Hell Happened Read Online Free PDF Page B

be a sound itself. He was able to hear the whisper quiet blower from the air circulator in the cellar and the very gentle hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen. But other than those two pieces of equipment, there was a wonderful silence in the shelter.
    He padded down the stairs to the bathroom where he did his morning constitutional and brushed his teeth. He would shave and put all clean clothes on later this morning, but right now, he just wasn’t in the mood and he didn’t want to wake the others. He also wanted to know if anyone had seen anything, though he knew someone would have woken him if there’d been news.
    Wiping his face with the towel he looked at himself in the mirror. “When did I start making life and death decisions?” he asked himself, not for the first time, as he looked into his own eyes. They stared back without an answer.
    For much of his life, the biggest worries he had was if the farm was going to make a profit, or what could he have done different to keep Andrea, his ex-wife, from leaving him to grow old all alone. He’d never had an exciting life; just a day-to-day running of a farm, hiring helpers to assist him in the busy months and letting them go at the end of the season.  He’d made some friends, but only one or two close ones, and they were all dead thanks to the virus that had spared his son and him, and a few others.
    Whenever he looked into the mirror now, he saw a man who was in way over his head and way over his experience. He didn’t see a survivalist, just a farmer who was trying to make the most of what was.
    He hung the towel back on the rack and left his reflection to ponder. He had other things to worry about. As he remembered his ex-wife saying so many times that he just wasn’t an introspective man or a very deep thinker.
    Andrea had divorced Jerry six months after his daughter had joined the Army. She hated the “military machine” and by extension, began to hate Jerry. One morning he came in from the field and there was a note saying she still loved him, just wasn’t “in love” with him anymore.
    They’d had fights in the past, disagreements that lasted days and weeks, but Jerry thought they’d done pretty well raising two kids. They’d been married in their mid-20s and had almost 20 years together when the dam broke and she left him.
    Try as he might, Jerry couldn’t convince Andrea to come back home. She filed divorce papers, took her share of their savings and moved to Seattle to be with her high school sweetheart.
    It’d pissed Jerry off and he lost 28 pounds from not caring if he ate or not, and the farm had suffered some as well. Randy and Jerry’s friends from Horizon Church where he worshipped got him through the hell. It was a slow process, but Jerry eventually found a way to make it through another day without wanting to just curl up and die.
    Just thinking back to those times caused a flicker of pain in Jerry’s chest, but not the thudding like he’d had three years earlier. It was the past. She was also probably dead. So probably was her high school sweetheart.
    Kellie heard him coming and offered her hand as he climbed through the hatch. “Good morning,” she said quietly. He took her hand and lifted himself up. Someone had brought a chair up sometime during the night and Kellie had been sitting in it.
    “Good morning. No one showed up?” She’d had the fore thought to also make coffee. She had a mug beside her and offered him some which he took gratefully. “Nope. Randy and Eddie said they thought they heard some shots that were really far off, but they weren’t sure. No one saw anything,” she told him.
    Jerry sat down on the grass and picked up the binoculars. It was still more than an hour before sunrise, but the eastern horizon was already getting light enough to see five or 10 miles distant. He saw nothing moving.
    They sat in silence for a few minutes.
    Jerry wasn’t sure why Kellie hadn’t gone back to bed. She could still