Our Survival: A Collection of Post Apocalyptic EMP Survival Thrillers

by Williams, Ron

  In that moment, Randall decided that he would not show Gale mercy by letting him pass, even if it meant risking his own life and limb.

  Without another moment of hesitation, he rose from his position and charged Gale head on, around ten yards away from his position.

  Gale saw the incoming blur that was Randall out of the corner of his eye and swung around the .45 to respond, but it was too late.

  Randall crashed his body hard into Gale’s and both men went tumbling down the ravine towards the bank of the creek. Gale lost his grip on the gun and it landed in the mud.

  Randall regained his footing first and wasted absolutely no time in continuing his relentless attack.

  Grasping Gale by his jacket collar, he lifted him up off the ground and then flung him hard against a nearby large cedar tree.

  THUMPH!

  Stunned by the force of the blow that directly impacted his back and head, causing immense amounts of pain, the dazed Gale saw multiple Randall’s coming for him.

  Randall pinned Gale against the cedar with his left arm while his right instinctively reached for the KA-BAR knife that was sheathed on the left side of the gun belt.

  Gale struggled, but Randall managed to free the 7-inch blade from its sheath, and the moment he did, he plunged it deep into Gale’s gut!

  Gale hollered as the frigid pain shot throughout his entire body, but Randall muffled the noise by placing his hand over his mouth.

  “This is mine, by the way!” Randall sneered.

  He unbuckled his gun belt from Gale’s waist, and it dropped to the ground.

  “Who was killed in the attack?!” Randall asked. “Who was it?! Who did you kill?!”

  He slowly released his hand from Gale’s mouth to allow him the chance to speak. Half of the knife blade was still embedded in Gale’s abdomen and Randall’s fist was tightly locked over the grip.

  Gale groaned in pain and refused to say a word.

  “WHO?!” Randall pressed again, pushing the blade in a little further.

  “Robert, Robert!” Gale finally cried out as the pain grew more intense. “It was Robert!”

  It hit Randall like a stone brick. He gritted his teeth as he mercilessly twisted around the blade in Gale’s abdomen. Gale cried out and Randall muffled his mouth again.

  “Who did it?!” Randall continued. “Who?! Answer quickly if you value your life!”

  Gale grinned and coughed up blood. Despite the fact that the knife that had pierced his torso was sucking the life right out of him, it gave him cruel amusement to see how evident it was that the news of Robert’s death had clearly affected Randall.

  “I did,” Gale taunted as he coughed up more blood that sprayed across Randall’s face. “I killed him.”

  “NO!” Randall screamed impulsively.

  He pulled the large knife out of Gale’s gut and then plunged it in again. And then again. And again and again. All in a rage as he imagined nothing in his mind but all the things that he, Thomas, and Robert had done when the three of them had grown up together. The memorable camping trips they had gone on, the strenuous and yet exhilarating mountain hikes, the thrilling ATV and motorcycle rides, the trips to the shooting range, and the serene summer evenings fishing for perch and bass outside of the cabin. Randall had always treated Robert as if he were his older brother.

  Blood drained out of Gale’s body and he crumpled to his knees before Randall. Randall looked at his knife in his hand, the black blade marinated in blood. He couldn’t believe what he had just done in his fit of fury. Who had he become?!

  His face perspiring and pale as death, Gale’s eyes rolled up to meet Randall’s one last time.

  “I…lost…a brother too,” Gale managed to say in between deep, wheezing breaths and more coughs of blood. “Now you know how it feels.”

  Randall looked down at the dying Gale on the ground, instantly feeling immense regret for what he had done to him, when he heard the calls of the militia members in the near distance.

  Without hesitation, Randall recovered his gun belt, 1911, and AK-47 from the ground. He ascended the top of the slope and disappeared right over the edge just when Mitchum and his militia members appeared around the bend in the creek.

  * * *

  Butler and his group of militia members sweated hard as their legs carried them through the woods towards the direction of Mitchum’s calling voice.

  “Lewis, get up here now! Lewis, over here now!”

  Butler’s heart was accelerating not from his running pace but from his worst fear that his gut was telling him was about to come true.

  Rounding the same bend in the creek, Butler looked ahead and spotted Mitchum and around fifteen other militia members standing in a circle around something or someone next to the water.

  Butler caught up and forcefully pushed his way through the crowd, shoving a couple of people to the ground, when he saw what they had gathered around.

  Gale was dead. His eyes were glazed over in death and his mouth left gaping open in horror. He was laying in a muddy puddle of his own blood. There were at least five punctures in his jacket through which the blood was seeping from the stab wounds.

  Butler’s didn’t breathe. He didn’t blink. He didn’t move a muscle. He just stood there and looked, as if he knew long ago this would happen.

  George and his group of militia arrived next, splashing their way through the creek.

  “Dad, what is it?” George asked.

