“Yeah we’ll see if we can find someone to take over for you, but your best bet is to ask Lewis on the way into town. Cya.”
Small chance he was going to take a stranger to the shelter to talk to Lewis about taking over for him. His cousin would kill him if he did. He’d just have to leave the northern border open for a bit, and if trouble came of it there was no one to blame but Turner for not setting up a better system to deal with people on patrol needing to head back to town for some reason. Well, Turner and Trev himself, since he could technically just send Mandy on while he continued his patrol. But uncomfortable as he was about letting her in at all the thought of letting her in unescorted was even worse.
He turned back to find the sunburned woman gnawing on the largest piece of jerky in the bag. “Do you need to rest? The town’s about four miles away.”
“As long as I can eat on the way,” she replied. Trev nodded and started up the hill and she was quick to fall in behind him.
On the way back he was feeling too guilty about his borderline hypocrisy to talk much, but after Mandy had finished eating she was happy to fill the silence for the both of them by telling her story.
She’d been a dental hygienist in Spanish Fork before the attack, single and living in a one bedroom apartment with less than three days of food in her cupboards since she mostly ate out or ordered in. For the first few days after the attack she’d treated things as normal, going to work and eating at her usual restaurants. It wasn’t until she saw her favorite places closing down because of lack of ingredients that she realized that food wasn’t making its way into the city and she should probably start stocking up just in case.
It was almost too late when she went to the store, as she saw to her dismay that all the food aisles were empty and other items were quickly being snatched up as well. She’d even gone to the pet food aisle in desperation, only to find that it, too, was bare. It was pure good fortune that she found a small bag of cat food that had somehow gotten mixed with the kitty litter and escaped notice. The idea of eating pet food revolted her, but she’d purchased it all the same in case of a real emergency.
She’d started eating from it the next day, while at the same time going door to door around the apartment complex begging to purchase food. Some gave her a bit out of the goodness of their hearts, although nobody accepted any of her money, but she was still getting hungrier by the day and was almost out of cat food.
When the riots started a week after the attack Mandy started to get really scared and seriously considered leaving, but there was nowhere to go. A single man living a few apartments down offered to let her ride with him and some friends to Denver, where they’d heard FETF was setting up a relief station, but she’d assumed he was a creeper with bad intentions and had refused.
“I’ve spent the last five days wishing I’d accepted,” she admitted to Trev. “Now that I’ve seen really bad men I realize how harmless and generous my neighbor was.”
The night of the riots the disaster became personal for Mandy, when a group of hoodlums began looting her apartment complex. She’d woken up to screams, crashings, and the sound of gunshots, and had scrambled to hide in the foot space beneath her vanity, pulling the small stool in after her and stacking some dirty clothes on it until she was hidden.
She’d waited there for almost half an hour listening to awful noises all around her before she heard the sound of people breaking into her apartment. For the next fifteen minutes she listened as her stuff was thrown around in the living room and dishes in the kitchen were smashed as if for fun. Then the looters had found their way into her room and began tossing it down for anything worth looting.
Mandy had sat in petrified silence watching through a tiny opening between the clothes piled on her footstool and the corner of the foot space, barely daring to breathe as her bed was overturned and her closet ransacked. Her dresser drawers were emptied on the floor and her clothes tossed around as they searched for hidden valuables, and she’d been forced to listen to them making crude jokes as they pawed through her underwear. With each passing second she’d grown more and more certain that they’d eventually find her, and when they did she’d soon wish she were dead.
But the closest the looters came was searching the vanity directly above her and smashing its mirror. Then they all started shouting and left in a rush to go on to the next apartment.
Even after they were gone Mandy waited for more than an hour without hearing any noises anywhere in the rest of the complex, cramped in the tiny space sobbing her eyes out, before she finally found the courage to crawl out and look at her devastated home. The looters had stolen all her valuables and destroyed most of what they didn’t take, shattering her last illusions of normalcy. She’d gone out into the complex to find other families gathered comforting each other through the tragedy, and even with others around her had never felt so alone.
Luckily a Hispanic family living one floor up kindly welcomed her into their home, although the next day FETF arrived to inform everyone in the apartment complex that they’d been assigned to a temporary evacuation shelter in the city of Price to the southeast. The coordinators gave the families enough food for a few days and showed them the route to take along Highway 6, then sent them on their way unescorted.
Along the way Mandy’s group joined up with other evacuee groups heading in the same direction until there were hundreds of them strung along the highway in a line as far as the eye could see. Even though her group was among the first people who’d set out they did pass a few other groups, although far more often were passed themselves.
On the third day Mandy was dismayed when she recognized many of the men in a group that had just caught up to them as the same ones who’d ransacked her home. And true to their nature they’d immediately joined with other men of the same vile morals and seized control of the growing caravan, confiscating all food to “properly oversee its distribution”. From then on the distribution to anyone not in that group was halfhearted at best, with men offered little and women and children scarcely better treated. Only the most attractive women in the caravan ate as well as the looters, provided they gave the thieves-turned-despots a reason to be generous to them.
“It only got worse from there,” she admitted to Trev about an hour later as they climbed over the last low rise before town and came in sight of Aspen Hill’s first houses still about a half hour away. “Eventually the hoodlums stopped trading and started taking, if you get my drift. That’s when I decided it was time to leave, even if it meant setting off away from the highway on my own. I knew there had to be some towns around here, some way to get to Price.”
The description of what she’d gone through sickened Trev. “Did your group say anything about stopping at Aspen Hill or passing through the town?” he demanded. If so he could talk to Deputy Turner about doing something to stop what was happening.
She shook her head. “They’re following 6 all the way there. I was traveling well off the road so I’d stay far away from them.” The blond woman gave the houses a longing look. “Oh look at this place. It’s like the riots and all the violence up north completely passed it by. I wish I could stay here.”
Trev shifted uncomfortably. “If you were sent to Price you should keep on going there. Like I said, I’m happy to offer you a meal and a bed, maybe a bit of food to help you make it the rest of the way, but that’s all I can do. The town decided together not to take in refugees.”