Joshua (Book 1)

by John S. Wilson

  Brad wasn’t completely happy with the results. “Finish him off!”

  The man fired again, this time shooting several rounds in quick succession. Brad seemed more pleased this time around, “Looks like you’re hitting the center of the windshield, go half a meter right.”

  The man noticed his rifle was now empty and ran back to get another magazine there on the curb where Brad left it. He returned in a casual run.

  “Forget it! He jumped out the window and crawled behind those cars … You’ll never get him now.” Brad didn’t know if the man did that on purpose or not.

  Edgar interrupted with more pressing concerns. “Here they come! They’re just now leaving their compound for the Indiana side! We’ve got maybe five minutes!”

  “How many!?” Brad was now sounding frantic.

  “Sixteen … No! Seventeen!”

  “Okay, were just going to have to get out of here on foot. Pick up all you can carry!”

  They all retrieved their gear from the Humvee, as much as they could carry, but before they left Brad had one more job to do. He went to the truck and with his pistol shot out the rest of its tires. He then opened the hood of their Humvee and started tearing out wires.

  Heavily burdened with gear, they ran off of the bridge as fast as they could, using some industrial buildings just north of it for cover. They quickly marched along in the dark and without a sound, heading west to New Albany, and then beyond.

  By sunrise they could go no further and made a concealed camp in a wooded area about two miles north of the main highway. While they heard their pursuers several times in the long night, they never once came close.

  The three friends spent the day sleeping two at a time while the other did guard duty. When finally the sun had set again they prepared to resume their separate journeys, to go their own ways.

  The boys decided to follow the Ohio a while and find a place to cross over in southern Missouri, then make their way to northwest Arkansas where they would pick up I-40 and then stay on it all the way home.

  The man said he would stay on Interstate 64 for now, although he didn’t know if he would follow it all the way to St. Louis. After their experience in Louisville he might go around.

  As they shook each other’s hands and gave their good-byes and hopes of good luck, Brad silently wondered if the man had missed that guard intentionally or not. He remembered their talk at the top of the hotel and the man telling them that he was a Christian and wouldn’t commit murder. Brad decided to give him the benefit of the doubt, to call it an accident. He didn’t want to think about what might happen to his friend in this new world if he couldn’t kill “in cold blood.”

  The man was once more on his own traveling across the low rolling hills and cultivated fields that made up that far southwest corner of Indiana, and for now still following the highway.

  Within four days, his remaining provisions ran out. While he had been looking for food all along, there was little to be found. It appeared that everything worth hunting was already gone.

  When he first started this journey his mind only thought of those hunting trips with his father. Before, he only searched for “game” animals of all kinds and on several occasions missed opportunities that presented themselves. Now, as that gnawing pain returned to his belly he would eat anything to keep from starving. With his .22 in hand, every day became a frantic search for whatever might keep him going just a little bit further.

  On the tenth, he used the last crackers from an MRE as bait on the ground and waited nearby. He killed several small birds that morning, a robin, a cardinal and several wrens. The meat from all of them barely made a meal.

  The next day the man wandered off the highway and into the intersection of two lonely roads where he found a bait and tackle shop. Everything of value was gone but as he was leaving noticed a bin next to the door. It was filled with earthworms that were still alive and the man knew they could keep him living for a few days more. He tried to eat them right out of the container but just couldn’t do it with them writhing around in his hands. Taking them outside he used a rock to grind them into a fine paste right there on the sidewalk. As he greedily stuffed his mouth with the meaty concoction, he wondered if there was anything he wouldn’t do to survive.

  After two more days of not eating, he found a very small dog wandering along the road. It was friendly and had no tag or collar and looked like it hadn’t eaten itself in a very long time. It obviously had been someone’s pet but by then the man didn’t care, the ache in his gut was now in control of his mind. He put the shaky little dog out of its misery and prolonged his yet another day. When he first bit into its roasted flesh he thought he would vomit it right back up again, but to his surprise found he could live with what he had done.

  The following morning he was awakened before dawn by the freezing air. Although it was not yet snowing he recognized that there was another unpleasant way to die. While he had his coat and gloves acquired months before, it wasn’t enough. He left the highway again where his atlas showed a town and found a small set of shops just off the highway. He wandered into a plundered dollar store. Like so many others the man had already seen before its front windows were gone and most everything inside was missing too. Among the scattered rubbish he did find a few treasures, a shirt, a pair of cheap pants and several pairs of socks. Never once did the man debate taking them but he did wonder what this officially made him, a thief or a looter.

  Sunday the seventeenth, mid-morning, and close to the highway again, the man heard a stark sound breaking the silence. He could hear a vehicle quickly approaching from behind him, the distinctive sound of its open exhaust easily coming to his mind. He ran up the side of a small hill, slipping and falling more than once in the frosty grass before finally making it to the top.

