“So how do we deal with this situation?” Jack asked.
“You’re in charge here as much as I am, little brother,” Arthur said, “and your ideas are as good as mine. I’m fixing to go out into the woods commando-style and hunt the bastard down. He obviously has some survivalist skills if he managed to get through the winter and find us all the way out here, not to mention the fact that he managed to shoot and kill a mountain lion, but I’m confident that I could take him out.”
“We don’t know if it’s just him, though, or if he’s managed to round more goons to start a new gang,” Jack said. “It could be that he wants to draw you and me out into the woods, and then when we’re on a wild goose chase after him, he and his friends attack the cabin.”
“So, what can we do?” Kate asked. “If we sit around here and do nothing, he and his friends could launch a surprise attack on us at night while we sleep. Or they could ambush us while we’re working since we all usually work alone or in pairs during the day. But then if Jack or Arthur goes out trying to hunt them, that leaves the rest of us vulnerable here.”
“I know,” Jack said, grimacing. “We’re in a tough position here. First thing, I think, is to set up guard duty. Someone’s going to have to stand guard every night to make sure Mark and his scumbags don’t take us by surprise.”
“We should also set up some traps and tripwires in the woods,” Arthur said. “Nothing that might catch an unwary animal, of course, but something that a human would stumble into.”
“We should also have guard duty during the day,” Kate said. “We don’t know how many people Mark has with him or how brazen they are. If there are enough of them, they might be confident enough that they might straight-up attack during daylight hours.”
“I doubt he has very many men,” Arthur said. “I go out into the woods every day. If more than a dozen scumbags were hanging out in the woods, there would be signs of ‘em, and I would have seen ‘em. No, I think more likely he’s managed to get together a handful of fellow scroungers. Now that they’ve exhausted whatever meager food supplies they looted from town and are in danger of starving to death. They’re probably looking for people like us they can drive out of their homesteads like they did with the people in town.”
“There’s no way they’ll be driving anyone out of here,” Jack muttered, curling his fingers into a tight fist of determination. “Not as long as one of here still draws breath and can squeeze a trigger.”
“I’ll shoot the bastard myself if I lay eyes on him,” Kate growled. Memories of what Mark’s men had done to her had roused deep and fierce anger in her.
“You all almost died trying to save my life,” Nick said. “And I don’t know much about fighting, but I’ll fight to the death to protect you and this place.”
“I’ll fight too,” Susan said, her voice soft but laced with indomitable determination. “This is all we’ve got left, and I refuse to let a bunch of evil bullies take it from us.”
Arthur looked around at everyone, making eye contact with each of them individually, and after he had done this, he smiled proudly and folded his arms across his chest, sighing with satisfaction. “I’ve lived out here for years on my own, and I always thought that was good enough for me. But now, with all of you here, I’ve realized what was lacking from my life for all those years: family. A real community. What we’ve got here, folks, is something precious, something worth fighting for … something worth dying for. And it fills my heart with pride to see how passionately you all feel about defending this place. I couldn’t ask for a better group of family members—and that goes for you too, Nick. You might not be a blood relative, but that doesn’t matter; you’re part of this family now, too.”
Jack, Kate, and Susan murmured their agreement with this sentiment.
“Thank you, all of you,” Nick said. “I’m humbled by everything you’ve done for me, and how well you’ve treated me. And I mean every word when I say I’ll fight and die for you and this place.”
“If we do things right,” Jack said, “nobody’s going to be dying … except Mark and his men. By attempting to intimidate and scare us with that whole skinned mountain lion thing, he’s actually committed a serious error: he’s informed us of his presence here and allowed us to prepare for him. If he’d attacked us out of the blue when we weren’t expecting it, he might have stood a chance, but now, we’re ready for him. And when he does come, he’s going to meet a wall of resistance so powerful it’ll blow him and whatever thugs he’s got with him back over the mountains into the Atlantic Ocean.”
