Final Dread: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Thriller (Surviving Book 3)

by Ryan Westfield

  But if Rod had one good quality, aside from his raw strength and power, it was that he was able to see the good in things that were otherwise horrible. The anger management program had been horrible, all about trying to bottle up what Rod considered good and healthy impulses. But he’d been able to see the good in stepping back and coming up with a plan before acting. At times, it had saved his life.

  “Look, you moron,” said Rod. “Think this thing through. If you shoot them, you think they’re going to be a lot of fun? If they’re dead, they’ll be no fun at all. And if you injure them, you think they’re going to be able to cook us breakfast and shit like that?”

  “Uh...” said Bill. “I didn’t think about it quite like that.”

  “I didn’t think so. The way I see it, we capture them alive and kicking. They’ll struggle at first. Maybe for a few days. And then, gradually, they start to like us.”

  “Like us? But they’re going to be our prisoners, I thought.”

  “Haven’t you ever heard of Stockholm Syndrome?”

  “What Syndrome? Is that some foreign shit?”

  “Stockholm Syndrome, idiot. It’s when the kidnapee starts to identify with the captors and sympathize with them.”

  “So? What does that have to do with us?”

  Bill was a good guy, but he wasn’t the smartest.

  Rod sighed. “Come on, man. Can’t you see it? After we grab ’em, just give it like a week, and they’ll be begging to stay with us. They’ll be as good as like real wives. They’ll do whatever we ask. Get me? Now do you want to go shooting your future wife? I didn’t think so. Now, come on. We’ve got to catch ’em before they get away. Remember how fast that blonde one is.”

  “Yeah, let’s go.”

  They gave each other stiff nods and increased their pace to a light jog. They were both big guys, and they weren’t about to do any all-out sprints. Then again, they didn’t need to. All they needed to do was follow the women to their hiding place. Or outlast them. Rod and Bill might not be the fastest, but they had a lot of stamina. That’s something that a nice even steady dose of meth helped with.

  Rod glanced over at Bill’s face, which was, as normal, covered with what looked like little cuts. Bill called them his “bug bites,” but in reality they were from the times when Bill took a little too much and thought that bugs were crawling all over his face, thus trying to scratch them all off him as fast as he could.

  Now there was a new expression on Bill’s face. And that was pure gleaming excitement. Excitement at having a woman. At having a wife. At having some fun, finally.

  Enough of this end of the world shit, enough trying to dominate the area like the rest of the gang was trying to do. No. This was going to be Rod’s and Bill’s time. Time to shine. Time to lie back and let the women do the work. In a couple weeks’ time, the women wouldn’t know what to do without them. That was the beauty of Stockholm Syndrome.

  And if it didn’t work? Well, they’d still have their fun. And they’d kill the women and move on, finding some more. There were always more out there.

  But these two were special. Rod knew he wanted the blonde one. She was something else.

  After a few minutes of brisk walking, Bill elbowed Rod, saying, “Hey, look, they’re going into that house there. See it? The one with the blue shutters.”

  The women had entered what looked like the rear end of a typical suburban cul-de-sac. They were in what amounted to a continuous backyard that curved around with the houses that surrounded the little circle of pavement.

  The houses were all neat little cookie-cutter deals. It wasn’t the sort of place that Rod and Bill had ever spent much time. Their kind hadn’t been welcomed around places like this. Well, no one was around to say anything about it now. The inhabitants of the houses had either fled, died, or were hunkered down in their basements for the long haul, terrified and starving slowly to death.

  Rod stopped in his tracks.

  The house that the women had entered was just three houses down.

  “What are you waiting for?” said Bill, looking back at him. “Come on, let’s go. They might run out the front door.”

  “Remember that this happened to us before, Bill?”

  “What?”

  “The blonde one ran into a house and we followed her. And then she was nowhere to be found.”

  “Uh, I guess, yeah. But this is different.”

  “Why?”

  “Uh, I don’t know.”

  “I’ll tell you why it’s different. Because this time we’re on to her tricks.”

  “What tricks?”

  “Stand here next to me and watch carefully.”

  Rod was pleased with himself. He and Bill stood there, side by side, in some suburban backyard where the grass was getting overgrown and would never be mowed again.

  The sun was going down soon, but for a moment, the constant cover of clouds seemed to disappear, and a ray of weak northern sun shone down on them. It seemed like a sign. A sign that Rod was only getting smarter and more clever.

  After only a few minutes, he observed exactly what he expected to observe.

  The women emerged from the very door that they had entered. They ducked down quickly into some hedges that led out to the front yard.

  “Come on, Bill. Follow me.”

  Rod led Bill to the deck of the house whose backyard they were in. Rod quickly broke the window by smashing the butt of his handgun into it. He reached through the broken glass, grabbed the handle, and swung the door open.

  The house was abandoned, with stuff scattered all over, as if people had tried to pack up at the last minute, which was probably exactly what had happened.

  Rod led Bill through the house, up the stairs, and to a bedroom with a window that faced the front of the house. From there, peering out the window together, they could look out onto the cul-de-sac itself.

  “Now watch this,” said Rod.

