Two Wolves and a Sheep: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller (Minus America Book 4)

by EE Isherwood

  Lamar, CO

  “Hold up, fella,” the man exclaimed, walking up to the side of Ted’s SUV with a clipboard. “We just got a new directive to confirm every vehicle’s occupants. I would have let you go, because frankly, it sounds like a bunch of busywork—”

  Ted didn’t let him finish. “Cool then. I’ll be on my way.”

  The guy kept on talking as if they were engaged in routine checkpoint pleasantries. “But I saw you have what looks like a bullet hole in your rear glass. You want to explain it?”

  He couldn’t believe all his good luck was about to be washed away by an inconspicuous hole in his window. He tried to think of a viable excuse and waved the man closer as if about to tell a good story.

  “I was honestly hoping no one would notice it. You know what it’s like out here in this part of the world. There’s nothing but endless farmlands and too much grass. You can see from sunrise all the way to sunset, with nothing in between. Makes for some boring guard duty, you know?”

  He prayed the official would commiserate with him but gave nothing in return but a grunt.

  Ted pressed on. “Well, I set up a few plastic bottles and began shooting them for target practice. I had the entire plains around me and what did I hit?”

  “Your own truck.”

  “My own truck,” he said with high drama.

  The man looked into the rear seating area. Emily was hunkered down behind the second row. The windows back there were tinted, giving her a little more cover. If the man saw her, he didn’t show it.

  “And what about that?” The guard pointed behind him.

  “What?” he said, locking his spine like a high-tension electrical wire.

  “That!” The guy pointed to back of Ted’s head. “You have a welt the size of a golf ball back there. Looks like you’ve been struck on the head.”

  Ted sighed with relief, which instantly made him wish he could control himself. He was displaying every sign of someone who had something to hide while passing through a security checkpoint.

  It wouldn’t be proper to explain he’d fallen in a farmhouse kitchen while running from search drones. “You aren’t going to believe this. After shooting out my own window, I hit my head on the rear liftgate.” He sighed again, this time sounding more upbeat. “It’s been a long freaking day.”

  “Well, you can take a break while we’re talking,” the guard walked toward the bullet hole. His two buddies watched from about twenty feet away, as if unsure if they should be with their leader or stay there. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to see the stamps on your book. You know, just to make sure you have clearance to travel.”

  “I understand,” he said, careful to hide the bomb blast of anxiety going off in his chest. He had no papers and there was a diminishing opportunity to talk his way out of the encounter.

  From the rear corner of the truck, the guard tapped metal with his clipboard. “Mind opening the back? While we’ve got all this paperwork going, we might as well confirm cargo, too.”

  He sat frozen in his seat. At the same instant, he took a mental snapshot of the roadblock. The two men were still in the far lane, looking suitably bored by their mission. The nosey guard had gone around to the rear, waiting for him to pop the hatch. Emily was somewhere in the cargo space.

  He acted like he was getting papers from the passenger seat so he had a private moment to communicate with her. “It looks like we’ll have to shoot our way out.”

  “I’m ready,” she whispered.

  The man called out again. “Whenever you’re ready, bud.” A touch of anxiety was in the guy’s voice, as if he was wondering why there was such a delay.

  “All right,” Ted replied in a bored tone out his window.

  The second the liftgate went up, it sounded like a grenade went off inside the cramped compartment. Emily fired the shotgun a second time, which seemed to blow his hair with the concussion.

  He’d been ready with his pistol the entire time; it came over the edge of his door, aimed at the two clueless men. They figured out what was taking place, but they’d been caught in the open. He counted off six shots.

  Emily added multiple shotgun rounds to his attack, putting both men to the ground in less than ten seconds. They never even got a chance to fire in return, which made Ted extremely proud.

  His ears rang louder than he ever remembered.

  “We’ve got to clean this up!” he cried out.

  They both hopped out of the truck. He immediately looked back to Lamar, which was about two miles away. A few vehicles moved on the road, with at least one heading for the roadblock. Unless they were Americans in disguise, like them, they had to assume bad guys were approaching. The last thing he wanted to do was get into an endless firefight with arriving vehicles.

