Push Back: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (The Disruption Series Book 2)

by R. E. McDermott

  “I have talked to one of them. Says he’s going to Baton Rouge lookin’ for family and his wife’s maiden name was Melancon. Which proves exactly nothing. How many Melancons you figure are in Baton Rouge?”

  “I don’t know. A lot, I guess. But is that all he said? What’s HIS name?”

  Cormier shrugged. “Didn’t ask, don’t care. But he did say he has a daughter who plays soccer at LSU.”

  The woman looked thoughtful. “Tim and I went to a game last year. Maybe if we know the name, I might be able to remember if there was a player by that name. At least we’d know if he was telling the truth about that.”

  “Even if he is, so what? He’s still—”

  Lisa put a hand on his arm and looked into his eyes. “Pop, I know you’re hurting about Mom and you haven’t had a chance to process it because you’ve been too busy taking care of us. But this isn’t you. You can’t just cut up two men who may be innocent just because of what they’re wearing.”

  He returned her gaze. “Yes, I can,” he said, then paused. “But maybe you’re right. We talk a bit more first.”

  ***

  Kinsey and Bollinger sat up as the rickety steps squeaked and they heard the padlock rattling in the hasp. The door swung open with a plaintive squeal and they squeezed their eyes shut as a bright flashlight painted their faces.

  “Okay, couyon, question time,” said a familiar voice. “What are your names?”

  “I … I’m Matt Kinsey, and this is Dave Bollinger.”

  “Tell me about your daughter. The soccer player.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Her name, for starters.”

  “Kelly. Kelly Kinsey. Her friends call her KK for short.”

  Kinsey heard murmurs and realized there were at least two people behind the light. He heard a woman whisper.

  “What position does she play?”

  “Goalie. But why the hell do you want to know—”

  The light retreated abruptly and the door closed, but he didn’t hear the padlock.

  “What the hell was that about?” Bollinger asked.

  “I don’t know,” Kinsey said, “but maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. If something happens to Kelly—”

  He was interrupted by heavy footfalls on the stairs outside, several men this time. The door flew open again and four men burst in with flashlights. He and Bollinger were hoisted to their feet by hands under their armpits and dragged outside and across to a larger building, the toes of their bound feet digging furrows in the dirt. Soft lantern light spilled from the windows of the building, casting another set of wooden steps in a soft glow. Not that they needed the light. Their captors half dragged, half carried them up the steps and through the front door to dump them unceremoniously into straight-back chairs in the center of a large sparsely furnished room, across from the head man.

  “Now, Coast Guard,” the man said, looking at his watch, “you have exactly five minutes to convince me I shouldn’t cut you up for gator bait.”

  ***

  It took closer to thirty, but Kinsey started liking their chances a lot better when the allotted five minutes passed with none of the Cajuns unsheathing a knife. Their captor insisted on a blow-by-blow account of everything that had happened to them from the time of the blackout, jumping on anything that seemed the slightest far-fetched and demanding more in-depth answers.

  Finally, Kinsey finished, and there was a long silence punctuated only by the breathing of the people collected in the room. Their captor rose to unsheathe a large hunting knife, and Kinsey’s heart fell. I guess I wasn’t that convincing after all, Kinsey thought as he watched the man approach slowly, his step deliberate.

  He stopped in front of Kinsey’s chair, just out of range of a two-footed kick, and squatted to look Kinsey straight in the eye.

  “I got a good ear for BS, and I don’t think anyone could make up a story like that,” the Cajun said.

  Kinsey heaved a relieved sigh as the man reached down and sliced the duct tape binding his ankles, then motioned for Kinsey to rise and turn so he could cut the tape from his hands. Kinsey rubbed his wrists and rolled aching shoulders as the man freed Bollinger.

  “Andrew Cormier,” the man said, turning from Bollinger to sheath the knife and extend his hand to Kinsey.

  Kinsey took the man’s hand. “Matt Kinsey,” he said.

  The Cajun grinned. “Yeah, I think we been over that.”

  “So we have,” Kinsey said. “So what now?”

