“He said the snowmobiles are parked in a workshop on the western side of town. It must be Macready’s Motors,” Jack said. “It makes sense. It’s got that big open section at the front, where the snowmobiles would be sheltered from the weather.”
“He said his was the red Polaris,” Kate said as they moved quietly but swiftly through the deserted streets, knee-deep with snow. “I hope we can all fit on it.”
“If we can’t, they may have left keys in one of the other snowmobiles,” Jack said. “You still remember how to drive one, right?”
“It’s been a few years, but I think I can handle it,” Kate said uncertainly. “At least, I hope I can…”
Jack took a look at the man through his rifle scope. The bell tower, with the light burning in it, and the prisoner tied to the bell stood out like a sore thumb in the thick darkness of the night. Jack saw the man was standing still and hadn’t tried anything. He knew he was being watched and knew that Jack was dead serious about putting a bullet in his stomach in the event of a betrayal. Jack was thus confident that the man had told them the truth about the snowmobiles.
Even though there were no signs of life in the town, the snow piles were high outside most buildings, and no lights were on except the one burning in the bell tower, Jack and his family felt as if they were being watched. Every step they took felt as if it could be their last. All of them waited for the enemy to burst out from some nearby hiding place with guns blazing. They moved through the town with their hearts in their mouths, their senses on full alert for any sign of danger.
The journey to the west end of the town felt like it took hours—with the perceived length of the tortuous, suspense-filled journey only making things more agonizing—but finally, they reached Macready’s Motors street. The sky was still black, and there was not yet any hint of gray on the horizon, so dawn was still an hour or two away, Jack surmised. He peered through his rifle scope at the prisoner in the bell tower, who he could hardly see from this distance, and saw that the man was still silent.
They trudged quietly through the dark, snow-thick streets, getting closer to Macready’s Motors. When they were near enough to see clearly through the darkness, they saw a couple of snowmobiles parked beneath the shelter out front. Jack used his rifle scope to scout out the place. There didn’t seem to be anybody nearby or anyone guarding the snowmobiles, but he wasn’t about to take any chances.
“We have to be absolutely silent until we’re ready to ride,” Jack whispered to the others. “No talking from this point on.”
With their hearts hammering in their chests, they crept over to the snowmobiles. As the prisoner had said, one of them was a red Polaris, an early 70s model. Jack whispered to the others to wait while he went and tried the key he’d taken from the prisoner in the snowmobile. It fit the ignition switch perfectly, and he breathed out a sigh of relief. They were almost free, almost…
Jack waved his hand, signaling to the others to come over. They hurried and quietly pushed the snowmobile out of the shelter out into the snow. It was a tight fit, but he managed to squeeze everyone onto the snowmobile. The time had finally come to flee the town and get to Arthur.
Jack turned on the ignition and started up the motor. The headlamp seared a tunnel of light through the dark night. The two-stroke motor sputtered, then roared to life with a howl that tore through the silence of the night like a bomb going off. With all pretense of stealth dropped, Jack yelled out to the others, “Hang on tight!”
He cranked the throttle, and the snowmobile surged forward across the snow. He set off at high speed, heading for the main road that would take them out of town and into the mountains … and the moment he got onto it was when the first of the pillagers came running out into the street from one of the dark buildings, screaming gutturally with wrath as he fired his shotgun at the fleeing fugitives.
There was no way for Jack or any of the others to shoot back; all they could do was hang on for dear life as Jack blasted through the streets at breakneck speed. Another man threw open a window and fired a few shots at them with a big caliber revolver … and one of the bullets punched through the snowmobile’s gas tank.
Gasoline started gushing out of both the entry and exit holes the bullet had left, and Jack, racing through the streets with the throttle pinned, watched in dismay as the gas gauge began dropping precipitously. “No,” he moaned as he watched the precious fuel draining rapidly away. “No, no, no!”
He swung onto the final stretch of road that led out of town, sliding the snowmobile through the curve with the throttle wide open. Freedom and life lay ahead, with death and torture snapping at his heels … and the gas gauge was showing empty. Jack gave the throttle a crank, but instead of a roar from the motor, there was nothing but a weak, impotent splutter … and then the motor died.
