Within a few minutes, they were finished, handing over the bag and their plates with face-splitting grins. “What do you kids say to the generous gentleman?”
“Thank you,” they chimed in unison.
“Children have to be reminded to show gratitude,” she said. “I’m Jade. These are Kenneth and Dawn.”
“Hello, Mr….”
“Call me Trevor.” He looked back at the woman. “So, what exactly was the problem you were having with the food storage?”
“Well, it’s mainly that we got confused about where certain things go. I don’t recall all the details, but we just made some bad choices, put some food in the wrong containers, and didn’t remember to keep stuff covered. By the time we remembered, it was too late. And all the food went bad. Do you know where things go if they’re intended for long-term storage?”
Hatfield searched the darkest cavity of memory to retrieve the answer. He recalled hearing his father say something about which kinds of items can be placed in storage and which others don’t need to be.
From behind, the guard said, “A lot depends on how much storage space you have. How much do you have?”
Jade shrugged. “I haven’t measured it. I can’t say for sure.”
A pained looked spread across his face. “I can’t really answer your question if I don’t know exactly what the problem is. You have any pictures of it so I can take a look?”
“I don’t have any pictures. But our bunker’s just a few blocks down the street, by the Takahoma. Next to the red house that had its roof blown off in the riots.
He turned to Hatfield. “Can you take over for me while I go take a look at it?”
“Go right ahead. Just make sure you’re safe out there. It’s getting close to nightfall.”
“No worries,” he said, jumping the fence, rifle strapped to his back.
Hatfield watched the four of them trail off into the distance. It was a sweet image, but in the back of his mind, he wondered if there was a danger to it that none of them could see. The four of them alone, only one of them armed, drifting into a world that had fallen in chaos.
He scanned the landscape, seeing no red flags. But the danger was out there, just waiting. Moments like this made him think of his father and made him wish he were more grateful for his upbringing. His father understood how dangerous and unstable a place the world really was, and he understood exactly how to prepare for it. He’d prepared his son—his only child—to be armed against it. But his son had let him down.
As he watched the setting sun fade behind the wreckage and debris of the city, he hoped for a chance to redeem himself. But for the time being, he was still groping for answers.
24
The gangbanger stayed crouched in the weeds, waiting. Niko was there to take a shot at the guard if one was available, but he didn’t have one. He was close enough to hear the conversation between this guard and the one who took off for the woman’s compound, but taking a shot would be risky. Too many people would come after him before he could have made it back to the barn.
But what he had now was more valuable than a shot at a guard. He had knowledge that Nathan needed and might possibly reward him for. That woman had missiles within her bunker. That would be something the leader needed to know.
Before racing back to the barn, Niko waited for the guard to move away from his spot. It took a while, but eventually, he did, giving him just the time to scurry back to the others, barely able to keep himself from giggling like a high school prom queen.
The noise of revelry and shouted joy could probably be heard for miles beyond the barn. Being well-fed put the gangbangers in good spirits. Nathan watched them dance and fire pistols into the air triumphantly, but he didn’t share their sense of triumph.
The exchange of food was, at best, a truce, not a victory. If they wanted to have full access to everything those homesteaders had, they’d need another plan. The fact that they didn’t want to endure the day-to-day pain-in-the-ass struggle involved with running the compound didn’t mean they had to settle for a half-ass win. Free food would only get them so far. They needed to take that place, but they needed to do it in a way that worked for them, a way that didn’t demand that they had to know what they were doing in that place.
Zan was in the middle of an arm-wrestling match when Nathan called him over, causing the grin to disappear from his face right away. Panicked by the urgency in his boss’s face, he leaped up from his seat despite being seconds away from a win.
“You wanted something, boss?”
“Yes, a few things. Number one, tell those idiots to stop firing shots into the air. We’re going to need every bullet if we want to stay ready at all times.
Zan started to race away, but Nathan grabbed his shoulder, tugged him back. “But first, we need to get an inside look of what that place looks like.”
“You mean the compound?”
“Yeah, we need to know if we can realistically run it and how.”
“You want me to torture those homesteaders for info?”
He shook his head. “Come on, dude. You know I do all the torturing myself. I can’t let you guys keep all the fun for yourselves. Give me that whip, and let’s go.”
With a subtle wave, he gestured for the three homesteaders to be yanked to the center barn. “Okay, you three! It’s time for you to tell us what you know about the inside of that place.”
Their faces stretched into terrifying masks. “We’ve told you everything we know!” The woman sobbed, “Please don’t hurt us anymore!”
He stooped to meet the woman’s face. “I will hurt you as much or as little as I feel like! It's that clear! And right now, I feel like hurting you a lot. Besides, you don’t have much to complain about anyway. You’ve been spared the worst of it because we don’t want you all scarred up. Not for what we’ve got in mind for you!”
A gangbanger in the middle of the crowd growled, “To be honest, long as it’s been since we’ve been with a woman, I’m thinking scarred or unscarred don’t really matter much in the grand scheme of things.”
