Scorched Earth: Book 2 in the Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival Series: (Zero Hour - Book 2)

by Justin Bell

  They huddled there for a moment, watching the group down below, and Clark tensed as the man with a cloth pressed to his bleeding scalp withdrew a pistol. He could see at least three other weapons among the group, two bolt-action hunting rifles and a pistol, but this fresh weapon was of the semi-automatic variety. Clark couldn’t tell the brand or caliber from this far away, but it didn’t really matter, if the guy holding it decided to pull the trigger, whether it was a .45 or nine-millimeter, Melinda and Javier would be just as dead.

  “All right,” Jackson started, then turned toward the group, “here’s what we’re going to do…”

  He stopped speaking, his eyelids drawing together.

  “Where did she go?”

  Clark and Broderick turned in the direction he was staring and noticed that yes, indeed, the woman was gone. A figure moved down by the backyard with the rusted swing set and Jackson shifted that way, glaring at her. She snuck through some shadows, curving around the house and made her way across the narrow sliver of front yard that they could see from their vantage point.

  “Help!” she screamed hard and loud, her voice blasting over the roofs of the small community, a vicious, pained shriek. “Help, they’re here!”

  Jackson twitched, but Clark held up an arm to hold him steady, looking out toward her on the narrow dirt road that ran past the row of homes. More scattered houses were on the other side of the narrow dirt road, the windows just as black and empty as the others along the ridge of the trees. Over behind the other house, the group of men shifted, separating slowly, drifting apart and moving as one loosely grouped organism toward the shouting, female voice in the road.

  “Travis?” the woman screamed. “Is that you, Travis? Please help!”

  One of the men broke off and moved to a trot, running between two houses and out onto the dirt road. Three men hung back, gathered around Javier and Melinda while the other five dashed over the dirt, running toward the woman.

  “Move, now!” Clark hissed and got to his feet, his weapon still clamped in his tight fist. Broderick followed close behind with Jackson bringing up the rear. Ducking low, they moved over the short grass, tucking tight to the back wall of the house.

  “They went that way!” the woman shouted, pointing down the road toward town. She had a hand pressed to her chest and was frantically gesturing, the group of men following the direction of her pointing.

  Clark, Jackson and Broderick sprinted across the gap between two houses, running low, staying in the shadows, keeping their eyes on the three men surrounding Javier and Melinda. Two of the men were the ones sporting bolt action rifles and the third held a revolver, all three of them looking out toward the road on the other side of the house.

  “Quick and as quiet as possible,” Broderick whispered. “If we fire, we could alert the other five!”

  They halted, backs pinned tight against the wall of the second house, looking over to the small group. They had slowly moved from the backyard to the side, filling the gap between the second and third house, slowly easing their way toward the dirt road. Clark could hear the scatter of footsteps sounding as if they were running down the road, and he hoped all five of the men had gone in pursuit of the phantom intruders the woman told them about.

  Broderick made his way past Jackson and Clark, moving toward the corner, and leaned out slightly, looking out at the group. The two men with bolt action rifles stood to the rear of Javier and Melinda, closer to the corner of the house, while the guy with the pistol roamed about six feet ahead of them making his way toward the road. It looked as if he might have been trying to keep an eye on the woman as well as watch the two prisoners.

  Broderick’s military eye didn’t like what he saw. The group was at least ten meters from where they stood, all three of them armed, with wide open lawn between him and them. They needed to take them out quickly, but more importantly, quietly, and the situation was not conducive to either. Kneeling by the corner, he silently measured the distance between them and the group and looked for any angled routes that might present an opportunity for surprise.

  A low scrape sounded from his right and he turned, then drew back. Jackson had clambered up onto a propane tank at the rear of the house and was climbing up onto the sloped, shingled roof, his fingers and knees scraping quietly along the rough surface of the roof. As he successfully settled himself on the gently slanted surface, he slung his backpack from his shoulder.

  “What are you doing?” Broderick mouthed to him.