  This was the first running car he had heard since Louisville. As he hid, listening to the sound approaching, he was reminded of the gangs holding the Ohio River bridges. He feared they tracked him down. As he lie face down in the wet grass with his rifle, the sound got closer, then the one sound doubled and now the man realized that it was two vehicles fast approaching. There was the louder noise and then a quiet, more desperate sounding one.

  As the two vehicles bounded around a sharp curve into view, he could see them, one chasing the other. The first, a small frail looking car was closely followed by a battered truck, its open headers drowning out the strained engine of the car it pursued. As it quickly came towards his hidden position, the truck smashed into the back end of the tiny car time after time trying to push it off the road. As they passed by the man the truck finally succeeded, pushing its prey into a ditch on the north side of the highway. As it did the truck lost control too, spinning around and skidding backwards into a grassy median on the opposite side. It came to an abrupt stop as its bed was crushed against a concrete embankment.

  The man grabbed his rifle and gear and instinctively charged off towards the wreck to see if he could help. Finally he came to a halt in center of the westbound lanes between the wreckage of the two.

  Immediately he was startled by the sharp crack of gunfire. Someone inside the truck was shooting at the man! The driver, his hand badly shaking, was firing his pistol at him from about twenty feet away. Without thinking he instinctively brought his rifle to his shoulder and fired, hitting the stranger right in the face.

  The man ran to the truck, its two front wheels still on the road, its engine still running, the ruptured fuel tank emptying in the ditch behind them. He could see the two inside were no longer a danger and reached in and turned off the motor. The driver had a small bloody hole where his right eye had been and the entire backside of his head was now gone. The passenger was dead too but not from the man’s bullet. Although covered with his friend’s blood, he wasn’t hit. His head was snapped back, his neck contorted. It was easy to see that it had broken on impact.

  With nothing more to see, the man raced to the other side of highway where the car had be
en pushed off the road. It had landed in a deep drainage ditch past the shoulder. The entire vehicle had noticeably creased just behind the front wheels, in profile the car now resembled the shape of a gentle “V.” He cautiously approached it with his rifle and could see a woman there in the driver’s seat. The car was crushed and she appeared trapped inside. Before he had a chance to speak, she called out to him in a weak voice.

  “Please help us.”

  The man climbed down in the ditch to the car. The engine was already dead and the man looked under it but could see no fuel leaking.

  The woman called out to him again. The man now noticed her struggling to breathe, “Please help my son … please.”

  The man looked over at the boy still secure in his safety seat and at first glance he didn’t appear harmed. The man put his rifle on the ground and then checked her door, both inside and out, finding it decisively stuck. Then he ran around the other side and found it too had been jammed with the force of the crash. Through the window he tried to remove the boy from his seat, the entire time the silent child watching his mother and fanatically clutching a toy. He couldn’t get the toddler to let go and it took some effort to finally free the child. The man then carried him out of the ditch and put him on the shoulder of the highway just out of view from the wreck. A quick check from the man and the boy still seemed unharmed. “You sit right here … okay.”

  The boy just sat there looking up at him and never uttered a word.

  With a folding field shovel in hand, the man ran back down to the woman’s side, “Your son is fine … he’ll be fine.”

  “Thank you.”

  The man now noticed the woman’s breathing was strained and blood filled her mouth. Despite knowing what it meant, he tried to be reassuring, “I’m going to get you out of there. You’re going to be all right.” Then he tried to pry her door open with his shovel until it broke in half. Discouraged, he looked up at her again.

  The woman was watching him the whole time, her breath more labored by the second, and when the man looked back at her she could see the truth there in his eyes. “I’m not going to make it … am I?”

  The man thought about her chances of surviving and conceded that under these circumstances they were probably zero. The woman’s chest was noticeably crushed, she had a thoracic blunt trauma and from the sound of her breathing broken ribs and at least one punctured lung. Studying the car from both sides, she was hopelessly pinned inside, impaled on its steering wheel. There was no way to get her out without cutting the car into pieces.

  Standing there trying to think about it honestly, and without emotion, he knew it was only a matter of time now. Even if he could somehow get her out she would need a whole team of surgeons to save her life, and they wouldn’t be coming, ever.

  At first he thought about lying, to just stay and comfort her till she was gone. But with some more consideration he knew it wasn’t his choice to make, he owed her at least that much. “There’s nothing I can do for you. I’m sorry. You need a hospital and you need it right now.”

  The woman wasn’t surprised with the diagnosis, her breathing only became more labored and now she struggled to talk. “How … how long?”

  He owed her the truth, “I don’t know … maybe an hour. You’ll probably lose consciousness after a while.” He couldn’t tell her the ugly details though.

  Then the man thought of another need the young woman might have while she was still conscious. “Would you like to pray together?”

  “No … I’ve already made my peace with God.” Her breathing struggled more with every word and now she had only one concern in the time she had left. “Please take my son. Please take Joshua away from here. Take care of him … keep him safe.”

