by Ryan Walker
They didn’t have much daylight left, and really didn’t want to have to turn on flashlights after dark. They didn’t even bother with the refrigerator and freezer. Anything inside would have gone bad within a couple days of the power going out.
The cupboards had some canned and dry goods, but nothing that was really optimized for survival. It was more a collection of staples that would be supplemented with fresh food when the owners arrived.
There was a jar of instant coffee, though, and some tea bags that went into their rucks, along with a bag of rice and a couple boxes of pasta. The rest was things like canned soups, stews, and sauces, things that had a pretty low ratio of calories to weight.
They set a couple cans aside for dinner that night, though.
“Let’s make a quick check of the outside,” he said to Thomas.
The two grabbed their rifles, and went out the house’s back door. Randall started to walk towards a couple of small sheds, while also looking around for the entrance to a canning cellar, when Thomas tapped his shoulder.
“Look there,” he said, pointing up the valley in the direction they’d come from. The rays of the setting sun were coming in at just the right angle to illuminate a dust trail heading towards them at a good clip.
“Too fast to be horses,” Randall said.
“So you’re thinking these guys are the reason we couldn’t find any good Hi-Luxes or old Land Rovers?” asked Thomas.
“I hope there aren’t enough of them to have cleaned out the entire supply in the area. We need to get down where those things can’t follow and keep moving,” replied Randall.
“No soft bed tonight?” Thomas asked.
“Not until we get to the cabin,” Randall said. “Let’s gear up and roll. Now.”
They retrieved their rucks from the kitchen and went back out the rear door of the house. They were halfway across the backyard when gunshots broke out, a lot closer than they’d expected.
As he was diving for cover, Randall chanced a quick look up the valley and saw the dust cloud was still moving towards them.
He didn’t have time to wonder how long they’d been under surveillance, though, as he had an unknown number of hidden gunmen shooting at him.
For the second time that day, he and Thomas found themselves behind cover silently signaling to each other. Randall wanted to get down into the trees and brush below the homestead as quick as possible, especially before the vehicle coming up the road added attackers.
At the same time, if they could even up the odds before running, it would help. At least it was getting dark enough for them to see muzzle flashes. Thomas was the first to get a solid location on one of the gunmen. Randall let Thomas take the lead, maneuvering to put the gunman between them.
During this, Randall did a quick assessment of the threat they were facing. Their opponents were blowing through a lot of ammunition, and seemed to be firing wildly, popping out from cover and blasting away, the recoil of each shot tracking their aim up and away.
They probably didn’t have any formal military, police, or other training on dealing with targets that shoot back. While he and Thomas were still working to flank the first foe they’d identified, Randall caught another one stepping out from behind a tree to knock off a half dozen quick shots at Thomas.
With practice, it doesn’t take much time at all to put a good sight picture on a human sized target.
Randall had put a few thousand rounds downrange practicing exactly that, and all of that training paid off when he smoothly raised the barrel of his rifle, set his aim dead center of mass, and gently squeezed the trigger.
The yelp of pain from the man as the Randall’s bullet hit him and sent him stumbling sideways gave Thomas to perfect opportunity get good aim at the side of the tree his target was hiding behind.
As soon as the man recovered his composure and leaned over to shoot, Thomas’s AR-15 barked out three quick shots.
By Randall’s mental count of the guns he’d heard so far, that was two down, at least two more to go, and a truck still barreling down on them.
He had a good line on a massive old Douglas Fir that would put him at the edge of the woods. He signaled his intention to Thomas, waited for another burst of undisciplined fire to come and go and sprinted for it.
More shots went off. Randall heard Thomas’s rifle bark again, followed by another brief cry of intense pain. Randall assumed they had temporarily shifted the numbers to their favor.
Then he heard another rifle open up, to his right. He swore loudly as rounds whizzed past him and slammed into the trunk of the tree next to him.
He swung around to put the tree fully between him and the new gunman. At the same time, he saw an old Chevy Blazer in a homemade camouflage paint job turn off the road and down the driveway. Thomas needed to move, fast.
Randall edged around the other side of the tree, trying to catch a glimpse of the man who’d just shot at him, but couldn’t find him. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Thomas signaling the man’s location for him.
Randall beckoned his brother to break for it as soon as he got the chance, and started searching the area Thomas had indicated in earnest.
Randall finally saw movement. It felt like it took forever to get his M1A aimed at it, and even longer to gently pull the trigger back while he held the weapon steady.
Finally, the gun went off and he let the recoil of it push his shoulder back, pivoting on his left foot to get back behind the cover of the tree.
