Apokalypsis Book Three

by Kate Morris

  “I think I might have an idea,” Lila spoke up. Everyone turned to look at her. “My boss, Mr. Contuccini, is a big gun collector. I know where he lives.”

  “We can’t just go rob people,” Elijah said.

  She shook her head, “No, that’s not what I meant. Maybe we could trade for stuff. You know, barter or something. Last I heard his wife was sick, so maybe he’d be willing to trade.”

  “That might be a good idea,” Jamie remarked. “Got his phone number? Could you call him?”

  “I guess I could.”

  She departed the dining room for the den to make that call but came back a second later.

  “I’ve got no signal. It’s just doing a fast beep.” Alex took out his phone and handed it to her. She dialed in her boss’s number and said, “Doing the same thing. Wait. It’s a message.” Lila pressed the speaker button for everyone to hear the pre-recorded message: “All lines busy. Please try your call later. Thank you.”

  “Okay,” Jamie said calmly. “They said that would probably happen from time to time. Let’s just be patient and go at this from another angle. Anyone else have any ideas where we can get guns other than Lila’s boss?”

  “Why don’t you just use your government connections?” Elijah suggested.

  “Can’t,” he shook his head. “I already tried. They can’t spare anything right now. Military’s pulled up every last reservist. Every agent’s in the field. Besides, they know Wren and I are armed. To them, that’s good enough,”

  “Jeremy was just telling us that his neighbor has a lot of guns. Maybe we could trade for something he’d want,” Wren suggested.

  “That’s a good idea,” Elijah said. “I can call…oh, wait. I can run over to Jeremy’s and find out. I know his neighbor. He’s a cool old dude.”

  “Good. For now, let’s set up a plan to deal with the scouting of medical supplies,” Jamie said and sat at the table with sheets of paper. “I need to know every possible place- hospitals, urgent care centers, anywhere that would have medical supplies. If one of us is injured, there may not be a place to go and get care.”

  He was looking pointedly at Elijah. His eyes were indicating his stomach, and Elijah knew he was referring to when he’d had to apply a few stitches.

  “We all need to learn basic CPR, FirstAid, and basic survival skills,” he was saying.

  “Like how to give people stitches?” Wren asked, her eyes slanting toward Elijah.

  Elijah nodded. “Right.”

  “And some other things, as well,” Jamie said. “Starting tonight, we’ll begin lessons. Wren, hit the local library…”

  Lila broke in to say, “Everything’s closed. All the government buildings.”

  “Hit the library,” he stated more firmly to his charge, who nodded. “Alex will go with you. Elijah, I’ll take you to practice shooting. Lila, if you need practice, I’ll…”

  “No, not me. I’ve got it. I grew up huntin’ with my Pappy. I don’t need help,” she stated cockily.

  “Good,” he said. “I’ll leave the one pistol. Wren, you’ll take the rifle with you and Alex. I’m taking Elijah to practice with a handgun. Lila, you’ll just have to keep the house locked up until we get back. I don’t think things will get bad until after dark. We’ll meet back here for dinner this evening and then go to Jeremy’s neighbor’s house to bargain for firearms, maybe your boss’s place, too. If neither wants to barter, we’ll have to figure out another source at that point.”

  Elijah found himself wondering what that other source would be. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  Jamie drove them to a remote location about ten miles outside the city. It looked like an old factory of some kind. Jamie took empty soda cans from the trunk of his SUV and lined them up on a railing near the building.

  Then her protector took his time and explained the gun, a 9 millimeter Glock. He was attentive and listened carefully as Jamie took him through the entire mechanics of the gun, which he said he needed to learn to take apart, clean, and put back together. He went over safe storage of the gun in the holster, how the safety worked, and the cartridge size. Then they went over drawing it carefully and speedily until Elijah was comfortable. Finally, he was allowed to shoot it. By the third shot, he was hitting his targets. By the end of the magazine, he was hitting center mass on the paper targets Jamie had stapled to the side of a wooden post.