Everyone cheered when Jack said this; his enthusiasm and determination were infectious. The cheer was enough to rouse Jack and Arthur’s parents, who had been asleep. The old man, Kenneth, poked his head out of the door. “What’s going on there?” he asked, yawning. “Sounds like a New Year’s Eve party or something! It’s not December 31st, is it?”
“That was a few months ago, Dad,” Jack said, chuckling. His father was becoming increasingly forgetful, but it wasn’t anything to be concerned about just yet; it was simply old age creeping in, seeing as the old man had almost reached eighty years in age. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll talk to you and mom tomorrow. Go get some sleep; we’ll keep things down.”
“G’night, everyone,” Kenneth said, smiling and yawning again before closing the door.
“All right, so we’ll work on a plan to take these bastards down tomorrow,” Jack said. “For now, everyone else needs to get a good night of sleep, and Arthur and I will split watch duty tonight, right, big brother?”
“Sure thing,” Arthur said. “You wanna take first watch or second?”
“I’ll take the first watch,” Jack said.
“I’m always up before any of y’all anyway,” Arthur said, grinning, “so I don’t mind getting up a few hours earlier. Second watch for me it is then, first for you. From now until three in the morning, and I’ll take over then, okay?”
“Sounds good to me,” Jack said. He retrieved his AR-15 and some extra magazines, just in case, and he put on a bulletproof vest and combat helmet—Arthur had a few of these in his cellar, along with a lot of other military armaments, ammunition and equipment. If Mark wanted a war, he would certainly find one here, Jack thought grimly.
While everyone else got ready for bed, Jack and Arthur talked about how they would handle guard duty throughout the night. The first thing Arthur said was that the porch, which wrapped around half the cabin, was off-limits and was to be kept lit up all night. They had plenty of oil lamps and fuel for this, so keeping it illuminated wouldn’t be a problem. Jack would need to lurk in the shadows of the trees on the perimeter of the yard. Thus, he would be shrouded in darkness, while anyone who thought about trying to attack the cabin would have to step into the light, making them an easy target. Arthur also gave Jack some camouflage face paint to color whatever skin was visible outside the dark clothes he was wearing so that he would remain invisible in the shadows.
They decided on ten points that Jack would patrol between, staying at each point for fifteen minutes or so before stealthily moving on to the next. When Jack was ready, Arthur headed back into the cabin to get some sleep, leaving his younger brother alone in the dark woods around the cabin.
Jack sat quietly in the darkness, listening to the sounds of the night. Spring had not yet gotten into full swing, and the air was bracingly chilly, for some traces of winter still lingered, but it lacked the fierce bitterness of the past few months’ cold. Insects hummed and whined and buzzed, and a gentle breeze rustled the leaves of the evergreen trees. Above, the clear sky was a sea of sparkling stars. Jack sighed; it was so peaceful and serene here it was almost easy to forget why he was out here. He cautioned himself against complacency; despite the soothing nature of his surroundings, he must now allow himself to slip into a lull of complacency. Danger lurked somewhere in the shadow-thick forest, and he needed to be ready to confront it.
Time passed by slowly. In patches of starlight,
he was able to check the time on his mechanical wind-up watch—an item that was close to a hundred years old and handed down to him from his great-grandfather, which had been unaffected by the EMP—but every time he looked at the face it seemed as if very little time had passed at all.
Weariness kept creeping in, and if he stayed at one sentry post too long, his eyelids drooped and he started to drift into sleep. Even though he knew danger could very well be close, he could sometimes barely keep his eyes open, and after the first hour, his alertness began to drop.
Around midnight, the sharp crack of a nearby twig jolted him wide awake, and he dropped down to a crouch with his rifle shouldered, his heart suddenly hammering as he swept the rifle sights through the shadows, but he breathed out a long sigh of relief when he saw that it was only a deer.
The rest of the watch passed without trouble, and Jack was quite exhausted by the time Arthur came out to take over. When he crawled into bed next to Kate, he fell asleep moments after he closed his weary eyes.
