“Here you are, though,” Nick said. “That day came all right.”
“It sure did. You see, maybe, I thought, when Kate and I had reached retirement age and Susan had grown up and gotten married and started a family of her own, we could come out here and live peacefully, in harmony with nature, for our golden years. I always thought I’d finish out my career in the city, then move back here. Kate believed the same, of course … but life has a way of upsetting even the most well-laid plans, and the EMP strike certainly did that in a spectacular way. But in a way, I’m glad it forced us out here, because like you, I never realized just how much I would love living like this and how deeply satisfying it would be. Of course, I don’t mean to say that I’m grateful for all the suffering that came with the EMP and everything it unleashed, but I’m glad that we made it out here alive and safe, and that we’re now thriving here.”
“It all worked out for us, didn’t it?” Nick said. “Well, speaking of work, I need to get back to it. There’s still a section of the field that needs to be worked, and if I go hard, I can get it done before sundown.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Jack said. “Susan actually sent me here with a message for you. She wondered if you wanted to take a hike out to the big waterfall with her? If you leave now, you can get there and back before it’s dark. Go on. You’re well ahead of schedule here. You can leave the rest of this for tomorrow.”
Nick and Susan had grown very close since they had come here, and Jack and Kate approved of the romance that was blossoming between the two young people. Nick was an honest, honorable, and hardworking young man, and just the sort of man Jack had hoped his daughter would marry one day. That day was, of course, a number of years away, but Jack knew that it was good for both of them to have someone of their own age to hang out with, instead of being in the company of middle-aged adults the whole time.
Nick didn’t need much encouragement to spend time alone with Susan. He grinned at Jack. “Sure thing, I wouldn’t mind taking the rest of the day off and having a good hike out to the waterfall.”
“Go on then,” Jack said. “Susan’s waiting for you at the cabin. I’ll grab the shovel and the pick and get everything else packed up here for you. Go on, get outta here!” he said, playfully punching Nick on the shoulder.
Nick laughed and jogged through the woods to the cabin, where Susan, already decked out in her hiking gear, was waiting for him. “Took you long enough,” she joked, flashing him a wink and a sparkling smile that made him weak in the knees.
“I’ll be out in a second. Let me just put on a fresh shirt,” Nick said, running into the cabin to his room.
Half an hour later, they were deep in the woods on the trail that led to the waterfall. Its thundering roar boomed through the trees, and the low rays of the setting sun illuminated the forest with golden light. Nick and Susan walked along, hand in hand, chatting idly and enjoying both the picturesque, serene surroundings and each other’s company.
“It’s so beautiful out here,” Susan said. “I miss dancing and my classes and my friends, of course, but there’s nothing else I miss about the city.”
Nick was about to remark about how beautiful Susan was, following smoothly on from what she had said about their surroundings, but he paused before speaking, for he had noticed a smell. He glanced across at Susan and saw that she was wrinkling her nose, too.
“Ugh, what’s that smell?” she muttered. “Smells like a dead rat or something…”
Nick sniffed at the air. As they continued along the trail, the stench grew ever more powerful. “Smells like it’s gotta be something a lot bigger than a rat,” he grunted.
They went over a rise in the trail and then began to head downhill, toward the waterfall lookout point. The roar of the waterfall was like droning thunder in their ears now, but the horrid odor of death was thick and potent, like a wall of fog they had to push through.
“Ugh, Nick, let’s just forget about the waterfall and go home,” Susan said. “I can’t handle this smell any longer.”
Nick would have agreed to do that, but something pushed him on. He felt a pressing urge to investigate and discover the source of the foul stench, even though his sixth sense was warning him that it was something he wouldn’t like finding out. “Let’s go a little farther,” he said.
“Um, okay, if you insist,” Susan said, grimacing.
They headed downhill on the trail and turned a corner, and when they did, they saw it: the source of the reek.
“Oh my God,” Susan gasped.
“Shit,” Nick muttered.
They both covered their noses with the crooks of their elbows as they approached the dead creature: a mountain lion, which had been skinned and decapitated. Its head was nowhere to be seen, but that didn’t matter. What did was that a human had done this, and when Susan got closer to the body, terror tore through her as she realized just who that human was.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” she gasped, her voice shrill with alarm as she dropped down onto her hands and knees in front of the mountain lion corpse.
There, neatly lined up in a row in front of the dead animal, were seven bullets: one each for her, Nick, Kate, Jack, Arthur, and the men’s parents. She remembered that Jack had found four bullets lined up in front of the Humvee the morning after Mark’s thugs had prowled around it during the night on their way to the mountain town. The message was the same, and so too, surely, was the messenger.
“Mark’s here,” Susan whispered, every word laced with dread. “And he’s found us…”
37
“Dammit!” Arthur growled, staring at the drapes, which were closed against the darkness of night. Usually, he would have left them open until much later, but now, he had had to close all the drapes as soon as darkness had fallen with the threat of possible attack. He had also had to lock all of the doors, something he had never done here in the cabin. “That sonofabitch is like a cockroach you just can’t kill. I knew I shouldn’t have let him get away back when I had the chance to take him out.”
“If you’d done that, Nick wouldn’t be alive,” Kate said gently.
“I know, I know, I don’t mean that,” Arthur said. “I’m as happy to have Nick with us as anyone else is, I just can’t help regretting not putting that evil scumbag six feet under when I had the chance to. I know I couldn’t have done that and saved Nick’s life, of course. It’s just—it’s really frustrating.”
“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 s
aid. “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.”
Survive the Day Boxset: EMP Survival in a Powerless World Page 72