Hell's Encore: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller (This Dark Age Book 2)

by John L. Monk

  “We’re starting a fire,” Jack said.

  “W-where’s G-greg?”

  He started to tell her Greg was perfectly safe, but her eyes had closed again. A few minutes later, the smell of wood smoke had Jack’s mouth watering. He got up to check the kitchen.

  Back when the Sickness hit, most people only had a week or two of food, and nobody went to work. Sometimes his scavengers would get lucky and the owners had committed suicide, or hadn’t died at home. But neither case applied here, and the pantry was empty.

  “Stinkies in the bedrooms,” Larry said. “Kids too … Sickness got ’em all.”

  “How old?” Olivia said.

  “Real little. Like at the Satch.”

  Jack glanced at him, curious about the odd note of humanity in his voice. Larry’s little sister was in the Saskatchewan.

  “We need a car,” Jack said.

  “There’s tons of cars,” Larry said. “But they don’t work.”

  Jack nodded. “So we’ll get one that does.”

  23

  “She’ll be fine,” Larry said as he and Jack slipped out of the house.

  “I hope so,” Jack said.

  He wanted to add, I hope we’ll be fine, too, but didn’t. A leader had to seem confident, even if he felt scared or uncertain.

  Lisa’s fever had dropped to a hundred and one when he checked it last. She’d also woken up permanently and seemed lucid. She told them a little about what happened. How that crazy girl, Cassie, had launched two attacks on the farmhouse to avenge Carter.

  Larry said she’d always been pretty crazy, but even he seemed surprised at how far she’d gone.

  “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” Olivia had said in the voice she used to read to the children. Everyone nodded thoughtfully because it seemed biblical and profound.

  As they walked down the long, curved drive back to the road, Jack wondered about religion and whether it should be encouraged. The twins were sort of religious, though they didn’t carry on about it. Sometimes they’d pray over dinner, and sometimes they wouldn’t. Once, when Greg got mad and said Jesus Christ, Lisa threw him a chiding look, and her brother quickly apologized.

  Jack’s experience with religion was pretty limited. The few times he’d looked in a Bible, he barely understood a word of it. Lots of rejoicing, beholding, petitioning, sacrificing, and stuff about who was the son of this person or that and whether he or she was righteous. It seemed like a lot to remember, and he personally didn’t think anyone should spend more time on it than absolutely necessary. He thought maybe they could keep the Ten Commandments, though, which seemed like a quick and easy set of rules. Hard to argue with “Thou shalt not steal.” But he wasn’t so sure about the one saying not to create idols. Or taking God’s name in vain. What about Hindus? They had lots of gods and goddesses. But nobody in the group looked Indian. Granted, later on, that could change.

  Whatever religion people eventually settled on, Jack thought, it should be something easy and not too time-consuming. Nothing you had to remember a hundred different gods for, pray five times a day over, or spend years memorizing whose son begat which son of this or that person’s cousin. Also, nothing that started wars or got people executed for being the wrong religion.

  “You smell that?” Larry said, startling him from his thoughts.

  They’d been walking along the road, toward the house they’d fled from, for about ten minutes. The air grew foul with smoke. Not wood smoke from a fireplace, but more sour, as if mixed with burning plastic and chemicals. Ten more minutes and they saw the house, and it was on fire.

  “They burned it,” Larry said unnecessarily.

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure about this plan of yours?”

  “We need to get back home,” Jack said.

  Lisa had shown them long ago how to hotwire cars. It actually worked, unless the car was too new or fancy. If they couldn’t hotwire one, they could bring a battery back with them. Heavy, sure, but possible if they took turns carrying it.

  Larry wasn’t done. “How do you know we’ll even find these guys?”

  “She said they were a little ways down from her car. Won’t take much to have a look.”

  “I’m not sure I trust her. Sorry.”

  Jack wanted to argue, but knew it was hopeless. Larry would either come around or he wouldn’t.

