The Off Grid Survivor Box Set: Complete The Off Grid Survivor Series Books 1-4

by Connor Mccoy

  Camilla then took one step closer to block his view. “Well, someone’s a little anxious tonight,” Derrick said. “Did he take a long trip out of town? Well, that would be very, very convenient for me.”

  “I’m giving you three seconds to move your ass out of here,” Camilla said.

  “Oh, I’ll be happy to.” Derrick backed up, off the porch and onto the walkway leading up to it. “But you might want to vacate the house, and in a big hurry.”

  Camilla’s eyes widened. “Why?”

  Derrick grinned. “Ownership of this ranch has changed, to me. I’ve surrounded this whole house with my boys. At my command, they’ll turn this little homestead into Swiss cheese. So, do yourself a favor and move your pretty little rear out of my place.”

  “You son of a —” Camilla raised her weapon and opened fire.

  At close range, Derrick was easily struck, but her aim was off. Had she taken a few seconds to properly aim, she might have nailed Derrick in the head or someplace vital. Instead he dropped to the ground, but was very much alive.

  “Now!” Derrick shouted. “Fire!”

  Camilla quickly slammed the door shut and threw down the bar anchored next to the door. It fell right across the door, providing a solid brace that would make it very hard to get open from outside. “Liam! Carla! We got trouble!” she shouted.

  George and Teller rushed over to Derrick as the shots rang out toward the homestead. “You alright?” Teller grabbed Derrick by the shoulders. Derrick was clutching his side.

  Derrick pushed Teller aside. “Easy. You think I didn’t plan on this?” Derrick quickly got up, but not without George holding onto his right arm for support. Derrick knocked on his side. “Put on a Kevlar vest.” He winced. “Damn. It didn’t stop the bullet the whole damn way.” He hurried off toward the road while his men continued their assault.

  “Sir, why’d you leave yourself so open?” Teller asked.

  “I thought it was Conrad in there.” Derrick loosened up his vest as he walked. “The man’s too much of a good Samaritan just to gun you down in cold blood. I’ve seen him. He doesn’t have the eyes of a killer. I thought he’d give in, let us have his home.” Then he shouted in pain. By now he had pried the vest loose to reach underneath it. He pulled out a metal fragment with some blood on it. “What the hell did she shoot me with?”

  “Is it bad?” George asked.

  “No, the wound doesn’t feel deep.” Derrick tossed the bullet away. “Go tend to the house. Blow that bitch away. I’ll bind this up.”

  George and Teller raised their weapons and dashed off, leaving Derrick behind. Getting hit with that bullet took more out of him than he thought. How the hell did he mess this up?

  No, he didn’t mess up. He didn’t know Conrad’s girl would be in there. He should have let his men take the house first.

  As the gunfire continued, Derrick was content to stay out here and let it all play out. If it was just Camilla, she’d be overwhelmed in no time. And if a few of the boys got taken out in the process, it’d just be a few less mouths to feed from Conrad’s land.

  No, make that his land.

  Liam and Carla rushed toward the hall door as soon as they heard Camilla scream, “Liam! Carla! We got trouble!” Then, a series of loud pops rang out.

  “Hit the floor!” Liam cried out. He grabbed for Carla to push her down, but she was too far from his grasp. Fortunately, Carla had quick reflexes and made the dive herself.

  Carla put her hands over her head. “Shit, someone’s shooting at us!”

  Liam drew his gun. So, Camilla was right after all. But this was even worse than he could have imagined. The pops seemed to be all around them. One shot even penetrated the window over their heads.

  “Carla! Get in the closet!” Liam started crawling toward the door. “Barricade yourself!”

  “Are you kidding! You need my help! It sounds like there’s an army outside!” Carla retorted.

  “And if there is, you got to protect yourself!” Liam crawled faster. “Now go!”

  As Liam pushed the door fully open, he revealed Camilla, rushing down the hall toward to one of the back rooms, clutching her scoped rifle. Some of the windows were hastily blocked with wooden boards. Crouched down, Liam hurried into the hall and kept close on Camilla’s tail. She rushed into Conrad’s bedroom, smashed the rifle through the window glass, and opened fire.

