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

by R. E. McDermott

  “Bill, this is tough. I know that, but you were there for me, and I’m here for you. We all are.”

  Wiggins squeezed her hand. “I … I just don’t know what to do, Tex? Everything is so screwed up.”

  Tex shrugged. “We do what people have always done. We live, and if we’re lucky, we love and laugh a little. Fundamentally, the world hasn’t changed that much as far as the basics go, except nobody is hooking up with total strangers on an iPhone or getting their panties in a bunch because someone dissed them on Facebook.”

  Wiggins laughed and wiped his eyes with the back of his free hand. Then he stood and pulled Tex to her feet and wrapped her in a hug.

  “So are you going to hang around to kick my butt when it needs kicking?” he asked softly into her ear.

  “I sort of have to,” she whispered back. “You got my choo-choo train shot up.”

  Wiggins threw his head back and laughed again; then he and Tex walked down the hill hand in hand.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The Cave

  15 miles northeast of Buena Vista, Virginia

  Day 35, 7:20 a.m.

  Anderson sat on his makeshift log stool in his skivvies, pants around his ankles, examining his left knee in the flickering light of the torch. A few days’ rest had done wonders; the swelling was down, and it hardly hurt at all now, at least if he was careful how he put weight on it.

  The last days seemed like paradise compared to the ordeal of his escape and flight. Concerns about food eased somewhat on the second day when the chickens made themselves at home in a corner of the cave and began laying again. Likewise, both Cindy and, under her instruction, Jeremy had proved surprisingly proficient at woodcraft. By the third day, their snares and deadfalls were producing at least one meal a day, the protein supplemented by edible greens Cindy foraged from the forest. Between nature’s bounty and the water source at the back of the cave, they wouldn’t starve or die of thirst anytime soon.

  In fact, Anderson’s only real complaint was boredom. Cindy insisted he stay off his knee, a prohibition enforced with the rigidity of a drill sergeant. The result was days of boredom, stretched out on his mattress of evergreen boughs or sitting in the sun in front of the cave, waiting for Cindy and Jeremy to return from checking their traps or gathering firewood. His only pastime was digging insects out of cracks in the rock face, which he tossed to an appreciative audience of chickens.

  The evenings were better, sitting around the fire. Jeremy inevitably began to nod and retired to his mattress to snore until sunup, but Cindy, like Anderson, was by nature a night owl. They talked long into the night about everything, and nothing. The more he learned, the more he admired her; and she was definitely easy on the eyes.

  “How’s it looking?”

  Anderson jumped. Cindy stood in the flickering torchlight with an armload of firewood, which she bent to add to the nearby pile without waiting for his answer.

  “How do you do that?” he asked.

  She straightened. “Do what?”

  “Move so quietly,” Anderson said. “You’re like a cat.”

  Cindy shrugged. “You have to be light on your feet to dance, and moving quietly over rock isn’t very challenging.”

  Anderson nodded and began to stand to pull up his pants. Cindy waved him back down.

  “Leave it,” she said. “I want to look at that knee.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that. Now sit your butt back down,” Cindy said.

  Anderson sighed and sat back down on the upended log. “Yes, mother.”

  Cindy squatted and peered at his knee. “Looks like the swelling’s gone. Is it giving you any pain?”

  Anderson shook his head and was about to say no when Cindy reached out with both hands and began to gently probe his knee. Her touch was electric and totally unanticipated. The fly of his boxers gapped open as his erection rose unbidden.

  “Oh geez! I’m sorry, Cindy. I didn’t mean—”

  Her laughter resonated into the darkness of the cave, and she reached out and wrapped her hand around him.

  “Jeremy’s checking the deadfalls. We’ve got at least twenty minutes,” she said.

  ***

  As it turned out, they had a bit over thirty, and it was easily the best half hour of Anderson’s life in recent memory. Correction, pretty much everything in recent memory sucked, so he amended that to the best half hour ever.

  Afterward, he hardly felt the evergreen needles of his sleeping pallet scratching his bare back as he enjoyed the pleasant weight of Cindy’s naked body on top of his. He began to stir again, and she lifted her cheek from his chest and grinned.

