Survivors – A Novel of the Coming Collapse

The second roadblock was just west of Bradfordsville. This was strategically placed on a low bridge west of High View Drive, on State Highway 337. It consisted of six large trucks and truck trailers in a staggered formation, intended to slow the traffic to a slow, serpentine crawl. It was manned by a uniformed sheriff’s deputy and two private citizens who were wearing jeans and baseball caps. All three held identical rifles that Sheila didn’t recognize, but from their protruding magazines she knew that they were automatic or semiautomatic.

The deputy who approached Sheila’s car window asked suspiciously, “What is your business here?”

“I’m going to see the owner of a commercial building that I saw was up for lease.”

“Which one?”

“There wasn’t a sign. There was an old building next to it, as I recall, the Superior Food Market.”

“Well, they’re both vacant now,” the deputy grumbled.

“I intend to open a store in that smaller building, Lord willing.”

The deputy nodded and remarked, “Well, somebody oughtta get a store going again here or there’ll be folk starving.” After a beat he added, “It takes a lots of guts to open a business in times like these. You just keep yourself safe. You have any trouble, just ask for me, Deputy Dustin Hodges, okay?”

Sheila nodded and smiled.

Deputy Hodges gave a sweep of his hand and said, “God bless you, ma’am.”

As they proceeded to slowly drive through the remainder of the roadblock’s sharp S-turns, Emily quoted one of her favorite sayings, from the play A Streetcar Named Desire: “ ‘I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.’”

The old store building was on the main street running through Bradfordsville. It was sandwiched between the defunct Superior Foods and a gas station, also closed. At the gas station, a large hand-painted sign across the boarded front door proclaimed: “NO GAS.”

Sheila got out and examined the building. It was of the old false-front style and looked to have been built in the 1920s or even earlier. Peering through the dusty windows, Sheila could see a small sales floor ringed by a semicircle of glass cabinets. Behind was a doorway leading to a back room. There appeared to be an apartment upstairs.

A small hand-penned sign taped inside the window read: “For Sale or Lease, Contact Hollan Combs,” and gave an area code 270 phone number.

Sheila pulled out her notepad. On the inside of the front cover she saw something that her late mother had penned the year before she died of uterine cancer:

“A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself: but the simple pass on, and are punished.”

– PROVERBS 22:3

Sheila jotted down the name and phone number on a blank page.

She told Emily and Tyree to wait in the car. Then she strode toward the pay phone booth at the gas station.

Tyree protested: “Mom, the phones aren’t workin’. Not even the cell phone.”

“I know, I know.”

Thankfully, the plastic phone book holder still held a local phone book. Listed under C she found: “Combs H, 200 S. 6th Street, Brdfsvl.”

The house was just two blocks away. Again leaving her son and grandmother in the car, Sheila knocked on the door of a 1960s-style house. A weathered sign read: “Combs Soils Lab.”

The man who answered the door was in his seventies, gaunt, with thick black plastic-framed glasses. He carried a stubby Dan Wesson .357 revolver in an inside-the-waistband holster. He asked, “Can I hep you?”

“My name is Sheila Randall. I would like to lease that store building and apartment above it-next to the gas station. You own it, right?”

Combs seemed hesitant, “Well, there is

water working here in town-it’s all gravity from a big spring up by the Taylor County line-but no power, and I don’t even know what to charge in rent these days.”

“I propose five dollars a month.”

The old man laughed and slapped the side of his thigh. “You gotta be joking. Five dollars won’t even buy you a piece of penny candy.”

“I mean five dollars in silver coin.”

Hollan Combs jerked his chin back and said, “Oh, well, that’s different.” After pondering for a moment, he said, “I’ll need you to pay two months in advance, but you can lease it from month to month after that. I’ll also need a signed statement from you that you’re getting it as is, with no guarantee that the power will ever come back on. If and when it does, the power bill will be separate.”

Just a few minutes later Combs unlocked the store’s front door and ushered in Sheila, Tyree, and Emily.

“My last tenants here were brothers. They had a unique combination gun, cigar, and liquor store. They called it ‘Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms’ and they even answered the phone that way. That was good for a laugh. But the recession just went on and on-double-dip and then triple-dip, you know. They folded a year ago. I heard they moved back to Tennessee.”