Surviving the Swamp (Survivalist Reality Show Book 1)

by Grace Hamilton

  They quietly moved down the middle of the road, only encountering a few people milling about the town. Regan felt a little strange pushing a baby stroller down the middle of a deserted highway, but everything about the world they were in was surreal.

  They passed several cars that were parked in the lanes they had been in when the EMP had struck, stopping the cars in their tracks.

  “Look! I can see groceries in the back of that SUV!” Tabitha exclaimed, her faced pressed against a back window.

  They had been checking every car, hoping to find something to eat or anything that would prove useful. Most of the cars appeared to have been ransacked for supplies already.

  Wolf peered through the window of the backseat. Someone had taken the time to lock the door before leaving the car. The front driver’s side window was smashed in, but clearly something or someone had scared the vandal off, or maybe they hadn’t thought to look in the back. The plastic grocery bags were barely visible through the dark tinted windows of the mid-size SUV. Someone who’d been rushing from car to car might not have seen them at all.

  Wolf reached inside the front door and tried to use the automatic locks to unlock the back end. The electronic system had been fried, of course, and the electric locks were useless.

  “Stand back and I’ll break the window,” Wolf said, picking up a rock and then shattering the glass.

  “Gross!” Regan said, putting a hand over her nose when they were assailed by a combination of smells. “Spoiled milk, and I’m guessing spoiled meat.”

  Wolf reached inside and started pulling out the bags of groceries. Tabitha was waving a hand in front of her nose as he unloaded bag after bag. Flies were buzzing around in the heat, feasting on rotted fruits and vegetables.

  “This is so nasty. I can’t believe I’m actually digging through this looking for food to eat,” Tabitha groaned.

  “You ate termites in the swamp, babe,” Geno reminded her.

  “Thank you for reminding me. As if I would ever forget,” she shot back.

  “Woohoo! Toilet paper!” Fred cried, pulling out a four-pack of the bath tissue.

  “Any food?” Geno asked hopefully.

  “We’ve got a few cans of soup, some bags of chips, and a few other things,” Tabitha said, putting the good stuff to the side. “Looks like this was a single person. Too bad it wasn’t groceries for a family of eight.”

  Regan chuckled. “No kidding, and of course we find the one person who only buys fresh fruit and veggies.”

  “There’s a lot of TV dinners in here. They’re all ruined,” Tabitha said with disgust.

  “And nothing to drink but spoiled milk and juice,” Fred observed.

  “That’s it,” Wolf said, turning to look at the road where the groceries were spread around. “Let’s repack the backpacks and our babies,” he said with a smile.

  “My baby is officially a toddler,” Tabitha joked, shoving a can of soup in each leg of the sleeper.

  With everything sorted out, they began their journey toward the city once again. They shared the small bags of chips between them, though Wolf warned them the salt was going to make them thirsty. No one cared. Their hunger overrode his reason—even Wolf’s hunger was too strong to be denied once he smelled the open bags of junk food.

  “This doesn’t look promising,” Fred said after they’d finished the chips and walked on for another mile or so, looking up ahead at a group of armed men blocking the entrance into the next town.

  “Everybody, keep your cool,” Wolf ordered, moving to the front of the group.

  One of the men stepped forward and eyed them. “No trespassers,” he said.

  “We’re passing through,” Wolf returned, his hands up in the air. “My wife and I and our friends have family in Naples. We want to get to them.”

  The man smirked. “You think there’s anything there for you? Your families are dead.”

  Wolf shrugged. “My wife’s mother is there,” he said, and then he leaned forward to offer with a small smile, “I have to check on her or I’m never going to hear the end of it. Are you married?” he asked the man.

  The man glared back at them for a moment, but then chuckled. “I am. I know what you mean.”

  He peered around Wolf and studied each member of their group. The stroller was an excellent ruse. Trying to look irritated at Wolf’s joke, Regan played the part of an annoyed wife as well as she could, her hands firm on their stroller. She didn’t get the feeling the men were bad or evil. They were simply protecting their own families.

