Before the plague, Stryker considered himself a gentleman and was unfailingly courteous to women. He had been taught as a child to open doors for them and let them pass through first. That sort of chivalry was long dead. Erin and Haley never walked through any door unless he entered first. They never entered a building until he had it cleared. In short, when the situation changed he changed with it, and so did everyone around him.
Stryker glanced at the corners of the house, saw no shadows or movement, and then brought the carbine to his shoulder as he approached the door. After sweeping the windows on the front of the house, he moved down the left side of the structure and emerged in the back yard. The side windows were covered with blackout drapes and he couldn’t see inside.
After checking the back and other side of the house, he returned to the front yard and motioned for Haley and Erin to get out of the pickup. When he saw them crouched behind the engine block, weapons up, he moved to the porch, took two long strides, and kicked the door in. Catching the rebound with his left hand, he quickly swept the room with his carbine.
“No!” a woman shrieked. She was chained to an anchor bolt fixed to the living room floor. Stryker glanced at her, saw she was unarmed, and continued to move through the house, clearing all the rooms before he again passed her. She was filthy and, although clothed in near rags, looked emaciated. She recoiled away from him, remembering the figure that completely filled the doorway when he entered the house, and then shivered and covered her face as he moved by her soundlessly. She emitted a whimper and fell silent.
“Come in.” Stryker motioned with a hand.
“Is she all right?” Haley asked breathlessly as she moved past Stryker. Erin followed right behind her.
“I seriously doubt that, but get her ready to travel and find out if she’s okay to leave tomorrow morning. If she wants to leave right away, we can find somewhere else to stay. First, check her out and get her cleaned up.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Check the out buildings. Besides, she’s afraid of me and the best thing is for you two to calm her down.” He started to leave, and then turned back. “Get some food and water in her too. She looks like she’s starving.”
“You okay, Caleb?” Erin asked when she saw his expression of disgust and anger.
“Never better,” he lied.
She knew better, but let it pass. He was a complicated man in many ways and had his own way of dealing with things. They had become lovers a few weeks before, and she felt good about their relationship, but getting to know him was like peeling away the layers of an onion one-by-one. It took time, but she was patient by nature. She had her own issues to work through, but saw the bright side of things for the most part.
He saw nothing but potential trouble, and it somehow usually managed to find him.
Erin watched as he strode toward the first outbuilding. How a man that large could move so silently was beyond her. How a man, so brutal when required, could be so gentle confused her. In the end, he remained a bit of an enigma.
She understood the man who walked away from her well enough for the time being. He was the man who helped Gramps free her from sex slave traders. He led the fight to defeat ISIS fighters who invaded their country in the wake of the plague, and he was the man who mourned the passing of her gramps in the wake of the last battle they fought against the terrorists.
He was, for better or worse, her man.
Stryker returned to the house after clearing the outbuildings. They were all poorly maintained, and contained all sorts of junk most people would throw away. He lingered on the porch lost in thought about the woman they now had responsibility for.
Part of him wanted to clean her up, feed her, and move on. They’d had enough trouble since the plague and moving on seemed to be the best course of action to him.
Haley and Erin would never agree to it.
“Guess we’re going to have to drive her home, wherever that might be,” Stryker murmured to himself.
CHAPTER THREE
Stryker laid a massive knuckle-rich hand on the dining room table and looked around him. The women were all eating slowly and Annie, the prey of the men he just killed, flinched every time he reached for his water bottle or picked up a utensil to grab a bit of food. He was tiring of her cringing and shivering every time he moved a hand.
“Erin, would you put your hand over mine?”
“Why?”
“Humor me.”
Erin complied.
“Haley, please place your hand over Erin’s.”
She looked confused, but obeyed.
“Annie, can you put your hand on top of Haley’s?”
Annie also obeyed and placed her hand on the top of the pile, although she would not look Stryker in the eye or even look up from her food. Her hair was still wet from the bath Haley and Erin had given her, and it hung in tufts of dull blonde that fell over one shoulder. She wore a bathrobe the ladies had liberated from the bathroom and she looked very uncomfortable.
“These hands will never be raised against you,” Stryker said after a long pause, willing Annie to look up. She glanced up once, and then looked away again.
“These hands will protect and defend you in times of trouble. They will heal you when you’re sick, feed you when you’re hungry, and we will all die willingly to defend you and keep you safe.”
Annie held his gaze for the first time, her face conveying an inner conflict. She started quietly sobbing.
“Bad things happen to people, and I know that happened to you, but if you want to be a part of our group, there has to be trust,” Erin said.
“I guess I have to trust you,” Annie replied. “What choice do I have?”
“Well the first thing is that you have to trust Stryker,” Erin stated in a flat voice. “I know he looks like ten miles of bad road, but he’s the person you want to have around when things go to shit and if he tells you he will die for you he really means it.”
“How do you know that?” Her voice was filled with suspicion.
