First Light - An EMP Survival Novel (Enter Darkness Book 5)

by K. M. Fawkes

  “Sorry,” said Anna, slipping into a clean button-down emblazoned with colorful penguins. “I guess I should’ve warned you before I stripped in front of you.”

  “It’s fine,” Brad replied, a little too loudly.

  Anna eyed him regretfully for a minute, as though wanting to have a conversation she knew they were both too tired to have. “I’ll change in the bathroom next time,” she said finally, before turning the light out.

  “Thanks.” Brad rolled over on his side and counted to twenty, then thirty, then forty, waiting for the awkwardness to subside. By the time he finished counting, Anna was already asleep.

  Chapter 15

  When they awoke the next morning, the sun hadn’t yet risen over the fir-dotted hills to the east. It was just after 5:00am and from the narrow window Brad could see that a cold fog had descended over the river, while the woods lay dark and silent. “Is there a particular reason we had to leave before sunrise?” asked Anna, rising stiffly.

  “Three hours from now everyone else will be up,” said Brad. “You don’t want to be trapped here for the rest of the day saying goodbyes, answering questions, telling them you’ll see them again.”

  “Point taken.” Picking up her shirt off the floor, she strode to the door. “Any other reasons?”

  “We’ve got a better chance of surprising Lee if we show up early. He talks a lot of guff about waking up with the dawn but I’ve never seen him out of bed before 8:00am. If we’re lucky we might even be able to get the kids and get out of there before he rolls out of bed.”

  Murmuring thoughtfully, Anna left the room to get dressed.

  For a tense minute Brad wavered in hesitation, staring from the keys on the desk to the rifle that stood in the corner. He could leave now while she was getting ready and set off on the rescue mission without her. If she came with him, she risked slowing him down or (God forbid) getting shot again. But he knew realistically there was no chance of keeping her out of the truck; she was coming with him regardless.

  Truly, he found her commitment impressive, not least because she was still recovering from a serious leg wound—despite the painkillers Marley’s crew had provided her with, she had to still be in deep discomfort. It looked like her desperation to get the kids back was overriding it, for now at least, and Brad reflected that perhaps that primal desire to get her son back could come in useful.

  Six minutes later the door opened again and Anna came back in, looking freshly showered. Brad, who had showered the night before, had changed into cargo pants and a white camo shirt that William had given him.

  “You about ready?” she asked, looking serenely unaware of his inner conflict.

  “The sooner we leave, the better.”

  With a renewed sense of resolve Brad reached for the keys on the nightstand. Outside, the first birds were beginning to sing.

  “Say goodbye to your room and let’s hope to God this isn’t the last time we see it,” Brad said. “We’ll come back in triumph tonight, bringing the kids with us.”

  Driving a few miles below the now-defunct speed limit and following the route that they had chosen the day before, the two reached the wood surrounding the lake within half an hour. Bringing the car to a halt about a quarter-mile from Vanessa’s lakeside home, Brad emerged from the car and motioned with rifle in hand for Anna to follow him on foot. A dirt path lined with hornbeams and cedars curved broadly in the direction of Vanessa’s house, and as they reached the end of the trail Brad was pleased to find Lee’s truck parked in an overgrown yard outside.

  Blood pounded in his ears as they strode soundlessly up the walk onto the front patio, his anxiety vastly outweighed by the hope of getting to see the two kids again. Still, his hands shook unsteadily as he clutched the rifle and reached for the doorknob, which turned out to be locked. If Lee really was here, as he appeared to be, what could they possibly have to say to each other? It was bizarre to think that a lifetime of mutual hostility could be culminating in these next few moments.

  “We can’t get in through the front door,” he said in a hushed voice. “We’ll have to try some other way.”

  “What about climbing in through a window?” Anna didn’t look remotely nervous; maybe being shot at point-blank range did that to you. “Or breaking one.”

