The Systemic Series - Box Set

by K. W. Callahan

  Gordon pickup up the car’s CB radio, “Move your asses,” he growled into it.

  Moments later, one of the SUVs, accompanied by one of the pickups, passed them to take the lead. This was their typical convoy alignment, two protective vehicles in the front, Gordon – their commander in chief – in the middle, with two more security vehicles bringing up the rear.

  It took them just under half an hour to cut from route A1A – which ebbed and flowed along Florida’s coastline and outer banks – over to US1 and finally to Interstate 95. Over the past year, they’d become accustomed to making this run. And Gordon had to admit that even though he was a Florida resident, born and bread, it had to be one of the most boring and just plain ugly drives that the beautiful US of A – or whatever it was called now – had to offer.

  The drive was largely an unbroken, eye-blurringly boring blend of scrubby undergrowth that was knit into a thick mesh of vegetation mixed with swampy marshland. Hardly anything had been built along the corridor except for a couple gas stations near the turnoff for US1 and a small correctional facility out in the middle of nowhere.

  Gordon had to admit, putting the correctional facility out here away from everyone and anything and in the middle of a jungle-like environment had been a good idea. He figured that even the most desperate of escapees would turn right back around and ask to be re-admitted after seeing what they had to contend with once outside the prison. Escaping the facility would be the easy part, its interior a plush pleasure palace compared to what awaited them outside. There could be 95-degree temperatures often accompanied by comparable humidity, a blazing blue sky and the sun beating down as though you were in the Sahara, or there could be a torrential, monsoon-like downpour that made you feel as though you were mucking it out in Malaysia. Then there was mile upon mile of terrain to navigate with no safe haven from poisonous snakes, ravenous spiders, swarms of mosquitoes, armies of sand flees that invaded every inch and crept into every crevice of your body – and of course, alligators. Add to this the web-like netting of vines, trees, bushes, thorns, and spider webs, and there was a good reason why this part of Florida had yet to be developed.

  Once past this corridor of blandness, there was the crisp, clean, modern, heat-rippled black snake of asphalt that comprised Interstate 95. Numerous vehicles had been ditched here during the past year, often due to running out of fuel; and Gordon and his crew had been able to harvest a variety of parts and supplies from these abandoned relics. It was unusual to actually find a vehicle that still had any fuel left in it – let alone diesel fuel – and this was part of the reason why he was in such a rush to get to this particular tractor trailer before anyone else.

  Once on the highway, it was only about a half mile from the exit until they saw the big rig sitting lurched over on the northbound shoulder. Gordon hoped that there might be more treasures waiting to be discovered inside the trailer.

  His convoy pulled up, creating a sort of half-moon perimeter around the truck, alerting any potential new arrivals that they had laid claim to the wreck. Gordon and his salvage crew climbed from their vehicles. Several of his men took up positions on the highway – two facing north and two facing south – as lookouts and to provide a defensive line should anyone else decide to take a stab at their loot. Gordon and the rest of his boys inspected the scene. Two men went to check the truck’s fuel tank while Gordon and Jeff went around behind. Jeff popped the back of the truck, but they were disappointed to find it had either been traveling light or its contents had already been offloaded.

  Gordon walked around to the front of the semi. Being outside the air-conditioned comfort of the Mustang, he was sweating already. “Alright, pull that pickup with the siphoning equipment and barrel in the back around and let’s get to work. We ain’t got all day.”

  His two youngest son’s, Jerry and Barry sprung into action, getting the pickup truck with a 100 gallon drum strapped to its bed pulled up alongside the rig where they could begin the process of sucking out the diesel fuel.

