The World Ends In Hickory Hollow by Ardath Mayhar Read Free Book Online Page A

foodstuff, had plenty of fuel cut and stored dry, were preparing for crops in the spring, and were terribly afraid of something. Wariness fairly popped from the pores of both the adults.
    I also discovered that Carl had met us with a small .32 pistol in his jacket pocket. As I looked down at him from the wagon seat, I could see its distinctive shape in the pocket of his jacket. As the other pocket bulged just as much, its weight hadn't called attention to itself. Who notices a boy's loaded-down pockets, anyway?
    The discovery filled me with a foreboding that I hadn't known until now. What could have made a healthy, well-equipped young family so cautious–unless some danger was abroad, some immediate, here-and-now danger, unconnected with fallout and such?
    As we turned the wagon and headed back the way we had come, I felt the weight of my own pistol lying against my thigh in my jacket pocket and was glad, now, that Zack had insisted that I bring it. And when we reached the river track again and turned to go farther along it, I got out and ranged ahead, as if I were merely stretching my legs.
    The next lane had been used frequently, we could all see, but was now drifted over with dead leaves and sweetgum balls. I looked back at Mom Allie, and she looked at Lantana, who nodded.
    "The Sweetbriers lives up here, if I don't misremember. Old folks, most as old as me. Their folks been on that place since heck was a pup. If they're there, they'll be mighty glad to see somebody, I know," she said.
    Maud was, by now, weary of her new duty and ready to turn and go home. I took her by the cheek strap and led her into the track, and we meandered through yet another stretch of wood-land. Around the first bend, we found our way sloping steeply to climb a sharp ridge that was lined with venerable hickory trees. Crossing over, we found ourselves in clean-floored pine woods ... big woods, such as I had thought to be gone forever in the wake of the lumber companies and the pulpwood haulers.
    Lantana looked up into the whispering roof far above us. "I see they never sold their timber stand," she mused. "They love these old trees. Went hungry, many's the time, but they wouldn't sell ' em . Down here, so far away from a road and so close to their house, nobody could get in to steal ' em . So here hey be, still straight and tall and talkin ' to the wind. And all the lumber companies and the pulpwood haulers and the paper mills are gone a- gallagin '."
    We moved among the giant trees, even Maud's hoofbeats muffled to quiet by the carpet of needles that lay thickly on the forest floor. Then we saw watery blue sky before us and came out into a narrow field that separated the pine wood from the garden fence of a small gray house that huddled among leafless chinaberry trees. There was no smoke.
    Lucas pulled Maud up before the barbed-wire gate of the garden, and we all, moved by some strange instinct, went together into the heavily mulched rows, picking our way across to the yard gate. That stood open, and as we went through it, a small gray-brown form came trotting around the corner of the house bleating joyfully. It was a Nubian doe, and her narrow face was alight with greeting.
    She nuzzled at our hands as we followed the sand path around the house to the back porch. It was a screened enclosure containing a washer and a chest-type deep freezer. The door was unlatched, and we found the door into the kitchen unlocked–violently unlocked. Something had torn the door away from its own locking mechanism, splintering the door facing as well.
    I shivered, and Lantana laid her hand on my shoulder for a moment as I nerved myself to step inside. The kitchen had been ransacked. Cupboard doors had been left open, and broken glass, pots and pans, dishes, and loose flour lay in drifts across the bright linoleum. No sane person, scrounging for food, had done this. Pointless destruction had been the rule here.
    Into the hush that followed our entry, there came a