“I kind of doubt that,” she giggled, then turned around and threw her arms around my neck, planting a firm kiss on my lips. “What do you want to do today?”
“I can think of a few things,” I said suggestively. “But there’s one thing I want to do before everyone else comes back.” We’d spoken with them last night, and despite weather interference, found out that Tommy was doing well, and that everyone actually interested in coming back would probably return in about three days. That would give us time to fix up the cottage for Estelle and figure out a place for the children where Angie, Jackie, and I could have some extensive private time. There was a lot of ‘getting to know you’ that we still all needed to do.
“What’s that?” she asked, staying on her tiptoes, her muscular body and firm breasts pressed against me.
“The houses and the welcome center where the crazy guy was,” I replied. “I want to do a little investigation and see if we can find out what the hell he was all about.”
“If anything,” she said sourly, then smiled. “Tell you what. Let’s do that today, then enjoy the evening. Does that sound good?”
“Works for me,” I replied. “Tomorrow, we can make the cottage and guest rooms ready. Might have to move the three of us upstairs if we keep the kids in the house, though.”
“Won’t the thumping keep them awake at night?” she teased.
“I can pad the headboard and gag the both of you,” I replied with a grin. “I’m not worried.”
Her jaw dropped, and she stared at me as I started laughing.
Not long enough after that, we piled into my new Silverado and headed off for the interstate and the welcome center. Using Bruce’s suggestion, I pulled an old Garmin out of a box of electronics I kept in the cottage and hooked it up. Lo and behold, the dedicated GPS still worked like a charm. The thing hadn’t been updated in a few years, so there were sure to be some glitches, but likely it wouldn’t be anything to worry about.
“Starting at the welcome center, or that messed up neighborhood?” Angie asked. We both had sidearms on and rifles tucked away in the rear seats. This time, I’d opted for the AR-15 over the Creedmoor, and she had her own assault rifle.
Hopefully, we wouldn’t need them.
“Welcome center,” I replied. “Maybe Bruce missed something at the blind, too.”
“Okay,” She leaned her head back and smiled. “You take me on the nicest dates.”
“Right,” I snorted. “Though I suppose they aren’t too boring.”
“This might be,” she pointed out.
“True, but I still really want to find out why the hell that guy was out here,” I scowled off into the distance. “Was he local? Was he from someplace else? Did he write a manifesto planning to shoot someplace up before all this happened?”
“So many questions,” Angie groaned.
“And no answers,” I added, then switched on the four-wheel drive and slowed to turn across the muddy median and drive up the exit ramp into the welcome center parking lot.
We got out, and I locked the truck for maybe no reason other than habit, then headed off into the woods where the mostly destroyed blind had been. We’d left the dead man there, but there wasn’t any sign of the corpse when we stopped at the blast site.
“Huh,” Angie said.
“Definitely,” I said and cast my gaze about. There were drag marks in the leaves, but the rain hadn’t helped. “Probably animals.”
“Probably,” she agreed.
We spent about fifteen minutes going through debris, walking a slowly expanding spiral out from ground zero of the grenade explosion. In the end, we found two things. First, there were the partially eaten remains of the shooter that had been dragged about thirty or forty feet back into the woods behind some trees.
I was the one that stumbled across it, and while I bent to inspect the remains, Angie called out to me.
“I found a wallet!”
“I’ll be right there,” I yelled back, stood with a crackling of my knees, and hurried over to where she held a damp man’s wallet on a broken chain. The thing itself was of heavy leather, which might be how it survived.
I took it when she offered it to me, and we huddled up to see what it contained. There were a few dollars, some membership cards in the name Hunter Blake, and a driver’s license with a clear address in Little Shawmut, which I’d half-expected.
“Well, well, well,” I said.
“That was lucky,” Angie added. “Do we go check it out?”
“Yes, but carefully,” I replied. “This guy was way too good with bombs.”
She nodded, and we started back to the truck. “Do you know where that is?”
“Not exactly,” I replied. “It’s not that far, though, and just this side of the border.”
“Okay.”
We piled back into the truck. With the wallet and the information we had, while we didn’t have a good picture of who this guy was, we at least knew he was local, and a card-carrying member of several gun clubs. He’d also been a few years younger than me.
When we reached the house, it turned out not to be all that terribly far from where Jackie and I had gone into the woods on foot to reach the rest area from behind. We’d driven by the house, in fact, in Bruce’s truck.
“We were this close,” I mused. “Wow.”
Angie just nodded, and we both exited the truck at the same time, got our weapons, and made a careful approach. Unlike the surrounding houses, this one was locked up tight.
“What do you think?” I asked. “Go back and look for a key?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so unless you’re worried that he wired the whole place.”