It seemed that he had only been asleep for a minute or two when a bloodcurdling scream jolted him violently from his slumber. He and Kate scrambled to get out of bed, their eyes wide with confusion and fear as another scream tore through the cabin. It was Susan screaming, and Jack’s only thoughts were of protecting her. He sprang out of bed, snatching up his rifle as he did, flung open his door, and sprinted out to the living from, which was where the screams were coming from.
When he got into the living room, though, he saw that it wasn’t Susan who was in trouble. It was Arthur. He was lying on the floor in the pool of blood, breathing raggedly.
“The bastards … shot me,” Arthur gasped, his face pale.
“Uncle Arthur, oh my God, Uncle Arthur!” Susan screamed.
“Get ‘em … for me … Jack,” Arthur murmured. Then his eyelids fluttered briefly, and his eyes closed.
38
“Shit, shit, how did this happen?” Jack yelled.
“I don’t know, Dad,” Susan cried, dropping down onto her hands and knees next to Arthur, who was unconscious now. “I just got up to go to the bathroom, and I saw him lying there in a pool of blood!”
Outside, the sky was graying with the approaching dawn, so Jack knew a few hours had to have passed since he and Arthur had switched guard posts. The lamps were still burning on the porch outside, and when he peeked out of the door, he saw a trail of blood across the porch floor from where Arthur had dragged himself to the door. There was no sign of Mark or any other attacker, but Jack knew that they were out there somewhere. He quickly shut the door and locked it, and then hurried over to his brother. Dealing with the attackers was crucially important, but for now, saving Arthur’s life was his priority.
At this moment, Jack silently thanked his younger self for enrolling himself, Susan, and Kate in some advanced first aid courses—one of which had involved helping victims of gunshot wounds.
“Get Nick up, hurry,” he said to Susan. “And Grandpa and Grandma, we need everyone who can fire a gun to be watching the main doors, all three of them. Then you, me and your mom are going to do what we can to save Arthur.”
“Let’s get him up onto the dining room table,” Kate said, sweeping the items off the big table with one arm before yanking the tablecloth off with her free hand. “Susan!” she called out after her daughter, who was running to Nick’s door, “grab the big first aid kit from my room, please!”
She and Jack lifted Arthur and laid him down on the table.
“Must have been a powerful rifle to have got through this body armor,” Jack muttered. “Let’s get this bulletproof vest off and see how bad the damage is.”
He and Kate managed to get the bulletproof vest off and saw that Arthur had a large wound in his chest. The bullet had gone through his torso and lodged into the rear armor of the vest. Jack listened carefully to his brother’s breathing and then used a stethoscope from the kit Susan handed him to check Arthur’s heartbeat. Arthur’s breathing was ragged, but there was no sound or sign of blood in his lungs; that was a good sign, at least, but his heartbeat was very weak and growing progressively weaker.
“It looks like the bullet didn’t hit any major organs or arteries, but he’s lost a lot of blood,” Kate said, staring with horror at the big pool of blood on the floor. “Too much blood. He’s going to need a transfusion, or he won’t make it.”
“He and I have the same blood type,” Jack said. “Let’s get the entry and exit wounds stitched up and get the transfusion kit hooked up. We’ll get my blood into him.”
“He’s going to need a lot, Jack … more than you can give,” Kate said gravely. “You’ll be too weak to do anything for the rest of the day, perhaps even a few days. And we have enemies literally at the door…”
“If I don’t do this, my brother will die for sure,” Jack said. “I have to try, at least.”
Kate nodded, her expression severe. “Okay, okay. Let’s do this.”
While the others got into position to guard the doors, Kate and Jack cleaned and stitched up Arthur’s wounds, and then they hooked up the blood transfusion kit. Jack grunted and gritted his teeth as his wife stuck the needle into his veins and started slowly pumping his blood into his brother’s veins.
It didn’t take long for him to start feeling woozy, but he held fast, knowing that his brother’s life depended on receiving this blood from him. He only prayed that Mark and his men wouldn’t attack … but that prayer, it seemed, fell on deaf ears. Fifteen or twenty minutes after he began the blood transfusion, the booming crack of a gunshot echoed through the woods outside, accompanied simultaneously by the shattering of one of the living room windows as a bullet tore through it.