  “I’ll show you the rifle tonight,” Jamie said as he reloaded a magazine and jammed it back into the pistol. “I’m hoping to get our hands on some AR’s or additional rifles. Pistols are good for close quarter shooting, but for anything longer than twenty or thirty yards, we should be using rifles.”

  “Okay, I’ll try my phone again when we leave. If Jeremy picks up, I’ll see if we can talk to his neighbor.”

  Jamie slammed the hatch of the SUV and got in as Elijah did the same. They rode back toward the house in silence for a few minutes before her protector hit him with some serious questions.

  “What are your intentions with Wren?”

  “Sir?”

  He gave him an impatient look. “I know something’s going on between you and Wren. She’s never made friends or even attempted to. She’s always known how serious the importance of not making friends or getting involved with people was. Now, you come along, and she’s got a friend or…a boyfriend? I don’t know which. What is it?”

  “I like her,” he admitted. “A lot. She’s a good friend. I don’t want anything to happen to her.”

  Jamie ran a tired hand over his face. Elijah wasn’t sure if he had even gone to bed yet from yesterday.

  “Wren is…a complicated situation, to say the least,” Jamie said. “If you two become serious, it could get even more complicated.”

  “I care a lot about her, sir.”

  Jamie’s brow lowered, “Doesn’t matter, Elijah. Look, you seem like a good kid. But when this thing blows over and everything goes back to normal, I’ll still be in charge of her. Wren and I will be leaving. For now, with travel and coms down, we’re staying here. The government isn’t moving anyone right now. Just…just don’t get too attached. I have the final say, and when I deem it necessary, we’re leaving here.”

  He felt like Jamie had kicked him in the groin. Elijah was sick. What Jamie was saying was to move on, forget about pursuing a relationship with Wren. That was never going to happen. He’d already made up his mind about that. They were in each other’s lives, whether their guardians wanted them to be or not. The only way he was making an exit from her life was if she wanted that.

  “And what about Wren?” he worked up the courage to ask.

  He glanced over as they came to a stop sign. “What about her?”

  “Don’t you care what she wants?”

  “You don’t understand,” he said and turned left. “Wren is my responsibility. It doesn’t matter what she wants. My one job is to keep her safe. I’m assuming you know the whole truth?”

  Elijah nodded reluctantly, not wanting to get her into trouble. “I think so.”

  Jamie sighed and said, “Then you understand why I’m saying this. I have to protect her at all costs, even if that doesn’t go along with what she wants. Someday, who knows? Maybe you two can meet up again once the family has all been put away. For now, that isn’t possible. You saw what happened at the feed mill. These people will never stop sending people after her. The only reason we’re not gone yet is because of what’s going on everywhere with this virus.”

  “I know, sir,” Elijah said, feeling his insides being ripped apart with every new sentence that came out of Jamie’s mouth. “But I care about her. I want to protect her, too. Knowing what I know only makes me want to help protect her.”

  “Are you having sex with her?”

  Elijah cleared his voice and repositioned himself in his seat. “No! No, not at all.”

  “Good. Birth control in a time like now would be more important than it’s ever been. You wouldn’t want to get her pregnant. This
is not the time to be thinking about sex.”

  “I’m not, sir,” he lied. Of course, he was. It was Wren they were talking about. He hadn’t thought of much else since he met her, but he wasn’t about to admit that to her protector with the gun strapped to his waist. He could barely acknowledge it to himself. “I just care about her. I want to keep her safe.”

  “Then don’t get in my way,” Jamie warned. “I’ll never put anyone above Wren. She’s the one and only priority I have, so don’t get in the way of me doing my job.”

  “I wouldn’t,” he said. “Don’t you have family you want to get home to, check on, or…”

  “No,” he stated bluntly and didn’t expand on it.

  They fell silent again until they arrived at his house where Wren and Alex were unloading books out of the bed of the truck.

  “Got some books!” she announced with a smile, holding up her collection.

  “Yeah, she found some stuff I think will be helpful,” Alex added. “Plus, I never woulda’ fit into that basement window like she did. She’s a cat burglar’s dream.”

