This shocking turn of events had left our tiny town smoldering and in complete ruins and led us to realize that Olsten was apparently just another stop on our long road to nowhere – a road that had led us from the Chicagoland area down to the vast forests of southern Illinois, then on to the mountainous terrain of eastern Tennessee, and had now landed us, after our stint in Olsten, in the vast, moist, buggy wastelands of north Florida.
Frankly, all of us were sick and tired of having to pack up our lives and move on after being routed from spots where each time we thought we could settle down. The family road trip used to be something we enjoyed prior to the Su flu, a pandemic that had ravaged the world’s population. Such trips had been things to look forward to with anticipation, excitement, and a sense of adventure. They were opportunities to spend time with the family away from the pressures of school and work. Now such travel was dreaded – even feared. It was difficult, dangerous, and could even prove deadly. We’d thought – or maybe just hoped – that such journeys could be set aside for a while when we’d finally found Olsten. We’d settled in and had our lives set up quite nicely there, but we’d again been forced from our home, which seemed to be becoming a recurring theme in our post-flu lives.
And thus, here we were, scavenging, suffering, and living hand to mouth once again.
We’d left Olsten several days ago. Mysterious Molotov cocktail-wielding attackers had arrived in the middle of the night and evicted us from the general store we’d converted into our home. Thankfully, we’d salvaged a fair amount of supplies from the building before we’d been forced to stand nearby and watch it burn to the ground.
However, even with our supplies, Florida in the summertime was proving to be a tough foe. We were finding that clean drinking water and gasoline were the hardest items to come by. And with the heat and humidity that the “Sunshine State” was throwing at us, we were going through more water than we’d expected in an effort to stay hydrated. We were trying to limit ourselves to half a gallon of drinking water a piece each day, but with eleven in our group, we were still quickly consuming a fair amount of our supply. The only good thing was that the oppressive heat seemed to be keeping our activity – and in turn, our appetites – in check.
We were hoping to make it to the coast in the next day or two, but it was slow going. We’d drive for a few miles before finding a spot with some abandoned cars or an empty home to search in hopes of finding fuel, food, water, or other useable supplies. The old farm pickup with attached trailer that we were using as our transportation was running with its tank perilously close to empty. And constantly having to stop and look for more gas to continue our trek had kept our progress to a snail’s pace. Yet our efforts had only yielded us a paltry few gallons of gas in the process. It seemed like it was always just enough to get us to the next spot at which a few precious ounces awaited. I dreamed of the day that we’d come across a huge tanker truck in which we could fill our vehicle’s tank and then some. But I was afraid that in this day and age, such a dream was just that, a dream. With no oil wells or refineries running to create and process more fuel, and with other survivors of the flu having consumed or hoarded much of the excess supply over the past year, it was becoming increasingly difficult to scavenge gasoline.
My old college buddy, Ray – an FBI agent in the pre-flu world – who had joined our group back in the forests of southern Illinois with his now pregnant wife Pam, had said we might try grain alcohol in place of gasoline, but alcohol was probably even harder to find these days than gasoline. It was one of the few luxuries still available to people to help take their minds off of lost friends, lives, and loved ones, and the cruel realities of the post-flu world. There was no cable television, no sporting events, no movies – unless you had a generator and fuel to power a DVD player and television, which even if you did, you weren’t likely to waste such valuable resources on movie watching. There was no running water for soothing baths or hot showers, no electricity or natural gas for cooking romantic dinners, no doctors to diagnose and prescribe something for that achy back or those debilitating migraines, and no pharmacies to fill the prescription even if you had it. There were no date-matching services to pair you with your ultimate love interest, no mindless online videos featuring piano-playing cats or screaming goats to take your mind off things for a minute or two, and no cell phones, tablets, or instant messaging. It had become a world in which surviving to see another day was the ultimate luxury.
And even if you somehow managed to achieve several of those aforementioned luxuries, it was a constant battle to maintain them or keep someone else from taking them. Gone were the laws and order of the civilized world. Small segments of the current society had retained some semblance of its former self – certain rules, regulations, and inherent characteristics of dignity, civility, and chivalry – but there was no law enforcement to maintain order among those who chose to follow their most basic of human instincts and ignore the laws and protocol of the land once known as the United States of America. And since the flu had created a “sink or swim” sort of mentality, many of those who had survived were the ones willing to do whatever it took to stay alive, which often meant having to do the unthinkable.
Our group had been lucky in that I had always been a planner and a prepper. I had foreseen a situation not unlike the Su flu coming long before it ever arrived. And while as a writer in my pre-flu life, maybe the idea of such a situation ever coming to fruition seemed more the basis for a book than reality, I had undertaken the preparation process nonetheless, largely to err on the side of caution than due to any real expectation of such a scenario unfolding. I had stockpiled food, several guns, ammunition, medical supplies for my diabetic wife Claire, and other emergency items. I had even picked out a secluded spot – land owned by a family friend – in the forests of southern Illinois where we could safely hold out until things settled down and danger had passed. And I had even sent pre-written letters with detailed instructions to my closest loved ones before we left.