  Gordon and Jeff walked a safe distance away and each lit up a cigarette. Once common, cigarettes were now a luxury. One of the scavengers Gordon regularly did business with had begun growing and drying tobacco and was in the process of creating his own hand-rolled cigarettes. Gordon had arranged to purchase the entire first batch, and pending their quality, wanted to be the scavenger’s distributor once he perfected his craft. Even if the quality wasn’t there, Gordon really didn’t care. The few remaining people on the planet didn’t have many remaining indulgences, but cigarettes had become one of them. Even for non-smokers, cigarettes could be used to barter for food or other necessities, and therefore they had become a valuable commodity to almost everyone. Either way, Gordon wanted to get his hands on as many of these freshly-produced smokes as he could. Like alcohol during prohibition, even a shit product was valuable simply because it was scarce.

  “When’s Don supposed to be done with those cigs he promised us?” Jeff asked his father.

  Gordon shrugged, “Any day now…supposedly. Course that’s what he told me two weeks ago.”

  Jeff shook his head, “You’re too easy on that guy. Need to put some pressure on him.”

  Gordon shook his head, “Everybody’s got enough pressure put on ‘em these days. He don’t need no more. None of us do.”

  Gordon loved all his sons, and Jeff was slated to one day take over the family business, but Jeff was also impatient. He’d yet to develop the understanding and tolerance for occasional delay that often comes with age. Gordon had been very much like him, at least until the flu hit. Since then, he’d mellowed a little. He found the change in him somewhat surprising considering the numerous pressures and responsibilities that came with this new world. But Gordon had come to realize just how precious life was and how important developing and maintaining human relationships was in a world where human beings were about the scarcest resource of all.

  Gordon finished his cigarette and flipped the butt away onto the highway’s shoulder where it landed, bounced, and rolled to a stop, sending a tiny smoke trail up into the stagnant and breezeless Florida air.

  He walked to where his two sons were pumping diesel fuel out of the big rig. Jeff followed close behind.

  “How we coming?” he asked the boys, both of whom were in their mid-20s.

  “Almost done,” Barry said, wiping away the sweat that was dripping down his forehead and into his eyes and that caused him to blink and squint as he spoke.

  “How much we got so far?” Jeff asked.

  “I’d say getting close to half a barrel,” said Jerry.

  Jeff nodded, “Not bad. If we…”

  One of their northern lookouts gave a shrill whistle, “We got company!” he yelled behind him.

  Gordon and Jeff both looked north. In the afternoon sun, they could see the glint of vehicles approaching in the distance.

  “Alright boys!” Gordon yelled. “Let’s mount up! We don’t need any trouble. We got what we came for.”

  Jerry and Barry quickly finished their pumping. “We got just about all of it,” Barry said.

  “Good,” said Gordon. “Let’s go!”

  They all packed into their respective vehicles and made for the exit ramp that would lead them back to the relative safety of home.

  Gordon’s sons, Billy and Jerry, took the lead in one of the SUVs. The pickup hauling the diesel fuel and driven by his nephew Edwin was right behind them, and Gordon and Jeff followed closely behind their captured booty. Barry – Gordon’s youngest son – followed in the other pickup, and nephews Ian and Andrew provided rear cover for the convoy in the other SUV.

  As they took the exit, it put them heading east and back toward the coast.

  Gordon adjusted his side mirror. “Slide right so I can see,” he told Jeff.

  Jeff maneuvered the Mustang over slightly out of line with the rest of the convoy that was traveling down the center of the two-lane road.

  About a minute after they took the
exit, Gordon could see vehicles pulling into line behind them, three abreast; and they were closing quickly.

  “They’re followin’ us,” Gordon said to Jeff. “We could have some trouble on our hands.”

  “We can handle them,” Jeff said confidently. “We’ve been through this before. Get home quick enough and we can catch ‘em like rats in a trap,” he nodded.

  Just as he finished the words, two monstrous vehicles pulled out from the cover of the scrub brush lining the road about a half mile ahead of them.

  “What the fuck are those?” Jeff frowned, lifting his foot from the accelerator slightly as the vehicles leading the way in front of them began to slow.