  “I suggest y’all get settled down in the bayou. You gonna be here a while.”

  Kinsey shook his head. “Negative. I have to get to Baton Rouge.”

  “That may be a problem,” Cormier said.

  Somewhere in the Atchafalaya River Basin

  North of Morgan City, Louisiana

  Day 27, 9:20 a.m.

  Cormier shook his head. “It won’t work. I mean, your floating trailer’s a good idea, but I still don’t think you’ll be able to get around the locks at Bayou Sorrell and Port Allen. Plus there’s a lot of people up and down that stretch. The good people gonna take a shot at you for being feds, and the bad people gonna shoot you to take your stuff. It won’t work, Kinsey. I doubt you make it halfway.”

  “We have to make it work,” Kinsey said, tapping a point on the chart spread out on the table between them. “Port Allen Lock is directly across the Mississippi from LSU, and my sister-in-law’s house is just southeast of there. It can’t be much more than a mile from the river. I figure that’s the most direct and quickest way in and out.”

  Cormier shrugged. “Figure all you want, couyon. Y’all go that way and you’re dead meat.”

  Kinsey blew out an exasperated sigh. “Look, Andrew. I have to get there—”

  “I didn’t say you couldn’t get there. I said you can’t get there that way.” Cormier put his own finger down to the chart and traced a line. “You need to go up the Atchafalaya. It’s mostly farmland and woods on either side, and when you get to the Mississippi, there’s a couple of different places you can cross over the levee without an audience, eh.”

  Kinsey followed Cormier’s pointing finger, his doubt obvious. “But that’s twice as far, and when we reach the Mississippi, we’ll be over fifty miles upriver from Baton Rouge, maybe twice that with all the river bends.”

  “And you’ll be alive,” Cormier said. “You can’t do your family much good if you’re dead.”

  Kinsey fell silent, then gave a reluctant nod and studied the proposed route. “There’s a few towns along the way, do you think we’ll have any problems there?”

  Cormier shook his head. “They’re small places, and the river is plenty wide. You can stay to the far side of the river and blow right by before anyone can think about it.”

  Kinsey shook his head. “You’re forgetting something, aren’t you? We still have to tow the trailer to get over the levee into the Mississippi. I don’t think we’ll be ‘blowing by’ anybody with that thing in tow.”

  “We ain’t takin’ the trailer,” Cormier said.

  “What do you mean we’re not taking the trailer …” Kinsey trailed off and stared at Cormier.

  “And what do you mean WE?” Kinsey asked.

  Cormier nodded. “I figured me and a couple of the boys will take a little boat ride with you. We’ll take aluminum boats. If we tie off to yours, you got enough power to take us all up the river pretty fast. And the aluminum boats are light enough that we can manhandle them over the levee. We leave your Coast Guard boat on the Atchafalaya side.”

  Kinsey was speechless. “But why? I mean we appreciate it, but why are you helping us?”

  Cormier shrugged. “A lot of reasons. Maybe because every time there’s a hurricane, it was always the Coast Guard we see with helicopters, pulling folks off rooftops. Getting the job done while everybody else seems to be running around with their finger up their ass. Maybe because I’ve been thinking about this ship of yours over in Texas, and think maybe havin
g some friends outside the Bayou might be a good thing. We’re self-sufficient in everything but gasoline, and you tell me they got plenty of that.” Then Cormier smiled, but there was no humor in it. “And maybe because my only son is lying in the next room near death. He is in God’s hands, and there is nothing I can do here. But maybe while we’re out, we catch a few of these FEMA bastards to bring home and pass a good time, eh? Everybody was a little disappointed we didn’t get to chop you two up for gator bait.”

  Kinsey chuckled politely, not altogether sure Cormier was joking. “Whatever your reasons, I appreciate it,” he said. “When can we leave?”

  “We’ll get everything ready and leave at first light tomorrow,” Cormier said.

  “It’s still morning; we could get out of here today.”

  “’Cause there’s planning to do,” Cormier said, putting his finger on the map again to indicate a bend in the river. “There are a lot of things we have to think about, and this is a big one right here. There aren’t so many places to run into trouble going this way, but there could be a lot of trouble in one place, eh?”

