One shot rang out, and then another, as travelers targeted what they thought was my father’s location. In reality, he was about thirty yards to the west and ten yards behind where the shots went. The portable, wireless speaker was the size of a shoebox, and I doubted any of them would be able to score a hit.
Dad’s rifle spoke, and we all followed suit. During the slow approach of the raiders, we’d already determined our targets and the order of our shots. The men with rifles on the other side went down first, struck in the opening moments. I shot a man holding what appeared to be a scoped hunting rifle, the bullet striking him in the side of the neck and punching out a spray of blood that looked black in the distorted view of the goggles.
I went to the next target, a man firing a short-barreled assault rifle in my direction, and saw my shots strike first his upper chest, and then low on the face. He was dead before his head hit the ground. And then I was looking for my third target when I saw the effects of the automatic gunfire from Beth’s team strike down my next two targets.
The automatic fire, except for the shots from Beth, were sprayed in the general vicinity of the enemy force. The sudden eruption of suppressed weapons from an unexpected angle doomed the attackers, though they couldn’t tell it in the dark. I saw at least half a dozen of the raiders fall in those first few seconds, and then we were was simply mopping up the rest.
If I saw a weapon in hand, that person died. Simple rules of engagement at this point. They had wounded, screaming for mercy or momma or some unknown source of absent comfort, but I didn’t pay those cries any attention. I’d heard it all before and I wasn’t interested.
“Hold your fire,” my father whispered in my ear. “We need some prisoners.”
I stopped firing. Though the radio call had not been directed specifically at me, I had been the only one methodically shooting each of the wounded. I was careful to check to see if my target had a rope around their neck before I squeezed the trigger each time.
“Everybody hold tight,” my dad continued, now sounding like a golf announcer as he asked for each of us to check in on the radio. He was counting heads, I realized. If you couldn’t respond, that likely meant you were dead or critically wounded. The time seemed to stretch on for hours, not minutes, as the calls came in. I felt a profound sense of relief creep over me as finally the last caller, Connie, chimed in with a “present.”
After that, the cleanup began and we worked steadily until the first tinge of daylight broke the horizon. Despite my best efforts, some of the raider wounded survived. The two women who’d been roped together by the neck survived, too, though the older of the two women sported a bloody wound to her side. A mere flesh wound, Beth said as she tended to the injury.
As for me, I had my assignment already. Getting out my rubber kitchen gloves, I got to work piling up the dead and preparing them for a mass grave over on Boot Hill. That was where my family had been burying all the dead raiders. No prayers, no headstones, just a common shallow grave and a heart-felt good riddance.
I still hated having to handle the dead, going through their pockets and piling up the pitiful collection of what they considered loot. This crew was heavy on precious metals, mainly gold rings and what looked like the contents of a coin collection but light on food and ammunition. Lots of blades, however, and the ones I examined closely looked to have been poorly cleaned. I resolved to get a big pot and boil the whole lot. Forget rusting, I was worried about nicking myself and risking any of a number of blood-borne illnesses.
No, I didn’t like cleaning up after the battle, but that was a job I could handle. I did a lot of stuff I hated, and so far survived to tell the tale. And bitch about it. When my dad came to check on me, I assured him I was fine.
“I’m all right, Dad. Better me than some of the youngsters having to do this. Not fun, but not as bad taking a long walk in the rain, you know.”
“Yeah, I know. I just hate…you know, I just hate this world for you. And Paige, but you’ve been bearing the brunt of these changes, I’d say.”
Dad got pensive for a moment, and I let him have his time. He’d already found two of the raiders to interrogate, as well as the two prisoners we’d liberated. The ladies in our group would get the details from the two women, but I could help with the two raiders.
“Dad, why don’t you go spend some time with Mom and Paige? I know Paige still needs a lot of your attention after what happened to Grandpa. She still blames herself, you know. Last night can’t have been good for her. Go spend time there, and I’ll get with Mike and we can question those two.”
Dad glanced up and saw I was serious and a frown set across his bearded features. “Christ, Luke. Can you do what needs to be done? Mike and I usually have to water board these guys to get any answers.”
I laughed. “Waterboarding? Shoot, I never tried that. Never had the water to spare. Usually I just scared the shit out of them until they spilled. No, I’ve never done full-on torture, but I’ve always been able to make them talk.”
“Full-on torture? As opposed to what?” Dad asked, but my expression answered his question more clearly than words.
“Is there any horror you haven’t seen, Luke? Don’t…don’t answer that. Just, get these weapons cleaned up and spend some time with Amy. I’ll find out what these jokers know and we can discuss the details later.”
All right, I thought. Suit yourself. As I collected up the stack of firearms, I thought about possibly giving some of the ammunition, at least, to the Greenville folks.
God bless them, they showed up at the fence near the break-in within twenty minutes of the first shot fired. At first we worried these were reinforcements, but then I recognized Paul and Wes leading the four-man team.
Short on ammunition and still nearly broken in body and spirit, they came to help us hold off the invasion. They would do as neighbors and friends, I decided. Time would tell, but I already had a good feeling about these people. Well, goodish.
