by E S Richards
Despite still living in the city, Mary had moved out and into college accommodations. He had visited her a couple of times on campus and definitely got the impression from her room that Mary wasn’t the only one sleeping there. Still, Wilson would never ask his daughter about that sort of thing; he hoped she would divulge to his wife if there was a long-term man in her life, but Wilson was very much under the impression that it was not his place to ask. Currently he could only hope his daughter was safe in her dorm room, locked away from all the dangers of Washington—with or without a man by her side.
A timid rap on the door of his office brought Mr. Wilson’s attention back to the present and away from his absent wife and daughter. He lifted his head and looked toward the large oak doors, waiting for whoever had knocked to let themself in. No more than five seconds later a young woman did exactly that, her once neat bun now sticking off her head at a slight angle, the level of decorum within the White House decreasing rapidly.
“Excuse me, sir,” she spoke timidly, wringing her hands in front of her like a washcloth, “but the crew from the helicopter is back. They’re down the hall in General Shepherd’s office.”
Mr. Wilson immediately rose to his feet, pushing his chair backwards and scraping it on the wooden floor. The young woman excused herself and left his office as Wilson thanked her and started heading towards the door himself. Dixon and the others returning from the reconnaissance mission of the city was great news; hopefully they would be able to shed some light on what was happening, more so than the scattered reports Wilson was currently receiving.
He strode down the corridor with confidence, eager for more information and to try to formulate a more solid plan with General Shepherd. Hopefully this would give them a specific area of the city to target first, or perhaps allow them to gather more resources to start quelling the rising panic. Power had only been out for a matter of hours, but Wilson was very aware how badly that could affect the public.
Not bothering to knock, Wilson pushed open the door to General Shepherd’s office and stepped inside. His eyes fell on the general talking with Corporal Lawson, the woman clearly halfway through the debriefing of their mission. Next he spotted Dixon talking to Farley in hushed tones, a soldier similar to him who had found a job in the White House due to injury removing her from active duty. But that was all Mr. Wilson saw. The Osprey had taken off with ten soldiers on board, where was the other seventy per cent?
“Corporal,” Mr. Wilson spoke as he stepped toward the woman and General Shepherd. “Where is the rest of your team?”
A moment of silence filled the room before Corporal Lawson spoke, her voice somehow holding steady as she delivered the news.
“The bird went down sir, no more than ten minutes into our flight. The engines cut out and stopped working; there was nothing we could do. No one else survived the crash.”
Wilson let the words wash over him, processing what the corporal was saying. Ten soldiers had been in the belly of that helicopter and now almost all of their lives had been lost. The engines completely cutting out in the Osprey meant the effects of the EMP must be much worse than he originally anticipated. If the helicopter had spiraled out of control and crash-landed, that meant other helicopters and the tens of thousands of commercial flights which crossed over America each day had probably all also plummeted to the ground.
“What’s the rest of the city like?” Mr. Wilson spoke up after a moment, trying to focus on the task at hand rather than getting distracted by what the possibilities could be.
“A warzone.”
Wilson spun around away from Corporal Lawson as he heard Dixon mutter under his breath. He had spent many, many days beside the solider and Wilson trusted Dixon’s judgement. Raising an eyebrow, he indicated for the young man to continue.
“It’s complete and utter carnage out there, sir,” Dixon continued, straightening slightly and holding his hands behind his back as he spoke. “The bird went down and exploded, and all the other cars are following the same rule. Buildings are on fire and falling down, people are looting stores and stealing anything they can get their hands on. Fowler also survived the crash, but he was shot by a couple of jewelry thieves that we intercepted in a broken store window. After that we just starting moving back here, but literally everywhere you turn on the streets there’s some sort of death or destruction. Thousands dead already, I would guess, maybe tens of thousands.”
***
Dixon was well aware that he had spoken out of turn, but somehow he just couldn’t hold back in revealing what Washington had been like to Mr. Wilson. Corporal Lawson had debriefed General Shepherd, but Dixon didn’t feel like she had given enough gravity to how bad Washington was. He was unable to get the scenes he had witnessed out of his head; the sight of the young girl running through the streets covered in blood with tears streaming down her face was etched in his mind forever.
Dixon desperately wanted to reach out to Mary and find out if she was all right. He knew she had planned to spend all day in the campus library today to get ahead on her studies as they were supposed to be spending the weekend together. Dixon knew that wouldn’t happen now, but he still desperately wanted to know that she was safe. That she was alive.
Looking up at Mr. Wilson, he seriously considered telling the man everything about his relationship with his daughter. If Wilson had received any kind of information, he wanted to know it too and he doubted whether the man would be bothered by their relationship given the current state of the city. Dixon knew Wilson hadn’t approved when he caught them at an event once, but they had all grown up since then and Dixon had fallen very madly in love with Mary.
