by Nick Randall
Jon knew there were certainly tells that his house was occupied, but definitely didn’t want anybody to see him leave the place and know it was vulnerable.
Four more blocks out, and Jon brought them up to a house he’d had his eye on. Nobody seemed to have hit it yet, and he knew that the former occupants had been collectors of unusual things.
There were no guarantees, but Jon wanted to see if there was anything he might find useful.
It didn’t take much to break through the front door, and they pulled it shut behind them.
In every room they went into, they first drew all of the curtains, and then pulled out some small flashlights with red diffuser lenses that wouldn’t glow as far as regular lights would.
However, an hour of searching turned up an awful lot of useless artwork, and nothing that really looked like it’d help in the situation they were in.
A quick but thorough perusal of the pantry scored them some more staples and a good selection of herbs and spices, the latter something Roy had been playfully chiding Jon for.
There was also a nice selection of higher-end liquor. But when it really came down to it, dry goods were a much better use of their available carrying capacity.
Both men picked one bottle each as their personal bounty, though.
Once outside, they topped off their bags with walnuts and chestnuts from trees growing in the good-sized yard.
About halfway back to Jon’s, Roy used a hand signal to call a halt. Jon came up beside him and followed where Roy was pointing.
There were three men, all armed with rifles, just a block ahead and moving directly towards Jon’s house.
They didn’t seem to have proper tactical training, but at least had some vague sense of how to work together.
The three men also seemed to be staggered, front to back, but a good twenty yards between each.
Both Jon and Roy unslung their compound bows.
“Get them as fast as we can?” Roy asked.
“Yes. Let’s both hit the same one each time,” Jon said. “I know I can get them in the right place to take them down fast. You’re my insurance policy, buddy.”
“Got it,” Roy said, drawing his bow and starting to aim at the last man in the group.
“Set… And now!” Jon yelled.
He and Roy fired simultaneously. Both arrows hit home, and the man went down on his face.
“Second man…And now!”
Just like before, both arrows hit nearly simultaneously, and were enough to at least put him down, too.
They were both drawing on the last target when the man turned. He saw the people behind him down, and he ran.
“Damn it!” Jon said.
“Let’s go,” Roy said, quickly easing the tension on the bowstring.
He and Jon started a rapid, quiet advance to where they’d last seen their remaining target.
Roy figured the man was either going to take cover to make a stand, or run real fast. At least there was decent moonlight out.
With neither him nor Jon wearing the full battle rattle, they were able to move quietly enough for Roy to at least listen for a runner.
They got up to the corner they’d seen the man run around and heard nothing.
“Could be way far ahead,” Jon said.
“Could be but is also definitely armed.”
Roy chanced a peek around the edge of the building.
There, five houses farther down, he saw the man crouching down behind a fence, as if catching his breath.
Roy couldn’t understand this right away, as the man had run maybe half a block total.
“Something’s not right,” he told Jon.
“Split up and flank?”
“Maybe,” Roy said, continuing to watch the man.
After a minute, it became clear that the man was watching intently the very corner Roy was hiding behind.
“Yeah,” Roy said. “I’ll keep his attention on me, you get around behind him. He knows I’m here, at least.”
“Got it,” Jon said.
He started stalking silently away from Roy. Once his buddy had gone off, all that was left for Roy to do was to kill time and keep the man’s eyes where he wanted them.
A few times, he leaned a little farther out from around the building, sometimes looking to his left and moving his head and mouth as if he were talking to someone. Another time, Roy brought his bow up as if he’d seen something but aimed at a much closer building.
Finally, Roy saw the man’s back arch in pain, and he staggered forwards. A second spasm, and the man fell.
Roy didn’t doubt that Jon could get close and get a couple of shots off. All Roy had needed to do was buy him some time and distraction.
Jon appeared somehow from across the street from where Roy had expected to see him, a grin visible even at a distance.
“Let’s check out the first two guys we got, and then see what your stray there had,” Roy said, as Jon came up.
Chapter 9
Ben and Josie rifled through the two apartments that had been broken into during the firefight. One of them had a case of bottled water in the kitchen, and both had snacks and canned foods.
They packed up as much as they could carry, slammed a couple bottles of water and a couple energy bars each, and rode hard in the direction of Carleton.
After a couple hours, general tiredness, deepening hunger, and a big hill in front of them all conspired to force them to take a break.
They were out past the suburbs of Boise now, and mostly clear of the stretch of small businesses that lined rural highways leading out of cities.
The base of the hill offered a little stand of trees where they could lay down the bikes and sit out of sight of the road.
Ben had thought to snag a can opener and a few utensils while running through the kitchens, so lunch was cold canned pasta and crackers washed down with more bottled water.
“Give me your leg,” Josie said, going for her first aid kit after she’d finished eating.
Ben pulled up his pants leg, and noticed there was blood visible through the bandage but it wasn’t bleeding heavily.