“Because he does it for us every day. He clears buildings for us before we even get out of the car. He takes all the risks so we stay safe, and someday he will probably die for us and I will, I might add, be really pissed off when that day comes. It’s just who he is.”
“And you trust him?”
“Completely. He is not wired to do anything that’s not moral in his book. He will gladly kill people that don’t fit into his idea of honorable behavior, but I’m not sure, any longer, that it’s a bad thing.”
Stryker leaned forward. “Annie, I will protect you and keep you safe from now until the time you choose to leave us, if you do. But, you have to get your shit in a pile, get over your aversion to me, and become a member of the team. I can’t have you freaking out and doing something weird when we need you to be calm.”
“I’ll try,” she whispered and glanced at him briefly before again looking away.
“Can you tell us your story?” Erin asked gently.
“I’m not really sure where to start.”
“Where were you when the plague hit?”
“My husband and I were in Atlanta at a conference for travel agents.” She spoke seemingly by rote. Then she grew silent, and a look of despondency crossed her expression.
“Did he die from the plague?” Haley asked.
“Yes. He died two days after we knew it hit us.” She paused for a moment. “He was a good man. We were very happy together.”
“How did you get here?” Stryker asked.
“After my husband died, four of us managed to get a car started and began driving back. We all lived in different states, so we dropped off the first two in Alabama, and then drove through Tennessee. There were only two of us left, so we took turns driving and I dropped Pam off in Oklahoma.” She sputtered to a stop, and Stryker decided to let her rest for a bit.
They all ate in silence for a long few moments.
“What about you guys?” Annie asked, with a
forced gaiety in her voice, as though she was trying to make polite conversation.
“Well, Haley and I were about to be sold into sex slavery when Stryker and my gramps showed up and got us away from the slavers. They took us to Stryker’s ranch and we lived there for a while, but now we are on our way to San Diego.”
“Why San Diego?”
“There’s a naval vessel docked there and they’re going to try to rebuild what’s left of the country. We decided we should go check it out and see if it’s worth joining a larger group.”
Erin had decided to be intentionally vague about their plan because she didn’t want to get bogged down in details. She was more interested in getting information about Annie than talking about their group.
“Where is your gramps?” Annie asked, after thinking about Erin’s statement.
“He died a few a while ago.”
“Was he killed?”
“No, he died of cancer.”
Another long pause ensued.
“I’m sorry,” Annie said.
“Don’t be. He lived a good life and died on his own terms. We miss him, but we all should be so lucky.”
As the women chatted, Stryker examined Annie. She was painfully thin, but her face showed no bruising, and he grew convinced that her captors used food as a means of controlling her. He glanced down at her plate, where her food was largely untouched.
“You need to eat more Annie,” he said gently. “I imagine your stomach has shrunk and it’s not easy to eat, but you really have to start eating a normal diet pretty quickly or you won’t be able to hold up your end.” He paused. “I don’t know what it’s like to be starved into submission, but I do know we need you to be strong and that means you need to eat more. I don’t want you to get sick from eating too much, but for the next few days Erin is going to monitor what you eat, and it has to more than what you consume now.”
“I’ll try.” She bit her lip.
“Do that. We’re a team now and no team is stronger than its weakest link, so don’t be that.”
“I’ll try,” she repeated.
“Okay, you guys sit here and chat for a while and I’ll clean off the table and do the dishes.”
“You’re doing dishes?” Haley asked with a note of disbelief.
“You guys need to get to know each other better, and see if you can get Annie to eat more.” Stryker picked up the dishes from his group and carried them to the kitchen.
Stryker always knew when to make an exit. He had been freakishly large since childhood and understood that it made people uncomfortable to look up at him. He also understood that there were times that the best thing to do was to remove himself from a situation where a subtle approach was required. He was about as subtle as a blow from a sledge hammer.
He walked out the back door to the porch, watched the sun going down in a brilliant display of pink and red, and then walked around the house to grab camping lanterns from the pickup. He entered the house through the front door, placed a lit lantern on the dining room table, and grunted his dissatisfaction when he saw Annie’s plate still full.
“Keep working on that.” He left the room and went back to the kitchen.
As he washed the dishes, thanking God for running water at the house, he heard the conversation from the dining room grow more animated and, after another few minutes, he heard Annie laugh. A smile cracked his face.
“I’ll give them a few more minutes, and then we all have to go to bed,” he said to himself. Another round of laughter pealed through the house, and Stryker found himself marveling at the strength of the human spirit.
CHAPTER FOUR
“So how did dumb and dumber capture her?” Stryker asked Haley as they sat on the porch having morning coffee. It was really bad coffee, taken from MREs they lived on, but any coffee that wasn’t filled with sugar, flavoring, and cream was better than no coffee.
They’d all slept in the spare bedroom the previous night, with Stryker on the floor and Erin and Haley sleeping with Annie in the king bed.