The projectile slammed harmlessly into one of the wooden pillars that supported the ceiling. Still, everyone hurled themselves flat onto the floor, realizing that a barrage of shots would surely follow this one.
A voice roared out from somewhere outside—a familiar voice, one that Kate, Jack, and Susan knew well—Mark. “Howdy, friends!” he shouted out mockingly. “Uncle Mark an’ his buddies have come to pay y’all a lil’ visit! We already done taken out ol’ Rambo there, an’ the rest a’ you motherfuckers is next! Not the lil’ ladies, though; we gon’ keep them bitches alive for some fun, the fun I didn’t get to have a couple of months back! You sons a bitches thought y’all could escape me, huh? Thought you could kill my buddies an’ get away with it? Nobody fucks with Mark McAllister an’ gets away with it, nobody! Y’all motherfuckers are about to pay!”
Jack lay on the ground and realized that he had a terrible choice to make. He could stop the transfusion now and let his brother die so that he still had enough strength to fight, or he could continue with the transfusion but get too weak to help his family, and pray that they could fend off Mark and his men … which would possibly result in all of them dying.
It was a horrendous choice to have to make, but he knew that it would have to be made … so he chose.
39
“I’m sorry, Arthur,” Jack whispered hoarsely as he gripped Kate’s wrist, signaling to her to stop pumping blood. “I know you’d understand why I have to do this.”
Kate helped him get the needle out of his vein, but more shots crashed through the windows, shattering them while they were doing that. Susan screamed, and Nick shouted out with both fear and anger, but nobody was hurt … yet. Outside, Mark howled with vicious laughter.
“They’re gonna be closing in soon,” Jack said, “and we don’t know how many of them are out there. We have to take the fight to them and buy ourselves a little time.” He tried to stand up but felt his head spin; he was woozy from blood loss. “Nick!” he yelled out, dropping back down to his knees, “get down to the cellar, there are a couple of grenades down there, and bulletproof vests, get enough for everyone!”
“I’m on it!” Nick shouted, racing across the living room, stooped down low to avoid the bullets that came crashing through the windows at increasingly regular in
tervals.
“Get back, everyone!” Jack said. “They’re concentrating their attack on the front of the cabin, and it’s only a matter of time before they try to storm it!”
“Where do we go, Dad?” Susan asked, her eyes wide with fright.
“I’m going to try to draw them in here, and on the north side of the house,” Jack said. “If I can keep their attention focused here, the rest of you can make a break for it out of the kitchen door. There’s good tree cover that way.”
Kate gasped with shock. “Jack, are you crazy? You can’t stay in here to fight them alone!”
“It’s the only chance we’ve got,” Jack said grimly. “And if you can get out of the cabin, up onto the ridge behind us, you’ll have the advantage of the higher ground; the boulders up there make excellent sniping spots where you’ll be able to get good clear shots at them from a position of cover. You, Susan, and Nick and my mother have to make a break for it.”
“What about you and Arthur? And your father?” Kate asked, ducking as another volley of gunshots crashed outside, sending bullets whizzing through the cabin, shattering glasses and smashing plates and slamming into the walls.
“We’ll get Arthur down into the cellar. It’s the only place he might be safe … if he even survives the damage the rifle shot did to him, which is not looking very likely right now,” Jack said grimly. “As for my father, I think he can speak for himself.”
Kenneth was holding Arthur’s AK-47 with a vice-tight grip and a look of sheer determination on his craggy face. “I may be slow and forgetful these days,” the old man said, “but I still remember how to shoot straight, and I’m not moving an inch from this cabin. I’m gonna take out as many of the bastards who did this to my boy as I can,” he said. “I might not live to see the sunset at the end of today, but if sacrificing my life to save everyone else’s is what it takes, then that’s what it takes. I’ve lived almost eighty years now, and the rest of you have your lives ahead of you. Let an old man die with courage in his heart and a rifle in his hand and consider mine a life well-lived.”
EMP Survival In A Powerless World | Book 22 | The Coldest Night Page 20