“I almost wouldn’t be surprised,” I commented. “Well, we know he used motion detectors and radio detonators, so break out the flashlights and let’s have a look and see if we can see anything through the windows.”
She studied the house. “We can try, but I somehow doubt it.”
We got flashlights, though, and carefully circled the little red brick and white wood home. If I didn’t know better, I’d call it cute, but since the onetime resident tried to kill me twice and Jackie, Angela, and Bruce once, it took on a foreboding look where I suspected booby traps at every turn.
Unfortunately, all the windows were blocked with foil, and we couldn’t see in. Even the window of the door off the carport was blocked.
“You know what,” I said, “I have an idea.”
“What?”
“Come with me.” I drove the Chevy through the neighbor’s yard to about a hundred feet away, parked on the side of that house away from Hunter’s place, and then walked back out from. There was a blue Buick of some stripe that had been thoroughly vandalized sitting out front of that house. Standing beside it, I still had a reasonable view of the carport door.
Angie knelt down when I did and grinned as I took aim through the AR-15’s scope. “Might work,” she murmured.
I grunted, exhaled, and squeezed the trigger. One of the glass panes popped as a quarter-inch hole was punched through it. Nothing happened. I shifted my aim down. There were two locks, a deadbolt and the regular one. Once again, I aimed and fired. This time, I destroyed the deadbolt. Next was the regular lock.
Then, I waited for a few minutes before walking the hundred feet to the door and, with an angry kick, sent it swinging violently back on its hinges. That probably wasn’t the best choice I could have made, but my shoulder started hurting on the second shot, and I suspected that Mister Blake didn’t trap his own house.
The place was austere, even by militia standards, and outside of the now slightly shot-up kitchen, was filled, nearly floor to ceiling, with weapons and ammo culled from probably every shop that Jackie and I hadn’t hit. The one bedroom that had any clear space sported an air mattress with curiously stained sheets, a collection of men’s magazines, and a box of Kleenex along with a box of K-Y lube.
“Ew,” Angie commented.
I didn’
t say a thing, just went about searching for something, and eventually, I found it. Hunter had kept a journal, although he wasn’t the best speller in the world, and tucked into the journal was a brochure for a televangelist, Dr. Raymond Price. Something about that name struck me as familiar, so I flipped through it.
On the last page, a quote caught my eye. “Look to the light, ye faithless, and be healed, for the time of the Lord is come, and only the righteous shall be saved.”
“Wow,” I muttered.
“What?” she asked. While I’d poked around Hunter’s room, she’d disappeared off into the rest of the house. Still, her ears were sharp.
“Televangelist brochure,” I replied. “I’m trying to place the name, though.”
Finally, it hit me. Price was an evangelist turned politician who was elected to the Alabama Senate last year. He had quite a following, too, despite a sudden entrance into state politics. Supposedly, he wanted a federal seat, but that hadn’t happened yet.
Gathering the journal and the brochure, I headed back out, collected Angie, and we loaded up a bunch of the weapons and ammo into the Silverado before driving back to the farm.
That night, we had news that we shared with Bruce, Jackie, and anyone else listening at the CDC. According to Hunter’s journal, he’d spoken a few times with Reverend Price on his own ham radio, and that he had been told to watch for unbelievers and shepherd them on to their reward.
All of us knew exactly how Blake interpreted that.
Still, the call wasn’t all bad news. Tommy was doing well enough that all the doctors other than Gwen were ready to release him, and he wanted to return to the farm with Estelle and Jackie. They were going to spend one more day at the CDC, then Bruce was going to drive them back, provided I helped him refuel.
He wanted to see the journal, too.
Angie and I enjoyed that night, spent the next day cleaning and tidying the cottage and moving the rest of my stuff to the main house, then explored some more ‘getting to know you’ activities that involved disrobing and sweating, among other things.
The next day, around noon, we sat on the porch, relaxing. Temperatures were up in the mid to high sixties, and it was a nice, clear, sunny day. We shared some beers and waited until the distinctive rumble of the old deuce-and-a-half brought us to our feet.
Soon after, Bruce drove his truck down the driveway and stopped perfectly in front of the house. The passenger door opened, and Tommy, still skinny as a rail but with a much better color to his cheeks, slid to the ground and ran shakily over to me, calling, “Henry! Henry!”
Estelle, who’d apparently been sharing a seat with both the ten-year-old and baby Irene, got out next, followed by Bruce and Jackie.
Jackie ran over to hug me tight, not quite dislodging the little boy, and planted a kiss on my lips. “Have fun?” she asked.
“Some,” I replied with a grin. “Would’ve been better if you’d been here.”