  She chuckled, and Elijah forced himself to offer up a smile. He was sure it didn’t come off as genuine, though. As he was following them into the house, he caught Jamie’s watchful expression out of the corner of his eye. If he’d retained any hope at all for his relationship with Wren to continue, it was just killed with that one look from her fake uncle.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  November

  For the next week, they studied as a group and practiced the first few chapters of the CPR manual before preparing to head out each morning. Jamie said until everyone had it all down pat, they’d study like that every day. Their phones started working again after the second day, but the reception wasn’t a hundred percent, and the calls were dropping a lot.

  Elijah and Jamie went on trips every day to gather supplies and came back with at least a truckload each time. She didn’t get the impression that either of them liked the other any better, but at least they were civil and seemed to work well together.

  The landline phones were still down, but Lila told them after she couldn’t reach her former boss the entire week that she thought he kept a lot of his guns above the restaurant in the apartment his in-laws used to live in. She said she went up there a few times to fetch things for their boss or his wife and saw a few long guns resting against the wall near a bureau. There was an alarm system, but that hadn’t seemed to matter at the sporting goods store. The restaurant had been closed down for over three weeks now due to illnesses. She hadn’t heard from her boss for almost a full week, either. His last contact was to tell her not to come to work for a while and that they’d call when they were ready to re-open. She’d heard through the employee gossip mill that her boss had fallen ill to the virus, but she couldn’t confirm the rumor. Their first stop, though, was going to be Jeremy’s neighbor, Mr. Crenshaw. She knew Jeremy was long gone, which made Elijah a little sad. It bothered Wren how much it upset her him unhappy.

  She rode shotgun in Alex’s truck while Elijah drove. They were going out to see if they could make a deal with Lila’s boss or Jeremy’s neighbor while Jamie took Alex and foraged for more medical supplies and food. At first, her protector had protested her going, but then he saw the reasoning in it. The more hands they had doing the work, the faster and more productive their day would be. They only had three hours until dark, and they were all to meet back home before dark.

  “I hope your friend comes back soon and this all ends,” she said, trying to talk to him. He’d been a lot quieter after he’d come back from shooting with Jamie that day, which her uncle had said went great and that Elijah was a natural. But something felt off between them, and he was very distant.

  “Hm,” he murmured.

  “And we get guns somewhere tonight,” she added, feeling like a babbling idiot. She knew it. She should never have told him she wanted him to take her virginity. That’s what this uncomfortableness between them was about. “That’ll be good, too. Right? Elijah?”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah. Good.”

  Idiot. Stop talking! She berated herself impatiently and sat as quiet as a mouse until he pulled into his friend’s driveway in the nice neighborhood.

  “The front door’s wide open. That’s not a good sign,” Elijah commented and collected the metal baseball bat from behind her seat on the floor. He told his brother that he still had that at least. Jamie said until he found a gun to replace the one he lost, that the bat would have to do. It had sounded harsh. Of course, Jamie wasn’t always the sweetest, most charming person going and was a little rough around the edges. Elijah not having a gun was part of the reason she wanted to pair up with him today. At least she had hers.

  “Maybe he’s not gone yet and is loading stuff into his car?” she asked with hopeful intent.

  He shook his head as he opened his door, “Not sure. Let’s go. Stay close just in case something’s wrong. I still never got him to pick up the phone.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed.

  They walked up the short, brick walkway to the front door. Elijah pushed it a little farther open and went in first. They paused and listened a few moments. He turned slightly and nodded over his shoulder at her before entering Jeremy’s house again.

  Wren noticed a red handprint on the white wall near the television set as they walked through the open floor plan living-dining-kitchen space. Then she saw a red plop of what was likely also blood on the back of the pale gray sofa. It caused her breathing to accelerate. She wanted to run. This felt prophetic, and she didn’t want to turn a corner and find Elijah’s best friend dead on the floor.

  But they didn’t. They checked the whole house, even the finished basement. Jeremy was gone. Things were missing, too.

  “He was packing a luggage when we were here last. Remember?” Elijah asked. “I saw it on the stairs. I saw him packing. His luggage is gone.”

  “Maybe his uncle got here before…whatever happened here happened. Maybe he just left with him.”

