The Systemic Series - Box Set

by K. W. Callahan

  One of the grenade launcher guy’s buddies scrambled from behind the cover of a nearby vehicle to try to recover the weapon. Just as he reached it, the Kill King took him out with a single shot too. Then the King turned his attention to the SUV inside the pump station perimeter which presented the most immediate danger to the building being overrun. With nearly a 360 degree view around the building, the King could pretty much have his choice of targets as long as they weren’t too close to the side of the structure. But he had to act quickly before the attackers got a read on his position or before they got inside the pump station itself. Bullets were already starting to pound into his defensive sandbags, and he could feel the heat of the attack turning toward him and the gunner laying down heavy fire beside him.

  The King could see through the SUV’s passenger-side window, the head of one of the attackers crouched behind its open door. He drew a breath, held it, aimed, squeezed the trigger, exhaled, and watched. The SUV window shattered and the head disappeared from sight. A second later, a body tumbled out from behind the door and lay motionless on the ground.

  The King angled his rifle’s scope slightly to the right. He couldn’t see another head anywhere, but underneath the driver’s side door he saw a knee planted in the ground as one of the defenders crouched for cover. He drew a breath, held it, aimed, squeezed the trigger, exhaled, and watched. His bullet ripped into the exposed knee. A second later, a man sprawled out into the open from behind the door, writhing in pain. Realizing that he was in danger, the man immediately began scrambling back to the cover of the SUV, but it was too late. The King squeezed the trigger again, sending a round into the middle of the man’s neck, killing him instantly.

  Suddenly an explosion erupted just below the King. A grenade round had hit the building just below his position. The heat from the blast rolled upward, burning his face, and the smoke temporarily blinded his one and only eye as he ducked for cover behind his sandbag emplacement. He looked over beside him. The machine gunner was staring at him with lifeless eyes, a hole in the side of his face.

  King blinked hard and fished from his pocket a clean cloth he carried with him at all times to wipe his eye. As he recovered his vision, he saw someone next to him push the body of the gunner aside and start firing the machinegun.

  It was Ava.

  “Didn’t expect to see you here!” he yelled over the machinegun’s chatter, putting his rifle’s scope back to his eye.

  “You know where that round came from?” Ava yelled, pausing her fire just long enough for King to yell back to her, “No!”

  “Give me cover and I’ll find him though!” the King called.

  Ava swept the vehicles in the street with gunfire, momentarily quelling the amount of return fire they were taking and giving the King the chance he needed to locate his target.

  While he’d been focused on the SUV, someone had retrieved the grenade launcher from the dead man he’d dispatched just a minute earlier. The guy was taking cover behind the first car that had been destroyed by one of Jake’s land mines. The Kill King zeroed in on the man just as he stood to fire another round. He drew a breath, held it, squeezed the trigger, exhaled, and watched as a flash issued from the grenade launcher at the exact instant he fired his own shot.

  The man with the grenade launcher dropped to the ground, dead. At the same time, there was a deafening explosion as the Kill King’s rifle was ripped from his hands. Instantaneously, he was on his back and buried under sandbags. There was grit in his mouth, his nose, his ears, and his eye. He gasped for breath, choking on the dust and debris. The weight of the dirt and sand in the bags pinned him in place and he struggled to free himself.

  Suddenly he felt hands upon him, hands digging in the dirt and sand around him, and the pressure being relieved as someone pushed sandbags off him. As he blinked to clear his eye, he could see Ava – blood on her face and a cut below her right eye – working to extract him. He pulled his right arm from beneath a sandbag and Ava helped him to his feet. She pulled him along with her off the rooftop to the stairwell.

  The Kill King could see the right arm beneath Ava’s torn and tattered jacket was oozing blood from a deep gash.

  “You okay?” he asked, spitting more dirt and sand from his mouth and wiggling a finger in one ear to clear the ringing.

  She nodded, “I’ll live. You?”

  “I think so,” he said. He blinked hard, “Got something in my eye. But I think it’ll be okay. Can’t afford to lose that one too,” he shook his head as he cleared the debris from his eye.

  “Come on, let’s get downstairs,” Ava said, leading him along.

  They helped one another back down to the first floor where Ava guided them into the office. King was limping from where one of the heavy sandbags had fallen awkwardly on his knee and Ava still seemed somewhat dazed. The King collapsed into a chair while Ava fumbled on the desk for the radio.

  She found it, turned it on, and squeezed the talk button. “Go!” was all she said before she collapsed to the floor.

  CHAPTER 19

  Four days had gone by since we’d discovered the garden invasion, and with each passing day, we felt a little bit better about the situation. There had been no recurrence of the trespassers in the garden, nor any sign of their reappearance anywhere else around town.

  Ray and I had recently been back to the pond to refill the pickup’s tanks with water, and while I had noted some fresh tracks in the dirt around it, and the water level noticeably decreased, our water-hauling work proceeded without incident.