Most of those whom I had contacted had eventually joined us. Some never made it. And until we’d been forced from our safe haven by a roving gang of miscreants, we’d called the place our home.
That was nearly a year ago. We’d been moving from place to place ever since. We’d found a beautiful mansion we’d nicknamed “the castle” in the mountains of Tennessee, but we were forced to move on by local inhabitants incensed by our encroachment upon what they felt was “their” territory. That was when we decided to continue south. In Georgia, we had a brief stay at a small farm that had ended in disaster with the death of the farm’s owner and his wife. This traumatic event, paired with various injuries and illnesses among our group members, had forced us onward in search for a place we could finally call our own.
Olsten, a small and secluded town also in Georgia had seemed the perfect spot. But lack of water, and an area population that was apparently far less pleased with our choice of living location than we were, had forced our group, that also included my brother Will, his wife Sharron and their two children Paul and Sarah, my father Frank, Claire’s mother Emily, and our cat Cashmere – who had joined us at the castle in Tennessee – to once again move along.
Our experiences to this point in the post-flu world had left us gun-shy and with little faith in our fellow survivors. It had created in us an extreme distrust of others, and we were tired of having to start over again and again because sadly, in a world in which few people remained, we still couldn’t manage to find a place where we could live in relative peace and harmony with our fellow human beings.
The newspapers I’d read that had been printed in the last days in which mankind had such luxuries, reported that the flu’s mortality rate had run somewhere in the 95 percent range. If that was the case, in our nation of around 320 million people, some 16 million might have been spared from the pandemic’s wide-reaching grasp. I had few illusions though that this many people now populated what was once the United States. It was
likely that millions more had died in the ensuing post-flu months from starvation, other diseases and infections, as well as from the ridiculous sort of infighting over supplies and territory that we ourselves had experienced. My guess was that the nation’s population was now somewhere closer to 9 or 10 million people at best, which made the inability to cohabitate peacefully with our few remaining neighbors seem even more ridiculous.
It was just human nature I guess. But I had to admit, I was starting to find it all extremely tiresome. It was as though my family was on its own Trail of Tears, losing more members at each stop. Claire’s father and brother had been taken from us in southern Illinois. We’d lost my mother and our dear teenage friend Janet in Tennessee. And family friend Joanna, along with her young son Shane, had left the group during our stint in Olsten.
I was finding that I was growing extremely weary of our long journey south both physically and emotionally. Therefore, after being ousted from Olsten, when Ray had made a somewhat off-the-cuff remark regarding our need to find a castle with a moat in which to reside, I took his words to heart. And this was why we had come, with the blessing and consent of our entire group, to Florida. We were on the hunt for our castle, complete with moat, and I had an idea of where we could find it. Getting there however, was proving harder than I expected.
Therefore, after a long night of creeping slowly along in our aged pickup truck in an effort to conserve fuel, and an equally long morning of searching for more gas, as we exited the highway onto a road that appeared deserted at first glance, I was disappointed to see smoke rising in the distance ahead of us.
“Oh great,” I said dejectedly to Claire and Jason who rode beside me in the pickup’s cab. “What now?”
Everyone was hot, tired, and ready for some much-needed sleep, and the last thing I wanted was another problem, or worse yet…a confrontation.
CHAPTER 3
The SUV and pickup truck full of fuel leading Gordon and Jeff’s Mustang screeched and skidded to a halt as the two armored personnel carriers blocked not just the roadway, but due to their size, any hope of using the road’s shoulder or drainage ditch that ran alongside it to circumvent them.
Jeff quickly slowed the Mustang and angled it to the left as both he and his father Gordon looked for avenues of escape on either side of them, but all they saw were walls of tangled vegetation.
The two trailing vehicles bringing up the rear of their small convoy angled up behind them creating a sort of V-shaped defensive perimeter around Gordon’s Mustang.
Gordon knew he and his boys were outclassed and outmatched. He watched in his side mirror the three SUVs that had followed them from the interstate seal off their only potential escape route from behind. Two of the SUVs angled lengthwise across the road, each covering half a lane and the road’s shoulder. The third SUV stopped facing them, filling the center gap between its two counterparts, defending against any breakout attempt by Gordon and his men.
Armed men appeared through skylights in the rooftops of these SUVs, flipping up protective armored plates in front of them.
Gordon realized that these guys meant business. They weren’t any half-assed locals looking to steal some food or fuel – these guys were for real. He wondered where they had come from with such firepower, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that they had it and they were apparently willing to use it. He hoped they could just hand over the diesel they’d captured and be done with it.
But that was not to be.
The shooting started before he had even begun to consider how to approach the handover of the scavenged fuel. A projectile fired from the first armored vehicle landed just in front of the Billy and Jerry’s lead SUV and exploded. The front of their SUV jumped in the air, coming back down as it erupted into flames. Gordon watched in horror as his son Jerry fell from the passenger-side door out onto the pavement. The second armored vehicle chose this exact moment to open fire, ripping into the boy as he attempted to scramble for cover.
