Elise, who looked up to him and let him grade her homework. Ben had left her many years ago in the back of that squad car that came for him. She still wrote sometimes, but it had been so long ago.
It dawned on Ben in this strangest of situations that he hadn’t talked to her in quite some time. The panel snapped shut and then there was silence. Ben waited, wondering what would happen next.
“Hello?” He fidgeted in his stance, “I’m alone, I’m unarmed they all – I think they left me.”
Still, nothing happened. If she wanted to kill him she would have already. Instead, she had shut the door on him, like a chilly draft, or at best, a nosey raccoon.
Ben suddenly felt very cold as the fires were dying out around him, shrinking against the waxing strength of the late fall chill.
The single crack of a rifle. The needlepoint weight of something strong yanked his leg and pulled him off balance.
The bullet came from behind. Ben stumbled and crashed to his hands and knees. That’s when the pain finally came.
When the pain came so did the shriek of ghastly realization at the sight of his ruined leg and the moans as the sharp pain dulled and spread, filling his whole leg like searing hot lead.
* * *
Josie heard shuffling and muffled voices outside. She didn’t know how much time had passed since she shut the door on the bunker, only that Roy was in bad shape despite her best efforts at medical care, the air filtration system in the bunker had been activated, and Alex was now curled up on one of the fold-out bunk beds, sleeping. Her little white rabbit was long gone, disappeared upstairs somewhere.
The knock at the bunker door startled Josie out of her exhausted trance. She stood up from her place beside her wounded husband and pulled his pistol from his belt.
As she walked towards the stairs, she could hear the scared voice of a young man. He was asking for help, and claimed to be alone.
But Josie had just heard a second voice, and she knew somehow that the tension in this man’s voice was from being watched. She stood with her ear pressed to the door.
“Don’t you do it, Josie…” Roy whispered, speaking in an awful rasp. His mouth and face sneered in pain underneath the bandages. He shook his head, staring her down with his remaining eye. “Don’t open that door.”
She stared back at him, and recalled how he treated the last person who asked for help. With defiant silence, she turned back to the door and opened the sliding shutter.
The young man’s face leaned back as she pressed the muzzle of the pistol through the viewing slot and scanned the basement: all the shelves were emptied, some pulled down and toppled.
A few smashed jars lay on the ground with their contents spilled over the concrete. A thin veil of smoke filled the room, and the light of the fires flickered from upstairs. The air smelled of burned wood and plastic.
The boy looked frail and malnourished, eyes darting frantically from her to her gun and back towards the staircase. She slammed the sliding shutter back and locked it again.
No way was this a real plea for help. Suddenly she heard a gunshot and the unmistakable wail of a person in fresh agony. The young man outside started pounding on the door, and spoke.
“Please! Please let me in! I lied, I’m sorry, they’re still out there and this guy is completely crazy! I’m sorry we burned down your house, I’m sorry we did this to you! I’ve been trying to get away, these people are crazy!” he shouted, voice cracking and coming from somewhere near the floor. Josie knelt against the wall of the staircase, listening intently.
“Josie…” Roy said with a menacing tone “Don’t you do it. It’s a trick, you let him in and he’ll kill us all. Don’t do it!”
“Please! They’ll kill me if you don’t let me in!”
“Don’t do it! Don’t open that door!”
“He just shot me in the leg, he’s gonna kill me if you don’t let me in!”
“Keep that door shut, Josie!”
“…For the love of god, help me!” the young man moaned, banging his fist on the door.
“Mommy…” Alex said. Josie started and turned around. She hadn’t heard Alex walk to the base of the stairs. Her daughter looked at her with a pleading expression, sadness and fear in her voice.
“Don’t do it! Josie! Don’t open the door!” Roy shouted.
Josie stood up, inched open the door, and grabbed the young man by the collar and threw him down the bunker stairs, slamming the door shut behind her and locking it.
“Don’t move a god damned muscled you son of a bitch!” she shouted as she descended the staircase with the pistol pointed at him. The young man lay still on the ground, curled in a ball with his hands outstretched over his head.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot… please don’t shoot…” he whimpered, wounded leg trembling and leaking blood all over the floor.
“If you make one move I don’t like, I swear to god I will kill you…” she said, slowly advancing on him.
“Okay, okay…” he said, nodding.
“I mean it!” she shouted. He nodded again vigorously.
