You Can Believe It

By Paul Swearingen

One day, Dane woke up, but no one else did. Or so he thought.

But the neutron bombs hadn't killed everyone, as just when he was getting used to being alone in the world, two sisters showed up to change everything again. And yet they weren't the only ones to survive, or to die, and change his world, as he was to find out after he met Becky and saved her life.

Set in the very near future, "You Can Believe It" is suitable for ages 12+.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Swearingen
• Release date: Aug 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476117553

Paul Swearingen

Paul Swearingen is a retired English/journalism/Spanish teacher who managed to survive 34+ years in public, private, and government schools. He also was a radio newsman and disk jockey, a newspaper editor and photographer, a personnel manager for a large retail store (now defunct), and a long-time publisher of the National Radio Club's magazine, "DX News". He lives in Topeka, Kansas, where his main current duty is to keep his garden under close control.

Book preview

Chapter One

Four miles away, a boy murmured in his sleep, shivered, and turned onto his left side. For a moment, his breathing rate increased until he was almost gasping, but he slowly relaxed. In a few minutes he slipped back in to a deep sleep, only his chest moving in a gentle rhythm.

* * *

Dane sat up abruptly. He didn’t know where he was, why he couldn’t see or hear, why his left hip and shoulder ached with a dull pain.

I’m blind, deaf … dead, he concluded. But as his head cleared (What a headache!) the memories returned in a rush.

Marvin hit me. I ran away. I’m in an old storm shelter somewhere south of Kansas City.

He sat up and felt his lip where Marvin, his guardian, had struck him … the day before? The lump was still painful, but it was smaller. He rubbed his hip and shoulder and suddenly realized that if he didn’t empty his bladder soon he’d have a real problem.

The steel door gave a faint pop when he unlatched it and pushed it open, and he remembered wondering at the rubberized, air-tight edges of the door when he’d first entered the shelter last night after making sure that the obviously fire-damaged house fifty feet away had been abandoned. He could see no spider webs nor creepy-crawlies in the range of his flashlight beam, and as he had settled onto the dry concrete floor, his backpack under his head for a pillow, he had realized that the combination storm and bomb shelter was constructed to keep humans safe and water and critters out, although the floor could provide little comfort.

Outside, he took a deep breath of fresh air and faced the brightening sky to the east before he walked around to the back of the shelter and relieved himself into a stand of horseweed. He glanced at the burnt-out farmhouse again and looked around nervously, as if someone was listening and waiting to grab him and drag him away. How quiet it was in the country, he thought. In Kansas City he could hear rush hour traffic, Marvin snoring in the bedroom next door … No. Not any more.

He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket to check the time, but the time display was blank, and when he opened the phone the screen read No signal. He scowled and zipped up, his task finished.

Dane rubbed the sore spot on his left hip to no avail; it just hurt more. Note to self: no more sleeping on concrete. His stomach felt painfully empty, and he decided to try to hitch another ride to the next town so that he could find a truck stop, wash up, and get some breakfast.

He walked back down into the shelter to retrieve his backpack. The air inside was so stale that he had to hold his breath until he could make it outside again. He really should have tried to air the shelter out or even have left the door open last night, but he knew that rain was coming and had pushed the door tight and turned the handle to secure it.

He dropped the useless phone into the backpack and fumbled around until he felt his old Timex, one of the few things he still had from when his parents were still alive, and pulled it out of his backpack tilting it to catch the light from the east so he could read the digits. 6:10. Just about the same time that he arose every day for school. He’d been asleep almost ten hours, stiff legs attesting to a day previous spent walking beside an asphalt highway, except for an hour-long ride with an older lady who had picked him up in Lenexa and made him ride in the front seat and buckle his seat belt tightly. He’d told her he was eighteen and couldn’t afford a bus ticket to Tulsa, but he knew that he probably appeared no older than his sixteen years and perhaps even younger because of his five-foot-six stature. He’d dozed most of the time he was in her car, and she hadn’t asked any questions except for his name. She seemed to be glad to let him out of her car when she told him that she had to turn and head west, and if he was really headed for Tulsa that he needed to get out.