Nathan intimidatingly lifted an eyebrow. “The man’s got a point. With that in mind, let’s see how you look with a few scars on you.”
“Hold on a second!” shouted a voice from the side. It was the gangbanger sent on a mission.
“What is the problem?” Nathan yelled, his voice heavy with annoyance.
“We’re wasting our time with these three. I found out about this new place we should be thinking about.”
“What place?”
“I don’t know the address exactly, but it’s a bunker down by the river.”
“And?”
“Well, the place is stocked with missiles and missile launchers!”
“Missiles? And missile launchers?” Nathan hissed. “Can somebody even have that kind of stuff in their home?”
“I don’t know, but look, maybe she meant to say grenade launchers or something else, and she said missiles. That’s not the point. Whatever it is she’s got in there is worth getting ahold of.”
“Why? We have all we need right now to get control of that compound. Our problem is it would be a pain in the ass to have to run everything.”
“No, no, you’re not listening to me! You’re still talking about taking over the compound, but we could be thinking a lot bigger than that. We could take over the whole city! I mean, if we’ve got actual military weaponry—”
“Look, we don’t have time for bullshit—”
Zan—ever the diplomat—found a gentle way to interrupt his boss. “Actually, Nathan, he may have a point. If we can get our hands on a bunker with that kind of weaponry—even if she’s exaggerating what it is exactly—we could seriously take everything over. We could totally be in charge of the whole city, what’s left of it, at least.”
Nathan stayed silent for a second, giving his head a slow shake. “I’m beginning to like the idea the more I think of it. If we get control of that bunker, this city is ou
rs; this city is ours! Every square inch. We get our hands on some weaponry like that, and we take this place and be powerful enough to run everything. Unlimited access to food. Total control of the people. That will be our goal. But first, we have to take it. So let’s go!”
They rounded the guys up and sent them creeping forward in the weeds, heads down, guns up. Once there, it didn’t take long to find the bunker. It was a slightly sunken concrete structure covered mostly with grass.
From this distance, it looked damn near impenetrable. “Any chance that we can get into that place?” Nathan asked Zan.
“Doesn’t look like it,” his second-in-command replied.
“We may not have to,” Niko added. “The guy who went in wasn't planning on being in there all night. So really, we just have to wait things out until he comes out, then we charge the door and get inside.”
“All right, guys,” he said as they neared the place. “Step one is we wait for some to leave the place, and then we pounce.”
After nearly an hour passed, the gang started to grow restless, with some even threatening to head back to the barn. But when the back door of the bunker swung open, it was clear things were right on track.
They charged the door as the homesteader fumbled to get his rifle into his hands and fully trained, but he couldn’t get there quickly enough. He was shot down as the woman filled the nighttime air with a horrifying screech.
She had never fully walked out, so when the gangers began firing away, she was able to fall back inside. From outside, the gangbangers could hear her stumbling to her feet, and when they tried to shove the door open, they could feel her weak efforts to push the door shut. She whimpered as they shoved harder and harder, sending her to the floor in a matter of seconds.
Once inside, they saw her body scurrying to her feet and racing into the next room. The guys jumped after her, but Nathan stopped them. “No, no, no. I want to take this myself. You guys have had enough fun already.”
He laughed maniacally as her hysterical cries grew wilder and louder. When she clumsily picked herself up off the floor and scampered out of the kitchen and down a dark hallway, this only brought more joy to his eyes. He liked a good game of hide-and-seek. And as he tiptoed after her, gesturing for the guys to stay at the door, he said, “Come out, come out wherever you are!”
No answer.
He crept into the dark hallway, actually just an elongated tube, like the kind that connected the plane to an airport terminal. He kept going, no idea where she was. But that only made the game more fun. At the end of the long tube, he found himself in a compact cube-shaped room. There were three doors, two at the sides, one straight ahead.
He flung the one at his side open. This revealed nothing but more darkness. The game was getting to be a challenge, but he liked that.
“Marco!” he yelled. After another minute of creeping forward and hearing nothing, he screamed, “Hey! You’re supposed to say—”
Out of the next door, a hand jabbed out, spraying something in his eyes, mace or maybe something worse. “Arrgh!” he howled as three small bodies raced out of the doorway, shoving him to the floor.
Eyes in agony and vision blurred, he could hear their footsteps tap away into the distance. “What the hell happened?” somebody called into the room.
“She maced me. That’s what happened!”
“She got out?” Zan asked. “Shit, let’s go!”
“No, no,” he said, climbing to his feet. “Let her go. We got what we came for. We came to get ahold of this place, and now that we’re here, we just have to make sure that damn missile is here. And Niko, wherever the hell you are,” he said, groping around, vision still impaired, “You better hope it is here if you don’t want to get shot in the face.”
They all split up as Nathan leaned against the wall, eyes slowly coming back to focus, the pain still sharp but fading slightly. He laughed to himself, not remembering the last time he’d had this much fun.
Hearing that bell in the middle of the night, waking up everybody, wasn’t something that had happened before. So Hatfield knew it must have been alerting everybody to something serious.