“Have you heard anything from the teams you deployed?”
Dixon tuned back in as Mr. Wilson started to speak, addressing his question towards the general.
“Not yet,” the uniformed man shook his head. “They have their orders to try and restore the peace. We should be able to divide and conquer the city.”
“Somehow I don’t think violence is going to calm this storm,” Mr. Wilson sighed, planting his hands on his hips and looking out of the window behind General Shepherd’s desk. Several fires were now visible as they burned across the city of Washington, proof that things were rapidly going downhill outside the White House walls.
“There’s little else we can do,” General Shepherd retorted, confident in the abilities of his troops and reluctant to give in to Wilson’s pressure. “We need to try and calm it somehow.”
“We need to focus on restoring the power,” Wilson immediately took the General’s bait, locking eyes with him as their opposing views met. “Power is the most important thing: through power we can deliver knowledge.”
“Knowledge is nothing without troops on the ground to act on it. We can’t just sit around and wait for the lights to come back on.”
“Sit around?” Mr. Wilson threw his hands up in the air and dropped them back down on his thighs with a slap. “The only one sitting around here is you! We need to do something real for this country; I need to do something real for this country. Fixing the power is the most important thing and I’m going to see to just that. Dixon, come with me.”
Dixon stared after Mr. Wilson as the man very swiftly lost his temper and stormed out of General Shepherd’s office, giving him a final order as he left. But Dixon didn’t move. He knew that at the current time he reported to General Shepherd; Wilson may have been his commanding officer a day ago, but so much had changed in a day.
As he knew he should, Dixon remained where he stood, silently looking to General Shepherd and waiting for his official orders. The man let out a loud sigh and turned his back slightly to Dixon, shaking his head and looking out of the window.
“Go,” he eventually muttered. “Go and see what you can do.”
Chapter 10
The two men remained hidden in the treeline for several hours, watching the Dodge Fargo as it sat on the side of the road, its driver now long gone into the distance
. Len dozed off at some point and gained a few more precious moments of sleep, but Harrison remained focused on the truck in front of him, watching and waiting for anyone who might arrive.
Harrison was of two minds about what to do with the truck. With the tools he had brought in his rucksack, he felt he had a pretty good chance of being able to fix the vehicle. He realized that due to it being so old, there were no parts in it that would have been affected by the EMP. He also assumed that it had been in an underground garage or something similar for the past couple of days, therefore not directly exposed to the heat. Harrison had certainly seen several older model cars which had all been ruined in explosions following the EMP. Had it been in the center of Chicago he was certain the Fargo would have gone the same way.
Due to those reasons, he knew it would be foolish not to try and restore the truck and take it with them on their journey. But the one thing that worried Harrison was how loud the vehicle had been. That was why he was still hidden in the treeline watching, because he was certain someone else heard the noise and would be on their way to investigate.
He knew unless someone else had seen the truck in motion that it would be difficult for anyone to predict that it had been the Fargo up and running; the exterior of the pickup made it appear like it hadn’t been road-worthy in many years. Still, that didn’t stop Harrison from believing that someone would come looking and he didn’t want to be caught trying to fix the car if and when that happened.
Roughly twenty minutes later, he was proven right.
Staring down the scope of his A3, Harrison watched two figures walking towards them. He was quite shocked to see what looked like a father and son duo, the boy in his teenage years, while the father looked middle-aged yet well-built and strong. Running his eyes over their bodies, Harrison saw that the father had what looked like a Mach 2 rifle slung over his shoulder, the kind he was aware farmers often used on their ranches around the area. Immediately that made Harrison less anxious about the two people approaching him, seeing them only as a local farmer and his son, rather than a serious threat.
Still, Harrison had learned the hard way that no one could be trusted in this new world, the men they had met in Union Pier and the members of the Latin Kings they had encountered before evidence enough of that. Even if the two people approaching looked harmless, he wasn’t taking any chances.
“Len,” Harrison nudged his friend from where he had fallen asleep leaning against a tree. The sun was now starting to properly rise and Harrison wanted to be ready when the father and son duo arrived. “Wake up. We’ve got company.”
Len quickly rubbed his eyes and stretched, processing what Harrison had told him. He shuffled around where the two of them sat in the treeline and looked out in the direction Harrison was focused on. It was only when he was passed the A3 that Len was able to see the two figures approaching in the distance.
“What do you think?” Len asked as he handed the Remington M24A3 sniper rifle back to Harrison. Despite the rifle being a good addition to their duo, Len was still slightly uncomfortable holding a weapon of that caliber.