And I would see about getting them better weapons for the future. And radios, too. I knew we would be needing friends at some point, and I thought about that old saying I read in one of my father’s books. A friend helps you move, but a good friend helps you move a dead body. Well, we had plenty of corpses now and good friends these days helped you make them into dead bodies.
Pretty soon, I knew, we’d be able to assimilate these other survivors into our own system. I figured that for Dad’s long-term goals, since he was willing to let some of them inside the wire to work in the gardens. They would become part of what we had here, but only after Dad had a chance to evaluate each one of them. But not today, and not right now. We would thank these people for their concern and send them home with news of our victory here.
Though I didn’t recognize any of the dead, I could well imagine that before the lights went out, these scattered meat sacks had been neighbors, or at least people you passed with a polite word in the grocery store. Now they were worm food, and I couldn’t muster up enough emotion to feel sympathy, or even anger. I was tired, and I still had dead to bury.
Maybe tomorrow I would find the key to my lost emotions. Or something. Now I had to finish this nasty chore and go find Amy for some reassurance. Nothing to it, I lied to myself, still better than walking in the rain.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
The drive into Center was surreal. I think that was the right term, anyway. Coming through the area that first time, my attention was not the best, and I knew I was experiencing tunnel vision at the idea of getting home. Now, my head was on straight and I was scanning my sector carefully. The changes I noted made my heart heavy with realization.
The winding two lane was not exactly a well-traveled thoroughfare before the lights went out. Thoroughfare. I always liked that word. It sounded sophisticated. Anyway, as I looked closely, I could make out the telltale signs of refugees having passed this way. Stripped and looted vehicles dotted the roadway, of course, but so did the abandoned detritus of c
ountless pedestrians walking this stretch of blacktop.
Damaged shopping carts and discarded roller luggage littered the downtrodden grass shoulders. I thought I saw shapes that might have been bodies rolled off in the ditches. I had to look away from the baby strollers tossed haphazardly aside, praying they were unoccupied.
We rode in Dad’s big king cab diesel, with the old man driving and me riding shotgun with the barrel of my CETME barely sticking out of the lowered window. After the ambush two days ago, I was determined to stick with my bigger rifle whenever possible. One shot with the thing was enough to take down just about any threat I faced, and with the scope, I was good out to four or five hundred yards, even using surplus or reloaded ammunition.
The squish factor on my range was bullet placement. I could consistently hit a man-sized target at five hundred yards, but at four hundred, I was pretty comfortable with headshots. No, still no zombies, but if my target was wearing body armor, the big .308 Winchester round was likely to penetrate. If not, then a headshot. Maybe I was paranoid, but if we saw any more of those Homeland thugs, I was going for headshots all day long.
As we motored down the road, I really wished we could have brought two vehicles, and Dad shared my concern, but we simply lacked the manpower. For about the hundredth time since returning home, I wished some more of my father’s friends had made it to the ranch.
In the back seat, Lori and Beth sat flanking one of the new women, Kate Carnahan, rescued from the gang two nights ago. She was the main reason we were late in our planned visit to town. The original plan had Mike accompanying his wife, but Kate was too freaked out being that close to a strange man. Recalling Sarah Trimble’s reactions, I quietly suggested we take Lori in place of Mike.
Beth needed to go. Kate was wounded in the fight, taking a round in the upper chest that was ugly and bloody but not immediately life threatening. We didn’t know who shot her, but I suspected it was one of us. That was a sad but likely occurrence when the bullets started flying.
Regardless, she needed antibiotics and Beth was adamant about not depleting our own stocks more than necessary. She was a healer, but Beth was also skilled at triage, too. Kate was not staying, and she wasn’t one of us. I didn’t know the reason Kate wasn’t getting to stick around, but Beth made her pronouncement and I didn’t raise a stink. Anyway, no sense wasting valuable, nonrenewable resources on such a person. Hard truth, but still the way of the world these days.
The other woman rescued, actually a teenage girl I knew slightly from school, begged us to let her stay at the ranch even before Uncle Billy stood over her to help her stand. The shooting had barely stopped at this point and I could hear the moans of the wounded over her pleading.
Her name was Maggie Cartwright, and she would have graduated in another week if the lights had not gone out. We weren’t really friends, but she recognized me. Probably not by name, but as the sophomore with the big brain.
“What are you doing here?” she’d asked.
“I live here,” I had responded.
“Well, then I want to stay here too,” she announced, and started laughing and crying at the same time. Delayed stress reaction, Beth later called it. I knew the feeling, though, and I didn’t need a health care professional to give me the explanation. Against the odds, and all reason, she was still alive.
We sat around the expanded dining room table at our house, eating a late breakfast. Beth had whisked Kate away to the Big House to treat her wounds and probably debrief the woman while Maggie seemed to have latched on to me. I expected Amy to fuss, but she just gave me a tolerant smile as Maggie clung to my arm.
Maggie barely stopped eating long enough to talk, but the story she told was as horrifying as it was predictable. When the lights went out, she was at school and thought the whole thing was just another power outage. When nearly all of the cars in the parking lot refused to start, Maggie said she felt a little anxious, but eventually the school administrators got everybody home, one way or another. For Maggie, it was riding home on an overloaded school bus that barely rolled to a stop in front of her house before continuing on down the dirt road.
