Survival EMP Box Set | Books 1-4

by Lopez, Rob

  Seeing as he already had a reputation as a quitter, maybe it wasn’t a bad idea.

  Reaching his house, he unlocked his door and made his way through the kitchen. Pausing once to light the lantern, he headed straight for the bedroom. He needed to eat, but he also needed to lie down for a spell. He chose the latter first.

  As soon as he stepped into the bedroom, however, he froze.

  That goddamn soldier was in his house again, sitting on his bed, looking straight at him. He didn’t have his Glock pointing at him this time, and Jim could have pulled his pistol out, but he was simply too tired.

  “What the hell do you want?” he said irritably.

  The soldier looked at him. He had an assault rifle by him, but he didn’t move to pick it up.

  “I’m here to talk,” he said.

  “And I’m here to lie down, so get out of the goddamn way.”

  The soldier got up, and Jim flopped down on the bed, uttering a moan of relief as the weight was taken off his knee. Nonplussed, the soldier pulled up a chair and sat down, facing him.

  “You want to get a pillow under that knee,” observed the soldier.

  “I’m not going to move a goddamn muscle,” growled Jim.

  “It’s probably swollen. Having it up will help.”

  “What do you care?” said Jim. He paused as a thought occurred to him. “And how do you know about my knee?”

  The soldier said nothing. In spite of his solicitous remarks, he still eluded an aura of menace. With someone like him walking around the edge of town in the dark, Jim figured the militia patrols had a right to be jittery. Maybe there were reports about him already.

  “What right do you think you have, coming into my house all the time?” said Jim. “Do you realize how dangerous it’ll be for me if you get spotted coming here?”

  “Nobody spotted me,” said the soldier.

  “Oh, you’re sure of that, are you?”

  “I am.”

  It came out as a certainty, rather than a boast, and the way he said it chilled Jim. Like maybe he’d quietly kill anyone who saw him.

  “My name’s Rick,” said the soldier.

  “I don’t want to know that. I don’t want to know anything about you. This meeting didn’t happen and I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

  “I got you some food,” said Rick.

  On the dresser was an opened can of tuna with a fork stuck in it, and a glass of water.

  “Raiding my goddamn stores again,” snapped Jim.

  “Not this time.”

  Jim didn’t believe him, then remembered that he’d run out of tuna. The stranger had brought it to replace the one he’d taken before.

  “Give me that,” said Jim, his stomach rumbling.

  Rick passed the food over and Jim shoveled it down his throat, dragging his finger around the bottom of the can to get the last flakes.

  “Don’t think this is enough to make amends,” he warned, licking his fingers. He nodded toward the water and the stranger passed him the glass. Jim drained it in one long gulp. Wiping his mouth, he added, “You scared the bejesus out of me last time, and I got every right to turn you in.”

  Rick was unfazed. “I need information,” he said.

  “I told you everything I already know. I ain’t no oracle, and I’ve got enough problems of my own without you hanging around, so get out.”

  Rick studied him for a moment. “How badly do you want to get rid of Connors?” he said.

  “Not you as well,” exclaimed Jim. “I already got people telling me we should stage a rebellion and march on Asheville.”

  “It’s too soon for that.”

  “I know! It’d be a bloodbath. I’m sorry, what is it you’ve got planned?”

  “Nothing yet. I need intel.”

  “I don’t know why you keep going on about this Connors guy. It’s the new governor who’s doing this.”

  “No, it’s Connors. I know how he works.”

  “Well, I don’t, and I don’t know what it is you want from me.”

  “An alliance. Like the one I offered you before.”

  “You never offered me no alliance. You held a gun to my head, walked me out into my yard and left me to wet my pants when I thought you were going to kill me.”

  “I don’t mean then. I mean before.”

  “What are you talking about? I never met you before.”

  “Way before that, I offered you the chance to join an alliance with Old Fort, Marion and other communities. An alliance that might have been able to hold against Connors. But you refused.”

  “What? I don’t recall … wait, that was you?”

  “Yes.”

  Jim threw his hands up in despair. “Jesus Christ, you call that a serious offer? Some guy turned up with a message from someone we’d never heard of, and we’re supposed to just say, sure, why not? That was a joke. We were balls deep in problems. I didn’t have time to waste on small stuff. Hell, it probably got left till the end of some meeting, and then forgotten.”

  “It’s not small stuff now, is it?”

  Jim scowled. “I told you, I ain’t no oracle. And what happened to your grand alliance anyway?”

  “It didn’t happen. Pretty much everyone had the same attitude as you. Nobody cared. But they will soon.”

  Jim recovered his dignity. “So. You’re just here to say you told me so.”

  “No. Not interested in the past now. All I care about is whether you’re prepared to help me take down Connors. If not, I’ll leave.”

  Jim paused to think awhile. “This thing between you and Connors is personal, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s got that woman you mentioned last time.”

  “My wife.”

  Jim thought about it some more. “So this is a personal feud?”

  “It’ll be more than that.”

  “You want a war?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you want us to fight for you?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re not in a position to. Nobody is yet.”

  “Yet?”

  “There’ll be a time, and I’ll call it. Meanwhile, I need intel.”