He heard the grunt of his target as the round slammed into him, but any sense of victory was shattered when he realized the Blazer was tearing through the homestead’s yard, between himself and Thomas.
“Surrender! Surrender!” somebody was yelling over the sound of several more guns going off.
Randall saw one person firing from the passenger side of the Blazer while the driver shouted.
Three more men had dismounted and were firing towards Thomas’s position. Thomas made eye contact with Randall and signaled for him to run.
“Just give up!” the driver of the Blazer yelled again.
Randall started to take aim when two of the dismounted gunmen opened up on him.
Thomas signaled for Randall to run again.
“You don’t have to die!” the driver of the Blazer shouted.
“OK! OK!” Thomas called out.
He held his rifle by the fore grip, showing it from behind his cover.
“Cease fire!” the man in the Blazer called out.
Randall noticed that the two men who’d fired on him had turned their attention to Thomas. He had to do the uncomfortable math again.
They were willing to take his brother alive, so the best thing to do was make sure only one of them got captured.
The sun had gone down far enough now that he could barely see into the woods behind him.
So he ran.
Chapter Five
The Woods of North Idaho
The next twelve hours passed in a complete blur for Randall.
For the first few hours, he thought he could hear the sound of pursuit behind him, and of a vehicle on the road flanking and running ahead of him.
The first time the road dipped down towards the bottom of the valley, he crossed it, and went up the ridgeline. He hoped his pursuers would assume he’d stay along the river, and keep chasing along there.
By dawn, it seemed like it had been a wise choice, as he hadn’t heard anybody around him, and the Blazer passed below him several times, running back and forth.
A little bit after sunrise, the vehicle traffic stopped. Instead of feeling a sense of relief, that lit a fire under Randall.
He wasn’t sure if it meant they’d gotten the location of the Priest Lake cabin out of Thomas or not, but he knew that he had to get there as fast as he could now to get alert any family that had made it there to the potential threat, and to try and get together a rescue.
It was late morning when he finally caught sight of Priest La
ke. Ever since early childhood, he’d always adored the first glimpse of the lake.
It always meant at least a weekend, if not a couple of weeks, with his grandparents running through the woods and swimming in the crystal clear, cold water, usually with some of his cousins.
At that moment, though, that lake meant safety to him even if it was fragile. He hadn’t remotely felt this safe since the EMP. As exhausted as he was, he knew he couldn’t just walk up to the front door of the cabin.
If any of his family had made it to the cabin, they’d be extremely suspicious of anybody they saw approaching, so he’d have to make it obvious who he was. On the other hand, most of the people that lived and thrived up in this rural part of Idaho were strong-willed and independent.
Folks with those kinds of forceful personalities tended to bond tightly or hate each other. Most of the people that had property on the lake were friendly towards each other, but not everybody, and there was no telling what kinds of cracks the situation might have opened up between people.
Randall took great care keeping well out of sight of any of the other homesteads until he hit the narrow draw that would bring him up behind his family’s cabin.
He knew that his grandparents kept game cameras along the best approaches towards the house, but those would have all been rendered useless by the EMP.
As he carefully made his way down the draw that he’d been running through for as long as he could remember, he noticed a tripwire attached to a small, homemade Tannerite flashbang.
Randall was pleased to recognize the contraption as something he’d posted on his blog about a year ago.
After carefully stepping over the wire he got out his binoculars. Unlike the abandoned homestead where Thomas had been captured, the grass around the Priest Lake cabin was mowed.
A few windows were open, laundry was on the line, there was no clutter around. Finally, he caught site of somebody walking around the place. It was his cousin, Jane, on patrol.
She was a tall, lanky girl who ran cross country in the fall, played volleyball in the winter, and then ran track in the spring.
She was dressed in hunting camouflage and carried an old Winchester 1894 .30-30 lever action rifle that had most of the finish worn off.
As much as he wanted to just run up and hug her, rushing out of the woods at her would be a terrible idea. Instead, he picked up a stick, and banged on a tree three times. He paused, and did it again.
That go her attention. She immediately brought the rifle up, sighting along the barrel, and started backing herself towards an abandoned red Honda ATV for cover.
“Who’s out there?” she called out.
There was movement in one of the cabin windows. “It’s me, Randall.”
Through his binoculars, Randall could see a huge smile break out on Jane’s face, and to her credit, she kept moving towards cover.
“You sound like him,” she said. “You alone?”
“I’m alone.”
“Let’s see you, then. Real slow like you taught us.”