  “There’s nothing I’d like more, Romeo,” she said. “But I’ll have to take a rain check. Jeremy will be back soon.”

  “So there’s going to be a next time?”

  She studied his face. “Do you want there to be?”

  “Absolutely,” Anderson said. “Though I have to admit it took me by surprise.”

  She laughed. “That was sort of obvious.”

  “No, I mean that you would … that you wanted …”

  Cindy silenced him, her fingers on his lips. “You do realize you’re working pretty hard to spoil the moment, don’t you?”

  Anderson was totally confused.

  “You’re a decent guy, George. You risked your neck for us when you didn’t have to, and let’s just say facing death with someone is a pretty intense bonding experience. Add that to the fact we’re both single and horny as hell, and the sex was pretty much inevitable,” Cindy said.

  “Sooo …”

  She bent down and kissed him tenderly. “So let’s just play it by ear, and see where it goes. But now we better get up and get dressed before Jeremy comes in and decides he needs to shoot you.”

  ***

  They’d just gotten dressed and moved back outside when Jeremy’s head appeared over the lip of the ledge, followed in short order by the rest of his body. He beamed when he saw them and held up two gutted rabbits.

  “Lunch,” Jeremy said.

  “Good job!” Anderson said while Cindy just returned Jeremy’s wide smile.

  With no refrigeration, they normally cooked and ate small game as soon as it was killed, and two rabbits made for a bountiful early lunch. Anderson finished his third piece of rabbit, licked the juice from his fingers, and heaved a contented sigh.

  “That was really good. In fact, the only thing that could have improved it is a little seasoning,” he said.

  “I had all my seasonings and spices in big Ziploc bags in the trailer,” Cindy said. “Maybe they’re still there.”

  “You thinking we should go look?” Anderson asked.

  Cindy nodded. “If anyone was looking for us, I think we would have heard or seen them by now. I think it’s safe.”

  “The current may have smashed and scattered it from here to who knows where,” Anderson said.

  “And the trailer could be sitting high and dry on the creek bank a half mile downstream,” Cindy said. “One thing is for sure; if it’s there, it will be in or near the creek bed. We’ll just follow it a ways; if we don’t find it in a reasonable distance, we turn around and come back.”

  Jeremy was excited at the prospect. “Let’s go today!”

  Cindy shook her head. “We should leave at first light tomorrow to give us as much daylight as possible. We don’t know what we’re going to run into, and we don’t want to make the steep climb up to the cave in the dark.”

  ***

  They all turned in early for a change. As usual, Jeremy’s soft snores were drifting across the dying embers of the fire in minutes. The sleep of the innocent, Anderson thought as he rolled on his side. He was almost asleep himself when Cindy crawled in beside him and kissed the back of his neck.

  “Rain check,” she whispered. “Presuming you can be quieter than you were earlier.”

  Anderson smiled in the dark and shifted in place to face her, his sm
ile widening when he discovered she was naked. “Me?” he whispered back. “I seem to remember you might need to take your own advice.”

  Day 36, 5:40 a.m.

  They rose early to a breakfast of leftover rabbit and eggs and left as soon as there was enough light to navigate the steep slope down to the creek. They traveled light, carrying only water, some hard-boiled eggs for lunch, and their weapons. Anderson and Jeremy both carried M4s, but Cindy stuck to her tried and true shotgun.

  The steep climb down put Anderson’s knee to the test. There were twinges of pain, and he mentally put his recovery at ninety percent. He caught Cindy watching him, and smiled and gave her a thumbs-up. She gave him a skeptical nod and continued to watch during the rest of the descent. They had their first disagreement when they got to where the Mule was hidden.

  “This is premature,” Cindy said. “You’re still favoring the leg, and this is a good way to reinjure it.”

  “It’s fine. I’ll let you know if it starts bothering me, and I’ll stop and rest it.”

  “It’s already bothering you; I can tell by the way you’re walking. We’ll take the Mule,” Cindy said.

