Against the Grain Read Online Free PDF Page B

by foot. If they decided they wanted to abandon their rig at all. We had hoped the barricade would be enough of a deterrent for most people, but some saw it as a reason to come check us out, thinking we must have something good enough to protect.
    There were two other neighbors somewhat nearby, further on down the road from the Ranch houses and the barricaded end, so we were the lucky ones that got to deal with any “trespassers” first. It was good for the neighbors, but not ideal for us. They were just a couple of families, one with some livestock, and the other with the hay and farm fields that we all desperately needed, and what’s more, they knew it. It wasn’t a great situation although we tried to help them out with everything we could, including getting CB radio units set up to help keep everyone in contact. Even further down the road there were a couple other houses, now empty. Their previous owners having decided that they would be better off with their own relatives a few states away.  
    The CB radios were spares, or more accurately they were “liberated” units from abandoned cars and trucks that I had come across. With little to no outside electrical grid power, the car units were a good compromise that kept the little local area communicating. Clint, who lived even farther out, had a good CB, HAM, and Shortwave set up and an antenna tower that he ran off a big old generator. We used him as our “repeater” to get information farther in and out than what our little units were capable of doing.  
    Here at the Ranch there was a small battery bank and trickle solar charging system that we had cobbled together. The panel had come from the Harris’s grandparent’s motor home that they used to camp in during the summer months. It was a cheap system, but it gave us a way to recharge our batteries and monitor a radio scanner without running the car and truck engines. We actually had a good bit of gas in the various fuel cans, but there was not nearly enough stabilizer to keep the octane from going dead.  
    Every once in a while we heard over the radio how gas stations in the big city some thirty miles from here were getting irregular shipments in, it was mostly all slated for the hospital generators, then the infrastructure guys who were trying to fix the roads, and then the power and water crews. It would be a while before we saw any tanker trucks come out our way and in the mean time, what we had, we were reluctant to use. Not that we really had anywhere to go.
    “We picked up some weird static and a couple broken voices on the CB this morning. Then again on the FRS scanner a little bit later. I thought if they were close enough for the FRS’s to hear ‘em,we might want to have a lookout,” Nick explained to me.
    The FRS radios were little hand held walkie-talkies that during their prime, could be found at every box store and sporting goods site in America. Their range was never as good as advertised, and cell phones had taken over their urban usability, but in the woods they still had a place. Using them as we did now, it was not an exact science as the finicky radios were prone to picking up random static, but it was good for Nick to have thought outside the box on the subtleties of their uses.   
    “And have you seen anything yet?” I asked him.
    “I watched a chipmunk cross the road like two hours ago,” he deadpanned.  
    “Yeah,” I laughed. “Good call on getting eyes on the road in any case.”
    “So what are you doing out here?” Nick asked me. “I didn’t expect you to be back for a week or two.”  
    “Well… I kind of ran into someone and ended up bringing her back here,” I said lamely. I was going to need a better way to explain this if I got asked many more times.
    “ Her … really?” Nick repeated and raised a skeptical eyebrow.  
    “Yes, her ,” I relented. “Her name’s Megan. Bre and I went to school with her and I used to know her pretty well a while back. I