  Jackson shrugged, but crawled toward the peak and brought his backpack up next to him, slowly sliding the sword from the backpack. Broderick closed his eyes and shook his head.

  “This kid is going to get himself killed,” he whispered. “And the rest of us, too.”

  “Any other ideas?” Clark asked.

  Broderick shook his head, but shouldered his rifle just to be on the safe side. Out on the dirt road, the footsteps had fallen silent, meaning, Clark hoped, that the men had run far enough along that they wouldn’t quickly return.

  Up on the roof, Jackson pushed up into a crouch, looking down over the edge of the roof, drawing in a deep, steady breath. He took a couple of steps backwards, then charged, taking one lumbering step, then launching himself from the roof in a high arc.

  “Boo!” he shouted halfway through the fall, and the three men all whirled around, stunned, scrambling away. They didn’t scramble fast enough. Even as Jackson crashed down on the two men with bolt action rifles, Broderick broke from the corner of the house and bolted past the collision, three bodies tangling amidst each other, rifles scattering, sword held high, somehow missing the flailing limbs.

  Broderick passed them quickly and the third man with the pistol barely saw him, whirling on him, starting to lift his weapon. Broderick was too fast, and knocked the pistol aside with the stock of his M4, then torqued back around, driving it back into the man’s temple with the momentum of his cross-body swing. He crumpled like a stuffed animal minus the stuffing.

  Turning and bringing the weapon back up he saw Jackson drive the hilt of his sword into the bridge of a fallen man’s nose, splitting skin and spraying blood. The second man started to pick himself up and move toward him and Broderick winced, just imagining Jackson turning on him and swinging the sword, lopping off a limb. Broderick had been in his share of combat situations, but gunfights were a whole different animal than sword fights and he had no desire to see a half-blunt souvenir katana messily carve through human flesh and muscle.

  Thankfully he didn’t have to worry. Clark charged from the corner and wrapped massive arms around the last lunging man, hauling backwards and driving him skull first into the hard, frozen ground of the yard. He followed him to the ground and held him there, making sure he was still and quiet. All three of them lay still and quiet, Jackson, Broderick, and Clark all huddled over the fallen bodies. Javier and Melinda stood in the middle of the carnage just looking out at them, eyes wide and surprised.

  “Come on, come on!” Broderick hissed, keeping his voice from a shout, but as insistent as possible, gesturing toward the woman in the road. She glanced over her shoulder to make sure the men were still not in view and ran back toward them at full tilt.

  “Time to go!” she said as she approached and she fell in with the rest of them. Rather than returning to the trees they had come from, they ran across the dirt road, through the yard and plunged into the tree line on the opposite side, not wanting to revisit their involuntary meeting with the eight men. This side of the forest was thicker and darker, and within moments they were swallowed by thick woods, still without a car, and still without any clear idea of where to go next. The sky above them continued to darken, and the temperature crept south, bringing the world dangerously close to freezing.

  ***

  Aldrich - 16 Miles.

  “You ever hear of Aldrich?” Ralph asked guiding the old sedan over the crest of the two-lane road, easing it down the other side.

  “Nope,” Monique repl
ied from the passenger’s side, glancing haphazardly out the window at the passing trees. The sky was a dull gray, the color of an overused chalkboard, cloaked in thickening winter clouds.

  “Aldrich?” asked Francine from the back seat. “You sure? I lived in Connecticut my whole life and I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Looks like small town central,” Ralph replied. “I got nothin’ but trees and more trees out here.”

  “Better than what we had in Hartford,” Francine said quietly. “At least there’s nothing on fire out here.”

  “Or dead bodies in the streets,” whispered Monique, still looking absently at the sky through the passenger’s window.

  “Who knows what the town will look like,” Ralph said. “Could be just as bad.”

  Nobody replied to that comment, the car soaked in silence. Monique sniffled.

  “It’ll be okay,” Ralph said. “Really.”

  She shook her head slowly, as if she wasn’t really sure what she was disagreeing with. “Never be okay again,” she replied, almost too quiet to hear.