At home, Maggie tried to make her parents understand the magnitude of what had happened, but her parents and older brother thought she might be exaggerating the threat. Then, when her father tried to start the truck for a trip into town, only then did he begin to recognize just how much damage this power outage might cause.
“Stewart and Mom didn’t get why Dad was so upset at first, but as the days went on and we didn’t hear anything, my mother started getting worried, too.”
She paused, taking a long sip of her glass of milk and gave a satisfied sigh of pleasure.
“We lived in a little house about five miles outside Center, back towards the forestry road, you know? We didn’t have many neighbors close by, just a couple of retirees that lived on their Social Security checks. Dad and Mom would go by each day and look in on the Mitchells, but neither one said how the old folks were doing. That is, until one day when Mom came home crying. I guess it was about two weeks after the lights went out. She said Mrs. Mitchell was dead. Dad and Stewart headed up first and dug a grave and we all went to pay our respects. She was the first. Mrs. Mitchell, I mean. The next week, Dad found Mr. Mitchell. He was dead, too. Dad dug the grave himself and buried Mr. Mitchell next to his wife.”
I nodded as Maggie paused again. She seemed to be searching for how to tell this next part, as if embarrassed by the likely revelation. I decided to help her out.
“If the Mitchells had anything useful in their house, I’m sure they would have welcomed your family to use what they left behind. That’s been the way of it in places I’ve seen, anyway.”
Usually after killing the family in the house, I didn’t mention. No need to add that caveat. I figured things went down just like Maggie described, or she wouldn’t have even mentioned the old couple in the first place.
“Yeah, well, they had a lot of canned food in their pantry still,” she allowed, “and Momma couldn’t see letting the food go to waste. We were just about out at our place, and the garden wasn’t producing enough to keep up.”
They got by on collected rainwater and what they could carry from the stream at the back of their property. They carried water in five-gallon buckets and used a garden cart to do the hauling, she explained. They always boiled their water for drinking and kept a separate supply for the garden. The Cartwrights were losing weight, shedding those extra pounds we all carried before the lights went out, but making it all the same.
Maggie said she hadn’t seen another soul outside her family for nearly three months after the Mitchells died. She admitted with some dark humor how she was going stir-crazy from the isolation at first, but two weeks after the lights went out, her father hiked into town, hoping to find answers and maybe some additional supplies.
He returned that evening empty handed and only gave terse responses to the questioning by their kids. Maggie figured whatever he found was too disturbing to want to share. She decided being lonely was preferred to being dead. I thought she must be pretty smart to have figured that out on her own.
From the beginning of the emergency, they heard gunshots at all hours, day and night, but after a while, her father created a roadblock of sorts about a half mile up the dusty dirt road to further protect the family. He pulled down a couple of old trees, cutting them carefully to make the fall look like a natural break. After that, they managed to sleep a little easier at night.
So they hunkered down and tried to make the food stretch. She was worried about trying to make it through winter with so little, but in the end that didn’t matter.
“They came in the night, breaking down the doors and screaming into the house like animals. They reminded me of rabid pit bulls, eager to tear something apart. My folks, they killed my parents without even saying anything. Just hauled them out of bed and drug them out in the yard. I didn’t see it happen, but I heard the screaming, my momma’s sc
reaming, and the shots. Then the screaming stopped.”
Maggie looked down at her empty plate and didn’t say another word. She made no mention of her brother, or of what happened to her after the gang hit their house. I didn’t want to think about it, and whatever Dad found out from the raiders, he kept to himself.
I was thinking about Maggie when we were driving, and something about her story reminded me of something I meant to ask a while back.
“Hey Lori,” I called out, just loud enough to be heard over the wind and the engine noise.
“Yeah?”
“How come you guys were already out of school? I mean, I just remembered what Maggie said about getting home. We still had another week of school left when the lights went out, but I recall Helena saying she and Scott got their diplomas from high school. And you all were in Arkansas at cheerleading camp. How did that work?”
“Uh, because we got out of school before you guys did,” Lori responded with a curious tone. “And how were you able to go to Chicago if you still had school?”
“I already took my exams before I left, and we were only going to be there for three days. Friday, Saturday and fly back Sunday. I was planning on seeing some of my friends graduate, you know.”
“Like Maggie?”
“Hah!” I replied, but not bitterly. Much. “She seems like a nice enough girl but I didn’t know her or her group of friends. Not more than to just say hi. Remember, I didn’t grow up here. Outsider and all that.”
“Was it really that bad?” Dad asked, breaking into the conversation. Maybe not smoothly, but he was a father. They did things like that.
“No, not really,” I replied, hedging away from being totally honest. I was accustomed to being the new kid, but a small town like Center, and the even smaller community of Ripley, regarded newcomers with more than a touch of standoffish attitude.
“We were in different grades is all,” I continued, “but I had some friends from sports I wanted to see graduate. Some of the guys from the football team and all that.”
Walking in the Rain (Book 4): Dark Sky Thunder Page 13