  “Red will walk you through town. We don’t have anything. Don’t come back when you find out the city is no place for women and children. You will want to find somewhere else to go,” he said, apparently softening a little.

  Wolf nodded his head. “I understand. Thank you. We don’t want anything from you.”

  “Good. Red, how about you escort these folks to the other side of town?” the man suggested, looking at a large man with a shock of red hair and a matching beard.

  He nodded and jerked his head, indicating they should move along with him. As it turned out, the town was nothing more than a single gas station and a tiny market with a post office, along with a sprinkling of houses that were mostly set off on little side roads, some farms to be seen in the distance. She was glad the walk through town was short and sweet. Red kept looking at her and then the stroller. If he looked at her babies, things would get weird.

  Once Red had escorted them to the other side of town where another group of armed men was waiting, they were told to keep moving. The group didn’t need to be told twice.

  “Holy cow,” Tabitha breathed a sigh of relief once they were a good half mile away from the town. “That was some weird Stephen King stuff there. Do you think they’re all related?”

  Regan laughed. She had been wondering the same thing.

  “I bet they all have farms and plenty of food,” Fred answered. “There’s not enough of them to fight off the army of people that will be fleeing the city and headed toward them.”

  “How sad. They didn’t really seem like bad people,” Tabitha said with a hint of sadness.

  “We need to find some supplies,” Wolf said, refocusing the group.

  “How?” Regan asked. “Everything’s been looted or being guarded. We don’t have a weapon to threaten anyone into giving us anything.”

  “We’ll find something eventually,” he stated matter-of-factly.

  It wasn’t long until he was proven right. They soon spotted a house about half a mile off the highway.

  “Let’s go check it out,” Geno said.

  Tabitha scowled at him. “What if someone is living there?”

  Geno shrugged. “I don’t know. Not like we have a choice.”

  They made it down the dirt driveway. The home looked empty. Wolf knocked on the door before sticking his face up to a window.

  When he turned to face the group, he looked saddened. “I think it’s safe to go in.”

  “Why? What did you see?” Regan asked.

  “I’m guessing the homeowner.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “And you think that means we should go in?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Murdered?”

  Wolf shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  Geno used his beefy strength to bust the front door in. “Oh God,” he groaned, clamping a hand over his nose and mouth. “What the hell is that smell?”

  “Death,” Wolf answered solemnly.

  Fred and Wolf went in first to see if there was anyone else home. There wasn’t.

  Tabitha stood frozen in the entryway, staring at the old man sitting in a recliner with a gunshot wound to the head. A small handgun lay beside the chair.

  “He killed himself?” Tabitha asked in horror.

  Wolf nodded. “He probably figured he couldn’t defend himself against any looters and decided to go out on his own terms.”

  Urged on by his answer, Tabitha moved to the sm
all table beside the chair and began picking up various prescription pill bottles. “He had cancer,” she said, looking down at the man. “Poor guy didn’t stand a chance.”

  Regan watched as Tabitha put the medicine into the stroller. She raised an eyebrow, wondering if they were planning for cancer now.

  “One of these is a painkiller,” she explained in response to the look. “Another is an anti-anxiety and the other is a cancer drug. You never know who we may meet that has cancer and hopes to keep fighting. We can use the medicine to trade for other things,” she said softly.

  Regan nodded. It felt wrong to steal from a dead man, but it wasn’t like he was going to need it.

  “I’ll check the kitchen for food,” Regan said.

  “I’m going to look for first aid supplies and more medicine. If you find any, take it. Medicine is going to be very hard to come by. I don’t care if it’s expired, either—grab it,” Tabitha ordered her.

  “I saw a shed out back,” Geno said, pulling a backpack out from under one of the babies. “I’m going to look around for tools.”

  “Tools?” Fred questioned. “How is that going to help anything?”

