He Left Me to Die. Now I'll Survive Without Him! novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Grandpa's Hill

Lena walks the farm with Hank and decides what to build, then Eli's truck pulls in.

I pulled every stake up by hand and stacked them in the bed of my truck.

There were forty-one of them.

By the time I reached the gate, my palms were blistered and an old tractor was rattling down the road toward me.

Hank Ferris drove it with one hand and held a thermos in the other.

He was sixty-six, wiry and white-stubbled, and he had been my grandfather's best friend for fifty years.

"Those were a man in a clean truck," he said, killing the engine. "Tuesday. Said he'd bought the place, and I should expect new neighbors."

"He hasn't bought it."

"That's what I told him." Hank spat to one side. "He didn't like it."

He looked at my blistered hands, then at the stakes, then at me.

"You look different, Lena. You look like you've been somewhere."

"I have," I said. "Come walk the land with me."

We started at the barn and went up the ridge.

The hayfield ran flat to the tree line. The only way in was the one gravel road, and the cattle guard at the bottom.

Behind the barn the hillside opened into a low stone mouth, with a plank door gone gray.

I pulled it open.

My grandfather had dug the root cellar into the limestone in 1962.

Inside it ran forty feet back, cold and dry, with shelves cut into the walls and a floor that never flooded.

"He built it for the Cold War," Hank said, ducking in behind me. "Said the world ends every generation, so a man ought to have a cool place to wait it out."

"He was right," I said.

Hank looked at me for a long moment.

"The well's still sweet," he said. "He never let me forget it."

The spring came out of the rock fifty yards above the barn and ran into a stone basin, then on into the pond.

I knelt and drank from my hand.

It was so cold it made my teeth ache, and I nearly cried.

In the other life I had died thirsty on a gas station floor.

I stood up and wiped my face on my sleeve.

"Hank, I need a trench around the top field. Six feet deep, ten feet wide. A berm on the inside. A steel gate at the cattle guard."

"What for?"

"Something's coming in sixty days."

He didn't laugh.

"A flood?" he asked.

"A sickness. It starts at the pork plant in Marlow. By Christmas it's everywhere."

Hank unscrewed his thermos and poured coffee into the lid.

He drank it slowly.

"Your grandfather said that every few years," he said. "Never with a date, though."

"I have the date."

"Well." He handed me the lid. "I've got a dozer and a bad knee. I can push dirt all day, but I can't dig six feet and hold a tractor steady on a ridge at my age."

"I'll find someone."

"You'll find one man." He tipped his cap back. "Eli Garner runs the county road crew now. He can set a culvert in his sleep. You served with him, didn't you?"

My coffee went still in the lid.

I had not heard that name out loud in six years.

In the first life, I had heard it once more. A trucker at the roadblock said the road crew foreman had held the Marlow bridge for two days, and then it fell.

That was the week before Brent put me on the truck.

I'd never known if the man had been Eli.

"I served under him," I said. "In Helmand."

"Thought so." Hank grinned. "He asked after you at the diner last spring."

A diesel engine growled on the gravel road.

I turned around.

A white county pickup with an orange light bar was coming up the lane, spitting dust.

It stopped beside my truck.

The door opened, and a man unfolded from the cab.

Six foot four, broad as the door, dark hair going gray at the temples. Pale gray eyes, steady and unhurried.

Dog tags glinted at the open collar of his work shirt.

He looked at the stakes in my truck bed, and then he looked at me.

"Haskell," Eli Garner said. "Hank called before you'd got your boots dirty. He said somebody was tearing up survey stakes, and I came to see who I'd have to arrest."

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