EMP Crisis Series (Book 3): Instant Mayhem

by Russell, Mark J.

  Gary nodded but didn’t reply. Had what Palmer said sparked some kind of memory in the man? Some painful past? Palmer would have liked to know the man’s history, and where he had been when all of this started. He’d satisfy his curiosity and get those answers eventually, but opted not to press it at the moment. Let his shook-up Rottweiler lick his wounds and all.

  After another thirty minutes of trekking through the mostly wooded, rough terrain, they came to a ridge that opened up to a valley below. An entire town appeared, and Palmer couldn’t help but smile. The place was a square mile, near a river running east to west along the town’s southern edge, and just west of Clarks Crossing, it was joined by a tributary that first ran along the town’s north side. This made the place easy to defend, since there was water surrounding three sides. Only the east had an access point that wasn’t a bridge—the rest of the access points were natural choke points, and would turn into kill zones in the event of an attack. This place seemed easier to defend than most towns in the region. It was no wonder leadership had risen up here, and that they’d successfully defended it from any bandits or raiders who sought to overtake it.

  There wasn’t a good way to attack the town, that he could see. The only way to attack it was from within…

  Rising from their place on the crest of the hill, the wind whipped through his hair. The start of a plan was formulating, and he knew what he needed to do.

  “C’mon,” he said to Gary, and they headed down toward where he saw a roadblock at the southern part of town, before the bridge, guarded by a few men. “Remember, keep your weapon holstered, and let me do the talking. I have a plan.”

  9

  Nick waved at the truck as it left the compound, standing among the others—minus Tom Crogan, who of course was up in one of the guard towers on overwatch, making use of his rather amazing sharpshooter skills. Having no one on guard duty would have been inviting disaster.

  After a glance up at the tower, Nick turned to the others. “Okay, the sun’s up any minute now. There’s already some light. That means we’re running late. You all know your jobs, though, right? Let’s get those animals fed and the watering towers refilled. We’re short on hands, but we don’t have to be short on getting things done.”

  He clapped people on the shoulder with a smile as they left one by one, but in his head, he was already sorting out his own day’s tasks.

  The farming maintenance should be first. Although he had mentioned water towers, they weren’t really towers but barrels, arranged near the raised beds and the hardening trays to gravity-feed a slow volume of water through soaker hoses. It’d be a sad day when the last of those hoses wore out…

  Last out was Emma, who flashed him a quick smile as she turned to head back inside to cook. Making meals was no longer as easy as poking holes in the plastic before shoving a packaged dish into the microwave. She’d be in there for an hour, easy, and it got damn hot in that kitchen by the time all was said and done. At least she’d have the younger kids to help with the three-times-a-day cleanup, which involved a lot more than merely scrubbing dishes, with so many people to feed; it was a top-to-bottom scrub.

  Water levels checked, and fixed where needed, Nick headed toward the northernmost guard tower to check on their progress.

  Green trees flew past the window as Abram stared out, but he only halfway noticed them from his seat in the back. His thoughts weren’t on the beautiful Vermont scenery, but on more important things like fighting the urge to tell Frank to turn around and take him home.

  Home. It meant so many things. Emma and Shelly. Fenton. The Vermont land he had worked from nothing into a source of survival for so many people. All those people who relied on the land he’d brought to life, home meant them, too. And home had shrunk until it disappeared, in the side mirror, long ago as they drove north from the compound on Highway 100.

  Leaving was hard, but even harder still was leaving to go see some other man’s son-in-law, when it meant leaving behind his own child in a world that was no longer safe. It was especially hard to leave when that man didn’t even want to go, kind of like rubbing salt in an open wound.

  From the front passenger seat, literally riding shotgun, Owen said over his left shoulder, “Hey, old man. You look pensive. Penny for your thoughts?”

  Abram shook his head to help him refocus from his inner debate to the real world around him. “What? Oh. Nothing wrong, really. Just staring blankly into the distance.”