  Despite all his knowledge and training, the man knew he could do nothing for this woman, nothing but stand there and watch her die. But he could honor her last wish and that he would do. “Is there somewhere I can take him? A relative? A friend somewhere?”

  With his questions, the woman began weeping, “No … they’re all gone now … we had no where left to go …”

  He was desperate to do whatever he could to ease this woman’s suffering, if not in her body at least in her soul. “Don’t worry about your son. I’ll make sure he’s taken care of. I promise you that.”

  The woman was still weeping and her breathing only worsened, and now she began coughing up blood. But in spite of it all she still found comfort in the stranger’s words. “Thank you … God bless you.”

  Suddenly the man remembered something and ran to retrieve his pack there in the middle of the highway. He brought it back and with his hand blindly searched for some forgotten object inside. At last he pulled it out, a tiny glass bottle. “I have this … if you want it. It will end your suffering.”

  “Poison?”

  “It’s not painful. It’ll make you go to sleep. You won’t wake up.”

  The woman thought about it and after a moment reached out and took it from him.

  She fumbled with the cap, finally opening it, then raised it to her mouth, the small bottle shaking in her hand. She lowered it down again.

  The man just stood there watching, questioning what he had just done. It went against all of his training, all he believed. Life was precious, even one that was ending.

  The woman somehow seemed to know his thoughts, “This is what I want, but … stay here with me.”

  Although he was tortured over it, he would respect her wishes, but first another question came to his mind. “Do you want to see your son? I can go get him.”

  “No … I don’t want him to see me like this. But promise me again … promise me you’ll take care of my Joshua … please watch over my little boy.” The woman’s tears unrestrained now.

  “I promise.”

  The woman then brought the bottle back to her lips and tipped it forward taking the solution in her mouth. She held it there for a moment then closed her eyes and drank it down.

  He stayed with her the whole time holding her hand. In only a few minutes she fell in a sleep from which she would never return. As the woman sat there dying the man tried not to think of the oath he took or the values that only minutes before he held so dear.

  After she was gone he wiped her tears away and then his own. He then turned with a strange feeling on the back of his neck, that feeling like he was being watched.

  There above him on the edge of the road was the child, the toy still in his small hands, the boy silently staring down on him with those eyes, those unforgiving eyes.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The man stood holding the child’s hand and looking one last time at the columns that rose above him. The two separate pillars gradually combined into one blackened mass that spread over the highway, and beyond. From the top of the hill he could see the burning remnants of what only an hour before were two running automobiles and three human beings, all of it now engulfed by fire.

  After the woman died he took some clothes and rags soaking up the gasoline, then setting both vehicles ablaze, he created two crude funeral pyres. On the side of the hill closest to her, he hurriedly made a simple cross on the ground with thirty-one good-sized stones collected nearby. On the largest in the center, he scraped on it, “Rebecca Bryce – Rest in Peace” one final act of kindness he could think to give this woman. With a piece of paper he found in her purse he made a detailed map in case the child might ever want to find his mother again.

  But before the rushed funeral he went through both vehicles, although he didn’t find much. There was no food to be found and the only thing he thought worth taking was a coat and some mittens for the child. There were also those men’s clothes, but in the end decided he would rather be cold.

  The only guns he found were two pistols and a shotgun. A small Bersa .380 was what the driver tried to kill him with. With it was a holster, another magazine and forty-one rounds of ammo. The passenger of the truck had a sawed off single barrel shotgun that he never got to use. The
re were nine rounds with it, eight deer slugs and one round of number six shot. The young mother had a gun too, although it was useless to her when needed most, a 4-inch Colt “Trooper” .357 revolver with six empty cases inside and another two dozen scattered about the floorboard. The only other items he took were her driver’s license and another photo found in her wallet. He safeguarded the photos and the map he made with his own personal items, suspecting the boy might want to have them when he grew up.

  With this encounter with the woman and her child the man decided to stay off the highways from then on, to make his way to Wyoming across the open countryside. He knew the journey would be longer and more challenging, and that it might be dangerous traveling on the private property of others. He felt it was worth the risk. He would take his chances with some angry farmer but he had to get off the roads. That’s where all the animals were.

  On his map he found a small town in the same direction he was going. It was called Otwell and was about twenty miles away. The man hoped he might find some friendly people there that would take the child in. But when they finally arrived seven days later they found it was gone. Not one house or building was left completely intact. It was as bad as anything he had seen in the big cities. It looked like hell had come to town.

  Traveling with the boy was slow and dangerous, slower than anything he had known before. The child couldn’t walk very far before tiring and with all his gear the man couldn’t carry him too long either. On their best day, with a little luck, they might make four miles.

  After Otwell, they made their way northwest again, the man constantly hoping and praying he would find a family to leave the child with. Food was as scarce as before, now even more so with another mouth to feed. The man managed to kill a few small birds each day but at first couldn’t get the child to eat them, not until he realized the meat was too tough. After that he would chew the child’s food for him first, but still it wasn’t ever enough.