Right, well, I didn’t want him to fight me anyhow. I snaked an arm around his throat and tightened my hold, giving it only enough pressure to knock him out. I didn’t want to crush his windpipe or kill him. I didn’t want to kill any of them, I reminded myself.
I didn’t need to. If they died of their wounds, that was on them, not me. In the meantime, I was going to do everything I could to keep it non-lethal. I would not kill these men unless I had no choice.
Dee was still falling to the floor unconscious when I stepped over to where the curtain was pulled across the bedroom, still clutching my knife. Randall and Logan would have heard the commotion, but I was hoping they would assume that I’d just been struggling with the other men. After all, it would have been the natural thing to do—no matter how beat up I’d been. I crouched down and waited, balancing myself on my toes and narrowing my focus down to the spot where anyone would have to emerge from that bedroom.
Whoever came out first, I had to get the drop on them. Once that was done, I’d worry about the other guy.
The moment Logan appeared, newly armed with what looked like an S&W M&P Shield, I moved, sinking the six-inch blade into his thigh and twisting. Logan screamed in pain as I pulled my knife free, and he jerked to the side, dropping the handgun—which I caught in one smooth move before it hit the floor. I pocketed the gun and kicked the now-crouching Logan in the back, sending him sprawling into the middle of the living room.
Then I sprang back to the space between the bedroom and the bathroom. One deep breath was all I had time for, and I took full advantage of it. The next man out would be Randall, and I had no doubt that he was going to be the toughest opponent yet.
When he slid the curtain aside, he did it so quickly that it still surprised me, and he was already reaching back to un-holster his Glock. The sight of Logan thrashing in the middle of the room next to his two unconscious cousins, cursing and slipping on his own blood, was enough to make him pause, though—and I readied myself, prepared to slip behind the man and get my knife up to his throat.
But the crazy woodman’s reflexes were staggeringly quick. Instead of pausing and staring like I’d expected him to, he turned and brought his hand down on my wrist, sending my knife skittering across the floor. I paused for only a moment, then punched the guy right in the throat as he lunged toward me and stepped to the side. Randall’s momentum took him right past me—and that was all I needed.
As he drove past me, I put one arm up and wrapped it around his neck, using it as a lever to pull myself up against his back until I was in prime position. Seconds later, my forearm over his windpipe, I was leaning back with all my strength, using my right hand to steady and brace my still-trembling left arm. Randall threw himself back, trying to slam me against the wall, but I was ready for that too. The moment I felt him move, I jumped up and pushed my feet behind me, hitting the wall and throwing us forward again.
In front of me, Randall stumbled, surprised, and fell to his knees. He wasn’t out of the fight yet, though, and ducked one shoulder down, sending me sailing over his head and to the floor on the other side of him. I jumped up almost before I hit the ground, whirled around, and yanked the S&W from my pocket.
Angie screamed, but I fired anyhow, sending two bullets right into Randall’s stomach.
“Right. Well, I guess it’s time to go,” I hissed to myself.
Thank God Angie already had that splint on.
I grabbed my backpack and threw it on, gathered as many blankets as I could carry, and swept whatever cans I could find in the kitchen into my bag. Along the way, I spent a few precious moments searching for the truck keys but came up short.
I fixed my gaze on Randall, who was still on the floor, clutching his stomach. I rushed over and grabbed him by the arm. “Where are the keys?”
“Go to hell,” he mumbled.
I checked all his pockets, but the keys were nowhere to be found. I cursed under my breath and considered ways to get the information out of him, but quickly realized that the old truck probably wouldn’t be our golden ticket to safety—the storm had likely made most of the roads out of here impassable, and an old beater truck wouldn’t get us far…
Not wanting to waste more time searching for the keys, I let go of Randall and rushed over to Angie. I helped her to her feet, letting her lean on me as heavily as she needed while she got her one good leg under her.
“Lean on me, okay? Don’t put any weight on the other leg. If it gets to be too much, let me know and we’ll stop. We’ve got to get the hell out of here, but not if it starts hurting you.”
She just nodded, the color draining out of her face, and that was enough for me.
We moved toward the door, her weight leaning heavily against me, and then down the steps into the front yard of the cabin. At the bottom of the stairs, I handed her the pile of blankets, lifted her into my arms, and carried her into the snow-covered opening. Any tracks left by Randall or the cousins had already been filled in by the snow still whipping down to batter the world with frozen white. I tromped through the snow, still running on adrenalin from the fight, and located the improvised stretcher I’d left near the front steps when we’d arrived at the cabin. I kicked the snow off of it as best I could and laid Angie down, bundling her up in the blankets.
“John, wait,” she said. “The storm. It’s too much. We’ll freeze to death.”
I shook my head. It wasn’t the thing I would have chosen, true enough—but I didn’t think we had any options. “We don’t have a choice. We have to try to get somewhere safe. If we stay here, these bastards are going to kill us anyway. There’s a truck, but I don’t have the first clue whether it will actually run. And I don’t have the keys. I don’t know how to hot-wire a car, do you?”
