Fall of Houston Series | Book 3 | No Turning Back

by Payne, T. L.

  “I’m going to kill you! I’m going to gut that boy of yours. You took my son from me, and I’m going to make you pay. I’m going to skin your son alive right in front of you. You hear me, Will Fontenot? I’m going to make you wish you’d never been born.”

  Will’s head bounced off the floor repeatedly as he shook him. He could smell the stench of Blanchard’s breath and feel its warmth on his cheek. At that moment, Will thought he was going to die. But if Buzz didn’t kill him, he’d never let him get anywhere near his son.

  The glass broke near the front of the building, startling Buzz. He stopped his assault on Will long enough for him to shift his weight. He arched and attempted to throw him off, but Buzz held onto his shoulders. A barrage of rounds struck the facade.

  “Go!” Buzz told Derek and Wade. Secure the building. No one gets in.”

  As they ran toward the front of city hall, Buzz stood, hauling Will with him. Will repositioned himself and struck out with his foot, kicking at Buzz’s knee. He dropped but pulled Will down with him. They rolled, each struggling to be the one that came out on top. Will landed a blow to Buzz’s midsection and found himself on top. He reached back to deliver a blow to the man’s face, but someone caught his hand from behind. He was yanked back and found himself on his back with Valson Blanchard’s boot seated on his chest.

  “Lucky for you, old man, that I showed up when I did,” Valson said, as Derek and Wade applied flex cuffs to Will’s wrists.

  He was shoved into an office chair and wheeled into the council chambers. As soon as the swing doors opened, Will gasped. The smell was appalling. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed it before now. The grotesque faces of the former city council members stared back at him from the seats on the dais. They’d killed them all and staged them there. All except the mayor. Had they refused to go along with Buzz taking over the town?

  Will was pushed down the aisle toward the podium in front of the dais. What was the point of this? Will was having a hard time wrapping his head around such insanity. He tried to read the madman’s face, but he was expressionless. If he was revolted by the scene before them, he wasn’t showing it.

  “What’s going on here?” Will asked him.

  “Shut up!” Buzz yelled. “You don’t get to speak.”

  “What have you done here? This is madness,” Will said.

  Buzz rushed from behind him, spun the chair around, and got in his face. “You see what I’m going to do to your boy and the bitch with him. And whoever else is out there shooting at my men.”

  “He’s just a kid,” Will spat. “He’s thirteen years old. He’s never hurt anyone in his life.”

  “You think I give a flying flip how old your spawn is? They killed my boy. You people barged into my town, and now they’re out there running around shooting people. We will find them and when we do, I’m going to make them an example for everyone to see.” He leaned back. In his eyes was the look of pure insanity.

  Whether it was the years of drugs or he’d been born mentally ill didn’t matter at this point. There’d be no stopping him, no reasoning with him. Will prayed that Monte and Walker would just take Cayden and Isabella and get far away from Vincent.

  “Find them,” Buzz barked as he stomped back up the aisle toward the door.

  As soon as he was out of earshot, Will tried to reason with Derek. They’d never been close but Will had always tried to remain civil and friendly to the man when he was still with Savanah. Whatever he was, he was still her children’s father.

  “Derek, you have to help me. You can’t let that animal near my son.”

  “Why should I help you, Will?” He pointed to the dais. “That’s what helping you will get my family and me.” He leaned in. “Including your sister and her kids.”

  Those words were like daggers in his heart. The thought that they’d go after Savanah and the kids too chilled him to the bone. He tried to stand, but Derek pushed him back down. “There has to be something we can do?”

  “If there was, don’t you think the town would have done it already.”

  “How many of them are there? There can’t be more of them than the people in this town. We can fight them together.”

  “After witnessing this,” Derek nodded toward the dais, “the town is too scared to come out of the church basement.”

  Twenty-Eight

  Savanah

  Day Eight

  Blake looked like he was going to throw up. “You’re sure they weren’t some of ours?” he asked, his face in his hands.

  Jason nodded. “We’re sure. I don't know who they were, but definitely not US Military.”

  Luca twisted his hipster Viking braid around and around his finger. His fidgeting made Savanah’s anxiety even worse. “How confident can you be that they were military at all?”

  “They were all dressed alike and heavily armed. They looked to have some type of specialized communication equipment with their own satellite dish and everything,” Jason said.

  “Still, how can you be certain they weren’t ours?” Luca asked.

  “Well… they were all Asian and weren’t speaking English.”

  Savanah rested her head on her knees. She’d been nauseated ever since Jason had first told her about the “scouts,” as he called them. She couldn’t imagine a foreign enemy on American soil. The United States had the best military on the planet. How could this happen? How could any of this have happened?

  “I’m ninety-nine percent certain they were part of a foreign military force. Pete thinks that they are the ones responsible for the lights and everything not working. The question for us is, what can we do to protect ourselves?”

  “What can we do? We’re no match for an army,” Jane said, reaching out and taking Luca’s hand.

  “For now, we should prepare. We should make sure we have water and food stored in various locations, not just here but somewhere else if we have to flee in a hurry. Also, we should expand our perimeter, so we have advance notice if we get troops in the area.”