Gordon stared, frozen in his seat as his boy’s bloody body fell motionless on the pavement. There was no sign of Billy as the SUV continued to burn and be raked with machinegun fire, wavy lines of bullet holes being punched through its hood, doors and windows.
The second armored vehicle then swung its fire towards the pickup truck containing the diesel fuel, spraying the Mustang with several rounds in the process, none of which did much damage, but it forced Gordon and Jeff down in their seats for cover as the rounds opened up several holes in their windshield.
At the same time, the three SUVs behind them commenced firing as well, peppering Gordon’s rearguard vehicles with lighter, yet still intense machinegun fire.
The first armored vehicle launched another projectile that went wide of the Mustang and exploded near the road’s drainage ditch, but Gordon knew its intended target.
“We gotta move!” he yelled at Jeff. He grabbed the CB radio. “Get to the weeds!” he yelled into it, hoping that his boys could hear him over the intense machinegun fire, and that if they could, they could do something about it.
While he knew that his troops would fight to the death for him, that death would be quick in coming if they didn’t get their asses into gear. It was time for the general to lead his troops, and he now realized that he must lead them not just in victory but in defeat as well.
The all-encompassing fire both in front of and behind them – but especially from the armored vehicles – was so heavy though, it meant that it was hard for any of his men to safely make their way to cover. Most of their vehicles had been made inoperable by gunfire, leaving them useless in transporting them to the cover of the thick undergrowth just 40 yards away. This meant that they’d have to try to hoof it. But the suppressive fire of their attackers was just too much. If they sheltered in place, they were dead for sure.
Before he had time to contemplate it further, another projectile from the first armored vehicle landed and exploded just yards from their Mustang. Shrapnel from the explosion ripped into the front of the car, killing the engine instantly.
“We’re dead in the water here!” Jeff yelled at his father.
The second armored vehicle had started concentrating its machinegun fire at the lead pickup that held the diesel fuel and that his young nephew Edwin had exited and now sheltered behind. Gordon was sure the tank full of diesel would ignite any second.
He took a breath, expecting the explosion and the loss of yet another family member; but instead, the firing from the destructive power of the heavy machinegun suddenly and unexpectedly stopped.
Gordon saw it as their chance – their only chance.
“GO!” he yelled into the CB. “GO NOW!”
* * *
“Idiot!” Jake Steins yelled, smacking the man firing the Stryker armored fighting vehicle’s Protector M151 Remote Weapon Station hard in the back of the head.
The man’s name was Doug, and he was a new recruit to Jake’s crew. He rubbed the back of his head where Jake had struck him. They’d picked up Doug just outside Jacksonville because he said he’d learned how to operate the Stryker’s weapons system in the army, which Jake found may well have been true, but they sure as hell hadn’t taught him any common sense during his service.
“You’ll hit the fucking fuel tank, dipshit! That’s the whole reason we’re here!” Jake chastised him
Jake shoved Doug roughly aside, “Last time I let you do something I should have done myself. I didn’t survive the goddamn flu and make it all the way down here from Chicago to run out of gas and die in some bumfuck swamp, you asshole!”
Of course Jake was being overly dramatic, but that was Jake, and he was going to get his point across one way or another.
No matter what happened or how, it was never Jake’s fault. In fact, he was pissed already because he blamed his men for not getting this necessary fuel earlier in the day when they’d first stumbled across it. Jake’s Stryker armored vehicles were gas guzzlers, and while their highway fuel mileage ha
d been decent on the way down from Atlanta – where they’d been forced to abandon their operations after coming into conflict with the city’s three controlling families – they were in desperate need of diesel to quench the metal beasts’ seemingly insatiable thirst.
Jake’s men had discovered the tractor trailer on one of their scouting missions and hauled the stranded driver off into the nearby swampland where they executed him. However, they hadn’t had with them the siphoning equipment necessary to get the fuel out of the semi. Upon their subsequent report of the find to Jake, he had ordered the fuel-deprived Strykers safely stashed out of sight while his men gathered the requisite siphoning materials. It was at this point that he saw Gordon’s convoy headed towards the interstate and guessed what they were up to. Actually, it had been Ava, his right-hand woman, Latina lover, and planner for their organization who had pointed out the likely destination of the convoy and how best to handle the situation. Therefore, once Ava was done explaining what to do to Jake in private (so that he could eventually either take full credit for the success of the operation or blame her for its failure), he radioed his men and told them the plan as Ava sat nearby – just in case he left out any pertinent details.
The plan called for his first assault team comprised of three armored SUVs to circle around behind and observe the convoy from a distance, waiting for them to do the work of collecting the fuel. Then they would push the fuel-rich convoy back towards the coast. Meanwhile, Jake, Ava, and the remainder of their crew would maneuver their armored vehicles into a concealed position along the roadside leading back to the coast. Then all Jake had to do was sit, the spider laying in wait for his prey to come to him and be snarled in his web. As soon as the convoy was within striking distance, he would maneuver his armor to block the road and bring their heavy-hitting firepower to bear while his trailing SUVs pinned the convoy in place.
ASCENSION: THE SYSTEMIC SERIES Page 2