Constant Danger (Book 2): Defeat The Anarchy

by Westfield, Ryan

  Where was that vehicle?

  There seemed to be two small snow-covered roads, one on either side of the house.

  She rounded the corner of the little house, or cabin, or whatever it was. Her boots crunched through the snow. The sky was as gray as ever.

  No sign of a vehicle.

  But she could hear the engine idling.

  It was somewhere.

  More snow to stomp through.

  Then, when she rounded another corner, she saw it.

  A Volvo station wagon. An older model. Probably from the early 2000s.

  Meg hesitated for a moment, staying behind the corner, taking cover behind the house, letting only her head peek around.

  At first, she caught just a glimpse.

  All the doors were closed.

  There were people inside.

  That was all she saw before ducking her head.

  She didn’t want to be seen. Not yet.

  She was glad all the doors had been closed.

  Or had they?

  Yes. She was sure of it.

  But had there been footprints leading out of the Volvo?

  Maybe. She hadn’t gotten enough of a look to tell. Just an impression, nothing more.

  She needed another look.

  She led with her gun, getting the muzzle out there before her head. That way, she’d at least be able to shoot if something happened.

  She tried to maneuver just her eyes and forehead around the corner, but that wasn’t really possible given the physics of standing upright.

  But she did get a look.

  No, it didn’t seem that there were any footprints.

  Her eyes scanned the inside of the car.

  It seemed full. That was her first impression.

  Next, she started to look more carefully.

  Okay, there was the driver. A man. Middle-aged, probably. Hard to see clearly, given the salt residue from the roads that was caked on the windshield.

  There seemed to be no direct threat. No one had a gun pointed at her, as far as she could tell.

  No one was trying to get out of the car.

  In the passenger seat, there was a woman. And in the backseat, there appeared to be kids.

  Kids?

  Was this a family? It sure seemed like it.

  Meg cast a glance in all directions, then decided to approach the car.

  She didn’t lower her gun. There wasn’t time for that. There was a time and a place for not displaying power openly, but it wasn’t now.

  Meg walked quickly and purposefully, approaching so that they could see her clearly.

  The man and woman opened their mouths, surprise and fear coming over their faces as they saw the gun. Their eyes fixed on it, as if they could see nothing else.

  She went to the driver’s side window, motioning for him to lower it.

  He didn’t.

  She gave a purposeful look at her gun, which was pointed right at him.

  He did then, lowering the window slowly.

  “What do you want?” he said, his voice quaking.

  “We don’t have anything!” said the woman, presumably his wife, from the other seat. Her voice was high-pitched. She sounded beyond terrified.

  “Mommy!” squealed one of the little kids in the back. She couldn’t have been older than eight or nine.

  “What do you want?” said the man again. “We don’t have anything. It’s true.”

  Meg still didn’t say anything. She was studying them. And, more importantly, she was looking for any signs of danger. Any signs of a weapon that one of them might suddenly produce.

  She wasn’t exactly hardened, but she was very cautious and suspicious. She wouldn’t put it past someone to have a kid hide a gun for them, for instance, and she cast her glance at the older child, a boy who was about fourteen or fifteen, definitely old enough to work a firearm.

  “No one make any quick movements,” she said. “No one do anything suddenly or…”

  The implication was clear.

  Meg now made sure to check her surroundings again. There might be someone else out there after all. This family might be bait.

  “Anyone with you?” she said. “Anyone else? Anyone obligate you to come here?”

  “What? No. It’s just us,” said the dad. “Come on, don’t do this to us. We’ve been driving all night…. we’re exhausted…”

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” said Meg. “I’m not trying to rob you. I’m trying to protect myself.”

  “Can’t you put that gun away? It’s making us nervous. I’ve never felt comfortable around guns and...”

  “Me neither,” said the wife, practically shaking. “Please, put it away.”

  “Tough shit,” said Meg. “Get used to it. I need to protect myself.”

  She spoke the words forcefully, without apology. After all, why should she apologize for protecting herself, for acting responsibly? In her view, the family should have had guns.

  “We’ve been driving all night,” repeated the dad. “Our neighborhood was going crazy… we needed to get out of there…. we needed to protect the kids.”

  “We’re trying to drive up to Canada,” said the wife. “Things have got to be better up there. Everything we’ve seen here is just so… people have just lost their minds and gone completely crazy.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” said the dad. “People aren’t themselves. They’re just… we tried to stop and get gas somewhere…. the lights are out everywhere… and people are mean and violent.”

  “Someone attacked us,” squealed the kid in the back. “A bad man!”

  “He had a gun,” said the older child.

  “I… I don’t know what to do,” said the dad. “I didn’t mean to… I didn’t mean to do it…”

  “You had to, honey. You had no choice.”

  “Daddy ran him over!” squealed the little kid. “It went bump, bump, bump.”

  The kid obviously didn’t understand the seriousness since she started giggling. Her older brother tried to get her to be quiet.

  “Quiet, Davandra!” hissed the mom. “Don’t say that!”