  “We can hide until they pass. Surely we wouldn’t be their target,” Luca said.

  Jason raised one eyebrow. “That’s one option. I do think we should find a place for the children and those who can’t fight.” Savanah fought the urge to look at Mr. and Mrs. Bertrand. They’d been quiet through the whole discussion.

  “In World War II, the Nazis went house to house,” Mrs. B said.

  “We have the false room,” Savanah said. “Where we have all the food stored now, it's a hidden room. If you close the door, it just looks like a shelf inside the smaller pantry.”

  She and the children had hidden in there before. She’d told them it was a hurricane drill, but she’d been avoiding Wade, one of Mayor Thibodeaux’s scumbags.

  “We’ll move what we can into there and plan on the children remaining there,” Jason said.

  “We’ll stay with them,” Mrs. B said, looking at her husband.

  “I can still shoot. I can’t run much, but I’ve got a damn good aim.”

  “Good,” Jason said. “You’ll be the last line of defense for the children then.”

  “We’d need to move my in-laws in there too. Herbert might complain, but he can’t see worth a shit. He’d only be in the way.”

  “Herbert ain’t never been a good shot. He couldn’t hit the broad side of the barn if he was standing right in front of it.”

  “So, I’ll prepare them for that possibility and arrange a way to move them over here quickly,” Blake said.

  “What about the animals?” Jane asked.

  “We could have a few cages ready for some of the hens, but the room won’t hold much more than that,” Savanah said.

  Jane frowned. It would be devastating if anything happened to the livestock and other animals they relied on for food. But there was nowhere to move them to that would be safe from an invading army.

  “We need to beef up our perimeter defenses and add some early warning systems,” Blake said.


  “How? Look around. We’re spread out with open fields between the homes. What kind of defenses can we possibly install to stop an army?” Luca asked.

  Blake jabbed a thumb over his shoulder toward Savanah’s driveway. “Buried spike strips for a start. There are many more things like that we can do for anyone on foot. They’d need to get out of their vehicles to search houses, right?”

  “What about the early warning system?”

  “I was thinking we should have a talk with the folks over near Choupique and see if we can work together for a common defense. Anyone coming from the south would pass through there first. They would be considered our outer security zone. We would ask them to send someone to provide us with advance notice at the first sign of an invading force. In exchange, we could be their fallback position.”

  “I have a cousin down that way. He has a big family. I bet they’d go around and get support for something like that. He served in the navy too. He might have some ideas,” Mrs. B said.

  Blake looked at Luca. “We need someone to ride over there and have a talk with them.”

  Luca raised his eyebrows.

  “Can you ride a horse?” Blake asked him.

  Luca cocked his head to one side and his eyes narrowed questioningly. “Yeah.”

  “You can ride down there then.”

  “How far away is it?”

  “Eight miles,” Mrs. B said. “I can write you a note to give to Walter.”

  “We need to establish an outpost at that Y-intersection two miles from here. They’d have to pass that way if they came by vehicle.”

  Savanah sighed heavily. “This is all getting so complicated. We just don’t have enough people for this.”

  “We have Pete and his family, along with Rod. I think we should go back and talk to the rest of the neighbors who haven’t fled yet and fill them in. They may be more willing to take part now, maybe guard an outpost,” Jason said.

  “While Luca runs down to Choupique, I’ll work on burying our pre-emergency caches.”

  “Our what?” Jason asked.

  “Pre-emergency caches—or essential supplies, like ammo and extra weapons, along with food and water in case we get pinned down or surrounded.”

  “Sounds good,” he said. Savanah detected some skepticism in his voice.

  They were in over their heads. They weren’t trained fighters. None of them, besides Blake, had any tactical training or experience. They were farmers and homesteaders. Give her a goat with a sore hoof—no problem. An aggressive buck or ornery rooster—she knew how to handle that—but trained fighters with military-grade weapons, how could they possibly hope to win against those odds. Their only chance was to stop them before they reached the farms.

  “We could take out that bridge over Gray Gully,” Savanah said. “They could drive through the field, but not in a heavy truck, tanks, or anything. They’d get stuck for sure.”

  “How are we going to take out a bridge?” Luca asked.

  Savanah lifted one shoulder.

  “We may not be able to blow it up, but we could block it. It would slow them down,” Mr. B said. “There are enough old tractors around that we could pull over there and pile up.”

  “If we had time, that might be worth doing,” Jason said. “I just don’t think that we do.”

  The wheels in Savanah’s brain were spinning, trying to think of an effective way to keep a military force from entering their area. There weren’t that many roads leading to Sugar Cove. The unincorporated area southeast of Vincent was home to maybe seventy people—most were related somehow. There had been an influx of new people in the last few years as the older generation moved into town or passed and left their farms to relatives—some of whom chose to sell—like the Guidrys who’d sold over a hundred acres to the developer of Sugar Hill.

  She thought about the wall around their community. It was scalable, but it would slow someone down. She wished they had time to build something similar, but that could take weeks, if not months. The best they could do was the defensive measures she and Jason had employed to keep people from coming down her driveway.