  “Looks like armored vehicles,” said Gordon, pulling his handgun from the center console as two Stryker armored personnel carriers converged lengthwise across the entirety of the road, blocking the convoy’s route forward. “And it looks like we’re the rats in this trap.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Our group had been so happy, so content, so isolated. I thought we’d finally found a place we could call our home. We’d remained pleasantly untouched by the outside world in Olsten, Georgia for most of the spring and summer months until we were suddenly and brutally assaulted by an unknown enemy that had literally burned our town out from under us.

  This shocking turn of events had left our tiny town smoldering and in complete ruins, and we realized that Olsten was apparently just another stop on our long road to nowhere. That road had led us from the Chicagoland area down to the vast forests of southern Illinois, to the mountainous terrain of eastern Tennessee, and after our stint in Olsten, to the moist, buggy wastelands of north Florida.

  Frankly, all of us were sick and tired of having to pack up our lives and move on after being routed from spots where each time we thought we had settled down. The family road trip used to be something we enjoyed prior to the Su flu, a pandemic that had ravaged the world’s population. Such trips had been things to look forward to with anticipation, excitement, and a sense of adventure. They were opportunities to spend time with the family away from the pressures of school and work. Now such travel was dreaded – even feared. It was difficult, dangerous, and could even prove deadly. We’d thought – or maybe just hoped – that such journeys could be set aside for a while when we’d finally found Olsten. We’d settled in and had our lives set up quite nicely there, but we’d again been forced from our home, which seemed to be becoming a recurring theme in our post-flu lives.

  And so, here we were again, scavenging, suffering, and living hand to mouth.

  We’d left Olsten several days ago. Mysterious Molotov cocktail-wielding attackers had arrived in the middle of the night and evicted us from the general store we’d converted into our home. Thankfully, we’d salvaged a fair amount of supplies from the building before we’d been forced to stand nearby and watch it burn to the ground.

  Even with our supplies, Florida in the summertime was proving to be a tough foe. We were finding that clean drinking water and gasoline were the hardest items to come by. And with the heat and humidity that the “Sunshine State” was throwing at us, we were going through more water than we’d expected in an effort to stay hydrated. We were trying to limit ourselves to half a gallon of drinking water a piece each day, but with eleven in our group, we were still quickly consuming a fair amount of our supply. The only good thing was that the oppressive heat seemed to be keeping our activity – and in turn, our appetites – in check.

  We were hoping to make it to the coast in the next day or two, but it was slow going. We’d drive for a few miles before finding a spot with some abandoned cars or an empty home to search for fuel, food, water, or other useable supplies. The old farm pickup with attached trailer that we were using as our transportation was running with its tank perilously close to empty. And constantly having to stop and look for more gas to continue our trek had kept our progress to a snail’s pace. Our efforts had only yielded us a paltry few gallons of gas. It seemed like it was always just enough to get us to the next spot where a few more precious ounces awaited. I dreamed of the day that we’d come across a huge tanker truck from which we could fill our vehicle’s tank and then some. But I was afraid that in this day and age, such a dream was just that, a dream. With no oil wells or refineries running to create and process fuel, and with other survivors of the flu having consumed or hoarded much of the excess supply over the past year, it was becoming increasingly difficult to scavenge gasoline.

  My old college buddy, Ray – an FBI agent in the pre-flu world – who had joined our group back in the forests of southern Illinois with his now pregnant wife Pam, had said we might try grain alcohol in place of gasoline, but alcohol was probably even harder to find these days than gasoline. It was one of the few luxuries still available to people to help take their minds off lost friends, and loved ones, and the cruel realities of the post-flu world. There was no cable television, no sporting events, no movies – unless you had a generator and fuel to power a DVD player and television, which even if you did, you weren’t likely to waste such valuable resources on movie watching. There was no running water for soothing baths or hot showers, no electricity or natural gas for cooking romantic dinners, no doctors to diagnose and prescribe something for that achy back or those debilitating migraines, and no pharmacies to fill prescriptions. There were no date-matching services to pair you with your ultimate love interest, no mindless online videos featuring piano-playing cats or screaming goats to take your mind off things for a minute or two, and no cell phones, tablets, or instant messaging. It had become a world in which surviving to see another day was the ultimate luxury.