  “Grab what you can. We’re taking a Humvee.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked, already reaching into the cargo bay to grab some gear.

  “We’ll blend in better if we take the same vehicles they use. This truck has been a workhorse for us—” He tapped the door of the silver SUV. “—but she’s been on the Fort Collins news by now. They’ll recognize it from the roadblock on the other side of town. I can’t help but think the guy’s change of orders came in because of us.”

  They scrambled to get what they could in about sixty seconds. Once they had all the guns, most of the ammo, and some of the food, he reached down and grabbed a radio from the dead man. The Humvee didn’t require a key, so he set its ignition switch to ‘run,’ waited for the ‘wait’ light to turn off, then cranked it over to ‘start.’

  The rumble of the engine was annoyingly loud compared to the truck he was giving up.

  Emily got in a few seconds later. “Wow, this thing is loud!”

  “It is what it is,” he said, channeling his time in the military. “Here we go.” He turned the truck around and got away from the blockade and the dead men.

  It didn’t take long before the radio chirped, but it wasn’t about them. Two men talked back and forth about picking wives, or some nonsense. He didn’t care, as long as they avoided mentioning runaway couples. As he looked back, Ted was certain the vehicle behind them must have reached the grisly scene.

  Minutes down the road, Emily squirmed like she needed to hit the head.

  “What’s on your mind, partner?” he asked over the road noise.

  She got closer to him, which was a requirement in the wide cabin of the military truck. “I know you’re the expert at this stuff, but why are we going so slow?”

  He gave a fatalistic chuckle. “When I ditched our ride, I didn’t really appreciate what I was getting us into. This thing was made to go up hills and through mud bogs. It wasn’t designed for the highway. I’ve got the pedal all the way to the floor.”

  The brisk wind blew at them from directly ahead. The speedometer only went up to sixty miles-per-hour, and it hovered around that number.

  “Oh, crap,” she said dryly.

  They passed several cars and trucks heading back to Lamar, including a convoy of six or seven empty tractor-trailers. After each one passed, he leaned to check his mirror to confirm they weren’t turning around.

  For many miles they drove on the knife’s edge of waiting to be pulled over, waiting to hear a call to arms in the radio, and the frustration of feeling like they were going slow enough to pick up a hitchhiker on the fly. Eventually, an hour into the drive, they saw a lone mountain rise on the western horizon. Its bare peak was a distinctive contrast to what he thought of as the snow-capped Rocky Mountains.

  “We’re almost there, Em. Look. NORAD’s very close to Pike’s Peak. We can use the mountain as our guide.”

  “Great,” she said with relief.

  He still looked over his shoulder, positive someone had put the pieces together about what happened at the roadblock. Surely an enemy smart enough to invade America would have the capability to figure out it was the same perpetrators who’d been in Fort Collins and had killed the bikers on the dusty
streets of Nowheresville.

  Emily jumped in her seat. “Oh my God!”

  “What is it?” he replied, holding the wheel steady as he checked for threats.

  She looked at him like she’d seen the Grim Reaper. “Do you think this truck has one of those tracking devices on it?”

  It came down on him like a piano falling from the sky. “How did I overlook that?”

  Pike’s Peak suddenly seemed a lot farther away.

  Pike’s Peak, CO

  “This brings back memories,” Kyla shouted to Meechum as they huddled next to each other on a long 3-person bench bolted to the outside of the tiniest helicopter she’d ever seen. There was one soldier on the other side of Meechum, sitting with his rifle ready for action. Three other soldiers were on the opposite side of the craft. It was nothing like their prior ride in the sky, where she and Meechum had the entire interior compartment of a much larger helicopter all to themselves.

  It was also far less comfortable. Even Meechum had to twist her body between Kyla’s direction and the rider near the front to keep from cramping up. During one such contortion, Meechum winced in pain.

  Kyla became concerned. “Is it your wound?”