  Elijah nodded but didn’t look totally convinced. There was no way to even call him. Phones were barely working, texting was non-existent right now, and the internet was a bust. She worried she was wrong and that his friend was dead. If that were the case, then where was his body? She hoped they didn’t find it.

  “Elijah, we should…” she couldn’t bring herself to finish.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Want to go to the neighbor’s now or should we skip it?”

  He already seemed upset before they left his house. Suggesting they raid his best friend’s house for supplies they might be able to use would probably make him hate her.

  “No, I’ve met Mr. Crenshaw quite a few times. It’s cool. Let’s go.”

  When they stepped outside again, the blue skies and sun were fading away and were replaced with gray and clouds. The wind had also picked up as she walked beside Elijah through Jeremy’s yard over to the neighbor’s house a few doors down. He knocked on the front door.

  “Think he left?” she asked.

  Elijah knocked a few more times. Then he went around to the side of the house, and Wren followed. The garage door was up. Elijah went into the man’s garage, squeezing past his big SUV. He knocked on the door, which pushed inward. He turned to look at her with apprehension on his face. She shrugged. The man was heavily armed according to Jeremy, so just walking in could get them shot. Calling out to him could get them attacked by someone who might not be Mr. Crenshaw.

  He took a step up, and Wren grabbed his jacket. Her eyes implored him to stop, but Elijah frowned down at her.

  “Wait here,” he whispered.

  She hesitated before nodding. Then she waited what seemed like forever before Elijah came back to her.

  “He’s gone. He and his wife are gone. The guns are gone, too.”

  “Oh, wow. Looks like people are moving out of here fast,” she remarked as they went back to the truck.

  “Let’s go to that res
taurant where Lila worked,” he said, pulling out onto the road again.

  They drove in silence, which in turn drove her to madness. She just wanted to know what was wrong.

  “Text Jamie and tell him our status,” he said curtly.

  “Yeah, sure. That’s a good idea if texting was working,” she sent over an update, which didn’t go through.

  “Right, sorry,” he remembered. “Let’s just go.”

  She nodded.

  “Elijah, is everything ok?” she asked, avoiding the topic of his friend.

  “Yeah, sure,” he said without emotion.

  That didn’t leave her feeling any better about the situation. She didn’t bother him again as he drove them to the district where the restaurant was supposed to be located. Wren wasn’t very familiar with the area.

  “We’re gonna need more ammunition,” he said out of the blue.

  “You think so?”

  “Your unc…Jamie said he’s got about a hundred rounds for the rifle and about the same for his pistol. Yours takes a different caliber, and he said he only has three more magazines for it.”

  “Seems like a lot to me. That’s two hundred and forty or so rounds.”

  He shot her an incredulous look. “At the rate we’re blowing through ammo? No, we need a lot more.”

  She nodded as he pulled into the parking lot of a two-story mansion with a long addition off the back. Elijah pulled right up to the back door. On the side of the building where patrons would’ve gone in, there was a sign that was unlit in neon, Luigi’s Fine Italian Cuisine and Bar. A green awning covered a short walkway to the restaurant’s double doors.

  “Have you ever been here before?” she asked as he cut the engine.

  “Yeah, last year for dinner with a group of friends.”

  “Oh, yeah? With a girl?” she hinted with a playful smile.

  “Yeah, with a group of friends,” he answered without teasing or joking. “Ready?”

  She nodded, feeling even more dismayed than before. They got out and shut their doors quietly. Elijah hit the locks with the remote. The tweet of the alarm system engaging seemed so loud in the quiet business district. Across the street was a florist. Beside that a candy shop and two law offices, but no traffic on any streets. Luigi’s was a stand-alone building, but there were other former homes converted into businesses, too. An antique shop flanked the restaurant to the right. To the left was a pizza shop, then a jewelry store next to a wine cellar boasting of the best aged wines from Amish country, whatever that meant. Luigi’s looked like a classy place, and the district looked old and well-established. Lila said she made great tips and worked with a fun group, especially a girl Wren’s age named Jane something or other.