Eden's Hammer - By Lloyd Tackitt Page 0,14
and got him a bit later.”
Linda asked, “How many of them were there?”
“About eighty or so.”
“And you actually took them all on single-handed?”
“Yeah, well, I got a little cranky, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. Having recently lost Alice and all, I wasn’t exactly in my right mind. I’m not too proud of most of what I did to them, but on the other hand, they definitely had it coming.”
Linda asked, “What about those scars and the story of sleeping with a grizzly bear?”
Adrian blushed just a bit; Linda liked that. Adrian said, “Not long after I got into the mountains, but before the war started, I came face to face with a grizzly bear. We had a fight and he clawed me a couple of times—that’s where the scars come from. I finally got my spear into him and finished it. That meat fed me most of the winter.”
Adrian pushed his chair back a little while Linda took a sip of water.
“During the war, I was grazed on the head by a bullet and got a bad concussion. The cannibals were hot on my trail and I was woozy, and getting worse by the minute. It was a dicey situation. I found a hole under a mat of tree roots that was out of sight. I crawled into it to hide and passed out. When I came to several days later, I was laying with my head against the rear end of a hibernating grizzly sow. I guess the smell of the bear grease I had rubbed on me earlier to avoid sunburn plus my bear robe’s smell must have disguised my human odor enough to not awaken her. When I came to, I got out of there real fast, believe me.
“Later in the spring when we were chasing Wolfgang, we came across her and her cubs in the woods. She seemed to recognize me and left us alone, so I stupidly blurted out to my partner that that was the bear I had slept with. People being starved for good stories as they are, that one travelled fast. Too damn fast and too damn far—excuse my language, Scott. You know, it was the first thing Roman asked me about.”
Linda replied while laughing, “Well, you’ve provided plenty of entertainment for a lot of people, nationwide. That’s not a bad thing, you know. It’s made you famous, too.”
Adrian replied, “Yeah, but I don’t much care to be famous for that.”
Matt said, “You may not like it, but everyone else loves it!”
Tim and Perry laughed at Adrian’s obvious discomfiture.
Adrian asked Linda, “What’s your story? Roman tells me you probably know more about these raiders than anyone here.”
Linda sighed and put her fork down. It was apparent that she did not like to talk about this, but with a serious expression, she replied, “A few weeks before the solar storm, Jeff, my husband, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. With modern medicine’s finest efforts, there was a reasonable chance of him surviving it, but when the grid dropped, it was just a matter of time. After the grid collapsed, we moved out into the pine forest. We had a little place there that we’d planned to retire to and visited most weekends. We scraped by, like most folks, but Jeff got so weak that he couldn’t help. He passed away a few weeks later. Scott and I stayed, and we were able to hunt enough to eat and had water nearby, had a good start on a garden. Scott is a great hunter, far better than you would expect from an eight-year-old. We would have eked out a living.”
She paused for a long moment, looking lost in painful memories. Then she slowly continued.
“But then the raiders came. Some people who were fleeing ahead of them warned us, so we hid out and waited, hoping they would pass by. We were told they string out in a long thin line, living off whatever they can loot. Five men found our home, took everything we had left—which wasn’t much—then burned the house down. They were just pure evil. They moved on; they could have left the house and we could have returned, but they burned us out, and destroyed the garden to boot. We slipped past them that night and kept going. We stayed ahead of them by moving pretty fast. They stopped a lot to steal and eat. I had hoped to eventually find a place far from them and