EMP Catastrophe , Hamilton, Grace [phonics readers txt] 📗

in the guns. He double-checked the other weapons, opening them up smoothly the way Jade had once done when teaching the Riley family to shoot. When the guns were nothing more than a few pieces of metal and plastic and passed Wyatt’s concentrated examination, he slotted the pieces back together. The holsters got a cursory glance over—even marred or broken, they were still valuable and could easily be fixed. Then, he began to put items in the separate piles.

“Do you want to do it?” he asked Matthew quietly after a moment and Matthew realized he was splitting up the items.

A couple of days ago, Matthew would have insisted on doing it himself, convinced that Wyatt would try to palm off subpar goods or take the best of the best. Now, though, he realized he had to give a little and defer to Wyatt’s good judgement. Something David had been trying to get him to do for a while now. “I trust you,” Matthew said.

As the tension in Wyatt’s shoulders released, Matthew knew he had passed some kind of unforeseen test.

“My dad says you know a lot about the hotel,” Matthew said, turning to lean against the car. Over Wyatt’s shoulder, he could see Max and David trying to bind Jade’s wound with the minimal bandages and ripped T-shirts Patton must have found inside the gas station. Jade’s face was screwed up in obvious pain.

Wyatt nodded. “I used to play on those grounds when I was a boy. My own father was a tradesman and would sometimes do work on the hotel for the previous owners.”

“You know more about my own property than I do,” Matthew said. “My father said you know of a well somewhere.”

Wyatt smiled. “I do indeed, although I might have sold my ability to recall its location a bit hard. I was trying to strike a deal with him for fresh water and wanted to seem like I knew what I was talking about.”

Matthew’s heart sank. “So you don’t know where it’s located?”

“Not off the top of my head,” Wyatt admitted, matching bullets to the right gun and divvying them up between the piles. “I know I’ll remember if I’m on the property again, though. I’ll know it when I see it.”

“I’ve walked the property perimeter a hundred times this past week,” Matthew said. “I’ve never seen a well.”

“I know it’s there,” Wyatt said. “I know because I got scolded enough for playing around it. My old man was terrified I’d end up with my head on backwards at the bottom of it one day. I wasn’t the most careful of kids, always getting into trouble. Not the bad kind of trouble. Just the mischievous kind.”

Matthew laughed. “I think you and my son have a lot in common.”

Wyatt’s grin widened. “I’ll take that as a compliment. Kidnapping was never something that happened to me, though. Your boy handled it well. Just so you know, the well is most likely covered with vines and grass and debris by now. It had a wood or stone covering, so it might be well concealed, especially since it was a bit rough around the edges more than twenty years ago. You might have walked by it and thought it was a pile of rocks.”

“I’ll have to go back over the blueprints of the place,” Matthew mused. “It might be in the property files or listing and I don’t remember. Seems like an odd thing to overlook, though.”

Wyatt paused. “I’d be more than happy to help you look for it. If you wouldn’t mind my people using it from time to time.”

Matthew studied Wyatt and decided to take a chance on him. “After what you did for me today, I’m sure we can come to an understanding. If we find it, and it’s that run down, will the water even be good for drinking? I don’t know the first thing about repairing a well.”

Wyatt finished his sorting task and looked at Matthew. “I know some, but the Carpenter Country is full of tradesmen that have most likely dealt with something like that before. The water should be good because it comes from the aquifer below and if that was contaminated, well, then we have a whole different kind of problem on our hands. Still, I have no doubt that with our combined knowledge, we can get the thing up and running again. Would you be okay with us making use of it?”

“Of course,” Matthew said. “You help me find and repair it and you can definitely have access to it. Thus, we’ll all have sustainable water.”

Wyatt looked relieved. He held his hand out. “Deal.”

Matthew took his hand and they shook on it. Matthew couldn’t help but grin. He had a feeling this wouldn’t be the only project he and Wyatt worked on together. The hotel had made its first alliance, and Matthew hoped it would last them a long time. Hopefully, until civilization got back on its feet. If that ever happened. Either way, the future seemed a little less bleak than it had at the beginning of the day.

32

As Max walked back up the mountain road to the River Rock Hotel, he studied the orange and bright blue expanse of the sky. Summer months meant long days and short nights and Max felt as though he’d been transported to another universe…a universe where things had actually worked out for once. Where, if he blinked and pinched himself, he didn’t wake up in a hard bed in a tiny cell in the middle of Chicago.

Hours ago, he’d walked down this road trying to talk himself into accepting his own doom. He had prepared himself to face his impending death, or at least a long, drawn-out, unpleasant session with Colin. He had spent his walk focused on the pavement in front of him, trying to keep from hyperventilating and stopping his imagination from conjuring twisted ideas of what Colin would have in store for him when the cartel took him. Yet somehow,