“Who the fuck is upstairs? What do they want?” she asked, though she already knew half the answer.
“They’re convicts. We’re all escaped convicts, from a penitentiary in the next county.”
“And why did they come here? Why the fuck did you decide to attack my house and my family?” she asked, voice rising.
“I don’t know, I don’t know. The guys in charge wanted to get to the coast…” he said in an earnest tone, daring to glance up from the floor.
“They wanted to steal a boat and get to Mexico. But we’re starving, there’s no food between the prison and here…. and the town down the road is deserted. Nobody is there, and there’s not much left.”
“What happened to the rest of the world? Don’t look at her! …Where is everybody?” Josie barked when he glanced over to Alex, who sat on the nearby bunk with her knees tucked to her chest. The young man shook his head.
“I don’t know… I don’t know…” he said. “One day the power —”
“Keep your hands up!” Josie shouted as he started to pull his hands back to his pockets. He flung them back out.
“Sorry! I’m sorry… One day the power just went out in the prison. Back-up generators for security failed, too. Wasn’t long before there was a riot. The prisoners took over pretty quick. It was… awful.” he said, grimly recalling the gruesome takeover and escape. “We haven’t seen anybody else since. It wasn’t until we got to that town that we thought something bigger might be happening…”
Roy had turned his head to look at the boy on the floor, not saying a word and not moving a muscle. He watched like a coiled snake, occasionally glancing with a betrayed and violent expression up at his wife.
“And why should we help you?” Josie asked, ignoring her husband’s accusatory gaze. “Why shouldn’t I just put you down right here, right now?”
The young man glanced up at her again, and his expression had changed. He was a bit calmer, with a glint of perceptive cunning in his eyes.
“I don’t think you would do that… you’re not the type…” he whispered, and then hid his face again. “Besides, I have a little sister about her age.” he said, referring to Alex and pointing with one long thin finger.
“I just stuck with that gang upstairs to get through the territory. I kept waiting for my chance to get away so I could get back to my family. That’s all I want, that’s why I participated in all this… to get back to her and the rest of my family.”
Josie nudged him with her foot again and he looked back up to see the pistol pointed at his face.
“Why… should I… believe you?” she whispered, lip trembling with fear and rage, eyes wide with uncertainty and dancing with guilt.
The young man looked back up at her, and remained silent. She couldn’t read his expression, she was so exhausted from the past few weeks she couldn’t even think straight.
They cont
inued to stare at each other, a silent stalemate, neither one conceding trust or showing any sign of blinking. Then, the air began to stir, and the sound of muffled shouting came from above the ground as well as outside the bunker door.
Josie glanced up at the ceiling. The young man turned his head and looked too. The voices sounded panicked and confused, all at once.
Something wasn’t right. The sound of footsteps running up the basement staircase into the rest of the house drew Josie’s attention.
“Get up…” Josie said, gesturing with the pistol to the stairs. “Slowly…”
The young man rose to his feet and kept his hands on his head.
“Walk… upstairs, now.” she said, following close behind him but not too close. He ascended, and paused at the door.
“Open the latches, and push it open. Slowly.”
As he opened the door, the smell of the burned out home reached her nose, and the sounds of the panicking marauders reached her ears.
“Let’s get the hell out of here!” she heard one voice say.
“Where the hell did they come from?” said another.
She reached out and pushed the young man towards the basement stairs. He walked, looking behind him at her once in a while.
“Don’t look at me. Keep walking.”
As they approached the top of the stairs, Josie clenched her jaw and fought back a fresh wave of tears: the stars shone clearly and brightly through what remained of her kitchen and den.
The framework still standing was charred, and part of the house were still burning slowly but surely. Yet, above the shouting and the howling of the wind and the crackling of the fires, Josie heard something else: the unmistakable tempo of helicopter rotors, and they were close.
She looked around and saw the attackers sprinting across the fields and into the surrounding forests, arms full of stolen food and supplies. Some stood and waved with both arms at the sky.
Josie looked in the direction they were waving, and she saw two military helicopters with giant red crosses on their sides circling a few hundred feet above the house.
Their spotlights illuminated the ruins of the house, the many corpses littering the yard, the wreckage of the truck. Josie lowered her weapon and the young man lowered his hands. He turned, and they looked at each other once more.
TO BE CONTINUED….
Our Survival: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Thriller (Grid Down Book 1) Page 7