by E S Richards
All of that would change now, he vowed to himself. Amy might not love him anymore but he could still prove that he was a good father, that he could be a real family man. And if he could do that, who knows, maybe he could change Amy’s opinion of him after all. Maybe he could return to the man she fell in love with.
Stumbling through overgrown grass Len nodded to himself and repeated his vow. Everything was going to change, if only he could first find a way to reunite with them.
“Can’t be that much farther now, can it?” Len asked Harrison, his voice sounding loud in the silence despite it being little more than a whisper.
“Just under an hour I’d guess,” Harrison replied, wiping sweat from his brow with the palm of his hand.
The heat was still maddeningly uncomfortable although it was definitely not as hot as it had been at first. It was impossible to walk without breaking a sweat, but Harrison could see he was faring better than Len, his years spent in the bunker exposing him to extreme heat in the summer and extreme cold in the winter. His companion was absolutely dripping with perspiration, although he did walk with a smile on his face after their change in direction.
Harrison, on the other hand, wasn’t happy about moving toward the lake. It made him feel uncomfortable and his senses were more alive than ever, his head turning at every small sound and unfamiliar movement. The short conversation he’d shared with Len about Nina earlier made him feel on edge as well. Harrison didn’t like people knowing his private affairs, but bothering him more than that was how his last moments with his daughter kept playing over and over in his head.
***
“Dad,” Nina pleaded, “please sleep in the house tonight. I don’t like being in here alone.”
Harrison avoided making eye contact with his daughter. He could see how upset she was, but he couldn’t bring himself to go back up to his bedroom. Sophia had been dead a week and he had slept in his bunker every night since then. After so many years with his wife, Harrison just couldn’t face the thought of being in his bed without her.
“I can’t, Nina,” his voice instantly gave away how ashamed Harrison was of himself. “I just can’t be in there. It reminds me too much of your mother.”
“And you think things aren’t the same for me?” Nina’s voice started to rise as she spoke to her father, her jaw slightly clenched in an attempt to stop the tears falling from her eyes. “Everywhere I look I see Mom. I see her as she used to be and then I see her dying as well. This whole house is filled with her. You can’t expect me to just sit in here alone!”
Harrison inhaled sharply. His daughter’s words described exactly how he felt, exactly what he saw everywhere he looked. Sophia was in every room. Her smell was on the couch cushions, her lingering touch on the dining room table and chairs. The bathroom was filled with her medicines, the counter covered in them thanks to the years of treatment she’d had to receive. Harrison had known the end was near when the hospital suggested she go home to be somewhere familiar and comfortable in her final days. A part of him wished she hadn’t though; it just made moving on so much harder.
“Nina,” he started, trying his best to not make his daughter feel any worse. “You don’t under—”
“No!” Nina shouted, cutting Harrison off mid-sentence. “Don’t you dare say I don’t understand, Dad. Don’t you dare say that.”
“Do you have any idea how hard this is for me?” Harrison’s voice suddenly started to rise out of his control; he couldn’t stop the emotions from bubbling over inside of him. “Every time I look at you I see her, Nina. Every time I look at you I see your mother. She’s not just in this house, she’s in you as well. You look exactly like she did when we first met and now,” Harrison paused, his bottom lip quivering, “now that she’s gone I just can’t…I can’t…”
“Look at me?”
Nina’s voice was a whisper, her eyes pleading with her father’s. Harrison avoided her gaze, ashamed of himself for what he was telling his daughter, what he was implying to her. He loved Nina so much, but the pain of his wife’s death was still too raw for Harrison to deal with. He couldn’t explain how he felt, but it was eating him up inside.
“Dad?”
“I’m sorry Nina,” Harrison shook his head and turned away from his daughter. “I’m going down to the bunker.”
“You can’t live like this forever, you know!” Nina shouted at the back of her father’s head, her words piercing the air through the tears that fell freely down her face. “One day you’ll be down in that bunker and you’ll realize you have nothing left! Mom’s gone. She’s dead. It hurts. But we have to move past this. We have to be there for each other. Please Dad, I can’t deal with this alone.”
Harrison froze, one foot slightly off the floor in front of him. The words he knew he should say to his daughter were on the tip of his tongue, lingering just out of his reach. He knew what he had to do to be a good father, but as his foot touched the wooden floor he just couldn’t bring himself to turn around. He was a failure, a weak representation of what a father should be. And he simply couldn’t look at his daughter.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered under his breath as Harrison pulled open the backdoor and walked out into the garden towards his bunker. Nina’s shouts permeated the wall behind him, making him cringe with every word he heard her speak. He deserved each and every thing she was saying and yet none of them were powerful enough to make Harrison turn back. Climbing down the steps into his bunker, he finally let his tears begin to fall.