  A smug smile formed on his face as he looked down and watched the women emerge from the row of hedges, cross the cul-de-sac, and enter another house.

  “What are they doing?” said Bill. “Going from one house to the other?”

  “Exactly,” said Rod. “Going from one house to another. That’s how that blonde one has been evading us. But now we’ve got her. You just wait.”

  “But how? They’re going to just go from one house to the other. We’ll never catch them.”

  “You disappoint me sometimes, Bill. But don’t worry, the master has a few tricks up his own sleeve. We’ll get them. Don’t worry.”

  Despite his grin, with the corners of his mouth upturned, Rod was noticing that feeling in his bones. That jumpy sluggish feeling that meant he needed to re-up on his meth pretty soon. Easy enough. Now that there was no law, he could do it anywhere he liked. In a pharmacy. In a stranger’s abandoned house. It wasn’t like anyone was around to see. And if they had been? So what? If they had a problem with it, he’d shoot them in the face.

  Rod licked his lips as he thought about his new future. He was really starting to like this new world. He’d trade electricity for anarchy any day of the week.

  12

  Jim

  With each minute that had passed, Jim had expected to hear someone coming up those steps. He’d expected to hear shouting, cursing. He’d expected to see a pair of legs coming at him from where he crouched half-hidden under the simple metal desk.

  But nothing happened.

  No one had come for him.

  Instead, he’d heard the bike engines start up and slowly fade out into the distance.

  It had sounded like the bikers had left him there. But he didn’t want to believe it. He couldn’t believe it. Instead of thinking logically, he got stuck in some kind of panic fear-based state in which his grip on reality was slipping.

  There had been so many of the bikers. They could have taken him out. They were armed. They knew, to a large extent at least, what they were doing.

  Maybe he’d killed en
ough of them that they’d managed to misjudge him. Maybe they’d thought there must have been more than a single man there, fighting them off.

  Or maybe it was just a trap. Maybe the bikers had decided to take the easy way out and just hang back, waiting until he eventually emerged.

  Or maybe they just didn’t care. Didn’t care about doing anything with the bodies of their dead and fallen members. Didn’t care about honor enough to kill Jim, the man who’d killed their own members.

  Maybe the bikers were nothing more than a ruthless gang without any honor whatsoever. Maybe they’d done the smart thing and simply retreated with their tails between their legs. After all, they must have known that it didn’t matter. Statistically, it wasn’t likely that Jim would live much longer anyway. It wasn’t like he was going to be out there spreading the word on how the bikers had let him live. He didn’t even know the name of their gang. To him, they were simply “the bikers” and nothing more.

  Jim just didn’t know what had happened to them.

  What he did know was that he’d stayed there, bloodied and shivering under the desk, until the sun had set.

  The whole time, his mind had been racing. He’d been pumped full of adrenaline from the fight, utterly exhausted.

  Jim felt like a shadow of his former self. He clutched the knife as hard as he could, until his knuckles were white and his hand sent constant signals of pain to his brain.

  He not only felt shaky, but he felt like he was becoming unhinged. He was aware that he wasn’t making good strategic decisions, but it was a strange kind of awareness that felt like it didn’t have any effect on reality. He waited there for hours in that same position, the knife clutched in exactly the same way. If he’d been thinking clearly, he would have gone back down the steps and retrieved more weapons. A gun, for instance, would be much more useful than the single knife that he still had. Was he getting scared, or was he losing his mind? Or had he simply pushed his body too far in his attempt to survive? Maybe he’d just been through a lot. People did get shaken up, after all, from rough experiences.

  As the darkness settled around him, he started to doubt the entire experience. After all, how was it that he’d been able to kill so many of them, without succumbing to death himself?

  Jim couldn’t get their faces out of his mind. Their eyes. Their small pupils. Staring at him with nothing but death on the mind. The death stare. He knew that if he lived, he’d never be able to fully explain the experience to someone else. The experience of being inches from someone who wanted nothing more than to destroy you completely. But he doubted he’d ever want to explain that to someone. It was either something you had experienced or you hadn’t. And better if you hadn’t.

  As he looked for answers in his own mind, staring blankly into the darkness, he remembered that biker gangs often were associated with methamphetamine use and sales.

  If the bikers had been on meth, maybe that explained why their pupils had looked so small. Just like opiate addicts, whose pupils appeared to be chronically shrunken.

  The actual physical constriction of the pupils led to less light entering the eye. In a low-light environment like the pharmacy stairwell, this could lead to a loss of visual acuity, giving Jim a distinctive edge.

  Slowly, in the darkness, Jim managed to work his way out of his thoughts. He’d been waiting there to die, and now he realized that he was going to live.

  For another day, at least.

  He was incredibly stiff when he stood up. It took minutes just for the numbness in his extremities to go away.

  He checked himself for injuries. Major cuts, broken bones. That sort of thing. He should have done it earlier. Much earlier.

  He was getting his mind back. He was losing the intense fear that had left him almost paralyzed, waiting to die.

  He was physically OK. More or less. As OK as he was going to get, at least. At the very least, he wasn’t going to bleed out. He had some cuts. Some scrapes. His whole body hurt. But what did he expect?

