“All right then,” Keith said, “you’re always telling me I need to have a plan. What’s your plan for getting to Wilmington?”
Tremble nodded. “Now that you’re off the crutch, you’ll do exercises to strengthen your ankle. At the same time, we set as many snares and deadfalls as possible and dry or smoke jerky for provisions and gather up whatever else we can find—nuts, mushrooms, edible plants, whatever. I figure a week, but we’ll reassess as we go along. When I think you’re ready, I’ll pick a steep slope on the side of the hollow as a dry run, and when you prove you can get up and down it without reinjuring your ankle, we’re good to go. How’s that sound?”
“Like it will take forever,” Keith said.
“Take it or leave it,” Tremble said. “I’m not putting you at risk without a fighting chance. Old and crafty trumps young and foolish, I’m afraid.”
Keith sighed. “I’ll take it.” Then he muttered, “Like I have a choice.”
Tremble suppressed a smile as his son turned back to the rabbit. We’ll all have to relearn old skills to survive, thought Tremble as Keith finished and dropped the rabbit into the plastic garbage bag.
“Ready?” Keith asked, and Tremble nodded.
They walked through the woods, content in each other’s company until Keith broke the silence.
“You think Tex and Wiggins will make it, Dad?”
“I hope so, son. I sure hope so.”
South of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia
Intersection of Appalachian Trail and Chestnut Hill Road
One Day Earlier
Day 23, 9:35 a.m.
“You sure about this, Tex?” Bill Wiggins stared at the treeless gap where Chestnut Hill Road slashed through the woods in front of them. “I feel exposed anytime we come out of the trees now.”
“So do I, but this is the best bet according to Levi’s map,” said Shyla ‘Tex’ Texeira. “It’s less than a mile to a utility right-of-way that runs due east to US 340 and the bridge over the Potomac. Both this road and the right-of-way run through thick woods. We’ll just walk the tree line and duck into cover if we hear anyone coming.”
“How far before we get back on the AT?”
“Just on the other side of the bridge.”
Wiggins sighed. “I’m not looking forward to that friggin’ crossing.”
Tex shrugged. “It’s the best option. If we stay on the AT, we have to cross the Shenandoah bridge into Harpers Ferry and then cross the Potomac on the pedestrian walkway of the railroad bridge. It’s ten miles longer and two bridges instead of one.
“Besides,” she continued, “if those FEMA assholes are watching the southern approach from the AT, that’s where they’ll be looking. This way, if we’re stopped on the eastern bridge, we say we’re coming up 671. There’s no way to connect us with the Trembles, and crossing via the eastern bridge fits our cover story. But no one walking north up 671 would go through Harpers Ferry unless that was their destination. Who the hell walks miles out of their way for no reason?”
“I know, I know. I’d just like to avoid bridges altogether.”
Tex shook her head. “There are rapids and a lot of rocks, so even if we could find a boat, we might end up miles downstream. Or worse.”
Wiggins sighed. “Yeah, I get that. Just wishful thinking. How are your feet?”
“They’ve been better, but I’ll survive.”
“When we get across this bridge, we need to find a secluded place to hole up and scout around the outskirts of Harpers Ferry to find you some better boots. You can’t go much farther in those.”
Tex nodded and looked up at the sky. “Then we need to get moving. It’s two hours to the bridge, and we need to be across and well off the main roads before nightfall.”
Wiggins nodded and started into the clearing.
Sandy Hook Bridge—US 340
Three Miles East of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia
South Bank of Potomac River
Same Day, 11:55 a.m.
They crouched in the woods beside the highway and studied the bridge. “Not a soul moving,” Tex said.
Wiggins nodded. “I’m not liking this. This is a main road; I expected at least local traffic. I was actually hoping we could mix in so we didn’t stand out.”
“I don’t like it either,” Tex said, “but maybe it’s like Front Royal. Could be the locals banded together and barricaded the main roads further out. Loudoun Heights is due south, and there are other farming communities north of the river. Maybe they set up roadblocks to keep from being overrun? They wouldn’t have blocked the AT, so we bypassed them.”