“It’ll be a while until they get here,” Harrison spoke as he scratched his beard. “We can’t even be certain that they’re coming this way because of the Dodge. They look like a local farmer and his boy.”
“Why else would they be walking out here though?” Len asked as he looked around their surroundings. They weren’t exactly in a very remote area, but with everything that had happened there was no need for people to be traveling around.
“True,” Harrison nodded; he knew if it wasn’t for Len he would still be in his bunker but the fact of the matter was he was not, and neither were the two people walking towards them. “Let’s pack up our gear and wait it out.”
Without saying anything else Harrison rose to his feet and started walking back to where their two tents were set up. After what had happened in Union Pier he didn’t want to take any chances and even though the father and son appeared to be harmless, he knew that the situation in their new world had changed everyone—whether they were aware of it or not.
Under Harrison’s instruction, Len immediately went about ensuring the fire was completely out. Even though the approaching figures were still some distance away, they didn’t want to give them any clue to their location. That meant heating up water for their breakfast was out of the question, so while Harrison packed up the tents Len dug out some biscuits they could have instead. It was a small blessing in a way, Len still slightly skeptical about the water although he felt no different from how he had the day before. Desperately he hoped they had avoided whatever it was that had infected the people in Union Pier. Now that he thought back to it, the men who had tried to confront them had been truly sick; it was blatantly obvious something aside from the solar crash had made them that way.
As Len handed Harrison some food, his mind drifted back to his son, somewhere in South Haven with Amy by his side. James had popped into his head as soon as he’d realized the couple approaching were a father and son. The boy looked five or six years older than James was, but it was still enough to make Len yearn to have him by his side. It didn’t take much for his mind to fantasize about what his son would be doing at that moment, every part of Len hoping and praying that James wasn’t having a hard time.
“What’s the plan?”
Harrison didn’t need to look down the scope of the A3 to view the father and son when Len next asked the question. The two of them had sat in relative silence since packing away their gear and eating a quick breakfast. Len was in a slight daze thinking about his own son and Harrison’s brain was working a mile a minute trying to decide what the best way to deal with the situation was. He didn’t want things to get violent between the four of them—especially considering a child was involved—but the more he thought about it, the more confident Harrison became that he could fix the Dodge and the more he wanted to turn their long walk into a drive.
“Wait and see,” Harrison replied quietly from where they crouched in the treeline again, the father and son now no more than a couple hundred yards away. “They might not even stop; we don’t want to expose ourselves unless we have to.”
“What if they do stop?”
“Then we wait and see,” Harrison repeated, “just stay out of sight.”
Len shrank down further into the grass at Harrison’s words, his eyes not leaving the approaching couple. He didn’t like that Harrison hadn’t revealed much of his plan, although a part of him felt like perhaps the older man didn’t actually have one. It had to happen at some point and finding a potentially working car can’t have been anything that Harrison had planned for. The two of them almost froze in place as the couple walked into earshot, the dregs of their conversion floating through the otherwise silent air and towards their hiding place.
“…this it?”
“I reckon so; looks pretty beat up so I wouldn’t be surprised if she was making all that racket. Why don’t you jump in the cab and try the engine?”
Len bit his lip as he realized that the father and son had indeed walked this way because they’d heard the car engine, the father encouraging his son to jump into the front seat and try the engine.
“Key’s in the ignition still.”
“That’s good. Let me pop the hood and then you can give it a try.”
From their spot both Len and Harrison watched silently as the father walked around to the front of the vehicle and lifted up the hood of the Dodge. He then gave a thumbs-up to his son who turned the key, causing the 1952 engine to cough and splutter before refusing to turn over, then giving out.
“Try her again,” the father spoke with his head underneath the hood of the car. “I’ll try and figure out what the problem is.”
The teenage boy turned the key in the ignition a couple more times, each only churning out a horrible and broken sound from the engine. After the third try he climbed out of the cab and looked under the hood of the pickup beside his father, speakin
g quieter now that the two of them were side by side.
Len took the opportunity to look towards Harrison and raised both his eyebrows, silently asking his companion what their next step was. Harrison shook his head but didn’t say anything. It was obvious the pickup wasn’t currently in working order but his worry now was whether the duo would be able to fix it. If they did and they drove off, then the two of them would have effectively wasted a whole day just sitting around in the trees.
Harrison watched with bated breath as the father tugged a light-looking rucksack off his back, setting his rifle down leaning against the front wheel of the pickup. He then started pulling out tools from his bag, placing each one of them on the asphalt beside the rifle. From his position, Harrison couldn’t see exactly which tools the two had brought with them, but it seemed to be extensive enough. The man knew what he was doing too, quickly resuming his position under the hood of the vehicle and reaching out only momentarily to be handed equipment by his son.