25 Bombs Fell: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Series, 25BF Season 1

by A. K. Meek

  “Just like you said when you decided to head to Bartel,” someone else said.

  They picked up their packs and gear.

  “Oh, one more thing,” Will said, “I don’t think any of us has been in a gun battle before. Whatever happened, or happens, is—well—just happens. No hard feelings.” He glanced at Ed, who didn’t lift his eyes from his feet.

  “Do you think they’ll be back?” Jordana, clutching her dirty shawl, said.

  Will shrugged. “Don’t know. I think we just need to move along, keep moving.”

  Bruce said, “What if we run into others that are doing the same, hiding in the woods?”

  “We could stand here all day and dream up worst-case scenarios,” Nate said, tired of all the what-ifs. “But given we were attacked on the highway, it makes sense we leave the highway.”

  Bruce shot him a glance. “Well, the city boy knows how to defend us here in the country. Tell me, City, how long have you gone without a Starbucks? Do you know what a Georgia woods is like?”

  Amber, who clutched her husband’s arm, giggled.

  “Enough,” Will said. “This isn’t helping.” He scanned the group. “I think we can all agree to move to the woods, if there’s no problem.”

  “Wait,” Colton said. “I have a problem. Jacob, Brand, and I just put our lives on the line for everyone here. That’s fine once, maybe twice. But I’m not going to be the go-to guy when we get stuck in a mess.”

  “No one is asking that,” Will said. “I, we, appreciate everything you’ve done.” He looked to the others. Nate nodded.

  Colton scattered the pile of rocks that he had been stacking and stood. “I didn’t sign up to take care of people. Neither did these guys.” Jacob and Brand moved next to him. Their stern faces said they agreed. “We’re leaving.”

  “Leaving?” Will said. “You can’t.”

  The group stirred, whispers rising to complaints. “You can’t leave,” Jordana said. She turned to her husband. “Efrem, do something.” Her husband appeared speechless.

  Will wiped his forehead. “Colt, can we talk in private?”

  Colton walked from the group toward a car that had apparently slid off the road and bogged down in the soft highway shoulder dirt. Will’s eyes swept across the group and then he followed after him.

  “Why can’t we hear what’s going on?” Amber said. “We need to know what’s going on.”

  “See, this is what I’m talking about,” Bruce said. “Going separate ways. Each takes care of their own. We’ll survive better that way.”

  Amber hugged her husband’s arm. “If people can’t take care of themselves, they shouldn’t expect us to take care of them. My man will take care of me and Paige. We’re the only ones he needs to worry about.”

  “Fine for you,” Meredith said, stepping forward from behind Melanie, who had been crying for the past hour. “But some of us don’t have our husbands, or our families. What are we supposed to do?”

  “That’s your problem,” Amber said.

  “They’re coming back,” Jordana said, giving Amber a disgusted look.

  Will’s head was down as he approached the group. He took a deep breath, then took even longer to exhale. “Colton’s leaving,” he said, throwing up his hands. “Anyone else want to leave?”

  Colton pulled Jacob and Brand close and whispered to them. Brand turned to Will and raised his hand. “I’m going with Colton. So is Jake.”

  Will bit his lip and nodded. “Anyone else?” He glanced at Bruce, but he had turned away, busying himself with his daughter, like he didn’t hear Will’s question. So much for him being ready to leave with his wife and daughter.

  “Before we go,” Colton said, “we want our share of the weapons.”

  “What?” Will said.

  “We’re leaving together. We want our share of the weapons and supplies. That’s the least you can do.”

  Martin pushed away from the tree he had been leaning against. “We can’t divide up weapons,” he said.

  Colton walked to Nate and put his hand on his shoulder. “He uses math all day long. Have him figure out how to divide it.”

  Everyone turned to Nate.

  “Well,” he said. He gave Will a desperate look, and for the most part Will returned the same look. Nate pursed his lips and looked to the sunless sky, stalling because he wasn’t sure what to do.