  Cormier removed his finger, and Kinsey looked at the point indicated, the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, bounded on three sides by the wide Mississippi.

  “There are a lot of bad, bad people there,” Cormier said. “And I’m bettin’ by now they’re out and maybe on the river, and—”

  “And we gotta get by them,” Kinsey said.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Atchafalaya River

  Northbound

  Day 28, 11:15 a.m.

  The Atchafalaya River flows south, though much more directly than the Mississippi, its sinuous cousin to the east. Bollinger was at the wheel, guiding their strange little convoy over the sluggish brown surface of the river at twenty-five knots. They ran three abreast, a sixteen-foot aluminum boat lashed tight and unmanned to either side of the Coast Guard boat. Cormier and two of his men rode in the Coast Guard boat with them.

  As Cormier promised, they left the Cajun village at first light and wound their way through a maze of bayous for a good hour before reaching the main river. Kinsey attempted to memorize the path, but was hopelessly lost by the sixth turn in the first fifteen minutes. The only thing he was sure about was that they were leaving by a different path from the one they used coming in. Cormier watched him scrutinizing the banks closely and laughed.

  “Good luck remembering the way, couyon. The bayou, she is changing all the time. Tomorrow she will look very different, non? You have to know the things that do not change, and for that you will need a lifetime or a teacher. And I think no Cajun is going to be schooling outsiders anytime soon. We will be friends, I think. But we will come visit you when we want to talk, not the other way around.”

  Kinsey shrugged and grinned back. “Fair enough, I suppose. If I had a secure place, I wouldn’t be too eager to share it with anyone either.”

  They’d ridden upriver mostly in silence as they made their way through cypress swamp and pine forest, passing the occasional ramshackle tin-roof shack five to six feet off the ground on pilings, with an almost obligatory tumbledown dock jutting a few feet into the river. But no people. At one point Kinsey commented on the deserted feel of the place, and Cormier just smiled.

  “Oh, there are people there, mon ami, and we are in their gun sights. Trust me on that,” Cormier said, then pointed ahead at a bridge looming in the distance.

  “We’re makin’ good time,” Cormier said. “That’s the I-10 causeway, so we’re halfway to the Mississippi. We’ll reach the levee in time to get the boats over in daylight, and we want to go downstream in the dark anyway.”

  Kinsey nodded and watched the top of the bridge, looking for threats but finding none. Bollinger kept the boats to the center of the river as they motored beneath the double concrete span, and Kinsey noticed an opening in the trees ahead on the right bank. As they drew abreast of the small clearing, he glimpsed flashes of white between the trunks of the pine trees and after a moment made out the familiar shapes of recreational vehicles. A dozen people lined the bank, mostly men, but here and there a woman or a child. They stared at the passing boats in sullen apathy.

  “An RV park?” he asked Cormier.

  Cormier shook his head. “Not a park, I think a squat. Likely they were running from Baton Rouge in their RVs and made it here before they ran out of gas. Luckier than some, I suppose. They have shelter and they can fish from the river, and they’re hidden from I-10 by the trees. But by now, I suspect they are as desperate as everyone else.”

  Kinsey nodded and turned his gaze back upriver. There were more than enough desperate people in this cruel new world; right now the only ones who mattered to him were his family.

  “We’ll be coming up on Krotz Springs in an hour or so, and after that there are four small river towns scattered between there and the Mississippi levee. How much faster can we go?” Cormier asked.

  Kinsey moved to the door of the little cabin and looked into where Bollinger stood at the wheel, then glanced down at the throttle lever. He moved back to where Cormier stood astern of the cabin. “We have a bit of throttle left. Your boats are dragging us down, but I think Bollinger can get another ten knots out of her if need be. Why? Do you expect trouble?”

  Cormier shrugged. “These days, I always expect trouble. Then I can be happy if it doesn’t happen. I just want to know what our options are if we run into it.”

  Despite Cormier’s worries, they made it by Krotz Springs and the other villages upriver without incident. They stayed to the opposite bank, as far from the towns as possible, and accelerated past at full speed. The sun was well on its way toward the western horizon when Cormier pointed to a channel to the right.

