TYRANT: The Rise

by L. Douglas Hogan

  Sweating profusely from the anxiety of being caught by UN troops, Cade cautiously walked up to the door and knocked. Nobody answered, and in his frustration, he wiped the sweat off his face and kicked at the base of the door.

  “Wayne, I know you’re in there.”

  “Go away or I’ll shoot,” a voice said from inside.

  “Wayne, it’s me, Cade, Cade Walker.”

  Cade waited a moment and then heard the sound of an unlocking dead bolt and chain lock. Wayne opened the door and peeked out.

  “Cade? How long has it been? I can’t believe you’re still alive,” Wayne said as he continued to open the door.

  “Wayne, I need your help,” Cade said as he pushed his way into the house and saw a lady on the couch with two small children.

  “Wayne, children? Really? How irresponsible of you.”

  “I met a girl, man. We fell in love.”

  “I can’t be hearing any of that right now. I’m in trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “I’ve got the UN breathing down my back. I just escaped 149.”

  “You were on 149, Cade? C’mon, man, I took you for being smarter than that. Nobody goes to 149. There’s a lunatic running some kind of faction down there. He takes women, food, water, supplies, and weapons, doesn’t ask and doesn’t have a conscience.”

  Cade just looked at Wayne and didn’t say anything, but his body language said everything. Once Cade felt that he had Wayne locked on, he gave the lady on the couch the same look.

  Wayne broke the silence. “Okay, I think it’s time for you to be leaving.”

  “Wayne, I thought you took me for smarter than that.”

  Wayne knew he had a situation on his hands and gave Cade a quick once-over. Cade saw Wayne looking him over and knew that he was either putting together a strategy of attack or checking him for guns.

  “Wayne, I don’t have any guns. That’s why I’m here. I need your help. Give me a gun and some ammo, and I’ll get out of your hair.”

  “I don’t have anything I can spare,” Wayne said, lying to Cade.

  “I would rather you voluntarily help me than otherwise.”

  “Like I said—” Wayne started to say, but he was rushed by Cade, who ran at him with his shoulders and head tucked. Wayne tried to knee him in the face when he was close enough, but only got a glancing blow. It seemed that Wayne was in control, but that was only because Cade was fighting one-handed. His other hand was digging in his pocket for his four-inch switchblade.

  Cade pulled out his knife, hit the button, and the sound of steel sliding against steel was heard as it locked into place. Wayne felt a sharp stick to his heart that turned into a burning sensation. Cade had stabbed Wayne and was pushing all his weight up into Wayne as he pushed him off. Cade never let go of the blade and kept it firmly planted in Wayne’s heart. They shifted positions with Cade getting on top of Wayne.

  “I told you I wanted to do this voluntarily. You didn’t have to tell me no, and now it’s gonna cost you more,” Cade whispered into his ear. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of the lady.”

  When Cade was sure that Wayne was dead, he stood up. He brushed himself off and looked at the lady, who was too frightened to budge from the couch. She was holding her children’s eyes closed and pulling them in tight.

  “Where does Wayne keep the guns?” Cade asked defiantly.

  “They’re in the gun room, to the right,” she said, pointing in the direction of the room.

  Cade walked in that direction.

  He heard the door close in the front room and returned to make sure nobody was there. The lady and the kids had left.

  “They won’t survive out there, either,” he said as he went back to looking for the gun room.

  He found the room, but it was tightly secured. Cade returned to Wayne’s body and patted his pockets down for keys.

  “Nothing,” he said, standing up. He walked into the kitchen and started going through the junk drawers, which turned out to be every drawer.

  He found a ring of keys that were labeled. On one key, he read “Guns.”

  “This must be it.”

  He walked back to the room and unlocked the door.

  The walls were covered with rifles, and the tables were covered with pistols.

  “Wayne, there’s plenty here for the two of us. Why did you have to lie?”