  After half a minute the problem, surprisingly, worked itself out in his head. “Okay, so we have twelve guns and there’s twenty-five of us, whether we can use a gun or not. That’s,” he thought for another second, “about .48, almost .5 guns per person.”

  “Point-four-eight.” Colton nodded as he repeated the words. “So for three of us, that point five is one-and-a-half weapons.”

  Nate nodded. “Yeah, about one and a half. More or less.” He didn’t feel right about saying any of this, like he was betraying Will.

  Colton smiled. “Well then, that’s easy. We’ll take a 9mm and an M-16. One and one half.”

  “But you can’t leave us and take guns,” Feleysa said. “What’ll we do?”

  “No,” Will said in a hollow voice. “They earned it. Colton’s right. This is the least we can do. Give them what they want and need. We can’t force them to stay.”

  02.06

  WISHBONE

  Despite the anger of many, the group said goodbye to Colton, Jacob, and Brand. Loaded with backpacks and gear, the three disappeared into the woods, heading south, much quicker than the group could ever hope to walk.

  Nate walked the short distance to where Will sat under a tree, carving into the trunk with his multi-tool. Nate examined the cuts. “That was the best shooter we had,” he said. “He knew the most about weapons, firing, everything.”

  “I know, I know. I tried, but he didn’t want the responsibility. Jake and Brand, they would do anything he said.”

  “Three soldiers gone. That will definitely hurt.”

  Will folded the tool and put it in his belt sheath. “I guess I need a new soldier.” He gave Nate an intense look. “Congratulations, soldier.”

  “Me, a soldier? You sure you can trust me to point the gun in the right direction?”

  Will gave a smile, the first one Nate had seen in several hours. “I sure hope so. If not, Bruce would definitely have grounds to impeach me. But you showed courage earlier when we were being shot at.”

  Nate’s face flushed. “Well...”

  “Come on,” Will said, “don’t be modest. You stayed with me, even though you didn’t have a weapon. That says something. But we need to get moving if we want to get to the coast.” He grabbed Nate’s shoulder and gave a light squeeze, then walked over to the Lewis family. They had made a pallet for Yvonne with jackets. She looked terrible. Tired and terrible.

  Nate plopped under the tree. He rubbed his hands over new carvings made only a moment ago: No Hope.

  Will had put his trust in Nate, but he knew if he hadn’t been pinned to the road by his backpack strap, he would’ve been the first one to run. But that didn’t matter now. Will didn’t need to hear that.

  He dragged his backpack close, the backpack that had almost got him killed, and found his composition book. The pages were already crumpling, creasing from the wear and tear of being crammed in with everything else. He thumbed through the pages until he found three names and made asterisks next to each, along with the date. He tucked it away in his backpack. Twenty-two left of the twenty-five.

  Will had the group move off the road and travel parallel, skirting a cluster of trees. By the time they had stopped for the night, they had only moved a mile, maybe a mile and a half. Not very far at all.

  They set up camp a few yards into the forest, but not deep enough that they would have to deal with the Devil’s Rope that seemed to cover ninety percent of Georgia’s forests.

  In the early dark of night, Nate took one last bite, gagged, then spit out the horrible food. If he ever ate dehydrated cat food, it would probably taste like this.
He wiped the slobber from his mouth and shoved the vegetable medley food packets back in the MRE box and tossed it aside.

  The log he had slumped on was moist and finally permeated through his chempants, but he didn’t care. He idly peeled a piece of bark off the fallen trunk and scratched in the dirt. He tossed it aside and rested his head on his arm that rested on his knee.

  The others, the twenty-two—no, Will insisted that they still be called twenty-five—had made pallets in the forest and were settling down for the night. Four soldiers took up positions in the forest, surrounding the others. Nate knew he needed to get rest because he was going on shift in three hours, but he didn’t think he could sleep at the moment.

  Charles limped near and brushed leaves and twigs from the log before sitting on it. “You alright?” he said.

  Nate lifted his head. “I’m okay, I guess.”

  “Pretty scary out there today, right? Getting fired at, having to shoot back, not knowing if the next bullet is the one meant for you.”