Josie started unwrapping the wound. “You haven’t been taking your antibiotics on schedule, have you?” she asked.
Ben had to admit he hadn’t. With everything that had happened since they’d snuck out of the camp, he hadn’t been thinking about them at all. While it was fresh in his mind, he popped a couple.
“How often should you take them?” Josie asked.
“Three times a day, with meals,” Ben said, reading the bottle.
“Well, there you have it. No food, can’t take your medicine, right?”
Ben laughed at that. He noticed that Josie hummed to herself a little bit while she worked, and had a very sweet smile on her face.
He’d met criminally charming people in prison, so he knew a fake smile when he saw one, but Josie’s seemed to at least come from the right place.
Like she was trying to put him at ease, not trying to get something out of him.
She also had a very light touch while peeling the bandage back from his wound and putting antibiotic ointment on it.
“You do this a lot for your daughter, don’t you?” Ben asked, when it finally hit him.
“I’ve been Doctor Mom for years now. When your baby needs to get a shot several times a day, you’ve got to get a good bedside manner.”
She started wrapping a new bandage around Ben’s leg.
“Because of her diabetes, every injury she gets is worse than it is for other kids. She gets infections more easily, takes longer to heal. It’s a lot of work.”
Ben wanted to ask more, like why they decided to make a stand out in the middle of nowhere without any chance of support for the girl, but decided to let it be.
Josie seemed very relaxed and relieved to have something helpful to do, and not be focused on looting supplies and shooting people. He wondered if the chaos they were all going through would change her the way pris
on had changed him.
Seeing how gentle she was, how naturally she hummed her little song, he hoped that she wouldn’t have to harden up enough to lose that.
“So, do we want to hold with our original plan and finish the trip after dark tonight, or do you want to press on?” Ben asked.
Josie’s brow furrowed up in concentration while she worked. It was only after she had finished binding him up and pulled his pant leg back down that she spoke.
“I’d rather see where we’re going and make some good time, at least to the edge of town. If we wait until dark, we’ll have to move slower, and I’d be afraid of hitting something on the road. Once we get up that hill,” Josie pointed to the steep rise in front of them. “We’re going back down it really fast.”
“We’re more exposed in the daylight,” Ben said.
“Yeah, but so is anybody out looking for trouble. When we ran into those guys this morning, we could see them and count them. I’d much rather know for sure what I’m up against than have to guess.”
“Well. If we sit here any longer, I’m going to fall asleep. So maybe we should get back to it.”
“You and me, both,” Josie said. “First, though, let’s look at what we’ve got here.”
She pointed at the guns she and Ben had taken off of the men they’d fought earlier: a nice Benelli semi-automatic 12 gauge shotgun with a pistol grip and a scoped Ruger M77 Hawkeye .30-06 bolt action rifle. Both looked to be in decent condition, and had about a dozen spare rounds each.
Josie opted for the Benelli and Ben took the .30-06. They stuffed the spare rounds into their pockets.
Ten minutes later, they were in their lowest gears, pedaling hard to get up the hill. More than once, Ben was tempted to hop off and walk the bike up, but he knew that he was actually using less energy cranking away.
Every so often, he saw Josie glance over at him, and was sure she was thinking the same thing.
At the apex of the hill, they stopped for some more water, and looked down the road before them. It was steep and twisty, and Ben immediately saw the wisdom in tackling it during the daytime. He could just picture coming up on one of the curves blind, hitting the guard rail, and catapulting off the side of the mountain.
“I know we don’t have trained eyes for this, but do you see anything down there that looks like trouble?” Josie asked.
“I think we should at least get down off the top of the hill,” Ben said, remembering something from one of the novels he’d read in prison about not letting yourself be silhouetted on top of a hill or a ridge.
They rolled the bikes a little farther on, and kept looking down the road.
“I mean, I don’t see anywhere that it looks like anybody’s set up a trap or anything,” Ben finally said.
“So we go for it?”
“Better than just standing here, I guess.”
The rest of the day brought them up a few more brutal hills, and down some heavy grades.
A couple of times, they passed properties that looked like they were still occupied and cared for, but they never saw the residents. Ben hoped these were the kinds of people willing to just live and let live every time they went past.
Twice, they heard the distant rumble of diesel engines and quickly got off the road and into some bushes as a small military convoy passed.
Ben figured those patrols probably kept travel on the road less dangerous than they had feared it might be.
He reminded himself, the second time they hauled their bicycles back up onto the road, that less dangerous was not the same as safe. It seemed to also explain why the occupied homes they’d passed seemed non-threatening.
There must have been just enough routine traffic on the road to not consider everybody passing by to be an active threat.
“I wonder how far out they’re patrolling,” Josie asked, almost as if she’d been reading Ben’s thoughts.
“If we’re lucky, all the way out to Carleton.”