  He shook his head. “That would be the equivalent of an alarm system going off, alerting them to our presence. He’d have time to grab his weapons and be waiting for us when we climbed in.”

  “In that case we can try the back door. Or the garage,” Anna said. She pressed one hand against a fresh indentation in the doorpost. “Do you remember there being bullet holes here, before?”

  Brad shook his head, not wanting to consider the implications of that. “I don’t, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t there. Let’s check the back.”

  The back door was locked but someone had neglected to lock the door leading into the garage, which slid open easily. Again motioning for quiet, Brad led Anna inside into a room with a cement floor that smelled strongly of gasoline and motor oil.

  The silence that greeted them as they left the garage through a door leading into the main hallway boded well at first—if no one was yet stirring, they might even be able to coax the kids out of the house before Lee knew they were there. But each of the bedrooms on the first floor was empty, and Brad fought back a rising sense of panic as they neared the living room. A familiar stillness lay over the house, the kind of stillness he had experienced once or twice before when entering a building where death dwelt. Anna seemed to feel it, too, for she paused near the hallway bathroom as if not wanting to go any further.

  Reluctant, but determined to know the worst, Brad pushed open the hall door and stepped into the living room.

  The sight that greeted him there was even worse than he had anticipated, reminiscent of images he had seen on television of war zones and bombed-out houses. Several people lay dead, Vanessa among them, their bodies riddled with bullet holes and dark blood blooming onto the sofas or floor where they had fallen.

  Catching his breath, Brad was relieved to see that neither of the kids was among them. Neither was Lee; he must have taken them with him when he fled the house.

  Brad swore as he saw that the body of Remington, the retriever, lay among the dead. What kind of hellish scene had broken out here that led to an innocent animal being caught in the crossfire?

  He looked up just in time to see that Anna’s face had turned a ghostly color. Turning away, she vomited the remains of last night’s dinner.

  He waited until she had finished before saying, “Lee and the kids are still alive; we know that much.”

  “How?” said Anna faintly.

  “Because if they weren’t, this is where they would be.”

  “Where could they have gone, though?” she asked. “The truck is still parked out front.” She motioned toward the window, where a weak sun was rising over the snow-clad woods. “Unless someone else had a car and they took it.”

  “Around here cars are as scarce as hen’s teeth,” replied Brad. “It’s more likely they fled on foot. The question is, when? If we knew that, we could make a rough estimate of how far they’ve traveled.”

  “These bodies couldn’t have been here for more than a few hours,” said Anna. “I’ve seen bodies in varying states of decomposition. These are fresh. Their blood is still drying.”

  “You’re right.” Brad was standing in the kitchen; reaching over the stove, he turned off the front burner with a loud click. “They left the water boiling and it had only just reached the bottom. Not enough time to start a fire.”

  As he spoke, Brad’s gaze fell on the back yard through the kitchen window. A thin layer of powdery snowfall lay over the un-mown grass, in the midst of which he spotted fresh footprints. Shoulders tense, pulse racing, he turned to summon Anna, but was interrupted by a scream that jolted every nerve in his body.

  “Anna!” he yelled, darting into the living room where he found her clutching a
pile of blankets and pointing cryptically toward a still-moving body.

  “He’s—he’s not dead,” she said in a tremulous voice. “I wanted to cover them up—it seemed like the decent thing to do—and I was just walking past him when he reached out and just about grabbed my ankle.” She rested a hand over her heart and sat down in the one empty chair, too overcome for words.

  “Jesus,” Brad said lowly. The man lying on the floor was Joe—one of the two men who’d joined Lee on the road before arriving at Vanessa’s weeks before.

  Brad stood hunched over the big man and peered into his eyes. “I don’t even think he knows we’re here. If he’s still alive, he’s on his way out.”

  Slapping him lightly on the cheeks, Brad said in a louder voice, “Joe? Can you hear us?”

  When he failed to respond, Brad turned to Anna, “I think we’re too late.”