  “I’m still shaking, I can’t eat. I’m not sure I’ll ever recover from that.”

  Charles found a package of unopened crackers from Nate’s MRE on the stump and fumbled with it, tearing along the perforation. “After my first firefight I didn’t eat for three days, I think it was,” he said like he was casually talking about his first day in high school.

  Nate lifted his head. “You were in a firefight? You?”

  Charles had finally opened the crackers and took a big bite, crumbs getting caught on his beard and trickling onto his shirt. “I was.” He nodded.

  “So you know how to shoot. When I saw you in the Ark, you were teaching Juan, and you got mad at me because I saw you. Because I knew there was more to you.” He had scored a minor victory, unraveling part of Charles’ secret past.

  “Sorry about that. It wasn’t your fault. I shouldn’t have been mad at you. But that’s also why I can talk to you about it now.”

  “So then you can help us, you must know—”

  “No,” Charles said, raising his hand. “That’s exactly why I don’t want anyone to know about me. I swore a long time ago to never fire a weapon again.”

  “But why? I don’t understand. You can help us.”

  Charles bowed his head. He took another slow bite of cracker. A way to stall, from the look of it. He pulled his canteen and took a long drink, then wiped his beard with his chemjacket sleeve.

  “I joined the Army because I needed a job. This was before I was hired at the Post Office. After a year of training I deployed to Kandahar and forward deployed to a little outpost a few clicks from there, Camp Bull.

  “The suburbs around the camp were mostly abandoned. Fighting had been pretty intense the year before, but diminished by the time my rotation came through. We controlled it but only tentatively held it. Not many families moved back, even after we declared it ‘green’. Headquarters was concerned about insurgents moving into abandoned houses.

  “One day, about six months into my tour, my unit went on a patrol, outside the wire. Our area covered about six clicks. It was a typical day, like any other day there. They all kind of blended together. Anyway, on our route we found a dog, a Jack Russell mix, or something like that. A small white dog. He looked starved lying in the dirt. I thought he was dead, but once I got closer he sprang up and ran to me, like I was some kind of savior. Scared me half to death. I gave him some jerky and then we moved on.

  “After a few minutes I looked to my six and he was following us. For the rest of the time I tried shooing him away. He would leave, but after a few minutes would reappear from around a corner or in a doorway. Ramirez said the dog was sneaky like an insurgent, only smarter.”

  He gave a small chuckle, but it held no happiness. He took another drink. His hand shook.

  “When we headed back to camp he still followed. We snuck him in that evening and kept him in our tent. The next day Colonel Bevins found out, but he let us keep him, even though standing orders were to take no local pets.

  “We named him Wishbone ‘cause he looked like the dog on PBS, and he instantly became Camp Bull’s mascot. He had a free ticket everywhere: tents, chow hall, even Company HQ. All us grunts stopped when we saw him, petting him and giving him scraps of food. But at the end of the day he always ended up in my tent, in my cot, sleeping next to me, curled in a tiny white ball.

  “Three months later we went on another patrol in the province, like any other day. But I didn’t know Wishbone had followed me on that day. When I found out we were already about five clicks from camp. So I kept him near me.

  “It just so happened that was the patrol when we were ambushed.

  “The narrow roadway we were in erupted in automatic fire and we scrambled for cover. The patrol thinned out and we got pinned along a block. I grabbed Wishbone and ducked behind a cinder-block wall.

  “AK-47s echoed through the alleyway. We couldn’t tell the direction they were firing from. I got distracted looking for insurgents. Loosened my grip. He was scared. I didn’t have a good hold of him.”

  Charles stopped, staring at the trees. He took a breath and it quivered.

  “He jumped from my arms and ran into the roadway. The gunfire stopped. It became deathly silent. I knew that wasn’t good.

  “Then I heard them call him, my Wishbone. I couldn’t make out what they said, but by their tones and whistles, they called him, drawing him away from us, into the clearing. I wanted to call him back, run and grab him, but I was paralyzed.

  “I heard one shot and a yelp. I knew they’d shot him. They shot Wishbone, but I had to see.