Dozens of furious men came running through the darkness, their guns aimed at the fugitives on the snowmobile. “Hands on your fuckin’ heads!” one of them roared. “Do it, or we’ll gut the bitches in front of you! All a’ you, hands on your fuckin’ heads!”
Nick, overcome with weakness from his infection, dropped face-first into the snow. Jack realized there was no escape and bitterly raised his hands, as did Susan and Kate. It was over; they had been captured.
34
Jack’s nose had been broken, and blood was trickling out of his nostrils and running down his jaw into the stubble of his five-day-old beard. He could feel that one of his teeth was loose, a molar on the left of his jaw, where Mark had punched him. His mouth was full of blood, but he couldn’t spit it out because of the duct tape across his face as a makeshift gag. He, Kate, Susan, and Nick had all been tied to steel pillars in an empty workshop. Mark and his goons had given Jack and Nick a good beating, and both men’s eyes were swollen and purple, their faces cut up and bruised.
They hadn’t done anything to Kate or Susan, but Jack knew that his wife and daughter weren’t going to be safe for much longer. Mark had gleefully explained in great detail, though, the disgusting and perverted acts he and his men would perform on Kate and Susan the next day, though—acts that Jack and Nick would be forced to watch.
It wasn’t the pain of his injuries that hurt Jack the most. Instead, it was the knowledge that he had failed to protect his wife and daughter, and because of that failure, he would have to watch unspeakable things be done to them before these men would torture him and Nick to death. And with this cursed duct tape over his mouth, there wasn’t even anything he could say to Kate and Susan, who were both weeping softly, their cries and gasps muffled by the duct tape over their mouths.
He wondered bitterly if things wouldn’t have gone better for them if they had simply stayed put in the city. They would all have died eventually, of course, but starvation and thirst would have perhaps been kinder ways to go than what was about to happen.
All of them had been stripped of their weapons and most of their clothes, so they were sitting here shivering, beaten black and blue and bloody, in their underwear. Mark and his men had returned to their beds to sleep off their hangovers—they were all heavy drinkers, it seemed—and had left two men to guard the captives. Mark had promised his prisoners that he would be back to deal with them by midday, though.
They sat in somber, morose silence in the dark workshop, shivering against the cold, while the drunk guards leered at them and made macabre jokes about what they would do to them when Mark returned.
All hope was lost; there was no possible escape from this situation. Jack was highly intelligent and had been racking his brain for hours for a solution, for a way out, but there was none. That was it … this was the end.
The hours trickled by, feeling like days. Time felt, bizarrely, both sped up and slowed down simultaneously. Jack could barely bring himself to make eye contact with his wife and daughter, knowing the terrible things that were in store for them.
Finally, a few hours after soft gray light began to filter in from the outside world, Mark and his men—nine
of them, making a total of thirteen including the guards—walked into the workshop.
Mark was a large, heavyset man with a barrel of a paunch and thick limbs. In his late thirties, it seemed, he was bald on top, but long, greasy, red hair, streaked with gray, grew from the back and sides of his head and hung about his shoulders. He had a face that was scarred on one side from a bad burn, with his skin looking like molten plastic, and the few teeth he had in his wide gash of a mouth were yellow and crooked. A big, bushy, red beard covered the top half of his chest, and his small green eyes were bloodshot and full of cruelty and malice.
“Top o’ the morning to ya, sunshine!” he said, smiling mockingly at Jack. “I hope you’re ready for one hell of a show,” he said. “I had me a good rest, an’ now I’m hungry, but it ain’t meat an’ potatoes I’m hungry for…” He stared with unabashed lust at Susan and slowly licked his lips.
Jack tried to roar out a cry of naked fury and struggled with all his might against the ropes that kept him bound, but his efforts were futile; there would be no escaping his bonds.