  Another twenty minutes passed and they came to a T intersection with a sign for 81, which meant they were on the right road. They kept walking and soon arrived at Lisa’s shot-up car.

  “They took our car,” Larry said glumly.

  “Did you leave the keys in it?”

  “Maybe …”

  Just then, way overhead, an explosion of purple and bright green fire blossomed in the sky.

  “Wow, look at that!” Larry said.

  More bursts filled the sky, and despite the dangerousness of the situation, Jack found himself gazing at the shimmering and crackling display in wonder. It had been forever since he’d seen fireworks, and he couldn’t look away.

  “That’s weird,” Jack said at last.

  “But pretty,” Larry countered. “Least we know where they are now.”

  Jack nodded and started walking again. They couldn’t be more than half a mile ahead.

  “What time is?” Larry said.

  Jack checked his watch. “Nine-thirty.”

  “Someone might come this way.”

  Jack moved from the center of the road over to the side. “If that happens, drop down. If they’re looking at fireworks and driving cars, they probably won’t see us.”

  They kept walking, alternating between staring up at the fireworks and glancing back for approaching cars. After a few minutes, Jack grabbed Larry’s shoulder and pointed ahead. “You see something?”

  “Hard to see because of the rockets,” Larry said. “Might be a car, but …”

  They moved cautiously forward, low to the ground and stepping lightly. Sure enough, they found a roadblock of cars similar to the ones preferred by the Pyros way out east. Jack didn’t see any guards. They must have felt confident they’d gotten everyone in that fire if they couldn’t bother to watch their own roadblock.

  “Maybe they’re hiding,” Larry whispered.

  “Let’s go see.”

  Creeping to the cars from the shadows, they held their guns down but ready to fire. They listened quietly, barely breathing, before having a look inside. Empty. The keys were inside, but the cars didn’t start. When they popped the hoods, the batteries were missing, and for the first time that night, Jack was actually impressed.

  “Someone probably didn’t want to sleep out in the cold, but couldn’t just leave them here,” Larry said. “Worth more than gold right now.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” Jack said.

  They continued along, and pretty soon the booming bass of rap music sounded through the trees where the road curved to the right. Loud bangs with no accompanying starburst rocked the area, but to Jack, it didn’t sound like gunfire. Some sort of firecrackers. Big ones.

  “Cherry bombs,” Larry said. “They sure love fireworks.”

  Jack grunted and kept going. He liked fireworks, too. But they’d messed up and shot one of his best friends. He couldn’t allow anything like empathy to cloud his perception. The less he thought of them as people having fun, the better.

  The woods receded and they found two houses straddling the road and about twenty cars parked wherever there was an opening. Whoops and cheers sounded from the house on the right after a big rocket shot into the air and exploded. Jack counted maybe ten kids sitting on cars or standing near a big fire pit. Colorful boxes of fireworks were stacked on the hood of a car, briefly revealed in the fading starburst. The air was acrid with the smell of spent flash powder.

  Though nobody was on guard, they stuck to the shadows. Jack checked his rifle to ensure the safety was off. Larry moved his pistol-gripped shotgun from his shoulder to a ready position.
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  Jack eyed it dubiously. “We need to get you a rifle. That thing’s almost useless.”

  “Not up close,” Larry said. “Also, it’s fun.”

  Jack shrugged and let it drop. “Anyway, we can’t steal a car with all that going on. We’re going to have to wait.”

  “Might be a long time. They got electricity, see?” He pointed at an upstairs window.

  Jack’s attention had been so focused on the fireworks that he’d completely missed the steady light on the main floor—not flickering like a candle, and not white like a Coleman lantern. He cupped a hand to his ear and tuned out the whooping kids.

  “They have a generator,” he said at last.

  Larry sat down, then immediately stood back up. “Ground’s wet. Man, this sucks.”

  Jack didn’t reply. He thought about his injured friend and settled in to wait.

  After the fireworks ended, and the bonfire had died to a dull red glow, the kids went inside. Most of them to the big house on the right, but Cassie and another kid went across the street to the small, one-level house there.