  “Camilla!” Liam shouted from the doorway.

  “Find yourself a different window and start shooting! Derrick’s got us surrounded!” Camilla shouted as she broke away from the window and raced past Liam to the next room over. “The kitchen! Go there! Don’t let them into the house!”

  Carla pushed the sliding door of the closet in front of her. Her rifle was in her arms. She never had clutched something so powerful and so deadly in her life. It almost frightened her. Yet, she realized weapons like this were the key to survival, so any qualms quickly vanished.

  The sound of the pops outside made her skin crawl. Liam and Camilla were out in the halls, shooting back at their unseen assailants, and what was she doing? Ducking in a bedroom closet.

  What am I doing? I can’t hide in here! I have to help Liam!

  Her rifle then bumped her stomach. She ran her hand over her abdomen. No, no matter what she did, she wouldn’t be risking merely her own neck. Her child would be in danger, and if Carla died, her baby would suffer the same fate.

  Liam told me to stay out of this, she thought. But surely she could aim and fire out of the bedroom window once or twice, right? It might even frighten some of them off.

  Her fingers reached for the closet door. At that moment, one of the bullets hit the wall in the bedroom, the same wall that the closet lay in. The impact sent a tremor through the wall, and as Carla’s hand brushed the sliding door, she felt the quake to her fingertips.

  Her heart quickening, she quickly drew back. “Damn,” she whispered. What if she had gone out there? Just being in one wrong place at a critical moment could end her life.

  “Liam…” She cringed. She could do nothing but hide in here. While a comforting inner voice told her Liam and Camilla never would think less of her for hiding in here, it hardly helped as much as she wanted.

  Liam, still keeping his head down, reached the kitchen, but stopped as a few loud pops cut through the air. Then, nothing. The shooting seemed to move about outside, with one room taking hits, then another next to it, and so on. Their attackers likely were changing their positions, perhaps hoping to cover as much of the house as they could with gunfire.

  With their gunfire not trained on the kitchen, Liam saw his chance. He stood straight up, his back to the wall, and raised his gun. Then, he turned around to face the kitchen window. He gazed into the scope.

  Through the crosshairs, he could see one of the armed men. He wore a ski mask with a skull face on it. His gun was on his legs, and he was hastily shoving a magazine into it, but his clumsiness was impeding his efforts. Clearly, he wasn’t used to reloading a gun.

  Liam squeezed the trigger.

  The man lurched backward, releasing his gun, and falling over. He made a hit! The man lay still on the ground and did not move. Liam’s shot must have been fatal, or at least so severe that the man couldn’t get up without medical aid.

  A part of Liam felt sick inside. For so much of his life, he never had imagined he would have to kill another human being.

  You’re doing it for Carla and your family, Liam reminded himself as he hurried off to find another spot to shoot from.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I hate it when I’m right, Camilla thought as she squeezed the trigger again. She knew trouble was coming. She knew she would one day take up arms to defend Conrad’s home. But damn, why’d it have to come like this?

  The number of gunshots hitting the house suggested there had to be maybe seven or eight men outside. She had no choice but to wear them down from inside the house and keep any of them from getting inside. Fortunately, Conrad ha
d built his doors with locks and barricades that made breaking down any of them from the outside difficult. But that didn’t mean that one of them wouldn’t eventually give if assaulted with enough concentrated gunfire.

  So, she had to shoot from different spots in the house. If she shot from any one room for too long, the men might assume another part of the house was a safe place to try breaking in. Fortunately, not every sector of Conrad’s house had an entry door, but Camilla didn’t know what Derrick’s men might have up their sleeves. They could be carrying explosives. A well-placed explosive on one of the home’s windows might blow a hole big enough for Derrick’s army to enter, even blowing apart the wood they were using to block the windows.

  As she aimed through another window, she laughed. Mom, Dad, if you could see your city girl now.

  Then, she caught a break. One of the shooters was rushing toward the center of the crosshairs. She pulled the trigger. The man was struck in the arm and fell over. He tumbled across the grass, out of sight.