  Over the ensuing days, we decided to harvest as much as we could from our plantings just to be on the safe side and to avoid leaving any tempting fruit on the vine so to speak. We collected any ripe – or near ripe – tomatoes so that they could finish the ripening process safely indoors. We collected carrots, cucumbers, corn, and more. We also temporarily transferred our water from the back of the pickup into any remaining available containers we could lay our hands on and sent an armed party out to load the tubs full of apples and peaches so that Sharron could start cooking, canning, and using them in baking in an effort to help bolster our food supplies. Paul, Sarah, Emily, Pam, and Dad helped Sharron unload the fruit and then assisted with peeling, cutting, and dicing, as well as preparing containers and boiling water.

  On the fifth day, we felt reasonably secure with our food stocks bolstered, our garden picked clean of harvestable items, and all the fruit we could handle pulled from the peach and apple trees.

  That evening, it was again time for me and Claire to take over the night watch. I let her take the first stint from 6 p.m. to midnight since it was the easiest to cover. By this point in the summer, it didn’t even get dark until after nine, so it really didn’t feel like there was much of a night shift to cover until the second portion of the evening was in full effect.

  While this was nice for the person covering the early portion of the night, it kind of stunk for the person who had the second half, as it made it difficult to get any rest ahead of their shift due to the still-lit evening sky.

  This was the case for me tonight. It seemed like I had just dozed off when I felt Claire’s gentle touch wake me.

  “Ugh,” I moaned groggily. “Already?”

  “Yep…already. Sorry hon’,” she said as she slipped into bed beside me and I slowly slid my way out.

  “See you in the morning,” I groaned.

  “Uh huh,” she answered drowsily.

  I was envious of her, but I knew that duty called and that it was only once or twice a week I had to endure this hardship. It was a small sacrifice to make to ensure the safety of our group and its resources.

  In the darkness, I located my blue jeans draped over a nearby chair and wriggled into them. I found a t-shirt on the same chair and slipped it over my head. Then I located my .44 on the shelf I’d mounted on the wall beside the bed that allowed me to store our firearms within easy reach for Claire and me but out of reach of Jason’s tiny hands. I shoved the we
apon into my waistband. And finally, I retrieved the automatic rifle from a wall-mounted rack above the bed where Claire had placed it upon returning from her watch.

  I rubbed the sleep from my eyes with the thumb and middle finger of my left hand and headed downstairs.

  The first thing I did once outside was make a quick check of the garden. Finding that all was quiet on the backyard front, I moved around the store to take up my post on the front porch.

  Everyone had their own watch routine which I actually liked since it made it harder for anyone who might be observing us to get a feel for regular patterns to our shifts. My personal preference was to break up each hour into two mini-shifts. The first half hour I’d spend watching the front of the store, and then I’d circle around back to spend a half hour there. However, whenever I got bored or began feeling sleepy, I’d make an unplanned circuit or two around the store to help wake me up and pass the time. This also helped keep the watch more interesting, and more importantly, keep any prospective intruders off guard.

  That was my theory at least.

  Ray had told the group that it was good to change things up to keep us from falling into a monotonous routine. He had said that routine was the enemy on numerous fronts. Not only did it make our patterns easier to spot to outsiders, but it lulled us into a sense of complacency where we began to see and do the same things in habitual ways. Instead, he had said, we should vary our watch patterns as it would keep our eyes “fresh” and help us stay more alert. Changing things up helped our minds stay more active because it acted to “reset” them as we moved from place to place. He noted a study that had been referenced in his FBI training in which people had been given a simple list of five items to remember in one room of a house – the living room for example – and then asked to recall that same list as soon as they moved into another area of the house. The list might have contained things like eggs, butter, vacuum cleaner, mop, and toothpaste. They’d often easily be able to recount the items over and over again in the room in which they’d been presented with the list, but once asked to recite it just a few seconds after entering another room, very few of the study participants had been able to recount the full list with any regularity. Ray told us that it was because of a sort of reset our brains did as we moved into a new location. In a kitchen we began thinking about things like food, cooking, and eating. In a bathroom we began thinking about shaving, using the toilet, taking a soothing bath or shower, etc. This new train of thought caused our brains to loose focus on what we had been thinking about just moments before and focus on the things presented to us in a completely new environment. This, he said, was the reason why we might have noticed ourselves occasionally entering a room of our home for a certain reason or purpose only to realize once we got there that we couldn’t remember exactly why or what we’d gone there for, which we all agreed had happened to us in the past.

  It made sense once he’d laid it all out for us, but I didn’t think I would ever have thought about it otherwise. And so, this was the approach I adopted in an effort to make my shift as interesting as possible while keeping myself relatively alert and aware as I changed locations regularly.

  I kept a pack of gum handy since the cigarettes had run out long ago, and this helped keep me busy too, chomping away and blowing bubbles. I’d found that making mental lists of things we needed to do or prepare for the approaching fall and winter months also helped the time pass faster.

  Tonight, I was thinking largely about water. I wasn’t as worried as I had been since we’d soon be done harvesting our crops which would alleviate much of the strain upon our water supply. And I figured it had to rain sometime. I didn’t have much hope for the remainder of August, but I was praying that the rain gods would be kinder to us in September.

