Opus Odyssey_A Survival and Preparedness Story Read online

  Opus Odyssey

  A Story of Survival & Preparedness

  Boyd Craven III

  Copyright © 2017 Boyd Craven III

  Opus Odyssey, A Story of Survival & Preparedness

  By Boyd Craven

  Many thanks to friends and family for keeping me writing!

  All rights reserved.

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  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. Rick

  2. Rick

  3. Rick

  4. Rick

  5. Rick

  6. Tina

  7. Rick

  8. Rick

  9. Tina

  10. Rick

  11. Tina

  12. Rick

  13. Rick

  14. Rick

  15. Rick

  16. Rick

  17. Tina

  18. Rick

  19. Rick

  20. Rick

  21. Rick

  22. Opus

  23. Rick

  24. Rick

  25. Rick

  26. Rick

  27. Rick

  28. Tina & Opus

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Last year:

  “Sarge, it was like I told you. Other than hitting Dan, I didn’t have to hurt anybody, the other guy just gave up. I sort of feel bad Casey died, but that was his choice, not mine. If I feel bad for other people's bad choices then I don’t know if I could live with myself.”

  “So… despite a raging snowstorm, bad guys armed with guns and crowbars, and the dark, and cold, you kicked some ass, saved two grown assed men who never should’a been caught, and you led them home?”

  “In a manner of speaking?” I said, somewhat confused.

  “Congratulations, son. Of all the puckered assholes I’ve ever met, you walked into one side of hell and out the other. This time you were the last man standing.”

  “Sir? Your point?” I asked, not understanding any of that.

  “You’re not the only one. Now unlike you, I do feel bad about other people’s choices sometimes. Especially yours.”

  “Mine?” I asked him, totally confused now.

  “Yes, you see… this time, you were the last man standing, but what if something happened? What would that do to Tina?”

  “What does she have to do with this?”

  “If you had died out there, what happens to her? She loves you, don’t she?” he asked, straight to the point.

  “Yeah,” I admitted.

  “You love her.” It was a statement, and not a question.

  “Yes sir,” I told him.

  “Good. Don’t be a puckered asshole like every other guy. Do the right thing and make her an honest wife. And if you let one word slip of this conversation, I’ll be on you like flies on shit. You hear me boy?”

  “I understand sir, and you’re right,” I told him, a grin tugging out the corner of my mouth.

  “Now hand me that damned sandwich and wait here for five more minutes before telling the rest of them they can come back in.”

  Next Week:

  Something zipped between us, like a bee on crystal meth with a raging case of diarrhea. The sound of the shot was only a heartbeat behind that.

  We both dropped to the ground.

  “Opus, get behind some cover,” I screamed, as another shot hit a rock near my right shoulder, sending chunks my way.

  “Go,” Tina yelled, then shouted unintelligibly to the dog.

  I felt something brush against me, and sand and rock chunks sprayed my prone form. Something was hot and running down the side of my head. I must be sweating worse than I thought, thinking that the bullets whizzing past us weren’t at the firing speed that they’d been fired earlier. Opus had put his head down and was belly crawling to Tina.

  These weren’t hurried shots, and were barely missing, which was troubling and it made me feel funny in the pit of my stomach. The adrenaline was once again raging through my system and my ID was screaming fight or flight.

  “Let’s leapfrog the bushes for cover, he has to be firing at a distance—”

  Another shot went whizzing past, hitting about three feet in front of Tina’s head. She made her move, and I pushed myself to my feet and took off as two more shots came in. I never heard or saw where they hit, but I felt a tug at my pack as I slid to a stop near Tina, knowing something had happened, but my adrenaline and fear had me high as a kite, ready to run.

  “Rick, you’ve been shot!” Tina said, crawling toward me.

  1

  Rick

  If you had told me two years ago that not only would I become a somewhat serious prepper, but that I would also meet a woman and fall in love with her, I might have called foul.

  I didn’t really enjoy a ton of other people’s company and chose my friends carefully. Obviously, a lot has changed, and although I am what people consider an introvert, I just prefer quieter company to larger crowds. My love of camping and hiking went well with my ideas on prepping. Those, along with a string of events, had pulled Tina and me together.

  It was my last week living at Al’s. I would have left a couple of months ago, but his arrest had caused him to lose his job from missing too much work. I could have easily just given him a couple months’ worth of rent and walked away then, but I wasn’t sure he’d actually use it on rent if I gave it to him. Then again, it gave me time to adjust to the idea of how radically my life had changed. After the events of the past winter, I wanted something even more relaxed than my regular apartment lifestyle. There were too many people around me, and my greatest fears were still that there could be another bout of civil unrest.

  “Hello?” I said, not recognizing the number on the caller ID.

  “Hey, this is Sonja, is Al around by chance?”