  Butler turned his head to face his son with a solemn and yet serious look on his face. It was a look George had only seen twice before…once when his mother had passed away, and once more when they had first received the news that Gerald had been killed.

  “What is it?!” George’s voice wavered as he began to push his way through the circle of militia.

  Upon seeing his older brother lifelessly sprawled out on the muddy and gory ground, George immediately screamed at the top of his lungs.

  Randall listened to the echoes as he continued running through the woods.

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Butler laid the last two pieces of pine on the stack of wood. It was belly high, roughly eight feet long by three deep. The lowest levels of it were the driest wood, the dead stuff still on trees, mixed in with a loose pack of dried pine boughs. On top of that was old deadfall with more boughs mixed in. The top layer was fresh cut, and scented the air with the sharpness of resin.

  It represented two hours labor by himself and the militia with him. Butler knew that those two hours were more than he could wisely spend under the circumstances, but he simply couldn’t not do it. He turned away from the wooden structure to where his son lay on the ground.

  “Let’s get him up there,” he said.

  George, Mitchum, and two other men that had been especially close dropped to their knees and reverently lifted Gale up. They carried him over and set him on top of the pile. Butler crossed Gale’s hands over his chest.

  “You ready?” George asked as Butler backed away from the pyre.

  “Let’s do it.”

  While the rest had been building the pyre, Mitchum had made a couple of torches using his handkerchief, some magnesium shaved off his fire starter, and resin from some of the freshly cut pine. He handed these to Butler and George and took a lighter out of his pocket.

  “You got some words first?” Mitchum asked.

  “Yeah,” Butler said.

  He adjusted his grip on the makeshift torch while he composed himself.

  “I got some words,” he said, louder this time, turning away from the pyre to face the men gathered around him.

  “This is the second son I’ve lost in a short period of time. And this loss isn’t just mine. He is one of many relatives, friends, and compatriots all of you have lost since… Since the world went dark on us. The loss of Gerald hurt me, because he was the gentlest and kindest of my children. He was the one that taught me the value of connection with people. Gerald gave me the skills to share my vision with a
ll of you, and he’s the one that was right beside us as we all built that vision together.”

  Butler took a deep breath and went on. “Gale was the exact opposite of Gerald, in more ways than one. Gale was action, force, drive. Gale kept me young by keeping me on my toes and constantly challenging me to be his father, and that meant always keeping myself a step ahead of him. Gale dared me every single day. The work, the hard work we put into the Compound, the weeks and months of back-breaking labor we all did. Gale drove that. He was the first one up every morning and the last one to bed. His tireless energy inspired all of us.”

  Butler looked at the faces of the men around him. He could see his own feelings on his two deceased sons reflected back at him.

  “Gale wouldn’t want to be put in the ground to sleep and rot, and this is what he would have wanted,” he said, holding his torch out. “To go out as bright and as hot as he lived.”

  George touched the tip of his torch to his father’s, and Mitchum held the lighter under them. It took just a couple seconds for the resin-soaked cloth and the magnesium shavings inside to take. The torches audibly blazed to life. George and Butler nodded at each other, and each took a side of Gale’s pyre. They poked their torches into the dried pine needles at the bottom, getting several spots started.

  Before long, the dry kindling at the bottom took. The two men shoved the torches into the flames and took a step back.

  “The source of our loss is known, because now it has a name,” Butler called out. “Parker.”

  He let that settle over the men as the flames started to rise up the pyre.

  “In the names of Gerald and Gale, and of all those we’ve lost, I swear I will not rest until every single Parker is gone. We’re going to take them down, take them out one by one. Brother will feel the loss of brother, father of son, grandfather of grandson. Every single Parker is going to see one of their own die before they themselves fall. Mark my words. I will fight until even the very memory of Parkers is scoured from this land.”

  George raised his arms to the sky, and shouted, “Death to the Parkers!”

  Every man around him repeated his cry.

  * * *

  “Hey! Hey!”

  “What the…” Barry said.

  “Looks like half the town is coming at us,” Jane said, peeking through a gap in the curtain of the house Father Thompson had set them up in.

  It was the home of a family that had been in Washington state visiting relatives when the EMP had hit.

  “Hey!” came the voice from outside again.

  It clearly wasn’t Father Thompson’s.

  Barry went to the front door and opened it a crack. “What do you want?”

  “We all decided we don’t need you in town. You all need to clear it out right now.”

  “What?” Barry asked.

  “Who are we speaking to?” Christine said, edging up beside her husband.

  “Sam Powell! Look. We don’t have any beef with you, but things aren’t good right now! We can’t be taking any strangers in! We’ve got our own mouths to feed here, and we can just tell you’ve all got trouble coming behind you! Now, you can come on out and show us you aren’t taking anything you didn’t bring in with you, or we can toss you out!”

  Thomas went to the other living room window and peeked through the curtains.

  “A few dozen at least. A lot of them are armed. Rifles for sure, and just about everybody in these parts owns a handgun, too.”