  Cade was thinking “long distance,” so he grabbed a Bushmaster .30-06 and some ammo from the ammo locker, which opened with a key from the key ring he had found.

  He grabbed a Glock G26 9mm pistol from the table and secured some ammo for it from the ammo cabinet.

  He then went into the front room and sat down on the couch where the lady and kids had been sitting.

  “Still warm,” he said.

  Cade began familiarizing himself with the Bushmaster .30-06.

  “This should do just fine.”

  Somewhere west of Opal, VA

  Aaron had been walking for hours, following the country road and staying concealed in the vegetation just off the roadway. He was beginning to wonder if he would ever find the town that Mayor Arnie spoke of.

  Aaron had never been on such a high-risk mission before; excluding his escape from the District and Michael’s bunker, this was the most deadly risk he had ever taken. He’d spent his previous years preparing his mind for the challenges of the future. He was old enough and wise enough to know that there was going to be a gloomy life ahead if he wasn’t prepared for it. His mother and father immigrated to the US when his mother was pregnant with him. Zamora had barely made it to the US when Aaron was born. Aaron always thought it was cool that he was conceived in Israel and born in the United States. To him, that was the talking point of his life.

  Aaron decided to stop moving forward. He felt that he’d either missed the town or hadn’t followed directions accordingly. He wiped the sweat from his brow and took a moment to catch his breath. Just as he stopped to breathe, he looked around the dead-silent forest. Off to his right, on the roadway, he saw something colorful. It was an out-of-the-ordinary color.

  “Blue and white?” Aaron whispered to himself.

  He began walking closer to the roadway and noticed a blue and white minivan sitting just off the road in the ditch.

  He silently moved toward the minivan to get a closer look. It was dead silent, and his footsteps through the foliage sounded like explosions of breaking branches.

  The van looked like it had been there a while, and there were no signs of life anywhere, save a few birds.

  He walked even closer to the van and peered through the window. He saw a blue baby seat strapped in the back. He grabbed the door handle and opened the door.

  “Nothing too strange about an empty vehicle parked out in the middle of nowhere,” he said to himself.

  Every door was unlocked and the hatch was popped. It looked as though everything had been gutted from the vehicle, except dangling from the rearview mirror, Aaron saw a picture of a family. It was a baby boy and his mom and dad. It was hanging from a chain and dressed up in a plastic frame. The picture was barely two inches by two inches, but big enough for Aaron to see.

  Aaron’s mind flashed back to the wallet he’d seen on Mayor Arnie’s cabinet. It was memorable because who carries a wallet these days? The man and the baby in the wallet were the same two in the picture hanging from the rearview mirror.

  How could this be? What’s going on? Aaron thought to himself as he continued his investigation. Why would I be sent out after a red herring?

  Aaron rose up out of the van and continued his inspection on the outside. The registration plates said FIRST IN FLIGHT across the top and North Carolina across the bottom.

  They were traveling north, Aaron thought to himself.

  Aaron went back around to the passenger side and opened the glove box. There was a map and insurance policy inside. He opened the insurance policy and read the names of the owners of the vehicle. “Cody and Joyce
Pearce.” Aaron compared the policy to the vehicle and it matched. He assumed the picture on the mirror was of Cody, Joyce, and their baby boy.

  As Aaron closed the door and turned around, he saw a trail of trash in the overgrown ditch. The trash looked more and more like clothes the closer he got to it. Stooping down in the ditch, he reached down and grabbed a stick. He buried the stick in the piece of cloth and lifted it up. It was a man’s shirt. Aaron followed the trail deeper into the woods and found a lady’s pair of briefs.

  Aaron began to expect the worst as he continued to find things in the woods. His fears came to a culmination when he found the bones of two adults and one infant.

  Aaron began to talk to himself as he tried to rationalize this new information.