  I recognized her voice, but confirmation helped; I mostly remembered her as ‘Taco Bell girl.’

  “Naw, he said he was leaving for work an hour ago,” I told her. “He’s got a new schedule.”

  “Ah, if he’s working, no wonder he isn’t answering. Hey, listen, we were gonna go to a rally this weekend. Do you and Tina want to come with? We can snag some pizzas and beers later on.”

  “I’m not really into the kind of rallies you are,” I told her. “But thank you. Too many people, anyways.”

  “You must really hate politics. I still can’t believe you told Al to sleep with one hand over his butt till you got his dad to bail him out. He said he couldn’t sleep for two days.”

  I had to laugh; it hadn’t been one of my finest moments, and if I remembered correctly, I had also told him not to drop the soap. Gallows humor is what it was, not that I would ever wish that on anybody, but it was amusing to hear that it had bugged him. He hadn’t mentioned it, so I had a little nugget of info I could use if I needed him to back off of pushing for a wedding date. Sheesh. I hadn’t even talked to Tina officially about it since the hospital, where I’d gotten cotton-mouthed and written her a quick note. What we had talked about was moving in together, or me moving in with her.

  “I do hate politics, but like I said, too many people. Besides, I’m moving, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, after the rally, we could always come help you load up the big green creeper van and help you move!”

  “Sure, call me when the rally is done. But, I don’t know that I really have all that much to move. Almost everything I own is in one room and in—”

  “The property up north,” she finished for me.

&nbs
p; “Yeah,” I admitted sheepishly.

  “No, I totally get it, I’m not picking on you. My dad was the same way.”

  “Was?” I asked her.

  “He died… when I was twelve.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. “I had no idea.”

  “Oh, don’t be sorry, it was sudden, and it still hurts sometimes, but it is what it is, and it’s not your fault.”

  The younger lady had a point, and although I didn’t like politics, especially hers, she did show signs of wisdom and intelligence that I had missed when I had first met her. I’d thought she was just another string of one-or-two-date types of failed relationships that Al had been in for a while.

  Yet, she’d stuck around. I’m not an easy guy to get to know, but she was trying to make an effort, something I just now realized.

  “If the weekend doesn’t work out, maybe we can have you both come out with Tina, Opus and me for some BBQ or something. The summer is almost here, and the mini-storage is kind of slow right now.”

  “Hey, I like that idea. How about we ink it in, with a TBD date and time on it?”

  She sounded excited.

  “Works for me. I’ll let Al know you called, in case he forgets.”

  “Thanks, man! Later, tater.”

  Tater?

  I hit end, and shook my head. I walked over to my small desk and woke up my Mac. Now that I had gotten a little bit known in the PNR categories (paranormal romance), I had started writing longer. My fans were asking for MOAR! Since I could write a 60,000-word book as fast as I could write two 30,000 word books, that was what I’d been doing lately.

  I was using a program called Vellum to do the formatting and was happy when I saw a Dropbox notification that the file had been edited and updated by my virtual assistant.

  I sent off a quick email to double check that everything was done, and was soon going through the corrections on Word while waiting for a response. My phone buzzed instead of getting an email back, and I saw the note my assistant had sent.

  All ready.

  Good, because one thing I’d noticed, the more I wrote, the cleaner the writing got. Every draft handed back to me had fewer corrections per word count, and it was improving. Which meant, as a writer, I was growing—I think. Sales had been slowly climbing, book after book, and I’d got some great press from a couple of bloggers.

  One blogger had messaged me out of the blue on Facebook asking if she could review a book for me. I’d said sure, and then asked her if she wanted a review copy, but she said she’d already read it. I told her I would love a review; good, bad, or indifferent. Every review helped, and I looked at reviews as direct feedback from my core audience.

  What I got was a video review. I was blown away, and her video review was shared far and wide. It was weird. I’d got a phone call from the local news station and was asked to do an interview. I’d politely declined, because cameras kinda freaked me out and I’d rather stay mostly anonymous.

  Still though, having a book ready to go, making it my second full-length one this month, was going to do good for my bottom line. All this raced through my head as the editing side of my brain did the accept or reject changes. I finished it and then fired up the formatting software. That was the part I loved, yet it was only ten minutes of work or less to format a book using Vellum and have it ready for Amazon and a print version.

  My VA would take the page count from the formatted print version, and we’d work on a blurb together, and she’d do the final coordination with the cover designer I’d recently found. After working with her off and on for a while, I’d given her the passwords to upload the books for me.

  There is a lot of trust involved when you do something like that, but I’d had contracts drawn up by a lawyer. The VA would take care of the moving parts, so literally all I had to do was create the content, make suggestions on what I wanted on the cover, do final yay or nay on edits, format and then repeat. My content creation had finally gone through the roof by hiring out some of the work.

  My phone rang again.