  Just then, however, the man turned his face toward him and spoke.

  “Lee’s gone,” Joe wheezed, blood making his words hard to distinguish. “He took the two little ones with him.”

  Brad waited for the initial thrill of shock and horror to subside before asking him, “Did he do this? What happened here?”

  Joe spoke now only with difficulty, pausing between breaths.

  “When he came back to the house last night, it was obvious that he was out of his mind. Vanessa wanted to know how he had gotten the kids, and why you weren’t there with them. But he wouldn’t answer. Just kept ranting about how he was out of fuel and needed a place to hole up for the night, and how the Bible commands us to show hospitality to strangers—”

  Joe’s speech was interrupted by a long, hacking cough, and Brad turned his face to avoid being sprayed with flecks of blood.

  “We made a collective decision not to let him stay. Lee said that was fine; he’d keep going, into the woods if he had to. He said the kids would be safe with him.”

  “I’m guessing Vanessa didn’t like that,” said Brad.

  Joe shook his head with difficulty; it was clear that he was fading quickly.

  “She planted herself in the doorway, telling him he wasn’t taking the kids with him. That was the last thing she ever did. He shot her, more than once, as the rest of us ran to defend her. Lee was better prepared though, and faster.”

  Swallowing his horror, Brad asked, “Do you know where he went, then?”

  “Not a clue.”

  Brad counted to twenty, but that was the last thing Joe said. Reaching over and placing a thumb on his neck, Brad found that the pulse had gone still.

  He was gone, as were the good people around him, but Brad and Anna had no time to waste mourning the dead; the two children were still alive, as far as they knew, and the trail would be getting colder by the minute.

  Motioning for Anna to toss him one of the blankets, Brad draped it over Joe’s body and began heading for the back door.

  “Where are we headed?” asked Anna, rising from the sofa with difficulty.

  “Away from the house,” he repeated, eyes trained on the faint tracks near the wood’s edge. They were now rapidly disappearing beneath a flurry of new snowfall. “I wasn’t sure at first, but after hearing Joe’s story I don’t think those footprints can be anyone else’s. If we hurry, we might still catch them.”

  Chapter 16

  They followed the fading footprints through a meadow that in the spring would be profuse with mullein and goldenrods, but whose flowering bushes and dogwood shrubs now lay shivering under a thick blanket of snow. Brad no longer felt the cold. Every nerve tense, he waited for the crack of a rifle or the scuffle of boots alerting him to his father’s presence. He had been given one advantage in the altercation that was about to ensue: he had learned his father’s tracking skills at a young age.

  “We need to be careful,” he said lowly to Anna. “Lee’s tricky. I wouldn’t put it past him to have doubled back and be waiting behind us, because he knew someone was going to follow him into the woods.”

  “He couldn’t have known you would come,” said Anna. They were standing now at the dark edge of the woods. “He left us for dead back at the lake.”

  “He left you for dead,” replied Brad. “He always knew I would come after him. I’m guessing that’s why he fled after dispatching Vanessa, because he knew he would be safer on his own turf, and he wanted to be ready.”

  With a growing sense of trepidation, they followed the tracks into the woods, Brad wondering why his father, who was usually so careful, hadn’t bothered to clear away the tracks before advancing further. He was leading them straight to wherever he was hiding.

  Brad kept his misgivings from Anna, but he couldn’t help wondering whether there was some purpose in this. Maybe, he thought, as the wings of an immense partridge fluttered past them, maybe Lee wanted to be found. Or maybe, as he had suggested before, the tracks in front of them were a ruse designed to lead them away from his true hiding place.

  “Have we talked about what we’re going to do when we find them?” asked Anna, after they had been walking for about three quarters of a mile. She was having to lean on him, now, because her own lungs were beginning to give out.

  “It’ll depend.” Brad had been up thinking about this for most of the night. “If he starts shooting at us, we have the advantage of being protected by the wood cover. We can slip away and let him exhaust his ammunition.”