“Or maybe those FEMA assholes did the same thing to make it easier to spot northbound AT traffic.”
Tex shrugged. “Even if they did, what choice do we have? Besides, there are tons of secondary roads, so even with barricades, there’ll be other people who make it this far. We’re just two more lost souls trying to get home. They have no reason to detain us.”
“We’re armed. How will that go down?”
“How would I know?” Tex replied, temper flaring. “We just have to DO IT, all right? It’s either that or turn back, and I’m going to get to my folks or die trying.”
Silence grew between them until Tex spoke again.
“Look, I’m sorry I snapped, but my feet are killing me, and I don’t see an option. If you do, I’m all ears.”
Wiggins shook his head. “No, you’re right. This is it. We’ll play the hand we’ve been dealt.” He gave her a nervous smile. “Let’s cross the Potomac, partner.”
Tex nodded at the Henry survival rifle. “Maybe you should break that down and stow it and move your Sig to the small of your back under your shirttail like my Glock. No point in showing our hand.”
“Good point,” Wiggins said as he shrugged off his pack and began to disassemble the little rifle. A minute later it was all stowed in the hollow plastic stock and he slipped it in his pack. He jammed the Sig into his belt at the small of his back and dropped his shirttail over it. He shouldered his pack and nodded at Tex, and they started across the weed-choked verge toward the highway.
“This is spooky as hell,” Wiggins said as they stepped onto the long bridge.
“Tell me about it.” Tex unconsciously moved closer.
“Uh, maybe we should separate,” Wiggins said. “You know, just so they can’t get us at the same time.”
Tex grinned. “You want to run a zigzag pattern too? Anything else to make us look suspicious?”
Wiggins flushed. “Okay, dumb idea,” he said, but they drifted a few feet farther apart anyway.
They walked in tense silence, eyes watering in the bright noonday sun reflecting off the water, and sweating profusely in the heat radiating from the hard pavement underfoot. It was an unwelcome change from the soft paths and comforting shade of the deep woods.
“I’ll be glad to get back in the woods,” Tex said, halfway across. “I feel like a bug waiting for a flyswatter.”
“More like bugs on a friggin’ griddle—”
He was interrupted by squealing tires as a black SUV swerved onto the bridge and roared toward them.
“FEMA!” Wiggins looked over his shoulder longingly at the sanctuary of the distant tree-lined south bank. “What are we gonna do?”
“Nod and smile a lot,” Tex said out of the side of her mouth. The car swerved to a halt, blocking the bridge a hundred feet ahead of them. Two FEMA cops got out, male and female; both had their guns drawn but pointed down.
“Stop and place both hands on the top of your heads, NOW!” the man shouted.
“Doesn’t look promising,” Wiggins whispered as they complied.
“Walk forward slowly. Don’t make any sudden moves,” the man ordered.
They complied and he halted them twenty feet away. Both cops studied their faces as the man did the talking.
“Who are you and what’s your business?” he asked.
“My name’s Bill Wiggins, and this is Shyla Texeira
. We’re seamen who got stuck down south, trying to make it home to our families. We had a car until we ran out of gas. We’ve been afoot ever since.”
“How’d you get past the south roadblock?”
Wiggins shrugged. “Didn’t see it, but that’s not surprising. There are bad people on the road, and we’ve been staying to the fields and woods as much as possible. We’re only on the road now to get across the river.”
The story seemed to be working, on the man anyway. His body language relaxed a bit and his gun moved a fraction lower. The woman was more wary. Tex saw her eyes narrow and followed the woman’s gaze to Wiggin’s boots. The boots he’d taken off the FEMA cop he’d killed to save the Trembles. Boots exactly like the two FEMA cops were wearing.
“FREEZE!” the woman yelled as she focused on Wiggins and raised her sidearm, but Tex’s right hand was already going to the small of her back.
At over six feet and solidly built, Wiggins was the obvious threat, but appearances were deceiving. Tex aimed for center mass, but her shot went high and hit the woman in the throat. Too late, the man turned as Tex unloaded on him, hitting him twice center mass and multiple times in the legs. It was over in seconds, and Wiggins ran forward to kick the guns away from the fallen cops.