“Probably not that far,” she said reluctantly. “This is a lot of real estate, even if they just stick to patrolling roads. Roy told me a lot about keeping the peace around the bases overseas, and it wasn’t a very large area they could keep pacified.”
“Well, I’ll take it as far as I can get it,” Ben said.
“Agreed.”
Five hours later, they hadn’t seen any more patrols, but they were right up on the edge of Carleton.
It was late afternoon, and even after watching the town for twenty minutes from cover, they couldn’t tell for sure if the place was occupied at all or not.
“Now I say we wait until dark to proceed,” Josie suggested. “Too many places for somebody to easily see us where we can’t see them. Too many windows and blind corners.”
Ben nodded. “Darkness will be our friend then.”
They got themselves well hidden, and took turns sleeping until dark. They had another simple meal of cold canned food together, Josie made sure Ben took his antibiotic pill, and she changed out his bandage again.
This time, there was no fresh blood, and the skin was no longer hot to the touch.
They decided to leave the bikes well hidden, and just carry enough water and a little bit of food for the night.
During the afternoon, they took turns memorizing the names and the total number of streets between the highway they were on and Jon’s address.
They figured it would be best to not try to approach the place in full darkness, but if they could at least get their bearings and find somewhere close to stay hid until morning.
Unfortunately, all of the street signs had been taken down by somebody. In the darkness, with the two of them jumping at every noise in the shadows, they both quickly lost count of the intersections, or perhaps had taken the wrong fork at one of the Ys, and they realized they were hopelessly lost.
It was only the fact that they hadn’t seen anybody moving around that kept them from falling into a complete panic when they realized they really had no idea where they were.
They didn’t have a flashlight to try and read their map and figure out where they were, and even if they did, there’s no way they would have turned it on out on the street.
“Looks like somebody’s already busted up this house here,” Ben said, pointing to a house with some broken windows. “Worth hiding out in?”
“We could do much worse.”
They still approached very cautiously, rifles at the ready, covering each other as they leap-frogged across the home’s front yard to the door.
Once they were both up on the porch, they remained silent and listened for a long time, hearing nothing coming from inside, before Josie nodded.
Ben reached out and tried the doorknob, thankful that whoever had busted the windows to get in had not locked up on their way out.
It also suggested to him that the place was indeed empty.
The door creaked very slightly on its hinges as it swung open. There was a breathless second while they both waited for a gunshot that, mercifully, never arrived.
Carefully they went inside. Even without any light, the place was clearly a complete shambles.
The living room had been completely tossed. Going into the kitchen, they saw every drawer and cabinet open, anything that wasn’t shelf-stable food strewn all over the floor.
The fridge and freezer were open and smelled strongly of old, moldy food. They didn’t bother with the rest of the house, figuring there was no chance of finding anything useful, and instead went up to the top of the second floor.
With nothing better to do until they got enough light to get their bearings, they caught some more rest in shifts.
When Ben could see the first purple hints of dawn outside one of the windows, he woke Josie. Together, they went to each room, and by the first hint of lightening in the sky, figured out which way was east. From there, they were able to pick out a couple of larger buildings deeper into town. It took a while in the very dim light, but they eventually figured out within two or three
blocks where they were.
Chapter 10
Josie took the lead.
From the map, it looked like they had six or seven blocks to get to Jon’s house, and from the sky, it looked like they had maybe thirty more minutes of half-light to cover it and then try to figure out which one was his.
And then pray that Roy and Alex had actually made it.
Ben followed about ten feet behind her, along the same side of the street, as they made their way quick-stepping as quietly as they could.
Two blocks down, around a corner, and Josie saw bodies laying in the street.
The first humans she’d seen since the last military patrol the day before.
She knew Roy’s body well enough that she was immediately able to tell he wasn’t one of them, and neither was a child, so there was at least that momentary sense of relief.
She still wasn’t used to seeing fresh corpses yet, though, and her first instinct was to move on past them as fast as she could.
On the other hand, a part of her was curious as to why there were two bodies, that didn’t smell like they’d started rotting yet, in the middle of the road.
“Let’s keep moving,” Ben said. “Whoever did them might still be around.”
Josie couldn’t argue with that. She looked down the road in the direction they were heading.
The street ended with a T, and Josie remembered that Jon’s house was at the apex of one such intersection, on the last road at the edge of town.
The house at the end of the block was two stories, had what looked like a cement or brick wall all the way around it.
The house was also made of something solid and non-flammable looking, and all of the windows were covered by metal shutters.
It and the wall around it were painted with a tan color that almost blended in with the expanse of empty Idaho behind it.
Up top of the house was a wind turbine that looked to be functioning. If she had to guess, she’d say that’s the kind of place a guy like Jon might set up.
“I think that’s it,” Josie said to Ben. “Your leg up to a good run?”
Ben flexed his ankle a few times, and said, “You bet.”