  “Arnie has a wallet…the picture of the man on the driver’s license in the wallet looks like the man that owns the minivan…the baby picture in the wallet looks like the baby in the picture in the minivan…If his son forgot his wallet, then why is the minivan on the wrong side of the town? If his son lived in Virginia, why do the plates read North Carolina? This minivan should be broken down on the other side of town if they were headed to Philly. This doesn’t make any sense.”

  Aaron turned to walk away but was met by Alex. His presence startled Aaron.

  “What are you doing here?” Aaron asked him.

  “When you never showed back up, they sent me out to look for you. Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah, I guess, I wasn’t supposed to be back until tomorrow, but look what I found.”

  Aaron pointed at the corpses.

  Alex had a shovel that he was hiding behind his back. Aaron hadn’t noticed, probably because of the excitement of having found the corpses. When Aaron turned to show Alex the bodies, Alex hit him over the head with it, rendering him unconscious.

  “Sorry to have to do that. You seemed like a nice guy, but we have mouths to feed.”

  Later that evening, John, Belt, and the others began to smell smoke from the grill.

  “Aren’t you worried about attracting other groups?” John asked.

  Arnie just shrugged his shoulders and said, “No, we haven’t had a problem yet. The boys are good hunters. They always bring home the bacon.”

  John and Belt could sense that something wasn’t measuring up, but they couldn’t put their fingers on it. Everything seemed too copacetic for a town in the middle of nowhere. John had his guard up and was on high alert. Little sleep was to be had that night, but for the time being, they were going to enjoy some meat cooked over the grill.

  Arnie stood up and walked outside to the yard, where he saw Alex at the grill. Arnie patted him on the shoulder as he came up behind him and said, “Nice job.”

  Arnie turned back towards the house and pulled up a lawn chair next to a fire pit. “You guys going to stand around or are you going to relax a little?” he joked.

  The group walked over and grabbed what chairs were left, and some remained standing. Gideon sat on the ground and stared into the fire, wondering how his brother was doing and where his parents were.

  “My folks should have been back hours ago,” Gideon said. He had been holding his peace, but all the while, the other three had forgotten about them.

  John stood back up. “It’s going to be dark soon and we still have two friends out there that haven’t returned.”

  “Here, let me help you—” Arnie started.

  “No, you’ve helped enough. We’re going to be heading out now, back to the bus,” John said.

  John, Belt, Gideon, and Michael stood up and brought their rifles to the ready.

  “Be back later,” John said as they took off towards the bus.

  Once they were out of earshot of Arnie and the others, Belt said, “Have either of you seen anybody else that we haven’t met already? Besides the guys at the barricaded road, have you seen any other people in this town?”

  John thought a moment. Granted, the town wasn’t that big to begin with, but surely he would have seen somebody, anybody, for that matter.

  “No, I haven’t seen a soul. As a matter of fact, I’ve seen fewer people.”

  “I’m starting to second-guess your decision to send Aaron out on his own,” Michael said.

  “Me too,” John said. “This town is heavily surrounded by woods. There’s no telling what secrets are in them.”

  “I’m wondering, what are we going to find when we get there?” Michael asked.

  “I hope the three of you realize that we’re not going to find Joshwa and Zamora. If Arnie had really sent people out to find them, why didn’t they come in?”

  “Even his people didn’t return to tell us if they had found them or not,” Belt said.

  “Agreed,” John added.

  Gideon was beginning to feel alone. His brother was sent away and he didn’t know how he was, and his mother and father were seemingly missing.

  After a while of walking, they were approaching the bus. All four men drew their rifles and pointed them at the bus door. As they walked closer, John took the lead and carefully walked up the steps into the bus.

  “Josh?” John said softly.

  There was no answer.

  “What do you see?” Gideon impatiently asked.

  John carefully peeked up over the first seat and saw that the bus was empty. He looked back at Michael, Gideon, and Belt and told them to stay frosty. He slowly and methodically cleared the bus.

