“What’s going on here?” old man Sutton said.
“I told all of you to wait outside.”
“You’re not going to torture that man! If you do, I’m leaving with my car.”
“You’re not taking that car anywhere,” Cade said.
He then walked up to Sutton and hit him in the neck with the bolt cutters, dropping him to his knees. Cade then punched Sutton and he died there on the cold floor.
One of the other three men came running up to Sutton and checked his pulse.
“You killed him, Cade!”
“It was an accident.”
The man stood back up and looked at the others. They walked outside together and got into Sutton’s car. When Cade heard the car start, he ran outside and pointed his rifle at the driver’s side window. The driver, not seeing Cade, put the car in reverse and looked over his right shoulder to back out.
The man in the front passenger seat said, “He’s pointing his gun at us.”
As soon as the driver looked back forward, a shot rang out from Cade’s rifle. The bullet struck the driver in the head and the car accelerated in reverse until it came to a stop in the building across the street. Cade turned and walked back into the area where Nathan was still bleeding.
“We better bandage that up so you don’t bleed out on my floor.”
Cade took the bandage off of his head and used Nathan’s Ka-Bar to cut it into smaller pieces. He then wrapped Nathan’s finger to help slow the bleeding.
“You have nine more fingers, Nate. That’s twenty-seven more joints I can trim. Now, I’m asking nicely. Where’s Jess?”
Nathan was breathing heavy when he said, “They’re going to come looking for me.”
“Oh yeah. I almost forgot.”
Cade walked outside.
Nathan saw him walk past a couple windows and around the corner. When he came back in, he had a digital-camouflaged bag. Fear was now gripping Nathan’s heart as he recognized the bag. It was Ash’s.
Nathan began to cry.
“Apparently, Ash grew tired of waiting on you. He left on his own to find you and Jess. He told me that he had one hoot of a firefight with the UN guys that were here. Before he died, he told me that they beat those blue helmets. I thought that was good news.”
Cade unzipped the backpack and dumped the contents onto the floor.
Nathan stared in horror at Ash’s head as it rolled out onto the uneven floorboards and into the corner of the room, where it came to a rest facing Nathan.
“No need to squirt, Nate. It’s not like you haven’t killed a few people. You gunned down my entire Southside Raiders party.”
When Cade said those words, it was the same feeling one would have putting the final piece of a 50,000 word puzzle together. Everything made sense and he now had the broader picture, only the sense of achievement wasn’t there.
Nathan’s thoughts went back to Gorham when his sister was shot and bled out in his hands. He thought of Denny’s sister and how she was burned alive. The fire that torched her was now burning inside of Nathan. He stared into Cade’s eyes and he lost all sense of time and space. He felt only hate as adrenaline began shooting through his veins; he began hurling threats at Cade, completely forgetting that Cade was holding all the cards. His tunnel vision was narrowed as he stared into his eyes.
“Well, now. We can’t be having you talking to me like that,” Cade said, picking his rifle up out of the corner.
Walking up to Nathan, he pulled the bolt back, ejecting an empty shell to chamber a new one. He raised his rifle up to Nathan’s head and placed it against his forehead.
“This is the part where we say our goodbyes.”
Nathan was still full of rage and firmly pressed his forehead against the tip of the rifle, as if inviting Cade to pull the trigger and end his misery.
The shot rang out and blood splattered all over Nathan’s face. Cade dropped dead, revealing two figures standing in the doorway. One was a female with a silver 1911 in hand.
“And stay down!” Tori said.
“Cunningham?”
“Hey, tiger. Heard you were bleeding,” Tori said as she and Denny moved in to cut him free.
“Denny, I came looking for you.”
“Don’t worry about it, bro. I’m glad to see you’re still alive.”
Nathan stood up and hugged Denny and Tori.
“Cunningham, what are you doing here?”
“I’ve been chasing you for days. You tend to leave bullet holes and body counts wherever you go.”