  There were almost tears in the dad’s eyes, which looked red. There were large black bags under them. “I didn’t really have an option!” he said.

  “You sound sorry,” said Meg. “If he came after you and your family you had every right to run him over. Sounds like you did the right thing.”

  No one said anything for a long time. What Meg had said was definitely a strange concept for this family.

  “What are you doing here?” said Meg.

  “Trying to make it up to Canada,” said the wife again. “We thought Mark here needed to rest…. he was starting to fall asleep at the wheel.”

  “Why don’t you drive?” said Meg.

  “Mommy doesn’t like to drive,” said one of the kids.

  “I never learned,” she said.

  “Now might be a good time to,” said Meg.

  “But it’s too chaotic.”

  “Sometimes you learn when you have to,” said Meg. “But anyway, what makes you think Canada is going to be any better than down here?”

  “Things are just more orderly up there… I mean, look at their healthcare solutions,” said the wife. “They always seem to have everything figured out.”

  Meg didn’t say anything. She wasn’t about to get into politics with the woman. It wasn’t the time or place. And the wind was as cold as ever.

  What was more, it didn’t have anything to do with survival, whether Meg’s or the family’s.

  Politics, in effect, had been wiped off the face of the earth with the EMP. Sure, there were attitudes that were important. There were attitudes that would indicate whether someone was more or less likely to survive. But that was about it. The whole game of politics had vanished in an instant. Provided, of course, that the rest of the country was in the same circumstances that they were in, here in Massachusetts.

  But as Meg would later s
ay, she had a strong feeling that if Massachusetts were affected like this, then the rest of the country would be too. After all, otherwise they could have expected the National Guard to roll in about a day ago.

  And if the rest of the world hadn’t been affected, then wouldn’t there have been the UN coming in, with those funny little vehicles they had? Wouldn’t the whole world have intervened, or at least the powerful, economically “advantaged” countries? The US, after all, had certainly been all over the world itself.

  So, thought Meg, the only thing that made sense was that this wasn’t only local to Massachusetts, but was also affecting the whole of the US, or even the entire continent. Only time, though, would tell.

  “I was going to sleep,” said the man. “But… I…”

  “He’s too nervous. We’re all too much on edge. We won’t be able to rest easy until we get to Canada.”

  “I don’t think Canada’s going to be as much of a safe haven as you’d like to think,” said Meg. “Otherwise, we’d all be heading up there ourselves.”

  “What do you know?” snapped the woman. “Haven’t you heard about their healthcare?”

  Meg bit her tongue. “Look,” she said. “Wouldn’t they come down and help us? The economies are so intertwined… there’s no way the Canadians aren’t going to notice that suddenly their partners south of the border haven’t been responding…”

  “Maybe they did.”

  “Why didn’t they come down?”

  “Maybe they just haven’t gotten here yet.”

  There was no arguing with her.

  Meg looked the family over.

  They were annoying. Unprepared. In a worse situation than she was. They had some strange ideas.

  If it had been just the man and the woman, Meg would have just left them there, wishing them luck.

  But what about those kids? It wasn’t their fault that their parents were making such massive mistakes.

  They were so young. Maybe Meg owed them something.

  Not much. After all, she had her own skin to look after.

  She almost hated herself for saying the next words, “I think you can come in and rest if you like… I have to check with the owner… I just met her… then you can go on your way.”

  Meg, meanwhile, was thinking that once they’d rested for an hour, she’d try to convince them once more not head to Canada.

  “Oh,” said the man, looking over at his wife, giving her a worried look.

  She paused, hesitating. Finally, the wife spoke up, her eyes not meeting Meg’s. “Thank you for the offer,” she said, speaking in a formal way with a strange cadence. “But we wouldn’t want the children to feel… like they aren’t safe.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Meg.

  The woman’s eyes gave it away. They moved up slightly toward Meg’s gun, which she still held.

  “Wait,” said Meg. “You don’t want them to feel safe, or you don’t want them to be safe? Because those might be two very different things, depending on how you’ve educated them.”

  “Both,” snapped the woman. Then, to her husband. “Come on, honey. You’ve had enough rest, haven’t you?”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” he said, trying to snap into action, his hand going to the shifter, his feet pressing arbitrarily against the floorboards.

  “I’m not trying to hurt you,” said Meg.

  “Come on, honey. We’ve got to go. Come on.”

  The woman was actually putting the car into gear for her husband, whose tired, red eyes were casting around frantically.

  And before Meg knew it, the car was off, with the window still down, and the children waving at her from the backseat.

  She hated to think of what would happen to them.

  But she only watched them continue for a few moments as she stood there. After all, she had her own survival to worry about.

  She headed back inside, her boots crunching through the snow.

  The door was closed. And locked.

  She knocked.

  No answer.

  She knocked again.

  The door swung open.

  James was standing there, a goofy look on his face.

  “Come on in,” he said.