“Annie dropped off the last passenger and then ran into the roadblock,” Haley said.
“How long ago?”
“She doesn’t really know, but thinks it was around six months ago.”
“Well, I guess it really sucked being her,” Stryker replied.
“Your empathy is overwhelming.”
“Get over it. Bad stuff happens to everyone and if it doesn’t kill you, it may not make you stronger, but it sure as shit makes you happy to be alive.”
“Let me write that down for posterity. Oh, wait; I don’t have a pen, so I guess that just has to die its own death.”
“Smart ass.” A comfortable silence fell between them, and they watched a dramatic sunrise peek over the horizon and then bloom into a full landscape of daylight that grew into a harsh white light that was almost headache-inducing.
Erin came out, dressed in nothing but panties and a bra, and sighed. “Did I miss anything?”
“Just the sunrise.” Haley smiled.
“Did you find out where she wants to go?” Stryker asked.
“Are you trying to get rid of her?” Erin responded, suddenly fully awake.
“No, I just want to know what we’re going to do with her.”
“We’re not going to ‘do’ anything. We’re going to give her time to think it through, and then we can decide what we want to do.”
“Well, okay, but I really think we need to press her and find out if she wants us to drop her somewhere, or if she wants to come with us.”
“What’s the urgency?”
“None I guess. I just like having a plan.”
“The plan is there is no plan until she figures out what she wants to do,” Erin replied flatly.
“Okay.”
“What we know, so far, is that she is from La Verkin, Utah. The town sits at the entrance to Zion National Park. They were travel agents, as you know, and were at a convention when the crap hit the fan.”
“That part I know.”
“Okay, well, the bottom line is she wants to come with us, but has a brother and daughter that live in La Verkin, and she feels she needs to at least check on them. Her brother works in the park, and the daughter is a courthouse clerk.”
“Is she presuming they’re still alive?” Stryker asked.
“There is every reason to think if she survived, they did,” Erin responded.
“That’s a bit of a detour and is going to add a few days to the trip.”
“It is,” Erin agreed. “But, we have to take her there if we’re going to do the right thing. If it was one of us, we would do it without a second thought.”
“Well, that is well to the north of our route, but it is farther west. She’s going to have to decide before we get to Highway 285 North. That’s the best route and will cut a lot of time off the trip because it heads northwest at an angle and cuts the distance by one third.”
“When will we get there?”
“Probably by the end of today. We can overnight in Barstow, which is around twenty miles from the turnoff north. That will make for a fairly easy day so long as we don’t run into any more trouble.”
“I’ll talk to her and see if I can prod her into deciding something by this afternoon.”
Seven hours later, they passed Barstow and pulled off the freeway onto a service road. A few minutes later Stryker spotted the mouth of a clearing. In the center sat a log cabin. He made a U-turn in the front yard, parked the pickup facing away from the cabin, and examined the area. There was a hand-operated water pump directly to the west of the cottage and an outhouse on the other side. A picnic table and several plastic lawn chairs sat out front. They got out, grabbed their weapons, and did a slow scan of the tree line. Nothing moved, so they walked to the porch of the cabin and Stryker opened the door, gun up.
It was clear.
As they entered the one-room cabin, he saw it was very small. Two single beds sat against each wall, with the kitchen agai
nst the back wall, and a dinette with two chairs. The kitchen had a camp stove on the countertop, a sink, and a plastic camping cooler on the floor.
“This was somebody’s hunting lodge,” Stryker concluded.
“Looks like it,” Haley answered.
Stryker walked back to the front porch, scanned the horizon, and noted that the vegetation, unlike most of Texas, was mostly live oak trees and low lush bushes. He concluded they must be near a water source, and then remembered that the Pecos River was only a mile or so to the west.
He walked back into the house, where the ladies were getting dinner ready, and began disassembling and cleaning his XD at the kitchen table. After the weapon was clean, he reassembled it, dry fired it once, and then placed it back into his holster. He walked back out to the porch and sat down on a settee. Erin joined him and they sat in silence watching the light fade from the earth and shimmer upward until nothing but a faint glow remained on the horizon.
“Has she decided anything?” Stryker asked.
“Looks like we’re going to La Verkin,” Erin answered in a monotone. “You okay with that?”
“Sure. It’s not like we’re in any hurry anyway, so let’s take her home and, who knows, maybe somebody survived.”
“Well, we all know immunity runs in families, so there is a good chance for her.”
“You told her that?”
“I had to.”
“I’m glad you did,” He grasped her hand with his, watching it disappear under his fist. “For better or worse, she is one of us now, so we owe her honesty if nothing else.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Well, I guess it’s all good. Edwards and Elle probably have two more days to get to Portland. It will take him another week to get to San Diego.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“This morning.”
“What’s the news?”
“They’re fine. Making good time, but not pushing it. They decided to only drive during the day.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You didn’t ask. Besides, if you want the good stuff, you need to get up earlier.”
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