She looked up and bit her lip, but I could see the humor in her eyes. “I let my skills slip a few years ago when I gave up crime,” she whispered.
I huffed out a laugh. “Me too. Which means this is our best option. For now. Soon as I find something else, I promise I’ll let you know.”
I turned my back on her, lifted the handles of the stretcher, and lunged forward, dragging my wife away from the cabin and into the trees—and praying that I’d given Randall and his cousins enough to think about that they’d stay put in the cabin, rather than coming after us.
The wind was lashing at my clothes, and driving ice and snow stung my face. I wished more than once that I’d thought to grab more clothing from Randall’s cabin, but I ignored it all and focused on our forward movement. I needed to move as quickly as I could manage now, while my adrenalin was still up from that fight. Needed to get as much distance between us and those men in the cabin.
Needed to get far enough away that they wouldn’t be able to find us.
In that, we had luck on our side. The storm was still raging around us, and that meant the snow was covering our tracks quickly behind us. With luck, we’d be out of sight before anyone came out of that cabin. Without tracks to follow, they would have no idea which way we went.
Unfortunately, that was as far as my planning went. I knew we needed to get to safety, but I didn’t have a damn idea where we were going to go—or what direction would take us any closer to civilization. Hell, I didn’t even know if civilization still existed the way it had when we’d driven into the woods the day before.
If that had truly been an EMP, it meant someone had set it off. Someone had launched it. It would have affected everything within the immediate area—going even further afield if it had been large enough—and that would mean that nothing electronic was working, at least in the towns around here. I’d seen what mankind did when things stopped working the way they were used to. It wasn’t pretty. And I could only imagine what was happening in the cities, with thousands of people panicking at the light in the sky, things suddenly not working, and potentially a lack of communication from anyone in the higher levels of government.
Hell, maybe we were safer out here in the forest by ourselves.
Safer than we would be if we got into a city where everyone had lost their heads.
Then I remembered the men I’d left in the cabin and shook my head. Those men would be coming after us. I was sure of it. I hadn’t finished Randall, who might be just fine if he’d been wearing any sort of body armor—had there been any blood under his hand as he clutched his belly? And Logan probably only had a flesh wound, unless I’d hit an artery. The other two would eventually wake up—and none of them seemed like the kind of people who would shake their heads and let it go. Maybe the stupid ones, but not the other two. Yeah, I’d shot Randall in the stomach, but he was a survivalist. For all I knew, he’d been wearing Kevlar, just in case.
I hadn’t terminated him. And he would be angry as a bear. No pun intended.
They’d be coming after us. And our best answer—our only answer—was to get to some form of civilization, where we might have other people helping us. Or at least somewhere to hide.
8
I struggled through a frozen world of throbbing pain and slowly spreading numbness.
Exhaustion latched onto my limbs, combining with the heavy grip of knee-deep snow until I could no longer tell whether I was actually putting one foot in front of the other anymore. But I plowed ahead, dragging Angie’s litter behind me and checking in with her every so often. Manipulating her arms and legs and rubbing at her face, to keep the circulation up. Fighting until there was nothing left but the fight. Nothing left but survival.
I retreated into a place inside my own mind that I had prepared long ago, a place where I could disappear to escape the torment of the physical world. I’d gone there often while training for the military, and then again while serving in Afghanistan. Long marches, blistering heat, endless danger, all of the unbearable things I’d had to endure just to follow orders, to complete the mission. Now there were no orders. There was no mission except to keep my wife alive, but as I marched through a landscape of screaming white nothingness, the world around us faded until I could almost imagine I was back in the Middle Eastern desert. I could almost feel the sun burning into my limbs.
In the back of my mind, I knew it was only the sting of frostbite setting in. The pull of exhaustion, telling me to lay down and go to sleep, to let it all go. But I let myself surrender to the delusion, going forward with only one thought in my mind: I had to find safety. Had to find a place where there were other people. People to help us. People to save us.
I held to those thoughts even when the howling wind and driving snow melded with the blistering heat of a scorching sun, and laying down became my only option.
When I awoke, the house around me was bright. Bright and warm. The paint on the walls wasn’t quite white, but it was close, and I could see from the bed I lay in that the place was decorated with Southwestern art, fixtures, and knick-knacks that made the walls scream “hacienda.”
It didn’t belong in Michigan. Didn’t match the Cape Cod style that everyone used for their houses here. And that alone had my brain jerking back into gear, taking quick account of what it remembered—and what it didn’t. I jumped off the bed, tangled in blankets, and spun around three times, my eyes roving over the walls, looking desperately for danger, before I realized that I was alone.
Alone and in a house that held more color than my entire town. Where the hell was I? What the hell had happened out there? The last thing I remembered was pushing through the storm, Angie behind me in the litter…
“Oh God, Angie,” I gasped.
I jerked forward, my feet still tangled in the blankets, and nearly fell before I could get my feet free. Then I was running from the room, nearly shouting for my wife.
I got into the hallway and turned right, for no reason other than that it was my good side. I scanned the hallway, standing absolutely still and breathing heavily as I tried to get my bearings. I didn’t remember a thing. Not a damn thing. And that bothered me more than anything else. In all my time in the Middle East, I’d had one reputation: that of someone the other soldiers could count on. The one who never lost his head, the one who always had a plan for getting out of a situation.