“There’s so much to catch up on.’
“We can catch up later. It’s good to see you again,” Tori said, looking deep into Nathan’s eyes.
Nathan’s emotions were less like a man’s and more like a roller coaster as he went from fear, to hate, to anger, and then into Tori’s eye’s, where he felt only a sense of passion. He had had a crush on Tori for a long time, but she was married to Richard and had two daughters with him. He knew his own boundaries and refused to cross them. He wanted to ask her a ton of questions, but like she said, they could catch up later.
“I found your rifle, Denny,” Nathan said. “It must be in this back room.”
Nathan walked into the back room and recovered everything that had been taken from him, minus the MRE that old man Sutton ate. Walking out, Nathan realized how bad the situation was that he had barely survived.
He handed Denny his rifle, stepped over Cade, and knelt down by Sutton.
“I think he was a good guy, just lied to,” Nathan said, trying to keep Denny’s eyes off of Ash’s head.
“We heard a gunshot and then a loud crash,” Denny said.
“We need to wrap that a little better,” Tori said, grabbing the hand that Nathan had a pinky joint cut from.
Denny dropped his pack and removed a spool of gauze wrap. He took off the old wrap that Cade had applied, and replaced it with a clean wrap.
“That’ll do for now,” Denny added as he put away what was left of his gauze and grabbed his rifle and Cade’s rifle from the floor.
Denny turned around to leave and Nathan said, “Wait!” coming between him and Ash’s head. “Let me get the door for you.”
Tori saw what Nathan was doing and recognized Ash.
Before the Flip, the tightest members of the group were Nathan Roeh, Denny Ackers, Ash Dennings, Zig Sumner, Todd Smith, Stephen Gill, and Tori Cunningham. They were always the faithful participants in group meetings and training sessions. That’s why when Tori and Stephen didn’t show up at the Gorham rally point, it concerned Nathan so much. Life had been hectic since then and Nathan hadn’t taken much time to dwell on their whereabouts. Sometimes he would wonder where they were and if they were still alive. Seeing Tori was both refreshing and heart sinking. He had growing feelings for Jess, but now there was Tori. When he saw where Tori and Denny were standing, he knew there was no way to shield them both from seeing Ash’s head against the wall, but he thought he would give it a try and went for Denny.
Nathan went to pull the door open, stepping aside to reveal Ash’s head.
“Denny, he died searching for me. Cade got to him before he found me.”
“The ground’s frozen,” Tori said. “There’s no way to bury him.”
“He deserves a warrior’s burial,” Denny replied. “He was one of the best nonveteran group members we had. He made bad decisions, but he made good ones, too.”
Denny looked up at Tori and said, “Remember Todd?”
“Yeah?”
“Todd died because of one of those bad decisions. Ash, here, went out on a fool’s errand, and Todd was shot when we went looking for him. I punched Ash in the face that day for what he had done.”
“Denny, we’ve all made mistakes, good and bad. Let’s check the perimeter and find his body. We’ll burn him before we leave.”
Nathan, Tori, and Denny left in search of Ash’s body, but it was never recovered. That afternoon, they had a private memorial service for Morga
n, Blake, and Ash.
By the time they had caught up with what was left of the Marines, much of the weapons, ammunition, and food supplies from the UN encampment were already loaded into the HMMWVs and the Deuces, which was military slang for two-ton trucks.
Jess saw Nathan and Denny walking towards them with a woman. When she saw Nathan was still alive and with Denny, she was overwhelmed with gladness. She took off running towards them.
Nathan saw her coming and was feeling an onset of awkwardness, which was sure to be the norm for some time to come. When she reached him, Nathan handed Denny his rifle and he caught her and did the usual spin-around-and-kiss routine, which had become their own custom.
“I feared the worst but hoped for the best,” Jess told Nathan.