  “You feel like talking about it yet?” Ralph asked, but Monique didn’t answer. He glanced up in the rearview mirror, looking at Francine in the back seat, an almost sixty-year-old woman, her dark hair pulled back into a tight bun, revealing the sparse hint of gray at the roots. Her eyes narrowed, pinching crow’s feet at her temples and she looked out of her own window, purposefully avoiding Ralph’s eyes.

  “I guess nobody’s talking,” he muttered. As he guided the old sedan around another lazy left turn, he thought back to Hartford. It hadn’t fallen quite as quickly as Boston, but it hadn’t been far behind. He’d at least had the opportunity to watch the news reports and comment about the foolish Bostonians and how maybe they deserved to burn alive in their rathole city when he started hearing the sirens. The sirens had begun, a low and warbling echo, then ramped up until it sounded like they were coming from everywhere at once. Muffled thumps rattled the panes of glass in the windows of his low rent apartment, and when he struggled to open them, forced to break apart the solidified paint along the ridge, all he could smell was the rank punch of fresh smoke. It smelled like the pig roast he’d gone to last summer. It had been dead in the middle of July, hottest weekend of the year and the burning pig had smelled like rotting and burning corpses, like he imagined the incinerator at a funeral home would smell like.

  Didn’t stop him from eating it. That had been some damn fine roast pig.

  But smelling dinner was one thing. The entire city you lived in smelling like it was something else entirely. He’d rushed from the window to tell his mom what was happening, his eighty-year-old mother, a woman he was sure was far too stubborn to ever die, and when he came into her room, he knew in an instant that she was gone. Two days earlier she’d been Black Friday shopping, wrestling with the crowds for some stupid coffee machine, and now, here she was, head slumped, chest not moving, dead as a freaking doornail.

  Ralph hadn’t cried, he’d just kind of nodded as if agreeing with a well-made point. Seemed about right. Yeah, he could go along with that.

  The next muffled bang wasn’t so muffled. A violent, deafening explosion had erupted in the building next door, a dull pounding which had thrown bricks and glass in all directions, even punching a hole through one of his kitchen windows. He looked out through the shattered glass at a building next door fully alight with sudden flame, tendrils of yellow creeping up out of broken windows and crawling along the brickwork, reaching for oxygen to feed on.

  That’s when he’d decided to leave. Ralph didn’t know where he was going or what he was doing, but he threw some supplies in a suitcase and a duffel bag, packing up as quickly as he could, then ran down the three flights of stairs. Seconds later he was in the parking lot out back, jumping into his old 1980s Buick LeSabre, gunning the engine and taking off into the city, working his way out.

  He’d spotted Monique less than three minutes later, just walking aimlessly down the middle of the road. Her eyes were wide and vacant, her arms slack at the side of her hips, a whole row of buildings behind her coated in streaks of white hot fire. Ralph could see the rear end of a commuter bus jutting out of the base of one of the buildings, though he couldn’t be sure if that was the true cause of the fire. All he could see was Monique, a girl he placed in her late twenties walking down the road, literally in the middle of the street, feet bare, not dressed for the weather. He angled the Buick and screeched to a halt, pulling up on the sidewalk to avoid running her down.

  He’d slammed open the door and shouted out, telling her to get in. He still couldn’t quite remember why he had bothered showing her the compassion, something about the way she was walking and staring barefoot and confused that called out to him. Convinced him she needed his help. When she looked at him, her eyes were just empty shells, white pools looking in on… nothing. Ralph had been struck by that.

  It had taken him some time and effort, and he’d almost given up, but eventually he’d coaxed her into the car, convinced her to get into the passenger seat and come with him, and he’d been just about to take off when Francine had emerged, stumbling out of another burning building. She saw him helping Monique and came running. What was he supposed to do? Tell her he only helped the cute girls? He relented and let her climb in the back seat, then had taken off, speeding through the back streets of Hartford, cruising past strewn bodies. Monique had gasped at one point, gasped so loud it was almost a scream as they drove past what looked to be a family of five all lying on cobblestone just off the main road. The mother and two of the children were still holding hands as they lay there, some kind of twisted lifeless sculpture of a normal time.