  The woman composed herself. “I’m fine!”

  “But—”

  “I’m fine!” she repeated before changing the subject. “These MH-6s are pretty cool, but I don’t think I’d want to be on them all the time. I preferred the bigger Sikorsky Seahawk.”

  The man overheard her shouting. “Trust me, we would, too. The colonel brought these two Little Birds so we’d have a low profile on enemy radar.”

  Meechum turned and spoke to the guy, but when she reoriented on Kyla, it must have been obvious she didn’t hear what was said. “I told him thanks again for the lift. It sucks we were captured so easily—I’ll have to work on that—but this is going to catch us right up to your uncle and the president.”

  Kyla leaned closer to the Marine. The other woman had short hair, but Kyla’s blew wild, making it difficult to concentrate. Still, being close was the only way to talk privately. “Do you trust these soldiers?”

  “No,” Meechum said without hesitation, “but I took a risk. Once I knew they were aware of you in the bushes, I had to make sure they didn’t go in shooting. The thing about the president sucked to give away, but it was the only way to keep us in the game. If these guys turn out to be with the enemy, we’ll take ‘em all out.”

  Kyla leaned forward, worried the other passenger was going to overhear their conspiratorial discussion, but the wind and rotor noise made it impossible, as long as they weren’t shouting in the open. She was satisfied the soldier was oblivious.

  Still, the Marine’s braggadocio was legendary. “How are you going to fight back? We don’t even have a stick to our name.”

  Meechum laughed like she didn’t have a care in the world and motioned for Kyla to come closer. “I have my pistol. The colonel collected our weapons and put them in a duffel, but a soldier picked it up and carelessly shoved it in the back compartment of this helicopter. When I stretch my back, I reach in and help myself.”

  Kyla sat in wonderment at her travel companion. If anyone could take out two helicopter’s worth of men, it was Meechum. However, she sincerely hoped it didn’t come to it.

  The pilots of the two choppers kept them a few feet above the treetops as they got into the foothills of the Rockies. The colonel wouldn’t tell them where he planned to take them, other than toward her uncle. As they traveled from the grassy nothing of Wyoming and into the hills and mountains, she assumed they’d gone into Colorado. Once the white-capped mountains appeared, she was positive of it.

  They stopped once at a remote pasture that happened to have aviation fuel hidden next to what looked like an abandoned log cabin. Meechum suggested it was probably an off-the-books Air Force installation.

  An hour later, the man sitting on their bench tapped Meechum on the leg. “That’s our destination! Pike’s Peak!”

  She and the Marine looked forward. They were still traveling at tree-top level, which made the freestanding mountain seem even more impressive. As they neared the base, the pilot tilted the nose, taking them in a diagonal up the steep grade. The trees eventually thinned out as they neared the summit. At the top, there were no trees at all. It was made up of rocks, patches of moss, and a large gravel parking lot.

  “I didn’t expect to be able to park up here,” she joked to Meechum.

  “Me, either.”

  The helicopters landed about two hundred yards apart, which spoke to the sheer size of the flat space at the summit of Pike’s Peak. When she unstrapped from her seatbelt and hopped off, Meechum tucked her pistol into her front trouser pocket. Kyla stretched, in an admittedly clumsy attempt at drawing attention away from her friend, but it was all for nothing. The commandos spread out and looked everywhere except at the two of them.

  “Come on,” Meechum said in a closer-to-normal voice as the rotors slowed. “Let’s see what these boys have planned. I think we’re still a good way from Colorado Springs.” She pointed to the east.

  It was difficult to judge distance from the top of the mountain, but the high plains of eastern Colorado started like a flat carpet of grass and scrub about ten miles away. The city of Colorado Springs seemed to be painted onto the ground; the dense city blocks were dull gray and dark green. Between the city and their position on the mountain, there was a series of comparatively small ridges. They were grouped together like islands on the high seas. Most were covered in trees, though a couple of the taller ones went above the tree line.

