Looking Back Through Ash - Wade Ebeling Page 0,146
If the festivities did not happen tomorrow, Daniel would lose his chance, and the group. He could not show the group his remaining food stores now. It would almost surely cause such a backlash towards him that it was not an option anymore. It was better to just keep the concrete plant building and the food as a secret, in the event that the raid went horribly wrong. This would ensure the remaining stash was safe, a means to make it through the next winter if need be.
It was hard for Daniel to resist the urge that kept telling him to take a surreptitious trip to check on the concrete plant. He had to keep reminding himself that Jason had lived there for all of those years, remaining undiscovered, despite being in the Warehouse’s backyard. The thing that he regretted most about having to approach the group earlier than planned was leaving the backpack and combat vest behind. He had only paused long enough to stuff two extra thirty round magazine in his back pocket when he left with the food pails.
He had never meant for this to happen, but he only had a few frantic minutes before the main body of the group left for good. He figured that he could sneak off later to place the wanted items near the cache somewhere, but he had underestimated the complete lack of privacy that joining the group resulted in. He never got the chance to accomplish this task before having to go on record with Tony that the contents of the cache were, in fact, all he had. This put him in a far more vulnerable position than what he had first intended. The growing feeling of slow starvation made it very hard for him to stay away from the extra supplies, but he could not chance someone seeing where he went.
Daniel smiled, and bracingly slapped the backs of the group members around him, before making his way to the makeshift tent, which had served as his home since joining them. Crawling into the moldy smelling bedding, made from cushions pulled out of toppled campers, seemed a futile gesture; he did not expect to get any sleep during the night.
Wafts of a nauseating petrochemical stench blew in as he lay there. The ground water in this area was so saturated by the leaking vehicles that it had to be distilled to drink or cook with. This was accomplished by inverting the lids on pots and pans. A small can or metal cup was suspended from the handle of the lid. As steam rose up from the tainted water inside, hitting the lid and dripping back down purified, it was caught by the smaller cup. This was very labor intensive, and several of the lesser mobile members of the group had to work non-stop to have enough water for everyone.
Daniel’s thoughts decided that they were not going to cooperate with him, and he could not focus on Bob, or how best to kill him. Instead, the faces of the group’s children came before him. Smiling, laughing, and, worst still, reminding him of Rebecca. They moved as she did. They looked upon things with the same innocence that she would have. They did not have the same feelings of dread that the adults had; naivety being a child’s best attribute at times. Times like these.
Daniel was passing the hours in that hazy point between conscious thought and dreams. Trapped in the limbo of revisiting past trials and tribulations without any measure of control. He swam through a quagmire made up of murky memories of death, and the fear that came from years of being alone. Struggling to force away the sheer panic that he used to feel in his childhood had not easy, by any means. Those years were punctuated by such terror and loathing, scrubbing his mind entirely clean of them had proven to be impossible. Every sound, or flash of movement caught with the periphery of his childish vision, drove Daniel into hiding. But there was never anyone there to go check to see if all was safe for him, and the hours he had spent trying to convince his own body to move were incalculable.
Once again, Daniel found himself focusing on the part of his life that he most wanted to be rid of. Trying to wipe it away again brought him back to the group’s children. With the exception of a few misguided parental decisions, Daniel felt that