The ground was soft and damp from last night’s rain, and the air smelled different from anything that he could remember. Even though his nose was still stuffed up from the air in the shelter, he could still smell a certain burnt odor, almost as if some kind of chemical factory were nearby, not like what he remembered from meth lab fumes in the neighborhood from which he’d escaped, but more like an organic smell. Maybe like a chicken farm. Must be what fresh country air smells like, he decided, although it certainly wasn’t like what he remembered when he had lived in Oklahoma.

He pulled his water bottle from the backpack and tilted it to his mouth, rinsed and spat, and took a small drink. It had only about an inch left; maybe he’d better hold off drinking it down until he could buy another one in the next town, and his last piece of Spearmint gum would have to calm his stomach down for now.

The backpack dug into Dane’s shoulder as he hoisted it, and he bounced it a bit to settle it. He strode to the road, looked hopefully to the north for approaching headlights, and turned south again.

He had walked only about a hundred paces when he noticed a dead rabbit, just a step from the side of the road and partly in the ditch. It looked as if it had just lain down to rest on its side, and he broke off a dead stalk of buffalo grass and poked it and then turned it over with his shoe. No movement. But no obvious injuries or blood, either, except for the tiniest trickle of dried blood from the corner of its mouth. Wouldn’t a rabbit that had been hit by a car have some marks on it? Maybe its neck had been broken from the impact from the car tire. He recalled being in the front seat of a car directly behind another car cresting a hill when a cat had run in front of it and directly into the right front tire. The cat had not been run over but had been flung into the ditch with such force that he knew that it had been killed instantly. That’s probably what happened to the rabbit. He tossed the stem of grass into the ditch and moved down the road again. The rabbit wasn’t the only dead thing he’d seen recently. But dead bodies couldn’t hurt him.

The sun began to warm up his left side as he plodded along the middle of the left-hand lane. Again, he looked back down the road, hoping to see a vehicle moving his way so he could flag it down and catch a ride. Nothing. Maybe he wasn’t so smart in taking a state road instead of a federal highway, but the last thing that he wanted to see after he left Kansas City was a patrol car, lights strobing and headed his way.

He crested a slight rise and now could see a water tower and a grain elevator in the distance ahead, maybe a mile away. He was concentrating so hard on not feeling hungry that he almost missed the gaping hole in the fence to his right, the wire on either side of the hole swept into the pasture, which sloped gently away from the road. A parallel row of tire tracks ran through the flattened grass and the hole and on into the field. Dane closed his eyes and willed the scene away, but it was still there when he opened them.

He brushed through the weeds in the shallow ditch and stood next to the splintered stump of a cedar fence post. About a hundred yards from the breach in the fence a tractor-trailer truck was nose-down in a creek, partly submerged and turned to its left side, the trailer still upright, the running lights still visible, even in the sunlight. Across the creek several dozen or more dead Holstein cattle dotted the slope. He took a step towards the truck but stopped. He knew that it would be no use for him to walk across the pasture and look inside the cab, that whoever was in there was beyond help.

Something was really wrong around here. He looked back at the road, at the double tire tracks across the pasture, at the back of the trailer. Then he turned abruptly and stepped back to the road, on his mission again to find something to eat. Maybe the signs counting down the miles to Charlie Davis’s Country Store – 1 mile – Lenore would lead him to a decent breakfast served by a perky waitress in a brightly lit corner of the store.

Chapter Two

Dane shaded his eyes and peered through plate glass into the dark interior of the combination general store and gas station and between the flaking words that read, Charlie Davis’s Country Store Open 7 am-7pm Mon-Sat, 12-6 Sunday. He glanced at his watch – 8:22 am, and they should be open on a Friday – before he pulled at the handle, but the door was locked. Did he dare break into the store and risk getting caught? He thought of the semi he’d left behind, took a deep breath, and walked along the side of the building, glancing up at the high side windows, too high to scale and break through. The back of the building looked less secure behind the stand of dead weeds, and he decided that the security grate fastened to the wooden back door with lag bolts might come off with a little persuasion.

A rusty tire tool left in the unlocked trunk of a rusting ‘50’s-era Chevy two-door sinking into the ground behind the building was all he needed to pry off the grate and to smash the window He glanced at the alarm service sticker on the door and the flaking aluminum band around the edge of the door glass before he gave the window a whack. The alarm probably hadn’t been working for years and might never have been hooked up at all, and nothing happened after he reached through the opening, shot the deadbolt open, and turned the doorknob and walked into the dark interior.