  Colonel Avery appeared out of nowhere. “NORAD is inside the mountain closest to the city. You can drive right in from the other side.”

  Kyla was surprised. “We can’t even see it? How the hell are we going to stop my uncle?”

  Avery laughed. “We brought our toys for occasions such as this.”

  Almost on cue, a pair of flat, black drones raced over their heads. They were about the size of car tires. They stayed close together for a few seconds while speeding for the other mountains, but then split apart. One to the left, and the other to the right.

  “That’s how we were caught, wasn’t it?” Meechum stood with hands on her hips, admiring the drones in flight.

  The colonel laughed a bit. “Don’t feel bad. You couldn’t have gotten within a mile of my men without us knowing about it. We aren’t as bad at surveillance as the Blackouts.” He shifted to face Kyla. “If your uncle is out there, we’ll know in about ten minutes. If he isn’t…”

  Kyla didn’t need him to finish the sentence.

  CHAPTER 24

  Outside Colorado Springs, CO

  Once Emily had said the words, Ted was certain their Humvee was equipped with a tracking device. He was also convinced the enemy was working hard to make up for all the mistakes they’d made in the past. Instead of coming at them from random directions, they were quietly tracking them, plotting where to put a devastating and unavoidable roadblock to capture them.

  Unfortunately, there wasn’t much between Lamar and Colorado Springs but empty highway. They continued to pass other vehicles traveling the other way, and they kept looking for aircraft pursuing them, but the bad guys never showed up. Even their radio chatter was inane banter of no relevance to them.

  “These guys sure do like talking about their new wives. It’s like some type of cult, don’t you think?” Emily was the one holding the radio.

  “Yeah, but as long as they keep gossiping like old ladies, I’m happy to let them. I haven’t heard such poor radio discipline since flight school.”

  They had a good laugh about it, but one transmission cut into the party line.

  “Break, break, break. Code Seven on ID 50-2277. This is a shoot to kill order. Location, heading west on Route 94 approximately five miles from Colorado Springs. I repeat…”

  “That’s our cue,” he said, his heart somehow finding ever faster speeds to beat.

 
“We’ve got to ditch this thing. Make a run for it. Anything but wait for them to strike us down.” Emily sat all the way at the front edge of the rock-like seat, anxious for him to make a move.

  The suburbs were upon them. As best he could gather, they’d come in from the southeast and were almost on the southern edge of the city. Ahead, at the end of a winding road up a wooded hillside, he saw what had to be the entrance to NORAD. It was tiny, being twenty miles away, but he couldn’t think of any other reason there’d be a structure built into the side of a mountain up there.

  “We’re freaking closer than I thought.”

  “So? We’ll be dead if we keep going.”

  He didn’t stop. “Look, we’ve got a decision to make. If we keep this rig, we might be able to bluff our way through the front gate of their bunker. I’m sure they’ll still stop us, but it’ll give us an edge.” He looked around.

  “But the radio said…”

  “Not every unit can possibly be on the same channel as this one. We’re hearing what’s happening behind us. It will take time for them to communicate up and down the chain of command, spread the word, and whatever.” He prayed the enemy was as crappy moving data between silos of the different areas of operation as they were on protocol. He hated basing his own rules of engagement on the perceived limitations of the enemy, but he was already begging for sixty-five miles-an-hour in a stolen truck. He didn’t have a lot of options.

  “I don’t know. Maybe we should scrub this mission and go into hiding again. This is a big city.” She pointed out her window. The mostly-flat cityscape spread out ahead of them, always to the north.

  “If we wait, we lose the initiative and run the risk of the attack happening against our people and allies overseas. I think if we show up ahead of all the crap now zeroing in on us, we’ll have a shot at doing some real damage to their headquarters. We might even find the big guy himself.” He patted his chest. “We’ve gotten good mileage out of these uniforms. I can do it one more time.”

  He was comfortable, to a degree, going full-bore into the enemy nest. If he scored some critical hits against their command structure, it would be worth it. A big part of abandoning Kyla was to give himself the option of a one-way mission.