The one who never, ever blacked out.
The fact that I’d blacked out now, when my wife was depending on me…
That was when I remembered laying down in the snow. Thinking that it was all too much, and that I’d better just lay down and rest for a second before I went on. Thinking that I’d only be there for a moment. Just one. And then I’d get up and start walking again—though I had no idea where I was going. I remembered how absolutely, horribly hopeless I’d felt about the whole thing. Angie wounded. Us lost in the forest with absolutely no idea where we were or what we were supposed to do about it.
I remembered closing my eyes while Angie screamed my name behind me.
And then I remembered voices. Not mine. Angie’s, and one that belonged to someone else. I remembered strong arms lifting me up…and then the jolting, swaying movement of a car.
“Someone found us in the forest,” I breathed. Someone had come for us. Or rather…someone had managed to happen across us. I had no idea how that might have happened.
But if they’d brought me to this house, it meant that Angie was here somewhere as well. At least I hoped it did. And though I might have failed her in the woods, I wasn’t going to fail her now that we were in some stranger’s house.
I pushed myself to start moving again, pressing my back up and sliding along the wall toward the next room. A quick check of my pockets told me that I had been disarmed. Disclothed, in fact, considering I was now wearing what seemed to be pajama pants and… I glanced down at myself, frowning. A flannel shirt? Definitely not mine.
I never wore plaid.
Another quick check of my body, and I realized that I’d also been bandaged. The wound from the bear attack didn’t sting anymore, and I ran my fingers delicately over the spot, cataloging the ridges that meant I’d been taped up.
Right. So someone had found us in the forest, saved us, and brought us back here to doctor us and give us fresh clothes. We were either incredibly, freakishly lucky…or in a whole lot of trouble.
Because I didn’t think anyone did those things out of the goodness of their hearts. Or rather… Well, I might have thought that once. When I was a child. Not after I spent so long in the military—and certainly not after our experience with Randall and his cousins.
I started creeping along through the hallway again, my breath coming short and quick. Maybe we weren’t in the wilds anymore at all. Maybe we were in a town of some sort. I couldn’t imagine anyone building a cabin in the forest and then decorating it like this.
Then again, maybe someone who would do something like that was the same sort of person who found people stranded in the forest and saved them. I frowned at that, trying to twist my brain around the idea that those sorts of people existed, but that was going to be a losing battle. Exist, they might. But I’d never met any of them—and that made it awfully hard to believe that one was going to show up right when I needed them most.
When the next doorway opened up behind me, I actually fell into it. I’d stopped paying attention as I tried to figure out what was going on, and the sudden space behind me had me hurtling backward, stumbling along as I tried to get my feet back under me.
I finally got my balance and jerked around, eyes roving quickly through the room. This one was different than the one I’d been in, but it was decorated in much the same way. Overly colorful. Mexican-style decor, with a Mexican blanket draped across the wall and colorful curtains on the window. The window. At that, I frowned. It was bright white outside, so it was mid-day or so, if I was reading the situation correctly. We’d left the cabin just after the morning meal, and we must have been walking for at least an hour.
That meant that either an entire day had passed and I’d been asleep the whole time, or whoever this stranger was, they’d found us almost immediately. And lived somewhere close to where they’d picked us up.
Then
more of my memory came rushing back, and I remembered the reason we were out there in the snow. The EMP—or what I’d taken to be an EMP. Those men in the cabin. The violence.
The shots.
The man I hadn’t outright killed. The idea that they would almost certainly be coming after us.
I started turning in a circle again, crouched down and defensive against the enemy that I’d suddenly remembered. But then I shook myself firmly. I needed to get myself under control, or this was going to go badly very quickly. One step at a time, I told myself firmly. No use panicking when I didn’t know what was going on. First objective: Figure out what the situation is.
The EMP. Had that been real, or just a dream?
A quick glance up at the ceiling showed me that the lights were out. All the light was streaming in from the window, amplified by the white of the snow outside. But that was nothing new; when it snowed, you didn’t need light bulbs until the sun started going down. Until then, the snow itself acted like some sort of insane flashlight.
I moved toward the switch on the wall, narrowing my eyes, and flipped it up and down once. Then again. Then again.
No reaction. No lights coming on. And though that could have been for a number of reasons—including that there weren’t actually light bulbs in those lights in the ceiling—I was willing to give it at least a fifty percent chance that the electricity was actually out.
I’d have to check other rooms. Get confirmation. But if none of the lights worked, it increased the chances that there had in fact been an EMP event, especially since our cells phones and truck hadn’t worked either. It should have made me feel worse. It was a horrible complication, and there were a number of possible repercussions.
But that one clue that I’d been right about something made the world start moving again.
Second objective: Find Angie. I was bandaged, warm, and had on clean clothes. Or pajamas. But where the hell was my wife?
Bitter Cold Apocalypse | Book 1 | Bitter Cold Apocalypse Page 6