  “I can get the kids working on more spike strips,” Savanah said.

  Mr. B smiled. “I got some ideas for booby traps and punji pits.”

  Mrs. B cocked her head slightly and looked down her nose at him.

  “I’ve watched Rambo dozens of times,” he said.

  “You’re Rambo now?” she asked.

  “If I were twenty years younger. I can build a fire with sticks.”

  Mrs. B chuckled and touched his arm. “And matches.”

  Savanah envied their loving relationship. No matter what was ahead of them, they’d had a long and remarkable life together with many beautiful memories. What would her children remember about the pre-apocalypse days? Derek—and Wade?

  She shoved the thoughts of them aside and turned her attention to Blake and Jason. She studied their faces. They’d do what they could to protect the community and prepare them for what may be coming. It was a relief to have some type of plan, even though Savanah knew they were no match for a well-armed adversary. Before doing anything, she was going to repack her children’s bug-out bags. As much as she wanted to fight and save the farm, it wasn’t worth the risk of losing her children. If the enemy got close, they’d bug out—she just wasn’t sure to where yet.

  Savanah followed Jason into the house. He looked exhausted after being up for over twenty-four hours. His five o’clock shadow had grown into something closer to a beard. He could also use a shower or a stronger deodorant. She pulled her T-shirt up to her nose—they all could. She was amazed at the relief she felt having him back home. Home? A little more than a week ago, he’d lived in town and came out two or three times a week to help out around the farm. It wasn’t that she’d never thought about a relationship with Jason. It was more that she’d thought about it and dismissed it—not really because of anything about him personally. It was his family. She’d made that mistake before and didn’t want to repeat it. What about now? What had changed?

  “Why don’t you get a few hours of shut-eye before you run off again?” Savanah said as he peeled out of his sweaty shirt and threw it onto the stack of laundry piling up in the mudroom. He turned, flashing her his six-pack abs. Savanah had to look away. She didn’t want the distraction. Not right now. She needed to tell him about talking to his brother and she wasn’t looking forward to it. He would be pissed for sure, but he needed to know that his father may send his goons out looking for him. That could end badly.

  “I just need to grab a bite to eat and maybe a cup of coffee, then I’ll help you get things moved into the safe room for the kids and the Bertrands.”

  She’d hoped to have more time—that maybe he’d take it better after a nap—but it appeared that wasn’t going to happen.

  Savanah placed the steaming cup of coffee down next to Jason’s plate and took a seat across from him. She waited until his mouth was full of Mrs. B’s sourdough bread before blurting out that she’d been to talk to Valson.

  “You what!” Jason spat, bread and spittle flying across the table. His face reddened.

  Savanah tensed. “You were missing.” Her voice was high. “I thought he might have done something to you.”

  “And you thought you’d just walk down there and ask him. Savanah…!” Veins popped out in his neck.

  “I know. I know. It gets worse,” She scrunched her face. “He was going into town to tell your dad.” She leaned back in her seat and tried to make herself smaller.

  Jason closed his eyes and huffed then shook his head and opened his eyes. After he drew in a deep breath and let it out, he said, “I appreciate that you were concerned for me. I do. And I’m glad that you didn’t get hurt and leave your kids orphans.”

  Ouch! That hurt.

  She didn’t appreciate it. Was he calling her an unfit mother? She heard Derek’s voice in her head.

  No! They’re nothing alike.

  Jas
on looked after her kids in ways their biological father never had. She knew if something happened to her that he’d lay down his life for them. It was one reason she was falling for him—that, and he looked damn handsome when he was mad.

  “I’m very sorry. I shouldn’t have done that, I know. I can go back and let Valson know that you’ve returned and tell him to call off the dogs.”

  “No!” Jason barked. He paused and then held up a hand. “No. I’ll do it. I don’t want you anywhere near those animals.”

  She had complicated things, and now Jason had to fix it. In the mood he was in and as tired as he was, things could get ugly quickly. Regret stabbed at her heart.

  He pushed away from the table, grabbed his rifle and the small backpack he’d taken to carrying everywhere, and started for the door. “I’ll be back in thirty minutes. If for some reason I’m not, don’t come looking for me, Savanah. Stay here and make things safe for the kids.” He put his hand on the doorknob. “But I’ll be back. Don’t worry.”

  She’d worry—of course, she would. If something happened to him at Sugar Hill, she’d never forgive herself. In hindsight, she didn’t know what she’d been thinking of going there. Jason had been right. She’d need to be more careful—her children’s lives depended upon it.

  Blake and Mr. B helped Savanah, Kendra, and Keegan roll barbed wire out on the ground along the fence line in a crisscross or lattice pattern where it intersected less than an average human step. It was tacked up with stakes at various heights from ankle to knee level in the tall grass and the undergrowth that ran along the canal at the back of the property.

  “We’ll leave this area here open,” Mr. B said.

  Savanah stared at the path that led to the canal. “Why? Don’t we want to stop them from getting close to the house?”

  “We want them to use the path. Think of it like a funnel. It’s better than them spreading out. It will make them easier to hit.”

  “Counterattack kill zones,” Blake said.