments grind beneath me.  I still had the LCP in my hand. 
    Gary hit the gas and the tires squealed as we sped onto the road and took the on-ramp for I-81 south. 
    The women were silent.  Even Rebecca's crying had stopped.  Gary kept looking over at me. “You may want to put that away,” he said after a moment.
     
     

Chapter 5
     
    When Ellen and the kids arrived home, she sent Pete for Jim's Simplicity lawn mower and the garden cart that he towed behind it.  They set the propane tanks, Coleman fuel, gas cans, and diesel cans out of the vehicle.
    “Store the gas and diesel in the mower building,” Ellen said.  “Just leave them in the middle of the floor for now until I can add fuel stabilizer to the gas.  Then I need you to come back for the propane cylinders, the Coleman fuel, and the camping stuff.  Put it the new storage building and make sure that it's locked when you're done.  Got it?  Ariel and I are going to take the groceries inside.”
    Pete saluted.  “Got it, Mom.”
    While people like Jim were called “preppers” today, he came from a long line of hillbillies that knew that hard times were always just around the corner.  His father and grandfather had been people who never threw anything away and tried not to own things they couldn’t fix themselves.  While she shook her head at the various junk and scrap piles that Jim maintained around the property, she never complained about them.  There would have been no point in it for one thing.  Jim was his own man and probably wouldn’t get rid of his personal junkyard for any amount of persuasion.  But beyond that, there’d been countless circumstances where he’d repaired something using material scavenged from his piles or built something he needed from scratch simply using those salvaged or discarded materials.
    There had been some boom times in central Appalachia where they lived, but far more “bust” times, so people were never that far from raising their own food, home canning, and hunting.  When he'd built this house on fifty acres of overgrown farmland, Jim had taken all those things into account, even though farming and hunting were not activities he actively pursued now.  There were deer, turkeys, and squirrels on the land.  He had a pond stocked with bass, trout, catfish, bluegill, and several other species.  He had a garden, which could easily be expanded if the need arose.  There was also a spring that could provide fresh water year round.  If things ever got desperate enough, there was even a cave at the back of the property that could serve as an emergency shelter. 
    As a weekend project, Jim had taken pallets of old cinderblocks he’d salvaged from buildings that were being torn down and walled up the entrance to the cave.  After laying the blocks most of the way up, he threaded scraps of rebar and old steel fence posts down through the block cores to lock them together.  Then he filled the voids with a wet concrete mixture to grout them solid, and had installed a salvaged steel door in the wall.  With the door’s metal frame also grouted with concrete, it was a very solid entrance and would be impenetrable to most things that might try to gain entrance.  When he ran out of room for cinderblocks, he filled any irregular voids with mortar, sealing his wall tight to the rock outcropping.
     
    *
     
    It took them nearly an hour to unload and put away the purchases.  As part of Jim's design, the house had a large pantry near the kitchen door that allowed them to store their food in an easily accessible location.  There were also shelves in the basement for long-term stored food, bulk foods, and some of the home-canned