***
With very little else to focus his mind on, the last conversation he and Nina shared echoed through Harrison’s head. He wished he had acted differently. He wished he hadn’t been such a coward and had done what he was supposed to do. Wrap his arms around his daughter and tell her everything was going to be okay, tell her they were going to get through it, no matter how hard each day was.
Harrison still remembered finding the house completely empty two days later, when he had finally emerged from his bunker. Nina’s bags were packed, her closet stripped bare and her photographs peeled from the walls. Pictures of Sophia had been taken from the walls too, the wallpaper faded in color around where they used to hang.
Nina hadn’t left any indication of where she was going, no message, no note, nothing. Harrison didn’t blame her, knowing he had acted terribly towards her in that whole week after his wife’s death. Still he waited. Waited to see if she would come back. Weeks passed, then a month, six months. Nearly a whole year. And still, Harrison heard nothing from his daughter.
Then, on the anniversary of Sophia’s death, Harrison discovered some flowers had been delivered to the house. No sender’s address or indication of where they had come from, nothing but a small note with the words For Mom scribbled on it.
That was the moment Harrison knew his daughter was never coming back.
Chapter 4
“Get down!”
Len practically flung himself to the ground as he hissed the words at Harrison, taking cover behind an overturned delivery truck. Harrison startled at Len’s words but followed suit, the prepper knowing it was best to heed every warning in their situation even if he didn’t understand what was happening.
Len, on the other hand, was on full alert. His fingers trembled as he reached for the 9mm Beretta pistol in the holster at his waist, having only a couple hours of firearms training under his belt. He couldn’t tear his eyes off the group of people gathered around what Harrison had told him earlier was Hammond Dock, nestled right on the border between Illinois and Indiana. There were plenty of boats there, plenty of gas cans full of fuel too by the looks of things, but also present was one key hurdle that stood in their way.
Every person wandering around the dock sported a closely shaven head. Every one of them reminded Len of the attack he’d encountered deeper in the city, beaten mercilessly because he couldn’t hand over his wallet. He was almost positive the people who had attacked him belonged to this same group; there were
too many similarities for it to be a coincidence.
“These guys, or ones like them, attacked me in the city,” Len whispered to Harrison, as the older man also closely observed the faction in front of them. “They beat me up because I didn’t have anything they could steal. They’re armed and more than dangerous.”
Harrison didn’t say anything, but was carefully watching the people on the dock. Beyond them all having the same non-existent hairstyle, it was clear they were all part of the same group. They didn’t dress the same, but they all seemed to be following the orders of two individuals. There was an obvious hierarchy, which looked to have been developed long before the mass ejection that had brought Chicago to its knees. Harrison shook his head, knowing that from even those tiny pieces of information it was clear this group was well organized and probably—as Len said—dangerous.
“What’s your plan then?” Harrison skeptically asked Len, testing how his companion would react in the face of danger. “You wanted to come to the lake; still think we should try and steal a boat?”
Len bit his bottom lip, a nervous tick that was becoming more and more frequent as his journey continued. He could tell Harrison was throwing his idea back in his face. He was the one who had demanded they change course and travel towards Lake Michigan. He was the one who had persuaded Harrison it would save them valuable time.
But how could he have expected to find trouble waiting by the water? Len was sure the people who had attacked him had just been a rogue group he’d bumped into in the middle of the city; nothing about how they’d acted had made him think they belonged to a larger faction. He couldn’t deny it now, though, when the evidence of it was walking around in front of his eyes.
A strange sensation crept over Len as he watched the group going about their business—checking fuel gauges on boats or rifling through boxes of supplies. He realized that he wasn’t afraid of them like he should be; he wasn’t overcome by the feeling of cowardice that had grown so familiar to him over the years. Instead Len was angry. He was angry that this group had managed to get ahead in Chicago when their actions were nothing but cruel and selfish. He was angry that they seemed to have everything, while he was left with little more than just his desire to see his son. For once in his life Len looked at the group of people and knew he was better than they were, knew he deserved more than they had and yet, he also knew there was nothing that he was going to do about it.
“We can’t,” Len shook his head in disappointment. “There’s too many of them, and they wouldn’t think twice about attacking us. We’ll have to leave the boats for now.”
“A wise decision,” Harrison murmured, still not taking his eyes off the shaved heads in the distance. He found it very impressive how the group had become so organized so quickly and even more so that there were still so many of them after all the deaths Chicago had seen. Harrison knew less than he liked about the current gang activity in Chicago; keeping himself hidden away in his bunker most of the time secluded him from the information. He’d heard of a couple though, one that called themselves the Disciples and another dubbed the Latin Kings. From the appearance of the group in front of him, Harrison guessed they were a faction of the latter.
He was aware that the Latin Kings were the oldest gang currently active in Chicago, formed in the 1950s as more Latinos started to move into the city. Originally they campaigned for a better quality of life; however, over the years their intentions had changed and were now less than amicable. They’d spread all over the city, with over thirty thousand members swearing allegiance to the gang. If a group like that had all teamed together in the after-effects of the mass ejection, Harrison was all too aware of how quickly they could spread.