“What’s going on, Dad?” Justin asked.
“No idea, Justin, but I get the feeling it’s something we better pay attention to.” The Hatfield family jumped into their clothes and left the room, meeting everybody else gathered in the living room.
Jade—the woman he’d seen earlier, was there, her small body shaking with tears. Her kids—also distraught—were there too. The three of them were huddled together as if they’d just experienced something horrific.
A group of homesteaders gathered around her, watching her, waiting for her to catch her breath and find enough of her bearings to speak. When she finally pushed words from her quivering mouth, she said, “They got him. They killed him!”
“Who, ma’am?” Cecil asked.
She couldn’t bring herself to say his name, but Hatfield knew who she was talking about—even though he never knew the man’s name.
“Ryan!” she said, the name buried in desperate sobs. “They came out of nowhere and started firing as we left the bunker. They must have been waiting for him, waiting for us.”
Cecil’s face was creased by confusion. “Hold on a second, ma’am. You’re talking about Ryan? Ryan Hasselbeck? One of our homesteaders? What was he doing in your bunker? I was under the impression he was out on guard duty.”
Hatfield stepped forward, answered the question the woman couldn’t. “He was assisting her some food storage problems, Captain. He asked if I could cover for him while he went over to her bunker to help, and… well, we see what happened. I take full responsibility.”
Cecil’s expression was hard to read. The confusion on his face was lingering. He took a deep breath and asked her, “I understand if you’re in too upset a state to answer any of these questions, but was there anybody else harmed during all of this?”
“Not as far as I know,” she replied. “The three of us hid in a closet, then ran out and left once they attacked.” She spat out a small laugh. “I remember Mike—my husband—saying something about adding an escape hatch, but he never got around it. So we had to use mace and—” She collapsed into tears.
As the woman was ushered toward the living room couch, along with her kids, Cecil said, “I would like to speak with Mr. Hatfield alone.” The crowd dispersed, and the two of them were alone, with nothing protecting Hatfield from the captain’s laser glare.
“I know what you’re going to say, and yes, I made a bad call,” he said. “And it cost a man his life. You have no idea how bad I feel about all of that and—”
Cecil stopped him. “Trevor, you feel bad enough as it is. I didn’t come over here to browbeat you. I just anticipated that you may have some objections to the course of action we have to take here.”
“What course of action are we talking about here?”
“Don’t make me say it. We have to turn this woman away. We’ll let them stay for the night, but by morning, we’ll have to let them go.”
“But, Captain—”
“I’m afraid that is my final word. I just felt I’d tell you this now so you didn’t attempt to blindside me as you did the last time.”
“Captain, we need to get that woman’s bunker out of these people’s hands.”
“You want us to risk the remaining troops we have fighting for the bunker of some family we don’t know? Trevor, that’s madness.”
“No, no. Our reasons for getting that bunker back have nothing to do with this woman. She’s got things there that could put us all at risk if put into the wrong hands.”
“Such as?”
“A missile.”
“Excuse me?”
“She didn’t seem entirely clear what the device was, but whatever it was, we need to be concerned. These are not people who should have access to that kind of weaponry.”
“Trevor, they have us outnumbered. If they’d wanted to attack, they wo
uld have done this by now.”
“It’s not us I’m thinking about. They could take full control of the city, maybe more.”
Cecil’s voice softened. “It pains me to say this, but it’s not our job to save the world—or even the city or neighborhood. The world is already in chaos. It will stay that way regardless of what we do. The best we can do is protect ourselves, and dammit, if you look around at all the men we’ve lost recently, we haven’t been doing a great job of that.”
“But this woman’s family—” Hatfield stopped himself before launching into a rebuttal. “Okay, I understand.”
After a tap on the arm, the captain stepped away, leaving his honorary lieutenant with a headful of troubling thoughts. He glanced across the living room, catching sight of Jade and her family, their faces showing polite smiles. But it wasn’t clear what kind of panic may have lurked beneath them. His mind raced in circles, looking for a way to make things happen.
But it wouldn’t be easy. As much as he wanted to help this woman and her family, he knew in his heart that Cecil was right. The world was now a different place, a dangerous place that was awash in chaos and insanity. The question wasn’t just should they save the world, but could they?
25
After the middle-of-the-night interruption and the intense episode that ensued, more sleep was hard to come by. Hatfield stepped out of the compound without a sound, not sure what he was hoping for. An idea to help Jade’s family? A way to crush the gang at the barn? Any of these things would have been nice. But he’d happily settle for an encouraging word.
He approached the guard out front, hands up so as not to startle him. The guard turned, rifle waist-high. “I come in peace, brother. Lazenby, right?”
Lazenby chuckled. “Yeah. Didn’t mean to draw on you, buddy. Just a reflex.”
“No worries.”
“Out here for a smoke break?”
“No. Can’t sleep. Through about getting some target practice, but after all the drama lately, gunshots in the middle of the night may not make me the most popular guy around here.”
Survive the Day Boxset: EMP Survival in a Powerless World Page 15