“Jesus, Tex! I think—”
He turned to find her trembling, staring at the female cop. The woman was face up, blood gushing from her throat as she made strangling sounds like a fish dying on a dock. Tex bent and vomited on the road.
The woman was beyond help, so Wiggins turned to the barely conscious man lying in a rapidly expanding pool of blood. A concealed vest caught Tex’s rounds center mass, but from the blood pool, a round to his lower body struck a major artery. Wiggins knelt, fumbling with the man’s belt. He tugged it free to make a tourniquet and twisted it tight, managing to slow but not stop the bleeding. He grabbed the man’s hand and put it on the twisted belt.
“Hold this and you might have a chance. Do you understand?”
The cop nodded, unable to speak. Wiggins rose to find Tex still staring at the woman, now clearly dead.
“Tex! We have to go! Get in the car and start looking through your maps for a way out of here.”
“I … I … killed cops—”
“Who would have killed us. Think about it later. We have to go!” Wiggins led her to the SUV and helped her out of her pack. He unzipped it and pulled the packet of maps out then tossed her pack in the backseat before shrugging out of his own pack and tossing it in behind hers.
“I’m okay. Give me the maps,” Tex said as he slammed the back door.
He handed her the maps and she got in the passenger seat.
“Bill, the keys aren’t here,” Tex said.
“All right, I’ll check the cops. You just concentrate on the maps.”
The keys were in the dead woman’s pocket. As an afterthought, he took the woman’s boots and tossed them in the back of the SUV. He got behind the wheel to find Tex focused on The AT Guide and a local map.
“There are sure to be roadblocks on the main roads.”
Wiggins nodded. “We can’t be caught in this thing anyway. If we break contact, we’ll have a shot at playing innocent if they catch us. There are two five-gallon gas cans in the back; let’s find an empty car, gas it up, and get off road. With any luck we can find a four-wheel drive. Try to find us a nice secluded logging road that might keep us near the AT.”
Tex nodded as Wiggins swung the car north and accelerated off the bridge. He floored it, and the trees flashed by on either side.
“How long do you think we have before someone comes looking?” asked Tex, eyes still on the map.
Wiggins shrugged. “Who knows? A half hour maybe?”
The radio squawked, “Unit 17, what is status of reported contact? Request immediate SITREP. Over.”
“Or not,” Tex said. “Should we try to fake it?”
Wiggins shook his head. “They didn’t say anything about us moving, so either they aren’t tracking this thing, or all the GPS birds are finally down. If we answer and they don’t buy it, we’re blown, but no response might just be a comms problem. That might buy us a few minutes of indecision. But there will be cars or a chopper coming our way soon, maybe both.”
“So what’s the plan?”
“We’ll stick out like a sore thumb to a chopper no matter which way we run, so we have to ditch this thing and fast. Find a place to bury this beast in the woods.” He sighed. “It was nice while it lasted, but we’re afoot again.”
Tex nodded and turned back to the map.
“Slow down,” she said.
“SLOW DOWN? Are you serious? We have to get a little farther than this before we ditch—”
“Just slow down! I’ve got an idea, but I need a minute and I don’t want to overshoot our turn,” Tex said, turning back to the map.
Wiggins slowed and glanced over with a concerned look. “I sure hope you know what you’re—”
“There! Right on Keep Tryst Road ahead.”
Tires squealed as Wiggins powered the SUV around a long sweeping curve onto Keep Tryst Road and started to accelerate.
“SLOW DOWN,” Tex said, “and get ready to turn onto Sandy Hook Road. It’s a very sharp right just ahead.”
Wiggins nodded and skidded around the turn onto Sandy Hook Road.
“Tex, this is taking us back—”
“Trust me. Watch for a dirt road to the left.”
Wiggins’ concern grew as they powered down the narrow road southwest, then swung due west and he saw US 340, the highway they’d just exited, loom above them in the near distance.
“WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU TAKING US, TEX?”
“There,” she said, pointing to the left, “turn there. And put this sucker in low.”
“WHERE?” Wiggins demanded; then he saw it, a dirt track through the trees. He braked hard to make the turn and dropped the SUV in low gear. He powered down the narrow track, dodging trees and mowing down scattered saplings as thick as his finger until they broke out of the trees and he slammed to a stop before a steep gravel-covered embankment rising across their path.
“What the hell—”
“Get us up on the railroad tracks,” Tex said.
“What? Which way?”
“Either. We won’t be there long,” she said.
Wiggins cursed and started up the embankment at an angle, his heart in his mouth as the tires slipped in the loose gravel and the SUV rocked on its suspension, threatening to roll at any moment. He gained the top and they bounced due east along the tracks; Tex focused on the tree line down the embankment to their right.
“When do we get off this damn thing?” Wiggins asked, fighting the wheel, his speech unsteady as the vehicle slammed across the track ties at twenty miles an hour. “We may blow a tire any minute at this rate.”
“As soon as I see a break in those trees,” Tex replied, eyes glued on the tree line. “THERE!”
Wiggins whipped the wheel to the right, bouncing down the steep embankment toward a barely visible gap.
They lost the right-side mirror going in, and Wiggins was forced to a crawl, dodging larger trees and bulling his way over and through smaller saplings and brush.
“I give up,” Wiggins said through clenched teeth as he held the wheel in a white-knuckled grip. “Where are you taking us?”
“In about fifty yards, we’ll come to the old towpath for the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which runs concurrent with the AT here. Turn right and run due west along the river back to the bridge; then we’ll hide in this same strip of woods that runs under the bridge. I figure the last place they’ll look is the place we ran from. The woods should shield us from view, and the bridge will hide us from choppers. We don’t have a chance of outrunning them, so we have to outsmart them.”
They broke out of the trees as she finished, and a smile spread across Wiggins’ face as he whipped the battered car right on to the towpath. “I’ll be damned! Pretty smart, Tex.”
She rolled down her window. “Save your admiration and step on it. I hear a chopper.”
The chopper got louder as they raced for the bridge, but it was north of them, invisible below the tree line. They nosed their way into the wooded strip beneath the bridge with just seconds to spare. They heard the chopper circling as they cut brush and piled it around and on top of the SUV; it landed just as they crawled into their new hide.
“And now we wait,” Wiggins said.
Tex nodded. “And hope like hell no one puts two and two together. We’re sitting ducks if they figure this out.”
Chapter Two
Presidential Quarters
Camp David Complex
Maryland
Day 24, 10:15 a.m.
The Honorable Theodore M. Gleason, President of the United States of America, glared at the two men seated across the desk, a study in contrast. One was balding and of late middle age, his receding chin clean-shaved. He wore an obviously expensive suit and sported a Mont Blanc pen in the pocket of his freshly pressed snow white shirt. A gold Rolex peeked from beneath the edge of a monogrammed sleeve bearing the initials OAC. Even given the man’s current unease, he wore the uniform of the Washington power broker naturally, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact the world was going to Hell. But even wearing the external trappings of wealth and power, Secretary of Homeland Security Oliver Armstrong Crawford, or ‘Ollie’ to those who pretended to be his friends, was visibly uncomfortable. He was doing all he could to keep from squirming under the President’s gaze.
The second man was the polar opposite. In his late thirties and the picture of composure, he wore the black uniform of the newly formed FEMA Special Reaction Force, with a tape above his breast pocket bearing the name RORKE, and a single star on each shoulder. His sandy hair was neatly trimmed, as was his goatee, and an otherwise handsome face was marred by a thin, ropelike welt of scar tissue emanating from the corner of his eye and running down his left cheek. In an odd way it seemed to enhance rather than detract from his appearance, and he looked for all the world like a movie version of a pirate or perhaps a Viking. Brigadier General Rorke returned Gleason’s gaze evenly and without the slightest indication of concern.
Push Back: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (The Disruption Series Book 2) Page 2