  The faint hum of the still-running generator was a comfort because it would cover him if he accidentally kicked something. The ground everywhere was covered in a blanket of trash that ran from one side of the road to the other. Back at the cabins, they burned anything they couldn’t use. Here, they wallowed in it.

  “Careful where you step,” Jack said as they moved between the cars. “Here, this one.”

  The car they chose was the farthest back from the house.

  “Keys and everything,” Larry said, pointing at the shiny set dangling from the steering column.

  Jack shook his head. “We can’t. I just realized it.”

  “Why not? We can just go.”

  As tempting as that sounded, Jack said he wasn’t so sure. The roadblock wasn’t navigable unless they wanted to risk going into the ditch. The other way was probably also blocked.

  Larry sighed. “Man, it’s gonna be heavy as shit.”

  “But less smelly,” Jack said. He popped the hood and took out some pliers.

  “Hurry,” Larry said.

  “Shush.”

  Unhooking the battery was easy, but getting it out was a pain because he had to lift with his fingertips along the narrow ridge above the plastic guard. Adrenaline and urgency prevailed, and he got it out. After flexing his numb fingers to get the blood flowing again, he quietly lowered the hood and pressed it shut with a click.

  “Finally. Let’s go,” Larry said, already moving.

  “Wait,” Jack said, handing the heavy block of lead and acid to him. “I’ll meet you at the roadblock.”

  “Why?”

  “Just give me a minute.”

  Not staying to argue, Larry heaved it onto his shoulder and hurried back the way they’d come.

  Jack needed to see that generator. Had they taken it from the farm with the horses? He still hadn’t checked on them or the other farm. For all he knew, they’d been sacked, and the animals killed for food or simply out of meanness. Jack and Lisa had set up each farm with brand-new, blue Yamaha models.

  Even if the one here was different, he was curious: had they managed to wire it to the house the way Lisa had back at the cabins? If so, that suggested a certain sophistication at odds with their viciousness.

  Jack found the generator chugging along close to the house in the fenced-in back yard. He sighed in relief at the sight of the older-looking, silvery model.

  The house was quiet, and the lights had been off for a while now. Carefully, he climbed the chain link fence and landed deftly on the other side. He crept to the generator for a closer look and smirked at what he saw: a bank of plugs loaded with extension cords. Each cord snaked into the house through a cat flap.

  Jack’s gaze lingered on the bendy exhaust hose lying on the ground. About eight feet long, it stretched away from the unit and ended near a jumble of lawn furniture.

  Thoughts of his parents came to him unbidden. Before the Sickness, their love and some would say excessive guidance were all he’d ever known. Now that they were gone, he had to step into the void they’d left with his own brand of guidance: survival at any cost, and never let an enemy live to harm you again. Still clinging to the softer side of his upbringing, he’d followed his conscience when dealing with Cassie and her friends, and Lisa had paid the price.

  “Never again,” Jack said, and moved the hose.

  24

  In a flash of laziness-inspired genius, Larry had put the new battery in one of the roadblock cars. When Jack got back, it was running and pointing in the right direction.

  “What’d you see back there that was so important?” Larry said.

  Quietly, Jack said, “Nothing. Let’s get the girls.”

  The drive back was tense, with Larry glancing repeatedly at Jack, who pretended not to notice. He wanted to say something, but knew it would come out artificially chatty. Best not to say anything at all.

  At the new house, they found Lisa still awake and wearing a pair of oversized pajamas. Jack helped her outside and into the back of the car. Larry sat next to her and Olivia rode up front.

  “I want my cute car back,” Lisa said tiredly.

  “It’s all ruined now,” Larry said. “They blasted it.”

  “They’re the ones who need to be blasted,” she said.

  Jack caught Olivia’s troubled glance. Since finding Lisa, they hadn’t talked about the scene at the farmhouse, and he didn’t want to now, either.