Mark slowly circled the two women, like a wolf circling its prey. “Now, how should we start this?” he asked, smiling evilly. “Maybe you boys should go to town on the woman while I watch, get me in the mood for what I’m gon’ do to the girl, huh?” He paused here to chuckle, while his men chortled and loosened their belts, all staring at Kate with lust dripping from their cruel eyes. “Although,” Mark said, stopping next to Susan and softly stroking her hair before sliding one of his hairy, greasy hands inside her bra, “with tender young flesh like this, I don’t need no show to get me in the mood…”
Susan screamed, her cry muffled by the tape over her mouth, and tried to writhe away from his pawing hand. Jack roared and tried to thrash and struggle, but the ropes held him fast.
Mark chuckled and withdrew his hand. “Don’t act like you don’t want it, lil’ bitch,” he whispered into Susan’s ear. “When I’m done with you, whore, you gon’ be beggin’ Daddy Mark for more, I promise you that…” He then stood up and turned to address his men. “I’m gon’ go get some whiskey an’ beer from the liquor store,” he announced. “Who wants what? Y’all can get started on the mom while I’m gone.”
He took some liquor orders from his men and then walked off, giving Susan one last grope before he left. After that, the men cut the ropes from Kate, who struggled desperately, like a trapped mountain lion, against them, kicking and screaming, but there were simply too many of them, and they pinned her down on top of a table and started pawing at her underwear.
Tears burned at Jack’s eyes as he watched this terrible act unfold, helpless to do anything to stop it. The guard nearest him laughed maniacally … but then, suddenly, the man’s laughter turned to choked gargling. Jack turned and saw the man staggering forward, gripping his throat, from which blood was gushing. A broadhead arrow had skewered it.
The moment the next guard spun around in surprise as he saw his friend pitch forward onto the ground with an arrow through his throat, another arrow came thrumming through the air from the dark shadows at the back of the workshop. It thudded home through the guard’s eye socket, and he was dead before he hit the ground. The third guard fell with an arrow through his chest.
The men pawing at Kate hadn’t yet noticed that their comrades were dead, but it didn’t take long for them to realize that something was terribly wrong—soon enough, an arrow slammed through one of their throats.
The man fell forward onto Kate, gasping and jerking in his death throes, and the hot blood pouring from his skewered throat gushed over her chest. The other men scrambled for their firearms, but another two fell to the whizzing arrows from the darkness before any of them could even pick up their guns. And before any of them had the chance to squeeze off a shot at the unknown assassin, a burst of automatic rifle fire thundered through the workshop from the back. Three men dropped to the floor, bleeding and shuddering as they died. Another crackle of automatic fire hammered a spray of bullets through the torsos of the final three as they desperately scrambled for cover.
Jack stared at the dying men in disbelief, wondering whether the unknown shooter was a friend or an even more dangerous foe. The men gasped and writhed, slipping in pools of their own blood as they died, and Kate, screaming with both shock and horror, managed to shove the corpse of one of her assailants off of her. She jumped off the table and scrambled to get her clothes together, then ran over to Susan to shield her from the killer in the shadows.
Over the sounds of men dying, gasping and choking on their own blood, came the sounds of heavy boots clopping calmly across the concrete floor. Then, when the mysterious stranger finally stepped into the dim light drizzling in through the high windows, Jack, Kate, and Susan all almost jumped out of their skins with surprise and disbelief.
“Hello, little brother,” Arthur, smiling, said to Jack, popping the empty clip out of the AK-47 in his hands before slapping a fresh one into the rifle. “Looks like I got here just in time. Let’s get you all out of this hellhole.”
35
Nick opened his eyes, and for the first few seconds he was awake, complete shock and utter terror gripped him. He had no idea where he was or how he had gotten here. He was in some sort of mountain cabin, it seemed, with crude but solid log walls, in a warm bed with a fire burning softly in the little fireplace in the corner. He sat up, feeling weak and drained, but better than he could remember feeling for a long while. The last things he could remember seemed like images out of a nightmare. Being tied up, beaten up by thuggish men, tortured in an abandoned workshop…
The door creaked open, and Nick’s heart shot into his mouth. Fear flooded through him as a strange man stepped into the room. He had never seen the tall, bearded man before, but there was something familiar about him. He had Jack’s deep-set eyes and tall, proud nose, and in those eyes burned the same keen intelligence he had seen in Jack’s.