  As a hedge against the gods overlooking my oft-made requests, we’d managed to build up a reserve supply of several hundred gallons of clean water kept in the basement. This way, even if the pond dried up completely, we’d have something to keep us going for at least a couple of weeks, and maybe longer if we used it solely for drinking and little else.

  The night air felt surprisingly cool, cooler than it’d felt in weeks. It was nice, and it made it almost enjoyable to be out at this time of night. I listened to the soft chirping of the crickets. Somewhere in the distance, a coyote yipped. I sat on the front porch steps thinking. Fall would arrive soon, and then winter. I was worried about our food stocks…our meat supply more than anything. Poor Paul could only snag so many squirrels, and he was currently on hunting probation since our meeting last week. And as a group of eleven, ten of whom ate meat, we needed more than an occasional paltry few ounces of squirrel flesh to keep us fed.

  I knew that Sharron would do her best to pinpoint trees for nuts as another source of protein, but again, the energy expended harvesting and shelling the nuts for their tiny bits of flesh was almost more than they replenished.

  There was a soft breeze blowing tonight, and paired with the cool evening air, it made me shiver. I heard a bang somewhere in the distance down by the town’s sprinkling of houses, but it didn’t concern me. Several of the homes were in a severe state of disrepair and were well into the process of breaking down and falling apart. One of the trailers had some loose roofing that would flap around in the wind, and I guessed that this was what was responsible for the noise tonight.

  This was another area of concern for my mental list making. We needed to decide whether to stay put in the general store or move into the houses and start working on them before their condition worsened. If we waited much longer, they would be beyond repair and the choice would be made for us by the efforts of Mother Nature, Father Time, and Old Man Winter.

  I sat for a few minutes considering which houses were still salvageable and which of those needed the least amount of work to make them livable. All of them needed at least some work. And then of course there was the issue of removing the previous occupants. That would have to be dealt with first and foremost and was not something I was looking forward to.

  Before I knew it, my watch read nearly two o’clock. I stood, did a perimeter check, and ended my circuit at the rear of the store. Once there, I did a short walk around the garden, checking the chicken wire fencing with my flashlight, not so much to look for trespassers of the human variety but to search for small holes through which squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, and other small critters could wriggle. After making a few minor adjustments to the fencing, I went and checked the water tank levels in the back of the pickup truck parked nearby. I had replenished them several days ago after they’d been emptied of fruit. Both tanks were just a little under halfway full. Even with the covers atop them, we never filled the tubs more than about three-quarters of the way to keep slopping and spillage to a minimum on the way home. I gave us another three or four days before I’d have to make another trip to the pond, unless it rained, the odds of which I didn’t think were in our favor.

  I then killed a few more minutes checking that the back door was locked and that the outside entry doors to the basement were secure with a padlocked chain around them.

  Both were.

  This done, I decided to heed Ray’s advice and vary my routine a little. Rather than stick around out back, I wandered up front where I took up a position smack dab in the center of Main Street and where I could see up and down the town’s central thoroughfare, if it could be considered such.

  I gazed for a moment up the road in the direction we’d entered town several months ago, remembering the evening we’d rolled slowly and cautiously to a stop just a few feet from where I now stood. I thought about the fears we’d had when we’d arrived and the concerns about how we might be welcomed. I remembered the relief I felt upon realizing that the tiny town was deserted. And I remembered myself thinking that Olsten resembled the type of town I’d envisioned us eventually settling down in.

  I liked Olsten. Was it perfect? No. Would anywhere be perfect? I doubted it. The castle back in Tennessee was p
robably about as close as we’d come to perfection, but even that had its faults and had eventually been ruined by the townspeople of Tipton. But this place had a homey sort of feel. It was quaint, quiet, and maybe most importantly, completely ours.

  I took a long, deep breath, inhaling the fresh country air that was no longer touched by man or machine other than the small environmental footprint of our own group’s creation.

  I turned around to look toward the other side of town, to where the houses – and potentially our future home – sat.

  From the corner of my eye I noticed a faint glimmer of light coming from one side of town. It took me a few seconds to focus on the spot and it seemed as if it was gently pulsating, slowly growing in size. Another pinprick of light caught my eye from across town on the other side of Main Street, and then another, and another. I couldn’t figure out what was going on or what was creating the lights. It was like tiny Christmas lights had been strung up across town.

  But then I realized, if these lights weren’t natural, then they were manmade, and manmade could mean trouble.

  I walked quickly back to the front porch to alert the others, never taking my eyes from the lights that appeared to be coming from each of the homes around Olsten, and were growing in size by the minute. That’s when it hit me…they were fires. Somebody was setting our town ablaze.

  I darted up the front porch steps.

  “FIRE!” I yelled, dashing through the storefront and continuing on back to the stairway and up the stairs to the second floor. I flung the door to our apartment open. “FIRE!” I yelled again. “They’re setting fire to the town! Will!” I cried. “Get your gun! Claire! Sharron! Get the kids down to the basement!”