  “Six or so out back,” Angela called from the kitchen.

  “Same on the side here,” Susan said, looking out another window.

  “We’re surrounded,” Thomas said.

  “Look, we came in daylight and talked to your man, Father Thompson,” Barry said. “He said we were all square.”

  “Well, Thompson didn’t have the authority to make that decision for all of us! Now you clearing out, or we clearing you out?!”

  “Give us a minute, can you?” Barry asked, using his best grandpa voice.

  “As long as that minute ends with you all coming out of the house, sure!” Sam yelled back.

  “We can’t just go back out into the woods!” Claire protested. “We’re exhausted, three of us are wounded, and this is where Randall was going to meet us! We’re can’t just have them throw us all out!”

  “They’ve got us surrounded and seriously outgunned,” Thomas said.

  “And even if we did decide to stay by force, that makes us no better than those Compound guys,” Marcus said.

  “Minute’s up!” Sam shouted from outside, even though it had only been a few seconds. “Come on!”

  “We need more time!” Barry said, trying to keep his voice gentle and calm.

  “You ain’t got time!” Sam yelled.

  Everybody inside the house could see that Sam had the townsfolk with him fully on his side, and they were getting pretty agitated.

  “This might turn into a mob,” Barry said.

  Thomas tapped him on the shoulder. He handed his weapons over to his grandfather and stepped out the door, holding his jacket open to show the empty holster and knife sheath.

  “Sam is it? Let’s talk.”

  “No,” Sam said, chambering a round into his Marlin .30-30 carbine. “You walk.”

  Thomas turned side to side, to make sure everybody could see that he was unarmed.

  “Look. My family are just a handful of people, but we’ve all got a tremendous amount of skills that are useful for a situation like this. We didn’t have much with us, but I guarantee every single ounce of gear we have is useful. We are running lean and mean, and we want to work with you.”

  “No, you’re nine mouths we don’t have resources to feed,” Sam said.

  “We’re nine pairs of hands that can work with you. And whether we’re here or not, the folks in that compound up the way are going to come for you and what you’ve got. Even if we’d never come here, their operation is huge and hungry. They’d come sniffing around before too long. Us showing up here gave you warning of the risks that are out there.”

  Thomas looked around. He could see some of the people considering what he was saying, a few looked like they’d already taken it to heart.

  “We’re the kind of folk that have been preparing for just something like this for a long time,” Thomas said. If it weren’t for the Compound, we’d still be up in the woods and you’d never known we were there. We’ve got medical training, we know how to farm and hunt, some of us are military. We’re nine mouths, but eighteen hands, and we want to work alongside you, not take you over. We’ve got a working truck, we’ve got knowledge.”

  Sam looked around, gauging the mood. He could see what Thomas was seeing as well.

  “Well, we’re hard working folk here in Garden City, too. Nobody lives out here unless they know how to survive.”

  “So we survive together,” Thomas said. “What do you say? We’re all on the same side, so let’s all pull together.”

  Sam took another look around. He was nervous about Thomas’s charisma, but he could also see that the man had won over the crowd. He’d used up a lot of his influence just getting the people to turn their backs on Thompson and follow him. He didn’t have anything left to pull them away from the new guy in town.

  “Alright,” Sam finally said, handing his carbine to the man next to him.

  He went up and shook Thomas’s hand.

  * * *

  A half hour later, Thomas had the Hi-Lux truck fueled up again and was on his way to find his brother.

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Randall knew his safest course of action would probably be to bushwhack cross-country, doing his best to leave no trail. Butler had a lot of men, and they had vehicles. They’d be strongest along the road, and slowest going through the woods. But he didn’t have time for land nav through the forest. He needed to get to Garden City as fast as he could. The road would save him the trouble of having to find his way through the rugged terrain, and would also be b
uilt along the easiest route as well.

  He didn’t have time for the safe option. Randall needed to get to Garden City, see how much of his family was left, and let people know that Butler was coming. His only hope was that finding Gale’s body would slow his pursuers down as they took the time to bury him or otherwise tend to the body. That was a double-edged sword, though. Judging by the screams and anger he had heard behind him, when the Compound’s militia did come, they were going to bring fire and fury.

  It took Randall only a few minutes of hard scrabbling to get down to the road. He paused to catch his breath and assess the situation. The road was cut into the valley wall. By staying uphill, he’d have a better vantage point on any traffic coming at him, and he’d have the advantage of high ground if trouble came rolling up on him. He picked a line that would keep him about fifty feet up and started making tracks.

  The evergreen forest of the valley gave him good cover, especially dressed in camouflage like he was. The carpet of pine needles kept the undergrowth thin so he had reasonable visibility on the highway, but also plenty of beefy tree trunks to duck behind if he needed. The other advantage of the soft ground cover was that his own footsteps were muffled, giving him a better chance of hearing vehicles coming around a blind curve.