  “What if he doesn’t have the kids with him?”

  “I’m not worried about that.” He nodded at the small footprints spread out in front of them. “He wants us to find them. He’s testing me.”

  “I realize I don’t know your father better than I do, Brad, but why would he do that?”

  “He always had a very masculine ethos.” Brad spat into the snow distastefully. “He wants me to prove myself. He wants to find out if he raised a man or a—” He stopped. He had heard the words spoken over him so many times he couldn’t bring himself to repeat them.

  They walked another mile deeper into the woods, down a trail burdened with tamarack trees and frost-bitten mountain laurel. Here the tracks looked more pronounced, as if they had been newly made and the snow hadn’t had time to settle over them.

  “They were here less than an hour ago,” said Brad. “Still alive, all three of them.”

  “Oh, thank God,” said Anna, fighting back tears. “Oh, my sweet babies.”

  “Which means they’re close,” Brad went on. “The snow might have slowed their flight but they can’t be more than a mile or two away.”

  Holding tight to the rifle, Brad forged ahead, eager to finish the journey that they had started four days ago.

  His father had paid him an odd tribute by knowing that he would eventually make it out of the woods in pursuit of the children; there had been moments during that hike when he didn’t think he and Anna would ever emerge alive. He could feel his father pulling him forward as though by invisible strings; he could feel the respect that blazed between them in spite of their mutual animosity.

  Rounding another bend in the trail, they found themselves approaching a broad clearing surrounded by tall cedars and slender pine saplings. Brad pulled Anna to an abrupt halt, wordlessly pointing to the sky over the canopy: plumes of smoke were rising above the treetops into the murky and overcast sky.

  “Unless it’s a trick,” he whispered, “which we can’t rule out, they ought to be camped out in that clearing.”

  Anna struggled to maintain her composure, not wanting to give away their position. She had the look of someone who had almost given up seeing her children again, only to learn that the cause wasn’t as hopeless as she had feared.

  “What we’re going to do,” said Brad, “is we’re going to walk slowly to the edge of the clearing and find out what they’re up to—hopefully without being seen. From there we’ll decide how we want to move forward.”

  Anna’s heart was racing madly, clearly petrified for the children’s safety. “Promise you’ll aim carefully.”

 
“I’m not aiming at anything, yet,” said Brad. “Lee would be disappointed if I did, anyway. He drilled into me the importance of strategy and planning. He said only fools reach for their guns before all other options have been exhausted.”

  “But he didn’t always follow his own advice,” said Anna, remembering the grisly tableau in the living room of Vanessa’s house.

  “No. No, he didn’t.”

  Further up in the clearing they could hear the clatter of wood upon wood, the repetitive scuffle of footsteps on the topsoil and voices faintly speaking.

  “I told you to listen,” Lee was saying, “and you’re not listening. Now I need you to get up and sweep the debris out of the tent. Get up and do it before I get angry.”

  “But we didn’t pack a broom!” came the voice of Sammy, and a cry rose to Anna’s lips that was quickly stifled.

  “Do you need a broom?” said Lee with paternal belligerence. “Use your hands; use your feet if you have to! This is just our temporary home until I find us a real house to live in—one of those big two-story houses with a wraparound porch. And when Christmas comes we’ll put up a Christmas tree and decorate it. Won’t that be fun?”

  The sound of his father’s voice cutting through the silence seemed to awaken Brad’s earliest memories. He remembered the last Christmas before his parents divorced, when his mother had bought a tree on sale the week after Christmas because she couldn’t afford one otherwise. And now here Lee was promising houses and Christmas trees to children he barely knew, as if wanting to give them the childhood he had denied Brad.

  Anna was eager to rush the encampment and seize the two children, but Brad advised caution. “He’ll need to go hunting at some point, and he won’t want to take the kids with him. They’ll just be in the way at this point. The second he leaves, we’ll seize our chance.”