  Anderson shook his head. “Too noisy.”

  “We’re at least ten miles from the nearest house or road,” Cindy said. “Unless someone’s in the woods—”

  “Exactly,” Anderson said. “We’ve got as near to a perfect hideaway as we’re likely to find, and we should keep a low profile. If someone hears the Mule in the woods, who tells someone else, who then tells someone else, before long a whole lot of someones know there are people back here. Sooner or later FEMA might get nosy. Besides, we don’t even know if we’re going to FIND the trailer, in which case, we’ve made a lot of noise for nothing.”

  Cindy looked unconvinced. “But if we DO find the trailer, that’s a lot of gear to hump uphill to the cave. It’s going to be hard enough getting it up this far, without being exhausted by the time we even start.”

  They argued for five minutes, finally agreeing to make the initial search on foot. If they found anything worth salvaging, they’d assess the most efficient way to get it back to the cave at that time. Anderson considered that a win, though he didn’t press the point. From the look on Cindy’s face, she was less than thrilled at the ‘compromise.’

  Descending the creek proved to be much less of an ordeal than reaching it. It was back down to its normal flow, only an inch or two deep in most places, and the stair-step breaks in the slate bottom, which had made the Mule’s ascent difficult, had the opposite effect when traveling by foot. Their biggest concern was slipping on the slimy bottom or losing their footing on a loose rock.

  They moved down the creek almost as fast as the heavily laden Mule and trailer had crawled up it and, after two hours, reached the spot they’d entered the creek days before. Was it only a few days? Anderson thought. It seemed like a lifetime. He stood at the crossing and peered downstream.

  “It gets a lot steeper,” he said.

  Cindy nodded. “The creek runs directly downhill with a considerable drop over just a few hundred yards, then starts winding again with a more gradual incline. If it’s down there, it’ll be a bitch to get stuff back up this hill.”

  “What do you want to do?” Anderson asked.

  Cindy shrugged. “It’s not even midmorning. Let’s look a bit further, but if we don’t find it soon, it’s a lost cause.”

  Anderson nodded and started downhill. They hadn’t gone far when Jeremy let out an excited whoop.

  “Mom! I see it!”

  They followed Jeremy’s pointing finger to where the trailer rested on the creek bank, bridging the gap between two large trees growing in a line perpendicular to the stream. They scrambled down.

  The trailer had hit the trees sideways, borne on the raging floodwaters. Its short tongue rested against the upstream side of the tree closest to the creek bed, and the rear end of the trailer was jammed against the other tree. Debris and trash was mounded on the upstream side of the trailer, and as Anderson got closer, he could see the force of the partially dammed water against the side of the trailer had bent the tongue at a significant angle.

  “There’ll be no towing that even if we managed to get it out of here,” he said.

  Cindy nodded in agreement. “But everything is still lashed down. It’s a miracle it didn’t roll over. Now we just have to get the stuff back up to the cave.”

  She gave Anderson a withering look. “Which would be a lot easier if we had the MULE with us.”

  “All right, all right,” Anderson said. “You made your point. I’ll go back and bring it down.”

  Cindy shook her head. “I can get back up faster than either one of you two, and we’re not getting the Mule down this last slope anyway. I’ll go get the Mule while you two hump this stuff up to the crossing.”

  Anderson sighed, then nodded.

  “And one more thing,” Cindy said. “It’s going to be a three- or four-hour round-trip to bring the Mule back, so take your time and don’t overdo it on that knee. Remember, we still have to hump all this stuff up to the cave. Jeremy?”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Keep an eye on George. If it looks like his knee is hurting, I want you to remind him to rest. Can you do that?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Jeremy said.

  ***

  Jeremy took his instructions seriously and badgered Anderson the entire time they humped supplies up the hill. But truth be told, the young man also carried far more than his fair share up the steep slope, and Anderson was happy to let him. They finished in a little over three hours.

  “How long until Mom gets back?” Jeremy asked.

  Anderson shrugged. “I’d say another hour.”

