The Haven Series (Book 2): Haven

by Brian M. Switzer

  The man turned onto the street and continued in reverse until he had the SUV straightened out. He slammed the shifter up into first gear, his feet working the pedals with practiced ease. The tires spun, trying to find traction in the blood and gore. He reached for the four-wheel-drive button but before he could engage it the tires gripped the asphalt and the Jeep leaped forward.

  Heavy breathing was the only sound in the cabin. Danny watched the creepers get smaller in the distance then turned his attention to the driver. The mighty warrior was now a kind and wise-looking older man, looking back at him with a wry smile.

  “Pardon the outfit. It’s my opinion the biters have trouble seeing the color red.” He extended a hand. “Dr. Samuel Elliot Joseph, at your service. Let’s see if we can’t patch up your friend’s leg.”

  The Doc Draws Down

  * * *

  Danny hung on tight as Dr. Joseph raced the Jeep down Oak Street, headed west. “I’ve still got my little office out off of old Highway 66,” the doc said. “We’ll see to his wound there.” He reached into the center console and pulled out two bottles of water. “Share those around,” he told Danny.

  Danny handed one bottle back to Mark and took a big swig from the other. The water was blessedly sweet and he had to force himself to stop drinking after draining half the container.

  He leaned over his seat and held the bottle to Jiri’s dry lips, tilting it just enough to wet them. “Not too much buddy,” he whispered. “I don’t want you getting sick on me.”

  Jiri nodded and fell back against the rear seat, wincing each time the SUV bounced over a bump in the road.

  “I was in town to get feed at the co-op,” the doctor said, “when the three of you limped by a couple of blocks over. I stayed close in case you got yourselves in a jam, and you did.”

  Danny regarded the man top to bottom and confirmed he resembled Santa Claus, down to his wire-rimmed glasses. “We’re sure grateful to you,” he sighed. “You saved our bacon. I’m Danny Wilson, that’s Mark Renner behind you, and the fella with the boo-boo on his leg is Jiri Horsky. We’re much obliged.”

  They turned onto a lane lined on each side with what graceful stone and brick homes set well off the road. The houses displayed big front porches with columns and wide steps, and balconies outside the second-story windows. Swimming pools and tennis courts dotted the long, sloping lawns. This was where the dentists, doctors, and members of the executive suite lived. Danny filed the neighborhood away in his mind for later scavenging missions. They raced past those houses, wheeled around a curve and then made a screeching left. He was lost, and a little nonplussed that the kindly old doctor behind the wheel drove like a NASCAR pro.

  “How did you fellas end up afoot on the square?”

  “We’d heard a rumor that there were dry goods stored on the second floor of some of the buildings around there. Things were going fine until Mark back there,” he jerked a thumb toward the rear seat, “shot my partner. In a rare triple threat of stupidity, he put Jiri out of commission, spooked our horses and brought every creeper within a mile of the square down on top of us.” A glimpse in the visor mirror showed Mark with his head hung and his arms crossed over his chest.

  “Why did the one shoot the other?” The doctor’s smile had a perplexed slant to it.

  “Yeah, Mark, why’d you shoot Jiri?”

  “Just to watch me die,” Jiri muttered, leaning against the seat back and shivering.

  “No!” Mark looked up, eyes flashing; then he let out a deep breath and resumed staring at the floorboard. “I was trying to show them how light the trigger pull on my Beretta is.”

  The doctor smiled. “Boys will be boys, I guess,” he deadpanned. “Where are you gentlemen holed up, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Not at all. We’re out at The Underground.” The words were barely out of his mouth when the Jeep wrenched to the right and screeched to a stop. Alarmed, he searched the landscape outside his window and tried to find the threat. Seeing nothing, he turned back toward the doctor. The kindly older man was gone. Doc Joseph peered at him with cold, calculating eyes, and Danny stared down the barrel of a Colt .45.

  “The Underground, huh?” he spoke in a steely voice. “I heard what happens down there. A lot of murdering and raping is what I heard.”

