the trees, not a soul anywhere around him—this was why he’d moved to the Tennessee mountains. He didn’t have PTSD—no nightmares, no flashbacks, no sweats of terror. Maybe some shrink would tell him that his extreme withdrawal was a form of PTSD, but that’s what shrinks did: come up with diagnoses that justified their jobs. As far as Ben was concerned, anyone sane who had spent years dealing with the bullshit he’d dealt with would react the same way.
It wasn’t that he didn’t know people, or at least know their names. By necessity, he’d met some of the valley residents. People insisted on talking to him, even when he limited his responses to grunts. That was almost the only drawback to the area: Southerners were friendly. They talked to everyone. He didn’t want to be talked to. Once an elderly couple he’d just met had invited him to supper; getting away from old people was almost as hard as escaping an ambush, because they were persistent with their offers of hospitality. He’d felt as if his skin was being peeled away, and all he’d wanted to do was duck and cover.
He hadn’t even met any women he’d been remotely attracted to. Scratch that, his subconscious immediately said. Sela Gordon, the owner of the little general store / gas station on the highway . . . he’d noticed her. For one thing, she was quiet; she didn’t bombard him with questions or try to draw him into conversation. He could go into her store and pick up a few items without feeling as if he were under attack. Maybe she was a little shy, because she didn’t get real talkative with any of her customers. Shy was a bonus; she wasn’t likely to start feeling comfortable around him and start up a conversation.
She was slim, quiet, dark hair and soft brown eyes, just curvy enough to leave no doubt she was female. She didn’t wear a wedding ring—or any rings at all. When she wasn’t looking at him, which was most of the time whenever he was in the store, he’d indulge himself by looking at her, though he was careful not to let her ever catch him at it. That was the only time in the past three years his dick had shown any signs of life.
Brooding, he watched a lone car on the highway far below, its headlight beams crawling from left to right. Okay, so maybe he did have a form of PTSD. A few years ago he’d have been all over Sela Gordon, trying to score; the fact that he’d noticed she didn’t wear a wedding ring said a lot. Still, his reluctant interest couldn’t overcome his much stronger need for solitude.
The people down in the valley were still sleeping peacefully, for the most part. Maybe there were a few who didn’t sleep well and were waiting for dawn the way he was, maybe there was even someone who had a NOAA space storm alarm on their computer the way he did, though he doubted it. Their lives were about to change in drastic ways. His, not so much. His income stream would dry up when the CMEs hit and he stopped writing columns for survivalist magazines; his military pension would accrue until such time as the government and banks were up and running again, but the hard fact was there wouldn’t be any bills he needed to pay because utilities would stop working, and he’d be feeding himself with what he could hunt or grow. As an extra hedge, he had about a year’s worth of freeze-dried food stored in a secure locker under the house, he had canned goods, and he had plenty of ammunition stockpiled to protect his food and property.
If the think tank people were right and only ten percent of the population survived the coming Very Bad Day event, then he intended to be one of the ten percent.
Business had been brisk, for a weekday. Sela Gordon’s grocery store / gas station was located right on Highway 321, so business was usually good anyway. She wouldn’t get rich off the store, but she made a decent living. The gas pumps were out front, in the center of the smallish parking lot. Inside, there were seven rows of shelves filled with basic goods. No one would do their regular grocery shopping here, but if someone in the valley ran out of a few things and didn’t want to go all the way to