  Jeremy began to nod, then stopped and grinned. “You’re wrong, George. I hear her coming now.”

  Anderson heard it too, but it was wrong somehow. It wasn’t the throaty rumble of the Mule, and it came from the clearing where the cabin once stood, a quarter of a mile away. He put his finger to his lips to caution Jeremy and stood listening. The sound stopped, and Anderson heard the sound of two car doors slamming.

  “Someone’s at your cabin site, Jeremy. You stay here while I check it out.”

  Jeremy nodded. “I’ll go too. You may need help.”

  What I don’t need is worrying about you getting shot, Anderson thought, but he didn’t say that.

  “Negative. You need to get up the creek and warn your mom. Okay? If whoever it is hears the Mule, they’ll get curious, and we don’t want them looking for us.”

  Jeremy looked scared. “Is it the bad guys?”

  “I don’t know, Jeremy, but I don’t want to take any chances. Now go warn your mom.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Jeremy nodded and splashed up the creek at a run. Anderson waited for him to move out of sight, then started for the clearing, moving through the woods parallel to the trail. He slowed as he approached the clearing, then dropped to one knee and slowly parted the foliage.

  He suppressed a curse. Cindy and Jeremy’s cabin was still standing, though the walls were black and the roof was caved in at one corner. The rain! The same torrential downpour that claimed the trailer had doused the fire they started in the cabin.

  A FEMA Special Reaction Force Hummer stood in front of the blackened cabin, and Anderson could make out voices coming from the inside. After a long moment, two black-clad SRF troopers emerged from the cabin, one of them dragging a small black tarp. He threw the tarp on the ground and spread it out. Anderson’s heart sank.

  “It’s a UTV cover all right, for a big unit, probably one of those multi-seat side by sides.” The man scanned the ground around the cabin and pointed. “And look at that! Those ain’t hummer tracks; there was a UTV here for sure.”

  The second trooper seemed unimpressed. “UTV, BFD. Who cares, Carr? All I know is we’re supposed to be patrolling this section of the Lexington Turnpike, and this wild-goose chase is going to get all of our asses in
a crack.”

  “Yeah, well, you’d feel a bit different if it was YOUR brother that got capped. This never felt right to me. If the patrol visited here first, then got ambushed on the road later, why ain’t there any bodies in the cabin?”

  The second trooper shrugged. “All right, I’ll admit it’s strange, but what exactly do you plan on doing about it? We ain’t even supposed to be here, and I sure as hell ain’t joining no posse to chase ghost UTVs through the woods.”

  Carr bent and started rolling up the UTV cover. “We take this as evidence. That and the fact you and I both saw there ain’t any bodies in the house and there’s old UTV tracks all around should convince the captain. I mean, somebody out there murdered three SRF troopers, and we can’t let that stand. I’m sure I can convince him to mount a search and destroy mission. And if he won’t, I’m gonna round up volunteers and do it myself in my off time. Nobody murders my brother and gets away with it.”

  Anderson crouched, parsing the possibilities. They were leaving now, but it sounded like they’d be back. He felt his dreams of living the idyllic life of a cave dweller fading. He was debating his next move when the one called Carr looked in his direction and shouted, “STAND DOWN!”

  Anderson heard a sound behind him to the left and swiveled in that direction, unable to stifle a groan as an unexpected pain knifed through his left knee. He brought his M4 up, but knew it was too late even before the butt reached his shoulder.

  “FREEZE!”

  He stared into the muzzle of an M4 less than twenty feet away.

  “Ground your weapon very slowly. Then drop to your knees and put your hands on top of your head and face away from me. Do it now,” the man ordered.

  Anderson did as instructed.

  “HEY, CARR. WE GOT A VISITOR. AND HE’S WEARING ONE OF OUR UNIFORMS.”

  ***

  Assumptions can get you killed, and they probably already had, Anderson thought as he lay facedown in the grass, wrists tied behind him. Two slamming car doors did not necessarily mean two people. In this case, it meant four, with two on overwatch at the clearing perimeter. It was a bonehead mistake, and he probably had this coming.