  In Danny’s peripheral vision Mark reached for his Beretta.

  There was a flash of movement and the old man had the other Colt trained on Mark. “I wouldn’t do that,” he said in a calm voice, never taking his eyes off Danny.

  “Wheee,” Jiri sighed, slumping against the SUV’s door.

  “Hold on, now,” Danny said, his voice calm and level. “I can appreciate you being angry about what you might have heard, but that wasn’t us. Those things happened before we showed up down there.” The doctor didn’t say anything, just continued to stare at him with those cold and heavy-lidded eyes. The gun pointed at his face hadn’t fired and he took that as permission to continue. “As a matter of fact, my group is helping to make sure nothing else like that happens again.”

  He was silent for a moment, his mind racing. Doc Joseph sat unchanged, staring at him impassively; the twin colts never wavered. “Listen Doc, put the guns away. You’ve been a doctor around here for ages, right?” Danny nodded and rubbed his hands together. “Then you have to know Judge Tompkins.” He finally got a reaction- a flash of recognition in the man’s eyes. “That’s who we’ve been helping out down there. The Judge pulled a fast one on that bunch that was hurting people and then we showed up and now we’re all working together. Hell, Mark is The Judge’s number two guy.”

  Mark spoke up for the first time since the doctor drew down on them. “Everything he’s said is true, sir.”

  The doctor relaxed. He holstered one pistol and laid the other in his lap.

  Danny blew out a huge breath a rubbed the top of his head with his palm.

  “I’ll patch up your injured man, then take you three out to the caves myself. If what you are saying is true, I’ll apologize and pray God bless you. But if you’re lying, I’ll do my best to kill the lot of you before one of you get me.”

  “Fair enough.”

  The jeep swerved back onto the road. After a short distance, they turned down a long driveway. It ran straight for about seventy yards before veering sharply to the left and climbing a steep hill. At the top of the hill it turned right, splitting a copse of trees. When they emerged from the trees they came to a stop in front of a sheet-metal gate.

  “Run around and unlatch that gate Danny, then close it behind us,” the doctor said.

  On the other side of the gate, the drive went up another steep hill and parked in front of a neatly trimmed brick house. The house was the highest point for miles around and had a clear field of vision in every direction. The gate was part of an extensive circle of eight-foot-high fencing that he estimated ran a half mile around the property. A coil of razor wire topped the fence and wood beams ran at an angle from the ground to the middle of the fence, reinforcing it at ten-foot intervals.

  Danny whistled in appreciation of the layers of security. His admiration for the man grew. “How long did it take you to put all this up?”

  He didn’t answer at first. “You two follow behind me and help your man get inside.” He kept talking as they helped Jiri to the door. “I didn’t do a lick of this work. I retired a year ago last August and I had men out here working for three years before that.”

  Danny scratched his cheek with his free hand and looked around with a furrowed brow. “But why? That was a year and a half ago. There was no outbreak to justify all this yet.” He waved his arm around at the security measures.

  The doctor stopped to open a series of locks on the front door and turned the handle. They stepped inside the doorway and into a small foyer. There was a closed door to the right and a series of large open rooms to the left. Doc Joseph opened the door and pointed inside. “Bring him in here into the exam room. And son, to answer your que
stion- things haven’t been right in this country for a long time. I refused to see my retirement get ruined, so I prepared for the worst. I have to admit, though, I never figured dead folks getting up off the ground would be the problem we faced. Get his trousers off and get him up on the table.”

  Mark helped get Jiri up onto an exam table and supported him while Danny used his knife to cut through the blood-soaked denim above his wound. He scrutinized the room while he worked; something was off about it. The exam table Jiri huddled upon was unusually small and there were posters on the walls displaying various breeds of dogs and cats.

  The doctor picked up a black kit bag and set it on a counter across the room. He dug into the bag, pulling out an array of instruments and placing them on a tray. He set the tray on a high, narrow shelf next to the table. “Let’s see what we’re working with here,” he said in a gentle voice before bending to examine Jiri’s leg.