  Geno turned around and shot him a glare. “I may be able to fix a generator, a car, or anything else we could use. I never went anywhere without my tools, until the swamp, and I didn’t have a choice there.”

  “Tools are heavy,” Fred pointed out.

  Regan had to agree with Fred on this one, and paused from heading to the kitchen. She wanted to see how this played out. They weren’t going to be able to push the strollers forever, and she certainly didn’t want to carry around twenty pounds of useless tools.

  “It’s raining again,” Wolf said. “We should probably hang out here for a while.”

  Geno had his hands on his hips, glaring at Fred and completely ignoring Wolf’s comment about the weather.

  “We need tools,” Geno said through gritted teeth.

  “You can’t fix electrical components with a screwdriver,” Fred said, not backing down.

  Geno wasn’t going to drop the subject. That much was obvious. He shook his head and walked out the front door.

  Tabitha popped her head out of the bathroom. “He’ll be okay. Let him blow off some steam.”

  Fred opened his mouth to argue, but stopped when Wolf gave him a look that said he should drop it.

  “If we’re going to stay here, can we put him outside?” Regan asked.

  “Shouldn’t we bury him?” Fred suggested. “I mean, isn’t that the right thing to do?”

  Wolf hesitated. Regan knew he was anxious to get to his kid. She could understand that, too, but the sound of the rain beating down outside wasn’t all that inviting.

  “Are we going to walk in the rain?” she asked.

  Wolf let out a long sigh. “Fine, we’ll stay here tonight. We’ll heat up the soup we found earlier and set out in the morning again.”

  “I’ll start digging a hole,” Fred said. “Hopefully, there’s a shovel out there.”

  Wolf picked up the gun, checked the magazine, and put it on the table. “That’ll come in handy. We need to look around for more ammunition. I bet a guy living out here all alone probably has a rifle around here, as well.”

  Regan nodded. “We’ll look, but first, we have to get him outside.”

  Tabitha came out of the bathroom spraying a can of something that smelled like apples. She smiled. “That should help a little.”

  “Now we have apple-scented death,” Regan said dryly.

  Tabitha laughed. “Well, it’s better than straight-up death.”

  The woman had a point. “I’ll open a couple of these windows and hopefully air this place out.”

  “I found a first aid kid in the bathroom. It isn’t much, but every bit counts,” Tabitha replied as she followed Regan into the house’s kitchen, taking the kit to the small table to rummage through it.

  “Any allergy meds or EpiPens, by chance?” Regan asked hopefully.

  Tabitha shook her head. “No, but we’ll keep looking. We have five. Hopefully, we won’t need them.”

  Regan nodded her head, hoping the same thing. They were headed into summer, when wasps were way too busy for her liking. It was hard to think about how her life could end if she happened to get stung. There was no hospital they could race her to for emergency treatment, should she not have another EpiPen.

  Wolf started to drag the chair across the room, toward the back door. Regan was happy they didn’t have to carry the body. That was a little too far out of her comfort zone.

  Once they managed to get the chair with the dead man still in it outside onto the back porch, Wolf went out to help Fred dig the hole while Tabitha and Regan searched the house for anything useful.

  “I can see why he killed himself,” Tabitha said, standing in the kitchen.

  Regan nodded. “He wouldn’t have lived more than a few weeks with the food he had. Probably less than that.”

  “Yep, it looks like he mostly lived on freezer meals and pasta. I wonder how many other people are going to take the easy way out,” Tabitha said, looking to the trash they’d assembled and were taking outside to help air the place out. On the table, they’d collected some more cans of soup that would mean a decent dinner for their whole group, but not much else.

  “Hard to say,” Regan grunted as she hefted the trash, “but can you really blame him? It doesn’t look like he was in any shape to walk very far. He was completely alone out here, and sick,” Regan added, feeling a twinge of sadness for the man.