  “You’re supposed to be resting,” she snarled at him. “You’re not going to be any use to us if you…” Then she paused. She perceived something was different. She wasn’t quite sure what it was at first. Then she realized - It was warm in there. Very warm. She could feel the heat actually pouring out of the half-opened door. “Hey! What the hell? You’ve got a fire going in there?”

  “Yeah!” said James, his voice full of excitement. “Come on in! It feels great! I managed to fix the chimney. Barb and I did it… she already had the wood… it’s really roaring along.”

  “Shit,” exclaimed Meg.

  She managed to tear herself away from the heat, which felt excellent, taking several steps backward into the bitter, freezing air.

  From her new vantage point she looked up to the roof of the building.

  Sure enough, there was smoking pouring out.

  Lots of smoke.

  Lots of dense gray-white smoke that rose swiftly toward the sky.

  It looked like a beacon. A beacon calling to anyone in the area.

  If there was someone out there cold, someone freezing, they’d want to come here. They’d want to get warm by the fire.

  If there was someone out there who needed something else, were it shelter, food, companionship or warmth, they’d come as well.

  If there were those out there who destroy and murder others in order to preserve themselves, they’d come too. They’d see the smoke and come running. Or driving. Whichever was faster.

  They had to put the fire out.

  Immediately.

  Hopefully it wasn’t already too late.

  8

  Brandon

  There were two vehicles there. A couple of bodies. There had been some kind of gunfight. Not a normal scene for anywhere around North Adams. Highly unusual. But then again, these were highly unusual times.

  Brandon followed procedure as best he knew how.

  And he tried to follow what he’d learned from various sources. He’d always been the type to study up on his own, reading a variety of books from a variety of authors, trying to figure out for himself what was best, what worked, distilling everything down to just the essentials.

  He’d always wanted a bare bones approach, a very simple schematic that he’d follow himself, that he could train himself to act on.

  And the result?

  Stay relaxed as much as possible.

  The rounds made little thumping, pinging sounds against his squad car.

  He was being shot at.

  He’d fired three rounds himself.

  He wasn’t trying to keep track of how many rounds the enemy discharged. There was no point. This was real life, not the movies. He didn’t know what guns they had. He didn’t know how much spare ammunition they had. He didn’t even know how many of them there were over there. His best guess was two, but he was smart enough to know that it was nothing more than a guess.

  Brandon knew he couldn’t control his thoughts. He didn’t try to fight it when images of his son and wife came through his mind’s eye. There were images of the two of them crying, his wife trying to comfort his son when Brandon didn’t return home, but she was sobbing too hard to do much more than hold her young son, now the only family member she had. It was a horrible thought. And soon, Brandon knew, it might become reality.

  He didn’t try to fight it when he found himself wondering whether he should have taken this “call” at all. He knew there wasn’t any point in fighting it when he found himself mentally chastising himself for driving toward gunshots.

  Instead of fighting the thoughts, he tried to ignore them. And the way to do that? Focus on something else. Focus on relaxing. Focus on breathing. Focus on the gun in hand. Focus on the practical aspects of engaging in a gunfight. Focu
s on what he’d learned at the academy. Focus on what the authors had said in those books he’d studied.

  So in the end, the thoughts were there. But they were just thoughts. Nothing more. They didn’t control him. They didn’t make him freeze up with fear or anxiety.

  This left him with the ability to fight.

  But still, he was outnumbered.

  There was definitely more than one over there.

  And he didn’t have his shotgun. He had nothing but his sidearm.

  He was just one man.

  One lone cop.

  No way to call for backup.

  There was probably no way to win this fight.

  A full minute had passed now. No new gunshots.

  Brandon listened for footsteps. But at the same time, he was smart enough to know that his hearing, unprotected from the gunshots, was severely compromised. And he was likely not to notice how compromised it was.

  He’d have to look soon. He’d have to peek out from behind the door. He had to know whether one of them was trying to sneak up on him. After all, it was what he might have done in the situation. It would have been a good tactical move. Have one or two stay back. Send another up.

  Shit. He didn’t like the idea of exposing himself again.

  He had a bad feeling in his gut, as if a vise were squeezing his intestines.

  His heart had started to pound.

  OK. Breathe. Breathe.

  He told himself to keep breathing, forcing his diaphragm to work, sucking air in and expelling it.

  It helped a little. Not a ton. But enough.

  He knew he had to do it.

  In an extreme crouch, he moved away from the door, heading around to the back of the car. His idea was that he’d surprise them, popping out from behind the car on the other side near the truck, rather than where they were expecting.

  Or were they smarter than that?

  It was like a game of chess, trying to guess what the other side was going to do.

  He’d read about this. He’d read a lot about it, more than most guys on the force.

  But what had the books said?

  He didn’t know. In the moment, with the adrenaline pumping, when he was having to remind himself just to breathe, he had no idea what the books had said. He couldn’t remember the author names or the front covers. Not even the titles. He couldn’t remember anything about them, not even anything from his own notes, in which he’d tried to distill the books down to practices useful for fighting.