  “Nothing,” he said as he noticed the rifle rack had been cleared out. The cabinets caught his attention, as well. They had been tampered with. John opened one of the cabinet doors and everything had been gutted.

  Belt and Michael were on point, with their backs to the bus, while Gideon was running up into the bus to join John. John looked at Gideon and said, “We’ve been duped.”

  “Duped?” Belt asked.

  “The rifle rack is empty; the supplies are gone.”

  Michael began to curse.

  “I spent most of my adult life situating that bus. They did it,” Michael asserted with confidence.

  “I would have to agree with Michael,” Belt said.

  “Recommendations?” John asked.

  “I say we march ourselves back to that town, demand answers, and take care of business,” Michael said.

  “I agree, mostly,” John said. “Let’s head back.”

  The four of them began their march back to town, but upon arrival, they were met with a ghost town. Arnie, Alex, Sebastian, Ethan, Bailey, all of them gone.

  The fire that had been on the grill was only smoke at this point. Even the fire pit was smoldering.

  The four of them cleared Arnie’s house and found no one. They headed to the old barn in the backyard and entered it.

  John entered first. Seeing meat hooks hanging from the rafters of the barn, he thought nothing of them.

  John handed Belt his rifle and climbed up into the rafters to acquire some chains.

  “We’re going to use these chains to remove the logs and get out of Dodge,” John said.

  “We’re not going anywhere without my family,” Gideon said.

  “Your family’s dead,” John said.

  Michael put his hand on Gideon’s shoulder in hopes of comforting him, but he just shrugged it off and stepped away from the group.

  “If you guys already have it determined that my family’s toast, then I’ll head out on my own to find them.”

  “Calm down, son. If you go out there alone, you’ll turn up missing too. We need to stick together,” John said.

  “He’s right,” Michael said.

  “Look, Michael, you’ve lost your stuff. “I’ve lost my family. It’s not quite the same, is it?”

  Gideon left the group, despite all their combined attempts to keep the team together.

  John dropped a few chains and the three men hauled them to the bus. It was hard work and cost them a lot of time, but they opened the roadway and continued west. Michael drove while John and Belt watched for movement
in the town as they left it behind.

  CHAPTER XXV

  Weapons Company was driving up Route 149 to Murphysboro with Nathan. All Nathan could think about was finishing off the Southside Raiders. They had brought so much death to their peaceful community. Nearly all of its residents were killed or missing. His greatest pain was for his murdered sister, Katie. Now the prospect of having Denny on the fringe of a breakdown over Heather’s disappearance or, worst-case scenario, death caused great sadness in Nathan’s heart. These things made him all the more resolute to finish off the raiders.

  Buchanan was sitting in the passenger seat of his HMMWV with Nathan sitting catty-cornered to the rear of Buchanan. Nathan was leaning forward as they talked along the way. Nathan and Buchanan had to yell when they spoke because the HMMWVs weren’t built for a quiet ride. The engines had a way of drowning out soft talk.

  “I appreciate this, sir,” Nathan said.

  “Well, as I thought about it, I realized that we shouldn’t have an alliance going down the drain over a bunch of idiots.”

  “Somehow they managed to get UN vehicles and US military support vehicles. I don’t think they’ve hit us with combat equipment yet.”

  “That’s a good thing. It tells me that support services have been going to their community and getting ambushed. Resistance should only be a few civilians now that they seem to have emptied their main group out.”

  “When we were here earlier, men came pouring out of the buildings along the main drag and piled into busses that sat at intersections. I hope you’re right about them being cleared out, but I need to make sure. We still don’t know who was running the show or why they were attacking us.”

  “Maybe they’ve burned through their resources, or maybe the town is too dangerous to plunder?” Buchanan asked.

  “Hopefully option A. I’d hate to run into a problem bigger than the raiders,” Nathan replied.

  Weapons had successfully made the trip to Murphysboro. The convoy of combat vehicles slowed and spread out to avoid a bottleneck-style attack.