  “Well, I did find a couple boxes of matches. Let’s start a fire in the backyard and heat up this soup. I found some cans of chili, too,” Tabitha pointed out as she looked into a last cabinet. “Add that to the soup and tuna fish we have, we’ll have a decent dinner. There are some Saltines, as well. They look a little stale, but edible,” Tabitha said, rummaging around in a cupboard and pulling out a pot.

  They went out the back door of the small two-bedroom house and saw the three men lowering the dead man’s body into the hole they’d dug. It was a sad scene that Regan knew was likely to become far too common in the coming weeks.

  “Come on,” Tabitha said, touching her arm. “Let’s get dinner started.”

  They built a small fire close to the back of the house, using the overhang to shield the fire from the rain. The meal was hearty, and with their shrinking stomachs due to their lack of food over the past two weeks, they were all full well before they’d cooked all of the cans. They’d have some to eat for breakfast, which was good news for everyone.

  The evening passed slowly with nothing to do but sit in the dark house that still carried the scent of death. The opened windows had helped some, and relieved some of the heat in the stale air, but Regan was looking forward to leaving in the morning, if dreading what tomorrow held in store for them.

  15

  The sound of Geno coughing woke Regan up, though she wasn’t sure she had really slept. The guy had started coughing in the middle of the night and hadn’t let up. Tabitha and Geno had separated themselves from the rest of the group, but it hadn’t been enough.

  “Do you think he’s really sick?” Fred asked Wolf.

  “Hopefully, it’s only a cold.”

  Regan stretched and yawned. “It came on pretty fast,” she commented.

  Tabitha wandered into the area, looking stressed. “I need to find him some antibiotics. Right now it’s a cough, but if it gets worse, this could be bad. He’s running a low fever, as well.”

  “Was he sick while we were in the swamp?” Wolf asked.

  Tabitha shrugged. “The last couple days, he was feeling a little down, but nothing serious.”

  “Did he drink any water without purifying it?” Wolf asked, a concerned look on his face.

  Tabitha shook her head. “Definitely not.”

  “Being wet and cold couldn’t have helped,” Regan remarked.

  “You can’t catch a cold from the cold,” Fred chimed
in, smiling as if he said something profound.

  Wolf nodded. “No, but you can catch about a million other things from simply being in the elements wet and cold. Have you checked him over for any suspicious bites?” Wolf asked Tabitha.

  “First thing I did a couple days ago when he said he wasn’t feeling all that great. He was sick before we came here. Finished a round of antibiotics the day we flew out.”

  Wolf shook his head. “We’ll keep an eye on him. As you know, a low-grade fever isn’t a bad thing. It means his body is fighting off the infection. His body needs the fever to fight.”

  Tabitha nodded. “I agree. I still want to keep an eye out for any penicillin or even amoxicillin. I’m worried his sinus and ear infections never completely cleared up.”

  “We’ll keep our eyes open for anything,” Wolf assured her.

  “Can we eat quickly and get ready to move?” Tabitha asked. “The sooner we get to the next town; the sooner I can get some meds for him.”

  “Absolutely,” Regan assured her. “I’ll start the fire out back,” she added.

  Wolf nodded. “We’ll repack the stroller while Regan’s doing that and then head out as soon as we eat something—that’ll be good for Geno, too,” Wolf answered.

  They quickly packed up, and then had a fast meal of soup and crackers to get them on the road. Geno was looking a little worse for wear, but Tabitha clearly felt good about the fact that he made himself eat. Nevertheless, he was sick. His usual color was a little off and he had a persistent dry cough. Regan was pretty sure she knew what it was—pneumonia. It was fairly common for those living on the streets, especially during winter. She had seen plenty of elderly homeless getting rushed to the hospital, never to return. And if Regan recognized the signs, Tabitha knew what this was also, which explained her sudden need to get him some antibiotics.

  They set out for the next town in silence, their mood sullen. Geno’s coughing was a reminder to them all about how dangerous their situation was. They couldn’t afford to get sick.

  “Two miles to the next town,” Fred announced, reading the same sign they could all see.