“Ahh, you’re awake,” the man said, beaming a friendly smile at Nick. “For a while there, I wasn’t sure if you were ever going to open your eyes again, but you’ve pulled through. You’ve got a strong heart, kid, and one hell of a will to live; I’ll give you that. Here, you need to take this, though,” he said, handing him a pill and a glass of water.
“Wh–what is this?” Nick asked. “And who are you? Wh–where am I? What is this place?”
“The name’s Arthur, and I’m Jack’s older brother,” Arthur said, extending a hand to Nick. Nick took Arthur’s hand and immediately sensed the immense strength in the guy’s rough, calloused fingers. “This is an antibiotic you need to take. As for where we are, this is my house; my brother, his wife, and Susan are all here, too, but they’re busy preparing dinner right now.”
“I guess I’ve been out the whole day,” Nick groaned.
Arthur chuckled, and playful mirth sparkled in his eyes. “You’ve been out a little longer than that, kid,” he said. “Like I said, it’s a miracle you pulled through. Even with these,” he said, turning the antibiotic pill over in his fingers, “I wasn’t sure you’d make it. You’ve been drifting in and out of consciousness for the last two weeks. But most of that time, you’ve been out of it, rather than in.”
“Two … weeks?” Nick gasped, sitting up straight in the bed. “Are you serious?”
Arthur nodded. “Yep. Most people wouldn’t have been able to fight off the infection you had, even with the aid of these pills, which are some of the most effective on the market … well, that were on the market, seeing as no such thing exists any longer. But anyway, point is, you’re lucky to be alive.”
When Arthur mentioned the infection, Nick remembered that he’d lost half of his ear. He reached up with a trembling hand to feel the damage—unable to see himself due to the absence of any mirrors nearby—and expected the usual jolt of intense pain to zap through his head as soon as his fingers made contact with it. To his surprise, though, when his finger touched his mutilated cartilage—which was now unbandaged—ther
e was no pain. He could feel that scar tissue had formed where a large chunk of his ear had been bitten off and it seemed to have healed well. That, and the fact that he was no longer suffering from raging fevers and crazed delirium, prompted a sense of calm relief to wash through him.
“Thanks,” Nick said to Arthur, still feeling a little confused, despite the relief. “I mean, thanks for all the help. Thank you for saving my life. I’m truly grateful for everything you’ve done for me.”
“Just trying to spread a little good in this crazy world,” Arthur said. “Are you able to get up? You could do with a good hot meal, I bet. We’ve been feeding you small amounts of food, mostly pureed stuff and soup, which was mostly all you could keep down since you got here. You’ve lost a lot of weight.”
Nick peeled back the blankets and saw that he had indeed dropped a lot of weight. “Sure, I’d like to get up and try to get a meal down.”
“Let me help you.” Arthur gave him a hand to get him out of bed.
Leaning on Arthur, Nick was able to hobble out of the room. Arthur led him through the cabin to the main room, which was large enough to be both a living room and a dining room. The whole place was lit up by candles, which gave it a pleasant, welcoming, and homely ambiance. Jack, Kate, and Susan were already sitting around the table, on which a simple but hearty meal was steaming. In the fireplace, a big fire was roaring, spreading heat and light through the room. They all smiled when Nick came hobbling in, and Susan had an especially broad grin on her face.
“Welcome back to the world of the living!” Jack exclaimed.
Nick noticed that Jack’s face was bruised and cut, although the wounds seemed older and mostly healed. It prompted a vaguely recalled memory of taking a beating himself, and he shuddered at the unpleasant and disturbing recollection.
“It’s good to be back,” Nick said, grinning as he took in the somewhat surreal sight before his eyes, which looked almost like something off of an old-time Christmas card, minus the decorations and tree, of course. “What’s for dinner?” he asked, limping over to the table. “Smells great, whatever it is.”
EMP Survival In A Powerless World | Book 22 | The Coldest Night Page 18