He blinked his eyes and waited until he could see the dim outlines of the shelves and cartons between himself and the sunlit front of the store. The tire tool clattered when he dropped it inside the door, more loudly than he’d expected, and he walked to the front of the store. The hands of a wall clock advertising Dr Pepper were stopped at 10:42, the second hand still, and he knew that there would be no point in looking for a light switch.

Perhaps the phone worked? He picked up the receiver of the rotary dial phone on the counter. It had no dial tone. The line was dead.

Dane replaced the receiver, looked desperately at the clock again, and then crumpled to the floor and leaned his back against the counter, his face in his hands, the tears trickling down the sides of his face. He knew now that he was completely alone, and no one was going to give him a ride, bring him breakfast, wait on him, tell him to go to school, to do his homework, to quit fooling around.

But then he rubbed his eyes and stared at the shelves in front of him. Marvin and Anna were gone, and they could no longer abuse him. He felt his lip absent-mindedly. The lump was still there, but it was not nearly as sore as it had been yesterday. No more teachers and principals and counselors to tell him what to do and how to live his life any more. The thieves and bullies and snotty girls were all gone, too, and he could do what he liked from now on without the crap that he’d been forced to put up with for so long, since the death of his parents.

His stomach reminded him that he had a mission when he walked into the store, and he stood, took a deep breath, and looked around, realizing that breakfast couldn’t wait for him to figure things out. He pulled a plastic bottle from the cooler and a six-pack of Dolly Madison powdered doughnuts from a rack, backed up to the counter, and sat on it cross-legged. He twisted open the orange juice bottle, and took a long drink. It was still cool, but not cold. A mess of hotcakes and sausages, even as nasty and greasy as his aunt Anna used to make them, were what he was used to eating on special days when cereal wasn’t on the table for breakfast, but packaged food would have to do for today. And probably tomorrow. And then – how long?

As he chewed a doughnut, he looked around the store. The interior looked pretty much like the other country stores he remembered from when he’d lived south of Tulsa, before the death of his parents in a car crash had changed his world. For several months he’d lived with a foster family with too many other children in a crowded house in Sapulpa, and he’d quickly realized that he missed the daily chores of the farm he’d grown up on – feeding the chickens and geese, weeding the garden and picking tomatoes and cucumbers and squash, tracking down pale green tomato worms and knocking them off the stems and squashing them with a stick, and even mowing the yard with a rusty old Montgomery Ward push mower that somehow started every time on the second pull, belched blue smoke, and then ran with a few pops and sputters. He even missed his dad instructing him all the time on how to do things around the farm, not to mention all the 4-H projects he’d had to complete, from cooking to electricity to woodworking to raising vegetables. But that was before the court sent him to live with his father’s stepsister and her husband in Kansas City. His step-aunt Anna and her slob husband Marvin.

This store, too, probably had everything that he needed to live on, from food to hardware to first aid supplies, and the large white metal door in the back probably led to a freezer. The building stood on the corner of a block of old brick buildings, not on the highway in a stand-alone prefab building, and the molded-tin ceilings were high and the building long and narrow. When he’d walked the two blocks from the highway to the store, he had noticed that the other store buildings along the main street were dilapidated to the point of their roofs having caved in, and that only about a half-dozen houses were visible behind overgrown vegetation, most of them obviously deserted. The grain elevator was nothing but a tower of crumbling concrete next to a rusty railroad siding. Even before whatever happened last night, this town was isolated and almost dead except for Charlie Davis’s store located in the middle, as if the town had begun to die at the edges and had atrophied to this last point, almost like a cucumber vine in the middle of summer heat.

He finished the last of the orange juice and tossed the plastic bottle and the doughnut package into a round, tall wastebasket, pushed off the counter, and walked up and down the aisles of the store, taking inventory of the goods that were now his responsibility. For once in his life he could now make some plans on his own without everyone around him telling him what to do. It would take a couple of days for the meat and other perishables inside the freezer to thaw and perhaps another day or two before everything not canned started to spoil. The milk in the cooler normally would turn sour in a day or two after it warmed up, but he could stack the cartons inside the freezer and extend the time that the milk would remain drinkable. The canned goods in the store of course would last almost indefinitely, and some packaged goods might eventually mold or become stale, but most prepared food would be edible for months to come.