  Jim sat up in the bed. “And what do you propose to do with that intel?”

  “That’s for me to decide.” Rick handed him a piece of paper. “I want you to go about your normal lives. Don’t give Connors any reason to think you’ll cause trouble. Comply with everything and get the militia to relax. Send some traders to Asheville. Pick your most observant people. When you get the information I want, give it to Sonita. She’ll make sure we get it.”

  “Sonita,” said Jim, suddenly remembering the name of the woman rescued from the raiders.

  “She’ll be your main contact.”

  Jim read through the list on the paper, tapping his lips. “Harry offered me the chance to work with him on the council.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “The new mayor from Asheville.”

  “Take him up on his offer. Get him to give you a car. Get around a little. And destroy that piece of paper once you’ve memorized it. Use only people that you trust.”

  Jim shook his head slowly, bemused. “I don’t know why I’m agreeing to this. Sounds crazy.”

  “It’ll involve some risk,” said Rick, getting up and looping the rifle sling over his head. “You need to be cautious.”

  “You’re turning me into a spymaster.”

  “Pretty much. If you want to help your people, this is what you need to do.”

  “And when do we meet again?”

  “We don’t. After tonight, you won’t see me anymore.”

  After everything he’d said, it seemed to Jim that his parting words were the most ominous.

  13

  Barbara pulled out drawers in a cabinet and clothes from a closet, shaking everything to see if anything valuable fell out. She turned over a bed, slashed the mattress, threw pillows and teddy bear
s across the room. Dragging down a cardboard box from the top of the closet, she tossed out Hello Kitty diaries, Harry Potter books, a sports bra and an old flip-phone. Eventually she discovered a small box with a pair of starter stud-earrings inside. They weren’t gold, however, so they were discarded with the rest.

  Her crew were busy ransacking the rest of the house with a lot of crashing and thumping. They’d been busy all morning, searching through the abandoned homes of Old Fort, but had found surprisingly little gold for all their efforts. Partly it was because the houses had already been looted, and partly because there weren’t a lot of wealthy homes in the town. Even so, Barbara expected to find a little more than they had.

  “Hey,” shouted Teebar from across the hall. “Are they taking silver too? ‘Cos I got a nice brace of silver necklaces here. They gotta be worth something, right?”

  “No,” shouted Barbara in unison with a couple of others.

  “Well, screw them. I’m keeping them anyway,” said Teebar.

  “Hey, fellas,” called Mud from the bottom of the stairs. “Guess what? I went digging, and I struck gold.”

  Mud came up the stairs with a buck-toothed grin, waving a bag. Barbara came out to take a look. Mud reached into the bag and pulled out a severed, decomposing hand that had turned green with mold, tightened sinews drawing it into a fist. It was covered in dirt, with an earthworm still curled around it, but on one finger gleamed a ring.

  “Let me see that,” said Barbara.

  Mud turned away, cradling his find defensively. “Oh no you don’t,” he said, brandishing the sharp end of a shovel toward any takers.

  Barbara scowled. “That ain’t worth nothing.”

  “Worth more than you got.”

  “Where’d you get it?” said Teebar, coming out of another bedroom.

  “Found a grave out in the yard. Figured nobody had stripped the dead yet.”

  Everybody in the house kind of paused, then there was a race to get outside. Leaving the homes alone, they went looking for freshly dug graves.

  They found plenty of those, grouped in clusters in the public park, and dirt was soon flying as the dead were quickly disinterred, bony fingers checked for rings, sunken breasts for necklaces and skulls for gold teeth. Hordes of flies came to join them, until they were working in a black cloud. Barbara cracked first, swatting away the pests from her face and staggering out, spitting out a fly that had gotten in her mouth.

  “Goddamn, I hate these things,” she said.

  One by one, the others joined her, until only Mud was left. He had a kerchief hiked over his nose, and he worked patiently, cutting out earrings, nose rings and nipple piercings.

  “Wow, look at the titties on that dead bitch,” said someone in the group. “Grab a feel, Mud! Closest you’ll ever get.”

  Mud ignored him, dropping items into his bag.

  “Mud comes out now, the flies are gonna follow him,” said another.

  “Watcha talking about? He brought ‘em, the stinking son of a bitch.”

  “Hey Mud, you fixing to get yourself a bath sometime this year?”

  Tasks complete, Mud emerged from the cloud, triumphantly holding up his bag. “Laugh all you want, boys, but I’m a rich man now.”

  “If you was any kind of man,” sneered Barbara, “you’d share it out with your friends.”

  Mud strapped the flap of the bag closed and waved his Mac-10 submachine gun at the group. “Got some lead I can share out, if you want. Any takers?”

  Barbara gave him a black look. “Hell with this shit,” she said. “Let’s go up the hill and see if we can find ourselves a big old house.”

  Squeezed into one car, they left town on the road toward Round Knob, passing a few homes nestled in the trees or up slopes, none of which could be described as particularly opulent. After securing a few trinkets, they turned down a dusty track that led alongside a lake to Camp Grier. As they pulled up outside the cabins, Barbara looked at the large red crosses painted everywhere.

  “What we got here now?” she said, getting out.