  When they arrived at Big Timber, almost midnight, it felt as if a week had passed, though it had only been about thirteen hours. They moved Lisa into the Bunyan and endured the shocked reactions of the remaining officers.

  “What the hell happened?” Steve said, staring at Lisa’s pale, haggard appearance.

  “Is she sick?” Molly said, clutching baby Melody in her arms. The baby fussed and squealed, threatening to start crying any minute.

  “Later,” Jack said. “Clear the couch. Someone get a blanket.”

  Lisa pulled away. “My own bed …”

  “It’s upstairs,” he said. “You can’t climb all those steps.”

  “I’ll take her,” Brad said and scooped her gently into his powerful arms.

  When he came back down, looking worried, Olivia left and returned with the group’s stash of painkillers and antibiotics. “I’ll get her started on some of these.”

  “You sure about that?” Steve said. “You don’t know what they all do.”

  Olivia’s jaw took a set. “They worked for Greg! Lisa made him finish the whole bottle, like the instructions said, and we got like five more bottles.”

  “All right, sheesh, just saying.”

  While she was upstairs, the other officers pulled up chairs next to the smoldering fire, which Jack was busily building up.

  Leaving out the gory parts, he related the events as he understood them: the initial attack on the farmhouse at the beginning of the season, the second attack during the thaw, and the highlights of the day.

  Steve was grinning in open admiration. “That was pretty boss, you stealing one of their cars.”

  “I was there too,” Larry said.

  Steve nodded absently.

  Molly looked confused. “Listen … this other group … they’re too dangerous. We need to talk to them—make peace or something. What if they come here?”

  “Like to see them try,” Larry growled.

  “Why?” she said. “So you can shoot them? What’s that gonna do?”

  “Keep them from breathing,” Larry said.

  “Damn straight,” Steve said, slapping him a high five.

  Molly berated both of them for being stupid boys, then rocked Melody, who’d started crying.

  “See what you did?” she said and got up to walk around the room, cooing softly and trying to get the baby to suck her finger.

  The boys sat quietly in collective fear. Crying babies and angry mothers were not to be trifled
with.

  Minutes later, Olivia came back down. She took quick stock of the situation and sat with them.

  “Is she mad?” she whispered.

  Steve said, “When isn’t she?”

  The officers went over the options as they saw them while Jack watched the fire, barely listening, losing himself in the mysteries of flame and smoke and glowing ash. He didn’t want to think, so he concentrated on the act of breathing in and out. Mindfulness, his mother had called it. Doing something on purpose, however trivial. When the bad thoughts came, he acknowledged them, let them go, and took the next breath.

  “… gotta do something,” Larry said an unknowable amount of time later. “Can’t let them get away with it.”

  Jack blinked and looked up. “In the morning. You, me, and about ten Dragsters.”

  “Only ten?” Larry said. “They got like twenty people. Maybe more.”

  “We’ll be fine. And one more thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Make sure you bring the troublemakers. Eric and … whatever their names were.”

  “You crazy or something? They’re never gonna like you, whatever they said.”

  “That’s fine,” Jack said, leaning back and closing his eyes. “I don’t like me either.”

  Larry didn’t reply.

  They took three cars and a truck, with an officer in each vehicle: Jack, Steve, Larry, and Brad. Eric rode with Jack. Eric’s friends and two of Larry’s were spread around as close to evenly as possible.

  “Don’t know why I gotta come too,” Eric said after they exited the interstate. “I told you I don’t want trouble. Told everyone we’re cool now. Like I said.”

  Jack smiled. “This isn’t trouble. It’s actually a reward. You get to do more important stuff now.”

  The boy snorted. “Rather be back where it’s safe. People saying there’s like a hundred kids with guns. Saying Lisa got shot. Lisa.”

  Everyone at Big Timber knew she’d killed Carter for shooting her brother in the leg. And each telling ended the same way: with her bare hands. The sudden notoriety had made her more reserved in her dealings with everyone but Jack and the other officers. Unfortunately for her, that only added to her reputation.