“I didn’t teach you that. Robert did,” Randall said, naming his other cousin, and Jane’s older brother.
“Good catch. You still need to step out slowly, hands up.”
Randall held his rifle by the stock and held his arms up high as he walked out from the treeline. As soon as he was completely clear, he saw his cousin light up. She carefully set her Winchester down and came running up for a hug.
He heard the back door of the cabin open, and more family came out. His parents, Marcus and Susan, came out first, followed by his grandparents, Barry and Christine.
“It is so good to see you!” Randall said to his parents. “We were hoping you were up here when the EMP hit.”
“We…?” his father asked.
“Thomas and I,” Randall said.
The reminder of his brother suddenly dampened his excitement at seeing his parents. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
Ten minutes later, Randall was at the dining room table. With some food in him, sitting in a soft chair, fatigue started setting in. Jane, her parents Bruce and Angela, his grandparents, and parents, were all gathered around.
His other cousin, Robert, had been visiting the cabin with his wife while on leave from the Army when the EMP hit. That afternoon, the two of them were out hunting, and were expected back within the hour.
That put the entire family, minus Thomas, safely at the cabin. Randall quickly told them about their trek from Coeur d’Alene to the firefights, and Thomas’s subsequent capture.
“You did the right thing,” Barry reassured him. “You’d have just gotten yourself captured too, or killed, if you hadn’t high-tailed it when you got the chance. Sticking to the plan and getting up here was the best thing you could do.”
“I know,” Randall said, exhaustion starting to slur his words, “But it was so hard to leave him.”
“We know more about the threat to the south now,” Marcus said. “And we’ve got a better chance of rescuing Thomas as a group than you would on your own.”
“It’s the Compound, isn’t it?” Christine asked.
“They’re the only ones in the area that would have those kinds of numbers and several running vehicles,” Marcus replied.
“The Compound? What’s that?” Randall asked.
There was a round of surprised questions from the table that Randall, the famous survivalist and prepper blogger, didn’t know about it. “Everybody up here knows about them,” Christine said. “Most of them are ranchers, tradesmen, and retirees. Some farmers, some guys with white-collar jobs they could do remotely.”
The family filled them in on Butler’s community. As he got more details, he started to realize why he’d missed them entirely. The focus of his writing had always been primarily on individual, family, and homestead survival when things collapsed.
He researched and wrote extensively on how an extended family exactly like his could best prepare for the worst, and then survive it. Something on the scale of the Compound, which was more of a self-sustaining agricultural community, was outside the scope of all of his work, and therefore hadn’t pinged his radar.
About this time, Robert and Claire got home. After listening to Randall’s description of the two fights, he said, “Either they don’t spend much time on tactical training, or you and Thomas got real lucky.”
Robert was an infantry squad leader with the Army’s 4th Infantry Division, out of Fort Carson, Colorado. He was built on the long and lanky model, tall and lean with the endurance to march for days instead of bulky and muscular.
Whenever he was home he would leave his sister and cousins with drills to practice. The family didn’t always do them as hard as Robert would have liked, but they found ways to have fun with it.
For Robert, as long as they practiced them at all, he was happy.
“For you and Thomas to come out on top when surprised and outnumbered, and then for you to get out alive when it was ten on two. If these guys from the Compound did any serious group training, the outcomes would have been a lot different.”
“We’ve got that going for us then,” Bruce said. He was broad and strong, sharing the same light brown hair and dark eyes as his son. His wife, Angela, was sitting beside him. Robert and Jane both got their height from her.
“We don’t know if they’ve got a group that can act as a quick reaction force,” Robert said.
“If they had anybody that good, they would have sent them out to chase down Thomas and I,” Randall said sleepily.
“Maybe. But when you got here, where was the family’s best warfighter, and did you have any way of getting a hold of him?” Robert asked, reminding Randall that he and Claire had been out hunting for most of the day.
“It’s safest to assume that you happened to face off against some of their weaker elements, and that they may have much better between us and Thomas.”
Everybody around the table nodded agreement.
“Grandma. You said
the Compound offered you a buy-in last year. Do you have anything from them that might include a map or anything about the layout?” Robert asked.
Randall never heard his grandmother’s answer because he’d fallen asleep at the table.
“Son,” Barry said, poking him awake. “Go to bed. We’ll put a plan together and let you know when we’re ready to go.”
He went to one of the old Ford Jamboree RVs that the family kept parked behind the cabin precisely in case there were suddenly more guests or residents than there were available beds, and was asleep before his head ever hit the pillow.