  “Say, doc,” Danny said, swallowing hard, “What was your specialty when you practiced?”

  “I was an old-fashioned country veterinarian,” he answered in a proud voice. He turned to Jiri. “Young man, time to get that slug out of your leg.”

  The Doc

  * * *

  Alone in his new— home? Apartment? Cubicle? Doc Joseph didn’t really know what to call it —he poured himself another shot and relived the events of the day.

  He’d fished the bullet out of Jiri’s leg- it had taken a little over an hour to remove the slug, suture the injured muscle, and sew the whole thing shut. For a gunshot victim, the man was fortunate. The bullet wasn’t through and through- his femur bone had stopped its progress. Often that resulted in a shattered femur but in this case luck, strong bones, or the man’s thick sheath of leg muscle prevented that. The main cause of death with gunshot wounds was blood loss. Had the bullet been an eighth of an inch to the right, it would have hit the femoral artery and he’d have bled out in minutes. To Jiri’s good fortune, it didn’t hit anything important and lodged against the femur without doing it any damage.

  Danny, stayed by his friend’s side the entire time. He wiped the man’s brow, kept up a steady stream of encouraging chatter, and even held a retractor while The Doc fished out the lead.

  “Help me get him on his good side,” The Doc said. He selected a large needle from the tray. “I need to get this into his hip.”

  Danny hoisted him over on his side. “What’s that?” he asked, as The Doc prepared to inject the needle in a spot just under Jiri’s hip bone.

  “It’s a mixture of Dilaudid for pain, fentanyl to keep him calm, and an antibiotic.”

  Danny gave him a sharp look. “You use that on cats and dogs?”

  The Doc drummed his fingers on the metal table for a moment. “Let’s just say this procedure isn’t the first I’ve done on a human since the world turned to shit.”

  Danny nodded, and The Doc proceeded with the injection. He rolled Jiri onto his back and patted his leg with care. “He will need to rest for two hours, then we’ll get him on his feet. That will help to prevent his leg from stiffening up. ”He peeled his surgical gloves off and tossed them in a nearby wastebasket. He pointed at the grounds visible through a bay window on the far side of the office. “You and the shooter can explore the grounds if you’d like. But I need you here in ninety minutes so we can discuss the terms you must follow if I’m to take you back.”

  Eighty-eight minutes later Danny and Mark had returned and The Doc laid out his plan. The duo went plum nuts. They sputtered, they argued, they cajoled, they threatened. He was unswayed. He would return them to the quarry in his fashion, or he’d open the gate to the outside and they could try to get back on their own- those were the only options.

  “And I’ll tell you another thing, Chipper,” he told Danny, “if I get down there and get an inkling that things are the way I’ve heard, your life won’t be worth a bucket of cold piss. So think about that before you decide you want to do it my way.”

  His way took place two hours later and began with the doc’s truck crashing through the barrier next to the guard shack at the quarry entrance and careening down the hill. They raced across the bottom and came sliding to a stop near the entrance to The Judge’s tunnel.

  The Doc looked in his rearview mirror; a truck that had been parked at the entrance was speeding toward them and a smattering of armed people had emerged from a tunnel near the far quarry wall and was sprinting towards them. He didn’t have much time.

  He got out of his truck and hurried to the other side. Ducking low to make a smaller target, he pulled the passenger door open. His passengers sat huddled together. A small-gauge chain was looped around them one-by-one; each man had both hands cuffed to the chain. The doc pulled his scattergun from behind the seat, grabbed a handful of the chain, and directed them out of the truck. When he finished, the trio was trussed up in a row like county jail inmates on their way to court, and he had his shotgun pointed at their backs.

  Danny gave an appreciative whistled earlier in the day when The Doc pulled out his scattergun.

  “Ugly, isn’t it?” he’d asked with a leering wink. “Atchison Assault Shotgun- the deadliest shotgun in the world. It fires 360 rounds per minute and is designed for up-close warfare in urban areas. Like underground mines.” That was the gun he now held on the men in front of him.