No, there was no point in walking back to the blacktop and heading south, even if he found something to drive himself in. Charlie Davis’s store would do just fine for now until something better came along, and it was all his. He didn’t have to take orders from anyone now, and if he wanted to torch the place, he could. If he wanted to. But that wasn’t such a good idea; the smoke would be visible for miles and miles in the gently rolling Kansas countryside, and he didn’t want to attract attention, just in case anyone else had been as lucky as he had and had survived. He’d rather be alone from now on and make his own plans. This would be his party, and there would be no guest list.

He spotted a wooden door next to the cooler door, and he pushed it open and looked around. A window high in the back let in minimal light, but he could see that this room had been an office, complete with a classic roll-top desk and a lumpy daybed under the window. He could sleep here and survive on the food in the store until he figured out what was going on in the rest of the world. This room was nicer than his old bedroom in Kansas City, anyway.

No people, no animals, birds, probably no snakes … the world somehow had turned around while he was sleeping in the storm cellar. Maybe he was the only one left alive? No, surely there were other sealed rooms in the world, other safe places. He’d been vaguely aware of the turmoil in the outer world before he’d taken off from home, but he had ignored it. Too many problems at home, in school, and in the neighborhood for him to keep track of the world’s problems too. Marvin talked about ragheads, his jaw clenched, muttering something about a storm in the desert that his older cousin had been caught in, and once when Dane had brought home a friend whose parents had emigrated from Malta, Dane had caught him surveying his dark hair and Mediterranean features with a scowl on his face. He hadn’t said anything to Dane, though.

He carefully pulled the door closed, walked back to the hardware section of the store, and lifted a portable Panasonic radio off the shelf and broke open two packs of C-cells. He loaded them into the radio and snapped it on. Nothing. It was completely dead, and the next radio on the shelf was dead, also. He frowned and loaded two of the batteries into a flashlight from the next shelf. It worked perfectly. Well, maybe later he’d see if the little SONY portable somewhere in his backpack worked.

He put the radio back on the shelf and looked at the flashlight and slipped it into his back pocket. He’d keep that. It was more powerful than the penlight that he’d brought with him, and he might need it later. The store held enough to feed him for months, but if he was to stay alive, he knew that other things were necessary, like a gun and a car, and he’d have to pay a visit to the nearby farms to find what he needed. He wasn’t really sure of everything that might be necessary, but he’d scout around and take what looked useful. He tried not to think of the bodies that he’d certainly find when he opened doors of farmhouses and explored them.

The little store was isolated, but certainly not hidden, Dane thought. Anyone traveling on the state highway could easily spot the store if they followed the same signs that he’d noticed and turned off and into the almost-dead town. It would be a lot more convenient if he camped out here, with all the supplies close at hand, but it would be more dangerous. He’d need a gun for protection, and he’d need to barricade the back door a little more securely than just by an easily pried hasp and padlock. Two-by-fours, nails, some tools, maybe a bar across the back door from the inside after he nailed some plywood across the space where the window glass had been … he’d have to take a little expedition to see what he could find. The little shed out back looked a lot like the old privy on the farm in Oklahoma, and maybe there was a well or cistern in the neighborhood that still had a manual pump on it. He’d seen gallon plastic jugs of water and bath soap on the store shelves, but he knew that he’d have to haul water into the store building for spit baths in the sink in the butcher’s area as well as for drinking, eventually, and for washing his clothes. Maybe civilization as he’d known it was gone, but he knew that he’d stay civilized. He suddenly realized that his work in 4-H, along with his father’s and mother’s instructions hadn’t gone wasted, and he smiled for the first time that morning.

It was time for a little expedition now. He’d spotted several boxes of .22 longs and shorts behind the main counter, but the store didn’t sell firearms. All farmers kept a few guns in their houses, if nothing more than a .22 rifle for potting varmints. I bet I don’t have to look through more than one place to find one, he thought.

He looked around the store and clapped his hands, the sound echoing back to him from the brick walls and strangely making him not feel so alone. He hadn’t thought this hard since the time three of his larger classmates had trapped him in an alleyway and he’d been able to talk his way out of the situation. Well, he wouldn’t be able to talk his way out of this one, but he certainly wouldn’t be helpless, either, especially if he could find some useful stuff in a farmhouse. Farmers knew how to survive during tough times. They knew how to plan ahead, and so did he.

For the first time