“We lost Ash and Morgan. We almost lost Denny, but Tori saved his hide. Tori, this is Jess. We met her back in Chester. Jess, this is Tori. She was a member of our Home Guard group. When she never showed up, I figured her for dead,” Nathan said as he looked into Tori’s eyes.
Jess read Nathan’s emotional comment as he peered into Tori’s eyes.
“After the Flip, Richard refused to come with me, so I stayed with him. He was killed with Charity in a house fire set by looters. Amelia was kidnapped and traded for liquor and later killed by a cannibal in the Belleville area.”
Nobody knew how to respond to Tori’s story of perseverance. What she had gone through was unimaginable horror to the group members. All Nathan could do was let go of Jess’s hand and hug Tori.
Denny was also feeling the awkwardness of the situation, and he parted to assist the Marines and militiamen. The group spent the rest of the day warming up in the heated UN headquarters building and taking advantage of the generator. The train’s engine was destroyed by a TOW missile, rendering it useless, and the prisoners that had been loaded in it were set free. Many of them were sharply divided in opinion. Some were disgruntled because, despite the shackles, they believed they were going someplace safe to finish out their lives, but the others were happy to be freed because they had been taken at gunpoint and weren’t buying the UN’s story of relocation and government housing. Most of the people were starving, but were sent away because there simply wasn’t enough food to save them all.
The generators were portable, but ran on fuel, another resource that was hard to come by. Fortunately for the group, there were loads of fuel, food, and water on some of the rear cars of the train. They loaded what they could and rationed out what was left to the people they had freed.
CHAPTER XI
Gary, Indiana, December 14
Pastor Rory Price was less than ten miles from East Chicago and the Illinois border. By chance, he stumbled into a group of travelers that gave him a ride to his current location. Albeit, he was given several warnings not to travel in this area alone, he took the warnings into consideration and departed on foot towards what he hoped to be Buchanan’s primary destination. He wasn’t sure of what he was looking for, but Buchanan’s task had changed from Goose Island to South Dakota, and Rory wasn’t up to the task of traveling so far from home. Looking back, Rory was starting to miss the company and wondered if he had made the right choice. Regardless, he now found himself at the cusp of a life-altering time in history.
Looking around at his environment, Rory knew he had a long road ahead of him. He was now standing in front of what appeared to be an old college or academy of sorts. The windows were broken and the doors were open. He thought for a second about going inside to get out of the cold just long enough to collect his thoughts.
Gary, Indiana, was once a town of 80,000 people, but now it looked like a ghost town. Choosing not to enter the building, he walked north along its east wall until he came to Roosevelt Park and saw a Lutheran church building across the street. Rory wasn’t a Lutheran, but he knew the building was just a place of worship. As he walked closer to it, he saw signs in the yard with Persian writing on them. He recognized the language from his Bible college days. He couldn’t read a word of it, but knew it was a warning.
Decades before the Flip, Muslims were marking Christian churches with symbols that communicated to other Muslims the need to destroy the building or to kill its members. This symbol was one of those. He noticed that the windows were busted and pews from the inside were sitting in the yard. He raised his rifle to the high ready position and proceeded to move towards the building. It was a large two-story building and had two steeples.
If nothing else, I can get a better view from one of those, he thought.
Rory entered the chapel and made his way to the spiral staircase that took him to the top of the steeple. From the top, he looked north and saw Lake Michigan and a great deal of smoke plumes. The smoke plumes were alarming simply because there were so many of them. The smoke plumes were stemming from smokestacks, and where smokestacks are, there are factories. Rory reasoned that the factories were being operated by manpower. The biggest question stirring in his mind was Are these factories being operated by federal employees, slave labor, or UN personnel? Secondly, he wondered, What are the factories manufacturing?
The wind shifted and Rory smelled burning hair. The odor was pungent enough to leave the steeple and descend the staircase. He exited the back door and saw a pile of human remains that were burnt to a crisp. They had been there for some time and the pile wasn’t releasing the pungent odor that he had smelled from the top of the steeple. This was a different smell, more like old decomposing flesh. Closer examination revealed that these people were probably Christians, likely captured, killed, and burned by jihadist Muslims.