  Judging by his thinking, and the blows to the head he’d taken, he was probably concussed. A doctor would have recommended rest. Serious rest. Well, that wasn’t going to happen.

  He could think clearly enough to formulate a simple plan, and that was what mattered.

  He needed to find his wife and friends. Simple in theory. Hard in practice.

  It might take him some time to find them. In the meantime, he’d need to make sure he was armed. And that he had food and water.

  Arming himself was easy enough. He made his way back down the stairwell where he’d fought the bikers to the death. Now it was pitch-black. And many of the steps were still slick with blood. So he moved slowly and carefully.

  Instead of walking, he sat on his butt and moved down step by step. It was the only safe way to do it in absolutely darkness. There was no light at all, so having darkness-adjusted eyes did absolutely nothing. The clouds must have been covering the light from the moon and the stars. Made sense. It had been a cloudy day.

  With his hands, completely blind in the darkness, he felt around. He felt the bodies of the bikers he’d killed. They were splayed out down the steps in various strange positions, arms and legs at odd angles. He was forced to feel every inch of them. Their flesh had cooled to a large extent and the bodies had started to stiffen up ever so slightly.

  He checked their pockets, their hands, and their ankles, looking for knives and guns. And anything else that might be useful.

  He found a couple plastic bags of pills and powders. Of course, he couldn’t see what he was looking at. But he didn’t really need to know that they were some type of drug. Most likely opiates or meth.

  Obviously, Jim didn’t have any intention of doing either. He’d never done a drug in his life. Maybe a few beers now and then, and that was it.

  But Jim was also smart enough to try to recognize the utility in anything that he found. Opiates, obviously, could be invaluable for pain management. And in this new post-EMP world, pain was almost a given.

  Methamphetamine, even, if it was pure enough, could have its uses. After all, before it had become a street drug, it had been widely used by truckers, students, the military, and all sorts of workers who needed to remain alert for long hours. Of course, it had serious downsides. Serious health consequences. And that was with the pure products alone. The stuff that was consumed nowadays was definitely not pure. It was made in clandestine laboratories that didn’t have to follow a single safety or purification procedure if they didn’t want to. And what motive did they have?

  Jim wouldn’t use it unless he really had to, unless he had to be on the move for days and days at a time. If it was a matter of life and death, then taking an impure substance with serious health consequences still might be worth it, objectively speaking. If it had worked for soldiers and pilots, it might work for the average man just trying to survive.

  Of course, these were decisions for another time.

  Jim pocketed the pills and the powder. Tomorrow, when he had enough daylight to see by, he’d check them out, see if he could make out any markings.

  The bikers didn’t have much else useful on them except weapons and drugs. They didn’t have flashlights or bottles of water. They didn’t have matches, although a couple of them had lighters.

  Jim pocketed everything he could, and made his way all the way down both flights of steps, sliding on his butt the whole way.

  There wasn’t any light in the pharmacy, and he had to move slowly and cautiously, feeling the way with his hands and his feet so that he wouldn’t trip over anything.

  Finally, after what felt like hours, he was back outside the pharmacy.

  With his eyes already accustomed to the darkness, he could see quite a bit. The moon and stars were covered by clouds, as he’d assumed, but the cloud cover wasn’t quite totally complete, and there was enough ambient life to see by. Enough to walk by, anyway.

  So Jim could see, but he couldn’t see that far.

  He stood
still and he looked, and he listened, trying to determine if there was anyone else there.

  No sign of anyone. Of the bikers or the RV.

  It seemed that they’d all left.

  It seemed as if his wife and the others had done what he’d said and left the area.

  He was glad. He couldn’t hold it against them. Others, in the same situation, might have felt abandoned.

  But Jim didn’t.

  If Aly had left, he knew it would have been hard for her. Almost impossible. He also knew that it was likely she was still alive. Unless something else had happened to her.

  If she’d stayed, the bikers might have gotten her and the others.

  Jim’s purpose now was clear. Find Aly, Jessica, and Rob. Find the RV. Reunite with them.

  Hopefully, they hadn’t just continued on in the RV, leaving Jim completely for dead. Hopefully they’d found a safe place to shore up for the night, thinking that they might look for Jim again in the morning.

  Now all Jim had to do was either wait here at the pharmacy for them to return, or to try to find them tonight.

  If he had the energy, he would have started out walking tonight, and then returned to the pharmacy in the morning.

  And he was about to do this, but as he took his first step forward in the open air, he realized how shaky he was. He hadn’t eaten and he hadn’t had anything to drink.

  No drug would erase this state that he was in. Nothing would help except rest and food and water.

  So Jim made his way back into the pharmacy, intending to feel around for beef jerky and sodas on the floor. If he was lucky, maybe he could find an orange juice container or two.

  Again, he found himself back in the pitch-blackness of the pharmacy, and he knew that, even though he’d feel better with food and fluid, it would be a long, difficult night, wondering whether or not he would see his wife again.

  He wasn’t the type of man who found it easy to sit back and rest. He liked to be up and active. He liked to be the one on the move, always active and feeling like he was accomplishing something.