  “Stop!” he yelled at the people approaching him. The closest was a blond woman who held a pistol on him with a perfect two-handed police grip. Close behind her, a young man drew a bead on him with a military rifle. Something in the youngster’s bearing told him here the threat; the kid was walking death and his biggest concern. The two continued to advance on him, followed by a half-dozen others.

  “Drop your gun and step away from our friends,” the woman called in a steely voice.

  By way of response, The Doc stepped behind Juri’s bulk, lifted his scattergun, and fired a burst into the sky. “I said stop! The next rounds go into the back of their heads.”

  The pair stopped twenty yards away. “Let them go,” the woman shouted without breaking her shooter’s stance. “There’s no way out of here for you. The only way you leave alive is to let them go right now.”

  “Do what she says, old man,” Danny said without turning his head. “She’ll shoot us just to keep you from getting away.”

  “Shut up,” The Doc snarled. He yanked on the chain, causing all three of them to stumble backward a step. “No, you listen, Missy,” he cried. “I’m eighty-two years old with stage-three terminal cancer and the hospitals are all closed. Do you think I care what happens to me? But I promise you- if anybody fires at me I’ll drop these three where they stand.”

  The women waivered but the boy didn’t react at all. He took great care to keep Jiri between him and the kid’s line of fire. “You, with the rifle,” he called out, “What’s your name?”

  “Coy.”

  “Listen up, Coy. I want to talk to Judge Tompkins. You send someone to get The Judge and if I like how he answers the questions I ask, this will be over.”

  “What questions are those?” Coy asked him in a calm, even voice.

  The Doc fired another burst in the air. “I said get Judge Tompkins,” he cried.

  A familiar voice yelled from his right. “I’m right here. For God’s sake, Samuel, what are you doing?”

  Sam and Jody

  * * *

  It was a touchy situation for a while, but The Judge waded in and kept Doc Samuel from getting shot. It helped when Danny explained how he’d come to their rescue and Jiri told them he’d patched up his gunshot wound. There had even been laughter when he confessed he was sixty-eight, not eighty-two, and not only did he not suffer from cancer, but he was in perfect health. The Judge took him to his living quarters, presented him with a decanter of bourbon, and asked him to behave until he returned.

  An hour and a half went by before the judge came back. The crystal decanter was half-empty and Sam’s head was buzzing pleasantly when he re-entered th
e little apartment.

  He peeled off two jackets and a heavy coat and turned to Sam. “You should be happy to know I talked to Will and he’s agreed not to kill you.”

  Sam raised his glass in triumph. “I live to fight another day.” He tossed back a shot and looked at Jody with curiosity. “What sort of man is he?”

  “Will?”

  Sam nodded.

  “Smart. Capable. Maybe the toughest man I’ve ever met. He owned a successful cattle operation in Northern Kansas. The biters overran it and he headed south looking for a safe place for his family, drawing people to him as he went. He’s been out there, Sam, fighting those things every day. Learning how to kill them, not avoid them. We were down here hiding in these tunnels until they showed up and taught us a better way. The security measures you see- the guards, the towers, the weapons and more- his team did that, and got it done in about two months.”

  “He sounds like a good man.”

  “I believe he is.”

  “Say- what were those fellas doing up on the square to begin with? Where they really after a stockpile of food”

  Jody gave him a sly grin. “I’ll tell you that… after you agree to stay on here and do our doctoring.”

  Will and The Doc

  * * *

  It took into the wee hours of the morning and an empty decanter for Jody to win him over. Sam loathed the idea of giving up his compound atop the hill. But he got lonely wandering around there by himself, and there was safety in numbers. Plus, there was a definite need for a doctor in the community. Almost 150 people lived there now, and Jody said they were close to welcoming in more survivors. They didn’t even have an R.N. or a nurse’s aide around to tend to the illnesses and injuries that would spring up.