  “I don’t know how you can look so dejected will all this awe-inspiring scenery we’re going through, but something has you down. You don’t have to say you’re fine if you aren’t.” Owen smiled, looking moderately reassuring.

  Abram frowned.

  Owen’s smile faded.

  Abram replied, “Just homesick. I’m not used to leaving it.”

  Frank grunted. “At least you got a daughter who wants to see you. Must be nice, being welcomed home.”

  Abram swiveled his head toward Frank. “Regardless, she’s my responsibility. And that’s one responsibility I can’t meet if I’m not there to protect her.”

  Frank shook his head. “Sometimes, that’s a blessing. I can’t imagine living close to my jackass-in-law. I’d feel like I had to take care of his ungrateful ass, too, plus my daughter. No-good little—”

  Owen laughed, until Frank and Abram staring at him brought an awkward silence.

  Abram looked back to Frank after a moment and said, “Keep your eyes on the road.”

  “Mm hm.” Frank looked forward again, pointedly ignoring the man in the passenger seat.

  Owen said, “What?” He paused. “No really, what?”

  Abram cleared his throat. “It seemed just a bit insensitive. Did you mean to be?”

  “What? No.” Seemingly puzzled, Owen turned to Frank. “I—I’m sorry, Frank. I…”

  Frank didn’t look at the other man, but muttered, “Don’t worry about it.”

  The road ahead curved sharply, and he stopped talking abruptly to focus.

  Owen settled into an uneasy silence, likely embarrassed, so Abram was again left to his thoughts and the Highway 100 scenery for company.

  There were more productive ways to pass the time that wouldn’t let him dwell on his worries and homesickness, though. He blinked, tearing his eyes away from the trees surrounding them. “So, what’s the plan when we get to Burnsville? Are you going to walk right up to the Mayor’s Office?”

  Frank shrugged but kept his eyes on the gently-sweeping road. “I imagine they’ll have roadblocks and checkpoints set up. He’ll know I’m coming—if the bastard even lets us in. He may not. I probably wouldn’t, if the situation were reversed.”

  The road ahead, which had been on a gentle slope for the last half-mile or so, leveled out before gently rising again in the distance.

  Owen, speaking for the first time since making everything feel awkward with his badly timed laughter, turned halfway around to look back at Abram. “Before we get there, we might want to pull over somewhere and bury everything we won’t need immediately. I mean, they can’t steal it if they can’t find it. Maybe even the rifles.”

  “Not the pistols, too?” Frank glanced over.

  “Nah. If we show up unarmed, they’ll know we made a camp, or they’ll think we left them with other people. That’d be the worst one, because they might think we were scouting them for a raid.”

  “A legitimate concern, these days,” Abram replied. “In fact, we may want to circle the town and approach it from a different side. Just so no one can back-track us and risk finding the compound. Even if Kent didn’t order it, someone else could take notice.”

  “It’ll add time to the trip,” Frank said, his voice deeper and gruffer than usual.

  Why he’d be more concerned about the bit of extra time than Abram wasn’t clear, but it seemed like a trivial amount of time to Abram. He considered what to say for a moment before replying, “It won’t take all that much extra time. And Owen is right to want t
o take a few extra precautions. While it would probably turn out fine if we just drove right in, we don’t know these people or what condition they’re in. If some of them are hungry enough, they very well could set out to try to find our home. Not that it’d be easy, but why take the risk at all?”

  Owen had taken out the map—as the “shotgun” rider, he was also by default the navigator—and now said, “Abram, if you want, we could take the next right and dog-leg our route over to Highway 12 so that anyone we pass on the way won’t know which road we’re really coming from. Added protection. From the map, it’d only take another ten minutes at the very most. The next place we could do that is, I think, just beyond the crest of the next hill.”

  The road reached the bottom of the faint slope they’d been on, leveled out, and then began to slowly rise again—

  The car jerked violently forward, the engine going silent for a split second before resuming its purr. Just as Abram was unclenching his fingers from where he’d dug them into the seat to either side of him, it did it again.