  The military had moved quickly, and Ralph narrowly skated around caravans of Humvees, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and he thought at one time, he’d even seen a tank rolling slowly down Interstate 84 heading toward Hartford. They’d made a swift exit onto the dark and winding rural roads of Connecticut, slowly making their way west.

  Very slowly. Very carefully.

  Monique had barely spoken while Francine spoke far too much for Ralph’s liking. Ralph had never looked for responsibility in his life, had never wanted to feel obligated to anything… but here he was. And in spite of himself, he found himself relishing this protective nature. Monique had been mostly silent while they drove, only speaking here and there. During one break for Ralph to find a restroom, the two women had chatted, and Ralph got the feeling that Monique had shared a little slice of her life with her new female friend, but he hadn’t gotten the details. From time to time, she’d murmur about Tanya and David, whispering their names quietly as she looked out at the sky, perhaps picturing them in a better place.

  Ralph suspected they were her children, and assumed that they’d died at some point during the chaos in Hartford, but she hadn’t shared and he hadn’t pried. The way he figured it, all they had were themselves, so he’d get the story sooner or later, and if remaining silent helped her heal, that was okay.

  “You doing okay, honey?” Francine asked, leaning forward and placing a hand on Monique’s shoulder. She nodded non-committedly. “How about you?” Francine asked, this time turning toward Ralph, smiling warmly.

  “I’m good, Francine, thank you,” Ralph replied.

  “Have I thanked you lately?” she asked, squeezing his shoulder.

  Ralph chuckled. “‘Bout an hour ago.” He smiled and looked at her. “But I don’t mind. Glad I was in the right place at the right time.”

  “You and me both, buddy. You and me both.” She leaned back against the seat.

  “Thank you,” Monique said quietly at the window.

  “My pleasure,” Ralph said.

  Aldrich - 10 miles.

  “What do you say?” Ralph asked. “Stop off here and see if they’re in any better shape than Hartford? Maybe we’ll get lucky and this town that time forgot will be intact.”

  “Sounds good,” Francine replied and Monique nodded quietly in agreement.
<
br />   ***

  The interior of the Blackhawk was as silent as a tomb, the dull whip of rotors the only background noise as the dark, blunt-nosed aircraft coasted through the sky. Down below the city of Boston had faded away to green trees and empty roads stretching throughout the forest like veins. Veins without blood. No cars traversed these roads, nothing was in motion, the entire landscape beneath them a stoic and still painting.

  “Been a while since I drove one of these birds,” Greenway whispered as he guided the large helicopter on its trajectory back toward Chicopee Air Force Base.

  “You’re doing fine,” Wexall replied from the co-pilot’s seat, trying to hide her own unease. She felt relatively comfortable in the Blackhawk normally, but they’d just stepped out of the Little Bird, which handled considerably different than the larger aircraft, and the events of the past few hours had left them all more than a little shaken. The Blackhawk pilot and co-pilot were both dead, lying in the streets of Boston behind them, and one of their gunners, Yadier Roman was writhing in pain in the cargo hold, getting rudimentary care from Santamaria, who knew just enough about field dressings to be dangerous.

  “How’s our fuel?” asked Greenway.

  “We’re solid,” replied Wexall. “Short range, Blackhawk’s got a big tank. We’ve got some to spare.”

  Santamaria appeared in the empty space between the cockpit and the cargo area, leaning on one of the walls with a bent elbow. Sweat and dirt streaked his face and he pulled a hand across his forehead, trying to steady his breathing.

  “Is Roman holding it together?” Wexall asked, turning toward him.

  “As good as can be expected,” Santamaria replied. “He’s more pissed than hurt.”

  “I can relate to that,” Greenway said. “Who were those chumps, anyway? Why would they attack us?”

  “Same reason whoever it was attacked Team Ten? The world has, quite suddenly, gone sideways, and people react in weird ways.” Wexall looked down at the instruments and moved her hands toward the radio, switching it to the Chicopee frequency.