  If that man had any sense, he’d quit the fight now. Dammit, she thought. Are you assholes going to make me kill you?

  Conrad told her that people would come here in dark times. They would be desperate. Decency and civility would be driven from their spirits, to be replaced by an intense instinct to survive, no matter the cost. And if survival could be obtained by killing others and taking what they owned, so be it.

  It’s what separates us from the animals, Conrad once told her. We stick with our morals and beliefs. Without them, we turn on each other in the ugliest ways.

  Camilla hurried to the next window. Come on, give it up already, she thought as she looked through her scope and prepared to shoot again.

  Lance dove for the ground as the latest shot from the homestead rang out. His whole body shook. He hadn’t been able to get off a single shot in the past few minutes. Ever since gunfire started erupting from the home itself, he had been petrified. Derrick never told them Conrad would be fighting back, much less that the home had more people inside who used guns!

  How long had this battle been going on? There were so many loud pops in the air from gunfire that Lance’s ears stung. The sounds alone made it hard for him to make any clear shots at the house. Each time a gun was shot, he cringed and shut his eyes. More than once, he nearly was knocked over by one of his fellow shooters, who then cursed at him for not being more alert.

  Lance dashed to a small hill facing the home’s west side. Two more shooters were pumping in fire, but one of them just got nailed in the arm and tumbled over. Lance’s skin got cold. The wounded man was Kendall.

  “Dammit!” He rose to his feet and dashed away from the house as fast as he could. The other shooter retreated to the front of the house.

  “Hey!” George shouted as he rushed up to him from around back. “C’mon, man, we need some more fire! We—”

  George didn’t finish his sentence. A gunshot from the home struck him in his right arm. Crying out, George dropped onto the dirt.

  “George!” Lance ran up to him. “My God! You’re hit!”

  On the ground, George clutched his arm. “It hurts. Oh God, it hurts!” Blood gushed from an ugly wound on his arm. George just lay there and wept.

  “What do I do? What do I do?” Lance shook. George was in even worse shape than Kendall, as he didn’t even seem able to rise from the ground under his own strength. “Um, stop the bleeding. Yeah, stop the bleeding.” Then he rose and shouted to the front of the property, “Hey! Somebody help us!”

  Just then, Ethan came rushing in. “Keith! He’s dead!” He pointed to a fallen man on the ground some feet away.

  Lance and Ethan approached the fallen Keith from different sides. Their dead comrade lay on the ground, his rifle dropped into the grass next to his body. Blood trickled down his chest and across his arms. Ethan pulled off his mask. His face was still, and lifeless.

  Lance clutched his mouth. He thought he might throw up at any moment. He never had been in the presence of a dead human being before. He had avoided going to any funerals, even those of his own family, so he never had seen a human being in a coffin.

  Another of Derrick’s men hobbled into view, clutching his left leg. Blood trickled from it.

  This isn’t worth it, Lance thought as he ran back toward George. There’s no way there’s just one old man in that house. They were being hit from multiple sides of the homestead. There had to be two, maybe three, or more people holed up in there. Did Derrick lie to them? Did he know they’d be running into more trouble here? And where was Derrick, anyway? Lance had lost track of him the moment the battle began.

  “Maybe we should just bail on this and find somewhere else to go!” the man with the wounded leg cried out. “We can’t take this place!”

  “I hope I didn’t hear what I thought I heard,” Derrick said as he approached from their right. “We’ve got our salvation just waiting in that home and the fields beyond, and you want to cut out now?”

  “But we’re taking hits!” the wounded man protested.

  “So are they. We’ve got them outnumbered.” Derrick then turned to look at all the men present. “You got a choice. If you don’t take this house, you’ll die on the side of the road without food or water. This world’s only got what you can take, and we’re going to take this house.” He raised his gun high over his head. “Now, regroup, reload, and get ready for a second run. They’re not going anywhere. They can’t run or hide. If we don’t drop them to the floor, they’ll run out of ammo. Either way, we win.”

  The men who were unwounded or still could fight nodded and hurried off. George, however, could do nothing more than sit up. Lance walked toward George, but then Derrick stepped in and barred his path.