  “What in the actual crap?” Owen half-shouted.

  The engine didn’t cut out again, but the sound was rough, like the truck was struggling.

  “I’m not sure,” Frank said, just as they reached the crest.

  When the vehicle crested and leveled out, the sputter-stutter vanished, once again purring like a giant housecat. When they reached the opposite crest and began a shallow down-grade, it continued to run just fine.

  Abram looked into the distance, ahead. They’d reach another hill, and its incline, shortly.

  Frank said, “Brace yourself. If it does it again, we’ll pull over.”

  Abram grit his teeth. This is just damn perfect.

  He waited impatiently to see how badly they were boned.

  As the truck’s nose rose to accommodate the rising terrain, the engine jerked, then died.

  Damn this truck, you’ve got to be frigging kidding me.

  Abram leaned forward as Frank wrestled the suddenly manual steering, veering right to glide to a stop on the shoulder. “Frank, what’s wrong with this thing?”

  Owen lifted his head at last. He’d been staring at the floorboard, eyes narrowed. “Hm. Pop the hood.”

  Frank grunted, but did as Owen said, while Abram thanked his lucky stars he’d brought a mechanic on this trip.

  Owen led Frank through a series of instructions, ruling out one thing after another in a process of eliminating possible causes. Then, he tested the fuses under both the hood and the ones below the steering column. When he was done, Owen clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

  Abram frowned. “How bad?” Why mince words?

  Owen gave him a half smile. “Not bad at all. It could have been a pump, which would have hosed us. But nah, it’s easy. Frank, can you grab the duct tape from the back?”

  Frank cocked his head at Owen, then moved to the back to retrieve it. He handed the roll over, and then went back to re-secure the load in the bed of the truck.

  Meanwhile, Abram wandered to the front, where Owen stood carefully peeling a two-inch-long strip of tape, and said, “I don’t mean to doubt you, but the thing about fixing anything with duct tape is kind of a joke. Is that going to work?”

  Owen smiled, his good nature shining through without any hint of mockery. “Yes, sir, you betcha. I am ninety percent sure this is a pinhole leak in the fuel line. Most vehicles have a fuel pump, and a pinhole would either do nothing or leak gas into the engine compartment. Frank’s has been altered. It has a fuel pump at the head that moves gas by creating a vacuum. The hole lets air in, breaking the siphon effect, more or less. You follow?”

  Abram nodded. It sounded odd, but Owen seemed certain…“How do you know it uses a vacuum pump?”

  Owen pointed at a cylinder that looked spliced into a black hose. “Because I’m looking at it. Anyway, with a bit of spit, I found the leak right about…here,” he said, carefully wrapping the tape strip around the hose. He then tore off two more strips, wrapping one on either edge of the first one.

  Abram nodded. Good man, being so careful.

  Owen called around the hood, “Frank. Give it a whirl, now.”

  The engine turned over five times, but on the sixth, it caught, and after a half second of sputtering, roared to life.

  Yep. Thank goodness he’d brought Owen.

  10

  Eggs. The kids had only brought in enough for each person to have one. What had they done with the rest? Emma set aside the bacon, being careful not to knock over the lettuce and tomatoes perched precariously on the cutting board atop the counter, and headed for the coops. She went through the back door that led to the “mudroom,” a term she’d heard before but which had never made much sense until they’d come here to a working farm, and donned her boots. Sneakers weren’t practical for trudging through fields and muck and whatnot.

  The coops were uphill from the sunken garden beds—the opposite of raised beds, they were in a shallow depression below a low hill, where the rainwater collected and stayed the longest, so the rice growing there needed little extra water, especially with the weird mulch Abram used that consisted largely of the chaff from winter wheat—so she was breathing hard by the time she reached her mom, Shelly, who had a big sack of chicken feed hanging around her neck and shoulders where she could get at it with either hand, in front.

  Shelly smiled. “I’m surprised to see you out of the kitchen. Anything I can help you with?”