  “Hey there,” I said.

  “You coming out tonight or what?” Tina asked.

  “Or what,” I told her.

  “Really?”

  “No, just finished work for the day. I was going to call you in about five minutes or so, but you beat me to it.”

  “Great minds and all.”

  “Yeah, I’ll grab a shower and head over soon,” I told her.

  “Sounds good. Love you.”

  “Ditto, give my furry buddy an ear scratch for me.”

  “I will. Bye.”

  I hung up. I was going to grab a shower, but there were a couple more things I wanted to do before I went to her house, something I’d read about in a prepper group on Facebook. I fired up my Chrome browser and headed to Amazon. I ordered half a dozen LifeStraws, filters built right into a suction type straw, and a lock-pick gun. It was a Rube Goldberg-looking contraption, but people swore by them. I don’t know why I’d ever need to unlock something I had a key for, but figured it was something I could use in a book, so it would be nice for research.

  I updated the shipping address; I wouldn’t be here when they came in.

  2

  Rick

  Tina had my favorites out when I got there: her sourdough crust pizza and a six-pack of Budweiser. The day hadn’t quite ended, and the mini-storage was still open, but there was a lot of slack time. Two customers were loading or unloading their units, but nobody had stopped in the office since the morning.

  I felt something warm and wet on my leg and reached down to pet Opus, who melted under my hand into a puddle between the two office chairs Tina and I had slid next to each other.

  “So, you’re moving in.”

  “Yeah, you’re excited, aren’t you?” I asked her.

  “Oh, I definitely am. But, you don’t seem to be,” she said.

  Wait. Was this a trick? Some kind of Jedi mind-game, to lure me into sticking my foot into my mouth? Tina was one of a kind, but somehow I thought she might be testing me at this moment.

  “I’m excited, but it’s a lot of change. At least for me. I’m ready for it, though.”

  “It’s pretty big for both of us,” she said and put her hand in mine. I gave it a squeeze, and Opus whined from the floor.

  I reached down to scratch his head. “Doc says you gained some weight while healing up your bullet wound. Too much loafing around, so I can’t really give you any crust, boy.”

  Opus sneezed, the harshest condemnation he could give me. It suspiciously sounded like he’d said, ‘bullshit’.

  “You can have my crust,” Tina said, and dropped him a generous piece.

  He snatched it out of the air and wolfed it down.

  “I was going to give it to him,” I complained. “I just had to pull his chain some."

  Opus leaned his head on my leg and licked his lips. I dropped a half-finished piece, and he caught it in mid-air. I wasn’t the only one who loved Tina’s sourdough, but it was filling, and I’d noticed that since I’d started to eat what I stored and storing what I ate, my eating habits had changed.

  I was working out, and eating a more stable diet. That had helped me lean up and put on a bit of muscle; not that I was a bodybuilder by any means. But I did notice that I didn’t wear out as fast anymore, and I could usually run laps around the mini storage with Opus and Tina without feeling like I wanted to die.

  Then again, they usually did their laps twice a day, and I did mine once, but she was half my size, and Opus was a dog - a fabulously smart dog, who loved to run around to chase squirrels, and anything else small enough that he could catch and eat… or cadge some pizza from me.

  “Don’t give him so much, the cheese will make him stink!”

  “Well, I don’t have to smell dog farts for another few days,” I said and then took my hand back from hers and poked her in the side.

  She squeaked, and Opus stood up, looking at me sideways.

  �
��It’s okay buddy, just letting your mom know how much I love her.”

  “You still say it to the dog, but not me.”

  “See, Opus. She gets upset when I talk to you about the big deep issues. I think she’s got a problem with confidence or something.”

  Opus chuffed.

  “You both want to sleep in the doghouse?” she said sweetly, and then took the beers off the counter as a car pulled in in front of the rental office.

  It was 5:50pm; close to closing. I looked at Tina. She shrugged. Another day, another dollar. The front doorbell jingled as it opened and a familiar-looking man stepped in. He looked around, and I saw him sniff the air, probably catching the scent of pizza. Behind the counter, we were visible, but Opus stood up, his tail giving a tentative wag as his mom greeted the visitor.

  “Hi. Are you looking to rent a unit?” Tina asked, her usual opening.

  “No, ma’am. You don’t remember me, do you?”

  “You look familiar,” she said, hesitating a moment.

  He was almost six-foot-tall, dark hair, sunglasses and wearing a suit. Now that I thought about it, he looked like he could be one of the agents from the Matrix. He took off his sunglasses and put them in an inside pocket, and then I remembered who he was.

  “I was here about a year ago, when you had the armed robbery?”

  “Detective Stephenson?” Tina asked.

  “That’s me,” he said with a grin. “How’s business?”

  “It’s steady. Not a lot of actual work right now, but people keep paying their bills.”