  “Hey. You’re not hit, are you?” Derrick asked.

  “No,” Lance replied.

  “Then join the others and start shooting when they do.”

  Lance gazed at George. “But…”

  “Leave him. He’ll be fine.”

  “But he’s bleeding badly.”

  “Do you have cotton in your ears, boy? We’re taking this place. And if you’re not helping, you’re sure as hell not getting anything from here, not so much as a crumb.”

  Lance gulped. No, he couldn’t be left out to starve again. He had come this far and knew nobody here, not in any nearby town, no one who would take pity on him in any way. He had to win this.

  He rushed off to rejoin the others.

  Liam noticed the rate of gunfire was decreasing substantially. Soon the gunshots had stopped altogether.

  “What the hell? Why are they stopping?” Liam asked.

  “I don’t know.” Camilla glanced at the window she just had shot through. “They might be running low on ammunition.”

  Liam’s mind replayed the scene of the man falling down after Liam had shot him. Would that really have rattled them to stop their shooting?

  “These guys might have been spooked after I shot that man.” Liam gestured to the window. “They’re not soldiers or guys who are used to gun assaults.”

  “Yeah, but if Derrick’s leading them, he’ll whip them back into a fighting frenzy soon enough.” Camilla reloaded her gun with a fresh magazine. “Carla. Go check on her, now.”

  “Right.” Liam hurried down the hall to their bedroom. His heart raced. Was she alright?

  He burst into their room. “Carla?” he cried out.

  The closet door slid open. “Liam!” Carla responded. Sweat dripped down her face. She looked completely unhurt.

  “Thank God.” Liam crouched down. “There’s a break in the action,” he said. “We might have spooked them. Hopefully, they’ll beat it, but Camilla thinks they’ll start shooting again soon if Derrick can goad them into it.”

  Carla nodded, her head shaking. “How are we going to know they’re gone? They might just hide and wait for us to come out.”

  Liam swallowed. “Yeah, you’re right. But we can’t go outside. We have to outlast them inside
. They can’t have unlimited ammo.”

  “Neither do you!” Carla scooted out of the closet.

  “Carla, what are you doing? Stay in there,” Liam said.

  “You need another gun,” Carla raised her rifle. “Three of us taking shots at them will be better than two.”

  “But you can’t put yourself out here. Just hide. We can take them down.”

  “Forget it. I can’t hide any longer. What will happen if you die? And they shoot Camilla? Then they break in here and I’m dead anyway!”

  Liam raised his voice, though he hated to, especially to Carla. “Carla, it’s too risky!”

  “What? You think each day is nothing but a peaceful day in the countryside? No, every damn day is now risky.” Carla put the gun across her chest. “Sorry, Liam, but if we want to live, we’re going to have to fight for ourselves. I’m no different.”

  “There’s movement outside, lovebirds!” Camilla called. “You better get ready for round two, because they’re coming at us again!”

  Carla dashed out of the room. Liam shouted, “Carla!” but he stopped short of restraining her.

  He couldn’t help but feel that she was right. He wanted to protect her, but they were low on options. They couldn’t expect help of any kind to arrive. If Derrick’s army was going to be stopped, he, Carla and Camilla would have to be the ones to do it.

  Carla took up a position inside Conrad’s bedroom. She peered through the scope as if it all came easily to her. Then, she pulled the trigger, shooting a round through the already shot up glass pane.

  Liam quickly took a position at his bedroom window. Camilla was right. The men outside were taking new positions and raising their guns. It was time to rejoin the fight.

  “C’mon!” Cal shouted, “Let’s waste them!”

  The men started firing on the homestead, but almost instantly, gunfire from the house assaulted them. Lance was about to shoot, but the return fire made him duck again. Instead, he waited as the shots zinged from the house. Then he heard another scream, then a thud onto the ground. Conrad, and whoever was helping him, had taken out another of their force, in this case, the man who was previously shot in the leg. A quick glance told Lance the man was not so lucky this time—the shot struck him in the head. His eyes were open in frozen death.