Bruce stood by the front of the truck and looked me dead in the eye from several paces away.
“I’ve got to head back,” he said. “Things are pretty good right now, but there’s always going to be something on the horizon. The trick is to be ready for it.”
“Bye!” called several people around me, waving.
He waved back, then gave me a salute that I returned a bit awkwardly. “See you soon, Bruce,” I called out. “Our turn to visit next.”
The old survivalist nodded and got back into the cab of his truck, then carefully circled the yard, like he always had, and headed off for the road and the interstate.
We’d see him again soon, but right now, I was happy to have Estelle and the rest of my little, growing family back together.
39
Raymond Price
Judgment day had come, but it had been neither clean nor quick in its passing. Though perhaps this had not been the reckoning of God, but that of man in his hubris. Very few survived, and those all had stories to tell. They also had skills that were needed, and souls to be saved. I contemplated these thoughts as I sat in the small, plain office tucked into the back area of this small, neighborhood church.
A kerosene lamp gave me light, as the room had no windows. It was a place of isolation and contemplation for those whose calling was to lead. I sighed and swept my gaze over the shelves of books and papers, and idly stroked the leather-bound cover of the Bible that sat, closed, before me.
These were trappings, nothing more. Faith was the balm of fools and the tool of the leader. Now, while there were so few of us, was the time to lay the groundwork for the future. A future where the name of Dr. Raymond Price was spoken in hushed reverence on the tongues of every survivor from one coast of this once great nation to the other.
Somehow, in my city of Birmingham, I had quickly drawn a dozen or so survivors in, giving them guidance and reassurance when they sought it in the terrible days following the Judgement. I told them that, indeed, the meek had inherited the Earth, and that we were the chosen of the new Eden. All they had to do was look to the light and be healed.
Since then, and since our message began going out over the airwaves, we had drawn in a handful more and contacted even more via radio. Some knew me from my political career, others from my work as an evangelist. Many were even willing to relocate and commit themselves to the little community I was building.
“Reverend?” called a muffled voice from the hall outside, along with an insistent tapping.
I sighed and called back, “Enter,” in my affected Southern accent.
The door opened on a young fellow with dark hair and a rather sallow complexion. He wore a pair of black-rimmed glasses and a somewhat grubby blue tracksuit. This was Baron Chandler, former entrepreneur and technology specialist. Before The End, he was a radio hobbyist, and now, he was in charge of my outreach program, calling out on the airwaves to draw in those poor folks in need of guidance. He was also a whiny, annoying little shit.
“Reverend,” he said in his nasal voice. “We’ve lost contact with Hunter Blake.”
“That,” I said quietly, “is unfortunate.” Hunter had been a very eager fellow and had made some very interesting reports. Unfortunately, he struck me as a rather overzealous man in some respects.
He did, however, report seeing a man and a young woman moving together around I-85 between the Georgia border and Opelika, Alabama. They were always gone by the time he reached his vehicle to attempt to follow them, so he had no idea where they might live.
I spoke with him, then, one evening, on a more private radio channel, and we hatched a plan for him to capture the man, find out the woman’s location, and then take her, too. Once he had them, I would come myself to see to their indoctrination.
“Do you think he’s dead?” Baron asked. He was still in my office.
“Perhaps,” I said, regarding the young man with my best disappointed gaze. “Or perhaps not.”
He waited while I drummed my fingers on the desktop. Baron had done another unfortunate thing. By his ass-kissing and unfortunate usefulness, he had wormed his way into a position as my veritable right hand.
“I think,” I said slowly, “that it is time to start sending out explorers, people willing to go out, find other survivors, and offer them a hand. Start with assembling some of our people with more violent backgrounds. I suspect we may have need of their talents in the days to come.”
“Yes, Reverend.” The young man bobbed his head like a rooster until I thought it might fall off. “Anything else?”
“Once you have our volunteers,” I continued, “send them to me. Scouts and missionaries need to go out, and I suspect sooner than later. If indeed, Mister Blake has met with an unfortunate end, then that must be made right, don’t you think?”
“Yes, sir,” Baron nodded again.
“Thank you, Baron,” I said, letting myself beam a warm smile at him. “See to it as quickly as you can.”
He left my office in all haste, and I leaned back to contemplate the ceilin
g and how it had come to this. I needed to find out who these survivors were that Hunter had scouted, and I needed to send people out to the cities and the more isolated regions.
The cities, you see, held large enough populations that some were guaranteed to survive, while the isolated groups were less likely to even have experienced infection. What’s more, Baron had mentioned to me that he suspected there might be survivors at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta.
That was a promising thought.
A Note from the Author
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After The Virus (Book 1): After The Virus Page 27