  Emma smiled back politely. “I hope so. We need more eggs for breakfast. Do you know where the kids put them?” She grabbed a pitchfork leaning against the table and began to spin it on one tine, letting the long handle spin back and forth from hand to hand, fidgeting.

  Shelly pointed at a wicker basket on top of an unused egg incubator—it had been her dad’s most advanced one, with onboard sensors and so on, but it was useless now—and said, “Yeah, I wondered why they’d left them there. I was going to put them in the evapo-fridge when I got done here. Don’t take the pitchfork, though. I have to swap straw for the chickens today.”

  Emma tried not to frown. She hated that evapo-fridge contraption, which used water evaporation from dispersion into cloth wraps to cool off a small cooler. It worked, sort of, but it had to be filled about three times a day, and nothing ever got as cold as just dunking it in moving water, and it was a pain to wrap up again with only one hand while taking things out, or putting something in. “Okay, thanks. I’m pretty sure all the guys would want me strung up if they didn’t get their daily dose of eggs.”

  Shelly laughed, a light and airy sound. “More than likely. Maybe after tar-and-feathering you. Glad I could help. I hope you finish soon; my tummy is already rumbling louder than these chickens, and—”

  Crack.

  Just behind the coop, there came the sound of a branch breaking.

  Mother and daughter both froze at the same time.

  A shiver ran down Emma’s spine and her heart raced. There was no one over in the north field right now, or there shouldn’t have been. Okay, maybe it was just a fox or something—none of the tripwire alarms had gone off…

  Shelly put a finger to her lips. Her eyes were wide as she quickly unslung the bag of feed and set it down, heedless of a bit of spilled seed mix, and turned toward the sound—toward the back of the coop enclosure—while her now-free right hand slid down to the pistol she carried.

  Emma picked up the pitchfork in both hands, only half-aware of keeping the tines pointed down and away from her mother. The old Emma might have screamed and ran, but times had changed, and in the back of her mind, she realized, she had to change with them. She tightened her grip, and waited, listening for clues as to what was going to happen next, and where. She took a second to look around, seeking the exits to keep their relative position in mind.

  A woman’s voice Emma didn’t recognize, speaking in a hissing half whisper: “Shut the hell up, man. There could be people in there.”

  Close
r—like, just on the coop’s back wall—a man replied softly, but without whispering, “I didn’t see no one, and they’s only one angle we couldn’t cover. It’s fine.”

  “What if those others come back? That road winds back near here, they’ll see us, and—”

  “Shut yer whore mouth, lady. You’re lucky I even took you in, or you and that brat would have starved b’fore now. You seen all the supplies in that beater they was driving? They’ll be gone for hours, prob’ly more. Remember what I told you, grab ’em by the ankles so they can’t scratch you and shove ’em into the pillowcase. These people got plenty. They can spare half a dozen hens, I figure.”

  “Fine, Virgil, but don’t think I’m doing you any special ‘favors’ tonight.”

  “You will if’n you want to ‘eat’ tonight,” the man replied, voice dripping with sarcasm.

  All the while, Emma had looked around for some way out of the coop, but she and her mom were trapped inside—and the strangers were coming in.

  She turned to her mom and, uncertain, opened her mouth to ask what to do, where to go. Anything to fix this.

  Shelly put a finger to her lips, widening her eyes for emphasis. Then, she crept to one side of the doorway, which lay close to where the voices could be heard on the far side of the hutch’s thin-planked walls.

  Some part of Emma’s mind understood why her mom had chosen that spot. It would give her mom an extra half second before anyone coming in would see her. The fact that her mother had the presence of mind to choose a good spot, in the heat of the moment, was surprising. But most of Emma’s thoughts—those scattered ones that got through the fog of adrenaline—were focused on the pistol her mother held trained at the doorway at roughly head height. If her mom got the drop on whoever came through the door, she could take them prisoner. But if they resisted…Her mom’s eyes looked hard, surprisingly so. Then, the pistol would make a loud noise, and she had to be ready to move if it did.