Rory said a quick prayer for himself and started heading north until he had traveled about two miles and came to a thirteen-story building. It had the best vantage point of anything in the area, so he had determined to climb the emergency exit stairs until he reached the roof. From this vantage point, he was able to see the factories and the smokestacks with great detail. In addition, there were trains rolling in and out of the area. He had never seen so many trains in one place. From his position, he could not see people, but he saw larger moving and stationary objects. He saw a great number of shipping containers being brought in on barges to the same location where the trains were bringing in their shipments.
Putting two and two together, Rory was beginning to understand the enormity of what he was seeing. The trains and barges were acting almost in unison as they came into the port and dropped off what he believed to be people. The trains had been coming in from the south to converge at this location, while the barges appeared to be coming down the banks of Lake Michigan to drop off their shipments of shipping containers. Rory was not a geography major, but was fairly certain the Mississippi didn’t tie into Lake Michigan. He reasoned that the only two plausible options were that internationals from the Great Lakes area were also shipping people south to this location or that the containers were empty and being shipped to the US from Canada.
Slave labor? he thought.
The questions were more sophisticated now than before. He was looking for a FEMA camp and found a large manufacturing plant with manpower, electricity, and transport.
What’s going on here?
“Take it easy, mister, and you won’t get hurt,” a male voice said from behind him.
The voice startled Rory, causing him to spin around and grab for his rifle, which was still slung on his shoulder.
“I said easy mister,” he warned again.
Rory saw a black male, about six-foot-two-inches tall, grizzled looking and in his forties.
“I’m taking it easy. You just startled me is all,” Rory said with his hands rising slowly. “I don’t have anything worthwhile.”
“Why are you just assuming I’m going to take your stuff?” the man asked.
“That’s kind of been the nature of the times.”
“Why are you up here?”
“I was traveling from southern Illinois to Goose Island, and I thought I could get a vantage point from up here.”<
br />
“Why you want Goose Island?”
“I was traveling with a few companions and the plan was to free the people from the UN internment camps, but the plan went south, and now I’m alone.”
“Ain’t nobody getting into Goose Island. It’s a fortress.”
“We will.”
“Who’s we?”
“I’m sure they’ll be heading back, at some point. When they do, Goose Island will fall.”
The man studied Rory for a moment then lowered his rifle. “Are you hungry?”
“Actually, yeah, I’m pretty hungry. I’ve been saving what little I have.”
“My name is Markus. I have some friends downstairs. They said they spotted you from the ground level. I tracked you up here.”
Markus walked over by Rory.
Rory extended his hand and said, “My name is Rory.”
“Glad to meet you, Rory. I see you found the old steelworks,” Markus said, pointing to the smoke plumes.
“What’s going on over there?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Please, enlighten me.”
“It’s a crematorium.”
Rory was clearly shocked by the answer. “A crematorium?”
“Yeah. We don’t have all the answers, but we believe some of the shipments are dead bodies and other shipments are, well, live cremations.”
“Live cremations, as in burned alive?”
“Exactly. After the Flip, we started seeing these trains from the south and barges from the Kankakee and Illinois Rivers converging to this location. We tracked them from the time they were captured until they reached the crematorium. They marched live Americans from those shipping containers and trains into those buildings that are nothing more than giant superheated ovens.”
“This doesn’t make any sense. What about the FEMA camps?”
“The camps are where they keep the elect.”
“The elect?”
“Yeah, the chosen ones. There’s a few they keep alive because they stand a better chance at being more productive or useful for what the UN calls Relocation Protocol.”
“I’ve heard of the protocol. So, the whole spill they are telling the people is that they are being relocated, but they are actually separating the better educated and productive members of society from the sick and needy, only to take them there?”
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