  The place looked deserted, but a large pot perched above embers and an axe embedded into a pile of freshly chopped wood indicated some kind of occupation.

  “Looks like they evacuated,” said Teebar, his assault rifle at the ready. “Maybe they heard us coming.”

  “Hey, it’s a hospital,” said Mud. “Bound to be some dead folks around somewhere.”

  Barbara wrinkled her face in disgust. “Ain’t going to be no gold here.”

  Mud popped the trunk and pulled out a shovel. “Only one way to find out,” he said.

  “Ain’t wasting my time,” said Barbara, turning back to the car.

  “Hey, look,” said someone.

  Barbara looked and saw two people emerge from the long cabin, a black guy and a white woman.

  Barbara snicked the safety off on her rifle and began walking toward them. “You see to that black fella,” she told Teebar.

  “Hello,” said the woman. “Can I help you?”

  “You got any gold?” called Barbara.

  The woman looked perplexed. “I’m sorry?”

  Teebar ordered the black man down to his knees, walked behind him and put his foot into his back, pushing him face down in the dirt. “You move and I’m going to blow your sorry ass off,” he declared.

  “Search him,” said Barbara.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” said the woman. “We’ve already explained to you people who we are.”

  Barbara forced her gun barrel into the woman’s belly and began checking her fingers and searching her pockets.

  “We told your people that there’s typhus here,” said the woman.

  “Don’t know nothing about that,” said Barbara tersely. “What have you got inside?”

  “Patients.”

  “Show me.”

  “I warn you, they are highly contagious. We’re all carriers of the disease.”

  “I don’t care,” said Barbara, turning the woman around and pushing her ahead of herself. The others searched the black guy while Teebar kept his foot on his back. “You find anything on him, we split it,” called Barbara.

  Inside the cabin, patients sat up in their beds. Some had receding rashes, but most just looked pale. The woman turned around and tried to block Barbara’s entry.

  “These people are very sick,” she said. “You run the risk of catching typhus yourself. Do you know what typhus can do?”

  Barbara pushed her to one side and stepped in. “They look okay to me,” she said. “Everybody get your hands up. Show me your fingers.”

  The patients stared blankly at her. Pointing her rifle at them, she moved from bed to bed, grabbing hands to examine them, yanking back sheets to look beneath and forcing open a patient’s mouth to look at his teeth.

  “Stop that at once!” said the woman.

  Barbara whirled, grabbed the woman’s jaw in her grip and forced her back against the wall, pushing the rifle barrel under her chin.

  “Shut your mouth,” ordered Barbara. “Their rings and necklaces. Where do you keep them?”

  “What … what do you mean?”

  “Their gold! Where is it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. There is no gold. This is a medical facility.”

  “There’s gotta be something. Ain’t none of them married?”

  “I … I don’t know.”

  “Are you stupid or something? Wedding rings. Did you remove them? Where are you hiding them?”

  The woman rallied, puffing her chest out. “I don’t know what you are talking about, and the only person wasting time here is you. If you have nothing better to do, I suggest you leave.”

  Barbara’s lip curled in anger, then she narrowed her eyes. “Wait a minute, don’t I know you?”

  “I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

  “I seen you.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Yeah, I know you from somewhere.”


  Barbara stepped back to get a better look.

  “That’s right,” she said. “You were with that bitch that killed Luke. I remember seeing you now.”

  “I think you are mistaken.”

  The woman was hesitant, however, and Barbara felt sure now. Pushing the woman to the door, she shouted out to the others standing around the black guy, who was still on the ground.

  “Hey, fellas. Look who I found. Do you remember her being there when Luke got shot?”

  The others scrutinized the woman from a distance.

  “Yeah, she looks kinda familiar,” said Teebar.

  “Damn right she does,” said Barbara. “I’m going to bring her in and get myself a reward.”

  “A reward for all of us, right?” said Mud.

  “You go to hell,” spat Barbara.

  “Yeah, what are you talking about?” said Teebar to Mud. “What with you keeping all that gold for yourself.” He turned back to Barbara. “But you’re going to share with the rest of us, aren’t you?”

  “Hell, no. I’m the one that found her. You sons of bitches can go dig up some more stiffs.”

  Barbara nudged the woman out onto the steps.

  “C’mon Missy,” she said. “Got some folks downtown who’ll be happy to see you.”

  Barbara followed the woman down the steps, then felt the hard barrel of a gun press into the side of her head. She froze, glancing sideways. From around the corner of the building, a black woman had appeared, wearing a combat vest and wielding a sawed-off shotgun, and she looked pissed.

  “You let her go right now,” said the black woman.

  *

  Sally turned also, seeing April with the shotgun. Caught by surprise, Barbara’s eyes bulged with fear. The rest of the gang hastily raised their weapons, and Sally thought that a bloodbath was about to ensue. There was no one else behind April, and she was horribly outgunned.

  “April,” said Sally. “It’s okay. I’ll go with them.”

  “They’re not taking you,” said April through gritted teeth.

  “April, please.”

  “You put your gun down or we shoot,” shouted a gang member.

  “The hell you will,” said Barbara. “You’ll hit me.”