  And even if you somehow managed to achieve several of those aforementioned luxuries, it was a constant battle to maintain them or keep someone else from taking them. Gone were the laws and order of the civilized world. Small segments of the current society had retained some semblance of its former self – certain rules, regulations, and inherent characteristics of dignity, civility, and chivalry – but there was no law enforcement to maintain order among those who chose to follow their most basic human instincts and ignore the laws and protocol of the land once known as the United States of America. Since the flu had created a “sink or swim” sort of mentality, many of those who had survived were the ones willing to do whatever it took to stay alive, which often meant having to do the unthinkable.

  Our group had been lucky in that I had always been a planner and a prepper. I had foreseen a situation not unlike the Su flu coming long before it ever arrived. And while as a writer in my pre-flu life, maybe the idea of such a situation ever coming to fruition seemed more the basis for a book than reality, I had undertaken the preparation process nonetheless, largely to err on the side of caution than due to any real expectation of such a scenario unfolding. I had stockpiled food, several guns, ammunition, medical supplies for my diabetic wife Claire, and other emergency items. I had even picked out a secluded spot – land owned by a family friend – in the forests of southern Illinois where we could safely hold out until things settled down and danger had passed. And I had even sent pre-written letters with detailed instructions to my closest loved ones.

  Most of those whom I had contacted had eventually joined us. Some never made it. And until we’d been forced from our safe haven by a roving gang of miscreants, we’d called the place our home.

  That was nearly a year ago. We’d been moving from place to place ever since. We’d found a beautiful mansion we’d nicknamed “the castle” in the mountains of Tennessee, but we were forced to move on by local inhabitants incensed by our encroachment upon what they felt was “their” territory. That was when we decided to continue south. In Georgia, we had a brief stay at a small farm that had ended in disaster with the death of the farmer and his wife. This traumatic event, paired with various injuries and illnesses among our group members, had forced us onward in search for a place we could finally call our own.

  Olsten, a small and secluded town also in Ge
orgia had seemed the perfect spot. But lack of water, and an area population that was apparently far less pleased with our choice of living location than we were, had forced our group, that included my brother Will, his wife Sharron and their two children Paul and Sarah, my father Frank, Claire’s mother Emily, and our cat Cashmere – who had joined us at the castle in Tennessee – to once again move along.

  Our experiences to this point in the post-flu world had left us gun-shy and with little faith in our fellow survivors. We now had an extreme distrust of others, and we were tired of having to start over again and again because sadly, in a world in which few people remained, we still couldn’t manage to find a place where we could live in relative peace and harmony with our fellow human beings.

  The newspapers I’d read that had been printed in the last days when mankind had such luxuries, reported that the flu’s mortality rate had run somewhere in the 95 percent range. If that was the case, in our nation of around 320 million people, some 16 million might have been spared from the pandemic’s wide-reaching grasp. I had few illusions though that this many people now populated what was once the United States. It was likely that millions more had died in the ensuing post-flu months from starvation, other diseases and infections, as well as from the ridiculous sort of infighting over supplies and territory that we ourselves had experienced. My guess was that the nation’s population was now somewhere closer to 9 or 10 million people at best, which made the inability to cohabitate peacefully with our few remaining neighbors seem even more ridiculous.

  It was just human nature I guess. But I had to admit, I was starting to find it all extremely tiresome. It was as though my family was on its own Trail of Tears, losing more members at each stop. Claire’s father and brother had been taken from us in southern Illinois. We’d lost my mother and our dear teenage friend Janet in Tennessee. And family friend Joanna, along with her young son Shane, had left the group during our stint in Olsten.