  “I crawled in the dirt and pushed my head just enough beyond the bricks, looking for him. I saw him on the road. His red hind legs no longer worked and he struggled to drag himself with his front legs. He was trying to crawl back to me. His whimpers pierced me.

  “They laughed, taunting us in their filthy language. One of them knew some English. In his broken tongue he called us ‘weak Americans’ and said ‘your dog is dead.’”

  “For ten minutes I sat there, watching him. Eventually he stopped crawling and laid his head on the ground. I knew he’d died.”

  Nate, not sure if anything he could say would help this old man, said, “I’m sorry they killed your dog. So you couldn’t fight, shoot your rifle, anymore?”

  Charles shook his head. “No, no. That was just the beginning.

  “I cried for three days. Imagine that, a soldier, a grunt, already survived four firefights, crying over a stray dog.

  “A week later we received intel on possible insurgent activity about a click west of camp. My team was sent on a recon. We found the building that reports said could be a safe house. I was on sniper duty that day. If you ask me, I think I was best out of the group.” He smirked at his self-acknowledgment. “I climbed the roof next to the safe house and set up. In a couple hours I finally saw them, four of them, inside.

  “We—I—decided to intercept, even though it was supposed to only be a recon. The others, Ramirez, Jones, and the rest, didn’t need much convincing.

  “The roof of the safe house was partially thatched. Old branches and corrugated metal. Once I signaled to the others, I waited for the opportunity. After a minute one of them was in the right position. I was able to get a shot off. It shattered his leg, his thigh. I should’ve gone for center mass or a head shot, I could’ve easily taken him out with a shot between the eyes, but I wanted him to suffer. Those upper leg wounds bleed out at the right speed. You know you’re gonna die, but it’s not immediate; it’s a scary way to die.

  “Once I gave the signal my team kicked in the door and I scrambled off the building to join them.

  “There were four. Blood had splattered across the dirt floor and the one I shot was screaming, clutching his leg. They were scared, all of them, pleading in their language. They held up pictures of their wives and children and safety leaflets that the Air Force drops. But we didn’t care.

  “There was a pot of
something, a stew, boiling on a small open fire pit. It smelled like sewage.

  “All I could think of at that moment was Wishbone in the street, whimpering, trying to walk. Before I realized what I was doing, I grabbed that stinking soup and grabbed the nearest man, more a child, a young man, and forced him onto his knees, his head up and mouth open. I poured that boiling pot over him. His gurgles and screams… But at the time I wanted justice.” He snorted. “Justice,” he repeated.

  “We secured the door and interrogated them for several hours.” Charles stopped and stared up into the night sky. There were no stars, only clouds. “No, our report said interrogate, but it wasn’t that. If we shot them they would’ve been better off. It was torture.

  “Afterwards, we cleaned our hands, rifle butts, and bayonets. Then we burned the building.”

  Nate’s heart raced with sickening curiosity. “Did you eventually report it? Were those the insurgents that shot Wishbone?”

  Charles shook his head again and laughed, a bitter, dry laugh. “What does it matter if they shot him? We killed four men, probably innocent men, because of a dog. I valued a dog’s life more than four humans. When we got back to camp that night I had nothing to do but lie on my cot and stare into nothingness. I realized I was a monster.”

  “You were upset,” Nate said. “Isn’t that what the fog of war is? That’s what I hear about.”

  “Fog of war? That’s a term used to excuse behavior. The same as a therapist telling you that you’re not responsible for sleeping around on your wife because your father beat you or your mother didn’t give you dessert.

  “If you would’ve known me before I enlisted, you would’ve never thought I was capable of what I did that day. I realized I was evil to the core.

  “After that I chose to never fire any weapon again. I’m not blaming the rifle, but my hands.” He held up his old, dirty hands.

  “How could you do that in the Army, not fire a rifle?”

  “Lucky for me, I took shrapnel in my leg from an IED a week after that. They sent me to rehab in Germany, then home.” Charles rubbed his thigh, like he needed to rub it to prove that was why he limped. But the pain that welled in his eyes didn’t need proving.