“Do you think they’re all from Chicago?” Harrison asked thoughtfully, his curiosity intriguingly piqued by the group of people. “Or do you think some have come through Indiana?” The thought occurred to him that there might be additional factions of the Latin Kings in other cities, remembering something he’d once read that stated some gangs managed to operate cohesively across the country.
Len looked at Harrison and raised his eyebrows, the question confusing him. “What does it matter? Wherever they’ve come from, I don’t want to have another meeting with them. Come on, let’s go.”
Len reached over and tugged at Harrison’s arm, pulling the man away from the gap between the delivery truck’s cab and its cargo they had been spying through. Harrison shook Len off immediately, disliking being manhandled when he was only trying to gain information through observing the group. It was Len’s fault they were by the lake anyway, Harrison was entirely aware of that.
“All right,” Harrison hissed at Len, glaring at him to let him know he was unhappy with how their journey was going so far. “Head around that way; we might as well follow the lake now.”
Len was glad to get moving and picked up his feet, pushing forward in the direction Harrison had indicated. He hadn’t made it more than fifty yards beyond the cover of the delivery truck when voices in the distance caught his attention. Spinning around, Len saw the last thing he wanted to see: four men running towards them, weapons poised in their hands.
“Take cover!”
Harrison’s response came immediately, his right hand flying for the 9mm Glock G26 pistol at his waist and methodically checking that the magazine was loaded. Len watched him in shock, amazed at how quickly Harrison had sprung into action; his weapon was still pointed at the ground, but it was clear to Len that Harrison was ready to use it.
The two of them were crouching behind a low wall, blocking off one area of the beach from the train tracks that ran deeper into the city. So far Harrison could see only four men running towards them, but they still outnumbered them two to one. Scoping out their surroundings, Harrison considered running back towards the tracks; an abandoned freight train had derailed itself slightly and was now leaning at an angle. After a second of consideration, though, Harrison knew that running back towards the tracks would leave the two of them too exposed during the run, making them easy targets to be gunned down from behind.
Their hiding place wasn’t bad. Trees shrouded their movements slightly and the pair of them had the higher ground against the four gang members. Watching the way they moved, Harrison became more assured they were part of the Latin Kings, their mannerisms familiar from news reports he’d crawled off the Internet whilst hidden in his bunker.
“We should keep moving backwards, shouldn’t we?” Len asked from beside Harrison as he noticed the lopsided train as well. He kept one hand on the handle of his pistol as he spoke, unwilling to remove it completely from the holster just yet. Unsurprisingly, a large amount of the confidence he had felt earlier when watching the group had faded, being replaced with the recognizable itch of fear.
“We’re better off here,” Harrison spoke bluntly, readjusting the straps on his backpack as he spoke so it sat in a more comfortable position as he crouched. “Get that damn bow off your back if you’re not going to use the Beretta. We need to make the most of this cover while we have it.”
Len was struck by Harrison’s candor but he did as instructed, thankful for not having to use the pistol just yet. He knew it was unlikely he was going to hit anyone, but even the thought of aiming his weapon at people made him shudder slightly.
“Watch the way they’re running,” Harrison spoke through gritted teeth, his own pistol now up and pointing at the four as they moved closer. “Wait until they’re in range,” he paused, “I’ll tell you when.”
Len couldn’t believe he was going to shoot at these people. They had beaten him up in the street yes, but did that necessarily mean they were going to do it again? Stealing a glance at Harrison, Len was suddenly struck by how real the situation was. These men were an obstacle between them and their children and he couldn’t let them stop him from seeing James again.
The confidence that Len had desperately tried to generate since the newscast in O’Riley’s bar finally started to flood throug
h his body. He pulled an arrow from the quiver on his back and notched it to the bow. Harrison stepped out from cover in a smooth, practiced motion and fired four shots at the man who was at the front of the group approaching them. The snap of the rounds echoed loudly in their surroundings, and a howl of pain went up from the group as Harrison ducked back into cover.
The man in the lead clutched at his chest as he stumbled forward, his comrades abandoning him as they temporarily panicked, running for what cover they could find to hide from the incoming assault. Len peeked over the barricade he and Harrison were hiding behind and saw the injured man’s rifle clatter to the ground as dark red stains spread across the front of the man’s T-shirt. He fell to his knees and slumped over on his side a few seconds later, breaths coming in short, gurgling gasps.
There was a moment of silence as he lay still on the ground, then everything started moving at double speed.
The three remaining attackers all emerged from cover, their voices loud and profanity-laden as they charged forward through the mess of debris and damaged cars in front of Len and Harrison. Len was frozen, the arrow still notched on the bowstring but not pointed anywhere in the direction of the attackers.