  “That’s the channel to the Lower Old River lock. I think that’ll be the easiest place to cross.”

  Kinsey nodded and moved into the little cabin with Cormier close behind. Space was tight, so Cormier stood just outside, where he could talk to both Coasties. Kinsey ordered Bollinger into the side channel, and they all stood silent as he negotiated a bend and came to a split in the smaller channel.

  “The right fork goes to the lock. Take the larger fork to the left,” Cormier said. “That’s the old riverbed, and it dead-ends at the Mississippi levee.”

  Bollinger did as ordered, and they approached the dead end, a narrow sandy beach. Beyond it, a grassy slope rose like a great wall, filling their vision from left to right.

  “That thing must be a hundred feet high,” Bollinger said.

  Cormier shook his head. “More like fifty or so,” he said. “But it will seem like a hundred when we’re trying to carry a three-hundred-fifty-pound boat. That’s why I picked this spot. There’s grass on both sides, so we can drag the boats up and slide them down the other side.”

  Kinsey looked up at the towering levee. “You sure this is gonna work?”

  “No,” Cormier said. “But I’m sure five of us have a better chance of getting aluminum boats over the levee than you two had of getting your Coast Guard boat weighing many times as much around those locks, trailer or no trailer.”

  “Point taken,” Kinsey said.

  It went surprisingly well. They stripped everything from the first boat to lighten the load, and Cormier produced wide web strapping they slipped under the floating boat in two places as lifting straps. Grunting and straining, they walked the boat out of the water and across the little beach, two men on either side, with the fifth man lifting the stern.

  They set the boat down at the foot of the levee, and Cormier ordered one of his men up the slope with one end of a long rope. While the man climbed, Cormier tied the other end of the rope to the bow ring of the boat and then waited for his man to reach the top and take up the slack. By prearrangement, the others positioned themselves around the boat, and on the count of three, pushed and pulled for all they were worth, sliding the boat up the slope through the long grass as far as possible. The man with the rope gathered in the slack
as the boat advanced to a stop, then braced himself, the friction of the boat on the slope sufficient to help him keep it from sliding back. In a dozen heaves they had it resting on the crest of the levee and started back down for the second boat.

  More confident now, they loaded both outboards, trolling motors, and other gear in the second boat after first positioning it at the base of the levee. It made the boat heavier, but it would be faster and easier than carrying the heavy gear up the steep slope piecemeal. Twenty minutes later, the second boat rested beside its twin on the levee.

  Gravity was their friend now, but the big concern was the boats might slide down too fast and damage their thin aluminum hulls on a hidden rock. They sent them down the slope bow first, with the rope tied off to the transoms now, and two men holding back on the rope. Two others guided the boat down the slope, while the fifth walked in front, checking for any obstacles that might damage the boat. They had the boats in the water and fully outfitted just as the sun reached the horizon.

  Kinsey turned to Cormier. “Who you gonna leave with our boat?”

  Cormier nodded to one of his men. “I’m leaving Breaux. I told him to move it into the little inlet up in the trees to the right of the beach. You see it?”

  “I was going to suggest it,” Kinsey said. “When should we take off?”

  Cormier looked west, then turned back to Kinsey. “This channel puts us in the Mississippi directly across from the prison farm, but a wooded island in the middle of the river will screen us from sight. And I doubt anybody is in the fields of the prison farm at night, or maybe at all now. I say we wait until full dark, maybe two hours, then take off. We lash the boats together, so we don’t lose each other in the dark, and go on the trolling motors, using y’all’s night-vision goggles. We’ll hug the west bank until we get well past the prison; then we can stay close to whichever side is least inhabited.”

  “The trolling motors are gonna be slow,” Kinsey said.

  “They also going to be pretty quiet,” Cormier said, “and we’re gonna have a strong current behind us. But we do need to save the batteries, because we definitely need quiet when we go through Baton Rouge. We switch to the outboards when we’re safely past the prison, then go back to the trolling motors to go through the city.”